You need to re-read California law. In California, you can be cited for exceeding the maximum speed limit regardless of the speed of traffic.
You are confusing the fact that California law also allows you to be cited for failing to keep up with the speed of traffic if:
1) You are using a passing lane at below the speed of traffic and not actually passing anyone or making a legal maneuver 2) You do not use a turnout on a single lane highway when available and more than four vehicles are following.
I've been to traffic court several times and I've never seen anyone use the "keeping up with the speed of traffic defense" successfully, though many have tried.
Furthermore, I've never known anyone who was ticketed for driving below the speed of traffic in a passing lane even though it is illegal.
Finally, the way people in the urban parts of California drive, high speeds tend to be inherently dangerous. It's typical for there to be vehicles moving at 55 mph on the highway, and because the maximum speed in metropolitan areas is 65 mph on the highway and because driving standards are low, drivers are not expecting to be dealing with traffic in passing lanes moving at high speeds (like they are in countries like Germany). People will often enter a passing lane at 60 mph without signaling, which is dangerous if passing traffic is moving 80 mph or more.
That's why a ticket for driving over 10 mph of the speed limit on the highway is usually incontestable, because, it is inherently unsafe with the way people drive in the State.
Semi-tractors are not exactly speed demons without trailers. They tend not to get good traction on the drive wheels (because obviously they are designed for heavy loads) and the engine is geared toward low-speed torque, not high speed torque like a car.
Without a trailer, a tractor can accelerate about as quickly as a very slow car (think Prius) and is going to top out well-under the top speeds of most cars. Most cars are geared to go at least 100 mph with higher-end models maxing out around 140-160 mph in overdrive.
Some tractors are not even geared to go over 75 mph.
That is because these situations are pretty much nonexistent. Dramatic speed limit changes rarely are put immediately after blind corners without signs warning of a change placed beforehand.
In a situation like that, a judge is likely to dismiss the ticket. Usually each State has very specific traffic engineering rules about how speed limit changes are handled.
On most city and rural roads, the speed limits actually tend to be too high. For example, on multilane suburban roads at night, pedestrians in marked and unmarked crosswalks are almost invisible (until it is too late) to many drivers at more than 20 mph, yet these roads are often marked 35 mph and higher (and people often drive at 50 mph or more) for traffic flow purposes.
Only really on highways outside of congested urban areas is it same to exceed speed limits, and never in the US, because licensing standards are lax and people simply cannot drive safely at 90 mph or more.
This can be done in some countries like Germany on the open highway, because the licensing standards are very strict (everyone keeps right on the highway and only merges into a passing lane when it is safe to pass). It would never work in a country like the US where people will literally merge into a passing lane without checking the speed of vehicles in the merge lane or even using their signals.
If you really believe that merely claiming we have compelling scientific evidence to support a conclusion is the analogous to claiming that we have some kind of irrefutable, God-given truth, then I do not believe you are capable of engaging in a legitimate scientific debate.
In science, we never claim absolute knowledge and we do not use illogical arguments such as "you could be wrong". Science is about staking a claim on a theory and then backing up that theory, not about epistomological arguments.
In science, it does not matter what the "Truth" is or whether a theory is even "True", as scientific philosophy admits that we can never be certain to know the "Truth". All that matters is which theory has the best predictive effect.
Anytime I see the argument, "scientists have been wrong in the past," I usually ignore the rest of what is written, because it is a most illogical, ridiculous argument. The only time it would ever make any logical sense is if someone claimed, "scientists are never wrong," which is an argument which I have never seen any credible person make.
Science, as a philosophy, recognizes that every theory is subject to refutation. There are no unassailable truths in science. It also recognizes that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and you are not going to overturn well-established theories without extraordinary evidence.
So claiming that a theory could be wrong because theories have been wrong in the past is a weasel argument used to attempt to cast doubt on a theory without actually presenting a BETTER scientific theory to replace it. It is an argument with no legitimate standing in scientific debate but rather a crutch illogical people use to avoid challenging an existing theory the proper way, by presenting evidence of a better theory.
You cannot extrapolate from individual parents to large groups of people. That is illogical and unscientific.
