I want to own my music. Then stick to CDs or unencumbered MP3s. The idea of a subscription service is that you keep paying for it to hear all the music you want. You would end up canceling your subscription the moment you downloaded as much music as your hard drive could hold and that would be the end of it. Big initial payment, low monthly payment.
I didn't see any mention of cryonics in any coverage of his death so I assume he never followed through with it, but if he actually did maybe there's the hope that he's not gone forever and may be back again someday.
'Time claims that "nobody cares" about the Government's increased spying powers and that "polling consistently supports that conclusion." They don't cite a single poll because that assertion is blatantly false. Just this weekend, a new poll released by Scripps Howard News Service and Ohio University proves that exactly the opposite is true. That poll shows that the percentage of Americans who believe the Federal Government is "very secretive" has doubled in the last two years alone (to 44%)'"
I have no idea what the truth is on this matter, but the fact that "nobody cares" is not refuted by "the percentage of Americans who believe the Federal Government is 'very secretive' has doubled... to 44%." Simply put, it's entirely possible more people believe the government is more secretive--but they simply don't care.
It's not in any way shocking to learn that people are apathetic. If you ask them whether they want a secretive government, most people will say no. But if you use an objective metric it's very easy to conclude that those same people really don't care that strongly one way or the other.
The summary chose a poor poll to quote, there were a number of better ones that actually back up Salon's argument
"By a 76-19 percent margin, American voters say the government should continue monitoring phone calls or e-mail between suspected terrorists in other countries and people in the U.S., according to a Quinnipiac University national poll released today. But voters say 55-42 percent that the government should get court orders for this surveillance."
and
"Red states, where President George W. Bush's margin was more than 5 percent in 2004, disagree 51 - 46 percent with the President that the government does not need warrants. Blue state voters who backed John Kerry by more than 5 percent want warrants 57 - 40 percent, the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University poll finds.
A total of 57 percent of voters are "extremely" or "quite" worried that phone and e-mail taps without warrants could be misused to violate people's privacy. But 54 percent believe these taps have prevented some acts of terror. "
Photovoltaic is already cheaper than a tie-in if you're far from the grid. There are people right now living off-grid with photovoltaic.
Not in Alberta, I'd also like to under what conditions people are living like off the grid using only photovoltaic.
I'm not arguing that there's no place for photovoltaic, there are many applications it's awesome for, and there are regions of the world where it probably can become a cost effective alternative with further development, but it's not there yet.
The cost of fossil fuels doesn't include the cost of global warming; the cost for fission doesn't include the cost of waste disposal as that's an unsolved problem.
Actually I think long term storage and decommissioning is included in the initial bill. As to it being an unsolved problem, yes it's an issue, but it's not the end of the world, radiation wise the really bad stuff also has a really short halflife so long term storage isn't an issue, as for the toxic waste we already deal with tons more toxic waste from other sources, it's just the radiation buzzword that scares people.
(Nor does it count the heavy, heavy government subsidies needed to get a plant built).
As opposed to the absolutely absurd subsidies that go toward photovoltaic? Besides most of the immense cost for Nuclear is due to licensing and absurd regulatory hurdles that come up due to anti-nuclear folks, you can cut out a ton of the regulatory cost without compromising safety in any significant manner.
All factors in account, photovoltaic does well. Yes, you need energy storage systems for cloudy days.
Cool, you know of a good energy storage system? My understanding is that batteries aren't really there (at least not economically).
Is there a reason you're against building new ones?
Nuclear waste, the environmental devastation of uranium mining, nuclear proliferation dangers, the terrorism dangers, the inherent dangers of operating a controlled chain reaction (no, even pebble bed reactors are not safe)
Is uranium mining any worse than any other kind of mining? Particularly since you don't need nearly as much uranium to fuel a nuclear plant as coal for a coal plant.
For terrorism countries generally try to secure their nuclear waste and none would ever give a bomb to terrorists. Yeah there's risks of terrorists/proliferation but I don't think they're significant.
As for safety I'm sorry, Nuclear reactors ARE safe, I'd feel MUCH safer living next to a Nuclear reactor than living next to a coal/gas/hydro plant or even a wind mill. The only major incident, Chernobyl, involved an improperly designed, built, and staffed reactor.
All that, and supply is very limited. At current usage rates, the world's known uranium supply will last less than a century - much less if usage grows. Yes, there may be technical solutions (reprocessing and breeding) to that, but 1) they're not here now, and 2) they all seem to end up going to thorium in the end.
Limited?! I'd love to see your source for that since only a serious distortion of the facts could support the statement that we'll be out of uranium within the century (and yes, I'm not using wikipedia as my only source).
Heavy deployment of fission-as-we-know-it is a band-aid, a stop-gap that gives a false sense of security that we can continue with the assumptions of cheap energy . Don't waste time and money on a half-assed temporary solution that pushes the problem off onto our grandkids (well, the grandkids of breeders), fix the problem right by reducing usage and developing clean sustainable sou
Cool, now which one of these renewables or fission reactors is actually in a state where we can start replacing coal plants on a large scale tomorrow?
Photovoltatics and wind are here now. Better energy efficiency is here now.
They are?. Photovoltaic are far too expensive, and wind is extremely intermittent and doesn't product much energy. Regardless if you want a stable power grid you can't really generate more than ~20% with either due to their intermittent nature, and for place that don't get much sun or wind they're really not an option.
Just look at Germany, pushing renewables as hard as they can, and having to build coal plants like crazy since the renewables can't keep up.
New fission plants, as TFA mentions, are years away.
I'd rather not sit on coal reactors for another 20 years waiting for some breakthrough instead of utilizing the pretty good solution in nuclear plants that we have right now.
Sure, use the ones we have now, might as well get the best use out of them. I'm against building new ones, I'm not arguing for shutting down the ones we have. (Of course, I do want very strict safety practices in the existing ones.)
Is there a reason you're against building new ones? The only legitimate reason I can think of is waste disposal, which is a serious issue but isn't nearly as bad as most people think.
The fact is the renewable tech just isn't there, it might be eventually but with global warming I don't think we have the time to wait for it.
