You're Giantsoftwarecompany (tm). You rely almost entirely on the fact that your systems are preinstalled, and that most people have already gone through the learning curve. Most of your home/personal support is performed by friends, relatives, whatever that support Grandma's computer in their free time.
Aside from the incentive that THOSE people have to push their supportees to some other OS, you've now just made the 'repair' process a 'reinstall'(x2) process. You've just increased the 'time cost' of a repair event to be the equivalent (or, 2x the equivalent) of just installing a different OS.
Most service companies would steer clear of anything that makes 'switching to another vendor' a comparable decision since inertia is a big reason most customers stay even if they are mildly unhappy. I guess MS has some other plan?
Maybe before it shows up in US Congress, they should offer "Pages gone Wild!" or "Jimmy the Intern gets to sit on the Senator's Staff"....my guess then they would be fine with it.
Totally OT, but in my particular dialect (USA Upper midwest) they don't even come CLOSE to rhyming. Where are you from? SMUT rhymes with shut or cut. SMURF rhymes with earth or birth.
IANATL, but "the company could also have priced that paticular seat at $1 and been well withing their rights." would have been followed immediately by an IRS audit, in which case they would have been free to declare that price a false one, set their own price, and then tax that.
IAACB (I am a customs broker) and that's how Customs does it. If they have a suspicion that your declared value is less than the resonable market value, they can invoke the ability to use calculated transaction value in which they first compare against other similar articles, or, if the item is fairly unique, to calculate your costs themselves, add on a market-supportable profit, and value that item at what they calculate your value SHOULD be.
Face it, that camel's nose is under the tentflap. We've accepted without question that the government has the right to tax basically anything without question or resistance. The congress cannot stop spending our money, they're like heroin addicts on a bender. This government is no longer controlled by the people, nor does it work for the people. Draw your own conclusions.
I think it's economics. Tkaing E3 as an example (sorry to all you marketers whose job rides on this) but someone in some position of authority had to do the math and say 'wait a sec; we're spending HOW many hundreds of thousands on this event, the booth, the bimbos, and sending a few flunkies on a junket...for what again?'
...I'm NOT a fan of Second Life - I think it's feeble, clumsy, laggy, antiquated in every technological way, and pointless - but even I draw the line at calling it a pyramid scheme.
That's just silly. If anything, it's closer to a pure meritocracy than anything - there are some stunningly creative people in there (apparently with LOTS more time than me). There are a lot of things I'd be interested in exploring DESPITE the horrendous lag and 1992 graphics. Hopefully these creative people can sell their work for Linden$ and turn that into cash based on market forces.
At some point, people have to be responsible for their own actions. It's 'caveat emptor' for the computer world, which itself is capitalist Darwinism that is essentially no different than any OTHER non-computer capitalist mechanism.
If I enter 2nd Life with no knowledge of what I'm doing, and expect to "make ton$$$ of money!", I'm probably going to waste my time (and if I'm stupid enough to spend real money, I'll lose that too). How is this ANY different than if I buy a franchise restaurant without knowing anything about the business, or start day-trading stocks knowing NOTHING about the market? In every case, my ignorance will cause me to make mistakes (at best) or even be exploited by more savvy actors (at worst) but either way, the ending will not be happy for me.
In that sense, 2nd life is no different than the real world.
...that this is part of the key to MS's success (any they either are naive or in denial about it).
The fact that Win95 was widely and easily pirated was the GIGANTIC leap for Windows becoming the dominant OS in the industry. OS/2 was much harder to pirate (or was simply not that common) and windows won by default, certainly not because it was better in a majority of ways.
The ubiquity of Windows-version OSs (due largely to piracy) has been Apple's strategy writ large: where Apple practically gives computers to educational establishments to get people 'hooked' on the system, Windows-by-sneakernet did the same thing ^2.