Individual studies like the ones you cite are controlled for environmental variables. Group IQ studies are uncontrolled, which makes them useless for determining WHY different groups have different IQs.
I don't usually respond to anonymous accounts, but I feel some of the issues here warrant a response so that you will not mislead others.
1) The inheritability of IQ is a individual characteristic, not a group characteristic. That means, everything else being equal, parents with a higher IQ will be more likely to have children of a higher IQ. However, this has never been shown to apply to groups, because different groups, by their very nature, are not equal. You cannot extrapolate from individual parents to large groups. In fact, there is much evidence that group IQ is not genetic. For instance, Native Americans used to have a large IQ gap with whites, an IQ gap that has largely dissipated within a few generations and therefore was almost certainly environmental, not genetic.
2) Gould was not a "fraud". He simply made one mistake in one book, perhaps out of arrogance, perhaps due to the fact that Gould was ultimately correct about skull size although he was incorrect about the exact outcome he criticized.
We already know, for instance, that a big reason that African Americans are so far behind the rest of Americans is due to environmental factors that can be controlled (the difference in income and education between African Americans and black immigrants to the US is good corroboration of evidence), so learning how much, if any of this disparity is caused by nature would not be productive, in my opinion.
I think we already have a pretty good idea of why certain groups struggle and fall behind. The problem is not figuring out the problem but the solution, and making that solution a political reality.
In science, nothing is perfect. Nobody says that stellar astrophysics is not a legitimate field of science simply because we can measure virtually nothing about a star other than its topmost layers of atoms. Rather, it is well-respected science because we can create theories about the interior of a star and test those theories based upon correlations of factors we can measure with theoretical properties.
Similarly, we cannot measure G (or whatever psychologists call it), which is true intelligence directly, but we can create theories based upon G and then measure factors correlated with it, such as IQ.
Ultimately, science is about what works best, not what is perfect, and IQ, while an imperfect measure of G, is a very productive and useful metric for making predictions, so it is valid science.
The issue there though is that there are many types of IQ tests and if one type of IQ test were flawed then gaps would be radically different on different tests.
They certainly are not perfect, but when you average them over large populations, they are a pretty well-correlated with what is believed to be "true" intelligence. The idea behind IQ tests is not that you can measure intelligence directly, but rather that you can measure factors highly correlated with intelligence, such as pattern recognition, the same way that you cannot measure nuclear fusion rate directly in a star, but rather indirectly like through color and magnitude.
1) It is extremely unlikely that we will find all genes responsible for intelligence in our lifetimes.
2) The theory that the IQ difference is genetic is not unscientific. Rather, you have groups on different sides of the issue (whether they have an underlying agenda to promote the idea that all groups of people are equally intelligent or that some groups have superior intelligence) that try to use the science to promote their parochial social agenda. The truth though is that no credible scientist in the field is going to admit to knowing the answer to these questions and most do not seek publicity because the results of the research is controversial
And of course the genes that confer dark skin are not associated with the genes that confer intelligence, as far as anyone knows. It would be uneconomical and unethical to perform an actual "intelligence" experiment to determine if some groups do have greater innate intelligence, and to be honest, proving or disproving the theory that different groups have different innate intelligence levels would do absolutely nothing to advance society, as far as I can predict. People still deserve to be judged on their individual merits regardless of the results of the nature versus nurture debates.
The problem is, people are suggesting there are differences across races but then cannot really show compelling, conclusive scientific evidence to support their claim.
For instance, scientific research (something that is not widely reported in public venues for obvious reasons of political sensitivity) clearly shows a huge IQ gap between blacks and whites, consisting of 10-20 points and persisting across the Americas, Europe, and Africa.
Some have argued that this gap is genetic (and we certainly cannot rule it out); however, there is no conclusive evidence to support their claim that the IQ gap is genetic.
Similar IQ gaps (such as between whites and Native Americans) have disappeared over time in the past, so anyone should be very skeptical of a claim that blacks have a lower IQ because it is a genetic population trait and not an environmental trait.
Like with the IQ gap, many people (most of them not actual research scientists like this author) are making these nature over nurture arguments on a wide variety of topics without sufficient research to back them up but rather to fit into their own world-view about cultures and population groups being genetically inferior or superior, an antediluvian throwback to the pseudoscience of anthropology at the turn of the 19th century.
