OTOH, then, I would welcome a discussion about global warming without the (required?) paen of schadenfreude over the cities that will be drowned, the people that will starve, and the general end of civilization that will occur if we don't stop driving SUVs.
"To assume that it's a "fault" that you haven't had a female president or that "meaningful respect" is a serious driver is very male-oriented thinking."
I think that was part of the OP's point, and one that neatly explains why the 'women's movement' is generally marginalized and considered rather silly (by a huge majority of the women I know): feminists seem to exclusively demand equality ACCORDING TO MALE MEASUREMENTS.
As a female coworker once commented (best I can remember) when we heard on the radio about women not making as much as men or getting as many work hours per week, "Yeah," she said, holding up a short pencil, "I'd have to be nuts to want to measure the world by male standards. To every one of them this is 12" long, I'm guessing their yardstick of happiness wouldn't really measure up, either?"
Which was rather an ouch-worthy moment for the men in the room.
However, it doesn't cause you a single note of worry that it took essentially an internal leak (or deliberate penetration) to penetrate this web of collusion? More broadly, it took this for people to be willing to release their raw data sets? On something THIS important? Really?
I mean, that's the equivalent of a kids saying "ok, yes, I admit I snuck in and opened my christmas present early" when he's been denying it for WEEKS and is then confronted with video evidence to the contrary.
You really don't get any points for your conscientious admission when your guilt is already proved.
From my humble observers chair, let me present two parallel issues: - Anthropogenic global warming: much of the data leans toward proving that there IS warming going on. Some of it suggests strongly that human activity is forcing, but we don't really understand the mechanisms, and routinely new data is gathered which contests the relatively flimsy hypothesis. Nevertheless, many people are convinced, and thus government policy is written based on the assumption this is fact, despite the more recent evidence (lack of actual warming) that their models are probably almost totally wrong. - Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction: much of the data leans toward the idea that the Iraqis under Saddam Hussein are busily working toward the creation of weapons of mass destruction. Clearly, the Iraqis used chemical weapons against their own populace, and the Clinton administration, congress, and the Bush administration that followed (as well as most foreign intel organizations) all agree that Saddam is after WMD, but the IAEA inspectors don't find anything except perhaps faint suggestions that at one time there might have been such a program, long since dismantled/failed. Nevertheless, many people are convinced, and thus government policy is written based on the assumption this is fact, despite the more recent evidence (lack of actual weapons ever being found) that their models are probably almost totally wrong.
One of these two episodes caused 6 years of wrenching political debate, the question constantly attacked by the media and defended by an administration; an issue that no longer became a simple fact to be debated on its rightness or wrongness, but a malignant signal of an administration and political philosophy's essential EVILNESS, to be attacked by its critics relentlessly and defended by its supporters blindly and reflexively.
What would be your position on the Iraqi WMD question if there were an inside leaker who distributed 61 megs of emails between Bush and Cheney EXPLICITLY discussing how critics would be silenced, data would be edited and massaged to bring up the results they wanted, FOIA requests evaded and (again, explicitly) discussing the destruction of critical data and documents to prevent them ever being seen and used to question the policy?
In fact, I daresay there are a lot of readers of/. who already ASSUME such discussions took place regarding their 'issue of contention', despite a lack of actual proof. "Deniers" now HAVE proof, not just assumptions.
Neither of the two, actually. Nature is a magazine, edited by humans, who have their own collection of baggage and biases. In general, these don't interfere with a generally good job of presenting relatively objective information on science. As far as anthropogenic global warming is considered, they're as likely as anyone to fall for the popular hysteria, particularly when it's driven by their own peers.
Now, you might dismiss this was "ah, he's a denier, he's just parroting his viewpoint" and in a sense I am - a believe global warming is probably a systemic change maybe/maybe not tipped by human activity, and that in any case it's extremely unlikely that it's driven by CO2, or limitable in any meaningful way without genocidal levels of population reduction. There, that's my bias, all clear and present.
But I'd look directly at Nature and ask when they've made any such clear statement? Clearly, they have a non-challenging editorial stance when approaching the laughable 'science facts' in an Inconvenient Truth (not a whisper from Nature as far as I can recall). Nature IS a respected science journal, that would be a perfect place for the fallacies of the AGW hypothesis to be dissected and the valid conclusions reinforced. But no, instead they seem to prefer the role of mandarins, defending an established dogma without really every looking at it critically or questioning it honestly.
