Generally the deniers start with the argument that warming and climate change aren't happening, then move on to the argument that it is happening, but it's not influenced in any way by human activity, then to the argument that who cares if human activity is causing global warming since global warming is a good thing since it opens up all kinds of land for us, etc., etc. Regardless of how far along this continuum a typical denier has travelled, they will typically instantly fall back to a previous position depending on their audience.
A lot of his points are pretty disingenuous and deceptive. He talks a lot about relative distances, and details such as how much further it is to Mars than to the moon, but doesn't once bring up the fact that, when you're out of Earth's gravity well, travelling that extra distance doesn't actually require a particularly greater amount of energy, just more time. True, the time is not something insignificant, and there are all sorts of other factors involved, but he's surely aware of both those other factors and that his distance argument doesn't stand on its own. Despite surely being aware of it, he brings none of that up and sticks with his simplistic argument. So, from my point of view, he's either being intellectually dishonest, or simply writing for an extremely intellectually limited audience.
I'm curious, in the actual new article, not the old one it's following up, what maths do you see that are sound? From my read-through of the article, aside from scaling some distances and speeds and atmospheric concentrations of CO2, I didn't see any mathematics.
In terms of "most hostile environment[s] known to man", the surface of the moon isn't even in the top ten. How about the surface of mercury on the side facing the sun? The surface of Venus? The upper atmosphere of Uranus? Antarctica in winter (try surviving for twenty minutes in an Antarctic storm in a pressure suit that would let you survive for hours, or days with a bigger oxygen supply, on the surface of the moon). The atmosphere of Saturn with its hypersonic winds. The bottom of the Marianis trench? The corona of the sun? Anywhere in the radiation belts of Jupiter? Any erupting volcano you care to name (and people do visit them, crazy though they may be)? One of the Fukushima reactors a few months ago?
Sure, the moon is a lot more dangerous than walking around in your back yard, but with the right precautions, working on the moon can be routine and not much more dangerous than working in any other industrial environment. The biggest danger is probably radiation from solar flares, but it travels slower than light, so it can be easily predicted and a shelter can be kept near all working areas for protection. The vacuum can be dealt with using a pressure suit, and the danger of a leak is greatly mitigated if there's a nearby shelter you can run to if you spring a leak. A pressurized vehicle of some sort could work as a shelter, and could carry large gas storage tanks, so the pressure suits could have a line running to them so they could last longer. Freezing would be unlikely in a pressure suit in a near vacuum, and overheating would be a bigger concern. With an ample gas supply, refrigeration in a vacuum would be easy. Sudden death from a meteorite strike would always be a danger, but we don't have any statistics on the actual frequency of such strikes.
Of course, most construction work would be done with large construction vehicles, and those can be operated via telepresence so, most of the time, the workers could be sitting in comfortable bunkers on the moon, or even offices back on earth with a brief time lag.
The actual amount of the budget spent on the military seems to be more than shows up on most pie charts. The most obvious example is the $53 billion or so spent on Veterans affairs. There's no way that shouldn't be considered part of the military budget, but it shows up instead as more than 10% of discretionary spending.
A quote from _Minority Report_ is practically obligatory here:
Cyber Parlor Customer: I wanna kill my boss. Rufus Riley: Uh-huh, okay. You got some images I can work with? [spots John approaching with Agatha and hastily tries to cover up his unethical transaction] Rufus Riley:... Uh, yeah, being concertmaster for the Philadelphia Symphony is one of our most popular choices... Cyber Parlor Customer: No, I wanna kill my boss. Rufus Riley: You sick bastard! You're what makes this a terrible world to live in!
Of course, the world in _Minority Report_ was an intrusive, authoritarian nightmare police state.
Anyway, your idea for an online market of people killing their bosses and said market driving people to kill their bosses is intriguing, but not very likely. People who kill their bosses generally do it for deeply personal reasons, or maybe personal financial motivations, not because there is some sort of market for it, and that's unlikely to change. In a similar vein, it's pretty likely then, that the actual "market" for child porn isn't actually the driving force behind its creation. Anyone creating child porn is almost certainly doing it on the side and has a primary interest in molesting children. Anyone creating child porn _without_ a personal interest in molesting children, such as an organised crime group, is still probably only doing it on the side as part of their child prostitution ring.
You are aware that this guy is a quadriplegic, right? He doesn't dress himself, and the clothes he wears are probably mostly selected for bagginess to make them easier to take off and put on. Also, he probably has a lot of trouble maintaining body temperature, so he has to wear layers as well as headwear to keep warm.
Right, some places have more sunlight than others, but we have an existing power grid that provides power from one area of the country, or even other countries, to where it's needed. So solar plants can be built where practical and the power sent where it is needed, just like with other types of power plants. As for cloudy days and night time, that's a matter of design and scale. For solar cell farms, you need some sort of secondary storage medium, like a hydroelectric system powered by water pumped uphill during the day. For some of the thermal systems, all you need is sufficient mass and day or night makes little difference.
The strategic reserve recognizes that we depend on oil for our day to day lives and, crucially, that the oil companies themselves can't or won't provide a sufficient supply safety margin themselves. So, the government provides it, at the taxpayers cost, because it's necessary if we're going to rely on oil. They could tax the oil companies directly to do it, or require them by law to do it, and then oil prices would go up and the cost would be apparent at the pump. So, it's a subsidy to the oil companies, or a hidden cost to relying on oil, whatever way you want to look at it.
