When agents of the US government censor, torture and otherwise violate the US Constitution, enemies of the US can claim hypocrisy. The US must act better to be perceived as better.
This is idiotic. The US acts better.
Of course when talking about muslims "acting better" doesn't mean much, but even if US soldiers had raped EVERY iraqi woman and merely left half of them alive afterwards, they'd have acted better than muslims. (the muslim prophet kidnapped women using a military force only identified in the muslim "holy" texts as "the muslims", had them raped by said military force called "the muslims", asked ransom for them, which was paid, and then killed the women, every last one, only to proceed to attack the village, eventually succeeding in severing all heads involved, their crime ? refusing to become muslim. This is the man every muslim has as a first duty to imitate. Despite their utter lack of decency, most muslims actually do behave better than their prophet, but most massacring paedophiles behave better than him)
Are you seriously claiming the US is behaving worse than the muslims ?
Are you totally insane ? Do you have a wife ? A daughter perhaps ? Shall I act "slightly better than 'the muslims'" against her for a while and see if you "perceive me better" ?
So let's just take your post as an illustration of that age-old principle : Never let reality come in the way of a "progressive" argument. Progressive being apparently Iran "we don't have no gays <cue picture of an Iranian noose containing well, a gay, with 'islamic' soldiers poking them with bajonets".
Unfortunately their political aim is a religion. Their religion is not like Christianity, that explicitly leaves politics outside of it's scope, but a totalitarian ideology like nazism that leaves nothing (not eaven how people wipe their ass) out of it's scope. Every last millimeter of behavior is utterly regulated in this racist totalitarian and supremacist political ideology that intends to destroy human rights.
So, all we have to do is eliminate Islam, and the world will be safe? There wouldn't be any reason they're doing these things, just that they're Muslim? What about the peaceful Muslims? What about the terror acts not carried out in the name of Allah?
Islam has long since died. It died at the hand of British soldiers and a Turkish homosexual in 1923, and it's last hope died in Paris a few years later.
What we're seeing today has little to do with islam as it was practiced in the 19th century, or any time before that.
What about the peaceful Muslims?
Ok so let's define muslim. Muslim is someone who, unquestionably, believes the text of the quran, the quran who specifies it is meant literally (quran 3:7) and promises hellfire for anyone who even tries to "add symbolic meanings". A verse that is read most often at the execution of baha'i or ahmadi muslims in islamic nations.
So this "believing muslim" is a person who literally (see quran 3:7) believes he is a slave with orders to "fight and kill", coming straight from allah (quran 9:111). (fighting is to continue until there are only believers left)
He is someone who believes there "must always be war" (quran 2:213). That "women are less than men" and that if a woman, whether muslim or non-muslim, is tought to question any of it she is to be ignored if possible, locked up if she doesn't immediately ceased and beaten if she continues with her questioning...
That there can't be human rights at all.
How, exactly, can one be at peace with anyone who believes that is the ultimate, everlasting, authority ? Except by dieing I mean.
This is a theoretical question : given someone who believes these type of things are the ultimate authority, how can one (even a muslim) be at peace with him/her ?
So if you're answer is going to come down to "but muslims don't believe in the quran", then please stop before you start. That's what I mean by "islam died in 1923 at the hands of British soldiers". And they killed islam for VERY good reasons. (see for example the negotiation that Thomas Jefferson conducted with islam)
Today's movement is trying to violently re-establish a dead corpse. The only question is how many must die before they give up. It appears the answer is "a lot".
Islam, or the english translation of that arabic word, "repression", is not a religion like Christianity. Islam dictates how you wipe your ass, and threatens to kill anyone who does differently. (in case you're wondering, muslims have to wipe their ass using 9 stones and only their left hand).
It is not a personal religion, it is not about behaving well. It is about FORCING others (without violence if possible, with violence if necessary) to behave islamic ("hisbah"). It is not a personal faith, and if practiced in this way it means nothing. It is, in essence a racist religion that is based on forcing people to accept their superiority based on nothing. You know, like nazism was.
As the founder of islam says : "islam will be victorious because of terror".
Another one of his statements "you love life and we love death and that's why we will win", real eloquent guy there.
So, all we have to do is eliminate Islam, and the world will be safe?
As we've clearly established, the large majority (over 99%) of terror acts are comitted by muslims, because they're muslims. Obviously the world will not become disneyworld because this racist semi-islamic ideology dies. But it *will* become a hell of a lot nicer and safer.
The roads don't become safe because you fix your brakes. It is nevertheless a good thing to do, because it makes them safer.
Terror works, and so does censorship. Using violence to advance a political position works. So what went wrong in the beginning in Iraq ? To little agressiveness on the american side. This whole rules of engagement thing.
Al-qaeda on the other hand, placed bombs in a girls pre-school and detonated the bombs when american soldiers brought back a lost girl. 28 of the children died and both soldiers (and the girl they protected) survived.
And somehow the western press means by "proportionalism" that the US should be less agressive, imagine. The Iraqis know perfectly well how muslims fight : kidnapping kids, wives and old people and executing them en masse in hopes of demoralizing an enemy, have been normal features of muslim conquests everywhere.
All indigenous cultures of northern africa have been totally obliterated by islam : from the ancient egyptians (who still existed when the muslim caliph ordered the library of alexandria burnt down), to the pseudo-roman carthagens, to berbers and tons of other cultures.
Terrorism works. Sooner or later other people will start catching up to this message.