"Now that people have glimpse of the actual communications between the scientists, compare that to say, the hacked emails of Sarah Palin, See where you find more smoking guns."
Note to 140Mandak262Jamuna: the election was over more than a year ago. She didn't win the Vice Presidency, you can stop obsessing over her. Really.
"A few suspect emails do not destroy millions of man hours of research."
Of course not. But when the main suppliers of that information to policy makers turn out to be advocates of a dogma with a vested interest in manipulating that data, in colluding to hide contrary information, in DISPOSING (whups! accident!) of the raw data sets that they've compiled, attacking critics, and generally behaving as if they have something to conceal, it IS possible for those individuals to taint that research and especially the conclusions drawn therefrom.
Who Watches the Watchmen, indeed?
It's a known psychological fact that very often the victims of a con will be the most vociferous defenders of the con artists - they are now defending their own reputation and self-image, no longer mere facts of 'does this snake oil work or not?'.
You're missing the simple human motivation of power.
Why did Rachel Carson blame DDT when ALL the subsequent testing showed that it wasn't DDT that caused eggshell thinning, etc.?
Why have enviromental alarmists previously cried that we're all going to die from: - too much cold - too much heat - running out of food - running out of oil - running out of clean water - all the wild animals going extinct - running out of landfill space - PCBs - mercury - lead - acid rain - nuclear power - coal power - overpopulation ? CONTROL.
Of course, Gore himself WAS likely just in it for the money, he's well on the way to being the world's top magnate with his fingers in every carbon-trading scheme.
You act as if the AGW zealots have nothing to gain from ignoring the failures in the science. No matter what the science says (that would be the REAL data, not some massaged, averaged, sampled, and manipulated data), everyone that has a political stake in declaring "the sky is falling"* will tend to fight tooth and nail against anyone claiming that CO2 isn't the catastrophe it's claimed to be. Simple selfish interest.
* whether this be from: too much cold, too much heat, running out of food, running out of oil, running out of clean water, all the wild animals going extinct, running out of landfill space, DDT, PCBs, mercury, lead, acid rain, nuclear power, coal power, overpopulation...did I miss any 'doomsday naturalist scenarios' posited in the last 30 years?
Fail 1) who EVER said corporate legitimacy had anything to do with morals or ethics? Ever? Corporate success is measured in return on investment for shareholders. Full stop. Naturally, such an organism will try whatever options are available (generally legal, but illegal if the odds of getting caught/punished/whatever are calculably trivial) to succeed.
Fail 2) equating the actions of a mercantilist cartel formed in the 16th-17th Century with the conduct of pirates in 2009. I'm not sure if that's a failure in moral equivalence (in ENTIRELY different contexts) or if it's historical ignorance or if it's simply political disingenuousness, but it hardly even makes SENSE, even at the most superficial levels.
So let me see, in this ONE chain of posts, the "main" reason for our crappy educational system is: - "poor schooling in the fields of Language Arts, Drama/Theatre, and Humanitarian studies." - "zero tolerance and standardized tests" - "the Department of Education with its centralized planning, heavy handed bureaucracy and one-size-fits-nobody policies" - "the quality of teachers (and) Teacher's unions" - "the quality of parents" - "the education major itself in colleges"...well THAT clears things up immensely. And we wonder why there's no 'silver bullet' to fix this? That would be my $0.02; the reason our educational system sucks is because the causes are many, subtle, interrelated, and long-term - all of which resist the sort of quick, easy, money-oriented solution our politicians are inclined to try to apply. So I guess my answer is: - "the politicians"
SL was neither the best nor the brightest of the various shells that tried to offer a 'new' way of browsing and providing web content. I can think of at least 4 off the top of my head, and that was 6+ years ago. It was essentially nothing more than a graphical shell for a MUD, an ancient concept in Internet years. (TiA: I was a beta for ViOS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vios in 1999, so SL in 2003 was utterly not impressive.)
In fact, it was one of the slowest, kludgiest ones I ever had the misfortune to try. (In truth, that probably had a lot to do with the unprecedented amount of access the users had to customize their experience and manipulate the world in non-trivial ways.)
