No, this is what you get when you have a bought and paid for Congress. Lobby money bought them, now they're delivering on their promises to keep from raising taxes on the rich and the corporations.
No, it's definitely NOT what you get when you have a bought and paid for Congress; in that case we'd have some kind of "compromise" that'd keep taxes low on the rich, even if it made the deficit worse. This is what you get when you change the parliamentary rules to disenfranchise the minority party but your own party is so divided you can't enforce party discipline.
In the post Gingrich/Hastert Congress, speakers only allow votes on bills the majority of his party's caucus will back. The speaker doesn't allow votes on bills that might pass because some of his party vote with the minority party. The problem with the 112th Congress is that the majority caucus (the Republicans) are split between pragmatic old-school conservatives and Tea Party radicals. Not to mention those who have reason to fear Tea Party activism in the primaries -- a side effect of gerrymandering safe Republican seats is strengthening radical party elements in a district.
In any case, since the Republicans can't decide on an agenda the majority of their caucus can get behind, and the speaker won't allow measures to come to vote if they'd only pass with a coalition of Democrats and pragmatic Republicans, nothing gets done. The 112th Congress is possibly the least effective Cognress in history, not just failing to pass no-brainer legislation like veterans benefits, but failing to even bring them to a vote. In the end it boils down to one man, Speaker Boehner, whose leadership is so weak there's almost no point negotiating with him. He can't even get his coalition to pass *his own proposals* for dealing with the fiscal cliff ("Plan B").
What's worse is the wind turbines, perhaps because Ontario is in the centre of the continent, generate most of their power during the shoulder periods of power demand.
That doesn't matter, so long as the wind generation capacity you have is less than your fossil fuel capacity. As long as that's true, you can think of it almost like having a super-efficient storage method for the wind power your generate: you "store" it as unburned fossil fuel.
Only *after* your wind generating capability exceeds your non-renewable energy sources,does the wind power you can't sell "goes to waste". But then it was going to waste anyhow. You're still thinking of renewable energy sources like non-renewable ones. It doesn't matter if you don't capture and use every bit of a renewable energy source, because there's always more of it coming. What matters is can you make the dollars and cents work. It's quite possible for a 10% efficient solar array to be successful yet a 50% efficient one to be a financial failure. It depends on the cost of producing, siting, installing and maintaining the array vs. the value of the electricity it produces. The 90% of energy you waste with the inefficient cells doesn't matter; 100% was going to waste before you installed them.
It may well be that your government set up a bad deal, but that's just lack of financial acumen, not a problem with the technology.
Wind power is and will be taxed like any other income. They're getting a break up front on capital expenses because policymakers have reasons other than private profitability to have secure domestic sources of energy.
Largely, I suspect, because having discovered how weak their critical thinking skills are they're applying their disbelief with a broad brush.
Fake public demonstrations existed before the Internet, but they really took off with the Internet because a single person can pretend to be dozens using the anonymity of Internet forums. With technology and focus a half dozen people could appear to be hundreds, or even thousands.
But there being tigers hiding in the jungle doesn't mean they're hiding under your bed.
I went down to see the Occupy Boston encampment down in Dewey Square last year. I'm no expert in counting people, but there were clearly hundreds of people living in a constricted half-acre tent city -- the densest human habitation I'd ever seen. This is the *opposite* of the labor efficiency of Internet astroturfing. How much would it cost to pay hundreds of people to live like that for two months, or to be arrested as hundreds of the protesters were? Altogether there were over seven thousand arrests, and that was only a tiny fraction of the protesters.
I think the reaction to the FBI documents is overblown. The FBI was keeping tabs on the movement, but that's part of the agency's job, and that *can* be done without violating anyone civil rights (whether it *was* done remains to be seen). But the movement itself wasn't overblown. It's the largest economic protest in this country since the Bonus Army of 1932.
Think of anyplace you've worked. Haven't you seen people doing things they probably shouldn't, because nobody is going to hold them accountable? Why should government be any different? It's always much easier to do the right thing when somebody is checking up on you.
I've worked with state and local government agencies around the country, and some are better than others. Some in fact are quite good. But none are perfect, and they all have their share of deadwood, just like any other workplace. The best government agencies are the ones that manage to attract people who are in it for more than a paycheck. Granted that idealism causes some problems, but not nearly so much as the corruption and inertia that rules in certain other places.
