In at time when there was no penitentiary system the guilty either had to pay with money or blood
Leviticus was written down around 500-300 BC, a time when Greek civilization was at its high point, when the Maurya dynasty rose in India and made religious tolerance and public health care the law, when Egyptian and Persian civilization had existed for millennia. Civilized people at the time lived in great cities with art, theater, palaces, public works, codes of law, judges, lawyers, traders, accountants, restaurants, night clubs, artisans, scribes, apothecaries, priests, monks, and all the other accoutrements of civilization.
The society that wrote down Leviticus, in comparison, was a band of backwards desert nomads that had missed the boat on civilization.
No it is not. If the ice on greenland melts the sea level rise is over 7m.
That would take centuries no matter what happens with climate change.
If a vulcano breaks out below greenland and all the ice drops into the ocean over a few years time span, you have the 7m instantly.
That has nothing to do with global warming and is completely outside our control. Furthermore, subglacial volcanoes are common and don't cause rapid, massive melting of entire ice caps.
Even with "normal" temperature increase like we see right now, it wont take 100 years to rise the sea more than a meter. During the next 100 years it is indeed very likely that most of Greenland will melt.
There is no realistic scenario under which Greenland's ice cover will melt this century.
When permafrost melts it is not instantly ready for agriculture and make take a century or more to become ready.
True, but temperatures aren't rising overnight anyway, and even if they did, it would mean a temporary reduction in arable land, not a permanent one. Your arguments about day lengths and topsoil don't support your horror scenarios of "extinction level events" and "collapse of civilization".
It wouldn't shock me if all of the climate disruption reduced human population by half by 2100 but I won't live long enough to see it
That's not an "extinction level event" or even a "civilization ending event", that's 1960s population levels. And that could also happen due to a pandemic or other causes we have no control over.
Under the most contrived, hypothetical climate change scenarios, we might be looking at a few centuries of "dark ages" while human societies rearrange themselves. Under any realistic climate change scenario, we're talking about a modest reduction in GDP. Talking about "extinction level events" and "collapse of civilization" is pure FUD, unsupported by fact.
Neither land mammals nor humans are going to go extinct even if the polar ice caps melt completely and we have another Eocene maximum. We know that because mammals and primates didn't go extinct last time this happened, they thrived.
We have never had rapid global average temperature change of 10C
Fascinating: you have your argument demolished, and you immediately shift to some other scenario.
Not all previous climates on earth would be compatible with a complex human society like we have today.
Indeed. A snowball earth would be really bad, for example. Even glaciation of the form we had 30000 years ago would be really bad. Any of the warm climate earth has experienced over the last 65 million years is compatible with mammals, people, and complex societies, as we can see from the rich plant and animal life that existed over the entire period.
A 4C increase could very easily become a deal breaker for our civilization. A 10C increase would almost certainly mean the extinction of nearly all currently living species of mammal.
That's nothing but fear mongering without any evidence to back it up; from all we know about Earth's climate history, those statements are false.
"Increase the risks and costs somewhat" doesn't even begin to cover the risk we are taking by not addressing this
We can't "address it". The carbon is already in the atmosphere, and it ain't gonna come out for a long term. And we ain't gonna stop emitting; all anybody is talking about is capping emissions at recent levels. Whatever anthropogenic warming is going to happen is going to happen; all politicians are talking about is whether it happens a few years slower or faster.
* Collapse of sea-based proteins caused by:
- water acidification, caused by increased CO2 in the water
This has happened before; it doesn't lead to an extinction of land-based animals, and it doesn't even lead to significant extinction of higher animals in the oceans. All that goes extinct is calcareous animals, and they come back when pH drops again. Not a big deal. This has happened many times before.
- over-fishing
Overfishing is a disgusting abuse of the marine environment, but it has nothing to do with climate change.
