Historical records exist of agriculture practices in several areas of Europe
This may be a shock to you, but Europe is not the world.
I'd even argue so far as that the burden of proof rests with those who claim it was merely a local phenomena.
Nonsense. "It's 75 degrees here in Baltimore. The burden of proof is on those who claim that it's not 75 degrees all across the planet right now!"
Furthermore, it seems to suggest that the Earth can warm up several degrees and actually be beneficial for mankind in terms of increased growing seasons for many areas and increased food production in general.
Again: Europe is not the world. A few degrees warmer might well be pleasant for England -- but deadly for India.
For example, we have nothing but computer models to support the assumption that so-called "green house" gases contribute to warming..... A junior high science student can tell you that a real green house works not because of the flavor of the glass enclosure, but because of the color of the plants and the way they change the wavelength of inbound light....The sun beats on the earth 24/7/365 and the only reduction to the temperature of the Earth's system is what is reflected back into space as UV and visible light, but that can only be in a less-than equal ratio to that which the Earth receives from the sun, so the net increase is always positive on the system over time. So where does the heat go? Natural conduits such as the oceans drive it into the core, which acts as a heat sink.
The problem is, I'm not sure if you're a complete idiot or being sarcastic. Because there are a great number of people out there who do actually believe shit this stupid.
(Just in case: Earth would be freezing without the greenhouse effect, also it's what makes Venus so hot; your car, which most likely contains no plants; and once an object reaches thermal equilibrium it radiates the same amount of energy out that it received from the sun (in different wavelengths, not via "reflection"), we're just changing the Earth's equilibrium temperature.)
Back in the days of USENET, we used to throw around this bit of wisdom: "It can be shown that for any nutty theory, beyond-the-fringe political view or strange religion there exists a proponent on the Net. The proof is left as an exercise for your kill-file." (Attributed to Bertil Jonell.) The problem is that now, some proponents of such nutty theories -- like the idea that anthropogenic climate change is some sort of scam -- are in positions of actual authority.
Defense contractor or person who gets the EITC? Profit!
I know that the mythology that the poor are "lucky duckies" who don't pay taxes is popular with the Fox News set, but in actual fact most people receiving the EITC are still paying FICA taxes, various federal excise taxes, plus of course state and local sales and property taxes. Most people getting the EITC are not turning a profit from the government.
Zen came to fruition the Tang Dynasty, at the height of development of Buddhism in China.
I don't know what you mean by the "height of development"; certainly Buddhism was popular, but it was a version encrusted with superstition and metaphysics and nonsense about accumulating merit ("good karma") to get a better incarnation the next time around. In large part Ch'an developed as a corrective to this. The whole idea of "highest practice" is completely antithetical to the point of Zen: what you are doing right now this moment is your highest practice. Chop wood, carry water, write code, say stupid shit on/. -- this is IT.
Without a solid foundation, studying Zen (especially in the West) is simply nonsense.
One doesn't study Zen, one practices Zen. It's a matter of experience. Consider why the Sixth Patriarch tore up the sutras. (Supposedly. If he ever really existed.)
The fact is, if you read his writings, or those of any other movement that utilized "civil disobedience", you will find that part of the deal is accepting that the government is going to enforce the laws you disagree with.
"Accepting that the government is going to enforce the laws you disagree with" is accepting reality. If that's what's meant by "accepting the consequences of his actions", then it's true but so trivial as to be useless.
The point is that if one mounts a defense -- social, legal, or even physical -- to that enforcement rather than passively "accepting" it, one is still engaged in civil disobedience.
Yes, the guy who deliberately breaks an unjust law and then fights the cops who come to arrest him is still engaged in civil disobedience; the "civil" refers to the "civil authority" one is disobeying, not to behaving "civilly". I'm not, for the moment, saying that such fighting is or is not a wise action; just that "civil disobedience" is a wider concept than nonviolent resistance. Remember that Thoreau praised John Brown, whose attack on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry could fairly be described as terrorism; he was most definitely not a pacifist of the King or Gandhi variety.
