Daniel Kahneman of Princeton won a Nobel prize based on work discovering just that. Essentially, he demonstrates that, contrary to traditional micro-economic theory, the behavior exhibited by actors in the economic arena is not always rational.
In a world where people who never break a sweat spend hundreds of dollars on fancy athletic shoes, and where a tee-shirt with a designer's logo on it has surplanted actual designer clothes, isn't this a trivial observation?
Look at the average American's purchasing habits. "Rational" is not the word that comes to mind.
In fact. over the past few decades government and industry have been working hard to make sure our economic behavior is non-rational - rational behavior would lead to lower consumption, thus lower production, thus lower growth.
Typing, I can almost keep up with my thoughts, and I find that papers, essays, and stories flow much easier from my mind to the page.
I find that, when writing stories or poems, thoughts are "bursty" enough that writing by hand is no problem, and I rarely want to move more than a line or two around (in the first draft), so arrows and circles do fine. I also find notebook and pencil more portable to environments condusive to writing - parks, bars, coffeehouses, et cetera.
(But then if I want to share, I have to type it up..I've still got a backlog of years of untyped poetry. OTOH, I started out focusing more on performance than printed form.)
Essays, I like to compose at the keyboard, moving chunks of text around as I go. (Perhaps influences by years of USENETing?) I'm still a lousy typist, though.
1. Bring up Help.
2. Type "turn off automatic spell checking".
And of course everyone knows that right term is "automatic spell checking", not "redlining" or "spellcheck" or "autocorrect".
Finding what you want in the on-line help is not always as trivial as you make it out to be. Understanding and following the directions given in the help can be even more nontrivial.
First you have to know that the misfeature you want to deactivate exists - i.e., know that there is automatic spell checking, not just some ill-defined weirdness where what you type isn't what shows up on the screen.
Then you have to know about, and be able to use, the on-line help system. Then you have to be able to describe the misfeature in the right terms, so it shows up on a search. Then you must make sense of the directions given.
Failing to complete this string of tasks once or twice is often all it takes to create "learned helplessness", and the user doesn't even bother trying anymore, feeling "It's too complicated, I'm too dumb."
A simple spell check would be nice, but I'm not sure if Vi has that anyway. Emacs might.
Of course it does. Emacs has everything.:-) M-x flyspell-mode turns on interactive spell-checking.
I've been writing (and performing) poetry for about 10 years, and have recently been trying short stories. I find that paper and pencil is my preferred method for composing the first draft. (At least for poetry and stories. Essays, and document I write relating to coding, I prefer to start right at the keyboard.) When I type things up and revise them, I work in Emacs. Besides the general bloatedness of word processors, I find that text is easier to edit in a fixed-width font designed for the screen.
When I did my first (self-published) chapbook, it was with LaTeX; next time around I might go with OpenOffice, but I'll be importing plain text from Emacs and just using OO for formating.
Re:Article has nothing to do with RFID tags
on
RFID Hell
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· Score: 1
The PATRIOT act is a law granting vast powers to the government of the US (who had those powers already, anyway - otherwise they would not have been able to pass the PATRIOT act)
Uh, no. The US government frequently passes laws granting itself powers it does not possess under the Constitution. The PATRIOT act, most federal drug laws, many firearms laws, current copyright laws, COPA, et cetera.
Every once in a great while, someone who's not completely illiterate ends up on the Supreme Court and the Court acknowledges and strikes down an unconstitutional law. (Usually after many years and the ruination of thousands of lives).
The day of charging per copy of a work (software, song, whatever) is finished. Over. Dead, just hasn't stopped moving yet. It is not pining for the fjords, it is an ex-viable concept.
The sooner we accept that, the sooner we can get on to coming up with new ways to get authors, developers, musicians, etc., paid.
I suggest getting rid of copyright, and replacing it with a right to royalties from profit-making use. Similar to songwriter royalties today - if I sing "Tangled Up In Blue" in the shower, I don't owe anyone a nickel, but when I sing it in a bar, Dylan gets paid.