And.. if it did affect you, chances are that your back yard is in Iraq..... or new york (twice)... or in london (twice)... or in madrid... or in barcelona... or amsterdam... or paris... or...
Or, merely this week :
6/28/2008 (Khyber, Pakistan) - A sectarian disagreement leaves eight dead. 6/28/2008 (Tripoli, Lebanon) - Shia terrorists detonate a bomb in an apartment building, killing two residents. 6/27/2008 (Pattani, Thailand) - A 64-year-old man is murdered by Islamic gunmen. 6/27/2008 (Narathiwat, Thailand) - A 36-year-old civilian is shot to death by Mujahid after dropping his children off at school. 6/27/2008 (Jijel, Algeria) - Six security personnel are taken out by al-Qaeda gunmen. 6/27/2008 (Vedeno, Chechnya) - Four police are ambushed and killed by Jihad fighters.
This week alone there have been 173 dead bodies due to terrorism (in the name of a certain religion). Denying the problem is as stupid as saying it affects everyone.
America is free of terror because it only has a tiny amount of muslims.
If you worship a massacring terrorist like mohamed, that apparently causes a tendency to randomly kill. Especially if you believe "all muslims are slaves of allah, their orders are to kill for islam" (quran 9:111, and this specifies explicitly that it is to be interpreted literally)
energy storage technologies have "blossomed lately"... meaning there were a few successfull experiments, making further research interesting.
Nothing economically feasible can hold 200 megawatts for 12 hours. That's 8.5 petajoules that we need to be able to both store and retrieve, and obviously at those rates you don't want to have any less than 99% efficiency, or something's going to get cooked badly.
We are nowhere near these requirements. Therefore the only solar plants in existence provide a tiny bit of grid support during the heat of the day, and they're not critical either (meaning in reality the grid throws most of their energy away*)
* In reality the usage graph of any city is not a flat curve, but it's got spikes like a fakir's bed. Meaning you constantly must pump some 10% more energy in the grid, and destroy it at the community level, unless you want to have rolling blackouts. That's what the solar plant in spain is used for (well it's only got enough power to do half that job), and only on a local level. And even with that trivial job it's managed to cause 2 blackouts. It's cheap electricity, but it's got a few of the other properties of cheap stuff.
We cannot currently make it work. No amount of whining is going to change that. Study advanced physics and make ultracapacitors another few million times better and the problem is solved. But that's not likely to happen commercially any time soon.
The cause of the droughts remains a mystery: some blame climate change and others say it is down to farmers destroying surface vegetation. Satellite images suggest vegetation in the region has recovered significantly over the last 15 years, pushing the southern Sahara into retreat.
This is obviously exactly what anybody would expect, but somehow the ipcc has obscured even basic logic in many people. More energy available for plants = more plants, since plants use this energy to procreate.
Well if you believe that why not just install peddle generators in every home ?
At least that way apartment blocks won't have issues.
Never mind that even in Israel solar on the roof can barely cover water heating (in winter it's insufficient)... You do not have the intensity of the sun over the dead sea deserts in many places in America...
*sigh* what's the use in discussing with people with "green" opinions ?
If what you say is true, then how come there are any non-solar plants left in the US ?
-> it's cheaper than power plants -> it doesn't need to be transported (please explain how this sun gets to alaska ? nasa's going to launch a mirror ?) -> it's available now for 30 years, and during that 30 years it was already cheaper
If you've got assumptions as insane as that, there is no use discussing. I'm guessing that despite solar providing cheaper power for 30 years now, you *still* don't have any solar power on your roof, right ?
It's like your adsl modem. Everybody knows that if you fill up the line to an adsl modem traffic slows down like hell.
Well at that point you're going to see you're using about 80% (90% if you've got a really good modem with big buffers) of the line. Using many downloads you may bet this slightly above 90% but only a wizard gets it above 95% (I hear there's a zmodem-over-udp tool that can do it, but tcp will not do it).
You'll also notice the line is, despite "not completely filled up" and "still more than 2 isdn lines available capacity" dog slow. Utterly unuseable.
It gets worse since tcp generates extra traffic, even more than normal, on a congested line, which can really exacerbate the problem further at times.
okay, it's simple : a datapipe is not a water pipe. It's serial, not parallel.
In a water main every droplet of water has it's own space available, in an OC-48 every bit must be nicely lined up and 1 bit at a time gets sent down the line. (yes I know about the modulation, so it's 64 bits or so, but the principle is the same)
That means that a line that is 90% utilized in a space of 15 minutes is 13.80 minutes utilized and 1.20 minutes not utilized at all : there could be a single 13.80 minute burst and then nothing and the line would be 90% utilized. Generally you're going to see a limited number of bursts per minute.
The bursts are unpredictable, but they get exponentially longer the higher the utilization gets. A 1% used line will in practice only have bursts of milliseconds. In a 90% used line the bursts will (sometimes, obviously) last minutes.
During a burst, basically the pipe is utterly full. Nothing can get in until enough stuff gets out first.
Therefore a 90% utilized line is totally unuseable for anyone. It leads to massive slowdowns.
I know this is not what you want to hear, but it's the way it is, simple as that.
"during the day" oh great... no lights on at night then I guess. Let's not forget that at the average american longitude you get about 60% efficiency during even the day, not 100% (meaning you only get 60% of the rated power on average during the day, and that's assuming you tracking the sun). So let's see your estimate grow :
3.9 * 10^14 * 2 (at night) * 1/60% * 2 (for winter) * 1/10% (transportation losses)... we've long since passed your estimate. So we're on to, what 20% of land ?