I don't have a lot of experience with Texas, but in that experience there was both some unusually good and unusually bad people there. I think that's related to the anti-government attitudes. You get people working for government who are bottom feeders, and you get really dedicated people who are willing to put up with the public's disrespect in order to serve it.
You can't hire and train up young talent if there isn't a job for them. And if you do, but let them go afterwards, you've just wasted money you'll never get back again.
If you read TFA, you'd know the big concern isn't that the satellites are going to stop working, but that the expertise needed to design, build and operate the replacement satellites will retire or move on. This is a real concern.
People who've never run an engineering project think you can take a project that is budgeted to cost X dollars, put it on hold when you've spent 0.7X dollars for some arbitrary length of time, then pick it up much later and finish it for 0.3X dollars. It doesn't work that way. Every time you restart a project it's can be logistically like starting from scratch -- sometimes even worse. I've had customers who take deliverables and sit on them from months. Since I can't keep my team sitting on its hands for months I put the team on something else. Then suddenly the customer signs off on the deliverables and wants work on the next phase to start right away. The team has to refamiliarize itself with the project and figure out what they were up to and why -- if the team is still intact.
Delay is a potent driver of cost overruns and a major source of quality problems.
In any case, this kind of reason drives me nuts. Yes, a solid, conservative piece of engineering often exceeds its design specs. In fact, it's surprising if it doesn't. So you can expect a satellite with a ten year planned lifetime not to conk out at ten years and a day unless you are very unlucky, *but you don't factor that into your planning* otherwise design specs mean nothing. The "happy accident" of a system outperforming its specification is no accident, it's the product of respecting the boundaries of what can be guaranteed.
Plus, you have all the problems of a computer, because these TVs *are* computers. I have a Vizio which takes forever to boot up. It's currently out of service because of a problem with the logic board, which needs replacing.
Well, I once gave a 1 star review to the kindle edition of a linear algebra text in which equations and formulas were hopelessly messed up -- on the Kindle. I'm talking about the exponent of a term being on a different page from the term.
I thought it was a fair review of *the product* because the kindle edition was unusable *on the kindle*, and I made it clear what the basis of the rating was in my review.
I'd be OK with Google's terms of service if it were not for one word: "publish". That raises both intellectual property and privacy red flags. Google doesn't need to publish your data to do any of the things you mention. I don't think they're going to print out your data, slap covers on it and put in bookstores, but I do believe they intend to make it public in other ways that affect your rights to claim the data as "private".
I don't put anything on Google services that I might want to claim copyright on, for similar reasons. Google's TOS includes an unlimited license for them to publish any material that users put on their services:
When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content.
Here's Google's disclaimer:
Google does not claim any ownership in any of the content, including any text, data, information, images, photographs, music, sound, video, or other material, that you upload, transmit or store in your Gmail account.
But note what Google does *not* promise to do: avoid harming users' economic interests in their data. Yes, you might still *own* your data, but you give Google practically unlimited permission to do anything it pleases with your data, up to and including binding it in a paper book and selling it.
I'm not particularly concerned they'd do that -- that's sure to be viewed as unconscionable. I believe that what Google wants to do are things that some jury somewhere might construe as "publishing". Unfortunately, that same jury that would exonerate Google based on the TOS would also strip the author of certain special rights authors enjoy for unpublished manuscripts -- secrecy, for example. It is also possible (I hope) that at under future changes in copyright law, Google's having quasi-published a manuscript might effect its copyright term.
Scientists might have similar issues with inadvertently "publishing" data by storing it on some Google service (Gmail for example), thus rendering it unpublishable in an academic journal.
If Google intended to protect the users' interest in their data, they'd qualify the permissions they claim to "publish" your data so it only applied to public facing services. Yahoo does this:
"Publicly accessible" areas of the Yahoo! Services are those areas of the Yahoo! network of properties that are intended by Yahoo! to be available to the general public.
So I avoid GMail and use Yahoo Mail for anything I don't want "published", because Yahoo doesn't claim a right to "publish" emails and their attached documents, but in Gmail Google *does*.