The Internet is really the opposite, though. As more people use it, it becomes more valuable, not less.
You sure about that?
I started using the net in 1988. I thought it would be really neat if someday everyone had e-mail.
I reconsider that with every penis enlargement spam that hits my inbox.
The Internet becomes more valuable as more knowledge traverses it; but as Zappa observed, information is not knowledge. Most of what's being added now is static, not signal.
I have no problem with people who need SUVs having them, and because that's a very difficult matter to quantify, I wouldn't support laws restricting SUV ownership.
Some of the larger ones I think should be banned as hazzards to navigation. Or at least be classified as trucks and require additional licencing.
But, frankly, most SUV owners, who most certainly do not need them except for the pseudo-safety reasons they've convinced themselves of, need a good kicking, and I'd love to figure out a safe, legal, libertarian way of doing so.
Making the pump price of gasoline reflect its true costs (including wars, foreign aid, environmental damage, et al) would let the market do most of it - at $5 a gallon, you wouldn't see any more commuter SUVs. (You'd also see a lot more investment in public transit in urban areas.)
Problem is, rasing prices like that royally screws the working class folks who can't afford to go out and buy a new car. We've held off dealing with true costs for so long that we've seriously distorted our society, planning cities around automobiles; the recoil if we let go all at once would be devastating.
So, from a practical perspective, a "gas guzzler" tax on the purchase price would work better. Something like tax = price / highway MPG rating.
What makes hybrids affordable is that there are massive government subsidies reducing the price of the car.
What makes non-hybrids affordable is that there are massive subsidies of the price of gasoline. Most of our foreign policy is centered around cheaping oil cheap; much of of energy policy is "go ahead a trash the enviroment, just keep prices low".
If pump prices reflected true costs - about $5/gallon - the choice would be clear.
What I really want to see is hybrid technology applied to engines running on renewable fuels like biodiesel and methanol. The biggest stumbling block to widespread use of methanol fuel has been low energy density, thus low MPG and frequent refueling. Hybrid methanol engines could push the mileage up to a practical level. The tech is here today, and it would start a methanol refueling infrastructure that could be used later for methanol-based fuel cell vechicles.
Consider this, according to definition (b), if I shake you, your body's motion is sound, even if it doesn't make a sound.
So? My body's motion in such a case is sound. It may be inaudible. If you managed to shake me stongly and quickly enough, it would be audible to the human ear
Even a photon is sound, since it is a vibrating particle, transmitting its vibration through space-time.
Viewed as a particle, a photon does not vibrate. Viewed as a wave, a photon is a vibration, but of EM potential, not of pressure changes in a mechanically linked medium.
SF and fantasy have nothing in common. I don't know why people insist on putting them together.
Depending on how you like your definitions, either Science Fiction is a subset of Fantasy, or both are subsets of Speculative Fiction. The superset (Fantasy/Speculative Fiction) refers to stories that take place in a world that is most definitely and recognizably not our own, where the author must create not only characters and plot but the entire universe in which the story takes place.
That universe may be a sword-and-sorcery world, a plausible future world (hard SF), an implausibe but interesting future world (soft SF), a slightly twisted world ("Twilight-Zone" style horror), and so on.
So why is hard SF on the decline, compared to the 1950s and 60s? Largely because the promises of the post-war technology boom have now been seen to be empty.
Atomic power gave us Chernobyl, unsolved waste storage problems, and nuclear profileration worries, instead of electricity "too cheap to meter".
The "green revolution" gave us higher crop yields - but unsustainable ones, as well as pesticide contamination in our food and water, and worldwide argicultural market practices that look like something out of an Abbot and Costello routine. (We set up a market that forces poor nations to abandon nutrient-diverse native crops and grow rice; then when they have vitamin deficiencies we suggest GM "golden rice". This is progress?)
