By displaying ads for shorter periods of time, click frequency will actually go down.
And by annoying more users to install various ad-block products the click frequency will also go down, so the article's "it just makes sense" claim that click-throughs will go up is, like all such claims, suspect at best.
Except Ocean Heat Content, as measured by the Argo network, did not show any significant trend for the period 2004-2008.
And from that what conclusion are you going to draw?
Peilke quite properly draws the conclusion that ocean heat content did not increase in the period of 2004-2008. That's a scientific question, and he's obliged as a scientist and rational human being to believe the instrumental measurements.
An irrational, anti-scientific human being might be tempted to make some further claim of a sweeping and political kind, but that would be stupid, and Peilke is many things, but stupid is definitely not one of them.
Thanks! I've been quite provocative here at times and made some enemies, who periodically get mod points. It's kind of gratifying, really, to know that I'm annoying the small-minded.
BTW if you do know of any climatological discussion of the heat-content vs temperature issue (which was heavily promoted by one of the Pielke's about ten years ago to deafening silence from the rest of the climate community) I'd love to hear about it.
For example, the average surface temperature of the sun is 6500 K, though if you measure at various points, you may get more or less than that.
You've managed to miss my point entirely. The Sun is homogeneous: the heat capacity of the solar atmosphere is pretty much a constant.
The Earth's atmosphere, in constrast, is incredibly inhomogenous. The heat content of the water it contains is in some cases greater than than the heat content of the air, and it is trivial to have situations where a block of air that is five degrees cooler contains more heat than its warmer counter-part.
Anyone who wants to take an average over terrestrial atmospheric termperatures has a lot of explaining to do, and personally I've never seen it done. The codes I've seen to handle the problem spend a lot of time on spacial homogenization and estimation, but nothing at all on heat content. They don't even mention the issue.
The only correct way to generate an average temperature is to work out the heat content of the atmosphere and then create the "average" by assuming an average heat capacity. But doing this requires that we have a wet-bulb temperature record to match the dry-bulb one, and we don't.
This is just ordinary first-year thermodynamics, and you'll forgive me if I suspect that most "climatologists" are actually not competent physicists, because they never talk about this question.
The paper you mention may be bogus, the point regarding the meaninglessnes of "average temperature" in the context of a highly inhomogenous medium like the Earth's atmosphere over even moderate space and time scales, is entirely valid and speaks directly to the basic competency in physics of climatologists.
Not faster than a Phalanx with Lockheed Martin's new laser system mounted on it.
Excellent! So we can build machines to destroy the machines we build to destroy machines!
I'm finally starting to understand the whole "logic" of this "war" stuff: instead of using this incredible technology to create a world of plenty with nothing much worth fighting over, we will use it to destroy things, thus sapping the economic productive capacity of the world, reducing our opportunities to trade, and cause our enemies to invest in more useless, deadweight loss electro-mechanical junk to stop our deadweight loss electro-mechanical junk.
That's brilliant! Eventually we could even build automated factories to create the machines we use to destroy the machines they build to destroy our machines that destroy their machines, and the human population could go back to trying to scrape a bare living out of the miserable wasteland we have managed to reduce the Earth to.
I'm curious to hear more about your concept for a solar-powered jet engine.
I don't see why a solar or electric Brayton-cycle heat engine shouldn't be possible. I'm actually curious that no one has done this for solar farms instead of Stirling-cycle engines. While the theoretical efficiency of the Stirling-cycle engine is ideal, the practical problems are large due the the number of moving parts and issues with heat transfer.
Brayton-cycle turbine engines inject the heat into the working fluid away from the moving parts, and one can imagine the air flowing through a heated mesh to perform the transfer. Not a winner for this applciation, where direct electric-drive propellers have compelling efficiency and possibly weight advantages, but for solar farms it might very well be competitive with Stirling engines.
Isn't it frustrating that the military never encourages the development of new technology?
Isn't it sad that new tech that might as easily be developed for peaceful uses only gets funded by idiots who think that killing people is the first, best solution to any problem instead of what it transparently is: the worst one?
Why not fund these things through a civilian agency like NASA? Why does killing people, which is known to be the most awesomely inefficient, ineffective means of solving problems, get almost all the cash?
Note to the logically disabled: I have not said "violence never solves anything", I've said that it demonstrably is an inefficient, ineffective means of solution to virtually all problems of large-scale conflicts.
Ask any economist if war is ever rational, and they will almost certainly tell you it isn't. There are always ways that all parties can resolve their legitmate conflicts to the greater benefit of everyone.
So thumping your chest and triumphally telling me that "war ended evil XYZ!" is not an argument. To make an argument you have to present the case that there was no other way evil XYZ could have been ended, or that the alternatives would have done more harm than war. With regard to WWII, for example, it is not clear to me that a few decades of containment of the kind used against the USSR wouldn't have solved the problem with far less loss of life and property than war produced.