There pretty much isn't any energy source that's subsidy free. Energy production is often done on the kind of scales where government assistance and involvement of various kinds is inevitable. There's too much invested in fossil fuel use for it to vanish tomorrow, or even a decade from now, and renewables aren't ready for everyone yet. Obviously for in home energy production, not all options are available to everyone, and some people have no options to generate their own power whatsoever. It's the same situation as having your own water supply. If you own no land of your own, you have to use a municipal water supply. Some people have an accessible, clean, salt-free water table they can sink a well into and get water using electrical power and a pump. Some people are lucky enough to live in places where flowing artesian conditions exist and they just have to sink the well and they get water pressure straight from the ground. It's the same with renewable power sources. Some people can put up solar cells and they're a good investment and some people can't. Same with wind power or water.
Solar plants really do seem to be quite viable right now. As the article you link to points out, solar isn't practical right now for some people. The person who wrote the article is doing the math for his particular situation and it doesn't come out that well. Of course, a large part of that is because his power company buys power from him at an exploitive rate. But yes, plenty of people can't use solar power right now, but there are plenty who can, and for whom it's worth it, provided they have the capital.
As for the strategic reserve, it is a temporary buffer, nothing more, as you say. But it's a temporary buffer maintained by the government. The costs of maintaining it are part of the costs of reliance on oil, and they're not borne by the oil companies.
Fossil fuels do run the country at present and for the foreseeable future. The fossil fuel industry is the goliath, and renewables are the up and coming little guys. It's going to take a while before we know which renewable technologies will work out and which won't. In the meantime, we know the future of fossil fuels: we'll run out. If we could make more fossil fuels, they wouldn't be fossil fuels any more, they'd be renewables too. Predicting how long exactly they'll last before recovering them becomes an energy negative proposal is difficult, but the doomsayers have the pretty much ironclad fact that non-renewable fuels eventually run out on their side. Even if it's two hundred years in the future until they run out, we should still see what we can do about preparing for the future now.
As for subsidies for oil companies. Yes, there are tax breaks on exploration. Is that somehow not a subsidy for the oil companies? There's all the money spent on services and infrastructure specifically for transport of oil. Mineral rights are also quite frequently practically given away so oil companies aren't paying very much for the oil they pump out of federal land in the first place. Then there's the strategic oil reserve, the oil the US buys to ensure a steady supply. Without that steady supply, we might be much more encouraged to use other power sources, but since the US government spends money to maintain supply, the oil companies are spared that competition. I'm not going to open the can of worms about all the money spent for military support for oil companies in the Middle East and other parts of the world. Then there's all the externalities. Just how much will the gulf oil spill cost in the long run that the oil companies themselves aren't paying? Who is paying for it?
As for the supposed huge subsidies for renewables, the vast majority of that is subsidies for corn ethanol. Everyone knows corn ethanol isn't a serious renewable. It's just an excuse to subsidize corn growers. Some of the rest of the money is spent on research on how to extract otherwise unreachable oil, which doesn't exactly count as a renewable either.
The fact is, some classes of renewables work, and they work now. If you have the up-front capital, you can buy solar cells for your home and it's a sound investment, saving you money on power in the long run. So it is a better option than relying on only grid power, but it just isn't a reasonable option for many since they don't have the money. There's no perfect renewable solution yet, of course, but the technology will get there. My claims that the promises of renewable energy will pan out are just as valid as claims that the promises of better oil drilling and recovery technology will pan out.
The renewables are delivering as well, whereas the future of oil is looking less and less bright. As for government funding renewables research and not traditional fossil fuels, what world are you living in. Fossil fuels are government funded and subsidized in dozens of small ways and a few pretty big ones.
The problem isn't assuming that technology won't get any better. The problem is people relying on future technological advances that they don't know for sure will happen. Those people who predicted running out of oil soon (usually the prediction was more that peak oil would happen soon rather than completely running out of oil) were generally projecting forward from the situation at the time. True, they weren't anticipating future oil recovery technology, but if you're going to exercise reasonable caution, you shouldn't anticipate things you never know will happen. It's kind of like relying on winning the lottery.
Reads like the same old, same old to me? Basically the oil industry is excited about the potential of future technology that hasn't been conceived of yet to increase production without that pesky diminishing returns problem. Meanwhile, future renewables technology is just pie in the sky optimism that will never bear fruit.
The school fingerprint system is almost certainly accessible to police officers actually working in the school.
So they may be able to see the data. That does not mean they can run a fingerprint against it or copy the database.
You previously wrote: "The school hashes would have to be accessible by the police. They are not and it would be illegal for the police to access them." The point is, that assertion is ridiculous. Police are actually quite likely able to access the fingerprint data in some way and even the most egregious abuse of the data wouldn't be considered "illegal" by anyone in a position to actually press criminal charges.
Also, the contractor for the fingerprint service could quite also service the local police as well.
Just like the same telephone technicians who work on your phones work on the police phones. Does that mean that you conversations are being listened to by the police? No.