If a doctor(never mind whether the doctor is reputable, he is a doctor) recommends that I do heroin to help with my stubbed toe, should the government and insurance companies pay for it, simply because some doctor says that it would help rehabilitate me?
Yes. That's the way prescriptions work. If the doctor is writing bad prescriptions, investigate them and, if appropriate, pull their license; otherwise, shut up and pay for the prescribed drugs or other medical goods.
People would stop going to actual doctors and would go to fly-by-night doctors in order to get a cheap Wii.
If there are "fly-by-night doctors" out there, then your problem is with the medical licensing authorities, and your efforts would be best directed to getting them to do their job, rather than meddling in the doctor-patient relationship.
The very concept of civil disobedience is that you accept the consequences of your actions, even if they be unfair consequences imposed by a corrupt regime.
No. The very concept of civil disobedience is "we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right."
Thoreau didn't think to himself, "I'm going to go to jail to make a spectacle and show how wrong this war tax is"; he simply declined to take an action he felt was morally wrong. He didn't demand to stay in jail once someone paid the tax for him.
Nuclear is done correctly with new technology actually has the potential to REDUCE the amount of Nuclear waste we have and at the same time can be designed to be passively safe meaning in the event of a complete power failure
With new technology that does not yet exist in deployed form, maybe. "Energy amplifier" designs, for example, that use thorium fuel, can be turned off, and can burn up high-level waste, have potential (though they still produce a non-zero amount of waste, the thorium still has to be mined, and the weapons proliferation concerns, while lessened, are not completely eliminated) -- but aren't here yet. Meanwhile, wind and solar are here now.
In the first case, when a message containing a "Bcc:" field is prepared to be sent, the "Bcc:" line is removed even though all of the recipients (including those specified in the "Bcc:" field) are sent a copy of the message. In the second case, recipients specified in the "To:" and "Cc:" lines each are sent a copy of the message with the "Bcc:" line removed as above, but the recipients on the "Bcc:" line get a separate copy of the message containing a "Bcc:" line. (When there are multiple recipient addresses in the "Bcc:" field, some implementations actually send a separate copy of the message to each recipient with a "Bcc:" containing only the address of that particular recipient.)
Each recipient address from a TO, CC, or BCC header field SHOULD be copied to a RCPT command (generating multiple message copies if that is required for queuing or delivery). This includes any
addresses listed in a RFC 822 "group". Any BCC fields SHOULD then be removed from the headers.
In today's society that entire ideal has been twisted around to the situation where Federal law is becoming the only law and State legislatures are being relegated to position where they have no power at all.
Nonsense. Almost all criminal law still resides at the state level. Punch someone in the nose or steal their car or write them a fraudulent check, and you'll end up in a state court.
There's certainly a legitimate debate to be had about the balance of power in our federalist system, but simple-minded ideas about the states almost being sovereign nations under the Constitution, or about states having "no power at all" today, are not helpful to the discussion
The Constitution did NOT original set the country up this way.
The Framers envisioned an agrarian nation where only white male landowners had the vote, slaves counted as 3/5th of a person, and citizens had no protection against oppression by state governments.
If we don't live in the nation envisioned by slave-rapist Thomas Jefferson, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.
the way the US was originally setup (with the states essentially being independent countries with a loose Federal government). Sure we've lost track of that original ideal (that's effectively what the US Civil War was about)
No. That "original setup" might be said to apply to the U.S. under the Articles of Confederation, but those were an abject failure. So we came up with the Constitution, under which the individual states are nothing at all like independent countries: they cannot enter into treaties, issue money, lay import or export duties, keep troops in peacetime, or make compacts between themselves.
The romantic notions of some living in the southern U.S. notwithstanding, the U.S. Civil War was about a bunch of slave-owners who tried to get their way through terrorism.