You are free to disagree: I can certainly see the point is arguable. But simply stating, "We did this with war therefore this could only be done with war" is not an argument, any more than saying "I drive screws with a hammer therefore a hammer is the only way to drive screws" is an argument.
Now let the mod-war begin! (My anti-violence posts seem to wander all over the place, typcially resulting in "-1, Insightful" outcomes, which amuses me no end, knowing I'm offending the losers.)
Contains such howlers as "There's no such thing as average temperature"...
Why is that a howler? It seems like uncontroversial physics if by "no such thing" you mean it has no physical meaning.
If I take two bodies, one with temperature T1 and one with temperature T2, what is their average temperature? If you say (T1+T2)/2 you are mathematically correct, but thermodynamically incoherent.
There is in general no thermodynamically meaningful way of averaging temperatures, which is why we should be talking about atmospheric heat content, not temperature, and why ocean temperatures--which are rising--are by far the most plausible evidence for increasing heat content in the troposphere.
I'm not an American, as it happens, so I'm aware that American political indepencence was a result of far more than just political violence, and could have been achieved with far less violence than the ridiculous deadweight loss of war. Every other Commonwealth country managed that. Only Americans were so incompetent as to use violence as their primary means of achieving independence.
I'm also aware, as a non-American, that slavery was eliminated in most of the world without substantial amounts of violence. There was an element of violence--there always is--but the Abolishists depended far more on moral argument and ultimately on technology. If the North had let the South go slavery would be just as dead today, and fewer people would have been killed.
So yes, stupid people see that in a few cases violence as a primary means of change actually did manage to achieve something at the price of thousands or millions of dead people--mostly young men. They infer from that that those things could not have been achieved any other way. Which is why we call them stupid people.
But wait, you probably think that war is sometimes a rational solution to problems, right? Because WWI worked so well at sorting out the issues facing Europe that WWII never had to be fought, and there really was no better way than killing tens of millions of people to deal with the issues, right?
It's people like you, who are too stupid to see the alternatives, who are the cause of so much misery in the world.
This is not some coincidence of psychology, it is a fact of necessity.
And in other news, most of the people working on the Manhatten Project were nuclear physicsts, chemists, and engineers.
What is it about these people that makes them want to blow up the world?
That said, looking back now it is clear to anyone with an ounce of empiricism that political violence is such an inefficient and ineffective means of achieving political aims that no one who actually cares about achieving political aims will ever use violence as their primary weapon.
In Sri Lanka, in Spain, in Ireland, in Darfur, in Palestine, in Iraq, in Afghanistan and on and on and on morons have decided that political violence is the best way to do... well, something. It's not clear, at least to me, what the "something" is: people who choose violence generally have vague and abstract goals, because any more specific and concrete goal would make it obvious even to the average person how stupid it is to use violence to pretend to achieve it.
In fact, one might even suspect that people who choose violence do so because they like violence, not because they honestly believe it makes realizing their purported goals any more likely.
To ensure we all know that aarondubrow and/or the/. editors are incapable of imagining that almost everyone is familiar with an 80-year-old technology that they happen to have never heard of before.
This is a common phenomenon: people generally project their own state of mind on everyone else. They are also incredibly touchy when you point this out, which tells you how deeply internalized this tendency is.
I was going to make a crack here about all the religious people who think that non-religious people have non-religion as their religion, but thinking that was too inflamatory I then considered describing my recent experience with configuring printing on an embedded Debian system, and how the documentation still fails utterly to allow the user what Eric Raymond calls "the luxury of ignorance", instead approaching the problem from an expert's point of view that is completely useless to a n00b like me, but realized that would probably be even more inflamatory, and I honestly can't think of a case that wouldn't really piss someone off, which suggests how universal the phenomenon is and how sensitive people are when you call them on it.
And I'm not arguing that the actions of said vandals shouldn't be illegal and that said vandals shouldn't be prosecuted and jailed.
For that matter of that I think protesting is a bit of a farce, we need alternatives to protests not harder to get at political processes.
My point is that poisoning people is terrorism. If you kill people while you do it you're a murderer and there are better ways to solve problems. If you want to consider yourself a businessperson and not a murderer don't be surprised when the intelligence agencies of the government of the people you exploit are investigating you.
Sociopathic managers give everyone who cares about the economy a bad name. They give the impression anyone who wants to do something about energy production, or innovation, or making money is some sort of raving nutter who thinks that any number of human lives can be sacrificed to save one dollar.:-)
I can keep this up all day. The point I was making, that you spectacularly failed to get, is you are implicitly assuming an asymmetrical position that is fully consistent with the Nanny State privileging one form of social organization--the limited liability corporation--over all others.