That is a misuse of science and the actual researchers are right to call-out the author on his misinterpretation of their work.
You have to remember the inverse square law though.
A comcast router 1 meter from your WAP will interfere with your network (at the source) 10,000 times less than a neighbor's WAP 100 meters away.
So yes, your closest neighbors' modems do interfere with your signal (which is why you try to pick different channels), but the interference drops-off geometrically the further away the source is (which depends on the distance between your device, your WAP, and your neighbor's WAP.
. . . if you are near a State or Federal highway, you get routed to the CHP instead of local law enforcement even though in theory, the technology can usually tell whether or not you are actually on the highway or in a nearby city.
Actually, the GPS is not a problem in that situation. If you can actually receive enough GPS sattalite signals, the GPS will identify which apartment you are in (or at least, show that you are in one of a small number of apartments) because it can identify your location to a accuracy of 10 meters or less.
The difficulty though might be the first responders mapping latitude, longitude, and altitude data onto a map of the apartment complex. If the map does not identify how many floors up 50 meters is, the only way for first responders to figure out the apartment would be with their own GPS altimeter.
. . . we would immediately replace all fossil fuel plants with nuclear while working to upgrade the grid and replace the nuclear plants with distributed solar by the end of the century.
Of course, that would require us to actually put our fear, avarice, and ignorance aside and work together as Americans for the betterment of our country and our species, something which seems unlikely in the current political climate.
The statement I made is that the consequences of global warming will be profoundly negative FOR human civilizaiton.
The statement that you made is that human civilization is, "a bad thing".
You keep making straw-man arguments where you assign claims to me that I did not make, for instance you write: "civilization was good in the past, but is already or in the future will become bad," yet I made no such argument. In fact, I made it clear that civilization is not either an inherently a positive or negative thing, simply something that exists. I made it clear that it is in our own best interests as a species to mitigate long-term threats to our civilization, such as global warming.
Then you make the further strawman: "you trying to make a distinction between the "past" of civilization and the "future"? Civilization was good in the past, but is already or in the future will become bad?"
Civilization is neither inherently good nor evil. Stop putting words in my mouth. I believe it is in our own best-interest to do things to preserve the long-term health of our civilization, which I have made clear includes working toward a carbon-neutral future. That does not imply that civilization was ever "good" or "bad" or will be in the future.
And I never, "admitted that we are really bad at predicting what will happen in the future." That is another straw man argument you make. We are very good at predicting some future events. We are really bad at others. That is why science comes with error bars. You are making the false claim that because we are really bad at predicting one aspect of climate change we are really bad at predicting all aspects of climate change, which is absurd on its face.
A lot of climate change boils down to simple physics. If we keep increasing the greenhouse effect, for instance, barring some dramatic man-made or natural disaster (such as an asteroid strike or nuclear winter) we can say with extremely high certainty that the earth will keep warming, ice will keep melting, low-lying areas will be subject to flooding and destruction, et cetera. If you ask us to predict how much the mean temperature will increase by 2100, that will come with a significant error bar, because it depends on a lot of factors (like how much CO2 we emit, the sensitivity of the ocean, feedback systems such as water vapor, et cetera), but we can say it will lie in a certain range which will have certain consequences.
My access points actually potentially can use the entire authorized spectrum. That's actually how some of the new high-end routers achieve much higher wireless N speeds (in theory over 1 Gbs) by using the entire 2.4 and 5 ghz spectrum simultaneously (of course, you have to have two devices that support broadband spectrum).
Most devices use more than one channel these days and you need at least three channels of seperation to reduce interference. In the US, there are only 12 channels in the 2.4 Ghz band, so if you want to get good wifi throughout your house and live in an area with high interference, you need three difference access points in three different parts of the house on three different channels, which leaves zero room for any other wireless device, such a Comcast modem, which would just interfere with my existing wireless access points.
And a lot of new routers can use the entire 12 channels simultaneously to achieve higher than standard wireless-N speeds (over 1 Gbs in theory, but in reality, you'd be lucky to get the entire 110 Mbs ISP connection over wireless N in this neighborhood).