* Destruction of arable land, caused by:
- Increase in temperature directly
- Deforestation - causing soil erosion
- Increased atmospheric energy leading to more extreme weather, both increase in droughts and storms
- Flooding caused by sea level rise
On balance, arable land isn't destroyed by climate change, it merely moves around. In fact, arable land may well increase due to climate change, with huge areas of Europe, Siberia, Canada, and Alaska thawing and becoming arable.
Depending on how bad it gets, a significant portion of the worlds food production could collapse in a matter of years.
It "could" do that for many reasons other than climate change. It also doesn't cause extinctions of homo sapiens because rapid, abrupt climate change has happened many times since homo sapiens evolved and we didn't go extinct. Furthermore, sea level rise simply cannot happen abruptly, no matter what the temperatures do; it's physically impossible.
Other reports recently suggests a best case scenario of +4C temperature increase, and worse case in the 8-10C range. The later is likely extinction level changes.
Neither land mammals nor humans are going to go extinct even if the polar ice caps melt completely and we have another Eocene maximum. We know that because mammals and primates didn't go extinct last time this happened, they thrived.
The climate on this planet just isn't stable; it has never been and never will be. Anthropogenic carbon emissions are pushing the climate in a particular direction and arguably may increase risks and costs somewhat. It's worth thinking about that and it's worth talking about, although there's not much that can be done about it anyway.
But the kind of FUD and language like "extinction level changes" and "nightmare world" are unscientific, unjustified drivel and fear mongering.
Yeah, it's not like New York City recently experienced severe flooding or something causing at least $60 billion worth of damage, killing a few people, and basically shutting the whole place down for days.
So? New York City is built on the ocean; flooding and hurricanes come with the territory and have been having for as long as people have been living there. Climate change and sea level rise will make them a bit more frequent over the next century. That's not a "nightmare world".
That web page points to a 7m rise by default, a completely unreasonable scenario for centuries. IPCC predictions were 0.5-1m in the worst case; even with the adjustments from the article, maybe that goes up to 0.75-1.5m over the next century. Furthermore, it is nonsense to take an elevation map and project flooding from it; sea level rise and flooding don't work that way.
And it's not like we have a choice: sea level rise has been going on for thousands of years, and it's continuing steadily no matter what we do. With an enormous effort, we may be able to slow it down slightly, nothing more.
Engineering doesn't mean just putting in safety margins that make people happy, it means making cost/benefit tradeoffs. And it means taking into account opportunity costs.
Expending too many resources on reducing green house gas emissions may mean that, in the long run, far more people may die than if we had done nothing.
"Unless we reduce our carbon pollution rapidly, this study clearly shows we are heading for the nightmare world at the top end of the IPCC predictions,"
No, we'll simply be heading for a world with sea levels that are a few feet higher and temperatures that are a few degrees higher a century from now, ample time to adapt without much effort. It's not like we need to move New York or Miami overnight.
Samsung isn't getting destroyed; despite Apple's little games, they are doing well. And Samsung is also offering Windows 8 tablets and laptops (and some pretty nice ones at that), so they don't really care.
As for Windows phone, now that Microsoft has entered the market, they'll be forced to cross-license; they can't avoid silly patent lawsuits any more than anybody else.
Oracle? That's the company that just sued Google over Java. There are already several JavaScript engines for Java, and they'll be updated to use whatever non-proprietary JVM features Oracle deigns to add. So, the only real reason for Oracle to take the lead on this is that they want more control over JavaScript on Java and lock people more into their software "ecosystem". Thanks, but no thanks.
by the fact THAT APPLE WON THE CASES. Not only were they not illegitimate lawsuits, but Apple WON.
Apple won one lawsuit, but that verdict may not stand. Even if it does, it's unclear whether it has any business significance or doesn't harm Apple more than it helps. The incremental value of $1bn for Apple is nearly zero, and the amount is lost in the noise given Samsung's brisk sales. But the lawsuit has pissed off a lot of people in the tech industry and made Apple look increasingly like a bully who can't win through making better products. The lawsuit also means that Apple has opened the door to a floodgate of lawsuits, and they are a juicy target because, as Jobs put it, they "copy shamelessly".