This privileged position means that corporations are automatically considered under the protection of the Nanny State, while everyone else who might oppose them for any reason is automatically tarred with the brush of (potential) "xyz-TERRORIST".
Yet the T-word is for some reason never used with regard to the wide range of intimidation tactics and other underhanded and nominally illegal activities that sociopathic managers routinely employ against everyone from their own workers to the citizenry at large.
DHS provides information to a company about someone who poses a real security risk to them (the company).
I have an epistemological question: how do you know?
You're making claims as to the information that the people at DHS have, but seem to think that that information is necessarily sound. In fact, all the people at DHS can have is suspicions. If they had more, they would be charging people (unless they are incompetent as well as corrupt, which is always a possibility.)
The unfortunate reality is that there are always managers in these kind of companies who go too far, and if we're honest, given the toxic nature of the stuff being injected, anyone playing around with profiteering on these sorts of sites is playing around with poisons and exactly the kind of people who ought to be investigated by homeland security.
That sure sucks for the people who are for shale oil extraction but are not and do not support sociopaths or profiteers, but unfortunately sometimes life isn't fair.
and aren't therefore connected to natural gas reservoirs
Yet. Fracking isn't exactly brain surgery. I've worked in the industry (micro-seismic monitoring) and know how poorly understood the rock mechanics of this process is.
Shale gas wells tap the gas from a tight shale that's completely separated vertically from the aquifer.
I'm curious how you managed to get to a deep shale formation without drilling through the rock on top. Once you've put a well in the whole "vertical separation" claim doesn't look so good, and it's not as if well linings never leak, so please don't bother to bring that one up. We're talking about facts here. Well linings leak, rather more than 1% of the time.
Nobody who has just spent $$$ on drilling a well wants the very gas they were after to piss itself away into an aquifer. You may doubt companies stick to regulations, but I'm sure you don't suspect their desire for not literally letting their profit evaporate.
Ok, now you're just being a moron. I guess you also think that no company would ever engage in the kind of systematic laxity that dumped a few millions barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico three months ago. I know being a corporate shill is mentally and morally damaging, but seriously, just how stupid do you think the rest of us are?
This bogus argument that "profit maximization in the long term will prevent the people who work for companies from ever engaging in risky behaviour that would limit long-term profits" is the corporate Stata Claus: it would be so NICE if it was true, but y'know what? It's false. Bringing wells/mines/whatever into production FAST is generally strongly incentived in the extraactive industries, and it is not at all uncommon for companies to lose long-term profits in the name of hitting short-term goals. Look up "high grading" if you're unfamiliar with this all-too-common corporate phenomenon.
The people who work for companies, as witnessed by the idiots at BPHTO (BP/Halibuton/Trans-Ocean), are more than capable of making bad, short-sighted decisions that result in pretty much unlimited environmental damage, and the proof of that is they already have. That is simple empiricism, and for someone to trot out that tired old corporate "just so" story about how profits will protect us all is sad.
Naturally, there are also plenty of loopholes in the regulations to make sure that Corporate America can continue to rape and plunder low-life commoners like you and me.
Well, like the Director of Homeland Security in PA said, commoners aren't "stakeholders" in the process. Seriously, the people who merely live on the land can hardly be said to have a stake in the process? Did they invest millions in anyone's re-election campaign? Did they offer lucractive consultancies to defunked politicos and retired facisists?
This story and the discussion here is such a wonderful encapsulation of everything that's wrong with American civilization, from the callous identification of corporate and state interests with the "stakeholders" in the environment and economy, to the idiots who see this as an opportunity to engage in their moronic partisan debate while ignoring the reality that it is the Party against the People no matter which wing of the Party happens to be in power, to the nitwit libertarians claiming that if we just got rid of government regulation without first overturning the Companies Act everything would be just fine.
If libertarians want to be taken seriously they must first attack the most invasive intrustion of the Nanny State into economic life: the special protections that certain forms of social organization (corporations) get that protect the people who constitute them from the full legal consquences and liabilities of their actions.
If anyone wants to fix America they have to realize that it is fundamentally faced by procedural problems, not political problems. The Party must be removed from the central place of power in American politics, or nothing will ever get better. The means of doing that include preventing gerrymandering by putting redistricting in the hands of an arms-length authority, and putting strong limits on campaign contributions of all kinds, up to the point of allowing only public funds to be used for campaigns if there is no other way to stop the corruption.
There's a reason why parties still toss out grandiose claims when everyone knows they're bogus -- its still better than nothing, and given the choices between two (or more) evils, people will in general pick the one that seems the least evil to them.