Do you live in a cave? Try reading about this, where the senate essentially said that the telcos were completely guilty in the warrantless wiretapping scandal, but unconstitutionally granted them amnesty (it's clearly unconstitutional because if the legislative branch can grant ex post facto amnesty to constitutional violations without amending the constitution, then the constitution means nothing). You are aware that all telecoms have rooms in them full of equipment that belongs to the government that all traffic gets routed through? Seriously, what planet do you live on?
It's actually possible that the data sets are even already stored together.
Highly doubtful. The police databases are very strictly controlled to ensure that correct information is stored. There is no way they would allow data collected by a high school administrator to be in their database. It would taint all subsequent searches. Even if a "sketch" could be created the accuracy of the data would be in question. What is good enough for a school to identify a student is probably not good enough to stand up in a court of law.
How can you possibly be serious? Do you have any idea how many cases there are out there where fingerprints improperly ended up in the police databases or were supposed to be removed and weren't? They certainly would allow data collected by a high school administrator into their database. It wouldn't taint all subsequent searches. Judges seldom allow the fruit of the poison tree doctrine to apply to "accidents". They certainly wouldn't apply it to all fingerprint searches just because some prints in the database were improperly gathered. In the specific case where a match comes up with an improperly gathered print, they just print the person again when they arrest them and then the original print isn't an issue any more. Then they have a print that will stand up in a court of law.
I think it is illegal for the police to access them, but from the point of view of the police and the school, it would probably be a gray area at best, and the only recourse anyone whose fingerprints are shared has is a civil suit. Arrests and subsequent searches based on a match from a school database _might_ be thrown out in court. There have been plenty of judges in similar cases who have basically decided that they'll allow unconstitutional searches as honest mistakes, as long as the police swear it won't happen again. Or they'll just find a pretext for another search.
You don't think that the ACLU wouldn't take up the issue and have all such data removed from national databases? It would be very hard to plead that copying a school's fingerprint database was an "accident". Remember that to run a search on a school database one has to use the only interface which is a finger scanner. That means that the poli
Ok, so the non-criminal pictures come from the "NimStim" photo catalogue of headshots of various emotional states and are selected for Caucasian males between 20 and 25 with little or no facial hairs and no scars, facial markings or tattoos. For each head, they chose the "neutral" expression. The criminal photographs came from the Missouri, Montana, Michigan, and Florida online criminal offender databases. The photos were edited to remove backgrounds and to "maintain a consistent photo quality, and remove differences in lighting, graininess, photo quality, etc."
So, basically, it was mug shots versus model shots. They did ask some participants if it was obvious that some of the pictures were mug shots. Since their theory is that people have a subconscious ability to recognise criminals by facial features, it seems odd that they believe that their subjects would be able to consciously tell that some pictures were mug shots.
In any case, I went through the pictures myself and made some observations. It seems that, although there were some false positives, I was able to determine which were criminals and which were not based on cues in the pictures very well. The method I used wasn't subconscious, however, it was a very conscious method. I looked for light glare. Turns out that the amount of light glare, especially on the forehead, is a very good indicator of whether or not someone is a criminal.
Anyway, there might be something to the study. The results about women being less likely to identify rapists as criminals suggests that there's at least something there, although that could have more to do with the attractiveness criteria they used to select images in the first place. There might be something in people's appearance that makes them more likely to be criminals, although if there is, it's probably a self-fulfilling prophecy. In any case, the study has too many problems with it to list here. Selection bias is just the start. Trouble is, even if there is something to the study, the effect isn't strong enough to be reliably used for any sort of crime detection. False positive rate would be through the roof.
1. The national databases that the police use already merge together all kinds of different systems from different vendors. Data is lost during the conversion from an image of the fingerprint to a numerical hash, and the original print cannot be created exactly from it. The data that gets converted into the hash comes from analysing the characteristics of the fingerprint and identifying and measuring the various features (there's a reason it's called biometrics). That data is exactly the same kind of data that any other fingerprint program collects, and it _can_ be converted. Also, although the original print cannot be recreated exactly from it, something like a composite sketch of the original print can be created. 2. The school fingerprint system is almost certainly accessible to police officers actually working in the school. Also, the contractor for the fingerprint service could quite also service the local police as well. It's actually possible that the data sets are even already stored together. I think it is illegal for the police to access them, but from the point of view of the police and the school, it would probably be a gray area at best, and the only recourse anyone whose fingerprints are shared has is a civil suit. Arrests and subsequent searches based on a match from a school database _might_ be thrown out in court. There have been plenty of judges in similar cases who have basically decided that they'll allow unconstitutional searches as honest mistakes, as long as the police swear it won't happen again. Or they'll just find a pretext for another search.
Your faith that justice will prevail this time, when setups like this have been abused pretty much every single time in the past, comes off as just a little naive to me.