Nuclear fission is a poor solution anyway. Inherent safety problems, limited fuel supply (on the order of a century or two at most, perhaps much less), security concerns (both weapons technology proliferation and terrorist targeting concerns), unsolved waste disposal problems - the only reason this gets the support it does is because the military-industrial complex loves nuclear technologies, and some technical types who grew up on science fiction have a romantic attachment to Harassing the Power of the Atom.
Looking at the numbers Nuclear is probably the safest large scale power generation technology we have. As for the limited fuel supply I've heard that this is actually a myth, particularly when you start including alternative fuels. The Nuclear waste does suck but is exaggerated quite a bit and isn't nearly as bad as it used to be.
We should be devoting our resources to efficiency, renewables (including orbital photovoltaic), accelerator-based thorium reactors, and fusion. Building new fission reactors is a distraction from the real solutions.
Cool, now which one of these renewables or fission reactors is actually in a state where we can start replacing coal plants on a large scale tomorrow? I'd rather not sit on coal reactors for another 20 years waiting for some breakthrough instead of utilizing the pretty good solution in nuclear plants that we have right now.
So.. it's less toxic than one of the world's most famous deadly poisons
That's really reassuring. It's also less toxic than mercury (it's toxicity is apparently pretty comparable to lead), just don't eat too many DU shell casings and I'm sure you'll be fine.
You do realize that legislators (such as U.S. Congressmen) are charged almost exclusively with making human arguments to human beings, and with carrying out the will of human beings, right? This guy isn't going to be working with clean, cold science and logic. He's going to be working with politicians and voters. A scientific mindset unused to making irrational arguments and expecting people to calmly accept good evidence is probably a handicap. I believe I mentioned that very issue. However I think the benefits of rational thought, even when dealing with an irrational system, outweigh the downsides. The major downfall of most politicians is gaffes, and the standard gaffe is a politician making two slightly contradictory arguments in different situations. Even the ones that are unjustified are enabled by the fact that the politician generally muddled the argument themselves in order to make a point that wasn't quite there. I believe that this is a product of irrational reasoning and it is extremely hard to avoid unless you think rationally. If he rigorously sticks to making rational arguments he should be able to avoid many of the gaffes that plague most politicians and make some good policy.
As to the making of arguments if he is a rational thinker he'll may have some trouble coming up with good 20 second soundbites for the news (as you usually have to bend facts for that) but as to the actual making of arguments I believe it would be a net benefit.
Will having a tech-savvy congressman change the game at all?
Why would a tech-savvy human being be any more useful or valid as a politician than an education-savvy human being? Or a law-savvy human being? Or an entertainment-industry human being? Or a war-savvy human being? Or a bureaucracy-savvy human being? Or a classical literature-savvy human being? Or a propaganda-savvy human being? Or a violent revolution-savvy human being?
Is there something special about technology, that sets tech-savvy humans apart from all the other kinds of humans when it comes to politics? Actually I think there is.
With all the other disciplines you mentioned you're working primarily with material generated by humans and judged by humans. You can make an illogical or irrational decision and still do well since you're working in an irrational environment.
With science or technology you can't make irrational arguments since your answers aren't judged by other human beings, they're judged by reality. A judge might let you make a certain argument that doesn't quite apply since it's fair, or might disallow a valid argument that does apply because it isn't fair. A program will never make a bug go away because it isn't fair, and no matter how hard you've worked at a theory it can still turn out to be completely and utterly wrong. I don't want to overgeneralize, but I believe this constant re-enforcement of reality does force scientists and programmers to think more rationally. Now some don't always apply rational thought outside of their local domains but my experience suggests that in general they are identifiably more analytical and rational with their arguments than other groups.
Of course that doesn't necessarily mean scientists and coders would make better legislators, after all government is explicitly dealing with people and thus is an irrational system, a rigorously rational thought process could very well lead to poor decisions (particularly from a political perspective). Moreover, I notice some people try to deal with this by constraining the domain into something more rational and thus end up generating a fairly extreme system based on this simplified reality (notice how many programmers are either very far to the left or right). However, I do feel that there is a definite difference in the decision making process, and applied properly I feel this could lead to better legislative decisions.
The iPod hasn't been out for 10 years. Stop trying to rewrite history. Surely the Apple name and Steve Jobs reality distortion field helped the portable players gain popular acceptance faster than they would have otherwise, but the technology was already on the market and improving, and the blatant advantage over cd players and tape decks would have become well known fairly quickly.
I wonder what the industry would look like today if Apple hadn't come on the scene, would the mp3 player industry still be as big?
Ya know, back in high school and my various science and math classes there were a lot of cases where I thought I was smarter than the teacher (heck, in a lot of cases I probably was), and thus every once in a while I would try to prove one of the teachers wrong. With one lonely exception you know how I would describe myself in those situations? Wrong.
When I started in high school calculus, my teacher accused me of cheating because I never showed any of my work. I did all of the problems in my head. I explained to her that I didn't show my work because writing it slowed me down and caused me to loose my train of thought. She actually stood over me on the following test while I proved my case. That test was completed 20 minutes before any other student and I had every answer correct. She had no problems with me just giving answers following that. I never felt the need to prove a teacher wrong, but she did (^_^) When she was absent, I was the teacher. The substitute didn't know what to do anyway, and the other students would ask me to teach the class. She later recommended me as a tutor for a friend of hers in college.
It doesn't matter if I was smarter than the teachers, compared to me they were experts in those areas and if we disagreed I was almost certainly the one in the wrong.
It sounds to me like you had a question about their teaching. Rather than pose it as a question, you challenged them with what appeared to you as an inconsistency. They elaborated, thus clarifying the conflict for you. I'm sure they didn't mind. They probably thought you were quite precocious and appreciated that you were paying attention. Asking questions is a good thing. It leads to finding and verifying answers. In my experience, global warmers shout you down and insist your questioning is heresy. That's not science, it's religion.
I was going more for the situation where a lay person believes they know more about a subject area than experts in that area, with very few exceptions those people are wrong (the school example wasn't perfect in that regard, particularly as I really didn't do that much arguing with teachers).
