Those aren't really altruistic states. In fact, i consider them fascist states.
Fascist states are states where the government forces private enterprise to act not solely out of profit motive, but demands they behave according to the government's standard of justice. Not just when it is about criminal actions vis-a-vis other people or companies, but always. They have to consider more than the liberty of other people and companies, they, for example, have to consider the co2 impact on global climate.
Communist states go a bit further, and simply run the companies themselves, based solely on justice imperatives, and not, at all, on economic realities.
So what is a fascist state ? An example of a fascist state would be greenpeace making laws about how companies should behave "towards the world". An example of a fascist policy would be the co2 marketplace of Europe.
NO, they demand laws that force people to not harm others(which is in fact a fundamental premise of 'liberty', as opposed to 'libertarianism').
I talked to some European fishermen just last week. They do not seem to agree with your premise that they only "force people not to harm others".
And I'm in the fishermen camp on this one.
In the end, the choice comes down to this : either people die, or animals die (esp. in Africa this is the case). Greenpeace laments the fact that animals have always lost these choices. I do not. Nor does anyone whose ever had his livelihood or life threatened by greenpeace.
And please don't start the gaia "all our fates are connected" crap. It is exactly the reverse. The more large animals are alive, the less humans will be. If a wolf gets sight of a toddler in a "natural environment", whatever happens will lead to either the human's death, or the wolf's, for all reasonable courses of events. Likewise, but more abstract, nature reserves mean less food production (especially, again, in Africa), meaning less population AND THEY ALREADY HAVE OVERPOPULATION (ie food production is insufficient to keep the population alive).
You know, there are whole states that are run "for the betterment of their people". In other words, altruistic states where decisions are not made on economic merit, but on the basis of "justice".
You're absolutely right that Halliburton is not a company that decides based on justice, it decides based on economic self-intrest.
And you're completely right that Greenpeace DOES decide actions based on (their idea of) justice (more realistically : on how "righteous" it makes them look to others. Therefore greenpeace is, first and foremost, a media and public relations organization. They do not produce things with the intention of buying land and turning it into a voluntary "sustainable community" : they demand laws to force others to do so). Economic self-intrest is at best a very minute factor in their decision making. Only rich people join greenpeace, people without any financial worries.
So let's look at some relatively large "justice based" organisations : -> North Korea (stealing from the poor and giving to cronies) -> Cuba -> Iran (we are not to judge other religions, whose essence is other opinions of justice. That their ("allah's" if you're truly naive) opinion of justice includes stoning innocent women "must not be judged", that would be racist. I wonder if you "progressives" consider the stoned victims of muslim "justice" racists. Odds are they do not think very well of that "justice", of that religion) -> Saudi Arabia (same goes, except with slightly less official prostitution (also called mut'a "marriage")) -> China (stealing from the rich and giving to the politicians *cough* *ahem*, of course, I mean giving to the people) -> Soviet Russia (same goes) ->...
Greenpeace consists of individuals, who care, first and foremost, for themselves. There's nothing saintly or even remarkable about greenpeace members, they are perfectly human. And it shows :
Greenpeace opposes anything with co2 exhaust AND hates the one solution to the co2 problem that might actually work (today, not in 50 years) : nuclear power. They are also already decided : they oppose nuclear fusion, if and when it becomes available.
Also greenpeace ignores massive co2 exhaust where it is politically inconvenient : ever looked at a wind turbine ? Every last square millimeter you see is reprocessed oil. On the inside, tons of components are made with oil, and the remainder, the steel supports, are made by burning coal (that's how cast iron is still made, coal is just too cheap and convenient. Everywhere you mine iron you will find coal deposits on top of it, between it,...)
I hope this post can help you understand : good intentions do not necessarily result in good results. In fact, some very, VERY bad results had very good intentions (like all communist states, most dictatorships, lots of genocides,...)
You would take the word of a $30000 electricity bill a month person that "we all need to conserve power" ?
I'm thinking perhaps you should move to North Korea, lots of Al's there. Have you tried pine needle tee for breakfast yet ? I hear it's extremely healthy, better than eggs and bacon. Pine needle tea, the true breakfast of champions. Apparently it even cures cancer. Lucky people, those North Koreans.
And yes, I'd take Dick Cheney's word over Al Gore's any day. It's closer to reality, by a wide margin. Even if that doesn't mean it's anywhere near the truth.
You suggestion is tantamount to suicide, which is really just away of hiding your ignorance. You could as easily say "if you don't like it, get out", but then you couldn't pretend you have the moral high-ground.
Pacifism, which is what these protesters *claim* to be defending, while yelling they have rights that only exist due to the biggest and best guns on the planet between them and many regimes, IS suicide. Calling out for pacifism, as a dependant on a system that's maintained by military force, is obviously hypocrite.
Pacifism, even by itself is tantamount to suicide. That's not my fault, it doesn't have anything at all to do with me. So please stop acting like I'm all that stands between you and a perfect kumbaya world.
Look, are we blaming Bush for "not doing enough to prevent 9/11" or for "doing too much to prevent another 9/11" today ?
You see, I get confused. I know my network equipment has a feature called "fast-switching", but sometimes I wonder why cisco installed that feature on the democrat party.
Wanna bet the "protesters" were doing more than just standing there with placards ?
I mean I'm not saying they were "peace protesting" like at the G20 meeting with firebombs and axes, but protesting means standing in the street peacefully with as many placards as you want. (the picture is protestors "protesting" the G20 summit in London. Full article here.
You don't get, as a protestor, to deny anyone access anywhere. You don't get to damage cars, or any other type of private property and, of course, a protest takes responsability for all protestors. If the police thinks the group is damaging property or denying people access to a location, they do not only have the right to end the protest, they have the duty to do so.
Besides, peace protesting in the united states is a farce. Someone who hides in a territory that's defended by the biggest guns on the planet is not a peace protestor. A real "peace protestor" would demonstrate in a lawless region without police forces present. You know, like Southern Darfur. You don't see many peace protests there, of course, for good reason. It doesn't make peace protests in America any less hypocrite.