There is a long historical precedent that company B cannot respond to company A's 2â"3 year success with a #1 market-leading product by simply copying that product in exacting detail, including accessories and box packaging
You can't invent new intellectual property laws out of thin air. Courts only recognize patents, copyrights, and trademarks. Furthermore, despite their frequent abuses by companies, these laws ultimately exist to protect and advance the interests of the public, not to make companies rich.
Your theory that the legal action by Apple was the result of a âoeFuehrer cultâ or was âoecrazyâ or âoeirrationalâ is obsoleted
That's not a "theory". We have a good idea of who Steve Jobs was from the biographies and reporting after his death. While a brilliant businessman and someone with good taste in design, Steve Jobs was also a ruthless dictator in his companies, and someone who regularly stole ideas from other companies and admitted to it. And Steve Jobs was foaming at the mouth over Android in a way that was completely unjustified, in particular given how much the iPhone had stolen from products like Palm and Windows Mobile.
Samsung looks like a cool, tough competitor who's making better products at a lower price. Apple comes across as a sore loser who's falling behind technologically. Unless Apple comes out with something big and important again soon, this doesn't end well for Apple.
"Because whats going extinct is at the bottom of the food chain. It means everything above it goes extinct... and no, this hasn't happened in hundreds of millions of years. The impact is profound, and sudden (on biological scales) and devastating to all life on the planet."
In fact, about 30-50% of marine invertebrate species (and most calcareous species) went extinct at K-Pg 65my ago, but only about 10% of bony fish went extinct and all mammalian lineages survived; so much for "everything above" going extinct. The globe was free of ice caps during the entire Paleocene and Eocene (65my to 34my ago) and Atmospheric carbon was as high as 2000ppm (Pearson and Palmer, Nature 406, 2000). So, your statements are demonstrably complete nonsense.
As for "climate change denialists", I don't know why you brought that up. As far as I'm concerned, anthropogenic climate change is well established.
You obviously have no idea what that article is talking about. You're as scientifically illiterate as those people who keep whining on about "irreducible complexity".
That's not an 18th century Cree proverb. That doesn't even make sense. What are 18th century British colonists supposed to have poisoned the rivers with?
In addition, the Cree were largely hunter gatherers. Such societies generally have low population densities and life expectancies of less than 40 years, and they practiced various unpleasant forms of population control. If we took their advice on how to live, 99% of Americans would have to die. Cutting down trees, damming rivers, trading, and (gasp!) financial markets are what put food on your table and heat and light your home reliably, day after day. Not only can you metaphorically "eat money", you can't eat without it.
I find it fascinating that people can live in the modern world and be so completely oblivious to how food ends up on everybody's table.
You mean people are complaining less. True. But that doesn't mean that these organizations have less influence, it means they have found ways of being less visible while wielding more influence.
All these articles are anti-GEMA in sentiment.
So? The facts they report, large increases in GEMA-related fees, are true.
I can't figure out why some smallish results from marine ecology are "news that matters" to nerds.
Given the inevitably rising CO2 levels and constantly changing ocean conditions, there will be lots of marine extinctions, just like there have been many times before in earth's history.
This is what mail filter rules are for. Generally, unsolicited mail to lots of people can be put into a low priority folder. You can send an auto-reply to let the sender know.
Oh, please, who are you kidding? German politicians and courts are so completely in the pocket of media companies and copyright holders that people don't even realize anymore what's going on because it is so entrenched. Germans have to pay GEMA, VG Wort, and other such organizations if they fart. And much of the ridiculous copyright legislation in the US is pushed by German media companies like Bertelsmann.
Do you not realise that without a stable environment we lose even the basics such as food and energy supply and therefore any kind of society so all your arguments are moot. This is not some political or economic issue its one of basic survival.