The problem I find with arguing about global warming is I don't have the years of training required to fully evaluate the evidence, however I have the experience to know that trusting the people who have done so (the climatologists) is the next best thing. Realistically I think there are only two real valid arguments that can be used against global warming
a) The premise that a significant majority of climatologists believe in global warming is false. b) There is an identifiable bias in the scientific process that would cause the majority of climatologists to reach a false conclusion.
Any argument based on the actual science is both beyond either of our abilities to fully evaluate (unless you have spent years doing actual climate research) and is assuming that countless, highly intelligent scientists, have all somehow missed that relatively simple evidence.
I'm sorry but scientists know CO2 isn't the biggest single factor in global warming.
I think you just agreed with me on point 3. It would seem we've found a middle ground (^_^)
Yeah, logic based on supporting evidence. It's a great thing. That's how real science works (^_^)
As I pointed out the evidence that a small and gradual amount of warming was a good thing isn't particularly strong evidence towards the conjecture that a sudden amount of large global warming will also be good.
You claim further warming is definitely bad Actually I didn't claim this, I claimed your evidence that further warming is good was flawed.
I strongly suspect that more global warming is bad (not the doomsday scenarios in movies or some media sources of course) and given the potential consequences I believe that it's highly prudent for us to take action to prevent it.
but even your cult leaders over at realclimate.org admit their point 4 is highly contentious. I'm not familiar with the nature of their uncertainty but personally long term I suspect that a higher global temperatures would probably a good thing. The problem is the transition period, particularly when changing rainfall patterns turn a lot of our best farmland into semi-arid areas/desserts and new areas with good rainfall can't produce the same crops yet. The fact is we're living fairly well with the climate in it's current condition, I'm not about to risk our current coastal regions and food supply on the chance that a significant and sudden alteration of the climate won't be a bad thing.
Btw, you keep accusing people of ad hominims and such and yet you refer to "your cult leaders over at realclimate.org".
This last one brings us to the ultimate death blow to the global warmers' argument. The warming we've experienced since the last glacial period has brought us grasslands, forests, jungles.... When the next glacial period comes, the planet will be covered mostly by icy tundra and extreme deserts again. Warming has only made this planet MORE habitable to us. I've got 12000 years of proof that warming is good. What do you have to the contrary? That's hilarious, so your "ultimate death blow to the global warmers' argument" is that since slow gradual warming has been good to us in the past rapid warming over the next century or so will also be good?
Gotta love that logic! "Hmm, you seem to feel a lot better after having that drink of water, how much better will you feel when I drop you in the middle of the Atlantic!"
Sure, and while I'm at it, why don't you ask the entire population of blue states in the north eastern US if they'd like to be buried under a mile of ice again any time soon. That has always puzzled me. The ones who have benefited the most are the ones complaining the loudest... Hey! Just like in the initial summary. Full circle, how about that!
Oh I follow, if we don't have massive global warming in the next century we'll have a massive ice age, that makes sense!
No one claims that every single scientist on the face of the earth agrees that humans are causing global warming, that's not what scientific consensus means.
Oh yes... I've discussed the scientific consensus once in this story already. As a matter of fact, this is the second time I've linked to it already.... It seems all you guys are able to say is "scientific consensus" like a bunch of flat-earthers.
Ya know, back in high school and my various science and math classes there were a lot of cases where I thought I was smarter than the teacher (heck, in a lot of cases I probably was), and thus every once in a while I would try to prove one of the teachers wrong. With one lonely exception you know how I would describe myself in those situations? Wrong.
It doesn't matter if I was smarter than the teachers, compared to me they were experts in those areas and if we disagreed I was almost certainly the one in the wrong.
Hey, everybody knows it's true, therefore it is!! That's called an appeal to belief and it doesn't make your argument any stronger. For the second time in two posts you're screwing up your logical fallacies since this isn't a popular belief, this is a belief held my climatologists. What you were probably looking for is appeal to authority, but again that wouldn't apply in this case because Climatologists actually ARE authorities on climate!
Seriously, if someone came up to you and said "pi is a transcendental number, a whole room full of math profs told me!" would you then turn around and say "that's an appeal to belief, that proves nothing!".
And looking at your other post. Do you honestly believe, that all those thousands of climatologists who have been studying global warming for years, that they're all so unbelievably stupid as to have overlooked those factors that you outlined in a/. post?!? I can just imagine,
Bill: Hey Fred, look at this slashdot post! Do you know we had an ice age with CO2 at 4400 ppm!
Fred: Damn Bill! I was just looking at that last week but I thought it only said 44 ppm... Well I guess that takes care of global warming, damn, I don't want to be the one to have to tell Gore.
I'm sorry but scientists know CO2 isn't the biggest single factor in global warming. They know that exact numbers are hard to determine, particularly over the course of a few years, that not every measuring station gives clean data, that we don't want to live in an ice age. They've written countless papers on these subjects and I have no reason to think they're making some massive systemic error.
I'd say the fact the entity making the claims about global warming is funded by an oil company is pretty damn relevant.
Right... that's what they all say when reproducing the experiments fails to verify that data you wanted us to ignore. Oh, you haven't reproduced the experiments? Wow, so you're saying their experiment is junk only because of who paid to have it done? Well then... classic ad hominem.
Huh? The link didn't say anything about experiments. It claimed there wasn't a scientific consensus, to support this conclusion it took statements from a half dozen scientists, some were from organizations like the Competitive Enterprise Institute (who gets a bunch of funding from oil companies), others were in Earth Sciences (who often work for oil companies), not climatology, and some of the other quotes looked like they may simply have been taken out of context.
No one claims that every single scientist on the face of the earth agrees that humans are causing global warming, that's not what scientific consensus means. What it does mean is you have a hard time finding scientists who disagree, and at least in this case when you do find them chances are pretty good the source of their paycheck serves as a potential bias.
As to the whole ad hominem thing, so far every bit of anti-global warming evidence I've seen, and followed up on, has been thoroughly debunked, and moreover its sources can almost always be traced back to oil companies. I think I can make a pretty good Bayesian argument that when someone comes running up saying "Look! This evidence disproves it for real!!" AND they're getting a paycheck from an oil company that their evidence is probably gonna be wrong again.
You are linking to a site that is funded by Exxon, in case you didn't know.
