Fire is a really, really REALLY answer to this mystery. It requires a fire powerful enough to disable communications minutes after they finished speaking for the last time, while at the same time avoid detection by a multitude of fire/smoke detectos around the plane.
Then after the fire finishes off every single person on the plane, it decides to chill out for seven hours while the plane flays without issue, despite that having happened with no serious airplane fire ever.
It's nice that you have an active enough imagination to believe in this mystical all-powerful sky fire, but to me it's vastly more convoluted to have fire be responsible do to the seriously amazing number of things to have to go right (or wrong) for that to work. Either suicide or terrorists taking the plane is FAR more likely if you are going to apply a test of simplicity.
Why would the fire have to evade the detectors?
As for the fire going out without damaging the aircraft that seems plausible. A fire breaks out in the cabin area, kills all the people with smoke inhalation then kills itself by using up all the oxygen. It's even consistent with some of the weird flight behaviour as a pilot dying of smoke inhalation may not have adjusted the auto-pilot properly.
Seriously: a major airplane "disappears" despite evidence that it wasn't really crashed. Everybody's wondering who dunnit and how, and whether or not it will become another impromptu bomb.
There's a *lot* you can carry on a 777. $50 mil is a lot, but the amount of damage such a plane could do with a little direction makes $50 mil look like peanuts. And it's pretty clear that anybody with the skills to make it disappear as completely as it did is capable of more than just a little direction.
What is the evidence that it didn't really crash?
It looks like there may have been some odd circumstances around the crash, a hijacking or equipment malfunction of some kind, but I don't imagine there's a lot of places you can land and hide a 777 without someone noticing. The fact they haven't found the wreckage doesn't mean a crash still isn't the overwhelming possibility.
My gut says the reason it's so hard to deal with the current form of ligin is parasites would have evolved to eat anything simpler. Do they have any strategy for preventing parasites from finding the trick to breaking down the ligin in these modified trees?
But at the end of the day the failure of Iraq was fundamentally one of incompetence, there were certainly lies and criminal acts, but I believe the core motive of the people in charge was to help the Iraqi people.
That's kind of a very dubious claim - and one that rests more on personal bias than anything proveable... I see the US in much less of a rosy light, given how they, you know, installed Saddam there in the first place. And then supplied him with WMDs so he could kill the very rebels the US proclaimed to now side with.
I'm not sure many people would accuse me of seeing the US in a rosy light. The US actions in Iraq are basically driven by Pax Americana, the belief that the US is extraordinarily powerful and has a responsibility to exert that power to spread democracy and freedom. Also that any truly free populace would be pro-West, ie an unfriendly democratic leader must not be truly democratic otherwise they'd be friendly, and thus they're liable for overthrow.
Now the problem is this isn't completely wrong, anti-west democratic leaders do have a tendency to become totalitarian (Chavez is a good example), and it's not clear that a genuine democratic government is possible, or that open elections wouldn't result in even greater oppression. This leads to them playing a game where the try to micro-manage foreign politics winning short term gains but arguably increasing oppression in the long term by pissing people off.
Unfortunately expecting them to perform a useful intervention in Iraq was a bit like asking an elephant to run a daycare, an act of dubious value that was fated to end in tragedy.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I'm sure that trying to help is going to be a real comfort to all those who died - or have to live in constant fear thanks to their country descending into civil war. In short: given the absolute mess that Iraq became, I wouldn't care about the intentions of the US - even if I really believed they were doubtlessly altruistic to begin with...
What if solid evidence came out that revealed that Bush-Cheney didn't care at all about Iraqis or Democracy, but only wanted to enrich some defence contractor and oil exec buddies? I'm guessing you'd care a lot about those intentions.
The reason why I found Crimea to be MORE objectionable was because Putin has no noble motive. It's land theft pure and simple, made on a pretext so flimsy it makes Iraqs WDMs to be as common as sand. And while the body count has been low it runs the risk of war in an otherwise stable part of the world and significantly escalates the tension between the West and Russia, the long term consequences of the Crimean invasion could be far worse than those of Iraq.