Please think about what you're saying and some of the many resources on science around you. Primates have been around for 85 million years, and modern humans for at least 250000 years. Look up the PETM and glaciation cycles. The BBC documentary you link to talks about frequent and large "abrupt climate changes" over the last 100000 years. Humans and primates have survived and thrived under changes far larger than those predicted even under the IPCC's worst case scenarios of high growth and no action.
Global warming does not produce significant food shortages, it just causes arable land to move around. And how could global warming possibly decrease the energy supply? A lot of coal, oil, gas, and minerals are locked up under ice; if that melts, we might get more energy, we certainly don't get less.
Why is it people like you worry about politics and economy even when doing nothing is literally destroying the planet.
Instead of fabricating horror scenarios or watching British corporate edutainment, why don't you look at what the actual experts have to say, namely the IPCC reports. Even in those already alarmist documents, there is no serious claim about threats to "basic survival" of humans.
Climate change is, in fact, only a question of economics and politics: an important issue, but just one of many. And by repeating uninformed and unscientific horror scenarios, you let yourself be used as a tool for propaganda.
Slashdot Mirror
Leviticus was written down around 500-300 BC, a time when Greek civilization was at its high point, when the Maurya dynasty rose in India and made religious tolerance and public health care the law, when Egyptian and Persian civilization had existed for millennia. Civilized people at the time lived in great cities with art, theater, palaces, public works, codes of law, judges, lawyers, traders, accountants, restaurants, night clubs, artisans, scribes, apothecaries, priests, monks, and all the other accoutrements of civilization.
The society that wrote down Leviticus, in comparison, was a band of backwards desert nomads that had missed the boat on civilization.
That would take centuries no matter what happens with climate change.
That has nothing to do with global warming and is completely outside our control. Furthermore, subglacial volcanoes are common and don't cause rapid, massive melting of entire ice caps.
There is no realistic scenario under which Greenland's ice cover will melt this century.
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/tssts-5-2.html
Of course it has happened before:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_extinction_event
The great majority of species of fish survived, as did almost all mammalian species.
A PETM-like maximum would have a huge impact, to be sure, but it wouldn't cause humans or mammals to go extinct, as the GPPs claimed.
True, but temperatures aren't rising overnight anyway, and even if they did, it would mean a temporary reduction in arable land, not a permanent one. Your arguments about day lengths and topsoil don't support your horror scenarios of "extinction level events" and "collapse of civilization".
That's not an "extinction level event" or even a "civilization ending event", that's 1960s population levels. And that could also happen due to a pandemic or other causes we have no control over.
Under the most contrived, hypothetical climate change scenarios, we might be looking at a few centuries of "dark ages" while human societies rearrange themselves. Under any realistic climate change scenario, we're talking about a modest reduction in GDP. Talking about "extinction level events" and "collapse of civilization" is pure FUD, unsupported by fact.
What a fascinating mix of outright lies, exaggerations, and straw men.
There has never been a mass extinction where "95% of all species went extinct".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event
Fascinating: you have your argument demolished, and you immediately shift to some other scenario.
Indeed. A snowball earth would be really bad, for example. Even glaciation of the form we had 30000 years ago would be really bad. Any of the warm climate earth has experienced over the last 65 million years is compatible with mammals, people, and complex societies, as we can see from the rich plant and animal life that existed over the entire period.
That's nothing but fear mongering without any evidence to back it up; from all we know about Earth's climate history, those statements are false.
We can't "address it". The carbon is already in the atmosphere, and it ain't gonna come out for a long term. And we ain't gonna stop emitting; all anybody is talking about is capping emissions at recent levels. Whatever anthropogenic warming is going to happen is going to happen; all politicians are talking about is whether it happens a few years slower or faster.
This has happened before; it doesn't lead to an extinction of land-based animals, and it doesn't even lead to significant extinction of higher animals in the oceans. All that goes extinct is calcareous animals, and they come back when pH drops again. Not a big deal. This has happened many times before.
Overfishing is a disgusting abuse of the marine environment, but it has nothing to do with climate change.