So as someone who's been a close observer of the OS marketplace since the early 80s, it's clear to me that if MSs ham-handed antipiracy strategies really HAVE reduced the pirate-install rate to 22% (or lower, since I agree with most of the posters that most of that 22% is WGA failing for other reasons), that tells me that within a computer generation or two, MS will have to finally compete on its merits because new users won't just build their learning curve on MS OSs as default anymore.
Just to give you a sense of scale for Jupiter, the Earth would fit nicely into the Great Red Spot (N/S dims of red spot are almost exactly the same as the diameter of Earth).
Fahrenheit is a much more human-based scale, ostensibly it was derived from the maximum and minimum temps that Fahrenheit experienced (he lived in Copenhagen, IIRC).
So, 100 is "really hot" and 0 is "really cold". That seems simple and very human-centric, albeit not terribly useful for scientists.
I have to say, it sounds fairly dumb to say "oh my gosh, it's 37 outside!" - there's just no intuitive oomph to it.
There are a number of ways to respond to this question...
1) "I personally deal with European scientists on a daily basis, and find our lack of common measurement to be extremely frustrating." So? USE THE METRIC SYSTEM, then. *Nobody* is stopping you. I work for a European-HQ'ed paper company, and corporate is constantly dealing in square meters, while our customers are asking for things in thousand-square-feet units. Should I wring my hands and moan piteously about how complicated this is? Or is it perhaps easier just to learn the conversion rate(s) and become skilled at quick mental conversions?
There are hundreds if not thousands of industries in the US that commonly and regularly use Metric system units every day.
2) In a larger view, the difficulty in getting people to switch is symptomatic of our long-BROKEN educational system. We've had a system that accepts the production of stupid adults for a half-century; is it a surprise that much of the American electorate is, well, stupid? For 40 years, 'enlightened' social-promotion educators have insisted that there is no educational canon, no set of knowledge that's necessary to be a functional adult. Every time someone would say "look, maybe it's useful if we insist that all children must know X or must perform at Y level of aptitude before graduating", a chorus of voices (generally from the Left) would claim that was merely being classist, ethnocentrist, racist, or somehow a vague assault on the inherent value of whatever child didn't get it. Couple that with the capitalist overreach into the educational system (going after the Right now), from corporate sponsors pumping millions of units of sugar-pop and crap-snacks into nutrition starved teens, up to the ability of college athletes to skate through education because of their financial contribution to the school, and you have a recipe for disaster.
We need to return to elementary schools that teach the basics, and REQUIRE a certain level of aptitude before graduation. We need to have a post-secondary system that doesn't require the first 2 years to be remedial college-prep education. We need to have colleges insist on a specific canon of educational requirements for all students, and dispense with the boutique specifics that suit some tenure-protected professor's ideological goals.
Then, perhaps, in 20-30 years we can rebuild a working democracy, with an enlightened electorate capable of making intelligent choices.
Does this also apply to relatively dimwitted athletes that get $250 million over 5 years because of a fortunate genetic accident that gives them mad skillz?
Let's start there, oh, and Hollywood. I'm guessing that income disparity on Hollywood sets is fairly significant as well. Get back to me when you get Tom Cruise to accept SAG scale pay.
...the/. crowd all cry out at this horrific violation of free speech and the rising power of "the religious nutjobs".
Setting aside the multiple times that the "Inconvenient Truth" has been revealed to be Junk Science (http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/), why is it so objectionable that something be presented with contrasting viewpoints?
(Setting aside my suspicions that most of these same people wouldn't see anything wrong with showing Fahrenheit 9/11 as 'factual' either...)
And yes, the fanatics will immediately reply that "oh, then you're going to have to allow Flat-Earthers to present 'contrary viewpoints' about the Earth being round and all sorts of other stupid theories!" Well, no. There is no real debate about the earth being round. And the only way that you could possibly imagine there ISN'T a debate on global warming is if you are able to wave your hand and dismiss everyone who disagrees with you as simply staggeringly incompetent.