Audio recording technology allows us to record and reproduce sounds with exquisite precisions - and the RIAA gives us N'Sync and Brittney Spears.
Now, I like technology as much as the next guy. I make my living from it. But today we know that high technology isn't going to save us. High tech, in and of itself, is no longer as fascinating to us, and you can't sell books just by putting rockets and rayguns on the cover. And that's a positive change, because maybe now we can look inside ourselves for change.
And the best SF - like all the best fiction - is about what's going on inside us; it uses aliens to explore humans, distant worlds to explore Earth, computers to explore brains.
(BTW, last really good SF book I read: Jack Williamson's Terraforming Earth.
Not only should employees use nice, ear covering headphones, these should be provided by the company, as an expense of having one's employees work in cubicles.
But that would require acknowledging that making you work in a cube farm is in fact fscking you over.
Whoever invented the cube farm should be first against the wall when the revolution comes.
The signature on my credit card says 'Check Photo ID'. Not one clerk ever has.
If they did, and if they knew the right thing to do, they'd make you sign it - the card is not valid until signed. But yes, signatures are very rarely checked - and of course there are many instances (gas pumps with card readers, for example) where there're not even a pretext of possible checking.
It really comes as no surprise that music during concerts is altered to some extent.
Yes, but alteration far predates this effect, or digital effects, or even electronics. Reverb has been added to vocals for a long long time - even the acoustical design of concert halls, or ancient ampitheatres, is in effect a non-electronic reverb device.
My first reaction was that this was a horrible fraud, but is an autotuner any more cheating than using a little reverb in the vocals? A truly great voice can fill a room without reverb, a sprinkle of it can help a ok singer sound good, a heaping helping makes someone anyone with half a clue about pitch into a passable karaoke singer.
And is using a reverb effect any more cheating than using an acoustically friendly location? We all sound good singing in the shower. I know I sound a hell of a lot better in a real auditorium than I do singing in a bar.
So...I dunno. There's a line somewhere, between sweetening a natural talent and sugarcoating crap, but darned if I can say just where it is.
Nothing against it - not even any mention - in my 1963 copy of Hoyle's Rules Of Games.
Casinos, of course, make up their own rules. The main one is "if you start winning seriously, we will brand you a cheat and ban you". Banning card-counting is thought-policing, and the fact that casinos can get away with it only shows how much control of the local politics they have.
Most of the time counting cards refers to blackjack -- and they typically use 7 decks of cards. So, you'll need to keep track of 350+ cards.
Card counting systems don't keep track of all the cards, that being just about impossible. They keep a "score" on the deck, maybe something like +1 for every face card that's been played, -1 for each low card. (Real systems are more complex.)
If a lot a face cards have been played relative to low cards, then there are fewer left in the deck and it's less likely you'll be dealt one (and thus probably bust).
(Never been to a casino, but my dad loves to go up to Atlantic City and hit the blackjack tables, so we've spent some time talking about the game.)
with our current US leadership that argument is good enough to invade a country
Actually, the Bushies' arguement isn't so much "he's pointing a gun at me so I will duck", as it is "he has a criminal record and there is a bulge in his pocket, so even though an inspector just frisked him and didn't find a gun I will assume that he's got one and intends to shoot me, so I will shoot him first. Oops, that bulge was his wallet, not a gun after all. Well, he was a bad man so what I did was justified, and if any of you think vigilantism is a crime, remember you're either with me or against me and I'm the baddest mofo in town."
I had one professor who claimed you could link the increasing effects of global warming with "research" groups fighting for funding in congress. He even had charts.;)
I'll bet you a nickel that you can also link the increasing ill effects of cigarette smoking with research groups seeking funding.
Why? Because the more you look, the more you find; the more you find, the more motivation to become interested and look some more. Simple positive feedback in our search for knowledge, nothing sinister about it.