Actually it's not evasion - this is perfectly legal. Please do not describe legal actions as if they're a crime. You could try to make the case that they're immoral, but then again so is "redistribution of wealth", so you wouldn't get very far with me.
And -to be honest :
Every socialist (fascist to be exact : lip service is paid to private ownership, but the government controls "private" companies in practice, while the government is very anti-capitalist in policies, please do not invoke Godwin's law) government tries the same things, and they always end the same way. Since there are many companies all three tend to happen. Loads of companies leave the country, taking tons of jobs with them. A number of companies find a new loophole (I believe next up is the "the company isn't making any profits, we just bought every shareholder a mercedes so they wouldn't mind", but that's just to give an example (in other words, you make the company spend the profits in name, the products purchased end up at the shareholders home).
And a number of companies, having dealt with different percentage of taxes for many years, often decades, simply pay the increased tax - and the shareholders revolt. They liquidate the company and end it's activity entirely.
Tons of European companies try this on a yearly basis and one thing never happens : tax revenue never goes up. It goes down.
Fortunately for me the power output of the sun varies as much as 0.3% without so much as 5 minutes warning. (a "relatively large" sunspot)
Those -random, extremely short term- variations would, according to the Boltzmann law, cause short term variations of nearly 1 degree celcius, with the aforementioned 5 minute warning.
So every now and then, out of nothing, global warming gets applied to earth, and disappears a little slower (generally 3-4 days). The longer term cycles of the sun are much more powerful...
Schools should teach some basic statistics. This includes the difference between statistically analyzing a random variable (climate science) and trying to predict the outcome of a single instance of the random variable (weather prediction), and why the two are fundamentally different.
Are they fundamentally different ? One is totally independant of the other, right ? Oh wait... it's not. They are different operations on (what should be) the same dataset.
Also, let's not forget that one intuition of people is exactly right : the more accurate one is predicting the weather 1 week from now, and the massively inaccurate one is the average temperature 100 years from now (the current model was predicted to add 2% per year inaccuracy. However in both 2007 and 2008 the model missed by more than 5%. In 100 years that means that the temperature would rise 6 degress +- 87% (in kelvin, of course). So what the model really predicts in 100 years, which you'll never ever hear, is "a temperature between -220 degrees celcius and 240 degrees celcius" (of course with merely 95% certainty).
Schools should teach the Stefan-Boltzmann law in physics class. It gives a good first approximation of the impact of a 0.0001% variation of photosphere temperature on Earths surface temperature
Bzzzt *wrong*. An increase in solar radiation does NOT translate in a direct increase or decrease of earth temperatures. The temperature of the earth is determined by the balance between the energy loss, and energy gain.
If the energy gain would rise by 0.0001%, this will make the earth's temperature rise by (a bit less even than) 280 uKelvin PER SECOND until a new equilibrium is found. I need to do the calculations again, but for a completely static sun and earth this would lead to something like between half and 1 degree rise.
But, but, but, but, but, but... what you're saying only makes sense if some people really are better than others.
You're saying that people who try to study are entitled to better grades than criminal troublemakers, that people who try to learn have a right to better education than the worse performers. You are saying people are massively unequal, due to their efforts (mostly early in life, and nearly unfixable at later ages).
You're saying that blacks from criminal neighbourhoods really do have a problem that originates with their parents and friends, and that we should punish them by "denying" them the best education. Other people (those with parents who actually care for example) have the right to better education, better jobs, more money, and protection from their less educated classmates.
You're saying that equality of opportunity should be given, but that equality of outcome is the worst thing that could ever happen to education. You're saying we should discriminate, and merely give anyone one (1) chance to break through that discrimination.
Barack Obama is shitting himself and turning as red as a black tomato. Say... why are those helicopters leaving the white house in the direction of my house ?
If you thought "educated" meant "capable of thinking critically and understanding important scientific, social, and political issues" -- well, that was never what "public education" was for, anyway.
This sounds good in theory, but when thrown in practice noone actually wants to do this.
In practice this obviously means (just 2 examples) : -> teaching data denying global warming -> teaching data agreeing with global warming -> teaching against evolution -> teaching for evolution
AND tolerating, without ridicule ANY conclusion any individual kid comes to.
Can you see the greenie nuts (/religious nuts/socialist nuts/...) turn red already ? There are many issues where society currently just does not tolerate varied (and better or worse supported).
You cannot teach kids critical thinking in a society that states (or worse : teaches) it's "a crime" to deny global warming. That it's stupid to agree with OR deny evolution. Especially if one might state the trivial argument that we can't reliably predict weather 1 week out, and we're making huge claims over the weather in 100 years. There are other arguments, like that the sun is a 1400 petawatt nuclear reactor, and a 0.0001% variation is solar temperatures will make a hell of a lot more difference to earth temperatures than 1000 years of coal burning. Combined with the observation that solar temperatures regularly vary 1% or more, it's kind of hard exclude these effects.
All such arguments, especially when referenced, would have to be unquestionably accepted by the teacher, and the teacher should make other students accept these arguments too.
Includes ZFS and DTrace production ready !
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FreeBSD 7.2 Released
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· Score: 4, Informative
In short : 1/20 of the people who were infected died of the infection. This is a number that is too simplified : just about every baby infected died, as did just about every infected person over 75. Least affected were people between 5 and 20 years old.
Worldwide, the pandemic killed about 1% of the population. This totaled about 100 million people. The number is not well known since many hard-hit regions did not have data available : e.g. both the ottoman empire itself, and it's many enslaved populations went nearly totally unaccounted, it is quite certain that tons of black slaves of the muslims died totally untreated, and their numbers are not accounted for at all.
Just about every system in existence, whether related to health care or not was either abandoned or swamped. Entire factories were converted into hospitals, and basically nothing of the economy was operational. Trade, sea travel,... all worked at severely diminished capacities. Hospitals emptied of docters and nurses, since they very quickly either ran, or became infected and sick themselves.