That's called an ad hominem attack, in case you didn't know.
From your link
"An Ad Hominem is a general category of fallacies in which a claim or argument is rejected on the basis of some irrelevant fact about the author of or the person presenting the claim or argument."
I'd say the fact the entity making the claims about global warming is funded by an oil company is pretty damn relevant.
it's very risky this type of defense. it might be seen that he's so smart, that maybe he KNEW he could use this kind of defense and planned on hiding out in the open so to speak.
The problem with that theory is virtually all the evidence against him is circumstantial evidence stemming from his bizarre behaviour. Perhaps he can downplay the effect of that evidence with a geek defence, but he would still have seemed far less guilty if he didn't act suspiciously in the first place.
also there is no body yet, so i don't understand how exactly they are mounting a murder case against him? for all they know this is all staged by his bitter russian bride in an attempt to get back at him, stranger things have happened. Normally people would consider the sneaking back to Russia theory to be a crazy conspiracy theory. However I'm beginning to wonder if the people involved are actually crazy enough that she would have done something like that. Russian brides, affairs with crazy cross-dressing and possible serial killer maids of honor, aspergers, Linux, maybe the defence is thinking that if everyone involved is completely bizarre and doing bizarre things than the jury might buy the theory that the wife did something as bizarre as framing him.
And that justifies piracy (or terrorism, or murder, or jihad, or anything) how? That's what I love about Islam, there is always a reason for their behavior. Hmm, you seem a little confused about what I'm saying
My original post stated that since the vast majority of violent Islamic extremists are Arabic, but the majority if Islamic people are not Arabic, this means that the violence is an Arabic thing, not an Islamic thing.
You replied with an example of Arabic violence and slavery, with a claimed religious motivation, from the late 1700's.
I noted that in the late 1700's the west was invading nations and taking slaves on religious grounds as well, and regardless religion is generally just an excuse.
Then you made your latest post which seemed to confuse the grievances from the 1700s with the much more modern grievances I was talking about.
Sure there's some older stuff, colonialism, crusades, but I think a lot of it comes from more recent stuff. The US helping overthrow the Iranian Prime Minister in the 1950s and their subsequent support for the Shah which eventually lead to the Iranian Revolution (a trap the US might hit again with Saudi Arabia). And of course Israel.
For Israel they went and kicked out the Arab population. taking all their houses and land. Then after the 6 day war instead of returning the lands they occupied (probably the single rule in international law) they decided to start colonizing the occupied territories.
Note even the US has always stated that Israel has to return ALL the occupied territories, of course it is primarily due to US support that Israel is able to keep occupying them.
The fact is that Arabs do have a lot of very legitimate reasons to be mad at the west, and the US in particular. I'm not claiming this makes their violence or support of terrorism remotely acceptable. Just that their violent disposition toward us is very much the result of our own actions. Claiming the hate us because Islam is a fundamentally violent religion just doesn't have much basis in fact, it's just trying to avoid our own responsibility by blaming it on something else.
Religion of peace, my ass. Mod me troll, I don't care. Facts are facts. True, facts are facts, and they don't agree with you.
My understanding is the Arabic tendency toward extremism is due to a lot of grievances against the west. It's really only after the Iraq invasion and other post 9/11 US actions that Muslim terrorism toward the west started spreading to non-Arabs
You're understanding is wrong:
From AMERICAN SPHINX The Character of Thomas Jefferson by Joseph J. Ellis
"Several muslim countries along the North African coast had established the tradition of plundering the ships of European and American merchants in the western Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic, capturing the crews and then demanding ransom from the respective governments for their release. In a joint message to their superiors in Congress, Adams and Jefferson described the audacity of these terrorist attacks, pirates leaping onto defenseless ships with daggers clenched in their teeth. They had asked the ambassador from Tripoli, Adams and Jefferson explained, on what grounds these outrageous acts of unbridled savagery could be justified: "The Ambassador answered us that it was founded on the laws of the prophet, that it was written in their koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their [islams] authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners...."
This event occured between 1784-1789 while Jefferson was ambassador to France and Adams (2nd president) was ambassador to England. Good point, because back then Americans and Europeans never attacked other people, nor took slaves, on religious grounds or by using religious justifications.
Just like security privacy isn't a binary state. Do I want everyone in the world to know my relationship status? Maybe not. If someone is really interested, pokes around, and finds out, do I really care? Maybe, though if it was non-private enough to let some people know than that nosey 3rd person probably had a bunch of other ways to find out anyway.
Cue a hundred replies claiming that Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance; and maybe it is - I wouldn't know, since I haven't read their holy book. All I know is that it certainly seems attract lots of bloodthirsty lunatics who use their religion as an excuse to live up to their murderous nature.
When looking at violence among Islamist extremists the relevant variable isn't Islam, its Arabic. Only about a quarter of Muslims are Arabic, but virtually all of the terrorists are Arabic. My understanding is the Arabic tendency toward extremism is due to a lot of grievances against the west. It's really only after the Iraq invasion and other post 9/11 US actions that Muslim terrorism toward the west started spreading to non-Arabs (from what I understand mostly because they started to believe that maybe the west was actually declaring war on Islam).
So your argument is that these people are getting Engineering, Software Development, Chemistry and other technical degrees are doing so to further their careers in terrorism? I really find that hard to believe, I find it much more likely that they realize terrorism doesn't pay the bills and they actually want a career too.
As to the disproportionate number of terrorists with technical degrees there's a far simpler explanation. Terrorists, at least the handful that make it to the west, are essentially loaners who happen to get reeled in by extremists. I recall an actual study I heard a while back. The basically found that the hard-code terrorists started as kids (not particularly religious) recruited when they went to University. For the most part they were from another country, or from a rural setting, and didn't know anybody when they moved to University. When looking for friends they ended up associating with extremist groups and thus started on the road to terrorism.
Additionally if you're looking at the tiny sample who actually try to launch attacks in the west you've also got to consider the ones with degrees are going to be the ones with the resources to actually move to western countries.
The best people in history have thrown all of their energy into their work, and produced works of genius.
Then they die, because they had nothing left.