The system(s) the police use stores a picture of the print, but it also examines the features of the print and stores it as a hash. Even that may not be universal since there have been plenty of different vendors and standards throughout all the different jurisdictions and authorities collecting prints. You don't actually think that fingerprint searches are done by running some sort of image comparison between the print they're looking for and every other print in the entire system do you? It looks cool on a cop show when all the fingerprints flash by rapidly on the screen, but that's not how it's really done. After the list is narrowed down to a list of possible matches, then they can compare the actual images (by this point, all the search results are essentially suspects). So, even a system that doesn't store an image of the print, (and we don't actually know whether this system does or not, you're just guessing) and only stores a hash can contribute the stored information about the print to police databases. So, in a fingerprint search, the person and their info would still come up on a list of suspects, just without an actual fingerprint image (or a reconstructed representative one for display purposes) attached. Then the police would go and detain that person to get their fingerprint and do an actual comparison. Also, when you consider basic psychology, since the police have now spent extra time on this person, they'll be more likely to have a "hunch" that this person is the actual perpetrator. So, if the person's print is a close match, they'll be more likely to be suspected than someone else who is also a close match.
Personally, I think that an officer who is allowed to commit what amounts to crimes such burglary under certain conditions which justify the action should be charged with the crime that they committed if the special conditions which justify the action don't exist. I note that you mention that they should be "liable to that person or their family", which implies that you've considered the possibility that the "search" kills the "suspect". For pretty much any other profession, making a simple mistake when people's lives hang in the balance can still be a crime. For example, a wrecking crew that demolishes the wrong building would be guilty of criminal negligence in most jurisdictions, certainly manslaughter if there was someone inside. For some reason, police who get the wrong address and burst in, heavily armed, to the wrong address and kill people inside either by simply shooting them or through a heart attack, never seem to be pursued on manslaughter charges. For that matter, people never seem to wonder why, if the police had the wrong house, they had to shoot the occupants since they should only be opening fire in response to a threat.
The platters may be spinning, but current won't flow in the platters, so the fact that they're spinning pretty much means nothing. In any case, that's irrelevant to my post, since I was responding to an AC who suggested that the magnetic field would throw off the position of the heads in the hard drive and didn't say anything about the spinning platters. Moving the goalposts after the play is over is a pretty lousy rhetorical technique.
I'd like to elaborate on the static vs moving magnetic fields and how they relate to the heads. A hard drive works in any orientation. It doesn't matter if it's upside down, sideways, lying at an angle, etc. So, the heads obviously can manage to operate with 1G working on them in any direction. Since it has to deal with all kinds of vibrations during operation, the g-forces the heads can withstand while still functioning normally are probably quite a lot higher than that. If the force of the magnetic field in this house were anywhere near 1G at the distance the computer is to the magnetized structural members then it would be really easy to find the magnetized parts by all the metal objects stuck to the wall/ceiling/floor. For that matter, unless the magnetic force is either pulling straight up or down, it would probably be dragging the whole computer across the desk if it were that strong. So, a static magnetic force that isn't dragging objects across the room, would not be strong enough to make any difference to the heads. A moving magnetic field probably wouldn't do anything unless it were incredibly strong as well, but it's possible to conceive of a moving field that could vibrate metal objects or even induce current in them in ways that might interfere with the heads in a hard drive without being noticeable to humans in the room. It's still not very likely.
In that study you mention, where did they get the photos of the criminals? Were they mug shots, or did they actually get the criminals family photos? Photos from before or after they'd gone to prison? Did they do a control where they asked things like "does this person look happy or unhappy?" as opposed to "does this person look like a criminal or not?"
This technique exactly has been used by a number of suppressive governments in the past. Political opponents are labelled mentally ill and institutionalised indefinitely.
I think checking alleged haunted houses for magnetic fields is standard procedure. The problem is, when they find the field, they decide it's evidence of paranormal activity.
Of course 'hole' is just a simplification, I don't think anyone has ever disputed this fact. And UV light both creates and destroys ozone.
It does not, in fact follow from those facts that there was almost certainly a hole there every winter prior to CFCs (not that there wasn't, it just doesn't follow from those facts). The fact that UV light destroys ozone as well as creating means that, when the light is absent for the winter ozone is no longer created as readily, as you said in the grandparent post, but it's not destroyed as readily either. So, how the balance is maintained is a complex issue, not a simple one. It is known that ice clouds form in the polar cold and the ice crystals make up a reaction surface where a lot of chemistry takes place that destroys ozone. There probably are other natural chemical reactions taking place that destroy ozone on the surface of those crystals, so there probably has always been a 'hole' in the ozone around the poles. We also know that CFCs, and quite possibly other man-made chemicals, promote the destruction of ozone in those conditions. So, even if the ozone hole is natural in part, CFCs pretty definitely make it worse.
I currently live at almost the exact same latitude that I lived at when I lived in New Zealand, it's just Northern latitude now rather than Southern Latitude, but the UV is nowhere near as much of a problem here as it was there. Enough of my relatives and their friends and acquaintances have died from skin cancer in New Zealand that I'm quite happy if the ozone layer is as thick as possible. The CFC ban seems to be the wise thing to do in that circumstance.
I would probably be ok with CFCs being used as refrigerants in sealed systems if there were actually some sort of sane end to end system for appliances. For unsealed systems prone to leaking like car air conditioning, then it's right out. As for working fluids for cooling systems that are non-toxic... You are aware that R12 refrigerant, a CFC, while not particularly toxic by itself, turned horribly poisonous on the slightest exposure to heat or flame.
Sadly, I have to agree with you pretty much 100% on everything there (not sad that we agree, just sad what we agree about). Let's keep our fingers crossed for education.