The pattern was similar to what were seeing today. The virus is present in one form of another in humans and a variety of animals, mainly chickens, monkeys of various species, pigs, goats and sheep. The pandemic was not a single virus but several similarly mutated forms of what is thought to have originated from a single strand. There were "warning" epidemics that started, but failed to cause the disaster the eventual strain caused, like we've seen today with the various small bird flew infections, the slightly bigger epidemics in malaysia and indonesia, and now the mexican outbreak.
Attacking these animals makes no sense, since the same pattern was observed then, and now : the dangerous strain jumped ONCE from animal to human (presumably... it is also possible the virus mutated inside humans) and then only from human to human. If you want to prevent the infection from getting into a specific region, it's humans you need to worry about (e.g. an American military commander isolated Samoa using military force, which was spared the epidemic)
Please note that while we are capable of testing for the surface proteins of a virus (H1 is such a protein N1 is another) there are dozens of strains with the same surface features. It takes VERY expensive and time consuming tests to determine exactly which strain a patient has, and is rarely done at all, since there is no difference in treatment (despite all our medical knowledge, treatment for a virus infection is basically to make the patient comfortable and make sure he eats healthy).
Because of these limitations, there is very little information known about which strains and which genes were involved in causing the pandemic, and we have no data whatsoever about which genes went to which geographical regions.
But requiring even basic math standards from little kids is so unfair. After all some never learn them. Your only option is to, at some point, exclude the worse performing students from the "best" education, or at the very least limiting their choices. This not only involves "focring a bad education on them", but also involves telling them they're crap.
Requiring any sort of knowledge for passing school creates, in other words, inequality. Inequality that is, first and foremost, the result of lazyness on the part of the bad students and secondary a result of natural talent (or lack of such). But it's inequality.
Now in reality, obviously people are naturally unequal. Even races have "on average" differences that can present advantages or disadvantages. "Whites" are on average (a lot) taller than both black and yellow races. This creates advantages and disadvantages for both parties. But... worse than that there are also intellectual differences. On average only 1 in 7 (randomly chosen) whites will outperform a yellow person in an IQ test, and only 1 in 200 randomly chosen blacks will outperform a randomly chosen white person. There are even ideological differences, these are extremely obvious but extremely incendiary. Let's put it this way : your choice, both in religion (or "lack of it"), and even in political matters is a strong indicator of performance in IQ tests and both academic achievement and success later in life. Whoops.
So if you create advanced math classes, you'll see a lot of yellow faces, significantly less white faces, and every 5 years or so a single black face. You can imagine the screams of the politically correct nutcases. You will find in those classes basically no muslims (even in muslim states they would be sorely underrepresented), many christians, and slightly less atheists than christians. There wouldn't be many jews, but something like 80-90% of jewish students would find themselves amongst these "top performers". Imagine how incendiary this is, and then think about the obvious question : "since there is no difference in performance of christian students and kids of ex-muslim christian parents, clearly there is something in the religion that's preventing cognitive development. What ?". Imagine the world's response to obvious questions like that. Replace muslims with blacks, same question, but involving genes. Or find out how this relates to political orientation, and repeat for extra outrage.
Add to that that community organisers really, really dislike inequality. Even when it's so plainly obviously necessary things like excluding everybody except comitted students from higher education. Some even go so far as to make it the "responsability of the state" to change biological facts like the fact that a gay couple can't have natural children (you can laugh, but that's exactly what Europe is trying to do. Needless to say, it will fail, and create heaps of resentment along the way)
A "community organiser" is in charge of America, so I wouldn't expect the dumbing down to end any time soon. But soon a criminal drug addicted thief will no longer have to suffer "the humiliation" of having a lower grade in math than the kid who spends half his free time reading math and physics papers on the web. Prepare for worse, not for better.
I may not agree with the GP, but let's get the idiocy out of the way. Al-Qaeda is not fighting for allah. It is fighting to force a certain, massively oppresive political system on us. This system is, at best, vaguely hinted in their holy texts.
However, they can't be separated, because their paedophile massacring thief (also referred to as "paedophile prophet", after all raping little girls gets on that name) was quite clear on the subject that there was some political system that was to be enforced on people with military might. He wasn't too clear on which particular system that might have been though, which is why you have the nutcases having several systems.
You have the we-at-least-pretend-to-be-democratic system of Iran, or the oppressive dictatorships that all gulf countries adhere to ? Ahmadinejad is a civil engineer, in addition just a jew-hating gay-killing racist, and did actually rise through the ranks (partly) thanks to popular will. He is not part of either the military nor is he a cleric. Iran really does make some serious effort to at least incorporate parts of the popoular will in government. Of course the popular will of muslims includes jew-hatred, gay executions, stonings and worse. And while you will find that Jew hatred and gay executions occur in all muslim lands, in most they're simply executed by what amounts to a military dictatorship (and all lands with muslim minorities, even Holland, by "criminals")
So let's please get an ounce of sense : muslims are *not* fighting over imaginary friends, faith, belief or any such crap. Most of the terrorists have neither faith, nor a tenth of the self control that belief requires.
They are fighting to institute their own oppressive form of government through constant application of violence, preferably against defenseless individuals.
They are fighting for direct increases in personal power. Nothing more. They care little for any peoples at all, as long as they pay taxes. They are fighting, like most "ideologues" of failed ideologies, whether islam, marxism, maoism, or plain dictator worship, for direct power over other people.
allah is an excuse. A good one, since the political correctness idiocy does not allow one to point out that all of islam is a war ideology, which makes it an excuse that can't be criticized in polite company, even in America. In addition because islam is such a horrid war ideology, the acts of any sadistic sociopath are outclassed by the massive cruelty and sadistic actions of their paeophile thief and prophet, who can't be criticized, since he, not allah, is islam. Here's a newsflash : islam started with massacres, thieving, rapes and wars, islam spread by massacres, thieving, rapes and wars and islam is trying to start wars everywhere, stealing and raping (google "cronulla riots" to see an unsettling example). This much must be obvious for any casual observer.