Probably inspired by books like Neuromancer and Snow Crash, it was an attractive concept... only until you analyzed it rigorously. Let's see, I can type "Deutsche bank berlin customer services" in a browser, wait 0.246 seconds for the links to pop up, and click one to get to their site. OR, in the 'internet as virtual world' paradigm, I could log in to my avatar, and go 'flying' at Mach 15 to wherever DB Berlin's virtual hq was (which I'd probably have to look up), "enter" it, and then navigate in some Euclidean way to the customer service 'office'. Lot more fun, sure, not so efficient (not to mention orders of magnitude more hardware and bandwidth required). I can turn on "NPR's Science Friday" or d/l from the web to listen at FM-radio quality....or I could go into SL (login), travel to the SL place, and then watch my screen flicker at 15 fps while the giant penis-avatar to my left keeps lagging into the zebra-chick hovering over the stage, all the while the audio stutters and drops all over the place. Improvement?
It took all the efficiencies of the internet, and rendered them BACK into their real-world constraints of geography and linearity - being able to fly really fast doesn't really help that. Putting the internet in a real-world context doesn't improve efficiency of use nor quality of results, so what good is it? Who ever thought that was actually, a good idea? As far as I can tell, only the promoters.
Second Life somehow managed to gather a tiny bit more focus and attention (probably because it was free for users), making it the "go-to" place for all the people WHO DIDN'T REALLY UNDERSTAND THE INTERNET IN THE FIRST PLACE. Thus, some businesses followed out of simple cash-sniffing self-interest. Some other sorts of organizations showed up - as the BBC article says, you could hardly open a newspaper Technology section or computer magazine without some reference to SL for a couple of years there.
Couple all this failure with the Linden Labs' arbitrariness and hypocrisy*, I was astonished then that people (and especially businesses) bought into it for so long.
* and I do mean hypocrisy; The only value I thought it MIGHT have was that I thought the whole thing MIGHT be an interesting social experiment of the concepts of the Commmons, broadened to numbers of people undreamed-of by late-90's standards. The ability to customize the code, plus what was a strict hands-off policy by the Lindens, seemed like it might be a cauldron for a working-through of the Greater Internet Dickwad Theory (http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/). Sadly, when actually confronted with a situation that turned somewhat internet-ugly, they folded to their interventionist sensibilities to make sure everyone 'played nice'. (http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2003/07/war_of_the_jess.html)
People using Second Life to experience the internet always seemed to me like chimps futilely trying to use their termite sticks to dial a phone....it *might* work, clumsily, but conceptually you're light-years away from really 'getting it'.
Not sure why you'd bother to think that it's going to anything real, since the Fed seems to be ok with saving jobs and dumping money into DISTRICTS THAT DON'T EXIST.
So you're saying that the next time Mom asks for tech support, he should bind her up in duct tape, leaving a little hole and saying "fight your way out Mom! It will do you good!"
While amusing, I don't think that would really solve her or his problems.
Perhaps I was speaking ironically of our SOCIETY'S view of things, and not my own? Christ man, maybe you could step outside your rage for just one second and think that by commenting on it, perhaps I AGREE WITH YOU?
There is no such thing as 'peak oil'. This is the same extrapolationist nonsense that's been spouted in the same breath as 'we're running out of landfills', 'we're running out of fresh water', and 'we're running out of food'. FUD BOLLOCKS.
(And here's a tip: nobody believes you because you've been spewing this same alarmist crap since the late 60's.)
As many people said above, there are trillions of bbls of reserve crude. As others cogently pointed out, much of this is energetically nonsensical to retrieve.
However, oil is NOT our only source of energy. As a hypothetical exercise, one could build a nuclear reactor - along with a nearby fast breeder for reprocessing plutonium wastes - and essentially have infinite energy at that site. If electrical energy was not in the format we need (ie until the electric car becomes practical), then that energy can be used to retrieve more oil.
It's very very simple: as supplies for oil become more prohibitive to retrieve, the incentive to develop replacements for it increases. Eventually, oil will probably not be needed at all for energy, only for its use as a source for other raw materials.
For now, all those plastic shopping bags fluttering in the trees down in the street put the lie to any nonsensical fears about 'peak oil'.
To give you some idea of the scales involved, even traveling at the targetted 5m/sec speed continuously, it would take the climber nearly 3 MONTHS to get to geosynchronous height of approx 35,000 km.
"Nevertheless, it raises an interesting question: if intelligence can be increased by something so simple as an increase in the expression of a single NMDA receptor subunit, why hasn't it already happened?"