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Generally the deniers start with the argument that warming and climate change aren't happening, then move on to the argument that it is happening, but it's not influenced in any way by human activity, then to the argument that who cares if human activity is causing global warming since global warming is a good thing since it opens up all kinds of land for us, etc., etc. Regardless of how far along this continuum a typical denier has travelled, they will typically instantly fall back to a previous position depending on their audience.
A lot of his points are pretty disingenuous and deceptive. He talks a lot about relative distances, and details such as how much further it is to Mars than to the moon, but doesn't once bring up the fact that, when you're out of Earth's gravity well, travelling that extra distance doesn't actually require a particularly greater amount of energy, just more time. True, the time is not something insignificant, and there are all sorts of other factors involved, but he's surely aware of both those other factors and that his distance argument doesn't stand on its own. Despite surely being aware of it, he brings none of that up and sticks with his simplistic argument. So, from my point of view, he's either being intellectually dishonest, or simply writing for an extremely intellectually limited audience.
I'm curious, in the actual new article, not the old one it's following up, what maths do you see that are sound? From my read-through of the article, aside from scaling some distances and speeds and atmospheric concentrations of CO2, I didn't see any mathematics.
In terms of "most hostile environment[s] known to man", the surface of the moon isn't even in the top ten. How about the surface of mercury on the side facing the sun? The surface of Venus? The upper atmosphere of Uranus? Antarctica in winter (try surviving for twenty minutes in an Antarctic storm in a pressure suit that would let you survive for hours, or days with a bigger oxygen supply, on the surface of the moon). The atmosphere of Saturn with its hypersonic winds. The bottom of the Marianis trench? The corona of the sun? Anywhere in the radiation belts of Jupiter? Any erupting volcano you care to name (and people do visit them, crazy though they may be)? One of the Fukushima reactors a few months ago?
Sure, the moon is a lot more dangerous than walking around in your back yard, but with the right precautions, working on the moon can be routine and not much more dangerous than working in any other industrial environment. The biggest danger is probably radiation from solar flares, but it travels slower than light, so it can be easily predicted and a shelter can be kept near all working areas for protection. The vacuum can be dealt with using a pressure suit, and the danger of a leak is greatly mitigated if there's a nearby shelter you can run to if you spring a leak. A pressurized vehicle of some sort could work as a shelter, and could carry large gas storage tanks, so the pressure suits could have a line running to them so they could last longer. Freezing would be unlikely in a pressure suit in a near vacuum, and overheating would be a bigger concern. With an ample gas supply, refrigeration in a vacuum would be easy. Sudden death from a meteorite strike would always be a danger, but we don't have any statistics on the actual frequency of such strikes.
Of course, most construction work would be done with large construction vehicles, and those can be operated via telepresence so, most of the time, the workers could be sitting in comfortable bunkers on the moon, or even offices back on earth with a brief time lag.
The actual amount of the budget spent on the military seems to be more than shows up on most pie charts. The most obvious example is the $53 billion or so spent on Veterans affairs. There's no way that shouldn't be considered part of the military budget, but it shows up instead as more than 10% of discretionary spending.
A quote from _Minority Report_ is practically obligatory here:
Cyber Parlor Customer: I wanna kill my boss. ... Uh, yeah, being concertmaster for the Philadelphia Symphony is one of our most popular choices...
Rufus Riley: Uh-huh, okay. You got some images I can work with?
[spots John approaching with Agatha and hastily tries to cover up his unethical transaction]
Rufus Riley:
Cyber Parlor Customer: No, I wanna kill my boss.
Rufus Riley: You sick bastard! You're what makes this a terrible world to live in!
Of course, the world in _Minority Report_ was an intrusive, authoritarian nightmare police state.
Anyway, your idea for an online market of people killing their bosses and said market driving people to kill their bosses is intriguing, but not very likely. People who kill their bosses generally do it for deeply personal reasons, or maybe personal financial motivations, not because there is some sort of market for it, and that's unlikely to change. In a similar vein, it's pretty likely then, that the actual "market" for child porn isn't actually the driving force behind its creation. Anyone creating child porn is almost certainly doing it on the side and has a primary interest in molesting children. Anyone creating child porn _without_ a personal interest in molesting children, such as an organised crime group, is still probably only doing it on the side as part of their child prostitution ring.
You are aware that this guy is a quadriplegic, right? He doesn't dress himself, and the clothes he wears are probably mostly selected for bagginess to make them easier to take off and put on. Also, he probably has a lot of trouble maintaining body temperature, so he has to wear layers as well as headwear to keep warm.
Right, some places have more sunlight than others, but we have an existing power grid that provides power from one area of the country, or even other countries, to where it's needed. So solar plants can be built where practical and the power sent where it is needed, just like with other types of power plants. As for cloudy days and night time, that's a matter of design and scale. For solar cell farms, you need some sort of secondary storage medium, like a hydroelectric system powered by water pumped uphill during the day. For some of the thermal systems, all you need is sufficient mass and day or night makes little difference.
The strategic reserve recognizes that we depend on oil for our day to day lives and, crucially, that the oil companies themselves can't or won't provide a sufficient supply safety margin themselves. So, the government provides it, at the taxpayers cost, because it's necessary if we're going to rely on oil. They could tax the oil companies directly to do it, or require them by law to do it, and then oil prices would go up and the cost would be apparent at the pump. So, it's a subsidy to the oil companies, or a hidden cost to relying on oil, whatever way you want to look at it.