Nope. Parties lie because they hope that people forgot they lied last time they were elected, and people accept the lies because they've never seen another way to campaign.
The notion that "lies are better than nothing" is so stupid it hardly bears replying to, really.
This is the key used to *make* individual manufacturers' keys.
I haven't paid much attention to the whole HDCP mess as I've seen that movie before, but this simple fact is the most astonishing thing in the whole account.
There are only two possible outcomes to a set-up that depends on a single master key like this:
1) the key gets out. For a technology that is supposed to be around for decades this is as near to inevitable as can be, even if it couldn't be reverse-engineered. Even if 99.99% of the attempts to find or leak it fail, only one has to succeed and the key is out there forever.
2) the key gets lost. Most organizations suck at data management, and if there are few enough copies to be safe there are few enough copies to lose over the course of decades. My only regret now is we'll never see headlines that read, "MPAA asks hacker community to reverse engineer lost secret key".
I'm half-way tempted to go into the DRM business. If you're being paid buckets of money to build something that you know won't work it never matters if you fail. Wouldn't that be nice?
They're absolutely right, there's no proof that god doesn't exist.
Having worked on experiments that helped prove the non-existence of specific particles (the 17 keV neutrino and the non-existent axion that hovered ephemerallhy in the wings of heavy ion experiments in the late '80's) I find this whole arguement bizarre in the extreme. Anyone who uses it on either side of the god debate is simplyh declaring their absolute ignorance of how science--which disproves the existence of things all the time--actually works.
The basic method is simple: if X exists, then under circumstances Y phenomenon Z will occur.
We then create circumstances Y and see if Z occurs. For bonus points we demonstrate our sensitivity to Z with various calibrations.
We do this all the time, both in the lab and in ordinary life. Whenever we do it with regard to anything other than god, no one takes any exception to it, and rightly so because it is an entirely unexceptionable procedure.
When we apply this perfectly ordinary procedure to "god" a bunch of wingnuts start equivocating between "evidence" (which is all we ever have in science) and "proof" (which is the exclusive concern of a very small number of extremely up-tight mathematicians.) And unfortunately a number of purpoted atheists don't call them on this.
Having your information filtered against your will != choosing a filter for your information.
Right. The first is evil, the second is stupid.
Every time you use a search engine, you're filtering data, otherwise, it will just be a list of sites on the Internet
Excellent use of equivocation! I think the judges are definitely going to award this one a mark in the high eights, maybe even the low nines!
Obviously only an idiot or a shill would use the word "filter" to mean "filter out results that offend my cultural prejudices" and then flip to mean "filter out results that are completely unrelated to the object of my search".
Why are you talking about "irrefutable proof"? Is this a discussion of mathematics, the only field where anything remotely resembling "irrefutable proof" exists?
I thought you were talking about existence claims of ordinary things and phenomena. No one who seeks or claims "irrefutable proof" of such things is reasonable.
Forget that, they ran on a platform of transparency.
I'm advising a friend who is running for office (city council in a smallish town) and she's been hit with a lot of questions about what her platform is, whereas she's really a pragamatic problem solver with a great record of listening to people and using the best factual information available to fix stuff.
I told her to reply to questions about her platform by saying, "Platforms are what politicians say before they're elected, and we know how that works out. The Harper government ran on a platform of greater transparency. So I'm not going to make you any grand promises, except to say that I'll listen to the voices of my constituents and do my best to find practical, affordable, sustainable solutions to their problems."
The number one issue in the district where she's running--based on talking to the people there door-to-door--is quality of roads and sidewalks, which are not mentioned in anyone's platform.
The whole media circus of political platforms is old and tired and will hopefully be dead soon. We've all seen how it ends far too often. Time to stop listening to politicians lies and start asking them, "Why should we think you're going to respresent us rather than your party after we vote for you?"
In rough times, you have to diversify and try to slide into new markets to keep making money.
Yeah, I'd do that except the Bush/Obama bailouts took all my money, leaving it in the hands of the corporate sector to go on a buying spree because stock prices tanked wiping out my 401K.
As it happens, I'm not an American, so none of that is true, but I can't help but think it's how a lot of Americans must feel: the government socialized the risk of corporations that are already heavily protected from liability by the Nanny State's special treatment of them under the various Companies Acts, leaving the corporate sector flush with cash at a time of (arguably) relatively low stock valuations.
Ergo: merger mania! Acquisitions for all! Well, at least for all who are hiding behind the skirts of the Nanny State, rather than living within their means and struggling to get by. Just remember: helping out those folks would be Socialism!
Slashdot Mirror
By displaying ads for shorter periods of time, click frequency will actually go down.
And by annoying more users to install various ad-block products the click frequency will also go down, so the article's "it just makes sense" claim that click-throughs will go up is, like all such claims, suspect at best.