Evolution is not a "good thing". It is simply part of the natural world, like gravity or a massive forest. It is neither inherently good nor evil. Your premise is false.
I worry about it the same as I worry about any other threat to human civilization: nuclear war, asteroid strikes, a massive fire, flooding, et cetera because I want human civilization to prosper. You seem to take the attitude that it doesn't matter what happens to the human race to our children and grandchildren, an attitude which I find highly objectionable and contrary to my ideals.
We can make accurate predictions. As time goes on, the error bars on our predictions get smaller. We do not know everything, but we do know quite a bit. We know, for instance, that global warming is going to cause massive worldwide flooding. We know it is very likely to greatly increase the number of severe weather events. We know that it will dramatically disrupt human civilization by destroying the infrastructure we have built our civilization around.
There are potentially much worse consequences, but I fear the consequences we can say with a high degree of accuracy will occur much more than some of the more apocalyptic scenarios. Again, you are making a false premise. My fear is based upon fear of the known consequences of global warming, not the unknown or uncertain ones.
And your claim that civilization is "profoundly negative" is again a false premise. Civilization is neither negative or positive. The whole point of a successful civilization is to work in its own best interests, and its own best interest is to prevent a runway greenhouse gas effect. You don't have to "abandon civilization" to do that. That is again a false premise.
And no, it is not my contention that "civilization is a bad thing". That is a straw man you have created.
Your entire argument is based on false premises, anthropomorphism, and straw man arguments.
We adapted human civilization to stop emitting harmful amounts of CFCs that were destroying the ozone layer and we can adapt human civilization to stop emitting greenhouse gasses that will eventually destroy a lot of what we have built up over the past 5000 years. We have the technology to move our civilization to a carbon neutral future. At this point, we just need the political will to do so. Right now, there are too many selfish individuals who have money invested in destroying our civilization through the unfettered release of atmospheric carbon. Until we put a stop to that, humanity will be on a road to a worse future for our children than the ones our parents left us.
It's still a false analogy because I derive immense benefits from my tax money, even if 100% of it does not go to programs that directly benefit me.
By contrast, I derive zero benefit from Comcast's wifi service.
I have a cellular phone with unlimited data. I have absolutely no use for someone else's wifi as my 4G service is much more reliable in the US than Comcast and Comcast is not even a service provider in most of the countries I travel to.
Furthermore, I wouldn't use it anyway as the connection is not secure and someone could easily spoof a fake Comcast hotspot and steal my login information.
Actually, almost all wireless devices use the same scientific bands: blutooth, cordless phones, keyboards, wifi, et cetera. While some do use alternatives like the 900 Mhz band, most use the 2.4 Ghz or 5.8 Ghz ISM bands.
And yes, Wifi is degraded by every single device that uses those bands, but the signal strength falls off at the square of the distance, so an interference source inside my house is much more troublesome than one outside my house.
My home wireless network already uses 100% of the 2.4 and 5.8 Ghz band because interference in a big city is really high. All Comcast would do is degrade my signal and provide me with a slower connection than my current provider.
How would it benefit me to have the quality of my wireless devices such as my wifi network, Bluetooth, cordless keyboards, telephones, et cetera diminished in my own home?
I get a direct benefit from the taxes I pay, such as roads, trains, ferries, buses, police and fire services, street cleaning, research grants, et cetera. I get zero benefit from Comcast using my wireless spectrum.
Everything is "debatable", but what scientifically literate people believe about global warming is very far removed from public opinion, just like it is with evolution, nuclear power, GMO, and a host of other scientific subjects.
Also, there is really no scientific debate any longer in refereed journals as to whether:
1) The greenhouse effect is increasing due to human activity (actually, there was never really much of a real debate about this).
2) The increase in the greenhouse effect has become the primary long-term driver of global warming (the scientific consensus has strongly leaned towards this conclusion since the third IPCC report).
The question of consequences is a more controversial and active area of research, but there is little doubt that given that our entire civilization is based upon the stability of the climate (including building much of our most productive manufacturing centers, population centers, and agricultural centers in places likely to be damaged or destroyed by global warming), I do not think there is much debate that the long-term effects on human civilization will be profoundly negative.