This is not a fight over religion, faith or any such crap. This is a fight over their will to impose a rigid medieval dictatorship over other human beings, needless to say with them at the top. Religion is an excuse, nothing more. Terrorism, and a large part of contemporary islam, is nothing more than sociopaths vying for state power.
allowed radical experiments to be performed by gigantic, non-redundant entities (PDF). This is dangerous,
So we should break up the large banks, and replace them with an untold number of smaller, local banks that each follow their own strategy ?
Letting them go bankrupt should have exactly this effect. Destroy the whole, sell of the pieces one-by-one to the highest bidder.
And the alternative is propping up banks, running the extremely enormous risk that we've misidentified the cause of the current crisis... (too much regulation ? too little ? Obama ? Bush ? Clinton ? CRA ? The devil ? Oil price ? Energy prices ? GW (not GW itself obviously, but the policies "to prevent it" are affecting the economy) ? I'm not arguing for anyone of them, I'm just saying there's probably good arguments for a lot of these factors)
If we misidentify the cause of the current failure, or fail to act on it, even slightly, then we'll have an even bigger disaster on our hands in a few months/a few years...
So we should force the banks to follow a much more capitalist course, versus Obama's communist "fix"... well one would have to admit that's a given.
(I'm using the capitalist/communist distinction in it's original distinction : centrally (government) directed versus distributed decision making. With these (long used) definitions Obama's actions are squarely in the communist camp).
I've yet to see any one of these projects that have use or did use taxpayer money. I have service from my city, and no tax dollars were spent on the project. None. Nor do they take any income from taxes.
If this is correct, can you then please specify what money was used to implement them ? Just give a few examples.
The problem with government building networks is that they make everyone pay (a lot) to provide crappy service for a few. Or at least that's how it works here (Belgium).
And obviously, while it would be easy for them to open said "public" telephone network, they fought it tooth and nail, and still it's not possible to prove anything but sub-par service on their equipment (they won't allow you to match their own offer on "their" (public) infrastructure).
Just look to EU telcos if you want to see how horridly expensive and inefficient public networks are. Just pick one, they're all the same.
To create these materials... And how many heavy metal catalysts (that are supposed to be recycled, but in practice cannot all be recovered from the reactor).
And obviously how much oil-based fertilizer was used in growing the stuff in the first place.
I wonder if this "green" car is as green as Al Gore.
Actually just about all animals, plants, microbes, viruses and prions will behave in the same way.
Only humans sometimes reject the impulse for a better one. Sometimes. Not nearly as often as everyone keeps telling themselves. But sometimes, yes, sometimes.
What this has to do with America is anyone's guess.
The hierarchy of review or acceptance is a joke. Nobody checks even one tenth of the packages installed on even a basic redhat install. It just doesn't happen. Everybody's trusting "the other guy" (mostly the one upstream) to do it. Except... the guys upstream only exceedingly rarely check, or trust the packagers to do it. Circles of trust are worthless. Downstream checks are done for a few packages (like the kernel), but in general they're more rare than "let's help the people" politicians who don't steal.
"My bias is showing" - so is yours. You're unprepared to admit that open source has as a necessary consequence that every last check for security, except the most labor intensive one in existance is disabled.
With open source, you basically do not have the (reasonable) option of trusting the author(s). Your only option is checking every last bit yourself. And even if you'd want to do that, perhaps there are 2000 people world-wide capable of a thorough code review. Perhaps 2-3 are watching the linux kernel, courtesy of ibm, and they found several attempts to introduce trojans over the years. Most base system packages aren't being watched, at all.
Your claim is therefore dependant on there not being "above average" attempts to introduce backdoors into base system packages.
Something which is contradicted by, for example, the TCP wrappers trojan insertion.
I'm not claiming there aren't Chinese spies inside microsoft. I'm claiming there are probably not enough to corrupt the kernel, and the critical people are being watched too closely to succeed in coordinating a successful subversion attempt.
On linux, freebsd,... nobody's even seriously attempt to check people. Chinese (or Indian, or muslim, or just plain criminals or even bored adolescents) literally don't have to get up from their desk chair to do what would require organizing a coordinated effort right in the middle of America while being watched by several powerful institutions whose mission is nothing else than preventing that sort of thing.
Also the consequences of a failed attempt for the individual inside microsoft are none too pleasant, probably involving several decades in a little box with no windows. In the open source case, the consequence of a failed attempt is probably a few months work building a new nickname's coding reputation, if even that.
God knows I've spent many a week restoring linux servers that had been backdoored in some stupid way. It's not hard.
You bring up a very important argument : trust. Who do you trust in the cases of you being the Dalai Lama and you're using linux or windows.
Windows : you're trusting Microsoft, the State of Massachusetts and the Federal Government of America. All of these organizations vet their people, every step up the ladder means more thorough checks. This means that Microsoft has the option of ratting out just about everything you know to the chinese
Linux : you're trusting everyone, everywhere with the basic smarts of getting code accepted in an open source project.
This is the story of a "slightly better than average" attempt at backdooring the linux kernel was thwarted :
They would at least need to get past a single code review. From all contributors information is recorded and verified. Microsoft knows the social security numbers, bank accounts, and in most cases close associates of all these people. I'm sure that were one to dig deep enough, you'd find that the xp kernel (like some central parts of the linux kernel) has been vetted by NSA experts. In the case of the windows kernel, I'd bet you'd even find the NSA screened it's contributors.
Can you say the same for linux kernel contributors ? Not NSA style checks, have you done "normal" company employment checks like microsoft has. Do you know social security numbers, names (verified) and bank accounts for all the people you trust with running ring 0 code on your pc (that means all linux kernel contributors) ?
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Those aren't really altruistic states. In fact, i consider them fascist states.
Fascist states are states where the government forces private enterprise to act not solely out of profit motive, but demands they behave according to the government's standard of justice. Not just when it is about criminal actions vis-a-vis other people or companies, but always. They have to consider more than the liberty of other people and companies, they, for example, have to consider the co2 impact on global climate.