I wish people would stop looking at the last 50-100 years, and get it through their heads that to understand climate modeling, you need to look at eons.
Climatologists are looking at eons. Look at the IPCC reports, damn it. The Technical Summary would be a good place to start.
Interesting that the people who accept Global Warming based on a consensus of scientists are the same people who required infallible proof that Iraq had biological/chemical weapons, and would settle for nothing short of that.
I don't know anyone who required "infallible proof". I know many who demanded "reasonable proof". You know, like proof not based on forged documents.
I know other who say that even if "reasonable proof" of Iraqi WMD had existed, pre-emptive war would still have been illegal, immoral, and bad precedent; that bombing the shit out of a nation for possessing WMD, while we keep our nukes and chemical stockpiles, is hypocracy of the greatest degree. (Not to mention self-defeating..."Shit! Look what happened to Iraq! If we had nukes, those American fsckers wouldn't dare attack us...get the Russian mob on the phone...")
Reason: around 635 (give or take a hundred years) Krakatoa exploded and put a significant amount of dust and gas into the atmosphere causing what is known as the "Little Ice Age."
Oh, and of course the world's climatologists forgot about this, except for a handful of Brave Rouges who Challenged the System...
Jeez.
Climatologists are smart enough to figure in volcanic dust, and solar radiation variability, and natural climatological variability. There's still a significant factor left over that seems to result from human activity.
This is not an extraordinary claim - indeed, it would be highly surprising if we could pump tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere without some effect.
(And Krakatoa was in the 1800s. And the "Little Ice Age" ended long ago.)
Oh please! First of all, there is no true solid evidence of global warming.
Oh please! If I were to point a gun at your head, would you wait for true solid evidence that it were loaded before you ducked? Of course not - the only truly solid evidence is your brains splattered on the wall, by which time it's too late. Same with global climate change.
The scientific consensus is strong. Perfect, no, but outside of right-wing talk show hosts and oil company shills, there is no real doubt that human activity is altering the climate.
We don't have an "experimental Earth" and a "control Earth" to compare. There's only one, and we need it. We're fucking with the spaceship's life support system here. This is not intelligent survivial-oriented behavior.
especially when this report suggests that all those negative side effects people talk about (flooding, etc...) will not happen.
RTFA. The melting of the ice cap won't cause ocean levels to rise, but it will mess with the Gulf Stream - very, very bad. And melting of glaciers will cause sea level rises; you don't think that if the polar ice melts, some glaciers will melt too? (Antarctic melting would also cause sea levels to rise.)
Re:Don't ya just hate em?
on
RIAA Quashed
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· Score: 2, Informative
What's wrong with capitalism? If you don't like the price of popcorn, don't buy it. If you can't afford the cost of a CD, spend your money someplace else.
First, you're confusing capitalism (a system based on control of capital resources by a minority of government-backed "owners") with the free market (a method of determining what good and services should be provided).
Second, a system of state-created monopolies on making copies isn't a free market. Especially when that system goes far beyond it's Constitutional mandate. which allows such monopolies only for authors and inventors for a limited time - not for their corporate masters of inheritors, and not for years after their death.
Slashdot Mirror
In a world where people who never break a sweat spend hundreds of dollars on fancy athletic shoes, and where a tee-shirt with a designer's logo on it has surplanted actual designer clothes, isn't this a trivial observation?
Look at the average American's purchasing habits. "Rational" is not the word that comes to mind.
In fact. over the past few decades government and industry have been working hard to make sure our economic behavior is non-rational - rational behavior would lead to lower consumption, thus lower production, thus lower growth.
I find that, when writing stories or poems, thoughts are "bursty" enough that writing by hand is no problem, and I rarely want to move more than a line or two around (in the first draft), so arrows and circles do fine. I also find notebook and pencil more portable to environments condusive to writing - parks, bars, coffeehouses, et cetera.
(But then if I want to share, I have to type it up..I've still got a backlog of years of untyped poetry. OTOH, I started out focusing more on performance than printed form.)