No heating in winter either I presume.
You have to transport that power. What are you going to use to transport power from the sahara to the us ? Or even from, say california to alaska ?
The plants have what you might call "internal resistance", keeping the plants running, especially for plants as massive as these solar plants are going to be (3x the size of france, see below) it's going to be significant. So let's say you lose, certainly at the start, another 10% of power.
Remember the current infrastructure loses about 10% per 100 kilometer (and we don't yet have the superconductor technology necessary to truly improve that, again perhaps we do in 10 years, but not now). So 5000 kilometer is not a feasible distance to transport power.
I would also like to add that 5% of the surface area of the US is a massive stretch of land. The us has 50 states, so 5% is between 2 and 3 states entirely filled up, every last square millimeter, with solar panels. And that won't fit the bill, as indicated above.
If you're basing your thinking on propaganda (like solar power being competitive per watt for 30 years now ????) then it has no use arguing with you.
I could say the same about you : do you actually believe what you're saying. Solar power certainly is not competitive per watt. There is one (1) company that is making that claim, and it's product remains to be proven, and there are still lots of snags for them to hit. Could be a really nice option in 5 years, or at least 1-2 years, but not now.
Everything we build now will not be competitive, and will have to be rebuild. And it requires too much space.
These are all things that are basically being researched. They're interesting, to be sure. But they don't justify anything more than research plants.
Solar concentration technology is certainly not capable of generating commercial electricity yet. It is promising, yes. And we should certainly build one or two demo plants, but that's it.
Not actual projects. Those actual projects are built TODAY using, at best, today's technology, more likely yesterday's.
So let's evaluate your argument. We need to build new technologies. "New" meaning either not invented yet, or we're in the process of inventing them. Great, perfect plan, fabulous... I do have one question though, that I must insist you answer :
How exactly do you build a power plant that hasn't been invented yet ? Unless you can answer that question your argument is worthless.
For the same reason carter's demand was worthless, it wasn't possible. Congress is a waste of money, and it's certainly not capable of researching advanced physics. Therefore that law under carter was worth the same as all Carter's other policies (like putting ahmadinejad "we don't have no gays in Iran, we do kill them, I don't know why you think we have them" in power for example) : about as much as an investment in SCO.
There is an argument that global warming has caused deserts to grow, but one also has to consider the effect of desert reclamation (the Soviets were big on this) through irrigation and careful land management.
No global warming caused deserts to shrink, not grow.
What can be seen trivially is that obviously the permafrost regions of the earth become forests due to global warming. Nobody lives there so it's an easy area for forests to expand into.
However, the data also shows that global warming caused the Sahara to shrink. I don't think anybody has attempted to answer why (the ipcc and the goracle would scream bloody murder if such an investigation got funded obviously).
To be completely honest... plants require energy... we like green... green = plants... global warming = more energy = more plants = more green and more animals.
But you'd get shot stating something as trivial as that on the msn.
The main problem is the space required for solar power. To generate the amount of power used by america using currently feasible (economically feasible) solar panels (5-8% efficiency) in the regions that America has you'd need between 300 and 500% of the American soil. (they also cost a lot more than feasible, but since democrats totally ignore economics, let's do it too, and let's say... uhm... that america will print the necessary money)
Oops.
Now you might think, cool, let's wait till 100%... unfortunately, and allowing for massive projects on water, we need to wait for it to drop below 40% before it can be feasibly used to generate power.
Let's not forget that you have day-night, summer-winter, and the higher the longitude, the less sun you'll collect. A 100% efficient solar panel in New York will generate about 55% of it's rated wattage on average.
Note that if you start building solar panels now, they will obviously be of the inefficient kind, meaning they cost space, and will either have to be redone in a few years, or they will eat into available land. And let's not forget that despite every american apparently trying to lose weight, they do eat, obviously necessitating a large amount of agriculture, which eats space, lots and lots of space.
Obviously neither oil, nor nuclear have this problem (wind, however, does have that problem). Oil requires some surface area, but not significant amounts. Nuclear requires 800 square meters per gigawatt. Enough said.
Solar requires more surface area than we have. It's a no-go until cheap panels are ~ 60% efficient, and even then it will require the clearing of massive stretches of land.
For obvious reasons nothing will grow below a solar panel.
So... even with those panels working optimally the question will remain... several states worth of surface area will have to be stripped of every last feature, every last plant, every last animal... which ones ?
Reality however has 2 "little" problems with your "bother" -> oil IS "uber critical to american energy needs" -> so is coal
Unless you're willing to cut your energy usage by 80% (meaning that you're asking alaskans to DIE or basically demanding america abandons alaska altogether)
-> solar isn't critical, and won't be for (at least) 10 years, probably more, current technology is not good enough. It does NOT work.
per contrast
-> nuclear isn't critical, but it CAN be. It can, for at least 20 or 30 years, and given only current technological levels, constructed within 1-2-3 years, supply the needed energy (to keep alaska populated, to keep the economy running, whatever argument tickles your fancy). The side comment with this argument is that however much nuclear can heat homes and run factories, it cannot run cars (yet). That, too will take another 10 years or so.
So to be completely honest, except for the odd experiment, the best amount of solar power in your grid feed (right now) is... 0%, all the rest are "coolness" or pr-projects. They look good, but they're wastes of money.
They serve no practical purpose (beyond potentially building confidence in engineering of this type of power systems, but since the supply of energy feeding into them currently sucks...)