I think you guys tried that before and it ended with us burning down the white house.
No one wanted to annex Canada in 1812. The Brits were kidnapping American sailors, supporting the Native Americans we were fighting (on the right side, there, though for their own geopolitical benefit rather than wanting to aid the oppressed "noble savages"), and attacking our ships;
Canadian territory was just something they had that we could take and use as a bargaining chip to get them to stop.
Good luck eavesdropping on my pillow talk from across the street when my windows are closed and my curtains are drawn. This is actually impossible, given the current state of technology
Highly questionable as to whether it's impossible with current tech -- see the 2010 update on laser eavesdropping on this page -- but even if it is, so what? Why should you have to close your windows and draw the curtains to enjoy the same expectation of privacy in your own bedroom that your grandfather had, before parabolic mics became common? He could leave his window open on a pleasant summer's night and murmur sweet nothings to your grandma, knowing that no one could hear without hanging right outside the window, trespassing.
And why should your grandchildren have to put in place active defenses against laser eavesdropping? There's a much better, more respectful solution: the just use of sanctions, including the use of force, against people who violate other's rights to privacy. In an anarchy, I'd simply punch an eavesdropper directly in the nose, and my neighbors would be fine with it; under a government, the state threatens to punch them in the nose (or shoot you) if they don't go sit in a room and have a long time-out and think about what an asshole they've been.
Hell, one can collect your DNA without ever coming to within hundreds of miles of you, so no stalking is required.
Would you care to explain how?
if you expect a piece of information to be private, then publishing millions of copies all over the place is the single worst thing to go about it.
Your fundamental error is in holding unintentional information leakage to be equivalent to publishing. If I went around leaving vials of my blood for folks to analyze, that would be publishing; the completely involuntary shedding of skin flakes and hairs, is not.
I repeat: the expectation of privacy is not negated by the theoretical possibility of surveillance.
And, oh yes, the person at the center of the CRU meltdown, Phil Jones, now admits there has been NO GLOBAL WARMING FOR THE PAST 15 YEARS.
Which, when looking at a trend over 1,000 years, means diddlyshit. If you cherry-pick your start and end point in any data that moves up and down, you can find an increase, decrease, or whatever. (Did it not strike you that fifteen years is an odd length of time to pick?)
"There's been no warming over the past three days of spring! Seasonal warming is a myth! In fact, today was cooler than yesterday! We must be headed into winter, not summer!"
Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming
Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.
There are many reasons to doubt AGW as a legitimate climate change candidate. The shrillness of its proponents not being the least.
The only "shrillness" I see is that of so-called "skeptics". Great Ghu, man, did you read the page to which you linked? Did you not notice your own SHOUTING IN ALL CAPS while misrepresenting Jones's position?
Have you no sense of shame, sir? Or at least of irony?
Scientific theories need to be evaluated under a bright light, not hidden away in a closet
Yes, they do. And climate theories have been evaluated under a bright light. And unlike N rays, or cold fusion, the consensus of knowledgeable experts has emerged that anthropogenic climate change is a real phenomenon.
especially when hundreds of billions of dollars are going to be taxed every year based on that theory.
No, the economic implications have nothing to do with the science. There is no "especially" here. In fact, your invocation of it illustrates the motivation behind much of the denial: for whatever reasons of political philosophy, many people find the prospect of carbon taxes disturbing, and so are psychologically motivated to deny the evidence.
It's rather like a guy having a heart attack who keeps dismissing it as indigestion; it's not necessarily that he's ignorant of the symptoms, but nobody wants to think that a heart attack could happen to them.
Or are you talking about the oil industry which makes 7-10% profit per year, 5-8% less than what the federal government taxes their product at, plus the additional state taxes upon their product.
Oh, pity poor Exxon/Mobil, with its profits on the order of $40 billion dollars a year. This one oil company could only outspend the entire fscking EPA by a factor of slightly less that four-to-one and still maintain a profit. We can see how it is that the poor oil industry only constitutes half of the top ten, and only three of the top five, of Fortune's Global 500.