Looking back at great swaths of my own life, and imagining the ability to remember them much, much better, the reason becomes apparent: suicide?
I agree with you to a small degree, except insofar that there is an order of magnitude difference at the ultimate point where reality intrudes - the pen can be mightier than the sword, but only figuratively. In point of fact, a murderer breaking into your home (or the agent of a thieving government) can be killed by a bullet, where writing something nasty isn't going to do much.
Finally, as regards your comparison - you're right, except to continue the metaphor, this guy who cracks cable modems is essentially asserting that people are entitled to free bullets which is nonsense.
I think it must be that people spend too much time watching clever courtroom dramas where the cagey defense attorney saves the day by finessing some narrow point of legal semantics. Not how it really happens; in point of fact, most judges are sensible enough to see that a guy 'hacking' cable modems is trying to cheat the system - and then SELLING them is trying to profit from it, and it suddenly becomes nontrivial in the eyes of the law. In the same sense that you don't get the black DEA choppers descending if you build a water bong, but the moment one tries to sell them (as if people don't know what they're for) then you start to catch some official attention.
I'm going out on a limb, but I'd guess strongly that he wouldn't have ANY issues if he was just hacking cable modems and saying 'aha, I beat you guys again'. No, it's not the charges that are "bullshit", it's someone thinking that they have some civil right to break laws that they don't feel apply to them. (And as for the civilly disobedient, yes, there IS a human right to break laws you think are immoral; however, your unjust suffering of the punishment is supposed to attract attention, NOT get you 'off the hook scot-free'.)
Slashdot Mirror
Which is really very sound advice, thank you.
OTOH, then, I would welcome a discussion about global warming without the (required?) paen of schadenfreude over the cities that will be drowned, the people that will starve, and the general end of civilization that will occur if we don't stop driving SUVs.
"To assume that it's a "fault" that you haven't had a female president or that "meaningful respect" is a serious driver is very male-oriented thinking."
I think that was part of the OP's point, and one that neatly explains why the 'women's movement' is generally marginalized and considered rather silly (by a huge majority of the women I know): feminists seem to exclusively demand equality ACCORDING TO MALE MEASUREMENTS.
As a female coworker once commented (best I can remember) when we heard on the radio about women not making as much as men or getting as many work hours per week, "Yeah," she said, holding up a short pencil, "I'd have to be nuts to want to measure the world by male standards. To every one of them this is 12" long, I'm guessing their yardstick of happiness wouldn't really measure up, either?"
Which was rather an ouch-worthy moment for the men in the room.
Real world market is about $8 billion, as I recall, so 1% would be a nice $80 million.
In RIAA money, if you're calculating how much is lost to those damn pirates, those numbers should be multiplied by a gajillion.
I think it's more of a news story that DARPA is apparently terrified of the Dakotas, or perhaps Minnesota.
..which is great. Unquestionably.
However, it doesn't cause you a single note of worry that it took essentially an internal leak (or deliberate penetration) to penetrate this web of collusion? More broadly, it took this for people to be willing to release their raw data sets? On something THIS important? Really?
I mean, that's the equivalent of a kids saying "ok, yes, I admit I snuck in and opened my christmas present early" when he's been denying it for WEEKS and is then confronted with video evidence to the contrary.
You really don't get any points for your conscientious admission when your guilt is already proved.
From my humble observers chair, let me present two parallel issues:
- Anthropogenic global warming: much of the data leans toward proving that there IS warming going on. Some of it suggests strongly that human activity is forcing, but we don't really understand the mechanisms, and routinely new data is gathered which contests the relatively flimsy hypothesis. Nevertheless, many people are convinced, and thus government policy is written based on the assumption this is fact, despite the more recent evidence (lack of actual warming) that their models are probably almost totally wrong.
- Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction: much of the data leans toward the idea that the Iraqis under Saddam Hussein are busily working toward the creation of weapons of mass destruction. Clearly, the Iraqis used chemical weapons against their own populace, and the Clinton administration, congress, and the Bush administration that followed (as well as most foreign intel organizations) all agree that Saddam is after WMD, but the IAEA inspectors don't find anything except perhaps faint suggestions that at one time there might have been such a program, long since dismantled/failed. Nevertheless, many people are convinced, and thus government policy is written based on the assumption this is fact, despite the more recent evidence (lack of actual weapons ever being found) that their models are probably almost totally wrong.