It's not that you "must" apologize for everything. It's that in so many cases, apologizing is the rational thing to do. Cases like this are the extreme example. Not only the people who were harmed by the wrong in their grave, the people who might be harmed by the apology are in their grave too. True the benefits of apologizing are not so high, but the costs are nil.
Apologizing is often a cheap way to alleviate an unproductive conflict, or in this case to help sweep the political detritus of a largely finished unproductive conflict off the political stage. In my country there are people who have an irrational fear of our government apologizing - as if people will stop fearing our drones and smart bombs and our global force projection capabilities if one of of leaders ever utters a humble word.
Our country makes it too easy for nutcases to have guns. I, for one, would give up the right to bear arms for everyone, and not miss it.
The problem, as you implicitly acknowledge, is telling the nutcases from the sane and responsible ones.
As timeOday says below, gun rights aren't worth this, but that's not a choice we realistically have -- I say that as someone who has never fired a gun and has no interest in ever firing a gun. We can't wish away all the guns that are in private hands, and we can't wish away America's gun culture, any more than we can wish away marijuana. Even if we could, that ignores the fact that the vast, vast majority of participants in that culture are responsible and non-violent citizens.
The longing when something like this is for something quick and simple we could do to make it alright, or to make it not happen again, but while there are things we can do they aren't simple or quick. Wishing guns away won't work. Flooding the country with even more guns won't work either [note 1]. The things we can do are make sure that everyone has access to mental health care and screening, develop better security procedures for schools, and keep track of gun sales to make sure they aren't going to one of that small minority of dangerous persons we know about.
Those things we can do aren't dramatic, aren't a 100% effective, and they aren't easy. But they're better than doing things that just make us feel better, or just pretending to do things.
Note 1: Historically it makes sense to look at the old west as a place with lots of guns which were routinely carried in the open. Some gun advocates have cited the low numbers of murders in Kansas territory cattle towns as proof that an armed populace is more peaceable. This however neglects to adjust the figures by population. In Abilene from 1870-1872 there were "only" 7 homicides, but the average population of Abilene at any one time was around 700 souls. That works out to a murder rate of 317/100,000 population. By comparison the highest rates for contemporary US cities are 72.8/100,000 for New Orleans and 40.5 for St. Louis. The only one of the five Kansas cattle towns with a lower *rate* of homicide in the 1870s than contemporary New Orleans was Wichita with a rate of 53/100,000. The rest were 165/100,000 or higher. If you lived in Dodge city for the ten years from 1876-1885, you had a 1/61 chance of being murdered. In Monterey County, CA in the 1850s, the homicide rate was an astounding 609/100,000. There is no doubt that widespread carrying of firearms would prevent *some* incidents like this. It might even have prevented *this* one. But there is no evidence that it would cut the murder rate, and historical data doesn't support that hypothesis.
Once you've developed a soluble circuit, the rate at which it dissolves is no doubt a parameter that can be tweaked to yield the desired lifetime.
The fact that the circuit dissovles away is a *feature*, as in soluble sutures. We can already implant electronic circuits in the human body, but I believe the idea is to create circuits you don't need to remove with a second round of surgery.
Especially because giving up Baikonur would force Russia to launch from higher latitudes, reducing their payload to orbit capacity for certain orbits.
I'm picturing a crusty old political geographer sitting up in one of his wingback chair and saying, a quavering voice, "Russia wants a warm water space port."
Well, it's not as simple as you suggest. The data shows that the maximum extent of the Antarctic's seasonal sea ice has grown recently, which is the opposite of what you'd expect if the temperatures were increasing. But temperature isn't the only thing that determines the extent of seasonal ice. There's wind too, and that's what researchers think caused the increase in extent.
Still, it's quite possible for certain regions in a global warming scenario to become dramatically cooler, due to changes in the transport of energy from warmer regions to cooler in ocean and air currents.
The link you provided doesn't seem to support your conclusion that global warming was a politically driven issue in the 70s. What it shows is that the state of research back in the 70s is a political issue for *us today*. That doesn't somehow magically go back and taint the motivations of researchers forty years ago.
The graph in the article is interesting by the way. The number of global cooling or neutral papers grows through the decade, they're just outstripped by the growth in warming papers. What you are looking at is the beginning of the emergence of the global warming consensus, which took place largely without the public or media noticing.