There pretty much isn't any energy source that's subsidy free. Energy production is often done on the kind of scales where government assistance and involvement of various kinds is inevitable. There's too much invested in fossil fuel use for it to vanish tomorrow, or even a decade from now, and renewables aren't ready for everyone yet. Obviously for in home energy production, not all options are available to everyone, and some people have no options to generate their own power whatsoever. It's the same situation as having your own water supply. If you own no land of your own, you have to use a municipal water supply. Some people have an accessible, clean, salt-free water table they can sink a well into and get water using electrical power and a pump. Some people are lucky enough to live in places where flowing artesian conditions exist and they just have to sink the well and they get water pressure straight from the ground. It's the same with renewable power sources. Some people can put up solar cells and they're a good investment and some people can't. Same with wind power or water.
Solar plants really do seem to be quite viable right now. As the article you link to points out, solar isn't practical right now for some people. The person who wrote the article is doing the math for his particular situation and it doesn't come out that well. Of course, a large part of that is because his power company buys power from him at an exploitive rate. But yes, plenty of people can't use solar power right now, but there are plenty who can, and for whom it's worth it, provided they have the capital.
As for the strategic reserve, it is a temporary buffer, nothing more, as you say. But it's a temporary buffer maintained by the government. The costs of maintaining it are part of the costs of reliance on oil, and they're not borne by the oil companies.
Fossil fuels do run the country at present and for the foreseeable future. The fossil fuel industry is the goliath, and renewables are the up and coming little guys. It's going to take a while before we know which renewable technologies will work out and which won't. In the meantime, we know the future of fossil fuels: we'll run out. If we could make more fossil fuels, they wouldn't be fossil fuels any more, they'd be renewables too. Predicting how long exactly they'll last before recovering them becomes an energy negative proposal is difficult, but the doomsayers have the pretty much ironclad fact that non-renewable fuels eventually run out on their side. Even if it's two hundred years in the future until they run out, we should still see what we can do about preparing for the future now.
As for subsidies for oil companies. Yes, there are tax breaks on exploration. Is that somehow not a subsidy for the oil companies? There's all the money spent on services and infrastructure specifically for transport of oil. Mineral rights are also quite frequently practically given away so oil companies aren't paying very much for the oil they pump out of federal land in the first place. Then there's the strategic oil reserve, the oil the US buys to ensure a steady supply. Without that steady supply, we might be much more encouraged to use other power sources, but since the US government spends money to maintain supply, the oil companies are spared that competition. I'm not going to open the can of worms about all the money spent for military support for oil companies in the Middle East and other parts of the world. Then there's all the externalities. Just how much will the gulf oil spill cost in the long run that the oil companies themselves aren't paying? Who is paying for it?
As for the supposed huge subsidies for renewables, the vast majority of that is subsidies for corn ethanol. Everyone knows corn ethanol isn't a serious renewable. It's just an excuse to subsidize corn growers. Some of the rest of the money is spent on research on how to extract otherwise unreachable oil, which doesn't exactly count as a renewable either.
The fact is, some classes of renewables work, and they work now. If you have the up-front capital, you can buy solar cells for your home and it's a sound investment, saving you money on power in the long run. So it is a better option than relying on only grid power, but it just isn't a reasonable option for many since they don't have the money. There's no perfect renewable solution yet, of course, but the technology will get there. My claims that the promises of renewable energy will pan out are just as valid as claims that the promises of better oil drilling and recovery technology will pan out.
The renewables are delivering as well, whereas the future of oil is looking less and less bright. As for government funding renewables research and not traditional fossil fuels, what world are you living in. Fossil fuels are government funded and subsidized in dozens of small ways and a few pretty big ones.
The problem isn't assuming that technology won't get any better. The problem is people relying on future technological advances that they don't know for sure will happen. Those people who predicted running out of oil soon (usually the prediction was more that peak oil would happen soon rather than completely running out of oil) were generally projecting forward from the situation at the time. True, they weren't anticipating future oil recovery technology, but if you're going to exercise reasonable caution, you shouldn't anticipate things you never know will happen. It's kind of like relying on winning the lottery.
Reads like the same old, same old to me? Basically the oil industry is excited about the potential of future technology that hasn't been conceived of yet to increase production without that pesky diminishing returns problem. Meanwhile, future renewables technology is just pie in the sky optimism that will never bear fruit.
The school fingerprint system is almost certainly accessible to police officers actually working in the school.
So they may be able to see the data. That does not mean they can run a fingerprint against it or copy the database.
You previously wrote: "The school hashes would have to be accessible by the police. They are not and it would be illegal for the police to access them." The point is, that assertion is ridiculous. Police are actually quite likely able to access the fingerprint data in some way and even the most egregious abuse of the data wouldn't be considered "illegal" by anyone in a position to actually press criminal charges.
Also, the contractor for the fingerprint service could quite also service the local police as well.
Just like the same telephone technicians who work on your phones work on the police phones. Does that mean that you conversations are being listened to by the police? No.