Communist states go a bit further, and simply run the companies themselves, based solely on justice imperatives, and not, at all, on economic realities.
So what is a fascist state ? An example of a fascist state would be greenpeace making laws about how companies should behave "towards the world". An example of a fascist policy would be the co2 marketplace of Europe.
NO, they demand laws that force people to not harm others(which is in fact a fundamental premise of 'liberty', as opposed to 'libertarianism').
I talked to some European fishermen just last week. They do not seem to agree with your premise that they only "force people not to harm others".
And I'm in the fishermen camp on this one.
In the end, the choice comes down to this : either people die, or animals die (esp. in Africa this is the case). Greenpeace laments the fact that animals have always lost these choices. I do not. Nor does anyone whose ever had his livelihood or life threatened by greenpeace.
And please don't start the gaia "all our fates are connected" crap. It is exactly the reverse. The more large animals are alive, the less humans will be. If a wolf gets sight of a toddler in a "natural environment", whatever happens will lead to either the human's death, or the wolf's, for all reasonable courses of events. Likewise, but more abstract, nature reserves mean less food production (especially, again, in Africa), meaning less population AND THEY ALREADY HAVE OVERPOPULATION (ie food production is insufficient to keep the population alive).
You know, there are whole states that are run "for the betterment of their people". In other words, altruistic states where decisions are not made on economic merit, but on the basis of "justice".
You're absolutely right that Halliburton is not a company that decides based on justice, it decides based on economic self-intrest.
And you're completely right that Greenpeace DOES decide actions based on (their idea of) justice (more realistically : on how "righteous" it makes them look to others. Therefore greenpeace is, first and foremost, a media and public relations organization. They do not produce things with the intention of buying land and turning it into a voluntary "sustainable community" : they demand laws to force others to do so). Economic self-intrest is at best a very minute factor in their decision making. Only rich people join greenpeace, people without any financial worries.
So let's look at some relatively large "justice based" organisations : ...
-> North Korea (stealing from the poor and giving to cronies)
-> Cuba
-> Iran (we are not to judge other religions, whose essence is other opinions of justice. That their ("allah's" if you're truly naive) opinion of justice includes stoning innocent women "must not be judged", that would be racist. I wonder if you "progressives" consider the stoned victims of muslim "justice" racists. Odds are they do not think very well of that "justice", of that religion)
-> Saudi Arabia (same goes, except with slightly less official prostitution (also called mut'a "marriage"))
-> China (stealing from the rich and giving to the politicians *cough* *ahem*, of course, I mean giving to the people)
-> Soviet Russia (same goes)
->
This guy said it best
Greenpeace consists of individuals, who care, first and foremost, for themselves. There's nothing saintly or even remarkable about greenpeace members, they are perfectly human. And it shows :
Greenpeace opposes anything with co2 exhaust AND hates the one solution to the co2 problem that might actually work (today, not in 50 years) : nuclear power. They are also already decided : they oppose nuclear fusion, if and when it becomes available.
Also greenpeace ignores massive co2 exhaust where it is politically inconvenient : ever looked at a wind turbine ? Every last square millimeter you see is reprocessed oil. On the inside, tons of components are made with oil, and the remainder, the steel supports, are made by burning coal (that's how cast iron is still made, coal is just too cheap and convenient. Everywhere you mine iron you will find coal deposits on top of it, between it, ...)
I hope this post can help you understand : good intentions do not necessarily result in good results. In fact, some very, VERY bad results had very good intentions (like all communist states, most dictatorships, lots of genocides, ...)
You would take the word of a $30000 electricity bill a month person that "we all need to conserve power" ?
I'm thinking perhaps you should move to North Korea, lots of Al's there. Have you tried pine needle tee for breakfast yet ? I hear it's extremely healthy, better than eggs and bacon. Pine needle tea, the true breakfast of champions. Apparently it even cures cancer. Lucky people, those North Koreans.
And yes, I'd take Dick Cheney's word over Al Gore's any day. It's closer to reality, by a wide margin. Even if that doesn't mean it's anywhere near the truth.
You suggestion is tantamount to suicide, which is really just away of hiding your ignorance. You could as easily say "if you don't like it, get out", but then you couldn't pretend you have the moral high-ground.
Pacifism, which is what these protesters *claim* to be defending, while yelling they have rights that only exist due to the biggest and best guns on the planet between them and many regimes, IS suicide. Calling out for pacifism, as a dependant on a system that's maintained by military force, is obviously hypocrite.
Pacifism, even by itself is tantamount to suicide. That's not my fault, it doesn't have anything at all to do with me. So please stop acting like I'm all that stands between you and a perfect kumbaya world.
Look, are we blaming Bush for "not doing enough to prevent 9/11" or for "doing too much to prevent another 9/11" today ?
You see, I get confused. I know my network equipment has a feature called "fast-switching", but sometimes I wonder why cisco installed that feature on the democrat party.
Wanna bet the "protesters" were doing more than just standing there with placards ?
I mean I'm not saying they were "peace protesting" like at the G20 meeting with firebombs and axes, but protesting means standing in the street peacefully with as many placards as you want. (the picture is protestors "protesting" the G20 summit in London. Full article here.
You don't get, as a protestor, to deny anyone access anywhere. You don't get to damage cars, or any other type of private property and, of course, a protest takes responsability for all protestors. If the police thinks the group is damaging property or denying people access to a location, they do not only have the right to end the protest, they have the duty to do so.
Besides, peace protesting in the united states is a farce. Someone who hides in a territory that's defended by the biggest guns on the planet is not a peace protestor. A real "peace protestor" would demonstrate in a lawless region without police forces present. You know, like Southern Darfur. You don't see many peace protests there, of course, for good reason. It doesn't make peace protests in America any less hypocrite.
Just a thought ...
Actually it's not evasion - this is perfectly legal. Please do not describe legal actions as if they're a crime. You could try to make the case that they're immoral, but then again so is "redistribution of wealth", so you wouldn't get very far with me.