As for overpopulation, I think that's a red herring. Exactly how would you go about using global warming to deny an overpopulation problem? Who actually worries about climate change who isn't also concerned about overpopulation?
One of the reasons people are skeptical or even deniers is all this bullshit that they can't get the models and prediction straight. If you keep changing your story, people won't believe you. It's that simple.
If you don't change your story when data challenges it, you're not doing science. It's that simple.
I understand that "people" (by which *I* mean "some people") are easier to convince if you never change what you say no matter what new evidence comes up. That's because they don't understand the difference between changing your story purely for the effect it has on the listener, and changing your story because you've learned something new. In other words, the "people" you are citing can't tell the difference between dishonesty and honesty. Let's take Antarctic sea ice as an example. "People" may take scientists honest admission that seasonal sea ice is increasing as a sign of dishonesty, but it's a peculiar conspiracy that raises and publishes doubts about itself.
In any even the Antarctic ice kerfuffle turned out not to be related to lowered temperatures at all, but more energetic winds driving the sea ice beyond regions in which it formed.
Baloney. It's the political hacks who pounce on something like this and say "Look! The scientists revised their consensus predictions, *obviously* it's just politics because the truth never changes." They say this because politics is the only thing they (think) they understand. It's just as silly as when they get up on their high horses about "revisionist" historians -- revising history is what *actual* historians do. Revising climate predictions is what climatologists do, and in any case the rumors of what the new IPCC (you like them now?) forecasts will contain is well within the range that's been discussed all along, except for a somewhat more pessimistic sea level rise figure. If you'd actually been paying attention to science news instead of political pundits, you'd know that the recent buzz has been the remarkable accuracy of the original 1990 IPCC report (source: http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate1763.html). This is a remarkable piece of support for the anthropogenic hypothesis, since the computer models used in the late 80s relied heavily on atmospheric CO2 accumulation.
The only reason people like you think climate change is politically driven myth is because you weren't paying attention *before* it became a political issue. It was vigorously debated in the scientific literature well before it became a political hot potato -- check the abstracts on Google Scholar if you don't believe me. Now you can pooh pooh a 2 degree rise in global average temperature and 1 m rise in sea level, but that's because you have no idea what the effects of those changes will be. A 1m mean sea level rise means substantially more frequent flooding events. A 2 degree temperature rise has a huge effect on the distribution of vector borne diseases.
It sounds benign to say that there will be "new arid zones in the Southern United States", but only if you don't think about what the appearance of a new arid zone would mean.
What I object to is your repeated statements that that is the only way we could have gotten those technologies. That's not only unreasonable, it's historically wrong.
The problem isn't government, it's you and people like you.
I'll set aside the silly personal attack and address your point.
You are arguing against a strawman position. My point is that the government invested in the technologies I mentioned because there was a significant public need that would have been unmet. I don't deny that in most of these cases (excepting the Internet because of net neutrality) the technology might have eventually emerged, but the problems they addressed would have gone unsolved, probably for decades. The people working on those problems were right to use public money to solve them.
That those needs were met by public funded research is a historical fact. The onus is upon you to show that the Internet and GPS might exist by now without government investments in technology. These two technologies probably alone justify all the money the US has spent on applied research *ever*, and are huge generators of private business opportunities.
I was using irony to make the point that throwing advanced battery research into the same category as teleportation or desktop cookie synthesizers is silly. Those examples address two of three criteria that in my opinion justifies public research investment (1) advancement is feasible and (2) there is an important public need for the technology. The original post I was responding to was just an intellectually sloppy ideological harangue.
The third criteria is that the progress needed requires levels of investment that are unlikely to come from private investment, typically because of uncertainty about when the investment might start paying back. Battery technology is kind of a borderline case here. Clearly there are many incremental improvements that can be made, and its an important area of commercial research. But an improvement of the magnitude being discussed seems unlikely to emerge on its own soon. I am skeptical that any one research program can outpace private development, but the value of incremental progress on this is so high that it's probably worth covering some approaches that are a bit futuristic for private investors.
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Asshole.
No, this is what you get when you have a bought and paid for Congress. Lobby money bought them, now they're delivering on their promises to keep from raising taxes on the rich and the corporations.