You seem to be under the impression that jet engines rely on heat to generate thrust.
A graduate of the University of Toronto, I see.
Except Ocean Heat Content, as measured by the Argo network, did not show any significant trend for the period 2004-2008.
And from that what conclusion are you going to draw?
Peilke quite properly draws the conclusion that ocean heat content did not increase in the period of 2004-2008. That's a scientific question, and he's obliged as a scientist and rational human being to believe the instrumental measurements.
An irrational, anti-scientific human being might be tempted to make some further claim of a sweeping and political kind, but that would be stupid, and Peilke is many things, but stupid is definitely not one of them.
Thanks! I've been quite provocative here at times and made some enemies, who periodically get mod points. It's kind of gratifying, really, to know that I'm annoying the small-minded.
BTW if you do know of any climatological discussion of the heat-content vs temperature issue (which was heavily promoted by one of the Pielke's about ten years ago to deafening silence from the rest of the climate community) I'd love to hear about it.
For example, the average surface temperature of the sun is 6500 K, though if you measure at various points, you may get more or less than that.
You've managed to miss my point entirely. The Sun is homogeneous: the heat capacity of the solar atmosphere is pretty much a constant.
The Earth's atmosphere, in constrast, is incredibly inhomogenous. The heat content of the water it contains is in some cases greater than than the heat content of the air, and it is trivial to have situations where a block of air that is five degrees cooler contains more heat than its warmer counter-part.
Anyone who wants to take an average over terrestrial atmospheric termperatures has a lot of explaining to do, and personally I've never seen it done. The codes I've seen to handle the problem spend a lot of time on spacial homogenization and estimation, but nothing at all on heat content. They don't even mention the issue.
The only correct way to generate an average temperature is to work out the heat content of the atmosphere and then create the "average" by assuming an average heat capacity. But doing this requires that we have a wet-bulb temperature record to match the dry-bulb one, and we don't.
This is just ordinary first-year thermodynamics, and you'll forgive me if I suspect that most "climatologists" are actually not competent physicists, because they never talk about this question.
The paper you mention may be bogus, the point regarding the meaninglessnes of "average temperature" in the context of a highly inhomogenous medium like the Earth's atmosphere over even moderate space and time scales, is entirely valid and speaks directly to the basic competency in physics of climatologists.
Not faster than a Phalanx with Lockheed Martin's new laser system mounted on it.
Excellent! So we can build machines to destroy the machines we build to destroy machines!
I'm finally starting to understand the whole "logic" of this "war" stuff: instead of using this incredible technology to create a world of plenty with nothing much worth fighting over, we will use it to destroy things, thus sapping the economic productive capacity of the world, reducing our opportunities to trade, and cause our enemies to invest in more useless, deadweight loss electro-mechanical junk to stop our deadweight loss electro-mechanical junk.
That's brilliant! Eventually we could even build automated factories to create the machines we use to destroy the machines they build to destroy our machines that destroy their machines, and the human population could go back to trying to scrape a bare living out of the miserable wasteland we have managed to reduce the Earth to.
And they say there's no such thing as progress!
I'm curious to hear more about your concept for a solar-powered jet engine.
I don't see why a solar or electric Brayton-cycle heat engine shouldn't be possible. I'm actually curious that no one has done this for solar farms instead of Stirling-cycle engines. While the theoretical efficiency of the Stirling-cycle engine is ideal, the practical problems are large due the the number of moving parts and issues with heat transfer.
Brayton-cycle turbine engines inject the heat into the working fluid away from the moving parts, and one can imagine the air flowing through a heated mesh to perform the transfer. Not a winner for this applciation, where direct electric-drive propellers have compelling efficiency and possibly weight advantages, but for solar farms it might very well be competitive with Stirling engines.
Isn't it frustrating that the military never encourages the development of new technology?
Isn't it sad that new tech that might as easily be developed for peaceful uses only gets funded by idiots who think that killing people is the first, best solution to any problem instead of what it transparently is: the worst one?
Why not fund these things through a civilian agency like NASA? Why does killing people, which is known to be the most awesomely inefficient, ineffective means of solving problems, get almost all the cash?
Note to the logically disabled: I have not said "violence never solves anything", I've said that it demonstrably is an inefficient, ineffective means of solution to virtually all problems of large-scale conflicts.
Ask any economist if war is ever rational, and they will almost certainly tell you it isn't. There are always ways that all parties can resolve their legitmate conflicts to the greater benefit of everyone.
So thumping your chest and triumphally telling me that "war ended evil XYZ!" is not an argument. To make an argument you have to present the case that there was no other way evil XYZ could have been ended, or that the alternatives would have done more harm than war. With regard to WWII, for example, it is not clear to me that a few decades of containment of the kind used against the USSR wouldn't have solved the problem with far less loss of life and property than war produced.