Land theft is kind of a misnomer. There are very important navy bases in Crimea - ones which the Russian navy kept using after the USSR dissolved... and which they must've felt in danger after their puppet government got kicked out of Ukraine. Not that I approve of this move - had enough of Russia sitting around here for fifty years - just saying it's a whee bit more nuanced than you make it seem like.
As for reactions and fears... the world is only up in arms because we are reminded of the Cold War. If China decided to annex parts of Mongolia, I could tell you what would happen: a big, fat nothing. Ukraine is too close, and the bad memories with Russia are too recent. But this was really to be expected; after the NATO continously expanding east and losing Serbia, Iraq and now Ukraine... of course Russia would react in some way.
They had a 25 year lease on the bases I'm not sure losing them was really a risk, and even if they did Russia already had territory on the Black sea. The importance of those bases was as a symbol of their relationship with Ukraine. While the most extreme wing of t
You didn't find a few hundred thousands getting killed objectionable - while one (reportedly anyway) guy getting killed you did?
I'm sorry, but... what?
Well I actually said I was a huge opponent of Iraq and I've been so from the start.
But at the end of the day the failure of Iraq was fundamentally one of incompetence, there were certainly lies and criminal acts, but I believe the core motive of the people in charge was to help the Iraqi people. Unfortunately expecting them to perform a useful intervention in Iraq was a bit like asking an elephant to run a daycare, an act of dubious value that was fated to end in tragedy.
The reason why I found Crimea to be MORE objectionable was because Putin has no noble motive. It's land theft pure and simple, made on a pretext so flimsy it makes Iraqs WDMs to be as common as sand. And while the body count has been low it runs the risk of war in an otherwise stable part of the world and significantly escalates the tension between the West and Russia, the long term consequences of the Crimean invasion could be far worse than those of Iraq.
Maybe the news I'm seeing isn't accurate but it appears the majority of people currently "invaded" wants to join Russia. Hope is all those people want and joining a large world force/economy is something that can provide people with a better life. Especially considering that a large percentage of this population is of Russian background.
There's surely some significant support for joining Russia but I think it's weaker and less manipulated than is generally believed. Russia quickly established control of the media, Russian troops shut down public protests or displays in favour of Ukraine and protected pro-Russian mobs. Yes it's meaningful that the population didn't rise up in revolt, it implies that they don't consider Russian citizenship to be a horrible outcome, but that's a long way from saying they wanted it.
Moreso it's seizing another countries territory through military force, it drastically changes the incentives around military force and is extraordinarily dangerous.
I don't know if I'm a nerd like us any more. I mean, I have an obsessive knowledge of trilobite fossils, and given a random sentence from any of the Harry Potter books I can tell what book and chapter it is from, but I don't feel like I belong with these kinds of people. What's left for me? What am I? How did pop-culture steal my identity?
I think that WW comes from a part of nerd culture that enjoys markers of group identity, cons, trekkies, etc. And because they're organized it means they have a disproportionate impact on nerd culture.
I think there's a lot of geeks who love genre stuff and love talking about it, but really rebel against group identification or any attempt to stereotype. I think I come from this latter grou^H^Hpersuation, I enjoy some decent SF but I'm not going to go to a con or lose myself over a celebrity. There's nothing wrong with those who do, whatever brings you meaning is worthwhile, but it's just not how I'm wired.
I'll be curious what the new show is actually like, despite not really connecting with WW I do enjoy a lot of his work.
This. NASA is not a political body and should not act like one.
If an anti-science President gets elected in 2016, will the world refuse to stop working with the USA? If they did, wouldn't we be upset?
Russia didn't refuse to work with the USA when America invaded Iraq, did they?
I'm a huge opponent of the Iraq war but I consider Russia's actions in Ukraine quite a bit more objectionable than the US's actions in Iraq.
I think there's two parts to NASA, there's the straight science part and the space exploration part. The science part should mostly ignore the politics and ideally not be affected by the crisis. But the space exploration aspect doesn't have a lot of practical impact at this point and is more symbolic and aspiration, I'm still not sure if I agree with it, but a given the primary product of the space program is prestige it does make sense to use it to punish Russia for political reasons.