A reply to the various good replies to my comment:
1) people can sell their goods for whatever currency they want to, as one reply already stated. In fact, there was just a news story about a pizza place in Laredo, TX (I believe) that is selling its food for pesos. Aside from kneejerk right wing paranoia, nobody particularly cares. It's his business, and he'll probably do much better because he's catering precisely to his customer base.
2) a national institute of standards sets standards, it doesn't (AFAIK) try to legislate behavior. If you want to quote your car's performance in 'rods per hogshead of gas' feel free, the NIS simply precisely defines how long a rod is and how much a hogshead is.
So many of you seem to be missing the point. The metric system is not BANNED in the US. People use it as they need/want to. I use it preferentially in my business, as I am in international shipping. It's the system of choice for much of science, medicine, and technology. So if other people don't want to use it, it appears to be needless busybodyism to insist that they conform.
It's a multipart question, and the people who either have a vested interest in the answer or a political motivation (ie because they enjoy attacking Republicans/Bush, usually forgetting it was Clinton that refused to sign Kyoto...) cheerfully build strawmen to ignore this.
1) is there climate change? 2) is it caused to a significant degree by human activity? 3) is the result of climate warming bad? 4) can the human activity be changed such that the effect is altered, and what is the opportunity cost for doing so? (each question is followed by an "if yes, then...")
Few people debate 1; as the poster(s) above pointed out, climate has *always* changed, and is changing. It appears to me that only eco-nuts are claiming that climate should somehow be static from here forward (apparently to remain convenient for humans, ironically). Yet eco-nuts nevertheless like to claim that the 'neanderthals' of the Right are constantly denying 'global warming'. No, as a likely member of this cohort, we don't deny the warming we merely deny your nutball hysteria and most of your solutions, swampie.
2 seems likely, although I haven't seen conclusive proof. We're putting a LOT of heat out, as well as large amounts of CO2. So anecdotally it seems credible to me. But the earth is a BIG system. Almost inconceivably big. Larger shifts in CO2 and temp have occurred historically, and just as quickly, long before humans showed up. It's NATURAL for humans to try to correlate events and their own actions - that's how we got dryads, superstition, and arguably, God - but that doesn't mean they are actually connected causally. Further, it's not impossible that something happens for the first time; it doesn't mean that the observer somehow caused it, no matter how politically convenient he'd find it.
3 NOBODY seems to know, although we managed to live quite successfully at lower tech levels and higher temps at regular periods in our history.
And 4 is what's really under argument. Environmentalists stamping their sandal-clad feet and crying that "we have to" is unpersuasive. And a report claiming that global warming is going to cost X is (nearly) meaningless unless it's compared to the Y cost of mitigation.
Environmentalists' arguments are only going to convince the choir until they first acknowledge that their history of 'global prediction' is really quite bad. Have we run out of clean water? Space for landfills? Food? Trees? Oil? No. None of the 'sky is falling' predictions have come true, so pardon me if I am somewhat skeptical of your latest crisis cry.
Nice assumption. It could be that "right wing zealots" are delighted, now that it's not required to KILL A LIVING BEING to harvest them.
Oh, you don't think a fetus is a living being? It kind of depends on your definition, doesn't it? Personally, I'd rather err on the side of being overcautious, else: Vell, ve vere getting rid of zese pesky Jews anyvay, warum not get some use from zhem from medical experiments, ja?
"So, when Bill Gates donates large amounts of money to buy patented medications, he's equally protecting the sanctity of human life and the sanctity of international IP laws. Convenient way to look great, do good things, all while protect his own interests."
Heaven forbid he does something that helps people, AND is good for him.
One wonders if there is any possible altruistic gesture that anyone could ever do that wouldn't get internet pundits bitching about something or another. I doubt it.
"President, President-elect, Vice President or other officer next in the order of succession to the office of President, or Vice President-elect"
IANAL but this is pretty clear to me. This includes threats against: 1) the President 2) the President-elect (if after an election but before their taking office) 3) Vice-President 4) other officer in the order of succession to the office of President 5) the Vice-President elect (if after an election but before their taking office)
Nobody else. Not officers-in-line-of-succession-elect...it's quite explicit, really.