The taxation levels on oil products are far, far too low. If we paid at the pump for the environmental damage and the foreign policy costs of our oil addiction, gasoline would be at least twice as expensive.
Analyzing what you deposit in a public restroom is also likely to work. A single hair that you shed from your head in a public place may be clearly visible and identifiable, depending on your hair style.
Where I come from, we flush after using public restrooms. Any trace left behind is mixed with traces from dozens, or even hundreds (it's not like standard cleaning removes every last trace of biological material) of other people. And if you're following me closely enough to find a shed hair, you're stalking. The expectation of DNA privacy remains.
And you have to understand that identification is not at the core of the issue.
It is in fact the core of the issue. I don't care about statistical statements about a large social group, provided that they are accurate and based on data collected in an ethical manner. (Which would not be the case in the Havasupai incident.) To say "African Americans have a higher rate of sickle cell anemia than the general population" or "Irish Americans have higher rates of alcoholism" is fine. Discrimination on the basis of those statements is another matter, but is not limited to DNA information, or even to medical information. I care about privacy: about information about individuals.
the simple fact is that it is silly to expect something to be private if you drop millions of copies of it everywhere you go.
No more silly than to expect a conversation to be private when your sound waves radiate in all directions. Sure, I might need a super-amplifier to hear your pillow talk from across the street, but too bad, it is silly to expect your words to be private if you let sound waves out of your house, right?
There's a huge difference between a public conversation, and a conversation that can be overheard given enough ingenuity on the part of the eavesdropper. And there's a huge difference between giving a DNA sample, and having one's DNA collected by a stalker.
The expectation of privacy is not negated by the theoretical possibility of surveillance.
Your example is 100% backwards. Consider something simple like adding a host to a standard ACL list for webservers. Why should it be any harder than simply editing a plain text file? Why should it involve some meaningless symbolism of dragging one shape into another shape? How do I grep through these shapes? How do I filter them into reports? How do I back up old configurations? How do I copy configuration from one system to another?
Why should configuring a computer system require manual, slow, error-prone, use of a GUI?
Race was brought into this in 1492, when the genocide of the Native nations began. It continues today, with ongoing treaty violations. Neglecting to discuss the past and present vast influence of racism on policy, hiding behind some "let's not bring race into this" excuse when in fact the whole issue is rooted in beliefs about race, is not honest and rational behavior.
Each of us sheds millions of skin cells every day, everywhere we go, leaving our DNA samples on everything we touch.
And because there's so much DNA being shed, mine mixes in with everyone else's. It's not personally identifiable data, unless you take a sample from me, or get a sample from somewhere where I've been the only recent occupant.
Given that there is no way for anyone to get an identifiable sample of my DNA without assault or trespass, I have a very strong expectation of DNA privacy.
The study you cite is flawed. Both diets contained about the same number of calories
Uh, that's not a flaw. That's good experimental design: holding all other factors constant while varying only the one under investigation, in this case the ketogenic nature of the diet. If two diets are similar except that one is ketogenic and one isn't, and they have the same weight-loss results, then this indicates that ketosis doesn't mean anything for weight loss.
The point of Atkins is that if you stick to the rules, it doesn't matter how much you eat
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This may be a shock to you, but Europe is not the world.
Nonsense. "It's 75 degrees here in Baltimore. The burden of proof is on those who claim that it's not 75 degrees all across the planet right now!"
Again: Europe is not the world. A few degrees warmer might well be pleasant for England -- but deadly for India.
The problem is, I'm not sure if you're a complete idiot or being sarcastic. Because there are a great number of people out there who do actually believe shit this stupid.
(Just in case: Earth would be freezing without the greenhouse effect, also it's what makes Venus so hot; your car, which most likely contains no plants; and once an object reaches thermal equilibrium it radiates the same amount of energy out that it received from the sun (in different wavelengths, not via "reflection"), we're just changing the Earth's equilibrium temperature.)