No, it's definitely NOT what you get when you have a bought and paid for Congress; in that case we'd have some kind of "compromise" that'd keep taxes low on the rich, even if it made the deficit worse. This is what you get when you change the parliamentary rules to disenfranchise the minority party but your own party is so divided you can't enforce party discipline.
In the post Gingrich/Hastert Congress, speakers only allow votes on bills the majority of his party's caucus will back. The speaker doesn't allow votes on bills that might pass because some of his party vote with the minority party. The problem with the 112th Congress is that the majority caucus (the Republicans) are split between pragmatic old-school conservatives and Tea Party radicals. Not to mention those who have reason to fear Tea Party activism in the primaries -- a side effect of gerrymandering safe Republican seats is strengthening radical party elements in a district.
In any case, since the Republicans can't decide on an agenda the majority of their caucus can get behind, and the speaker won't allow measures to come to vote if they'd only pass with a coalition of Democrats and pragmatic Republicans, nothing gets done. The 112th Congress is possibly the least effective Cognress in history, not just failing to pass no-brainer legislation like veterans benefits, but failing to even bring them to a vote. In the end it boils down to one man, Speaker Boehner, whose leadership is so weak there's almost no point negotiating with him. He can't even get his coalition to pass *his own proposals* for dealing with the fiscal cliff ("Plan B").
What's worse is the wind turbines, perhaps because Ontario is in the centre of the continent, generate most of their power during the shoulder periods of power demand.
That doesn't matter, so long as the wind generation capacity you have is less than your fossil fuel capacity. As long as that's true, you can think of it almost like having a super-efficient storage method for the wind power your generate: you "store" it as unburned fossil fuel.
Only *after* your wind generating capability exceeds your non-renewable energy sources,does the wind power you can't sell "goes to waste". But then it was going to waste anyhow. You're still thinking of renewable energy sources like non-renewable ones. It doesn't matter if you don't capture and use every bit of a renewable energy source, because there's always more of it coming. What matters is can you make the dollars and cents work. It's quite possible for a 10% efficient solar array to be successful yet a 50% efficient one to be a financial failure. It depends on the cost of producing, siting, installing and maintaining the array vs. the value of the electricity it produces. The 90% of energy you waste with the inefficient cells doesn't matter; 100% was going to waste before you installed them.
It may well be that your government set up a bad deal, but that's just lack of financial acumen, not a problem with the technology.
Wind power is and will be taxed like any other income. They're getting a break up front on capital expenses because policymakers have reasons other than private profitability to have secure domestic sources of energy.
People have gotten quite skeptical these days,
Largely, I suspect, because having discovered how weak their critical thinking skills are they're applying their disbelief with a broad brush.
Fake public demonstrations existed before the Internet, but they really took off with the Internet because a single person can pretend to be dozens using the anonymity of Internet forums. With technology and focus a half dozen people could appear to be hundreds, or even thousands.
But there being tigers hiding in the jungle doesn't mean they're hiding under your bed.
I went down to see the Occupy Boston encampment down in Dewey Square last year. I'm no expert in counting people, but there were clearly hundreds of people living in a constricted half-acre tent city -- the densest human habitation I'd ever seen. This is the *opposite* of the labor efficiency of Internet astroturfing. How much would it cost to pay hundreds of people to live like that for two months, or to be arrested as hundreds of the protesters were? Altogether there were over seven thousand arrests, and that was only a tiny fraction of the protesters.
I think the reaction to the FBI documents is overblown. The FBI was keeping tabs on the movement, but that's part of the agency's job, and that *can* be done without violating anyone civil rights (whether it *was* done remains to be seen). But the movement itself wasn't overblown. It's the largest economic protest in this country since the Bonus Army of 1932.
Think of anyplace you've worked. Haven't you seen people doing things they probably shouldn't, because nobody is going to hold them accountable? Why should government be any different? It's always much easier to do the right thing when somebody is checking up on you.
I've worked with state and local government agencies around the country, and some are better than others. Some in fact are quite good. But none are perfect, and they all have their share of deadwood, just like any other workplace. The best government agencies are the ones that manage to attract people who are in it for more than a paycheck. Granted that idealism causes some problems, but not nearly so much as the corruption and inertia that rules in certain other places.