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You need to re-read California law. In California, you can be cited for exceeding the maximum speed limit regardless of the speed of traffic.
You are confusing the fact that California law also allows you to be cited for failing to keep up with the speed of traffic if:
1) You are using a passing lane at below the speed of traffic and not actually passing anyone or making a legal maneuver
2) You do not use a turnout on a single lane highway when available and more than four vehicles are following.
I've been to traffic court several times and I've never seen anyone use the "keeping up with the speed of traffic defense" successfully, though many have tried.
Furthermore, I've never known anyone who was ticketed for driving below the speed of traffic in a passing lane even though it is illegal.
Finally, the way people in the urban parts of California drive, high speeds tend to be inherently dangerous. It's typical for there to be vehicles moving at 55 mph on the highway, and because the maximum speed in metropolitan areas is 65 mph on the highway and because driving standards are low, drivers are not expecting to be dealing with traffic in passing lanes moving at high speeds (like they are in countries like Germany). People will often enter a passing lane at 60 mph without signaling, which is dangerous if passing traffic is moving 80 mph or more.
That's why a ticket for driving over 10 mph of the speed limit on the highway is usually incontestable, because, it is inherently unsafe with the way people drive in the State.
Semi-tractors are not exactly speed demons without trailers. They tend not to get good traction on the drive wheels (because obviously they are designed for heavy loads) and the engine is geared toward low-speed torque, not high speed torque like a car.
Without a trailer, a tractor can accelerate about as quickly as a very slow car (think Prius) and is going to top out well-under the top speeds of most cars. Most cars are geared to go at least 100 mph with higher-end models maxing out around 140-160 mph in overdrive.
Some tractors are not even geared to go over 75 mph.
That is because these situations are pretty much nonexistent. Dramatic speed limit changes rarely are put immediately after blind corners without signs warning of a change placed beforehand.
In a situation like that, a judge is likely to dismiss the ticket. Usually each State has very specific traffic engineering rules about how speed limit changes are handled.
It depends on the situation.
On most city and rural roads, the speed limits actually tend to be too high. For example, on multilane suburban roads at night, pedestrians in marked and unmarked crosswalks are almost invisible (until it is too late) to many drivers at more than 20 mph, yet these roads are often marked 35 mph and higher (and people often drive at 50 mph or more) for traffic flow purposes.
Only really on highways outside of congested urban areas is it same to exceed speed limits, and never in the US, because licensing standards are lax and people simply cannot drive safely at 90 mph or more.
This can be done in some countries like Germany on the open highway, because the licensing standards are very strict (everyone keeps right on the highway and only merges into a passing lane when it is safe to pass). It would never work in a country like the US where people will literally merge into a passing lane without checking the speed of vehicles in the merge lane or even using their signals.
If you really believe that merely claiming we have compelling scientific evidence to support a conclusion is the analogous to claiming that we have some kind of irrefutable, God-given truth, then I do not believe you are capable of engaging in a legitimate scientific debate.
In science, we never claim absolute knowledge and we do not use illogical arguments such as "you could be wrong". Science is about staking a claim on a theory and then backing up that theory, not about epistomological arguments.
In science, it does not matter what the "Truth" is or whether a theory is even "True", as scientific philosophy admits that we can never be certain to know the "Truth". All that matters is which theory has the best predictive effect.
Anytime I see the argument, "scientists have been wrong in the past," I usually ignore the rest of what is written, because it is a most illogical, ridiculous argument. The only time it would ever make any logical sense is if someone claimed, "scientists are never wrong," which is an argument which I have never seen any credible person make.
Science, as a philosophy, recognizes that every theory is subject to refutation. There are no unassailable truths in science. It also recognizes that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and you are not going to overturn well-established theories without extraordinary evidence.
So claiming that a theory could be wrong because theories have been wrong in the past is a weasel argument used to attempt to cast doubt on a theory without actually presenting a BETTER scientific theory to replace it. It is an argument with no legitimate standing in scientific debate but rather a crutch illogical people use to avoid challenging an existing theory the proper way, by presenting evidence of a better theory.
You cannot extrapolate from individual parents to large groups of people. That is illogical and unscientific.