They sell drugs because the money is easiest and they have a competitive advantage with a large organization (manufacturing, retails, supply chains, etc). If you take the drugs away the replacement rackets are lower revenue and require smaller orgs. Both factors that reduce the size of the operations.
You'll still have organized crime but not the kind that grows to the scale of a large retail chain.
There's a quick video montage of inventions starting at the 2:55 mark which features an old polycarbonate MacBook (or a late-model iBook?), an iPad, and an iPhone, but the logos are not visible on any of them. To be perfectly honest, despite having owned an iPad and that model of iPhone, I didn't even recognize them as being Apple products until I re-watched the video, just because of the angles they were shot at and the actions the scenes were focusing on. Had I not been looking for them, I wouldn't have seen them.
The only Apple product that is on-screen for any length of time, as well as being the only one with the logo clearly visible, is what appears to be a MacBook Pro being used by the actor portraying an inventor, but in no way was it suggested that the computer itself was the invention. Rather, the invention was some CAD diagram he had on his computer. Even so, the computer does get quite a bit of screen time with the shining Apple logo clearly visible.
The phone and tablet shown in the video aren't particularly identifiable on their own, but shown immediately after an Apple laptop a viewer would automatically assume them to be an iPhone and iPad.
The trial is about whether Samsung violated Apple's patents on phones and tablets. The video leaves the impression that not only are Apple's patents valid, but they're such amazing examples of patents that the Federal Justice Center chose them out of countless possible inventions as examples.
I'm not sure you can get much more prejudicial than "you need to decide whether Apple's iPhone and iPad patents are valid, to understand the issue here's a video made by the courts that gives examples of good patents... like Apple's iPhone and iPad patents".
First they had fascists in the government and now they'll have Sith. At the very least they should get Magneto as defence minister and fill the army up with Cylons.
I wonder if this would be a good cause for a disabled rights group. Hire a dev or two to go around fixing/nagging open source projects
Or, alternatively, hire a lawyer, and sue x.org for violating the ADA. That is the American way.
It sounds like you mostly want to take a shot at the ADA but looking at the link I don't see any mention of software except for the two instances where courts have ruled that websites aren't covered. Is there any precedent for a software project being sued on the basis of the ADA?
It's unfortunately the worst kind of bug in a sense. A feature that affects only a small minority of users but affects them severely.
If some developer or company doesn't have a specific interest in that set of users it's really easy for the bug to get overlooked.
I wonder if this would be a good cause for a disabled rights group. Hire a dev or two to go around fixing/nagging open source projects in an effort to improve accessibility.
Except that the sarcasm gets it wrong. The idea of homeopathy (as its name indicates) is to cause the body to fight against the effects of the diluted substances.
It just occurred to me that this is actually kind of how vaccines work. Of course a homeopath would likely just give you a shot of diluted live virulent Ebola (lots of fun if you get some active ingredient!)
The 2nd option said to stay in Ukraine under the 1992 constitution, that actually created a lot more autonomy and even allowed the Crimean parliament choose with which country it wished to be associated with. The Crimean parliament could even vote to join Russia anyways.
I think it's not a total exaggeration. Even a small royalty will be enough of a burden to knock out a lot of smaller podcasts who don't want to go through the hassle of paying someone to do their hobby, and larger podcasts may be driven towards more commercial content to generate enough revenue to make up the royalty. And how is the royalty calculated anyway? Flat rate? That kills the small podcasts. Per user? Where do the big ones get the money?
I think a ruling that resulted in podcasts having to may would legitimately devastate the podcasting landscape, even if the current big pods remain mostly unchanged it will adversely affect the number of new podcasts that enter the market.
I suspect the original herbalists did what you describe, but they were handicapped by the tools at their disposal. You can pick out a few very reliable correlations but you're going to screw up when it comes to ones that are rare or harder to detect. This is particularly an issue with side effects, as a rule if the substance interacts with the body it's probably going to have more than one effect and a lot of these natural cures can cause things like kidney damage since the herbalists simply had no way to detect that.
ps. I wonder who figured out that peeing on a wound was a good way to prevent infection. I can't help but think there's an interesting story behind that one.