Do you live in a cave? Try reading about this, where the senate essentially said that the telcos were completely guilty in the warrantless wiretapping scandal, but unconstitutionally granted them amnesty (it's clearly unconstitutional because if the legislative branch can grant ex post facto amnesty to constitutional violations without amending the constitution, then the constitution means nothing). You are aware that all telecoms have rooms in them full of equipment that belongs to the government that all traffic gets routed through? Seriously, what planet do you live on?
It's actually possible that the data sets are even already stored together.
Highly doubtful. The police databases are very strictly controlled to ensure that correct information is stored. There is no way they would allow data collected by a high school administrator to be in their database. It would taint all subsequent searches. Even if a "sketch" could be created the accuracy of the data would be in question. What is good enough for a school to identify a student is probably not good enough to stand up in a court of law.
How can you possibly be serious? Do you have any idea how many cases there are out there where fingerprints improperly ended up in the police databases or were supposed to be removed and weren't? They certainly would allow data collected by a high school administrator into their database. It wouldn't taint all subsequent searches. Judges seldom allow the fruit of the poison tree doctrine to apply to "accidents". They certainly wouldn't apply it to all fingerprint searches just because some prints in the database were improperly gathered. In the specific case where a match comes up with an improperly gathered print, they just print the person again when they arrest them and then the original print isn't an issue any more. Then they have a print that will stand up in a court of law.
I think it is illegal for the police to access them, but from the point of view of the police and the school, it would probably be a gray area at best, and the only recourse anyone whose fingerprints are shared has is a civil suit. Arrests and subsequent searches based on a match from a school database _might_ be thrown out in court. There have been plenty of judges in similar cases who have basically decided that they'll allow unconstitutional searches as honest mistakes, as long as the police swear it won't happen again. Or they'll just find a pretext for another search.
You don't think that the ACLU wouldn't take up the issue and have all such data removed from national databases? It would be very hard to plead that copying a school's fingerprint database was an "accident". Remember that to run a search on a school database one has to use the only interface which is a finger scanner. That means that the poli
Ok, so the non-criminal pictures come from the "NimStim" photo catalogue of headshots of various emotional states and are selected for Caucasian males between 20 and 25 with little or no facial hairs and no scars, facial markings or tattoos. For each head, they chose the "neutral" expression. The criminal photographs came from the Missouri, Montana, Michigan, and Florida online criminal offender databases. The photos were edited to remove backgrounds and to "maintain a consistent photo quality, and remove differences in lighting, graininess, photo quality, etc."
So, basically, it was mug shots versus model shots. They did ask some participants if it was obvious that some of the pictures were mug shots. Since their theory is that people have a subconscious ability to recognise criminals by facial features, it seems odd that they believe that their subjects would be able to consciously tell that some pictures were mug shots.
In any case, I went through the pictures myself and made some observations. It seems that, although there were some false positives, I was able to determine which were criminals and which were not based on cues in the pictures very well. The method I used wasn't subconscious, however, it was a very conscious method. I looked for light glare. Turns out that the amount of light glare, especially on the forehead, is a very good indicator of whether or not someone is a criminal.
Anyway, there might be something to the study. The results about women being less likely to identify rapists as criminals suggests that there's at least something there, although that could have more to do with the attractiveness criteria they used to select images in the first place. There might be something in people's appearance that makes them more likely to be criminals, although if there is, it's probably a self-fulfilling prophecy. In any case, the study has too many problems with it to list here. Selection bias is just the start. Trouble is, even if there is something to the study, the effect isn't strong enough to be reliably used for any sort of crime detection. False positive rate would be through the roof.
1. The national databases that the police use already merge together all kinds of different systems from different vendors. Data is lost during the conversion from an image of the fingerprint to a numerical hash, and the original print cannot be created exactly from it. The data that gets converted into the hash comes from analysing the characteristics of the fingerprint and identifying and measuring the various features (there's a reason it's called biometrics). That data is exactly the same kind of data that any other fingerprint program collects, and it _can_ be converted. Also, although the original print cannot be recreated exactly from it, something like a composite sketch of the original print can be created.
2. The school fingerprint system is almost certainly accessible to police officers actually working in the school. Also, the contractor for the fingerprint service could quite also service the local police as well. It's actually possible that the data sets are even already stored together. I think it is illegal for the police to access them, but from the point of view of the police and the school, it would probably be a gray area at best, and the only recourse anyone whose fingerprints are shared has is a civil suit. Arrests and subsequent searches based on a match from a school database _might_ be thrown out in court. There have been plenty of judges in similar cases who have basically decided that they'll allow unconstitutional searches as honest mistakes, as long as the police swear it won't happen again. Or they'll just find a pretext for another search.
Your faith that justice will prevail this time, when setups like this have been abused pretty much every single time in the past, comes off as just a little naive to me.
The system(s) the police use stores a picture of the print, but it also examines the features of the print and stores it as a hash. Even that may not be universal since there have been plenty of different vendors and standards throughout all the different jurisdictions and authorities collecting prints. You don't actually think that fingerprint searches are done by running some sort of image comparison between the print they're looking for and every other print in the entire system do you? It looks cool on a cop show when all the fingerprints flash by rapidly on the screen, but that's not how it's really done. After the list is narrowed down to a list of possible matches, then they can compare the actual images (by this point, all the search results are essentially suspects). So, even a system that doesn't store an image of the print, (and we don't actually know whether this system does or not, you're just guessing) and only stores a hash can contribute the stored information about the print to police databases. So, in a fingerprint search, the person and their info would still come up on a list of suspects, just without an actual fingerprint image (or a reconstructed representative one for display purposes) attached. Then the police would go and detain that person to get their fingerprint and do an actual comparison. Also, when you consider basic psychology, since the police have now spent extra time on this person, they'll be more likely to have a "hunch" that this person is the actual perpetrator. So, if the person's print is a close match, they'll be more likely to be suspected than someone else who is also a close match.