Individual studies like the ones you cite are controlled for environmental variables. Group IQ studies are uncontrolled, which makes them useless for determining WHY different groups have different IQs.
I don't usually respond to anonymous accounts, but I feel some of the issues here warrant a response so that you will not mislead others.
1) The inheritability of IQ is a individual characteristic, not a group characteristic. That means, everything else being equal, parents with a higher IQ will be more likely to have children of a higher IQ. However, this has never been shown to apply to groups, because different groups, by their very nature, are not equal. You cannot extrapolate from individual parents to large groups. In fact, there is much evidence that group IQ is not genetic. For instance, Native Americans used to have a large IQ gap with whites, an IQ gap that has largely dissipated within a few generations and therefore was almost certainly environmental, not genetic.
2) Gould was not a "fraud". He simply made one mistake in one book, perhaps out of arrogance, perhaps due to the fact that Gould was ultimately correct about skull size although he was incorrect about the exact outcome he criticized.
We already know, for instance, that a big reason that African Americans are so far behind the rest of Americans is due to environmental factors that can be controlled (the difference in income and education between African Americans and black immigrants to the US is good corroboration of evidence), so learning how much, if any of this disparity is caused by nature would not be productive, in my opinion.
I think we already have a pretty good idea of why certain groups struggle and fall behind. The problem is not figuring out the problem but the solution, and making that solution a political reality.
In science, nothing is perfect. Nobody says that stellar astrophysics is not a legitimate field of science simply because we can measure virtually nothing about a star other than its topmost layers of atoms. Rather, it is well-respected science because we can create theories about the interior of a star and test those theories based upon correlations of factors we can measure with theoretical properties.
Similarly, we cannot measure G (or whatever psychologists call it), which is true intelligence directly, but we can create theories based upon G and then measure factors correlated with it, such as IQ.
Ultimately, science is about what works best, not what is perfect, and IQ, while an imperfect measure of G, is a very productive and useful metric for making predictions, so it is valid science.
The issue there though is that there are many types of IQ tests and if one type of IQ test were flawed then gaps would be radically different on different tests.
They certainly are not perfect, but when you average them over large populations, they are a pretty well-correlated with what is believed to be "true" intelligence. The idea behind IQ tests is not that you can measure intelligence directly, but rather that you can measure factors highly correlated with intelligence, such as pattern recognition, the same way that you cannot measure nuclear fusion rate directly in a star, but rather indirectly like through color and magnitude.
1) It is extremely unlikely that we will find all genes responsible for intelligence in our lifetimes.
2) The theory that the IQ difference is genetic is not unscientific. Rather, you have groups on different sides of the issue (whether they have an underlying agenda to promote the idea that all groups of people are equally intelligent or that some groups have superior intelligence) that try to use the science to promote their parochial social agenda. The truth though is that no credible scientist in the field is going to admit to knowing the answer to these questions and most do not seek publicity because the results of the research is controversial
And of course the genes that confer dark skin are not associated with the genes that confer intelligence, as far as anyone knows. It would be uneconomical and unethical to perform an actual "intelligence" experiment to determine if some groups do have greater innate intelligence, and to be honest, proving or disproving the theory that different groups have different innate intelligence levels would do absolutely nothing to advance society, as far as I can predict. People still deserve to be judged on their individual merits regardless of the results of the nature versus nurture debates.
The problem is, people are suggesting there are differences across races but then cannot really show compelling, conclusive scientific evidence to support their claim.
For instance, scientific research (something that is not widely reported in public venues for obvious reasons of political sensitivity) clearly shows a huge IQ gap between blacks and whites, consisting of 10-20 points and persisting across the Americas, Europe, and Africa.
Some have argued that this gap is genetic (and we certainly cannot rule it out); however, there is no conclusive evidence to support their claim that the IQ gap is genetic.
Similar IQ gaps (such as between whites and Native Americans) have disappeared over time in the past, so anyone should be very skeptical of a claim that blacks have a lower IQ because it is a genetic population trait and not an environmental trait.
Like with the IQ gap, many people (most of them not actual research scientists like this author) are making these nature over nurture arguments on a wide variety of topics without sufficient research to back them up but rather to fit into their own world-view about cultures and population groups being genetically inferior or superior, an antediluvian throwback to the pseudoscience of anthropology at the turn of the 19th century.