Sorry to say it so bluntly but... wake up. We cannot fix it now. In 5 years we need to take another good luck, in the meantime only research projects are worth it, we cannot, for at least 5 years, expect any reasonable quantity of energy to come from solar power.
90% usage over 15 minutes means the line is totally dead. Because response times are critically dependant on there being place for short spikes (to give one meaningless example : dns, perhaps 50 bytes traffic total for a request, makes all the difference in the world). At 90% usage it would take A MINUTE for the request to get through.
And you call that "not congested". Everybody behind that line would beg to disagree.
What obviously no-one can ask is "just how bad is 2.6% congestion", never mind 5%
Well, as a network engineer, I can tell you this : it's VERY bad. This number means that some of their core lines were inoperable 1/20th of the time due to p2p.
The target number in any network, in case anyone doesn't know, is 0%. Congestion == line down. It creates unacceptable and unworkeable slowdowns.
And let's not forget that this congestion was created while they were upgrading their lines as fast as they could.
Yes but those birds and the thunderstorm do have a very important connection :
these events SHARE CAUSES. This is true for your second example as well. They would never satisfy the second part of the causation demand : A correlates with B (with a timeshift) but B never decorrelates with A (with or without a timeshift).
In otherwords : it is a specific type of deviation in correlation that implies causation in statistical data.
Actually there is a statistical concept "causation" as well.
So yes, correlation does not imply causation. The reverse is through, though, causation implies correlation. There is only one mathematical relation between "things that correlate" and "causes" that supports this outcome : intersection. All causes correlate.
So you only need another mathematical property of causation, take the intersection of the concepts and there you'll have a much more precise source for causation.
You could also simply take the temporal aspect in time series. Increases and decreases of solar output can be shown to correlate with temperatures a few months later (and the sun has entered a low-activity cycle, so temp is going to drop, no matter what the goracle (I want what he's smoking) says). This means that solar output causes temperature (doesn't mean it's the sole cause obviously, let's not get into it, it does explain over 98% of temp. variation though). If correlation occurs with a temporal shift, it is trivially simple to separate cause and effect.
There are other properties that imply causation as opposed to correlation : you can already see the concept in Bayesian theory. Every bayesian spam filter "knows" that an occurance of "viagra" causes spam.
The problem is much simpler : everybody (well for the moment esp. the UN and specifically the goracle) want to politicize science.
But the scientific attitude "we doubt everything" (that means that if the earth surface temperature rises to 5000 degrees after we double Co2 output, that the scientific response to "does co2 cause temp rises ?" remains "we doubt it"), is the very antithesis of policy. We don't know how the climate responds to co2. For the moment we don't know at all.
This is, to say the least, not what Obamatons want to hear.
person with poisoned/infected arm attached -> about to die person without arm -> gets to live
Since according to the hippocratic oath the preservation of life prevails.
Besides the "do no harm" is meant, obviously, in the hellenic sense, not in today's watered down, every-word-means-the-same absolutist attitude, where breaking a nail is considered "harm". Do no harm meant, in the hippocratic oath "do not break the hellenic moral code", which certainly allowed both for choosing the lesser of 2 evils and for mistakes and differences of opinions, including executions and war.
If the convicted individual in fact CHOSE these results, then there would be no need for a justice system whatsoever. We could simply leave these individuals to punish themselves. As they would certainly do in every case (in so far as this is apparently what they want).
Unfortunately as we all know, this argument is flat out wrong. People knowingly commit "evil" acts, out of sheer lazyness, or malevolence, or stupidity, or...
Are you seriously going to argue this is not true ?
So I'm not human according to you ? I take actions that I KNOW are morally or even rationally "wrong" (like writing on slashdot when I really ought to be studying), and I STILL DO THEM.
According to your argument : -> there are no fat people who eat at mcdo, or any restaurant -> there are no addicts to anything, not to alcohol, not to drugs -> nobody ever refuses to see a docter -> nobody ever sacrifices his/her life for anyone else -> noone resists arrest (since that leads with near absolute certainty to increased misery for all involved) -> noone makes a suicide attack (even quite rational people have run suicide attacks, say in WWII there were more than enough allied suicide attacks (not on innocdents, like the muslims do, just missions they knew they wouldn't return home from) -> muslims don't commit suicide attacks -> kamikazes don't exist, nor have they ever ->...
All these things are actions taken by individuals knowing full well that they will damage the individual. So rationally they're "stupid". Some are morally abhorrent.
All morally extremely good and all morally extremely bad actions have predictably bad results for the individual. The bad because there exists a justice system. The good because that's what makes them good : the sacrifice. Now the muslims sacrifice themselves to kill others, as did japanese shinto worshippers, which is obviously not good at all, unless you're a muslim I suppose. But what makes morally good actions morally good is the cost for them. Christ was simply of the opinion : dying for your faith is easy, it means nothing, living for your faith is hard, very very hard, it means everything. What makes such an action good is the cost involved.
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When agents of the US government censor, torture and otherwise violate the US Constitution, enemies of the US can claim hypocrisy. The US must act better to be perceived as better.
This is idiotic. The US acts better.