I don't have a lot of experience with Texas, but in that experience there was both some unusually good and unusually bad people there. I think that's related to the anti-government attitudes. You get people working for government who are bottom feeders, and you get really dedicated people who are willing to put up with the public's disrespect in order to serve it.
You can't hire and train up young talent if there isn't a job for them. And if you do, but let them go afterwards, you've just wasted money you'll never get back again.
If you read TFA, you'd know the big concern isn't that the satellites are going to stop working, but that the expertise needed to design, build and operate the replacement satellites will retire or move on. This is a real concern.
People who've never run an engineering project think you can take a project that is budgeted to cost X dollars, put it on hold when you've spent 0.7X dollars for some arbitrary length of time, then pick it up much later and finish it for 0.3X dollars. It doesn't work that way. Every time you restart a project it's can be logistically like starting from scratch -- sometimes even worse. I've had customers who take deliverables and sit on them from months. Since I can't keep my team sitting on its hands for months I put the team on something else. Then suddenly the customer signs off on the deliverables and wants work on the next phase to start right away. The team has to refamiliarize itself with the project and figure out what they were up to and why -- if the team is still intact.
Delay is a potent driver of cost overruns and a major source of quality problems.
In any case, this kind of reason drives me nuts. Yes, a solid, conservative piece of engineering often exceeds its design specs. In fact, it's surprising if it doesn't. So you can expect a satellite with a ten year planned lifetime not to conk out at ten years and a day unless you are very unlucky, *but you don't factor that into your planning* otherwise design specs mean nothing. The "happy accident" of a system outperforming its specification is no accident, it's the product of respecting the boundaries of what can be guaranteed.
Plus, you have all the problems of a computer, because these TVs *are* computers. I have a Vizio which takes forever to boot up. It's currently out of service because of a problem with the logic board, which needs replacing.
Well, I once gave a 1 star review to the kindle edition of a linear algebra text in which equations and formulas were hopelessly messed up -- on the Kindle. I'm talking about the exponent of a term being on a different page from the term.
I thought it was a fair review of *the product* because the kindle edition was unusable *on the kindle*, and I made it clear what the basis of the rating was in my review.
I'd be OK with Google's terms of service if it were not for one word: "publish". That raises both intellectual property and privacy red flags. Google doesn't need to publish your data to do any of the things you mention. I don't think they're going to print out your data, slap covers on it and put in bookstores, but I do believe they intend to make it public in other ways that affect your rights to claim the data as "private".
That's assuming you only exchange data with people who have enough sophistication to use encryption that's not baked in.
I don't put anything on Google services that I might want to claim copyright on, for similar reasons. Google's TOS includes an unlimited license for them to publish any material that users put on their services:
When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content.
Here's Google's disclaimer:
Google does not claim any ownership in any of the content, including any text, data, information, images, photographs, music, sound, video, or other material, that you upload, transmit or store in your Gmail account.
But note what Google does *not* promise to do: avoid harming users' economic interests in their data. Yes, you might still *own* your data, but you give Google practically unlimited permission to do anything it pleases with your data, up to and including binding it in a paper book and selling it.
I'm not particularly concerned they'd do that -- that's sure to be viewed as unconscionable. I believe that what Google wants to do are things that some jury somewhere might construe as "publishing". Unfortunately, that same jury that would exonerate Google based on the TOS would also strip the author of certain special rights authors enjoy for unpublished manuscripts -- secrecy, for example. It is also possible (I hope) that at under future changes in copyright law, Google's having quasi-published a manuscript might effect its copyright term.
Scientists might have similar issues with inadvertently "publishing" data by storing it on some Google service (Gmail for example), thus rendering it unpublishable in an academic journal.
If Google intended to protect the users' interest in their data, they'd qualify the permissions they claim to "publish" your data so it only applied to public facing services. Yahoo does this:
"Publicly accessible" areas of the Yahoo! Services are those areas of the Yahoo! network of properties that are intended by Yahoo! to be available to the general public.
So I avoid GMail and use Yahoo Mail for anything I don't want "published", because Yahoo doesn't claim a right to "publish" emails and their attached documents, but in Gmail Google *does*.