Essays, I like to compose at the keyboard, moving chunks of text around as I go. (Perhaps influences by years of USENETing?) I'm still a lousy typist, though.
And of course everyone knows that right term is "automatic spell checking", not "redlining" or "spellcheck" or "autocorrect".
Finding what you want in the on-line help is not always as trivial as you make it out to be. Understanding and following the directions given in the help can be even more nontrivial.
First you have to know that the misfeature you want to deactivate exists - i.e., know that there is automatic spell checking, not just some ill-defined weirdness where what you type isn't what shows up on the screen.
Then you have to know about, and be able to use, the on-line help system. Then you have to be able to describe the misfeature in the right terms, so it shows up on a search. Then you must make sense of the directions given.
Failing to complete this string of tasks once or twice is often all it takes to create "learned helplessness", and the user doesn't even bother trying anymore, feeling "It's too complicated, I'm too dumb."
Of course it does. Emacs has everything. :-) M-x flyspell-mode turns on interactive spell-checking.
I've been writing (and performing) poetry for about 10 years, and have recently been trying short stories. I find that paper and pencil is my preferred method for composing the first draft. (At least for poetry and stories. Essays, and document I write relating to coding, I prefer to start right at the keyboard.) When I type things up and revise them, I work in Emacs. Besides the general bloatedness of word processors, I find that text is easier to edit in a fixed-width font designed for the screen.
When I did my first (self-published) chapbook, it was with LaTeX; next time around I might go with OpenOffice, but I'll be importing plain text from Emacs and just using OO for formating.
Uh, no. The US government frequently passes laws granting itself powers it does not possess under the Constitution. The PATRIOT act, most federal drug laws, many firearms laws, current copyright laws, COPA, et cetera.
Every once in a great while, someone who's not completely illiterate ends up on the Supreme Court and the Court acknowledges and strikes down an unconstitutional law. (Usually after many years and the ruination of thousands of lives).
You don't.
The day of charging per copy of a work (software, song, whatever) is finished. Over. Dead, just hasn't stopped moving yet. It is not pining for the fjords, it is an ex-viable concept.
The sooner we accept that, the sooner we can get on to coming up with new ways to get authors, developers, musicians, etc., paid.
I suggest getting rid of copyright, and replacing it with a right to royalties from profit-making use. Similar to songwriter royalties today - if I sing "Tangled Up In Blue" in the shower, I don't owe anyone a nickel, but when I sing it in a bar, Dylan gets paid.
You sure about that?
I started using the net in 1988. I thought it would be really neat if someday everyone had e-mail.
I reconsider that with every penis enlargement spam that hits my inbox.
The Internet becomes more valuable as more knowledge traverses it; but as Zappa observed, information is not knowledge. Most of what's being added now is static, not signal.
Some of the larger ones I think should be banned as hazzards to navigation. Or at least be classified as trucks and require additional licencing.
Making the pump price of gasoline reflect its true costs (including wars, foreign aid, environmental damage, et al) would let the market do most of it - at $5 a gallon, you wouldn't see any more commuter SUVs. (You'd also see a lot more investment in public transit in urban areas.)
Problem is, rasing prices like that royally screws the working class folks who can't afford to go out and buy a new car. We've held off dealing with true costs for so long that we've seriously distorted our society, planning cities around automobiles; the recoil if we let go all at once would be devastating.
So, from a practical perspective, a "gas guzzler" tax on the purchase price would work better. Something like tax = price / highway MPG rating.
What makes non-hybrids affordable is that there are massive subsidies of the price of gasoline. Most of our foreign policy is centered around cheaping oil cheap; much of of energy policy is "go ahead a trash the enviroment, just keep prices low".
If pump prices reflected true costs - about $5/gallon - the choice would be clear.