On balance, arable land isn't destroyed by climate change, it merely moves around. In fact, arable land may well increase due to climate change, with huge areas of Europe, Siberia, Canada, and Alaska thawing and becoming arable.
It "could" do that for many reasons other than climate change. It also doesn't cause extinctions of homo sapiens because rapid, abrupt climate change has happened many times since homo sapiens evolved and we didn't go extinct. Furthermore, sea level rise simply cannot happen abruptly, no matter what the temperatures do; it's physically impossible.
Neither land mammals nor humans are going to go extinct even if the polar ice caps melt completely and we have another Eocene maximum. We know that because mammals and primates didn't go extinct last time this happened, they thrived.
The climate on this planet just isn't stable; it has never been and never will be. Anthropogenic carbon emissions are pushing the climate in a particular direction and arguably may increase risks and costs somewhat. It's worth thinking about that and it's worth talking about, although there's not much that can be done about it anyway.
But the kind of FUD and language like "extinction level changes" and "nightmare world" are unscientific, unjustified drivel and fear mongering.
So? New York City is built on the ocean; flooding and hurricanes come with the territory and have been having for as long as people have been living there. Climate change and sea level rise will make them a bit more frequent over the next century. That's not a "nightmare world".
That web page points to a 7m rise by default, a completely unreasonable scenario for centuries. IPCC predictions were 0.5-1m in the worst case; even with the adjustments from the article, maybe that goes up to 0.75-1.5m over the next century. Furthermore, it is nonsense to take an elevation map and project flooding from it; sea level rise and flooding don't work that way.
And it's not like we have a choice: sea level rise has been going on for thousands of years, and it's continuing steadily no matter what we do. With an enormous effort, we may be able to slow it down slightly, nothing more.
Engineering doesn't mean just putting in safety margins that make people happy, it means making cost/benefit tradeoffs. And it means taking into account opportunity costs.
Expending too many resources on reducing green house gas emissions may mean that, in the long run, far more people may die than if we had done nothing.
No, we'll simply be heading for a world with sea levels that are a few feet higher and temperatures that are a few degrees higher a century from now, ample time to adapt without much effort. It's not like we need to move New York or Miami overnight.
Is that a large hadron, or are you just happy to see me?
Samsung isn't getting destroyed; despite Apple's little games, they are doing well. And Samsung is also offering Windows 8 tablets and laptops (and some pretty nice ones at that), so they don't really care.
As for Windows phone, now that Microsoft has entered the market, they'll be forced to cross-license; they can't avoid silly patent lawsuits any more than anybody else.
Oracle? That's the company that just sued Google over Java. There are already several JavaScript engines for Java, and they'll be updated to use whatever non-proprietary JVM features Oracle deigns to add. So, the only real reason for Oracle to take the lead on this is that they want more control over JavaScript on Java and lock people more into their software "ecosystem". Thanks, but no thanks.
Apple won one lawsuit, but that verdict may not stand. Even if it does, it's unclear whether it has any business significance or doesn't harm Apple more than it helps. The incremental value of $1bn for Apple is nearly zero, and the amount is lost in the noise given Samsung's brisk sales. But the lawsuit has pissed off a lot of people in the tech industry and made Apple look increasingly like a bully who can't win through making better products. The lawsuit also means that Apple has opened the door to a floodgate of lawsuits, and they are a juicy target because, as Jobs put it, they "copy shamelessly".
You can't invent new intellectual property laws out of thin air. Courts only recognize patents, copyrights, and trademarks. Furthermore, despite their frequent abuses by companies, these laws ultimately exist to protect and advance the interests of the public, not to make companies rich.
That's not a "theory". We have a good idea of who Steve Jobs was from the biographies and reporting after his death. While a brilliant businessman and someone with good taste in design, Steve Jobs was also a ruthless dictator in his companies, and someone who regularly stole ideas from other companies and admitted to it. And Steve Jobs was foaming at the mouth over Android in a way that was completely unjustified, in particular given how much the iPhone had stolen from products like Palm and Windows Mobile.