But I'm not sure we can make even that determination.
1) There was no option that would have kept Crimea in Ukraine
2) Only 58% of the population was ethnic Russian, the Tartar's largely said they would boycott and many Ukrainians likely followed.
3) The pictures I saw the ballot boxes were transparent and the voting cards unfolded, that's a good way to influence the vote.
4) In early February only 40% of Crimeans wanted Ukraine to join Russia. Toss in a new government and a slightly difference question and you improve the numbers a bit, but not to 96%.
5) Pro-Russia mobs assaulted and intimidated anyone who was pro-Ukraine with the protection of the military, that helps keep people in line.
6) There wasn't evidence of fraud because there wasn't any international observers (or anyone else in a position to monitor the vote), for all we know they could have tossed the ballots in a shredder and made up the number.
7) Russia did a good PR job in making up stuff about Kiev
8) The pro-Russia President of Crimea (installed by Russia) came from a party with only 4% of the vote in Crimea
I have no doubt that a lot of Crimeans wanted to join Russia, and probably more than 50% at that time wanted to.
But consider another scenario. The Russians left then the pro-Russia Crimean government announced a referendum in 3 months. The Ukrainian government and Crimean government could both campaign freely and a vote was held similarly to the Quebec referendums in Canada.
It's probably close, maybe they still vote to join Russia, but I'd be shocked to see a result over 60%.
In the comment sections of news articles I noticed a lot of support for Russia, mostly talking about the "fascists" in Kiev (yes there's a few shady characters but that had been hugely overblown) and even endorsing the "referendum". It's not entirely unsurprising since Russia is a big country with a lot of ex-pats and people with Russian ancestry who might be sympathetic.
However, I noticed two curious things, first there was very little support for Russia on/. which has a more cumbersome account creation process (it's obvious if you're new). And secondly, unlike most people who have a strong opinion these commenters, when someone replied to them, very rarely replied back.
My gut tells me that Russia has engaged in a very widespread online astroturf campaign, targeting major news sites. I'm wondering if that has affected the degree to which news sites have been reluctant to directly criticize the 96% result in the referendum.
That's precisely the problem. The warming isn't going to cause much of a problem for most people old enough to post here. By the time the problems get too bad to ignore, we're already committed to even more problems, because the excess carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of years. That's why we keep getting these warnings, so we can avoid those problems before it's too late.
You are aware, I trust, of these things called plants. It turns out that they absorb carbon dioxide right out of the air. What's even cooler is that the more CO2 that's in the air, the faster they grow and thus the faster they absorb it. This is why greenhouses will often run with drastically increased CO2 levels.
Wow! This changes everything, you should tell someone about your amazing discovery!
Send it into Nature
Abstract: I don't think global warming will happen because the plants will eat all the CO2 out of the air
Introduction: Because plants use C02, so if we make more CO2 we'll get more plants and we'll have less CO2!
Conclusion: No CO2 means no global warming!
Future Work: We've got lots of CO2 so figure out why still there's more CO2 instead of more plants.
1) My criticism had nothing to do with his credentials, I actually treated him as a scientific equal to the climatologists and until I read his wikipedia entry while making my previous reply I actually thought he was a climatologist.
2) I re-read the criticism, and they never talked about his credentials either. They accused him of an overly simplistic analysis and misrepresenting climate research on extreme weather.
Possibly, but my point was just the question was framed insensitively, like the important consequence of those deaths was how they inspired his art. What you could ask is how their deaths affected him, or if you were really curious if he was able to use the pain or sense of loss to inform his art.
But with this form of interview I just don't know how you really ask either. Asking how he felt about the deaths is just really personal without providing a motive for why you want to know. And asking about how it informed his art presumes that they had a profound effect (which isn't necessarily the case since we don't know if they were close). That's something you could get at in a conversation, but with a single question I just don't think it's possible.
Pielke is a political scientist, so by your standard he's operating even further outside of his field of expertise.
But that's irrelevant as I've made clear in every one of my comments, my objection is not that he's necessarily wrong, it's that it's a valid scientific debate and is not being presented as such.