Were their comments stupid? Yeah, but not illegal according to THAT quoted statute.
Point taken, but let's say that you're one of the half-dozen major pharma companies. Your researcher discovers a cure for cancer.
The OP suggested that to maintain long-term profits, this would not be followed, or would be surpressed. In real terms - can you possibly IMAGINE such a thing?
First, you have to presuppose that everyone in the management chain (long or short) is irredeemably evil and greedy. You cannot have a single defector, or if you do, you'd have to expect these companies would be similarly RUTHLESS in silencing/killing anyone who would breathe a word about it outside the cabal.
Morality aside, this also totally disregards the sheer lucrative opportunity of being the company/CEO/whatever that CURED CANCER. What would that patent be worth? How about one's place in history?
I just find it amazing and funny (in a pathetic way) that so many people are so rabidly anti-establishment that they are willing to IMMEDIATELY build this massive (yet tenuous) house of suppositions rather than just accept that it's probably the simpler, more likely solution.
Does anyone else find it ironic that the "Sky is falling" Global Warming clique - generally considered in American parlance to be "liberal" - is invariably the most elitist, condescending voice in the room?
If one disagrees with a conservative, that's it - a disagreement. If one disagrees with a liberal, on the other hand, one is "stupid", "retarded", usually a beer-swilling, NASCAR-watching redneck, and most frequently EVIL.* Usually backed by the shadowy power of a multinational.
* EVIL: a concept which Liberals refuse to even acknowledge exists except insofar as they can apply it to conservatives.
Because the title 'scientist' is somehow magical? Do you genuinely believe that someone whose job title is 'scientist' is actually *smarter* than an investment banker, a computer tech, a stay-at-home-mom, or a greengrocer?
I'll credit a scientist expertise in his/her field. But when you have the UCS made up of "scientists" commenting on (for example) the uselessness of nuclear weapons, that's just stupid.
Example: how would these scientists respond if Henry Kissenger was somehow able to grab media credibility in a criticism of their "analysis of glucose transfer through cell membranes" (or WTF their speciality is)? Well of course, nobody in their right mind would believe Kissenger knew more than people who'd dedicated their education and lives to the subject of study?
Yet, somehow, Robert Oppenheimer's opinion on the utility of nuclear weapons in geopolitics is taken as credible? Why? I might not agree with him, but I'd suspect that Kissenger has more understanding of the nuances of geopolitics than some physics genius who's only occasionally left the rarified air of academia. Don't even get me started on the media asking Jeanine Garafalo's opinion. Sheesh.
Face it: the "Union of Concerned Scientists" is simply banking on the gullible believing that "oh, them are SCIENTISTS, so them are smart!" Joe Biochemist has no more intrinsic understanding of the nuances of climatology than you, me, or Joe Steelworker, he just ASSumes he does.
Only on teh InArw3b could this be modded "insightful".
Let's see, there's a really complicated, deadly family of diseases. Why haven't we cured them? 2 possibilities: 1) it's really hard, and we haven't figured it out yet 2) a secret cabal of giant corporations is colluding to make sure nobody releases it so they can make more money.
Obviously, 2 is the logical answer, right? I'm sure the recipe for the cure is on a 3x5 card stored right next to the Ark of the Covenant in that warehouse at the end of Indiana Jones. I believe Elvis is the warehouse guard, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Permission?
Hell, that's an invitation.
I'd wonder too. Commerically, it's beyond idiotic.
You're Giantsoftwarecompany (tm). You rely almost entirely on the fact that your systems are preinstalled, and that most people have already gone through the learning curve. Most of your home/personal support is performed by friends, relatives, whatever that support Grandma's computer in their free time.
Aside from the incentive that THOSE people have to push their supportees to some other OS, you've now just made the 'repair' process a 'reinstall'(x2) process. You've just increased the 'time cost' of a repair event to be the equivalent (or, 2x the equivalent) of just installing a different OS.