Back in the days of USENET, we used to throw around this bit of wisdom: "It can be shown that for any nutty theory, beyond-the-fringe political view or strange religion there exists a proponent on the Net. The proof is left as an exercise for your kill-file." (Attributed to Bertil Jonell.) The problem is that now, some proponents of such nutty theories -- like the idea that anthropogenic climate change is some sort of scam -- are in positions of actual authority.
"Dreaded" libertarian? Right-wingers like the word so much they stole it from the socialist anarchists.
I know that the mythology that the poor are "lucky duckies" who don't pay taxes is popular with the Fox News set, but in actual fact most people receiving the EITC are still paying FICA taxes, various federal excise taxes, plus of course state and local sales and property taxes. Most people getting the EITC are not turning a profit from the government.
I don't know what you mean by the "height of development"; certainly Buddhism was popular, but it was a version encrusted with superstition and metaphysics and nonsense about accumulating merit ("good karma") to get a better incarnation the next time around. In large part Ch'an developed as a corrective to this. The whole idea of "highest practice" is completely antithetical to the point of Zen: what you are doing right now this moment is your highest practice. Chop wood, carry water, write code, say stupid shit on /. -- this is IT.
One doesn't study Zen, one practices Zen. It's a matter of experience. Consider why the Sixth Patriarch tore up the sutras. (Supposedly. If he ever really existed.)
If anyone's interested, here's a quick sketch of the history of the two most significant teachers in the development of Zen, Bodhidharma and Hui Neng.
"Accepting that the government is going to enforce the laws you disagree with" is accepting reality. If that's what's meant by "accepting the consequences of his actions", then it's true but so trivial as to be useless.
The point is that if one mounts a defense -- social, legal, or even physical -- to that enforcement rather than passively "accepting" it, one is still engaged in civil disobedience.
Yes, the guy who deliberately breaks an unjust law and then fights the cops who come to arrest him is still engaged in civil disobedience; the "civil" refers to the "civil authority" one is disobeying, not to behaving "civilly". I'm not, for the moment, saying that such fighting is or is not a wise action; just that "civil disobedience" is a wider concept than nonviolent resistance. Remember that Thoreau praised John Brown, whose attack on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry could fairly be described as terrorism; he was most definitely not a pacifist of the King or Gandhi variety.
Yes. That's the way prescriptions work. If the doctor is writing bad prescriptions, investigate them and, if appropriate, pull their license; otherwise, shut up and pay for the prescribed drugs or other medical goods.
If there are "fly-by-night doctors" out there, then your problem is with the medical licensing authorities, and your efforts would be best directed to getting them to do their job, rather than meddling in the doctor-patient relationship.
No. The very concept of civil disobedience is "we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right."
Thoreau didn't think to himself, "I'm going to go to jail to make a spectacle and show how wrong this war tax is"; he simply declined to take an action he felt was morally wrong. He didn't demand to stay in jail once someone paid the tax for him.
It certainly helps that they've been able to export much of their nuclear waste to Russia. It also helps that their plants are built and run by a company that started out as a government agency and is still 85% state owned, so market forces have little to no impact.
With new technology that does not yet exist in deployed form, maybe. "Energy amplifier" designs, for example, that use thorium fuel, can be turned off, and can burn up high-level waste, have potential (though they still produce a non-zero amount of waste, the thorium still has to be mined, and the weapons proliferation concerns, while lessened, are not completely eliminated) -- but aren't here yet. Meanwhile, wind and solar are here now.
Not if the sender is well-behaved:
Also:
President Washington showed just how much say the federal government had within the borders of Pennsylvania under the (then new) Constitution when he put down the Whiskey Rebellion.
Nonsense. Almost all criminal law still resides at the state level. Punch someone in the nose or steal their car or write them a fraudulent check, and you'll end up in a state court.