It's not that you "must" apologize for everything. It's that in so many cases, apologizing is the rational thing to do. Cases like this are the extreme example. Not only the people who were harmed by the wrong in their grave, the people who might be harmed by the apology are in their grave too. True the benefits of apologizing are not so high, but the costs are nil.
Apologizing is often a cheap way to alleviate an unproductive conflict, or in this case to help sweep the political detritus of a largely finished unproductive conflict off the political stage. In my country there are people who have an irrational fear of our government apologizing - as if people will stop fearing our drones and smart bombs and our global force projection capabilities if one of of leaders ever utters a humble word.
Our country makes it too easy for nutcases to have guns. I, for one, would give up the right to bear arms for everyone, and not miss it.
The problem, as you implicitly acknowledge, is telling the nutcases from the sane and responsible ones.
As timeOday says below, gun rights aren't worth this, but that's not a choice we realistically have -- I say that as someone who has never fired a gun and has no interest in ever firing a gun. We can't wish away all the guns that are in private hands, and we can't wish away America's gun culture, any more than we can wish away marijuana. Even if we could, that ignores the fact that the vast, vast majority of participants in that culture are responsible and non-violent citizens.
The longing when something like this is for something quick and simple we could do to make it alright, or to make it not happen again, but while there are things we can do they aren't simple or quick. Wishing guns away won't work. Flooding the country with even more guns won't work either [note 1]. The things we can do are make sure that everyone has access to mental health care and screening, develop better security procedures for schools, and keep track of gun sales to make sure they aren't going to one of that small minority of dangerous persons we know about.
Those things we can do aren't dramatic, aren't a 100% effective, and they aren't easy. But they're better than doing things that just make us feel better, or just pretending to do things.
Note 1: Historically it makes sense to look at the old west as a place with lots of guns which were routinely carried in the open. Some gun advocates have cited the low numbers of murders in Kansas territory cattle towns as proof that an armed populace is more peaceable. This however neglects to adjust the figures by population. In Abilene from 1870-1872 there were "only" 7 homicides, but the average population of Abilene at any one time was around 700 souls. That works out to a murder rate of 317/100,000 population. By comparison the highest rates for contemporary US cities are 72.8/100,000 for New Orleans and 40.5 for St. Louis. The only one of the five Kansas cattle towns with a lower *rate* of homicide in the 1870s than contemporary New Orleans was Wichita with a rate of 53/100,000. The rest were 165/100,000 or higher. If you lived in Dodge city for the ten years from 1876-1885, you had a 1/61 chance of being murdered. In Monterey County, CA in the 1850s, the homicide rate was an astounding 609/100,000. There is no doubt that widespread carrying of firearms would prevent *some* incidents like this. It might even have prevented *this* one. But there is no evidence that it would cut the murder rate, and historical data doesn't support that hypothesis.
They've been drinking *human* milk even longer.
Once you've developed a soluble circuit, the rate at which it dissolves is no doubt a parameter that can be tweaked to yield the desired lifetime.
The fact that the circuit dissovles away is a *feature*, as in soluble sutures. We can already implant electronic circuits in the human body, but I believe the idea is to create circuits you don't need to remove with a second round of surgery.
I've never heard of a sweaty heart -- unless that's the name of a band.
Especially because giving up Baikonur would force Russia to launch from higher latitudes, reducing their payload to orbit capacity for certain orbits.
I'm picturing a crusty old political geographer sitting up in one of his wingback chair and saying, a quavering voice, "Russia wants a warm water space port."
Engineering is about balancing costs and benefits, and in a revolution, rebel life is cheap.
Well, it's not as simple as you suggest. The data shows that the maximum extent of the Antarctic's seasonal sea ice has grown recently, which is the opposite of what you'd expect if the temperatures were increasing. But temperature isn't the only thing that determines the extent of seasonal ice. There's wind too, and that's what researchers think caused the increase in extent.
Still, it's quite possible for certain regions in a global warming scenario to become dramatically cooler, due to changes in the transport of energy from warmer regions to cooler in ocean and air currents.
The link you provided doesn't seem to support your conclusion that global warming was a politically driven issue in the 70s. What it shows is that the state of research back in the 70s is a political issue for *us today*. That doesn't somehow magically go back and taint the motivations of researchers forty years ago.