Most service companies would steer clear of anything that makes 'switching to another vendor' a comparable decision since inertia is a big reason most customers stay even if they are mildly unhappy. I guess MS has some other plan?
Maybe before it shows up in US Congress, they should offer "Pages gone Wild!" or "Jimmy the Intern gets to sit on the Senator's Staff"....my guess then they would be fine with it.
Totally OT, but in my particular dialect (USA Upper midwest) they don't even come CLOSE to rhyming. Where are you from?
SMUT rhymes with shut or cut.
SMURF rhymes with earth or birth.
IANATL, but "the company could also have priced that paticular seat at $1 and been well withing their rights." would have been followed immediately by an IRS audit, in which case they would have been free to declare that price a false one, set their own price, and then tax that.
IAACB (I am a customs broker) and that's how Customs does it. If they have a suspicion that your declared value is less than the resonable market value, they can invoke the ability to use calculated transaction value in which they first compare against other similar articles, or, if the item is fairly unique, to calculate your costs themselves, add on a market-supportable profit, and value that item at what they calculate your value SHOULD be.
Face it, that camel's nose is under the tentflap. We've accepted without question that the government has the right to tax basically anything without question or resistance. The congress cannot stop spending our money, they're like heroin addicts on a bender. This government is no longer controlled by the people, nor does it work for the people. Draw your own conclusions.
I think it's economics.
Tkaing E3 as an example (sorry to all you marketers whose job rides on this) but someone in some position of authority had to do the math and say 'wait a sec; we're spending HOW many hundreds of thousands on this event, the booth, the bimbos, and sending a few flunkies on a junket...for what again?'
"We need to re-examine our basic assumptions about planetary atmospheres and what causes the observed heating"
Pish-tosh. I watched An Inconvenient Truth and am certain that we already know everything there is to know about atmospheric science.
...I'm NOT a fan of Second Life - I think it's feeble, clumsy, laggy, antiquated in every technological way, and pointless - but even I draw the line at calling it a pyramid scheme.
That's just silly. If anything, it's closer to a pure meritocracy than anything - there are some stunningly creative people in there (apparently with LOTS more time than me). There are a lot of things I'd be interested in exploring DESPITE the horrendous lag and 1992 graphics. Hopefully these creative people can sell their work for Linden$ and turn that into cash based on market forces.
At some point, people have to be responsible for their own actions. It's 'caveat emptor' for the computer world, which itself is capitalist Darwinism that is essentially no different than any OTHER non-computer capitalist mechanism.
If I enter 2nd Life with no knowledge of what I'm doing, and expect to "make ton$$$ of money!", I'm probably going to waste my time (and if I'm stupid enough to spend real money, I'll lose that too). How is this ANY different than if I buy a franchise restaurant without knowing anything about the business, or start day-trading stocks knowing NOTHING about the market? In every case, my ignorance will cause me to make mistakes (at best) or even be exploited by more savvy actors (at worst) but either way, the ending will not be happy for me.
In that sense, 2nd life is no different than the real world.
...that this is part of the key to MS's success (any they either are naive or in denial about it).
The fact that Win95 was widely and easily pirated was the GIGANTIC leap for Windows becoming the dominant OS in the industry. OS/2 was much harder to pirate (or was simply not that common) and windows won by default, certainly not because it was better in a majority of ways.
The ubiquity of Windows-version OSs (due largely to piracy) has been Apple's strategy writ large: where Apple practically gives computers to educational establishments to get people 'hooked' on the system, Windows-by-sneakernet did the same thing ^2.
So as someone who's been a close observer of the OS marketplace since the early 80s, it's clear to me that if MSs ham-handed antipiracy strategies really HAVE reduced the pirate-install rate to 22% (or lower, since I agree with most of the posters that most of that 22% is WGA failing for other reasons), that tells me that within a computer generation or two, MS will have to finally compete on its merits because new users won't just build their learning curve on MS OSs as default anymore.