The idea of 538 is supposed to be "here's a question that is poorly handled by the media, here's the data that either clears up the issue or adds a lot of context". Instead what we have here is "here's an area of active scientific research, here's my particular theory presented as the obvious conclusion to an uninformed audience without mentioning any of the dissenting evidence"
The response was that he was disregarding the fact that modern structures and forecasting should reduce costs,...
What expertise do climatologists bring to this part of the discussion? This is not a question of climatology but of economics. The guys criticizing Pielke are out of their area of expertise on this.
That's not my objection. It's that this is an actual scientific debate, not some popular misconception that's easily resolved with a once-over of the data.
Slashdot Mirror
Fire is a really, really REALLY answer to this mystery. It requires a fire powerful enough to disable communications minutes after they finished speaking for the last time, while at the same time avoid detection by a multitude of fire/smoke detectos around the plane.
Then after the fire finishes off every single person on the plane, it decides to chill out for seven hours while the plane flays without issue, despite that having happened with no serious airplane fire ever.
It's nice that you have an active enough imagination to believe in this mystical all-powerful sky fire, but to me it's vastly more convoluted to have fire be responsible do to the seriously amazing number of things to have to go right (or wrong) for that to work. Either suicide or terrorists taking the plane is FAR more likely if you are going to apply a test of simplicity.
Why would the fire have to evade the detectors?
As for the fire going out without damaging the aircraft that seems plausible. A fire breaks out in the cabin area, kills all the people with smoke inhalation then kills itself by using up all the oxygen. It's even consistent with some of the weird flight behaviour as a pilot dying of smoke inhalation may not have adjusted the auto-pilot properly.
Seriously: a major airplane "disappears" despite evidence that it wasn't really crashed. Everybody's wondering who dunnit and how, and whether or not it will become another impromptu bomb.
There's a *lot* you can carry on a 777. $50 mil is a lot, but the amount of damage such a plane could do with a little direction makes $50 mil look like peanuts. And it's pretty clear that anybody with the skills to make it disappear as completely as it did is capable of more than just a little direction.
What is the evidence that it didn't really crash?
It looks like there may have been some odd circumstances around the crash, a hijacking or equipment malfunction of some kind, but I don't imagine there's a lot of places you can land and hide a 777 without someone noticing. The fact they haven't found the wreckage doesn't mean a crash still isn't the overwhelming possibility.
My gut says the reason it's so hard to deal with the current form of ligin is parasites would have evolved to eat anything simpler. Do they have any strategy for preventing parasites from finding the trick to breaking down the ligin in these modified trees?
Either way it does sounds pretty cool.
I'm not sure many people would accuse me of seeing the US in a rosy light. The US actions in Iraq are basically driven by Pax Americana, the belief that the US is extraordinarily powerful and has a responsibility to exert that power to spread democracy and freedom. Also that any truly free populace would be pro-West, ie an unfriendly democratic leader must not be truly democratic otherwise they'd be friendly, and thus they're liable for overthrow.
Now the problem is this isn't completely wrong, anti-west democratic leaders do have a tendency to become totalitarian (Chavez is a good example), and it's not clear that a genuine democratic government is possible, or that open elections wouldn't result in even greater oppression. This leads to them playing a game where the try to micro-manage foreign politics winning short term gains but arguably increasing oppression in the long term by pissing people off.
What if solid evidence came out that revealed that Bush-Cheney didn't care at all about Iraqis or Democracy, but only wanted to enrich some defence contractor and oil exec buddies? I'm guessing you'd care a lot about those intentions.
They had a 25 year lease on the bases I'm not sure losing them was really a risk, and even if they did Russia already had territory on the Black sea. The importance of those bases was as a symbol of their relationship with Ukraine. While the most extreme wing of t
Only because you are stupid. Russia is DEFENDING itself from the US. How is that more objectionable than war for empire?
Orwell called. He wants his doublespeak back.
You didn't find a few hundred thousands getting killed objectionable - while one (reportedly anyway) guy getting killed you did?
I'm sorry, but... what?
Well I actually said I was a huge opponent of Iraq and I've been so from the start.