Personally, I think that an officer who is allowed to commit what amounts to crimes such burglary under certain conditions which justify the action should be charged with the crime that they committed if the special conditions which justify the action don't exist. I note that you mention that they should be "liable to that person or their family", which implies that you've considered the possibility that the "search" kills the "suspect". For pretty much any other profession, making a simple mistake when people's lives hang in the balance can still be a crime. For example, a wrecking crew that demolishes the wrong building would be guilty of criminal negligence in most jurisdictions, certainly manslaughter if there was someone inside. For some reason, police who get the wrong address and burst in, heavily armed, to the wrong address and kill people inside either by simply shooting them or through a heart attack, never seem to be pursued on manslaughter charges. For that matter, people never seem to wonder why, if the police had the wrong house, they had to shoot the occupants since they should only be opening fire in response to a threat.
The platters may be spinning, but current won't flow in the platters, so the fact that they're spinning pretty much means nothing. In any case, that's irrelevant to my post, since I was responding to an AC who suggested that the magnetic field would throw off the position of the heads in the hard drive and didn't say anything about the spinning platters. Moving the goalposts after the play is over is a pretty lousy rhetorical technique.
I'd like to elaborate on the static vs moving magnetic fields and how they relate to the heads. A hard drive works in any orientation. It doesn't matter if it's upside down, sideways, lying at an angle, etc. So, the heads obviously can manage to operate with 1G working on them in any direction. Since it has to deal with all kinds of vibrations during operation, the g-forces the heads can withstand while still functioning normally are probably quite a lot higher than that. If the force of the magnetic field in this house were anywhere near 1G at the distance the computer is to the magnetized structural members then it would be really easy to find the magnetized parts by all the metal objects stuck to the wall/ceiling/floor. For that matter, unless the magnetic force is either pulling straight up or down, it would probably be dragging the whole computer across the desk if it were that strong. So, a static magnetic force that isn't dragging objects across the room, would not be strong enough to make any difference to the heads. A moving magnetic field probably wouldn't do anything unless it were incredibly strong as well, but it's possible to conceive of a moving field that could vibrate metal objects or even induce current in them in ways that might interfere with the heads in a hard drive without being noticeable to humans in the room. It's still not very likely.
In that study you mention, where did they get the photos of the criminals? Were they mug shots, or did they actually get the criminals family photos? Photos from before or after they'd gone to prison? Did they do a control where they asked things like "does this person look happy or unhappy?" as opposed to "does this person look like a criminal or not?"
This technique exactly has been used by a number of suppressive governments in the past. Political opponents are labelled mentally ill and institutionalised indefinitely.
I think the problem is preventing the aluminum superstructure from _being_ the sacrificial anode.
You realise that the magnetic field in this case would be a static field, not a moving one right?
I think checking alleged haunted houses for magnetic fields is standard procedure. The problem is, when they find the field, they decide it's evidence of paranormal activity.
Of course 'hole' is just a simplification, I don't think anyone has ever disputed this fact. And UV light both creates and destroys ozone.
It does not, in fact follow from those facts that there was almost certainly a hole there every winter prior to CFCs (not that there wasn't, it just doesn't follow from those facts). The fact that UV light destroys ozone as well as creating means that, when the light is absent for the winter ozone is no longer created as readily, as you said in the grandparent post, but it's not destroyed as readily either. So, how the balance is maintained is a complex issue, not a simple one. It is known that ice clouds form in the polar cold and the ice crystals make up a reaction surface where a lot of chemistry takes place that destroys ozone. There probably are other natural chemical reactions taking place that destroy ozone on the surface of those crystals, so there probably has always been a 'hole' in the ozone around the poles. We also know that CFCs, and quite possibly other man-made chemicals, promote the destruction of ozone in those conditions. So, even if the ozone hole is natural in part, CFCs pretty definitely make it worse.
I currently live at almost the exact same latitude that I lived at when I lived in New Zealand, it's just Northern latitude now rather than Southern Latitude, but the UV is nowhere near as much of a problem here as it was there. Enough of my relatives and their friends and acquaintances have died from skin cancer in New Zealand that I'm quite happy if the ozone layer is as thick as possible. The CFC ban seems to be the wise thing to do in that circumstance.
I would probably be ok with CFCs being used as refrigerants in sealed systems if there were actually some sort of sane end to end system for appliances. For unsealed systems prone to leaking like car air conditioning, then it's right out. As for working fluids for cooling systems that are non-toxic... You are aware that R12 refrigerant, a CFC, while not particularly toxic by itself, turned horribly poisonous on the slightest exposure to heat or flame.
Sadly, I have to agree with you pretty much 100% on everything there (not sad that we agree, just sad what we agree about). Let's keep our fingers crossed for education.