"Nuclear will take many years to get on line and there's still too many problems to make it a major source of power."
Someone needs let the French know; pretty much their whole country is running on nuclear-generated electricity and they seem to be doing just fine.
Can't comment on the diet, but according to wiki:
12-14,000 km high by 24-40,000 km wide.
Earth is about 12,750 km diameter.
So yeah, at it's fullest you could fit 3 wide, but only the center one would fit completely widthwise.
Just to give you a sense of scale for Jupiter, the Earth would fit nicely into the Great Red Spot (N/S dims of red spot are almost exactly the same as the diameter of Earth).
Fahrenheit is a much more human-based scale, ostensibly it was derived from the maximum and minimum temps that Fahrenheit experienced (he lived in Copenhagen, IIRC).
So, 100 is "really hot" and 0 is "really cold". That seems simple and very human-centric, albeit not terribly useful for scientists.
I have to say, it sounds fairly dumb to say "oh my gosh, it's 37 outside!" - there's just no intuitive oomph to it.
There are a number of ways to respond to this question...
1) "I personally deal with European scientists on a daily basis, and find our lack of common measurement to be extremely frustrating."
So? USE THE METRIC SYSTEM, then. *Nobody* is stopping you. I work for a European-HQ'ed paper company, and corporate is constantly dealing in square meters, while our customers are asking for things in thousand-square-feet units. Should I wring my hands and moan piteously about how complicated this is? Or is it perhaps easier just to learn the conversion rate(s) and become skilled at quick mental conversions?
There are hundreds if not thousands of industries in the US that commonly and regularly use Metric system units every day.
2) In a larger view, the difficulty in getting people to switch is symptomatic of our long-BROKEN educational system. We've had a system that accepts the production of stupid adults for a half-century; is it a surprise that much of the American electorate is, well, stupid? For 40 years, 'enlightened' social-promotion educators have insisted that there is no educational canon, no set of knowledge that's necessary to be a functional adult. Every time someone would say "look, maybe it's useful if we insist that all children must know X or must perform at Y level of aptitude before graduating", a chorus of voices (generally from the Left) would claim that was merely being classist, ethnocentrist, racist, or somehow a vague assault on the inherent value of whatever child didn't get it.
Couple that with the capitalist overreach into the educational system (going after the Right now), from corporate sponsors pumping millions of units of sugar-pop and crap-snacks into nutrition starved teens, up to the ability of college athletes to skate through education because of their financial contribution to the school, and you have a recipe for disaster.
We need to return to elementary schools that teach the basics, and REQUIRE a certain level of aptitude before graduation.
We need to have a post-secondary system that doesn't require the first 2 years to be remedial college-prep education.
We need to have colleges insist on a specific canon of educational requirements for all students, and dispense with the boutique specifics that suit some tenure-protected professor's ideological goals.
Then, perhaps, in 20-30 years we can rebuild a working democracy, with an enlightened electorate capable of making intelligent choices.
Does this also apply to relatively dimwitted athletes that get $250 million over 5 years because of a fortunate genetic accident that gives them mad skillz?
Let's start there, oh, and Hollywood. I'm guessing that income disparity on Hollywood sets is fairly significant as well. Get back to me when you get Tom Cruise to accept SAG scale pay.
...the /. crowd all cry out at this horrific violation of free speech and the rising power of "the religious nutjobs".
Setting aside the multiple times that the "Inconvenient Truth" has been revealed to be Junk Science (http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/), why is it so objectionable that something be presented with contrasting viewpoints?
(Setting aside my suspicions that most of these same people wouldn't see anything wrong with showing Fahrenheit 9/11 as 'factual' either...)
And yes, the fanatics will immediately reply that "oh, then you're going to have to allow Flat-Earthers to present 'contrary viewpoints' about the Earth being round and all sorts of other stupid theories!" Well, no. There is no real debate about the earth being round. And the only way that you could possibly imagine there ISN'T a debate on global warming is if you are able to wave your hand and dismiss everyone who disagrees with you as simply staggeringly incompetent.