The graph in the article is interesting by the way. The number of global cooling or neutral papers grows through the decade, they're just outstripped by the growth in warming papers. What you are looking at is the beginning of the emergence of the global warming consensus, which took place largely without the public or media noticing.
As for overpopulation, I think that's a red herring. Exactly how would you go about using global warming to deny an overpopulation problem? Who actually worries about climate change who isn't also concerned about overpopulation?
One of the reasons people are skeptical or even deniers is all this bullshit that they can't get the models and prediction straight. If you keep changing your story, people won't believe you. It's that simple.
If you don't change your story when data challenges it, you're not doing science. It's that simple.
I understand that "people" (by which *I* mean "some people") are easier to convince if you never change what you say no matter what new evidence comes up. That's because they don't understand the difference between changing your story purely for the effect it has on the listener, and changing your story because you've learned something new. In other words, the "people" you are citing can't tell the difference between dishonesty and honesty. Let's take Antarctic sea ice as an example. "People" may take scientists honest admission that seasonal sea ice is increasing as a sign of dishonesty, but it's a peculiar conspiracy that raises and publishes doubts about itself.
In any even the Antarctic ice kerfuffle turned out not to be related to lowered temperatures at all, but more energetic winds driving the sea ice beyond regions in which it formed.
Baloney. It's the political hacks who pounce on something like this and say "Look! The scientists revised their consensus predictions, *obviously* it's just politics because the truth never changes." They say this because politics is the only thing they (think) they understand. It's just as silly as when they get up on their high horses about "revisionist" historians -- revising history is what *actual* historians do. Revising climate predictions is what climatologists do, and in any case the rumors of what the new IPCC (you like them now?) forecasts will contain is well within the range that's been discussed all along, except for a somewhat more pessimistic sea level rise figure. If you'd actually been paying attention to science news instead of political pundits, you'd know that the recent buzz has been the remarkable accuracy of the original 1990 IPCC report (source: http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate1763.html). This is a remarkable piece of support for the anthropogenic hypothesis, since the computer models used in the late 80s relied heavily on atmospheric CO2 accumulation.
The only reason people like you think climate change is politically driven myth is because you weren't paying attention *before* it became a political issue. It was vigorously debated in the scientific literature well before it became a political hot potato -- check the abstracts on Google Scholar if you don't believe me. Now you can pooh pooh a 2 degree rise in global average temperature and 1 m rise in sea level, but that's because you have no idea what the effects of those changes will be. A 1m mean sea level rise means substantially more frequent flooding events. A 2 degree temperature rise has a huge effect on the distribution of vector borne diseases.
It sounds benign to say that there will be "new arid zones in the Southern United States", but only if you don't think about what the appearance of a new arid zone would mean.
What I object to is your repeated statements that that is the only way we could have gotten those technologies. That's not only unreasonable, it's historically wrong.
The problem isn't government, it's you and people like you.
I'll set aside the silly personal attack and address your point.
You are arguing against a strawman position. My point is that the government invested in the technologies I mentioned because there was a significant public need that would have been unmet. I don't deny that in most of these cases (excepting the Internet because of net neutrality) the technology might have eventually emerged, but the problems they addressed would have gone unsolved, probably for decades. The people working on those problems were right to use public money to solve them.
That those needs were met by public funded research is a historical fact. The onus is upon you to show that the Internet and GPS might exist by now without government investments in technology. These two technologies probably alone justify all the money the US has spent on applied research *ever*, and are huge generators of private business opportunities.
I was using irony to make the point that throwing advanced battery research into the same category as teleportation or desktop cookie synthesizers is silly. Those examples address two of three criteria that in my opinion justifies public research investment (1) advancement is feasible and (2) there is an important public need for the technology. The original post I was responding to was just an intellectually sloppy ideological harangue.
The third criteria is that the progress needed requires levels of investment that are unlikely to come from private investment, typically because of uncertainty about when the investment might start paying back. Battery technology is kind of a borderline case here. Clearly there are many incremental improvements that can be made, and its an important area of commercial research. But an improvement of the magnitude being discussed seems unlikely to emerge on its own soon. I am skeptical that any one research program can outpace private development, but the value of incremental progress on this is so high that it's probably worth covering some approaches that are a bit futuristic for private investors.