You are free to disagree: I can certainly see the point is arguable. But simply stating, "We did this with war therefore this could only be done with war" is not an argument, any more than saying "I drive screws with a hammer therefore a hammer is the only way to drive screws" is an argument.
Now let the mod-war begin! (My anti-violence posts seem to wander all over the place, typcially resulting in "-1, Insightful" outcomes, which amuses me no end, knowing I'm offending the losers.)
Contains such howlers as "There's no such thing as average temperature"...
Why is that a howler? It seems like uncontroversial physics if by "no such thing" you mean it has no physical meaning.
If I take two bodies, one with temperature T1 and one with temperature T2, what is their average temperature? If you say (T1+T2)/2 you are mathematically correct, but thermodynamically incoherent.
There is in general no thermodynamically meaningful way of averaging temperatures, which is why we should be talking about atmospheric heat content, not temperature, and why ocean temperatures--which are rising--are by far the most plausible evidence for increasing heat content in the troposphere.
But then I realized, that if you're an American
I'm not an American, as it happens, so I'm aware that American political indepencence was a result of far more than just political violence, and could have been achieved with far less violence than the ridiculous deadweight loss of war. Every other Commonwealth country managed that. Only Americans were so incompetent as to use violence as their primary means of achieving independence.
I'm also aware, as a non-American, that slavery was eliminated in most of the world without substantial amounts of violence. There was an element of violence--there always is--but the Abolishists depended far more on moral argument and ultimately on technology. If the North had let the South go slavery would be just as dead today, and fewer people would have been killed.
So yes, stupid people see that in a few cases violence as a primary means of change actually did manage to achieve something at the price of thousands or millions of dead people--mostly young men. They infer from that that those things could not have been achieved any other way. Which is why we call them stupid people.
But wait, you probably think that war is sometimes a rational solution to problems, right? Because WWI worked so well at sorting out the issues facing Europe that WWII never had to be fought, and there really was no better way than killing tens of millions of people to deal with the issues, right?
It's people like you, who are too stupid to see the alternatives, who are the cause of so much misery in the world.
This is not some coincidence of psychology, it is a fact of necessity.
And in other news, most of the people working on the Manhatten Project were nuclear physicsts, chemists, and engineers.
What is it about these people that makes them want to blow up the world?
That said, looking back now it is clear to anyone with an ounce of empiricism that political violence is such an inefficient and ineffective means of achieving political aims that no one who actually cares about achieving political aims will ever use violence as their primary weapon.
In Sri Lanka, in Spain, in Ireland, in Darfur, in Palestine, in Iraq, in Afghanistan and on and on and on morons have decided that political violence is the best way to do... well, something. It's not clear, at least to me, what the "something" is: people who choose violence generally have vague and abstract goals, because any more specific and concrete goal would make it obvious even to the average person how stupid it is to use violence to pretend to achieve it.
In fact, one might even suspect that people who choose violence do so because they like violence, not because they honestly believe it makes realizing their purported goals any more likely.
To ensure we all know that aarondubrow and/or the /. editors are incapable of imagining that almost everyone is familiar with an 80-year-old technology that they happen to have never heard of before.
This is a common phenomenon: people generally project their own state of mind on everyone else. They are also incredibly touchy when you point this out, which tells you how deeply internalized this tendency is.
I was going to make a crack here about all the religious people who think that non-religious people have non-religion as their religion, but thinking that was too inflamatory I then considered describing my recent experience with configuring printing on an embedded Debian system, and how the documentation still fails utterly to allow the user what Eric Raymond calls "the luxury of ignorance", instead approaching the problem from an expert's point of view that is completely useless to a n00b like me, but realized that would probably be even more inflamatory, and I honestly can't think of a case that wouldn't really piss someone off, which suggests how universal the phenomenon is and how sensitive people are when you call them on it.
And I'm not arguing that the actions of said vandals shouldn't be illegal and that said vandals shouldn't be prosecuted and jailed.
For that matter of that I think protesting is a bit of a farce, we need alternatives to protests not harder to get at political processes.
My point is that poisoning people is terrorism. If you kill people while you do it you're a murderer and there are better ways to solve problems. If you want to consider yourself a businessperson and not a murderer don't be surprised when the intelligence agencies of the government of the people you exploit are investigating you.
Sociopathic managers give everyone who cares about the economy a bad name. They give the impression anyone who wants to do something about energy production, or innovation, or making money is some sort of raving nutter who thinks that any number of human lives can be sacrificed to save one dollar. :-)
I can keep this up all day. The point I was making, that you spectacularly failed to get, is you are implicitly assuming an asymmetrical position that is fully consistent with the Nanny State privileging one form of social organization--the limited liability corporation--over all others.