Of course when talking about muslims "acting better" doesn't mean much, but even if US soldiers had raped EVERY iraqi woman and merely left half of them alive afterwards, they'd have acted better than muslims. (the muslim prophet kidnapped women using a military force only identified in the muslim "holy" texts as "the muslims", had them raped by said military force called "the muslims", asked ransom for them, which was paid, and then killed the women, every last one, only to proceed to attack the village, eventually succeeding in severing all heads involved, their crime ? refusing to become muslim. This is the man every muslim has as a first duty to imitate. Despite their utter lack of decency, most muslims actually do behave better than their prophet, but most massacring paedophiles behave better than him)
Are you seriously claiming the US is behaving worse than the muslims ?
Are you totally insane ? Do you have a wife ? A daughter perhaps ? Shall I act "slightly better than 'the muslims'" against her for a while and see if you "perceive me better" ?
So let's just take your post as an illustration of that age-old principle : Never let reality come in the way of a "progressive" argument. Progressive being apparently Iran "we don't have no gays <cue picture of an Iranian noose containing well, a gay, with 'islamic' soldiers poking them with bajonets".
Unfortunately their political aim is a religion. Their religion is not like Christianity, that explicitly leaves politics outside of it's scope, but a totalitarian ideology like nazism that leaves nothing (not eaven how people wipe their ass) out of it's scope. Every last millimeter of behavior is utterly regulated in this racist totalitarian and supremacist political ideology that intends to destroy human rights.
This political ideology is called "islam".
So, all we have to do is eliminate Islam, and the world will be safe? There wouldn't be any reason they're doing these things, just that they're Muslim? What about the peaceful Muslims? What about the terror acts not carried out in the name of Allah?
Islam has long since died. It died at the hand of British soldiers and a Turkish homosexual in 1923, and it's last hope died in Paris a few years later.
What we're seeing today has little to do with islam as it was practiced in the 19th century, or any time before that.
What about the peaceful Muslims?
Ok so let's define muslim. Muslim is someone who, unquestionably, believes the text of the quran, the quran who specifies it is meant literally (quran 3:7) and promises hellfire for anyone who even tries to "add symbolic meanings". A verse that is read most often at the execution of baha'i or ahmadi muslims in islamic nations.
So this "believing muslim" is a person who literally (see quran 3:7) believes he is a slave with orders to "fight and kill", coming straight from allah (quran 9:111). (fighting is to continue until there are only believers left)
He is someone who believes there "must always be war" (quran 2:213). That "women are less than men" and that if a woman, whether muslim or non-muslim, is tought to question any of it she is to be ignored if possible, locked up if she doesn't immediately ceased and beaten if she continues with her questioning ...
That there can't be human rights at all.
How, exactly, can one be at peace with anyone who believes that is the ultimate, everlasting, authority ? Except by dieing I mean.
This is a theoretical question : given someone who believes these type of things are the ultimate authority, how can one (even a muslim) be at peace with him/her ?
So if you're answer is going to come down to "but muslims don't believe in the quran", then please stop before you start. That's what I mean by "islam died in 1923 at the hands of British soldiers". And they killed islam for VERY good reasons. (see for example the negotiation that Thomas Jefferson conducted with islam)
Today's movement is trying to violently re-establish a dead corpse. The only question is how many must die before they give up. It appears the answer is "a lot".
Islam, or the english translation of that arabic word, "repression", is not a religion like Christianity. Islam dictates how you wipe your ass, and threatens to kill anyone who does differently. (in case you're wondering, muslims have to wipe their ass using 9 stones and only their left hand).
It is not a personal religion, it is not about behaving well. It is about FORCING others (without violence if possible, with violence if necessary) to behave islamic ("hisbah"). It is not a personal faith, and if practiced in this way it means nothing. It is, in essence a racist religion that is based on forcing people to accept their superiority based on nothing. You know, like nazism was.
As the founder of islam says : "islam will be victorious because of terror".
Another one of his statements "you love life and we love death and that's why we will win", real eloquent guy there.
So, all we have to do is eliminate Islam, and the world will be safe?
As we've clearly established, the large majority (over 99%) of terror acts are comitted by muslims, because they're muslims. Obviously the world will not become disneyworld because this racist semi-islamic ideology dies. But it *will* become a hell of a lot nicer and safer.
The roads don't become safe because you fix your brakes. It is nevertheless a good thing to do, because it makes them safer.
He's winning because censorship always backfires.
No, he's winning because it WORKS. Are you seriously claiming the west censors the muslims more than the muslims censor the west ?
I'll just post a link to how "the economist" looks in a muslim nation :
http://jturn.qem.se/2006/more-pictures-of-iranian-censorship/
Terror works, and so does censorship. Using violence to advance a political position works. So what went wrong in the beginning in Iraq ? To little agressiveness on the american side. This whole rules of engagement thing.
Al-qaeda on the other hand, placed bombs in a girls pre-school and detonated the bombs when american soldiers brought back a lost girl. 28 of the children died and both soldiers (and the girl they protected) survived.
And somehow the western press means by "proportionalism" that the US should be less agressive, imagine. The Iraqis know perfectly well how muslims fight : kidnapping kids, wives and old people and executing them en masse in hopes of demoralizing an enemy, have been normal features of muslim conquests everywhere.
All indigenous cultures of northern africa have been totally obliterated by islam : from the ancient egyptians (who still existed when the muslim caliph ordered the library of alexandria burnt down), to the pseudo-roman carthagens, to berbers and tons of other cultures.
Terrorism works. Sooner or later other people will start catching up to this message.
And.. if it did affect you, chances are that your back yard is in Iraq.. ... or new york (twice) ... or in london (twice) ... or in madrid ... or in barcelona ... or amsterdam ... or paris ... or ...