Of course, middle management and morons live on. This is why humanity is doomed. Actually I think that's just the artsy ones. To the best of my knowledge top scientists don't really have particularly different life expectancies than average people, and while most of them tend to make their major contributions while relatively young a lot of that probably has to do with changing life/work balances and older brains as opposed to burnout. Famous creative people on the other hand probably do tend to die younger. This is likely due to the fact that people find crazy interesting, so crazy people tend to be more artistically famous, when coupled with the kind of attention artistic fame brings it's not surprising their mortality tends to kicks in a fair bit sooner.
...about domains being tasted by spammers etc. that then would try to sell them to you at inflated costs?
In some ways this is a lot better, so if I have an idea for a domain, go register it at NSI, get sidetracked, go back the next day, the domain would still be available and not stolen by somebody sniffing the whois traffic etc.
As long as network solutions is upfront with this practise I think it could definitely be spun as a positive vs a negative (check a domain here and you can be sure that you'll be able to register it for up to 5 days after, instead of risking it being stolen or held for ransom). Except if that is their intentions they're not doing it properly. After you perform the search they have a button "Add Domains To Order", that would signify the intention to purchase the domain, but NSI has already purchased it at that point. Or if they're actually concerned about sniffing packets they could taste it for only an hour or so until the user progresses further.
Here's a test, try searching for a domain from one IP, then try going through the purchase process from another IP. How much do you wanna bet that NSI is more than happy to sell the domain to the different IP? Heck if two different people both have accounts have them search a domain name with one then step through the purchase with another, even with two conclusively different entities I'm sure they'll be happy to take the sale. Note there's no reason a spammer couldn't sniff the domain you searched for, then purchase it from NSI. If NSI doesn't restrict the purchase to the person who made the search they've done absolutely nothing to stop sniffers from stealing domains.
Slashdot Mirror
For some random reason I was reading up on cryonics today and ran across a supportive quote from Clarke
"Although no one can quantify the probability of cryonics working, I estimate it is at least 90% -- and certainly nobody can say it is zero."
I didn't see any mention of cryonics in any coverage of his death so I assume he never followed through with it, but if he actually did maybe there's the hope that he's not gone forever and may be back again someday.
I have no idea what the truth is on this matter, but the fact that "nobody cares" is not refuted by "the percentage of Americans who believe the Federal Government is 'very secretive' has doubled... to 44%." Simply put, it's entirely possible more people believe the government is more secretive--but they simply don't care.
It's not in any way shocking to learn that people are apathetic. If you ask them whether they want a secretive government, most people will say no. But if you use an objective metric it's very easy to conclude that those same people really don't care that strongly one way or the other.
The summary chose a poor poll to quote, there were a number of better ones that actually back up Salon's argument"By a 76-19 percent margin, American voters say the government should continue monitoring phone calls or e-mail between suspected terrorists in other countries and people in the U.S., according to a Quinnipiac University national poll released today. But voters say 55-42 percent that the government should get court orders for this surveillance."
and
"Red states, where President George W. Bush's margin was more than 5 percent in 2004, disagree 51 - 46 percent with the President that the government does not need warrants. Blue state voters who backed John Kerry by more than 5 percent want warrants 57 - 40 percent, the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University poll finds.
A total of 57 percent of voters are "extremely" or "quite" worried that phone and e-mail taps without warrants could be misused to violate people's privacy. But 54 percent believe these taps have prevented some acts of terror. "
Photovoltaic is already cheaper than a tie-in if you're far from the grid. There are people right now living off-grid with photovoltaic.
Not in Alberta, I'd also like to under what conditions people are living like off the grid using only photovoltaic.
I'm not arguing that there's no place for photovoltaic, there are many applications it's awesome for, and there are regions of the world where it probably can become a cost effective alternative with further development, but it's not there yet.
The cost of fossil fuels doesn't include the cost of global warming; the cost for fission doesn't include the cost of waste disposal as that's an unsolved problem.
Actually I think long term storage and decommissioning is included in the initial bill. As to it being an unsolved problem, yes it's an issue, but it's not the end of the world, radiation wise the really bad stuff also has a really short halflife so long term storage isn't an issue, as for the toxic waste we already deal with tons more toxic waste from other sources, it's just the radiation buzzword that scares people.
(Nor does it count the heavy, heavy government subsidies needed to get a plant built).
As opposed to the absolutely absurd subsidies that go toward photovoltaic? Besides most of the immense cost for Nuclear is due to licensing and absurd regulatory hurdles that come up due to anti-nuclear folks, you can cut out a ton of the regulatory cost without compromising safety in any significant manner.
All factors in account, photovoltaic does well. Yes, you need energy storage systems for cloudy days.
Cool, you know of a good energy storage system? My understanding is that batteries aren't really there (at least not economically).
Is there a reason you're against building new ones?
Nuclear waste, the environmental devastation of uranium mining, nuclear proliferation dangers, the terrorism dangers, the inherent dangers of operating a controlled chain reaction (no, even pebble bed reactors are not safe)
Is uranium mining any worse than any other kind of mining? Particularly since you don't need nearly as much uranium to fuel a nuclear plant as coal for a coal plant.
For terrorism countries generally try to secure their nuclear waste and none would ever give a bomb to terrorists. Yeah there's risks of terrorists/proliferation but I don't think they're significant.
As for safety I'm sorry, Nuclear reactors ARE safe, I'd feel MUCH safer living next to a Nuclear reactor than living next to a coal/gas/hydro plant or even a wind mill. The only major incident, Chernobyl, involved an improperly designed, built, and staffed reactor.
All that, and supply is very limited. At current usage rates, the world's known uranium supply will last less than a century - much less if usage grows. Yes, there may be technical solutions (reprocessing and breeding) to that, but 1) they're not here now, and 2) they all seem to end up going to thorium in the end.
Limited?! I'd love to see your source for that since only a serious distortion of the facts could support the statement that we'll be out of uranium within the century (and yes, I'm not using wikipedia as my only source).
Heavy deployment of fission-as-we-know-it is a band-aid, a stop-gap that gives a false sense of security that we can continue with the assumptions of cheap energy . Don't waste time and money on a half-assed temporary solution that pushes the problem off onto our grandkids (well, the grandkids of breeders), fix the problem right by reducing usage and developing clean sustainable sou
Photovoltatics and wind are here now. Better energy efficiency is here now.