One of these two episodes caused 6 years of wrenching political debate, the question constantly attacked by the media and defended by an administration; an issue that no longer became a simple fact to be debated on its rightness or wrongness, but a malignant signal of an administration and political philosophy's essential EVILNESS, to be attacked by its critics relentlessly and defended by its supporters blindly and reflexively.
What would be your position on the Iraqi WMD question if there were an inside leaker who distributed 61 megs of emails between Bush and Cheney EXPLICITLY discussing how critics would be silenced, data would be edited and massaged to bring up the results they wanted, FOIA requests evaded and (again, explicitly) discussing the destruction of critical data and documents to prevent them ever being seen and used to question the policy?
In fact, I daresay there are a lot of readers of /. who already ASSUME such discussions took place regarding their 'issue of contention', despite a lack of actual proof. "Deniers" now HAVE proof, not just assumptions.
Neither of the two, actually.
Nature is a magazine, edited by humans, who have their own collection of baggage and biases. In general, these don't interfere with a generally good job of presenting relatively objective information on science.
As far as anthropogenic global warming is considered, they're as likely as anyone to fall for the popular hysteria, particularly when it's driven by their own peers.
Now, you might dismiss this was "ah, he's a denier, he's just parroting his viewpoint" and in a sense I am - a believe global warming is probably a systemic change maybe/maybe not tipped by human activity, and that in any case it's extremely unlikely that it's driven by CO2, or limitable in any meaningful way without genocidal levels of population reduction. There, that's my bias, all clear and present.
But I'd look directly at Nature and ask when they've made any such clear statement? Clearly, they have a non-challenging editorial stance when approaching the laughable 'science facts' in an Inconvenient Truth (not a whisper from Nature as far as I can recall). Nature IS a respected science journal, that would be a perfect place for the fallacies of the AGW hypothesis to be dissected and the valid conclusions reinforced. But no, instead they seem to prefer the role of mandarins, defending an established dogma without really every looking at it critically or questioning it honestly.
"Now that people have glimpse of the actual communications between the scientists, compare that to say, the hacked emails of Sarah Palin, See where you find more smoking guns."
Note to 140Mandak262Jamuna: the election was over more than a year ago. She didn't win the Vice Presidency, you can stop obsessing over her. Really.
"A few suspect emails do not destroy millions of man hours of research."
Of course not. But when the main suppliers of that information to policy makers turn out to be advocates of a dogma with a vested interest in manipulating that data, in colluding to hide contrary information, in DISPOSING (whups! accident!) of the raw data sets that they've compiled, attacking critics, and generally behaving as if they have something to conceal, it IS possible for those individuals to taint that research and especially the conclusions drawn therefrom.
Who Watches the Watchmen, indeed?
It's a known psychological fact that very often the victims of a con will be the most vociferous defenders of the con artists - they are now defending their own reputation and self-image, no longer mere facts of 'does this snake oil work or not?'.
You're missing the simple human motivation of power.
Why did Rachel Carson blame DDT when ALL the subsequent testing showed that it wasn't DDT that caused eggshell thinning, etc.?
Why have enviromental alarmists previously cried that we're all going to die from:
- too much cold
- too much heat
- running out of food
- running out of oil
- running out of clean water
- all the wild animals going extinct
- running out of landfill space
- PCBs
- mercury
- lead
- acid rain
- nuclear power
- coal power
- overpopulation
?
CONTROL.
Of course, Gore himself WAS likely just in it for the money, he's well on the way to being the world's top magnate with his fingers in every carbon-trading scheme.
You act as if the AGW zealots have nothing to gain from ignoring the failures in the science.
No matter what the science says (that would be the REAL data, not some massaged, averaged, sampled, and manipulated data), everyone that has a political stake in declaring "the sky is falling"* will tend to fight tooth and nail against anyone claiming that CO2 isn't the catastrophe it's claimed to be. Simple selfish interest.
* whether this be from: too much cold, too much heat, running out of food, running out of oil, running out of clean water, all the wild animals going extinct, running out of landfill space, DDT, PCBs, mercury, lead, acid rain, nuclear power, coal power, overpopulation...did I miss any 'doomsday naturalist scenarios' posited in the last 30 years?