Or, merely this week :
6/28/2008 (Khyber, Pakistan) - A sectarian disagreement leaves eight dead.
6/28/2008 (Tripoli, Lebanon) - Shia terrorists detonate a bomb in an apartment building, killing two residents.
6/27/2008 (Pattani, Thailand) - A 64-year-old man is murdered by Islamic gunmen.
6/27/2008 (Narathiwat, Thailand) - A 36-year-old civilian is shot to death by Mujahid after dropping his children off at school.
6/27/2008 (Jijel, Algeria) - Six security personnel are taken out by al-Qaeda gunmen.
6/27/2008 (Vedeno, Chechnya) - Four police are ambushed and killed by Jihad fighters.
This week alone there have been 173 dead bodies due to terrorism (in the name of a certain religion). Denying the problem is as stupid as saying it affects everyone.
America is free of terror because it only has a tiny amount of muslims.
If you worship a massacring terrorist like mohamed, that apparently causes a tendency to randomly kill. Especially if you believe "all muslims are slaves of allah, their orders are to kill for islam" (quran 9:111, and this specifies explicitly that it is to be interpreted literally)
energy storage technologies have "blossomed lately" ... meaning there were a few successfull experiments, making further research interesting.
Nothing economically feasible can hold 200 megawatts for 12 hours. That's 8.5 petajoules that we need to be able to both store and retrieve, and obviously at those rates you don't want to have any less than 99% efficiency, or something's going to get cooked badly.
We are nowhere near these requirements. Therefore the only solar plants in existence provide a tiny bit of grid support during the heat of the day, and they're not critical either (meaning in reality the grid throws most of their energy away*)
* In reality the usage graph of any city is not a flat curve, but it's got spikes like a fakir's bed. Meaning you constantly must pump some 10% more energy in the grid, and destroy it at the community level, unless you want to have rolling blackouts. That's what the solar plant in spain is used for (well it's only got enough power to do half that job), and only on a local level. And even with that trivial job it's managed to cause 2 blackouts. It's cheap electricity, but it's got a few of the other properties of cheap stuff.
We cannot currently make it work. No amount of whining is going to change that. Study advanced physics and make ultracapacitors another few million times better and the problem is solved. But that's not likely to happen commercially any time soon.
Here's one science dissenter :
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2005/sep/16/highereducation.climatechange
The cause of the droughts remains a mystery: some blame climate change and others say it is down to farmers destroying surface vegetation. Satellite images suggest vegetation in the region has recovered significantly over the last 15 years, pushing the southern Sahara into retreat.
This is obviously exactly what anybody would expect, but somehow the ipcc has obscured even basic logic in many people. More energy available for plants = more plants, since plants use this energy to procreate.
Well if you believe that why not just install peddle generators in every home ?
At least that way apartment blocks won't have issues.
Never mind that even in Israel solar on the roof can barely cover water heating (in winter it's insufficient) ... You do not have the intensity of the sun over the dead sea deserts in many places in America ...
*sigh* what's the use in discussing with people with "green" opinions ?
If what you say is true, then how come there are any non-solar plants left in the US ?
-> it's cheaper than power plants
-> it doesn't need to be transported (please explain how this sun gets to alaska ? nasa's going to launch a mirror ?)
-> it's available now for 30 years, and during that 30 years it was already cheaper
If you've got assumptions as insane as that, there is no use discussing. I'm guessing that despite solar providing cheaper power for 30 years now, you *still* don't have any solar power on your roof, right ?
It's like your adsl modem. Everybody knows that if you fill up the line to an adsl modem traffic slows down like hell.
Well at that point you're going to see you're using about 80% (90% if you've got a really good modem with big buffers) of the line. Using many downloads you may bet this slightly above 90% but only a wizard gets it above 95% (I hear there's a zmodem-over-udp tool that can do it, but tcp will not do it).
You'll also notice the line is, despite "not completely filled up" and "still more than 2 isdn lines available capacity" dog slow. Utterly unuseable.
It gets worse since tcp generates extra traffic, even more than normal, on a congested line, which can really exacerbate the problem further at times.
okay, it's simple : a datapipe is not a water pipe. It's serial, not parallel.
In a water main every droplet of water has it's own space available, in an OC-48 every bit must be nicely lined up and 1 bit at a time gets sent down the line. (yes I know about the modulation, so it's 64 bits or so, but the principle is the same)
That means that a line that is 90% utilized in a space of 15 minutes is 13.80 minutes utilized and 1.20 minutes not utilized at all : there could be a single 13.80 minute burst and then nothing and the line would be 90% utilized. Generally you're going to see a limited number of bursts per minute.
The bursts are unpredictable, but they get exponentially longer the higher the utilization gets. A 1% used line will in practice only have bursts of milliseconds. In a 90% used line the bursts will (sometimes, obviously) last minutes.
During a burst, basically the pipe is utterly full. Nothing can get in until enough stuff gets out first.
Therefore a 90% utilized line is totally unuseable for anyone. It leads to massive slowdowns.
I know this is not what you want to hear, but it's the way it is, simple as that.
"during the day" oh great ... no lights on at night then I guess. Let's not forget that at the average american longitude you get about 60% efficiency during even the day, not 100% (meaning you only get 60% of the rated power on average during the day, and that's assuming you tracking the sun). So let's see your estimate grow :
3.9 * 10^14 * 2 (at night) * 1/60% * 2 (for winter) * 1/10% (transportation losses) ... we've long since passed your estimate. So we're on to, what 20% of land ?