That is a misuse of science and the actual researchers are right to call-out the author on his misinterpretation of their work.
You have to remember the inverse square law though.
A comcast router 1 meter from your WAP will interfere with your network (at the source) 10,000 times less than a neighbor's WAP 100 meters away.
So yes, your closest neighbors' modems do interfere with your signal (which is why you try to pick different channels), but the interference drops-off geometrically the further away the source is (which depends on the distance between your device, your WAP, and your neighbor's WAP.
. . . if you are near a State or Federal highway, you get routed to the CHP instead of local law enforcement even though in theory, the technology can usually tell whether or not you are actually on the highway or in a nearby city.
Actually, the GPS is not a problem in that situation. If you can actually receive enough GPS sattalite signals, the GPS will identify which apartment you are in (or at least, show that you are in one of a small number of apartments) because it can identify your location to a accuracy of 10 meters or less.
The difficulty though might be the first responders mapping latitude, longitude, and altitude data onto a map of the apartment complex. If the map does not identify how many floors up 50 meters is, the only way for first responders to figure out the apartment would be with their own GPS altimeter.
. . . we would immediately replace all fossil fuel plants with nuclear while working to upgrade the grid and replace the nuclear plants with distributed solar by the end of the century.
Of course, that would require us to actually put our fear, avarice, and ignorance aside and work together as Americans for the betterment of our country and our species, something which seems unlikely in the current political climate.
The statement I made is that the consequences of global warming will be profoundly negative FOR human civilizaiton.
The statement that you made is that human civilization is, "a bad thing".
You keep making straw-man arguments where you assign claims to me that I did not make, for instance you write: "civilization was good in the past, but is already or in the future will become bad," yet I made no such argument. In fact, I made it clear that civilization is not either an inherently a positive or negative thing, simply something that exists. I made it clear that it is in our own best interests as a species to mitigate long-term threats to our civilization, such as global warming.
Then you make the further strawman: "you trying to make a distinction between the "past" of civilization and the "future"? Civilization was good in the past, but is already or in the future will become bad?"
Civilization is neither inherently good nor evil. Stop putting words in my mouth. I believe it is in our own best-interest to do things to preserve the long-term health of our civilization, which I have made clear includes working toward a carbon-neutral future. That does not imply that civilization was ever "good" or "bad" or will be in the future.
And I never, "admitted that we are really bad at predicting what will happen in the future." That is another straw man argument you make. We are very good at predicting some future events. We are really bad at others. That is why science comes with error bars. You are making the false claim that because we are really bad at predicting one aspect of climate change we are really bad at predicting all aspects of climate change, which is absurd on its face.
A lot of climate change boils down to simple physics. If we keep increasing the greenhouse effect, for instance, barring some dramatic man-made or natural disaster (such as an asteroid strike or nuclear winter) we can say with extremely high certainty that the earth will keep warming, ice will keep melting, low-lying areas will be subject to flooding and destruction, et cetera. If you ask us to predict how much the mean temperature will increase by 2100, that will come with a significant error bar, because it depends on a lot of factors (like how much CO2 we emit, the sensitivity of the ocean, feedback systems such as water vapor, et cetera), but we can say it will lie in a certain range which will have certain consequences.
My access points actually potentially can use the entire authorized spectrum. That's actually how some of the new high-end routers achieve much higher wireless N speeds (in theory over 1 Gbs) by using the entire 2.4 and 5 ghz spectrum simultaneously (of course, you have to have two devices that support broadband spectrum).
Most devices use more than one channel these days and you need at least three channels of seperation to reduce interference. In the US, there are only 12 channels in the 2.4 Ghz band, so if you want to get good wifi throughout your house and live in an area with high interference, you need three difference access points in three different parts of the house on three different channels, which leaves zero room for any other wireless device, such a Comcast modem, which would just interfere with my existing wireless access points.
And a lot of new routers can use the entire 12 channels simultaneously to achieve higher than standard wireless-N speeds (over 1 Gbs in theory, but in reality, you'd be lucky to get the entire 110 Mbs ISP connection over wireless N in this neighborhood).