And -to be honest :
Every socialist (fascist to be exact : lip service is paid to private ownership, but the government controls "private" companies in practice, while the government is very anti-capitalist in policies, please do not invoke Godwin's law) government tries the same things, and they always end the same way. Since there are many companies all three tend to happen. Loads of companies leave the country, taking tons of jobs with them. A number of companies find a new loophole (I believe next up is the "the company isn't making any profits, we just bought every shareholder a mercedes so they wouldn't mind", but that's just to give an example (in other words, you make the company spend the profits in name, the products purchased end up at the shareholders home).
And a number of companies, having dealt with different percentage of taxes for many years, often decades, simply pay the increased tax - and the shareholders revolt. They liquidate the company and end it's activity entirely.
Tons of European companies try this on a yearly basis and one thing never happens : tax revenue never goes up. It goes down.
Fortunately for me the power output of the sun varies as much as 0.3% without so much as 5 minutes warning. (a "relatively large" sunspot)
Those -random, extremely short term- variations would, according to the Boltzmann law, cause short term variations of nearly 1 degree celcius, with the aforementioned 5 minute warning.
So every now and then, out of nothing, global warming gets applied to earth, and disappears a little slower (generally 3-4 days). The longer term cycles of the sun are much more powerful ...
Schools should teach some basic statistics. This includes the difference between statistically analyzing a random variable (climate science) and trying to predict the outcome of a single instance of the random variable (weather prediction), and why the two are fundamentally different.
Are they fundamentally different ? One is totally independant of the other, right ? Oh wait ... it's not. They are different operations on (what should be) the same dataset.
Also, let's not forget that one intuition of people is exactly right : the more accurate one is predicting the weather 1 week from now, and the massively inaccurate one is the average temperature 100 years from now (the current model was predicted to add 2% per year inaccuracy. However in both 2007 and 2008 the model missed by more than 5%. In 100 years that means that the temperature would rise 6 degress +- 87% (in kelvin, of course). So what the model really predicts in 100 years, which you'll never ever hear, is "a temperature between -220 degrees celcius and 240 degrees celcius" (of course with merely 95% certainty).
Schools should teach the Stefan-Boltzmann law in physics class. It gives a good first approximation of the impact of a 0.0001% variation of photosphere temperature on Earths surface temperature
Bzzzt *wrong*. An increase in solar radiation does NOT translate in a direct increase or decrease of earth temperatures. The temperature of the earth is determined by the balance between the energy loss, and energy gain.
If the energy gain would rise by 0.0001%, this will make the earth's temperature rise by (a bit less even than) 280 uKelvin PER SECOND until a new equilibrium is found. I need to do the calculations again, but for a completely static sun and earth this would lead to something like between half and 1 degree rise.
But, but, but, but, but, but ... what you're saying only makes sense if some people really are better than others.
You're saying that people who try to study are entitled to better grades than criminal troublemakers, that people who try to learn have a right to better education than the worse performers. You are saying people are massively unequal, due to their efforts (mostly early in life, and nearly unfixable at later ages).
You're saying that blacks from criminal neighbourhoods really do have a problem that originates with their parents and friends, and that we should punish them by "denying" them the best education. Other people (those with parents who actually care for example) have the right to better education, better jobs, more money, and protection from their less educated classmates.
You're saying that equality of opportunity should be given, but that equality of outcome is the worst thing that could ever happen to education. You're saying we should discriminate, and merely give anyone one (1) chance to break through that discrimination.
Barack Obama is shitting himself and turning as red as a black tomato. Say ... why are those helicopters leaving the white house in the direction of my house ?
If you thought "educated" meant "capable of thinking critically and understanding important scientific, social, and political issues" -- well, that was never what "public education" was for, anyway.
This sounds good in theory, but when thrown in practice noone actually wants to do this.
In practice this obviously means (just 2 examples) :
-> teaching data denying global warming
-> teaching data agreeing with global warming
-> teaching against evolution
-> teaching for evolution
AND tolerating, without ridicule ANY conclusion any individual kid comes to.
Can you see the greenie nuts (/religious nuts/socialist nuts/...) turn red already ? There are many issues where society currently just does not tolerate varied (and better or worse supported).
You cannot teach kids critical thinking in a society that states (or worse : teaches) it's "a crime" to deny global warming. That it's stupid to agree with OR deny evolution. Especially if one might state the trivial argument that we can't reliably predict weather 1 week out, and we're making huge claims over the weather in 100 years. There are other arguments, like that the sun is a 1400 petawatt nuclear reactor, and a 0.0001% variation is solar temperatures will make a hell of a lot more difference to earth temperatures than 1000 years of coal burning. Combined with the observation that solar temperatures regularly vary 1% or more, it's kind of hard exclude these effects.
All such arguments, especially when referenced, would have to be unquestionably accepted by the teacher, and the teacher should make other students accept these arguments too.
Cheers !
You know, this has all happened before. What's the worst that can happen ?
Well this is what happened last time : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu
In short : 1/20 of the people who were infected died of the infection. This is a number that is too simplified : just about every baby infected died, as did just about every infected person over 75. Least affected were people between 5 and 20 years old.
Worldwide, the pandemic killed about 1% of the population. This totaled about 100 million people. The number is not well known since many hard-hit regions did not have data available : e.g. both the ottoman empire itself, and it's many enslaved populations went nearly totally unaccounted, it is quite certain that tons of black slaves of the muslims died totally untreated, and their numbers are not accounted for at all.
Just about every system in existence, whether related to health care or not was either abandoned or swamped. Entire factories were converted into hospitals, and basically nothing of the economy was operational. Trade, sea travel, ... all worked at severely diminished capacities. Hospitals emptied of docters and nurses, since they very quickly either ran, or became infected and sick themselves.
The pattern was similar to what were seeing today. The virus is present in one form of another in humans and a variety of animals, mainly chickens, monkeys of various species, pigs, goats and sheep. The pandemic was not a single virus but several similarly mutated forms of what is thought to have originated from a single strand. There were "warning" epidemics that started, but failed to cause the disaster the eventual strain caused, like we've seen today with the various small bird flew infections, the slightly bigger epidemics in malaysia and indonesia, and now the mexican outbreak.