Oh wait, that's how eco-nuts DO work.
A reply to the various good replies to my comment:
1) people can sell their goods for whatever currency they want to, as one reply already stated. In fact, there was just a news story about a pizza place in Laredo, TX (I believe) that is selling its food for pesos. Aside from kneejerk right wing paranoia, nobody particularly cares. It's his business, and he'll probably do much better because he's catering precisely to his customer base.
2) a national institute of standards sets standards, it doesn't (AFAIK) try to legislate behavior. If you want to quote your car's performance in 'rods per hogshead of gas' feel free, the NIS simply precisely defines how long a rod is and how much a hogshead is.
So many of you seem to be missing the point. The metric system is not BANNED in the US. People use it as they need/want to. I use it preferentially in my business, as I am in international shipping. It's the system of choice for much of science, medicine, and technology. So if other people don't want to use it, it appears to be needless busybodyism to insist that they conform.
It's a multipart question, and the people who either have a vested interest in the answer or a political motivation (ie because they enjoy attacking Republicans/Bush, usually forgetting it was Clinton that refused to sign Kyoto...) cheerfully build strawmen to ignore this.
1) is there climate change?
2) is it caused to a significant degree by human activity?
3) is the result of climate warming bad?
4) can the human activity be changed such that the effect is altered, and what is the opportunity cost for doing so?
(each question is followed by an "if yes, then...")
Few people debate 1; as the poster(s) above pointed out, climate has *always* changed, and is changing. It appears to me that only eco-nuts are claiming that climate should somehow be static from here forward (apparently to remain convenient for humans, ironically). Yet eco-nuts nevertheless like to claim that the 'neanderthals' of the Right are constantly denying 'global warming'. No, as a likely member of this cohort, we don't deny the warming we merely deny your nutball hysteria and most of your solutions, swampie.
2 seems likely, although I haven't seen conclusive proof. We're putting a LOT of heat out, as well as large amounts of CO2. So anecdotally it seems credible to me. But the earth is a BIG system. Almost inconceivably big. Larger shifts in CO2 and temp have occurred historically, and just as quickly, long before humans showed up. It's NATURAL for humans to try to correlate events and their own actions - that's how we got dryads, superstition, and arguably, God - but that doesn't mean they are actually connected causally. Further, it's not impossible that something happens for the first time; it doesn't mean that the observer somehow caused it, no matter how politically convenient he'd find it.
3 NOBODY seems to know, although we managed to live quite successfully at lower tech levels and higher temps at regular periods in our history.
And 4 is what's really under argument. Environmentalists stamping their sandal-clad feet and crying that "we have to" is unpersuasive. And a report claiming that global warming is going to cost X is (nearly) meaningless unless it's compared to the Y cost of mitigation.
Environmentalists' arguments are only going to convince the choir until they first acknowledge that their history of 'global prediction' is really quite bad. Have we run out of clean water? Space for landfills? Food? Trees? Oil? No. None of the 'sky is falling' predictions have come true, so pardon me if I am somewhat skeptical of your latest crisis cry.
".. but when is the rest of the USA going to follow suit?"
Well, why does everyone seem to care so much?
I mean, the US is particularly full of people that don't like governments telling them what to do - hell, the US was FOUNDED by people like that.
It's simply not practicable for the US gov't to say "you must all do it this way" for something so trivial.
Nice assumption. It could be that "right wing zealots" are delighted, now that it's not required to KILL A LIVING BEING to harvest them.
Oh, you don't think a fetus is a living being? It kind of depends on your definition, doesn't it? Personally, I'd rather err on the side of being overcautious, else: Vell, ve vere getting rid of zese pesky Jews anyvay, warum not get some use from zhem from medical experiments, ja?
"So, when Bill Gates donates large amounts of money to buy patented medications, he's equally protecting the sanctity of human life and the sanctity of international IP laws. Convenient way to look great, do good things, all while protect his own interests."