This privileged position means that corporations are automatically considered under the protection of the Nanny State, while everyone else who might oppose them for any reason is automatically tarred with the brush of (potential) "xyz-TERRORIST".
Yet the T-word is for some reason never used with regard to the wide range of intimidation tactics and other underhanded and nominally illegal activities that sociopathic managers routinely employ against everyone from their own workers to the citizenry at large.
Why is that?
DHS provides information to a company about someone who poses a real security risk to them (the company).
I have an epistemological question: how do you know?
You're making claims as to the information that the people at DHS have, but seem to think that that information is necessarily sound. In fact, all the people at DHS can have is suspicions. If they had more, they would be charging people (unless they are incompetent as well as corrupt, which is always a possibility.)
The unfortunate reality is that there are always managers in these kind of companies who go too far, and if we're honest, given the toxic nature of the stuff being injected, anyone playing around with profiteering on these sorts of sites is playing around with poisons and exactly the kind of people who ought to be investigated by homeland security.
That sure sucks for the people who are for shale oil extraction but are not and do not support sociopaths or profiteers, but unfortunately sometimes life isn't fair.
and aren't therefore connected to natural gas reservoirs
Yet. Fracking isn't exactly brain surgery. I've worked in the industry (micro-seismic monitoring) and know how poorly understood the rock mechanics of this process is.
Shale gas wells tap the gas from a tight shale that's completely separated vertically from the aquifer.
I'm curious how you managed to get to a deep shale formation without drilling through the rock on top. Once you've put a well in the whole "vertical separation" claim doesn't look so good, and it's not as if well linings never leak, so please don't bother to bring that one up. We're talking about facts here. Well linings leak, rather more than 1% of the time.
Nobody who has just spent $$$ on drilling a well wants the very gas they were after to piss itself away into an aquifer. You may doubt companies stick to regulations, but I'm sure you don't suspect their desire for not literally letting their profit evaporate.
Ok, now you're just being a moron. I guess you also think that no company would ever engage in the kind of systematic laxity that dumped a few millions barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico three months ago. I know being a corporate shill is mentally and morally damaging, but seriously, just how stupid do you think the rest of us are?
This bogus argument that "profit maximization in the long term will prevent the people who work for companies from ever engaging in risky behaviour that would limit long-term profits" is the corporate Stata Claus: it would be so NICE if it was true, but y'know what? It's false. Bringing wells/mines/whatever into production FAST is generally strongly incentived in the extraactive industries, and it is not at all uncommon for companies to lose long-term profits in the name of hitting short-term goals. Look up "high grading" if you're unfamiliar with this all-too-common corporate phenomenon.
The people who work for companies, as witnessed by the idiots at BPHTO (BP/Halibuton/Trans-Ocean), are more than capable of making bad, short-sighted decisions that result in pretty much unlimited environmental damage, and the proof of that is they already have. That is simple empiricism, and for someone to trot out that tired old corporate "just so" story about how profits will protect us all is sad.
Naturally, there are also plenty of loopholes in the regulations to make sure that Corporate America can continue to rape and plunder low-life commoners like you and me.
Well, like the Director of Homeland Security in PA said, commoners aren't "stakeholders" in the process. Seriously, the people who merely live on the land can hardly be said to have a stake in the process? Did they invest millions in anyone's re-election campaign? Did they offer lucractive consultancies to defunked politicos and retired facisists?
This story and the discussion here is such a wonderful encapsulation of everything that's wrong with American civilization, from the callous identification of corporate and state interests with the "stakeholders" in the environment and economy, to the idiots who see this as an opportunity to engage in their moronic partisan debate while ignoring the reality that it is the Party against the People no matter which wing of the Party happens to be in power, to the nitwit libertarians claiming that if we just got rid of government regulation without first overturning the Companies Act everything would be just fine.
If libertarians want to be taken seriously they must first attack the most invasive intrustion of the Nanny State into economic life: the special protections that certain forms of social organization (corporations) get that protect the people who constitute them from the full legal consquences and liabilities of their actions.
If anyone wants to fix America they have to realize that it is fundamentally faced by procedural problems, not political problems. The Party must be removed from the central place of power in American politics, or nothing will ever get better. The means of doing that include preventing gerrymandering by putting redistricting in the hands of an arms-length authority, and putting strong limits on campaign contributions of all kinds, up to the point of allowing only public funds to be used for campaigns if there is no other way to stop the corruption.
Foreign immigration, unlike anywhere else in the world comprises the backbone of the country.
And ignorance of anywhere else in the world, that too.