But at the end of the day the failure of Iraq was fundamentally one of incompetence, there were certainly lies and criminal acts, but I believe the core motive of the people in charge was to help the Iraqi people. Unfortunately expecting them to perform a useful intervention in Iraq was a bit like asking an elephant to run a daycare, an act of dubious value that was fated to end in tragedy.
The reason why I found Crimea to be MORE objectionable was because Putin has no noble motive. It's land theft pure and simple, made on a pretext so flimsy it makes Iraqs WDMs to be as common as sand. And while the body count has been low it runs the risk of war in an otherwise stable part of the world and significantly escalates the tension between the West and Russia, the long term consequences of the Crimean invasion could be far worse than those of Iraq.
Is it really more objectionable?
Maybe the news I'm seeing isn't accurate but it appears the majority of people currently "invaded" wants to join Russia. Hope is all those people want and joining a large world force/economy is something that can provide people with a better life. Especially considering that a large percentage of this population is of Russian background.
There's surely some significant support for joining Russia but I think it's weaker and less manipulated than is generally believed. Russia quickly established control of the media, Russian troops shut down public protests or displays in favour of Ukraine and protected pro-Russian mobs. Yes it's meaningful that the population didn't rise up in revolt, it implies that they don't consider Russian citizenship to be a horrible outcome, but that's a long way from saying they wanted it.
Moreso it's seizing another countries territory through military force, it drastically changes the incentives around military force and is extraordinarily dangerous.
I don't know if I'm a nerd like us any more. I mean, I have an obsessive knowledge of trilobite fossils, and given a random sentence from any of the Harry Potter books I can tell what book and chapter it is from, but I don't feel like I belong with these kinds of people. What's left for me? What am I? How did pop-culture steal my identity?
I think that WW comes from a part of nerd culture that enjoys markers of group identity, cons, trekkies, etc. And because they're organized it means they have a disproportionate impact on nerd culture.
I think there's a lot of geeks who love genre stuff and love talking about it, but really rebel against group identification or any attempt to stereotype. I think I come from this latter grou^H^Hpersuation, I enjoy some decent SF but I'm not going to go to a con or lose myself over a celebrity. There's nothing wrong with those who do, whatever brings you meaning is worthwhile, but it's just not how I'm wired.
I'll be curious what the new show is actually like, despite not really connecting with WW I do enjoy a lot of his work.
This. NASA is not a political body and should not act like one.
If an anti-science President gets elected in 2016, will the world refuse to stop working with the USA? If they did, wouldn't we be upset?
Russia didn't refuse to work with the USA when America invaded Iraq, did they?
I'm a huge opponent of the Iraq war but I consider Russia's actions in Ukraine quite a bit more objectionable than the US's actions in Iraq.
I think there's two parts to NASA, there's the straight science part and the space exploration part. The science part should mostly ignore the politics and ideally not be affected by the crisis. But the space exploration aspect doesn't have a lot of practical impact at this point and is more symbolic and aspiration, I'm still not sure if I agree with it, but a given the primary product of the space program is prestige it does make sense to use it to punish Russia for political reasons.
Take their main source of money away and they have to move to other enterprises to keep their organization alive.
Kidnappings-blackmail-ransom, selling organs, child prostitution, weapon trafficking, assassinations, protection rackets, robbery maybe? & etc
Depends on how far one is willing to go really.
They sell drugs because the money is easiest and they have a competitive advantage with a large organization (manufacturing, retails, supply chains, etc). If you take the drugs away the replacement rackets are lower revenue and require smaller orgs. Both factors that reduce the size of the operations.
You'll still have organized crime but not the kind that grows to the scale of a large retail chain.
There's a quick video montage of inventions starting at the 2:55 mark which features an old polycarbonate MacBook (or a late-model iBook?), an iPad, and an iPhone, but the logos are not visible on any of them. To be perfectly honest, despite having owned an iPad and that model of iPhone, I didn't even recognize them as being Apple products until I re-watched the video, just because of the angles they were shot at and the actions the scenes were focusing on. Had I not been looking for them, I wouldn't have seen them.