What I really want to see is hybrid technology applied to engines running on renewable fuels like biodiesel and methanol. The biggest stumbling block to widespread use of methanol fuel has been low energy density, thus low MPG and frequent refueling. Hybrid methanol engines could push the mileage up to a practical level. The tech is here today, and it would start a methanol refueling infrastructure that could be used later for methanol-based fuel cell vechicles.
So? My body's motion in such a case is sound. It may be inaudible. If you managed to shake me stongly and quickly enough, it would be audible to the human ear
Viewed as a particle, a photon does not vibrate. Viewed as a wave, a photon is a vibration, but of EM potential, not of pressure changes in a mechanically linked medium.
Depending on how you like your definitions, either Science Fiction is a subset of Fantasy, or both are subsets of Speculative Fiction. The superset (Fantasy/Speculative Fiction) refers to stories that take place in a world that is most definitely and recognizably not our own, where the author must create not only characters and plot but the entire universe in which the story takes place.
That universe may be a sword-and-sorcery world, a plausible future world (hard SF), an implausibe but interesting future world (soft SF), a slightly twisted world ("Twilight-Zone" style horror), and so on.
So why is hard SF on the decline, compared to the 1950s and 60s? Largely because the promises of the post-war technology boom have now been seen to be empty.
Atomic power gave us Chernobyl, unsolved waste storage problems, and nuclear profileration worries, instead of electricity "too cheap to meter".
The "green revolution" gave us higher crop yields - but unsustainable ones, as well as pesticide contamination in our food and water, and worldwide argicultural market practices that look like something out of an Abbot and Costello routine. (We set up a market that forces poor nations to abandon nutrient-diverse native crops and grow rice; then when they have vitamin deficiencies we suggest GM "golden rice". This is progress?)
Audio recording technology allows us to record and reproduce sounds with exquisite precisions - and the RIAA gives us N'Sync and Brittney Spears.
Now, I like technology as much as the next guy. I make my living from it. But today we know that high technology isn't going to save us. High tech, in and of itself, is no longer as fascinating to us, and you can't sell books just by putting rockets and rayguns on the cover. And that's a positive change, because maybe now we can look inside ourselves for change.
And the best SF - like all the best fiction - is about what's going on inside us; it uses aliens to explore humans, distant worlds to explore Earth, computers to explore brains.
(BTW, last really good SF book I read: Jack Williamson's Terraforming Earth .
Didn't London pretty much invent the killer fog?
But that would require acknowledging that making you work in a cube farm is in fact fscking you over.
Whoever invented the cube farm should be first against the wall when the revolution comes.
If they did, and if they knew the right thing to do, they'd make you sign it - the card is not valid until signed. But yes, signatures are very rarely checked - and of course there are many instances (gas pumps with card readers, for example) where there're not even a pretext of possible checking.
Yes, but alteration far predates this effect, or digital effects, or even electronics. Reverb has been added to vocals for a long long time - even the acoustical design of concert halls, or ancient ampitheatres, is in effect a non-electronic reverb device.
My first reaction was that this was a horrible fraud, but is an autotuner any more cheating than using a little reverb in the vocals? A truly great voice can fill a room without reverb, a sprinkle of it can help a ok singer sound good, a heaping helping makes someone anyone with half a clue about pitch into a passable karaoke singer.
And is using a reverb effect any more cheating than using an acoustically friendly location? We all sound good singing in the shower. I know I sound a hell of a lot better in a real auditorium than I do singing in a bar.
So...I dunno. There's a line somewhere, between sweetening a natural talent and sugarcoating crap, but darned if I can say just where it is.
Nothing against it - not even any mention - in my 1963 copy of Hoyle's Rules Of Games.
Casinos, of course, make up their own rules. The main one is "if you start winning seriously, we will brand you a cheat and ban you". Banning card-counting is thought-policing, and the fact that casinos can get away with it only shows how much control of the local politics they have.