No heating in winter either I presume.
You have to transport that power. What are you going to use to transport power from the sahara to the us ? Or even from, say california to alaska ?
The plants have what you might call "internal resistance", keeping the plants running, especially for plants as massive as these solar plants are going to be (3x the size of france, see below) it's going to be significant. So let's say you lose, certainly at the start, another 10% of power.
Remember the current infrastructure loses about 10% per 100 kilometer (and we don't yet have the superconductor technology necessary to truly improve that, again perhaps we do in 10 years, but not now). So 5000 kilometer is not a feasible distance to transport power.
I would also like to add that 5% of the surface area of the US is a massive stretch of land. The us has 50 states, so 5% is between 2 and 3 states entirely filled up, every last square millimeter, with solar panels. And that won't fit the bill, as indicated above.
If you're basing your thinking on propaganda (like solar power being competitive per watt for 30 years now ????) then it has no use arguing with you.
I could say the same about you : do you actually believe what you're saying. Solar power certainly is not competitive per watt. There is one (1) company that is making that claim, and it's product remains to be proven, and there are still lots of snags for them to hit. Could be a really nice option in 5 years, or at least 1-2 years, but not now.
Everything we build now will not be competitive, and will have to be rebuild. And it requires too much space.
These are all things that are basically being researched. They're interesting, to be sure. But they don't justify anything more than research plants.
Solar concentration technology is certainly not capable of generating commercial electricity yet. It is promising, yes. And we should certainly build one or two demo plants, but that's it.
... meaning research is needed ... lab setups.
Not actual projects. Those actual projects are built TODAY using, at best, today's technology, more likely yesterday's.
So let's evaluate your argument. We need to build new technologies. "New" meaning either not invented yet, or we're in the process of inventing them. Great, perfect plan, fabulous ... I do have one question though, that I must insist you answer :
How exactly do you build a power plant that hasn't been invented yet ? Unless you can answer that question your argument is worthless.
For the same reason carter's demand was worthless, it wasn't possible. Congress is a waste of money, and it's certainly not capable of researching advanced physics. Therefore that law under carter was worth the same as all Carter's other policies (like putting ahmadinejad "we don't have no gays in Iran, we do kill them, I don't know why you think we have them" in power for example) : about as much as an investment in SCO.
What was that little detail about "windfall tax" again ...
Djeeez ... I don't seem to remember. All the conspiracy nuts are trying to drown it out.
But what was it ...
There is an argument that global warming has caused deserts to grow, but one also has to consider the effect of desert reclamation (the Soviets were big on this) through irrigation and careful land management.
No global warming caused deserts to shrink, not grow.
What can be seen trivially is that obviously the permafrost regions of the earth become forests due to global warming. Nobody lives there so it's an easy area for forests to expand into.
However, the data also shows that global warming caused the Sahara to shrink. I don't think anybody has attempted to answer why (the ipcc and the goracle would scream bloody murder if such an investigation got funded obviously).
To be completely honest ... plants require energy ... we like green ... green = plants ... global warming = more energy = more plants = more green and more animals.
But you'd get shot stating something as trivial as that on the msn.
The main problem is the space required for solar power. To generate the amount of power used by america using currently feasible (economically feasible) solar panels (5-8% efficiency) in the regions that America has you'd need between 300 and 500% of the American soil. (they also cost a lot more than feasible, but since democrats totally ignore economics, let's do it too, and let's say ... uhm ... that america will print the necessary money)
Oops.
Now you might think, cool, let's wait till 100% ... unfortunately, and allowing for massive projects on water, we need to wait for it to drop below 40% before it can be feasibly used to generate power.
Let's not forget that you have day-night, summer-winter, and the higher the longitude, the less sun you'll collect. A 100% efficient solar panel in New York will generate about 55% of it's rated wattage on average.
Note that if you start building solar panels now, they will obviously be of the inefficient kind, meaning they cost space, and will either have to be redone in a few years, or they will eat into available land. And let's not forget that despite every american apparently trying to lose weight, they do eat, obviously necessitating a large amount of agriculture, which eats space, lots and lots of space.
Obviously neither oil, nor nuclear have this problem (wind, however, does have that problem). Oil requires some surface area, but not significant amounts. Nuclear requires 800 square meters per gigawatt. Enough said.
Solar requires more surface area than we have. It's a no-go until cheap panels are ~ 60% efficient, and even then it will require the clearing of massive stretches of land.
For obvious reasons nothing will grow below a solar panel.
So ... even with those panels working optimally the question will remain ... several states worth of surface area will have to be stripped of every last feature, every last plant, every last animal ... which ones ?
Reality however has 2 "little" problems with your "bother"
-> oil IS "uber critical to american energy needs"
-> so is coal
Unless you're willing to cut your energy usage by 80% (meaning that you're asking alaskans to DIE or basically demanding america abandons alaska altogether)
-> solar isn't critical, and won't be for (at least) 10 years, probably more, current technology is not good enough. It does NOT work.
per contrast-> nuclear isn't critical, but it CAN be. It can, for at least 20 or 30 years, and given only current technological levels, constructed within 1-2-3 years, supply the needed energy (to keep alaska populated, to keep the economy running, whatever argument tickles your fancy). The side comment with this argument is that however much nuclear can heat homes and run factories, it cannot run cars (yet). That, too will take another 10 years or so.