The only Apple product that is on-screen for any length of time, as well as being the only one with the logo clearly visible, is what appears to be a MacBook Pro being used by the actor portraying an inventor, but in no way was it suggested that the computer itself was the invention. Rather, the invention was some CAD diagram he had on his computer. Even so, the computer does get quite a bit of screen time with the shining Apple logo clearly visible.
The phone and tablet shown in the video aren't particularly identifiable on their own, but shown immediately after an Apple laptop a viewer would automatically assume them to be an iPhone and iPad.
The trial is about whether Samsung violated Apple's patents on phones and tablets. The video leaves the impression that not only are Apple's patents valid, but they're such amazing examples of patents that the Federal Justice Center chose them out of countless possible inventions as examples.
I'm not sure you can get much more prejudicial than "you need to decide whether Apple's iPhone and iPad patents are valid, to understand the issue here's a video made by the courts that gives examples of good patents... like Apple's iPhone and iPad patents".
There was an earlier version of the video that Samsung wanted them to use. I honestly don't understand the decision.
First they had fascists in the government and now they'll have Sith. At the very least they should get Magneto as defence minister and fill the army up with Cylons.
I wonder if this would be a good cause for a disabled rights group. Hire a dev or two to go around fixing/nagging open source projects
Or, alternatively, hire a lawyer, and sue x.org for violating the ADA. That is the American way.
It sounds like you mostly want to take a shot at the ADA but looking at the link I don't see any mention of software except for the two instances where courts have ruled that websites aren't covered. Is there any precedent for a software project being sued on the basis of the ADA?
It's unfortunately the worst kind of bug in a sense. A feature that affects only a small minority of users but affects them severely.
If some developer or company doesn't have a specific interest in that set of users it's really easy for the bug to get overlooked.
I wonder if this would be a good cause for a disabled rights group. Hire a dev or two to go around fixing/nagging open source projects in an effort to improve accessibility.
Except that the sarcasm gets it wrong. The idea of homeopathy (as its name indicates) is to cause the body to fight against the effects of the diluted substances.
It just occurred to me that this is actually kind of how vaccines work. Of course a homeopath would likely just give you a shot of diluted live virulent Ebola (lots of fun if you get some active ingredient!)
The 2nd option said to stay in Ukraine under the 1992 constitution, that actually created a lot more autonomy and even allowed the Crimean parliament choose with which country it wished to be associated with. The Crimean parliament could even vote to join Russia anyways.
I think it's not a total exaggeration. Even a small royalty will be enough of a burden to knock out a lot of smaller podcasts who don't want to go through the hassle of paying someone to do their hobby, and larger podcasts may be driven towards more commercial content to generate enough revenue to make up the royalty. And how is the royalty calculated anyway? Flat rate? That kills the small podcasts. Per user? Where do the big ones get the money?
I think a ruling that resulted in podcasts having to may would legitimately devastate the podcasting landscape, even if the current big pods remain mostly unchanged it will adversely affect the number of new podcasts that enter the market.
I suspect the original herbalists did what you describe, but they were handicapped by the tools at their disposal. You can pick out a few very reliable correlations but you're going to screw up when it comes to ones that are rare or harder to detect. This is particularly an issue with side effects, as a rule if the substance interacts with the body it's probably going to have more than one effect and a lot of these natural cures can cause things like kidney damage since the herbalists simply had no way to detect that.
ps. I wonder who figured out that peeing on a wound was a good way to prevent infection. I can't help but think there's an interesting story behind that one.
But I'm not sure we can make even that determination.
1) There was no option that would have kept Crimea in Ukraine
2) Only 58% of the population was ethnic Russian, the Tartar's largely said they would boycott and many Ukrainians likely followed.
3) The pictures I saw the ballot boxes were transparent and the voting cards unfolded, that's a good way to influence the vote.
4) In early February only 40% of Crimeans wanted Ukraine to join Russia. Toss in a new government and a slightly difference question and you improve the numbers a bit, but not to 96%.
5) Pro-Russia mobs assaulted and intimidated anyone who was pro-Ukraine with the protection of the military, that helps keep people in line.