Card counting systems don't keep track of all the cards, that being just about impossible. They keep a "score" on the deck, maybe something like +1 for every face card that's been played, -1 for each low card. (Real systems are more complex.)
If a lot a face cards have been played relative to low cards, then there are fewer left in the deck and it's less likely you'll be dealt one (and thus probably bust).
(Never been to a casino, but my dad loves to go up to Atlantic City and hit the blackjack tables, so we've spent some time talking about the game.)
Actually, the Bushies' arguement isn't so much "he's pointing a gun at me so I will duck", as it is "he has a criminal record and there is a bulge in his pocket, so even though an inspector just frisked him and didn't find a gun I will assume that he's got one and intends to shoot me, so I will shoot him first. Oops, that bulge was his wallet, not a gun after all. Well, he was a bad man so what I did was justified, and if any of you think vigilantism is a crime, remember you're either with me or against me and I'm the baddest mofo in town."
I'll bet you a nickel that you can also link the increasing ill effects of cigarette smoking with research groups seeking funding.
Why? Because the more you look, the more you find; the more you find, the more motivation to become interested and look some more. Simple positive feedback in our search for knowledge, nothing sinister about it.
Climatologists are looking at eons. Look at the IPCC reports, damn it. The Technical Summary would be a good place to start.
I don't know anyone who required "infallible proof". I know many who demanded "reasonable proof". You know, like proof not based on forged documents.
I know other who say that even if "reasonable proof" of Iraqi WMD had existed, pre-emptive war would still have been illegal, immoral, and bad precedent; that bombing the shit out of a nation for possessing WMD, while we keep our nukes and chemical stockpiles, is hypocracy of the greatest degree. (Not to mention self-defeating..."Shit! Look what happened to Iraq! If we had nukes, those American fsckers wouldn't dare attack us...get the Russian mob on the phone...")
The scientific consensus is that you're wrong. See the world-wide IPCC and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.
Oh, and of course the world's climatologists forgot about this, except for a handful of Brave Rouges who Challenged the System...
Jeez.
Climatologists are smart enough to figure in volcanic dust, and solar radiation variability, and natural climatological variability. There's still a significant factor left over that seems to result from human activity.
This is not an extraordinary claim - indeed, it would be highly surprising if we could pump tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere without some effect.
(And Krakatoa was in the 1800s. And the "Little Ice Age" ended long ago.)
Nothing like a link to a wacko right-wing think tank to bolster your case...
(I don't mean all right-wingers are wacko. I mean this guy is wacko, and also happens to be right-wing.)
The existence of the greenhouse effect is basic science. The scientific consensus that what we're doing is having an effect on global climate is strong. The so-called "sceptics" on global climate change belong in the same bin with the "sceptics" about evolution - in fact, there seems to be significant overlap.
Oh please! If I were to point a gun at your head, would you wait for true solid evidence that it were loaded before you ducked? Of course not - the only truly solid evidence is your brains splattered on the wall, by which time it's too late. Same with global climate change.
The scientific consensus is strong. Perfect, no, but outside of right-wing talk show hosts and oil company shills, there is no real doubt that human activity is altering the climate.
We don't have an "experimental Earth" and a "control Earth" to compare. There's only one, and we need it. We're fucking with the spaceship's life support system here. This is not intelligent survivial-oriented behavior.
RTFA. The melting of the ice cap won't cause ocean levels to rise, but it will mess with the Gulf Stream - very, very bad. And melting of glaciers will cause sea level rises; you don't think that if the polar ice melts, some glaciers will melt too? (Antarctic melting would also cause sea levels to rise.)
First, you're confusing capitalism (a system based on control of capital resources by a minority of government-backed "owners") with the free market (a method of determining what good and services should be provided).
Second, a system of state-created monopolies on making copies isn't a free market. Especially when that system goes far beyond it's Constitutional mandate. which allows such monopolies only for authors and inventors for a limited time - not for their corporate masters of inheritors, and not for years after their death.