Samsung looks like a cool, tough competitor who's making better products at a lower price. Apple comes across as a sore loser who's falling behind technologically. Unless Apple comes out with something big and important again soon, this doesn't end well for Apple.
This is what you said:
In fact, about 30-50% of marine invertebrate species (and most calcareous species) went extinct at K-Pg 65my ago, but only about 10% of bony fish went extinct and all mammalian lineages survived; so much for "everything above" going extinct. The globe was free of ice caps during the entire Paleocene and Eocene (65my to 34my ago) and Atmospheric carbon was as high as 2000ppm (Pearson and Palmer, Nature 406, 2000). So, your statements are demonstrably complete nonsense.
As for "climate change denialists", I don't know why you brought that up. As far as I'm concerned, anthropogenic climate change is well established.
I think computer searches should usually not be used as evidence in trials at all; there is too much potential for bias and misinterpretation.
You keep saying that they are losing power. Show me some examples where German copyright laws have gotten more liberal or fees have decreased.
You obviously have no idea what that article is talking about. You're as scientifically illiterate as those people who keep whining on about "irreducible complexity".
That's not an 18th century Cree proverb. That doesn't even make sense. What are 18th century British colonists supposed to have poisoned the rivers with?
In addition, the Cree were largely hunter gatherers. Such societies generally have low population densities and life expectancies of less than 40 years, and they practiced various unpleasant forms of population control. If we took their advice on how to live, 99% of Americans would have to die. Cutting down trees, damming rivers, trading, and (gasp!) financial markets are what put food on your table and heat and light your home reliably, day after day. Not only can you metaphorically "eat money", you can't eat without it.
I find it fascinating that people can live in the modern world and be so completely oblivious to how food ends up on everybody's table.
You mean people are complaining less. True. But that doesn't mean that these organizations have less influence, it means they have found ways of being less visible while wielding more influence.
So? The facts they report, large increases in GEMA-related fees, are true.
I can't figure out why some smallish results from marine ecology are "news that matters" to nerds.
Given the inevitably rising CO2 levels and constantly changing ocean conditions, there will be lots of marine extinctions, just like there have been many times before in earth's history.
This is what mail filter rules are for. Generally, unsolicited mail to lots of people can be put into a low priority folder. You can send an auto-reply to let the sender know.
Really? As evidenced by what? By the enormous increases in GEMA fees?
http://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/webwelt/article106373740/Gema-erhoeht-Speicher-Abgabe-um-1850-Prozent.html
http://www.augsburger-allgemeine.de/wirtschaft/Wo-tanzen-wenn-die-Disko-stirbt-id19903121.html
Look a bit more into the web of media companies, foundations, and government in Germany...
Oh, please, who are you kidding? German politicians and courts are so completely in the pocket of media companies and copyright holders that people don't even realize anymore what's going on because it is so entrenched. Germans have to pay GEMA, VG Wort, and other such organizations if they fart. And much of the ridiculous copyright legislation in the US is pushed by German media companies like Bertelsmann.
Please think about what you're saying and some of the many resources on science around you. Primates have been around for 85 million years, and modern humans for at least 250000 years. Look up the PETM and glaciation cycles. The BBC documentary you link to talks about frequent and large "abrupt climate changes" over the last 100000 years. Humans and primates have survived and thrived under changes far larger than those predicted even under the IPCC's worst case scenarios of high growth and no action.
Global warming does not produce significant food shortages, it just causes arable land to move around. And how could global warming possibly decrease the energy supply? A lot of coal, oil, gas, and minerals are locked up under ice; if that melts, we might get more energy, we certainly don't get less.
Instead of fabricating horror scenarios or watching British corporate edutainment, why don't you look at what the actual experts have to say, namely the IPCC reports. Even in those already alarmist documents, there is no serious claim about threats to "basic survival" of humans.
Climate change is, in fact, only a question of economics and politics: an important issue, but just one of many. And by repeating uninformed and unscientific horror scenarios, you let yourself be used as a tool for propaganda.