They are?. Photovoltaic are far too expensive, and wind is extremely intermittent and doesn't product much energy. Regardless if you want a stable power grid you can't really generate more than ~20% with either due to their intermittent nature, and for place that don't get much sun or wind they're really not an option.Just look at Germany, pushing renewables as hard as they can, and having to build coal plants like crazy since the renewables can't keep up.
New fission plants, as TFA mentions, are years away.
Sure, use the ones we have now, might as well get the best use out of them. I'm against building new ones, I'm not arguing for shutting down the ones we have. (Of course, I do want very strict safety practices in the existing ones.)
Is there a reason you're against building new ones? The only legitimate reason I can think of is waste disposal, which is a serious issue but isn't nearly as bad as most people think.The fact is the renewable tech just isn't there, it might be eventually but with global warming I don't think we have the time to wait for it.
Physically staying 27 until I die from something other then natural causes. Happy to oblige.
Can you post your birth date and address? I'll send you a special present a week before your 28th birthday.
Nuclear fission is a poor solution anyway. Inherent safety problems, limited fuel supply (on the order of a century or two at most, perhaps much less), security concerns (both weapons technology proliferation and terrorist targeting concerns), unsolved waste disposal problems - the only reason this gets the support it does is because the military-industrial complex loves nuclear technologies, and some technical types who grew up on science fiction have a romantic attachment to Harassing the Power of the Atom.
Looking at the numbers Nuclear is probably the safest large scale power generation technology we have. As for the limited fuel supply I've heard that this is actually a myth, particularly when you start including alternative fuels. The Nuclear waste does suck but is exaggerated quite a bit and isn't nearly as bad as it used to be.We should be devoting our resources to efficiency, renewables (including orbital photovoltaic), accelerator-based thorium reactors, and fusion. Building new fission reactors is a distraction from the real solutions.
Cool, now which one of these renewables or fission reactors is actually in a state where we can start replacing coal plants on a large scale tomorrow? I'd rather not sit on coal reactors for another 20 years waiting for some breakthrough instead of utilizing the pretty good solution in nuclear plants that we have right now.That's really reassuring. It's also less toxic than mercury (it's toxicity is apparently pretty comparable to lead), just don't eat too many DU shell casings and I'm sure you'll be fine.
As to the making of arguments if he is a rational thinker he'll may have some trouble coming up with good 20 second soundbites for the news (as you usually have to bend facts for that) but as to the actual making of arguments I believe it would be a net benefit.
Why would a tech-savvy human being be any more useful or valid as a politician than an education-savvy human being? Or a law-savvy human being? Or an entertainment-industry human being? Or a war-savvy human being? Or a bureaucracy-savvy human being? Or a classical literature-savvy human being? Or a propaganda-savvy human being? Or a violent revolution-savvy human being?
Is there something special about technology, that sets tech-savvy humans apart from all the other kinds of humans when it comes to politics? Actually I think there is.
With all the other disciplines you mentioned you're working primarily with material generated by humans and judged by humans. You can make an illogical or irrational decision and still do well since you're working in an irrational environment.
With science or technology you can't make irrational arguments since your answers aren't judged by other human beings, they're judged by reality. A judge might let you make a certain argument that doesn't quite apply since it's fair, or might disallow a valid argument that does apply because it isn't fair. A program will never make a bug go away because it isn't fair, and no matter how hard you've worked at a theory it can still turn out to be completely and utterly wrong. I don't want to overgeneralize, but I believe this constant re-enforcement of reality does force scientists and programmers to think more rationally. Now some don't always apply rational thought outside of their local domains but my experience suggests that in general they are identifiably more analytical and rational with their arguments than other groups.
Of course that doesn't necessarily mean scientists and coders would make better legislators, after all government is explicitly dealing with people and thus is an irrational system, a rigorously rational thought process could very well lead to poor decisions (particularly from a political perspective). Moreover, I notice some people try to deal with this by constraining the domain into something more rational and thus end up generating a fairly extreme system based on this simplified reality (notice how many programmers are either very far to the left or right). However, I do feel that there is a definite difference in the decision making process, and applied properly I feel this could lead to better legislative decisions.
I wonder what the industry would look like today if Apple hadn't come on the scene, would the mp3 player industry still be as big?
When I started in high school calculus, my teacher accused me of cheating because I never showed any of my work. I did all of the problems in my head. I explained to her that I didn't show my work because writing it slowed me down and caused me to loose my train of thought. She actually stood over me on the following test while I proved my case. That test was completed 20 minutes before any other student and I had every answer correct. She had no problems with me just giving answers following that. I never felt the need to prove a teacher wrong, but she did (^_^) When she was absent, I was the teacher. The substitute didn't know what to do anyway, and the other students would ask me to teach the class. She later recommended me as a tutor for a friend of hers in college.
It doesn't matter if I was smarter than the teachers, compared to me they were experts in those areas and if we disagreed I was almost certainly the one in the wrong.It sounds to me like you had a question about their teaching. Rather than pose it as a question, you challenged them with what appeared to you as an inconsistency. They elaborated, thus clarifying the conflict for you. I'm sure they didn't mind. They probably thought you were quite precocious and appreciated that you were paying attention. Asking questions is a good thing. It leads to finding and verifying answers. In my experience, global warmers shout you down and insist your questioning is heresy. That's not science, it's religion.
I was going more for the situation where a lay person believes they know more about a subject area than experts in that area, with very few exceptions those people are wrong (the school example wasn't perfect in that regard, particularly as I really didn't do that much arguing with teachers).The problem I find with arguing about global warming is I don't have the years of training required to fully evaluate the evidence, however I have the experience to know that trusting the people who have done so (the climatologists) is the next best thing. Realistically I think there are only two real valid arguments that can be used against global warming
a) The premise that a significant majority of climatologists believe in global warming is false.
b) There is an identifiable bias in the scientific process that would cause the majority of climatologists to reach a false conclusion.