There's a reason why parties still toss out grandiose claims when everyone knows they're bogus -- its still better than nothing, and given the choices between two (or more) evils, people will in general pick the one that seems the least evil to them.
Nope. Parties lie because they hope that people forgot they lied last time they were elected, and people accept the lies because they've never seen another way to campaign.
The notion that "lies are better than nothing" is so stupid it hardly bears replying to, really.
This is the key used to *make* individual manufacturers' keys.
I haven't paid much attention to the whole HDCP mess as I've seen that movie before, but this simple fact is the most astonishing thing in the whole account.
There are only two possible outcomes to a set-up that depends on a single master key like this:
1) the key gets out. For a technology that is supposed to be around for decades this is as near to inevitable as can be, even if it couldn't be reverse-engineered. Even if 99.99% of the attempts to find or leak it fail, only one has to succeed and the key is out there forever.
2) the key gets lost. Most organizations suck at data management, and if there are few enough copies to be safe there are few enough copies to lose over the course of decades. My only regret now is we'll never see headlines that read, "MPAA asks hacker community to reverse engineer lost secret key".
I'm half-way tempted to go into the DRM business. If you're being paid buckets of money to build something that you know won't work it never matters if you fail. Wouldn't that be nice?
They're absolutely right, there's no proof that god doesn't exist.
Having worked on experiments that helped prove the non-existence of specific particles (the 17 keV neutrino and the non-existent axion that hovered ephemerallhy in the wings of heavy ion experiments in the late '80's) I find this whole arguement bizarre in the extreme. Anyone who uses it on either side of the god debate is simplyh declaring their absolute ignorance of how science--which disproves the existence of things all the time--actually works.
The basic method is simple: if X exists, then under circumstances Y phenomenon Z will occur.
We then create circumstances Y and see if Z occurs. For bonus points we demonstrate our sensitivity to Z with various calibrations.
We do this all the time, both in the lab and in ordinary life. Whenever we do it with regard to anything other than god, no one takes any exception to it, and rightly so because it is an entirely unexceptionable procedure.
When we apply this perfectly ordinary procedure to "god" a bunch of wingnuts start equivocating between "evidence" (which is all we ever have in science) and "proof" (which is the exclusive concern of a very small number of extremely up-tight mathematicians.) And unfortunately a number of purpoted atheists don't call them on this.
Having your information filtered against your will != choosing a filter for your information.
Right. The first is evil, the second is stupid.
Every time you use a search engine, you're filtering data, otherwise, it will just be a list of sites on the Internet
Excellent use of equivocation! I think the judges are definitely going to award this one a mark in the high eights, maybe even the low nines!
Obviously only an idiot or a shill would use the word "filter" to mean "filter out results that offend my cultural prejudices" and then flip to mean "filter out results that are completely unrelated to the object of my search".
So I'm curious: which are you?
I don't see any irrefutable proof
Why are you talking about "irrefutable proof"? Is this a discussion of mathematics, the only field where anything remotely resembling "irrefutable proof" exists?
I thought you were talking about existence claims of ordinary things and phenomena. No one who seeks or claims "irrefutable proof" of such things is reasonable.
Forget that, they ran on a platform of transparency.
I'm advising a friend who is running for office (city council in a smallish town) and she's been hit with a lot of questions about what her platform is, whereas she's really a pragamatic problem solver with a great record of listening to people and using the best factual information available to fix stuff.
I told her to reply to questions about her platform by saying, "Platforms are what politicians say before they're elected, and we know how that works out. The Harper government ran on a platform of greater transparency. So I'm not going to make you any grand promises, except to say that I'll listen to the voices of my constituents and do my best to find practical, affordable, sustainable solutions to their problems."
The number one issue in the district where she's running--based on talking to the people there door-to-door--is quality of roads and sidewalks, which are not mentioned in anyone's platform.
The whole media circus of political platforms is old and tired and will hopefully be dead soon. We've all seen how it ends far too often. Time to stop listening to politicians lies and start asking them, "Why should we think you're going to respresent us rather than your party after we vote for you?"
In rough times, you have to diversify and try to slide into new markets to keep making money.
Yeah, I'd do that except the Bush/Obama bailouts took all my money, leaving it in the hands of the corporate sector to go on a buying spree because stock prices tanked wiping out my 401K.
As it happens, I'm not an American, so none of that is true, but I can't help but think it's how a lot of Americans must feel: the government socialized the risk of corporations that are already heavily protected from liability by the Nanny State's special treatment of them under the various Companies Acts, leaving the corporate sector flush with cash at a time of (arguably) relatively low stock valuations.
Ergo: merger mania! Acquisitions for all! Well, at least for all who are hiding behind the skirts of the Nanny State, rather than living within their means and struggling to get by. Just remember: helping out those folks would be Socialism!