Evolution is not a "good thing". It is simply part of the natural world, like gravity or a massive forest. It is neither inherently good nor evil. Your premise is false.
I worry about it the same as I worry about any other threat to human civilization: nuclear war, asteroid strikes, a massive fire, flooding, et cetera because I want human civilization to prosper. You seem to take the attitude that it doesn't matter what happens to the human race to our children and grandchildren, an attitude which I find highly objectionable and contrary to my ideals.
We can make accurate predictions. As time goes on, the error bars on our predictions get smaller. We do not know everything, but we do know quite a bit. We know, for instance, that global warming is going to cause massive worldwide flooding. We know it is very likely to greatly increase the number of severe weather events. We know that it will dramatically disrupt human civilization by destroying the infrastructure we have built our civilization around.
There are potentially much worse consequences, but I fear the consequences we can say with a high degree of accuracy will occur much more than some of the more apocalyptic scenarios. Again, you are making a false premise. My fear is based upon fear of the known consequences of global warming, not the unknown or uncertain ones.
And your claim that civilization is "profoundly negative" is again a false premise. Civilization is neither negative or positive. The whole point of a successful civilization is to work in its own best interests, and its own best interest is to prevent a runway greenhouse gas effect. You don't have to "abandon civilization" to do that. That is again a false premise.
And no, it is not my contention that "civilization is a bad thing". That is a straw man you have created.
Your entire argument is based on false premises, anthropomorphism, and straw man arguments.
We adapted human civilization to stop emitting harmful amounts of CFCs that were destroying the ozone layer and we can adapt human civilization to stop emitting greenhouse gasses that will eventually destroy a lot of what we have built up over the past 5000 years. We have the technology to move our civilization to a carbon neutral future. At this point, we just need the political will to do so. Right now, there are too many selfish individuals who have money invested in destroying our civilization through the unfettered release of atmospheric carbon. Until we put a stop to that, humanity will be on a road to a worse future for our children than the ones our parents left us.
It's still a false analogy because I derive immense benefits from my tax money, even if 100% of it does not go to programs that directly benefit me.
By contrast, I derive zero benefit from Comcast's wifi service.
I have a cellular phone with unlimited data. I have absolutely no use for someone else's wifi as my 4G service is much more reliable in the US than Comcast and Comcast is not even a service provider in most of the countries I travel to.
Furthermore, I wouldn't use it anyway as the connection is not secure and someone could easily spoof a fake Comcast hotspot and steal my login information.
Actually, almost all wireless devices use the same scientific bands: blutooth, cordless phones, keyboards, wifi, et cetera. While some do use alternatives like the 900 Mhz band, most use the 2.4 Ghz or 5.8 Ghz ISM bands.
And yes, Wifi is degraded by every single device that uses those bands, but the signal strength falls off at the square of the distance, so an interference source inside my house is much more troublesome than one outside my house.
My home wireless network already uses 100% of the 2.4 and 5.8 Ghz band because interference in a big city is really high. All Comcast would do is degrade my signal and provide me with a slower connection than my current provider.
I detached Comcast instead and got a better ISP.
How would it benefit me to have the quality of my wireless devices such as my wifi network, Bluetooth, cordless keyboards, telephones, et cetera diminished in my own home?
I get a direct benefit from the taxes I pay, such as roads, trains, ferries, buses, police and fire services, street cleaning, research grants, et cetera. I get zero benefit from Comcast using my wireless spectrum.
Everything is "debatable", but what scientifically literate people believe about global warming is very far removed from public opinion, just like it is with evolution, nuclear power, GMO, and a host of other scientific subjects.
Also, there is really no scientific debate any longer in refereed journals as to whether:
1) The greenhouse effect is increasing due to human activity (actually, there was never really much of a real debate about this).
2) The increase in the greenhouse effect has become the primary long-term driver of global warming (the scientific consensus has strongly leaned towards this conclusion since the third IPCC report).
The question of consequences is a more controversial and active area of research, but there is little doubt that given that our entire civilization is based upon the stability of the climate (including building much of our most productive manufacturing centers, population centers, and agricultural centers in places likely to be damaged or destroyed by global warming), I do not think there is much debate that the long-term effects on human civilization will be profoundly negative.