Fail 1) who EVER said corporate legitimacy had anything to do with morals or ethics? Ever? Corporate success is measured in return on investment for shareholders. Full stop. Naturally, such an organism will try whatever options are available (generally legal, but illegal if the odds of getting caught/punished/whatever are calculably trivial) to succeed.
Fail 2) equating the actions of a mercantilist cartel formed in the 16th-17th Century with the conduct of pirates in 2009. I'm not sure if that's a failure in moral equivalence (in ENTIRELY different contexts) or if it's historical ignorance or if it's simply political disingenuousness, but it hardly even makes SENSE, even at the most superficial levels.
"...tribalism in science is the main culprit here..."
Funny, the old word used to be 'fraud'.
So let me see, in this ONE chain of posts, the "main" reason for our crappy educational system is: ...well THAT clears things up immensely. And we wonder why there's no 'silver bullet' to fix this? That would be my $0.02; the reason our educational system sucks is because the causes are many, subtle, interrelated, and long-term - all of which resist the sort of quick, easy, money-oriented solution our politicians are inclined to try to apply. So I guess my answer is:
- "poor schooling in the fields of Language Arts, Drama/Theatre, and Humanitarian studies."
- "zero tolerance and standardized tests"
- "the Department of Education with its centralized planning, heavy handed bureaucracy and one-size-fits-nobody policies"
- "the quality of teachers (and) Teacher's unions"
- "the quality of parents"
- "the education major itself in colleges"
- "the politicians"
...when you find some NONviolent rape and murder, m'kay?
SL was neither the best nor the brightest of the various shells that tried to offer a 'new' way of browsing and providing web content. I can think of at least 4 off the top of my head, and that was 6+ years ago. It was essentially nothing more than a graphical shell for a MUD, an ancient concept in Internet years. (TiA: I was a beta for ViOS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vios in 1999, so SL in 2003 was utterly not impressive.)
In fact, it was one of the slowest, kludgiest ones I ever had the misfortune to try. (In truth, that probably had a lot to do with the unprecedented amount of access the users had to customize their experience and manipulate the world in non-trivial ways.)
Probably inspired by books like Neuromancer and Snow Crash, it was an attractive concept ... only until you analyzed it rigorously. Let's see, I can type "Deutsche bank berlin customer services" in a browser, wait 0.246 seconds for the links to pop up, and click one to get to their site. OR, in the 'internet as virtual world' paradigm, I could log in to my avatar, and go 'flying' at Mach 15 to wherever DB Berlin's virtual hq was (which I'd probably have to look up), "enter" it, and then navigate in some Euclidean way to the customer service 'office'. Lot more fun, sure, not so efficient (not to mention orders of magnitude more hardware and bandwidth required). I can turn on "NPR's Science Friday" or d/l from the web to listen at FM-radio quality....or I could go into SL (login), travel to the SL place, and then watch my screen flicker at 15 fps while the giant penis-avatar to my left keeps lagging into the zebra-chick hovering over the stage, all the while the audio stutters and drops all over the place. Improvement?
It took all the efficiencies of the internet, and rendered them BACK into their real-world constraints of geography and linearity - being able to fly really fast doesn't really help that. Putting the internet in a real-world context doesn't improve efficiency of use nor quality of results, so what good is it? Who ever thought that was actually, a good idea? As far as I can tell, only the promoters.
Second Life somehow managed to gather a tiny bit more focus and attention (probably because it was free for users), making it the "go-to" place for all the people WHO DIDN'T REALLY UNDERSTAND THE INTERNET IN THE FIRST PLACE. Thus, some businesses followed out of simple cash-sniffing self-interest. Some other sorts of organizations showed up - as the BBC article says, you could hardly open a newspaper Technology section or computer magazine without some reference to SL for a couple of years there.
Couple all this failure with the Linden Labs' arbitrariness and hypocrisy*, I was astonished then that people (and especially businesses) bought into it for so long.
* and I do mean hypocrisy; The only value I thought it MIGHT have was that I thought the whole thing MIGHT be an interesting social experiment of the concepts of the Commmons, broadened to numbers of people undreamed-of by late-90's standards. The ability to customize the code, plus what was a strict hands-off policy by the Lindens, seemed like it might be a cauldron for a working-through of the Greater Internet Dickwad Theory (http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/). Sadly, when actually confronted with a situation that turned somewhat internet-ugly, they folded to their interventionist sensibilities to make sure everyone 'played nice'. (http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2003/07/war_of_the_jess.html)
People using Second Life to experience the internet always seemed to me like chimps futilely trying to use their termite sticks to dial a phone....it *might* work, clumsily, but conceptually you're light-years away from really 'getting it'.