Heaven forbid he does something that helps people, AND is good for him.
One wonders if there is any possible altruistic gesture that anyone could ever do that wouldn't get internet pundits bitching about something or another. I doubt it.
Only if you are reaching.
"President, President-elect, Vice President or other officer next in the order of succession to the office of President, or Vice President-elect"
IANAL but this is pretty clear to me.
This includes threats against:
1) the President
2) the President-elect (if after an election but before their taking office)
3) Vice-President
4) other officer in the order of succession to the office of President
5) the Vice-President elect (if after an election but before their taking office)
Nobody else. Not officers-in-line-of-succession-elect...it's quite explicit, really.
Were their comments stupid? Yeah, but not illegal according to THAT quoted statute.
Point taken, but let's say that you're one of the half-dozen major pharma companies.
Your researcher discovers a cure for cancer.
The OP suggested that to maintain long-term profits, this would not be followed, or would be surpressed. In real terms - can you possibly IMAGINE such a thing?
First, you have to presuppose that everyone in the management chain (long or short) is irredeemably evil and greedy. You cannot have a single defector, or if you do, you'd have to expect these companies would be similarly RUTHLESS in silencing/killing anyone who would breathe a word about it outside the cabal.
Morality aside, this also totally disregards the sheer lucrative opportunity of being the company/CEO/whatever that CURED CANCER. What would that patent be worth? How about one's place in history?
I just find it amazing and funny (in a pathetic way) that so many people are so rabidly anti-establishment that they are willing to IMMEDIATELY build this massive (yet tenuous) house of suppositions rather than just accept that it's probably the simpler, more likely solution.
Does anyone else find it ironic that the "Sky is falling" Global Warming clique - generally considered in American parlance to be "liberal" - is invariably the most elitist, condescending voice in the room?
If one disagrees with a conservative, that's it - a disagreement.
If one disagrees with a liberal, on the other hand, one is "stupid", "retarded", usually a beer-swilling, NASCAR-watching redneck, and most frequently EVIL.* Usually backed by the shadowy power of a multinational.
* EVIL: a concept which Liberals refuse to even acknowledge exists except insofar as they can apply it to conservatives.
Because the title 'scientist' is somehow magical? Do you genuinely believe that someone whose job title is 'scientist' is actually *smarter* than an investment banker, a computer tech, a stay-at-home-mom, or a greengrocer?
I'll credit a scientist expertise in his/her field. But when you have the UCS made up of "scientists" commenting on (for example) the uselessness of nuclear weapons, that's just stupid.
Example: how would these scientists respond if Henry Kissenger was somehow able to grab media credibility in a criticism of their "analysis of glucose transfer through cell membranes" (or WTF their speciality is)? Well of course, nobody in their right mind would believe Kissenger knew more than people who'd dedicated their education and lives to the subject of study?
Yet, somehow, Robert Oppenheimer's opinion on the utility of nuclear weapons in geopolitics is taken as credible? Why? I might not agree with him, but I'd suspect that Kissenger has more understanding of the nuances of geopolitics than some physics genius who's only occasionally left the rarified air of academia. Don't even get me started on the media asking Jeanine Garafalo's opinion. Sheesh.
Face it: the "Union of Concerned Scientists" is simply banking on the gullible believing that "oh, them are SCIENTISTS, so them are smart!" Joe Biochemist has no more intrinsic understanding of the nuances of climatology than you, me, or Joe Steelworker, he just ASSumes he does.
Hilarious.
Only on teh InArw3b could this be modded "insightful".
Let's see, there's a really complicated, deadly family of diseases.
Why haven't we cured them? 2 possibilities:
1) it's really hard, and we haven't figured it out yet
2) a secret cabal of giant corporations is colluding to make sure nobody releases it so they can make more money.
Obviously, 2 is the logical answer, right?
I'm sure the recipe for the cure is on a 3x5 card stored right next to the Ark of the Covenant in that warehouse at the end of Indiana Jones. I believe Elvis is the warehouse guard, too.