Any argument based on the actual science is both beyond either of our abilities to fully evaluate (unless you have spent years doing actual climate research) and is assuming that countless, highly intelligent scientists, have all somehow missed that relatively simple evidence. I'm sorry but scientists know CO2 isn't the biggest single factor in global warming.
I think you just agreed with me on point 3. It would seem we've found a middle ground (^_^)
Small miraclesYeah, logic based on supporting evidence. It's a great thing. That's how real science works (^_^)
As I pointed out the evidence that a small and gradual amount of warming was a good thing isn't particularly strong evidence towards the conjecture that a sudden amount of large global warming will also be good. You claim further warming is definitely bad Actually I didn't claim this, I claimed your evidence that further warming is good was flawed.I strongly suspect that more global warming is bad (not the doomsday scenarios in movies or some media sources of course) and given the potential consequences I believe that it's highly prudent for us to take action to prevent it. but even your cult leaders over at realclimate.org admit their point 4 is highly contentious. I'm not familiar with the nature of their uncertainty but personally long term I suspect that a higher global temperatures would probably a good thing. The problem is the transition period, particularly when changing rainfall patterns turn a lot of our best farmland into semi-arid areas/desserts and new areas with good rainfall can't produce the same crops yet. The fact is we're living fairly well with the climate in it's current condition, I'm not about to risk our current coastal regions and food supply on the chance that a significant and sudden alteration of the climate won't be a bad thing.
Btw, you keep accusing people of ad hominims and such and yet you refer to "your cult leaders over at realclimate.org".
Gotta love that logic! "Hmm, you seem to feel a lot better after having that drink of water, how much better will you feel when I drop you in the middle of the Atlantic!"
Sure, and while I'm at it, why don't you ask the entire population of blue states in the north eastern US if they'd like to be buried under a mile of ice again any time soon. That has always puzzled me. The ones who have benefited the most are the ones complaining the loudest... Hey! Just like in the initial summary. Full circle, how about that!
Oh I follow, if we don't have massive global warming in the next century we'll have a massive ice age, that makes sense!Oh yes... I've discussed the scientific consensus once in this story already. As a matter of fact, this is the second time I've linked to it already.... It seems all you guys are able to say is "scientific consensus" like a bunch of flat-earthers.
Ya know, back in high school and my various science and math classes there were a lot of cases where I thought I was smarter than the teacher (heck, in a lot of cases I probably was), and thus every once in a while I would try to prove one of the teachers wrong. With one lonely exception you know how I would describe myself in those situations? Wrong.It doesn't matter if I was smarter than the teachers, compared to me they were experts in those areas and if we disagreed I was almost certainly the one in the wrong. Hey, everybody knows it's true, therefore it is!! That's called an appeal to belief and it doesn't make your argument any stronger. For the second time in two posts you're screwing up your logical fallacies since this isn't a popular belief, this is a belief held my climatologists. What you were probably looking for is appeal to authority, but again that wouldn't apply in this case because Climatologists actually ARE authorities on climate!
Seriously, if someone came up to you and said "pi is a transcendental number, a whole room full of math profs told me!" would you then turn around and say "that's an appeal to belief, that proves nothing!".
And looking at your other post. Do you honestly believe, that all those thousands of climatologists who have been studying global warming for years, that they're all so unbelievably stupid as to have overlooked those factors that you outlined in a
Bill: Hey Fred, look at this slashdot post! Do you know we had an ice age with CO2 at 4400 ppm!
Fred: Damn Bill! I was just looking at that last week but I thought it only said 44 ppm... Well I guess that takes care of global warming, damn, I don't want to be the one to have to tell Gore.
I'm sorry but scientists know CO2 isn't the biggest single factor in global warming. They know that exact numbers are hard to determine, particularly over the course of a few years, that not every measuring station gives clean data, that we don't want to live in an ice age. They've written countless papers on these subjects and I have no reason to think they're making some massive systemic error.
Right... that's what they all say when reproducing the experiments fails to verify that data you wanted us to ignore. Oh, you haven't reproduced the experiments? Wow, so you're saying their experiment is junk only because of who paid to have it done? Well then... classic ad hominem.
Huh? The link didn't say anything about experiments. It claimed there wasn't a scientific consensus, to support this conclusion it took statements from a half dozen scientists, some were from organizations like the Competitive Enterprise Institute (who gets a bunch of funding from oil companies), others were in Earth Sciences (who often work for oil companies), not climatology, and some of the other quotes looked like they may simply have been taken out of context.No one claims that every single scientist on the face of the earth agrees that humans are causing global warming, that's not what scientific consensus means. What it does mean is you have a hard time finding scientists who disagree, and at least in this case when you do find them chances are pretty good the source of their paycheck serves as a potential bias.
As to the whole ad hominem thing, so far every bit of anti-global warming evidence I've seen, and followed up on, has been thoroughly debunked, and moreover its sources can almost always be traced back to oil companies. I think I can make a pretty good Bayesian argument that when someone comes running up saying "Look! This evidence disproves it for real!!" AND they're getting a paycheck from an oil company that their evidence is probably gonna be wrong again.
That's called an ad hominem attack, in case you didn't know.
From your link"An Ad Hominem is a general category of fallacies in which a claim or argument is rejected on the basis of some irrelevant fact about the author of or the person presenting the claim or argument."
I'd say the fact the entity making the claims about global warming is funded by an oil company is pretty damn relevant.
The problem with that theory is virtually all the evidence against him is circumstantial evidence stemming from his bizarre behaviour. Perhaps he can downplay the effect of that evidence with a geek defence, but he would still have seemed far less guilty if he didn't act suspiciously in the first place. also there is no body yet, so i don't understand how exactly they are mounting a murder case against him? for all they know this is all staged by his bitter russian bride in an attempt to get back at him, stranger things have happened. Normally people would consider the sneaking back to Russia theory to be a crazy conspiracy theory. However I'm beginning to wonder if the people involved are actually crazy enough that she would have done something like that. Russian brides, affairs with crazy cross-dressing and possible serial killer maids of honor, aspergers, Linux, maybe the defence is thinking that if everyone involved is completely bizarre and doing bizarre things than the jury might buy the theory that the wife did something as bizarre as framing him.My original post stated that since the vast majority of violent Islamic extremists are Arabic, but the majority if Islamic people are not Arabic, this means that the violence is an Arabic thing, not an Islamic thing.