6) There wasn't evidence of fraud because there wasn't any international observers (or anyone else in a position to monitor the vote), for all we know they could have tossed the ballots in a shredder and made up the number.
7) Russia did a good PR job in making up stuff about Kiev
8) The pro-Russia President of Crimea (installed by Russia) came from a party with only 4% of the vote in Crimea
I have no doubt that a lot of Crimeans wanted to join Russia, and probably more than 50% at that time wanted to.
But consider another scenario. The Russians left then the pro-Russia Crimean government announced a referendum in 3 months. The Ukrainian government and Crimean government could both campaign freely and a vote was held similarly to the Quebec referendums in Canada.
It's probably close, maybe they still vote to join Russia, but I'd be shocked to see a result over 60%.
In the comment sections of news articles I noticed a lot of support for Russia, mostly talking about the "fascists" in Kiev (yes there's a few shady characters but that had been hugely overblown) and even endorsing the "referendum". It's not entirely unsurprising since Russia is a big country with a lot of ex-pats and people with Russian ancestry who might be sympathetic.
However, I noticed two curious things, first there was very little support for Russia on /. which has a more cumbersome account creation process (it's obvious if you're new). And secondly, unlike most people who have a strong opinion these commenters, when someone replied to them, very rarely replied back.
My gut tells me that Russia has engaged in a very widespread online astroturf campaign, targeting major news sites. I'm wondering if that has affected the degree to which news sites have been reluctant to directly criticize the 96% result in the referendum.
That's precisely the problem. The warming isn't going to cause much of a problem for most people old enough to post here. By the time the problems get too bad to ignore, we're already committed to even more problems, because the excess carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of years. That's why we keep getting these warnings, so we can avoid those problems before it's too late.
You are aware, I trust, of these things called plants. It turns out that they absorb carbon dioxide right out of the air. What's even cooler is that the more CO2 that's in the air, the faster they grow and thus the faster they absorb it. This is why greenhouses will often run with drastically increased CO2 levels.
Wow! This changes everything, you should tell someone about your amazing discovery!
Send it into Nature
Abstract:
I don't think global warming will happen because the plants will eat all the CO2 out of the air
Introduction:
Because plants use C02, so if we make more CO2 we'll get more plants and we'll have less CO2!
Conclusion:
No CO2 means no global warming!
Future Work:
We've got lots of CO2 so figure out why still there's more CO2 instead of more plants.
Well I have two responses to that.
1) My criticism had nothing to do with his credentials, I actually treated him as a scientific equal to the climatologists and until I read his wikipedia entry while making my previous reply I actually thought he was a climatologist.
2) I re-read the criticism, and they never talked about his credentials either. They accused him of an overly simplistic analysis and misrepresenting climate research on extreme weather.
No one is guilty of your central beef.
Possibly, but my point was just the question was framed insensitively, like the important consequence of those deaths was how they inspired his art. What you could ask is how their deaths affected him, or if you were really curious if he was able to use the pain or sense of loss to inform his art.
But with this form of interview I just don't know how you really ask either. Asking how he felt about the deaths is just really personal without providing a motive for why you want to know. And asking about how it informed his art presumes that they had a profound effect (which isn't necessarily the case since we don't know if they were close). That's something you could get at in a conversation, but with a single question I just don't think it's possible.
Pielke is a political scientist, so by your standard he's operating even further outside of his field of expertise.
But that's irrelevant as I've made clear in every one of my comments, my objection is not that he's necessarily wrong, it's that it's a valid scientific debate and is not being presented as such.
The idea of 538 is supposed to be "here's a question that is poorly handled by the media, here's the data that either clears up the issue or adds a lot of context". Instead what we have here is "here's an area of active scientific research, here's my particular theory presented as the obvious conclusion to an uninformed audience without mentioning any of the dissenting evidence"
The response was that he was disregarding the fact that modern structures and forecasting should reduce costs,...
What expertise do climatologists bring to this part of the discussion? This is not a question of climatology but of economics. The guys criticizing Pielke are out of their area of expertise on this.
That's not my objection. It's that this is an actual scientific debate, not some popular misconception that's easily resolved with a once-over of the data.