Not sure why you'd bother to think that it's going to anything real, since the Fed seems to be ok with saving jobs and dumping money into DISTRICTS THAT DON'T EXIST.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/jobs-saved-created-congressional-districts-exist/story?id=9097853
Guessed to be to the tune of $70+ BILLION so far.
"Change!" indeed. I think Boss Tweed would find that amusing. Daley might even be impressed.
So you're saying that the next time Mom asks for tech support, he should bind her up in duct tape, leaving a little hole and saying "fight your way out Mom! It will do you good!"
While amusing, I don't think that would really solve her or his problems.
Perhaps I was speaking ironically of our SOCIETY'S view of things, and not my own? Christ man, maybe you could step outside your rage for just one second and think that by commenting on it, perhaps I AGREE WITH YOU?
There is no such thing as 'peak oil'. This is the same extrapolationist nonsense that's been spouted in the same breath as 'we're running out of landfills', 'we're running out of fresh water', and 'we're running out of food'. FUD BOLLOCKS.
(And here's a tip: nobody believes you because you've been spewing this same alarmist crap since the late 60's.)
As many people said above, there are trillions of bbls of reserve crude.
As others cogently pointed out, much of this is energetically nonsensical to retrieve.
However, oil is NOT our only source of energy.
As a hypothetical exercise, one could build a nuclear reactor - along with a nearby fast breeder for reprocessing plutonium wastes - and essentially have infinite energy at that site. If electrical energy was not in the format we need (ie until the electric car becomes practical), then that energy can be used to retrieve more oil.
It's very very simple: as supplies for oil become more prohibitive to retrieve, the incentive to develop replacements for it increases. Eventually, oil will probably not be needed at all for energy, only for its use as a source for other raw materials.
For now, all those plastic shopping bags fluttering in the trees down in the street put the lie to any nonsensical fears about 'peak oil'.
"A mere fifty years ago, just throwing a dog or chimp into orbit was tricky business..."
More importantly, we were trying.
Now, it seems, we can hardly be bothered. We've got all these darn poor people to take care of, and WoW to play, not necessarily in that order.
To give you some idea of the scales involved, even traveling at the targetted 5m/sec speed continuously, it would take the climber nearly 3 MONTHS to get to geosynchronous height of approx 35,000 km.
Sounds like the UK ones are massively overengineered, inconvenient, and introduce extra points of failure unnecessarily.
Hm?
"Nevertheless, it raises an interesting question: if intelligence can be increased by something so simple as an increase in the expression of a single NMDA receptor subunit, why hasn't it already happened?"
Looking back at great swaths of my own life, and imagining the ability to remember them much, much better, the reason becomes apparent: suicide?
I agree with you to a small degree, except insofar that there is an order of magnitude difference at the ultimate point where reality intrudes - the pen can be mightier than the sword, but only figuratively. In point of fact, a murderer breaking into your home (or the agent of a thieving government) can be killed by a bullet, where writing something nasty isn't going to do much.
Finally, as regards your comparison - you're right, except to continue the metaphor, this guy who cracks cable modems is essentially asserting that people are entitled to free bullets which is nonsense.
I think it must be that people spend too much time watching clever courtroom dramas where the cagey defense attorney saves the day by finessing some narrow point of legal semantics. Not how it really happens; in point of fact, most judges are sensible enough to see that a guy 'hacking' cable modems is trying to cheat the system - and then SELLING them is trying to profit from it, and it suddenly becomes nontrivial in the eyes of the law. In the same sense that you don't get the black DEA choppers descending if you build a water bong, but the moment one tries to sell them (as if people don't know what they're for) then you start to catch some official attention.
I'm going out on a limb, but I'd guess strongly that he wouldn't have ANY issues if he was just hacking cable modems and saying 'aha, I beat you guys again'. No, it's not the charges that are "bullshit", it's someone thinking that they have some civil right to break laws that they don't feel apply to them. (And as for the civilly disobedient, yes, there IS a human right to break laws you think are immoral; however, your unjust suffering of the punishment is supposed to attract attention, NOT get you 'off the hook scot-free'.)
...UNLESS the people with a 360 don't want to pay $50/year for Live.