So to be completely honest, except for the odd experiment, the best amount of solar power in your grid feed (right now) is ... 0%, all the rest are "coolness" or pr-projects. They look good, but they're wastes of money.
They serve no practical purpose (beyond potentially building confidence in engineering of this type of power systems, but since the supply of energy feeding into them currently sucks ...)
Sorry to say it so bluntly but ... wake up. We cannot fix it now. In 5 years we need to take another good luck, in the meantime only research projects are worth it, we cannot, for at least 5 years, expect any reasonable quantity of energy to come from solar power.
90% usage over 15 minutes means the line is totally dead. Because response times are critically dependant on there being place for short spikes (to give one meaningless example : dns, perhaps 50 bytes traffic total for a request, makes all the difference in the world). At 90% usage it would take A MINUTE for the request to get through.
And you call that "not congested". Everybody behind that line would beg to disagree.
What obviously no-one can ask is "just how bad is 2.6% congestion", never mind 5%
Well, as a network engineer, I can tell you this : it's VERY bad. This number means that some of their core lines were inoperable 1/20th of the time due to p2p.
The target number in any network, in case anyone doesn't know, is 0%. Congestion == line down. It creates unacceptable and unworkeable slowdowns.
And let's not forget that this congestion was created while they were upgrading their lines as fast as they could.
Yes but those birds and the thunderstorm do have a very important connection :
these events SHARE CAUSES. This is true for your second example as well. They would never satisfy the second part of the causation demand : A correlates with B (with a timeshift) but B never decorrelates with A (with or without a timeshift).
In otherwords : it is a specific type of deviation in correlation that implies causation in statistical data.
Actually there is a statistical concept "causation" as well.
So yes, correlation does not imply causation. The reverse is through, though, causation implies correlation. There is only one mathematical relation between "things that correlate" and "causes" that supports this outcome : intersection. All causes correlate.
So you only need another mathematical property of causation, take the intersection of the concepts and there you'll have a much more precise source for causation.
You could also simply take the temporal aspect in time series. Increases and decreases of solar output can be shown to correlate with temperatures a few months later (and the sun has entered a low-activity cycle, so temp is going to drop, no matter what the goracle (I want what he's smoking) says). This means that solar output causes temperature (doesn't mean it's the sole cause obviously, let's not get into it, it does explain over 98% of temp. variation though). If correlation occurs with a temporal shift, it is trivially simple to separate cause and effect.
There are other properties that imply causation as opposed to correlation : you can already see the concept in Bayesian theory. Every bayesian spam filter "knows" that an occurance of "viagra" causes spam.
The problem is much simpler : everybody (well for the moment esp. the UN and specifically the goracle) want to politicize science.
But the scientific attitude "we doubt everything" (that means that if the earth surface temperature rises to 5000 degrees after we double Co2 output, that the scientific response to "does co2 cause temp rises ?" remains "we doubt it"), is the very antithesis of policy. We don't know how the climate responds to co2. For the moment we don't know at all.
This is, to say the least, not what Obamatons want to hear.
Perhaps but amputation is not an example of it.
person with poisoned/infected arm attached -> about to die
person without arm -> gets to live
Since according to the hippocratic oath the preservation of life prevails.
Besides the "do no harm" is meant, obviously, in the hellenic sense, not in today's watered down, every-word-means-the-same absolutist attitude, where breaking a nail is considered "harm". Do no harm meant, in the hippocratic oath "do not break the hellenic moral code", which certainly allowed both for choosing the lesser of 2 evils and for mistakes and differences of opinions, including executions and war.
Self-signed certificates are acceptable if you can spread the root public key *yourself* in a secure manner.
Simple, no ?
In any exchange between 2 known parties for example, it is *always* preferable to have self-signed certificates.
If the convicted individual in fact CHOSE these results, then there would be no need for a justice system whatsoever. We could simply leave these individuals to punish themselves. As they would certainly do in every case (in so far as this is apparently what they want).
Unfortunately as we all know, this argument is flat out wrong. People knowingly commit "evil" acts, out of sheer lazyness, or malevolence, or stupidity, or ...
Are you seriously going to argue this is not true ?
So I'm not human according to you ? I take actions that I KNOW are morally or even rationally "wrong" (like writing on slashdot when I really ought to be studying), and I STILL DO THEM.
According to your argument : ...
-> there are no fat people who eat at mcdo, or any restaurant
-> there are no addicts to anything, not to alcohol, not to drugs
-> nobody ever refuses to see a docter
-> nobody ever sacrifices his/her life for anyone else
-> noone resists arrest (since that leads with near absolute certainty to increased misery for all involved)
-> noone makes a suicide attack (even quite rational people have run suicide attacks, say in WWII there were more than enough allied suicide attacks (not on innocdents, like the muslims do, just missions they knew they wouldn't return home from)
-> muslims don't commit suicide attacks
-> kamikazes don't exist, nor have they ever
->
All these things are actions taken by individuals knowing full well that they will damage the individual. So rationally they're "stupid". Some are morally abhorrent.
All morally extremely good and all morally extremely bad actions have predictably bad results for the individual. The bad because there exists a justice system. The good because that's what makes them good : the sacrifice. Now the muslims sacrifice themselves to kill others, as did japanese shinto worshippers, which is obviously not good at all, unless you're a muslim I suppose. But what makes morally good actions morally good is the cost for them. Christ was simply of the opinion : dying for your faith is easy, it means nothing, living for your faith is hard, very very hard, it means everything. What makes such an action good is the cost involved.