You replied with an example of Arabic violence and slavery, with a claimed religious motivation, from the late 1700's.
I noted that in the late 1700's the west was invading nations and taking slaves on religious grounds as well, and regardless religion is generally just an excuse.
Then you made your latest post which seemed to confuse the grievances from the 1700s with the much more modern grievances I was talking about.
Sure there's some older stuff, colonialism, crusades, but I think a lot of it comes from more recent stuff. The US helping overthrow the Iranian Prime Minister in the 1950s and their subsequent support for the Shah which eventually lead to the Iranian Revolution (a trap the US might hit again with Saudi Arabia). And of course Israel.
For Israel they went and kicked out the Arab population. taking all their houses and land. Then after the 6 day war instead of returning the lands they occupied (probably the single rule in international law) they decided to start colonizing the occupied territories.
Note even the US has always stated that Israel has to return ALL the occupied territories, of course it is primarily due to US support that Israel is able to keep occupying them.
The fact is that Arabs do have a lot of very legitimate reasons to be mad at the west, and the US in particular. I'm not claiming this makes their violence or support of terrorism remotely acceptable. Just that their violent disposition toward us is very much the result of our own actions. Claiming the hate us because Islam is a fundamentally violent religion just doesn't have much basis in fact, it's just trying to avoid our own responsibility by blaming it on something else. Religion of peace, my ass. Mod me troll, I don't care. Facts are facts. True, facts are facts, and they don't agree with you.
You're understanding is wrong:
From AMERICAN SPHINX The Character of Thomas Jefferson by Joseph J. Ellis
"Several muslim countries along the North African coast had established the tradition of plundering the ships of European and American merchants in the western Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic, capturing the crews and then demanding ransom from the respective governments for their release. In a joint message to their superiors in Congress, Adams and Jefferson described the audacity of these terrorist attacks, pirates leaping onto defenseless ships with daggers clenched in their teeth. They had asked the ambassador from Tripoli, Adams and Jefferson explained, on what grounds these outrageous acts of unbridled savagery could be justified: "The Ambassador answered us that it was founded on the laws of the prophet, that it was written in their koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their [islams] authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners...."
This event occured between 1784-1789 while Jefferson was ambassador to France and Adams (2nd president) was ambassador to England. Good point, because back then Americans and Europeans never attacked other people, nor took slaves, on religious grounds or by using religious justifications.
Just like security privacy isn't a binary state. Do I want everyone in the world to know my relationship status? Maybe not. If someone is really interested, pokes around, and finds out, do I really care? Maybe, though if it was non-private enough to let some people know than that nosey 3rd person probably had a bunch of other ways to find out anyway.
Cue a hundred replies claiming that Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance; and maybe it is - I wouldn't know, since I haven't read their holy book. All I know is that it certainly seems attract lots of bloodthirsty lunatics who use their religion as an excuse to live up to their murderous nature.
When looking at violence among Islamist extremists the relevant variable isn't Islam, its Arabic. Only about a quarter of Muslims are Arabic, but virtually all of the terrorists are Arabic. My understanding is the Arabic tendency toward extremism is due to a lot of grievances against the west. It's really only after the Iraq invasion and other post 9/11 US actions that Muslim terrorism toward the west started spreading to non-Arabs (from what I understand mostly because they started to believe that maybe the west was actually declaring war on Islam).So your argument is that these people are getting Engineering, Software Development, Chemistry and other technical degrees are doing so to further their careers in terrorism? I really find that hard to believe, I find it much more likely that they realize terrorism doesn't pay the bills and they actually want a career too.
As to the disproportionate number of terrorists with technical degrees there's a far simpler explanation. Terrorists, at least the handful that make it to the west, are essentially loaners who happen to get reeled in by extremists. I recall an actual study I heard a while back. The basically found that the hard-code terrorists started as kids (not particularly religious) recruited when they went to University. For the most part they were from another country, or from a rural setting, and didn't know anybody when they moved to University. When looking for friends they ended up associating with extremist groups and thus started on the road to terrorism.
Additionally if you're looking at the tiny sample who actually try to launch attacks in the west you've also got to consider the ones with degrees are going to be the ones with the resources to actually move to western countries.
Then they die, because they had nothing left.
Of course, middle management and morons live on. This is why humanity is doomed. Actually I think that's just the artsy ones. To the best of my knowledge top scientists don't really have particularly different life expectancies than average people, and while most of them tend to make their major contributions while relatively young a lot of that probably has to do with changing life/work balances and older brains as opposed to burnout. Famous creative people on the other hand probably do tend to die younger. This is likely due to the fact that people find crazy interesting, so crazy people tend to be more artistically famous, when coupled with the kind of attention artistic fame brings it's not surprising their mortality tends to kicks in a fair bit sooner.
...about domains being tasted by spammers etc. that then would try to sell them to you at inflated costs?In some ways this is a lot better, so if I have an idea for a domain, go register it at NSI, get sidetracked, go back the next day, the domain would still be available and not stolen by somebody sniffing the whois traffic etc.
As long as network solutions is upfront with this practise I think it could definitely be spun as a positive vs a negative (check a domain here and you can be sure that you'll be able to register it for up to 5 days after, instead of risking it being stolen or held for ransom). Except if that is their intentions they're not doing it properly. After you perform the search they have a button "Add Domains To Order", that would signify the intention to purchase the domain, but NSI has already purchased it at that point. Or if they're actually concerned about sniffing packets they could taste it for only an hour or so until the user progresses further.
Here's a test, try searching for a domain from one IP, then try going through the purchase process from another IP. How much do you wanna bet that NSI is more than happy to sell the domain to the different IP? Heck if two different people both have accounts have them search a domain name with one then step through the purchase with another, even with two conclusively different entities I'm sure they'll be happy to take the sale. Note there's no reason a spammer couldn't sniff the domain you searched for, then purchase it from NSI. If NSI doesn't restrict the purchase to the person who made the search they've done absolutely nothing to stop sniffers from stealing domains.