There's certainly a legitimate debate to be had about the balance of power in our federalist system, but simple-minded ideas about the states almost being sovereign nations under the Constitution, or about states having "no power at all" today, are not helpful to the discussion
The Framers envisioned an agrarian nation where only white male landowners had the vote, slaves counted as 3/5th of a person, and citizens had no protection against oppression by state governments.
If we don't live in the nation envisioned by slave-rapist Thomas Jefferson, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.
No. That "original setup" might be said to apply to the U.S. under the Articles of Confederation, but those were an abject failure. So we came up with the Constitution, under which the individual states are nothing at all like independent countries: they cannot enter into treaties, issue money, lay import or export duties, keep troops in peacetime, or make compacts between themselves.
The romantic notions of some living in the southern U.S. notwithstanding, the U.S. Civil War was about a bunch of slave-owners who tried to get their way through terrorism.
No one wanted to annex Canada in 1812. The Brits were kidnapping American sailors, supporting the Native Americans we were fighting (on the right side, there, though for their own geopolitical benefit rather than wanting to aid the oppressed "noble savages"), and attacking our ships; Canadian territory was just something they had that we could take and use as a bargaining chip to get them to stop.
We let them burn DC, sure, just a bit of urban renewal. But when they tried to wipe out the shipyards in Baltimore that were building the ships that were embarrassing the mightiest navy on the planet, we Baltimoreans -- though outnumbered -- delivered an ass-kicking that has been celebrated in song ever since.
Highly questionable as to whether it's impossible with current tech -- see the 2010 update on laser eavesdropping on this page -- but even if it is, so what? Why should you have to close your windows and draw the curtains to enjoy the same expectation of privacy in your own bedroom that your grandfather had, before parabolic mics became common? He could leave his window open on a pleasant summer's night and murmur sweet nothings to your grandma, knowing that no one could hear without hanging right outside the window, trespassing.
And why should your grandchildren have to put in place active defenses against laser eavesdropping? There's a much better, more respectful solution: the just use of sanctions, including the use of force, against people who violate other's rights to privacy. In an anarchy, I'd simply punch an eavesdropper directly in the nose, and my neighbors would be fine with it; under a government, the state threatens to punch them in the nose (or shoot you) if they don't go sit in a room and have a long time-out and think about what an asshole they've been.
Would you care to explain how?
Your fundamental error is in holding unintentional information leakage to be equivalent to publishing. If I went around leaving vials of my blood for folks to analyze, that would be publishing; the completely involuntary shedding of skin flakes and hairs, is not.
I repeat: the expectation of privacy is not negated by the theoretical possibility of surveillance.
Which, when looking at a trend over 1,000 years, means diddlyshit. If you cherry-pick your start and end point in any data that moves up and down, you can find an increase, decrease, or whatever. (Did it not strike you that fifteen years is an odd length of time to pick?)
"There's been no warming over the past three days of spring! Seasonal warming is a myth! In fact, today was cooler than yesterday! We must be headed into winter, not summer!"
You might -- if you actually cared about the facts -- Google a little and see what Jones is actually saying:
The only "shrillness" I see is that of so-called "skeptics". Great Ghu, man, did you read the page to which you linked? Did you not notice your own SHOUTING IN ALL CAPS while misrepresenting Jones's position?
Have you no sense of shame, sir? Or at least of irony?
Yes, they do. And climate theories have been evaluated under a bright light. And unlike N rays, or cold fusion, the consensus of knowledgeable experts has emerged that anthropogenic climate change is a real phenomenon.
No, the economic implications have nothing to do with the science. There is no "especially" here. In fact, your invocation of it illustrates the motivation behind much of the denial: for whatever reasons of political philosophy, many people find the prospect of carbon taxes disturbing, and so are psychologically motivated to deny the evidence.