Attacking these animals makes no sense, since the same pattern was observed then, and now : the dangerous strain jumped ONCE from animal to human (presumably ... it is also possible the virus mutated inside humans) and then only from human to human. If you want to prevent the infection from getting into a specific region, it's humans you need to worry about (e.g. an American military commander isolated Samoa using military force, which was spared the epidemic)
Please note that while we are capable of testing for the surface proteins of a virus (H1 is such a protein N1 is another) there are dozens of strains with the same surface features. It takes VERY expensive and time consuming tests to determine exactly which strain a patient has, and is rarely done at all, since there is no difference in treatment (despite all our medical knowledge, treatment for a virus infection is basically to make the patient comfortable and make sure he eats healthy).
Because of these limitations, there is very little information known about which strains and which genes were involved in causing the pandemic, and we have no data whatsoever about which genes went to which geographical regions.
Let's just hope this isn't true. Then again, given how rational lawmakers are, let's just hope nobody asks the police to find out.
But requiring even basic math standards from little kids is so unfair. After all some never learn them. Your only option is to, at some point, exclude the worse performing students from the "best" education, or at the very least limiting their choices. This not only involves "focring a bad education on them", but also involves telling them they're crap.
Requiring any sort of knowledge for passing school creates, in other words, inequality. Inequality that is, first and foremost, the result of lazyness on the part of the bad students and secondary a result of natural talent (or lack of such). But it's inequality.
Now in reality, obviously people are naturally unequal. Even races have "on average" differences that can present advantages or disadvantages. "Whites" are on average (a lot) taller than both black and yellow races. This creates advantages and disadvantages for both parties. But ... worse than that there are also intellectual differences. On average only 1 in 7 (randomly chosen) whites will outperform a yellow person in an IQ test, and only 1 in 200 randomly chosen blacks will outperform a randomly chosen white person. There are even ideological differences, these are extremely obvious but extremely incendiary. Let's put it this way : your choice, both in religion (or "lack of it"), and even in political matters is a strong indicator of performance in IQ tests and both academic achievement and success later in life. Whoops.
So if you create advanced math classes, you'll see a lot of yellow faces, significantly less white faces, and every 5 years or so a single black face. You can imagine the screams of the politically correct nutcases. You will find in those classes basically no muslims (even in muslim states they would be sorely underrepresented), many christians, and slightly less atheists than christians. There wouldn't be many jews, but something like 80-90% of jewish students would find themselves amongst these "top performers". Imagine how incendiary this is, and then think about the obvious question : "since there is no difference in performance of christian students and kids of ex-muslim christian parents, clearly there is something in the religion that's preventing cognitive development. What ?". Imagine the world's response to obvious questions like that. Replace muslims with blacks, same question, but involving genes. Or find out how this relates to political orientation, and repeat for extra outrage.
Add to that that community organisers really, really dislike inequality. Even when it's so plainly obviously necessary things like excluding everybody except comitted students from higher education. Some even go so far as to make it the "responsability of the state" to change biological facts like the fact that a gay couple can't have natural children (you can laugh, but that's exactly what Europe is trying to do. Needless to say, it will fail, and create heaps of resentment along the way)
A "community organiser" is in charge of America, so I wouldn't expect the dumbing down to end any time soon. But soon a criminal drug addicted thief will no longer have to suffer "the humiliation" of having a lower grade in math than the kid who spends half his free time reading math and physics papers on the web. Prepare for worse, not for better.
I may not agree with the GP, but let's get the idiocy out of the way. Al-Qaeda is not fighting for allah. It is fighting to force a certain, massively oppresive political system on us. This system is, at best, vaguely hinted in their holy texts.
However, they can't be separated, because their paedophile massacring thief (also referred to as "paedophile prophet", after all raping little girls gets on that name) was quite clear on the subject that there was some political system that was to be enforced on people with military might. He wasn't too clear on which particular system that might have been though, which is why you have the nutcases having several systems.
You have the we-at-least-pretend-to-be-democratic system of Iran, or the oppressive dictatorships that all gulf countries adhere to ? Ahmadinejad is a civil engineer, in addition just a jew-hating gay-killing racist, and did actually rise through the ranks (partly) thanks to popular will. He is not part of either the military nor is he a cleric. Iran really does make some serious effort to at least incorporate parts of the popoular will in government. Of course the popular will of muslims includes jew-hatred, gay executions, stonings and worse. And while you will find that Jew hatred and gay executions occur in all muslim lands, in most they're simply executed by what amounts to a military dictatorship (and all lands with muslim minorities, even Holland, by "criminals")
So let's please get an ounce of sense : muslims are *not* fighting over imaginary friends, faith, belief or any such crap. Most of the terrorists have neither faith, nor a tenth of the self control that belief requires.
They are fighting to institute their own oppressive form of government through constant application of violence, preferably against defenseless individuals.
They are fighting for direct increases in personal power. Nothing more. They care little for any peoples at all, as long as they pay taxes. They are fighting, like most "ideologues" of failed ideologies, whether islam, marxism, maoism, or plain dictator worship, for direct power over other people.
allah is an excuse. A good one, since the political correctness idiocy does not allow one to point out that all of islam is a war ideology, which makes it an excuse that can't be criticized in polite company, even in America. In addition because islam is such a horrid war ideology, the acts of any sadistic sociopath are outclassed by the massive cruelty and sadistic actions of their paeophile thief and prophet, who can't be criticized, since he, not allah, is islam. Here's a newsflash : islam started with massacres, thieving, rapes and wars, islam spread by massacres, thieving, rapes and wars and islam is trying to start wars everywhere, stealing and raping (google "cronulla riots" to see an unsettling example). This much must be obvious for any casual observer.
This is not a fight over religion, faith or any such crap. This is a fight over their will to impose a rigid medieval dictatorship over other human beings, needless to say with them at the top. Religion is an excuse, nothing more. Terrorism, and a large part of contemporary islam, is nothing more than sociopaths vying for state power.
After a friend convinced me to try it out. Needless to say, after the installation (which remained in English) I was absolutely baffled.
(there were 3 installation images, a .iso and a -ja.iso. I assumed it was a newer version and ...)
By the end of that year I had 2 kernel patches in though.
allowed radical experiments to be performed by gigantic, non-redundant entities (PDF). This is dangerous,
So we should break up the large banks, and replace them with an untold number of smaller, local banks that each follow their own strategy ?
Letting them go bankrupt should have exactly this effect. Destroy the whole, sell of the pieces one-by-one to the highest bidder.
And the alternative is propping up banks, running the extremely enormous risk that we've misidentified the cause of the current crisis ... (too much regulation ? too little ? Obama ? Bush ? Clinton ? CRA ? The devil ? Oil price ? Energy prices ? GW (not GW itself obviously, but the policies "to prevent it" are affecting the economy) ? I'm not arguing for anyone of them, I'm just saying there's probably good arguments for a lot of these factors)
If we misidentify the cause of the current failure, or fail to act on it, even slightly, then we'll have an even bigger disaster on our hands in a few months/a few years ...
So we should force the banks to follow a much more capitalist course, versus Obama's communist "fix" ... well one would have to admit that's a given.
(I'm using the capitalist/communist distinction in it's original distinction : centrally (government) directed versus distributed decision making. With these (long used) definitions Obama's actions are squarely in the communist camp).
I've yet to see any one of these projects that have use or did use taxpayer money. I have service from my city, and no tax dollars were spent on the project. None. Nor do they take any income from taxes.
If this is correct, can you then please specify what money was used to implement them ? Just give a few examples.
The problem with government building networks is that they make everyone pay (a lot) to provide crappy service for a few. Or at least that's how it works here (Belgium).
And obviously, while it would be easy for them to open said "public" telephone network, they fought it tooth and nail, and still it's not possible to prove anything but sub-par service on their equipment (they won't allow you to match their own offer on "their" (public) infrastructure).
Just look to EU telcos if you want to see how horridly expensive and inefficient public networks are. Just pick one, they're all the same.
To create these materials ... And how many heavy metal catalysts (that are supposed to be recycled, but in practice cannot all be recovered from the reactor).
And obviously how much oil-based fertilizer was used in growing the stuff in the first place.
I wonder if this "green" car is as green as Al Gore.
Makes you proud to be human . This has nothing to do with America.
Actually just about all animals, plants, microbes, viruses and prions will behave in the same way.
Only humans sometimes reject the impulse for a better one. Sometimes. Not nearly as often as everyone keeps telling themselves. But sometimes, yes, sometimes.
What this has to do with America is anyone's guess.
The hierarchy of review or acceptance is a joke. Nobody checks even one tenth of the packages installed on even a basic redhat install. It just doesn't happen. Everybody's trusting "the other guy" (mostly the one upstream) to do it. Except ... the guys upstream only exceedingly rarely check, or trust the packagers to do it. Circles of trust are worthless. Downstream checks are done for a few packages (like the kernel), but in general they're more rare than "let's help the people" politicians who don't steal.
"My bias is showing" - so is yours. You're unprepared to admit that open source has as a necessary consequence that every last check for security, except the most labor intensive one in existance is disabled.
With open source, you basically do not have the (reasonable) option of trusting the author(s). Your only option is checking every last bit yourself. And even if you'd want to do that, perhaps there are 2000 people world-wide capable of a thorough code review. Perhaps 2-3 are watching the linux kernel, courtesy of ibm, and they found several attempts to introduce trojans over the years. Most base system packages aren't being watched, at all.
Your claim is therefore dependant on there not being "above average" attempts to introduce backdoors into base system packages.
Something which is contradicted by, for example, the TCP wrappers trojan insertion.
I'm not claiming there aren't Chinese spies inside microsoft. I'm claiming there are probably not enough to corrupt the kernel, and the critical people are being watched too closely to succeed in coordinating a successful subversion attempt.
On linux, freebsd, ... nobody's even seriously attempt to check people. Chinese (or Indian, or muslim, or just plain criminals or even bored adolescents) literally don't have to get up from their desk chair to do what would require organizing a coordinated effort right in the middle of America while being watched by several powerful institutions whose mission is nothing else than preventing that sort of thing.
Also the consequences of a failed attempt for the individual inside microsoft are none too pleasant, probably involving several decades in a little box with no windows. In the open source case, the consequence of a failed attempt is probably a few months work building a new nickname's coding reputation, if even that.
God knows I've spent many a week restoring linux servers that had been backdoored in some stupid way. It's not hard.
At the very least, it's not hard enough.
You bring up a very important argument : trust. Who do you trust in the cases of you being the Dalai Lama and you're using linux or windows.
Windows : you're trusting Microsoft, the State of Massachusetts and the Federal Government of America. All of these organizations vet their people, every step up the ladder means more thorough checks. This means that Microsoft has the option of ratting out just about everything you know to the chinese
Linux : you're trusting everyone, everywhere with the basic smarts of getting code accepted in an open source project.
This is the story of a "slightly better than average" attempt at backdooring the linux kernel was thwarted :
http://www.securityfocus.com/news/7388
http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=1999-01-22-005-10-SC
http://www.opennet.ru/base/sec/p52-18.txt.html
How can this be prevented ? Simple : vet your contributors BEFORE accepting code from them.
They would at least need to get past a single code review. From all contributors information is recorded and verified. Microsoft knows the social security numbers, bank accounts, and in most cases close associates of all these people. I'm sure that were one to dig deep enough, you'd find that the xp kernel (like some central parts of the linux kernel) has been vetted by NSA experts. In the case of the windows kernel, I'd bet you'd even find the NSA screened it's contributors.
Can you say the same for linux kernel contributors ? Not NSA style checks, have you done "normal" company employment checks like microsoft has. Do you know social security numbers, names (verified) and bank accounts for all the people you trust with running ring 0 code on your pc (that means all linux kernel contributors) ?