It's rather like a guy having a heart attack who keeps dismissing it as indigestion; it's not necessarily that he's ignorant of the symptoms, but nobody wants to think that a heart attack could happen to them.
Oh, pity poor Exxon/Mobil, with its profits on the order of $40 billion dollars a year. This one oil company could only outspend the entire fscking EPA by a factor of slightly less that four-to-one and still maintain a profit. We can see how it is that the poor oil industry only constitutes half of the top ten, and only three of the top five, of Fortune's Global 500.
The taxation levels on oil products are far, far too low. If we paid at the pump for the environmental damage and the foreign policy costs of our oil addiction, gasoline would be at least twice as expensive.
Where I come from, we flush after using public restrooms. Any trace left behind is mixed with traces from dozens, or even hundreds (it's not like standard cleaning removes every last trace of biological material) of other people. And if you're following me closely enough to find a shed hair, you're stalking. The expectation of DNA privacy remains.
It is in fact the core of the issue. I don't care about statistical statements about a large social group, provided that they are accurate and based on data collected in an ethical manner. (Which would not be the case in the Havasupai incident.) To say "African Americans have a higher rate of sickle cell anemia than the general population" or "Irish Americans have higher rates of alcoholism" is fine. Discrimination on the basis of those statements is another matter, but is not limited to DNA information, or even to medical information. I care about privacy: about information about individuals.
No more silly than to expect a conversation to be private when your sound waves radiate in all directions. Sure, I might need a super-amplifier to hear your pillow talk from across the street, but too bad, it is silly to expect your words to be private if you let sound waves out of your house, right?
There's a huge difference between a public conversation, and a conversation that can be overheard given enough ingenuity on the part of the eavesdropper. And there's a huge difference between giving a DNA sample, and having one's DNA collected by a stalker.
The expectation of privacy is not negated by the theoretical possibility of surveillance.
Uh, right. That's why flow charts remain so popular.
Some things are better expressed in text; some in figures. A set of rules -- like those for a firewall -- are better expressed in text.
Your example is 100% backwards. Consider something simple like adding a host to a standard ACL list for webservers. Why should it be any harder than simply editing a plain text file? Why should it involve some meaningless symbolism of dragging one shape into another shape? How do I grep through these shapes? How do I filter them into reports? How do I back up old configurations? How do I copy configuration from one system to another?
Why should configuring a computer system require manual, slow, error-prone, use of a GUI?
I very seriously doubt it.
And if you're following me around enough to do this, you're stalking me. Still criminal behavior.
Race was brought into this in 1492, when the genocide of the Native nations began. It continues today, with ongoing treaty violations. Neglecting to discuss the past and present vast influence of racism on policy, hiding behind some "let's not bring race into this" excuse when in fact the whole issue is rooted in beliefs about race, is not honest and rational behavior.
And because there's so much DNA being shed, mine mixes in with everyone else's. It's not personally identifiable data, unless you take a sample from me, or get a sample from somewhere where I've been the only recent occupant.
Given that there is no way for anyone to get an identifiable sample of my DNA without assault or trespass, I have a very strong expectation of DNA privacy.
Uh, that's not a flaw. That's good experimental design: holding all other factors constant while varying only the one under investigation, in this case the ketogenic nature of the diet. If two diets are similar except that one is ketogenic and one isn't, and they have the same weight-loss results, then this indicates that ketosis doesn't mean anything for weight loss.
And the point of actual science is that yes, it does matter how much you eat. People who lose fat weight (not merely the initial dehydration of Atkins-style diets) do so because they reduce their caloric intake. Atkins "rules" are fairy dust that disguise the fact that when it works, it works because it's a restrictive diet that results in people eating fewer calories.
So you believe that if you can consume 10,000 calories of fat a day and 0 carbs, sit around on your ass, and not gain weight? I'm sure that you can reference a published, peer-reviewed study that demonstrates this magic? And you can explain why a ketogenic low-carb diets gives no better results than non-ketogenic low-carb diets?