Prison life is racist. It's not very politically correct but, from what I've read real prison rape is most often multiracial with whites most often on the receiving end. Rape is not as common in US prisons as it once was, but it still happens from time to time. I'm just reporting what I read from real prisoners. It may be unpleasant, but the rapists in US prisons are usually black (who are usually the largest racial group anyway) and the victims are almost never black themselves. I've read that it's partly a racial revenge kind of thing. In prison movies you often see whites raping other whites, but I've read that it doesn't happen nearly as much in real life. I personally wouldn't care whether my rapist was black or white or hispanic. I'd do my best to kill him regardless of his skin color. I just mentioned the race issue because from what I've read it is a more realistic scenario. Well except for the gang thing. Presumably it would be just one guy.
So you want to convict people of just thinking about terrorism? You do realize that the definition of "terrorism" is going to continue to expand? Eventually it will include some activity that you think about.
Perhaps the fact that it is considered a crime is the point. We have so few actual terrorists that we need to start arresting people who merely fantasize about it. Whatever happened to "sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me."
Frankly I'm not sure we should be letting them pass laws at all. They've already proven they can't be trusted with such power. I think it's about time they were punished by only allowing them to repeal laws. After a decade maybe we can give them another chance to not act like a bunch of corrupt mentally retarded fascist fucks. If they abuse their law passing privileges again we make them only repeal laws for 2 decades the next time. If they abuse them again then their job titles will be permanently changed from law passers to law repealers.
It's not just about laws though. It's about the abuse of laws. About the character of law enforcement people. The US has some of the most violent and just plain evil LEOs in the world. I've heard that Russian police are also pretty bad, but there aren't many places where the people making use of the laws are quite so angry and sadistic. WWII Germany perhaps? Regardless of the paper laws the US feels like one of the least free countries I have ever lived in. I think it has something to do with our anti-intellectual culture which worships stupidity and violence.
Did you read the whole summary? It mentions that the FBI wants all communications on the internet to be redesigned to allow them to listen in more easily.
Your UID implies you are female. Women's prisons are like country clubs compared to men's prisons in the US. So it's easy for you to say. Nevertheless I quite seriously would rather die than cooperate with the FBI in any way whatsoever. I would definitely go to prison before doing so. Even if it meant getting assraped by a gang of huge black guys. The FBI and American law enforcement in general is the purest form of evil. Grown up school yard bullies with the brains of a retarded monkey but with Glocks, assault rifles, shotguns, tasers, pepper spray, bulletproof vests, and an irresistible urge to beat, torture, and humiliate people, and lock up everyone in cages.
Late 20th century Democrats believed in keeping the government out of our personal lives while allowing them to control our bank accounts. New Democrats believe in allowing the government to control both our personal lives and our bank accounts. At least they are consistent now.
Late 20th century Republicans believed in keeping the government out of our bank accounts while allowing them to control our personal lives in nearly every way. New Republicans believe in allowing the government to control both our personal lives and our bank accounts. At least they are consistent now.
The founders of our country were definitely Libertarians and the republic they dreamed up was a Libertarian one. Still, I have to wonder if, even then, Libertarians were a minority. It takes quite a lot of thinking to be a Libertarian or a Socialist. To believe in any non-dominant political philosophy requires too much thinking for most people. And people want to feel like they belong. So people with Democrat parents tend to be Democrats and people with Republican parents tend to be Republicans.
Well technically I believe they only disproved one particular 'implementation' of an aether. It could still exist in a way that is currently beyond our ability to detect. The idea of a wave that propagates without a medium has always bothered me. It's what all the evidence indicates, but it would be awfully nice if one day we do find that there is some kind of medium after all.
Exactly. If the government wants to 'do something' they could start by making the cockpit doors even stronger and more impenetrable.. I'd rather they throw their money at that than at hiring more pedo child molesters to rape, grope, and peep. When part of the job description is "finger fucking 5 year old Sally and exploring little Johnny's butt crack and balls" it's pretty easy to predict what kind of sick fucks you are going to be hiring for the job.
The government could also work on making better explosive detection machines. Not imagers, which are an inherently bad idea, but actual chemical detectors that are effective. Or they could just use Sulimov dogs trained to sniff explosives and only explosives.
The puffer machines were actually a good idea. Targeted at the only thing that really takes down airplanes: high explosives. The only problem was that they didn't work. That doesn't mean you have to give up on the whole idea of explosive detection though.
Secure cockpit doors, old fashioned metal detectors and Sulimov dogs are all the security necessary. You could replace the dogs with machines if anyone ever invents an effective one. Dogs are probably more cost effective than million dollar mass spectrometers, but, among other problems, many people are allergic to them. Robot dogs with built-in mass spectrometers might be a good alternative though.
And a naturally-occurring disease like Ebola could get into a major international airport and have much the same effect?
We now have a pretty effective Ebola vaccine and even before the vaccine the virus just wasn't all that contagious. People sick with the disease have traveled in crowded cities and crowded aircraft without a single recorded case of transmission.
Ebola is a very nasty disease if you haven't had the vaccine and certain varieties have very high mortality rates, but all of the outbreaks have been self-limiting and there haven't been any confirmed cases of airborne transmission of any of the strains that affect humans.
Smallpox would be make a very nasty weapon, but remember that humanity has dealt with the disease before. It did not wipe out our species. And because it only affects human beings it is vulnerable to mass vaccination programs. We killed it off once. We may be able to do so again.
Actually nuclear winter is far from proven. Your own wiki link talks about all the conflicting computer models. One computer model assumption would result in a nuclear winter. Another would result in only very temporary local cooling only at the bomb sites. The actual bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as evidence from nuclear tests seem to indicate that the climate effects would not be so severe.
With enough ICBMs you could target every major city in the world and reduce the earth's population by 80 or 90 percent, but whether you would wipe out humanity is far from certain. People living in remote areas would probably survive. And would anyone bother to bomb Africa or Australia or Indonesia?
Of course the effects from the fallout on a global scale are hard to predict. There's really only one way to find out. You have to try it. No doubt many people would die from the indirect effects of the radioactive material.
There extensions that revert the current Firefox version to the 3.6.28 UI? I'm quite happy with FF 3.6.28 for now, but they haven't stopped supporting it yet.
I'm guessing that you were not alive in the 70s or 80s or you would not be claiming that. People were well aware that smoking and lung cancer were related in the 1970s. The problem in the 70s was that we were all so worried about the coming ice age that we had to smoke. I distinctly remember being afraid of the coming ice age as a child. Just as children today learn to be afraid of the oceans boiling or whatever. I guess the difference is that everyone was really stupid back then and everyone is highly intelligent now. No one would ever believe in an unproven theory today. It would be impossible. People are just too damned smart.
I have found that many AGW-ists attempt to deny the idea of peak oil. Probably because if we do run out of oil or oil becomes too expensive to be a practical fuel for most things AGW won't have time to do its thing. We've warmed a fraction of a degree since the 19th century. Maybe the planet will warm another degree or two in the next century, but by that time we will have stopped burning petrol because it is too expensive. We'll have coal for a while longer, but it's not very practical to run a motor vehicle on coal. So most cars will have to be electric. The only practical fossil fuels will be coal and maybe natural gas or propane and those will be used up even faster because it's all we will have. So CO2 production will slow and by the time coal and natural gas become too expensive we'll have to either go 100% nuclear-electric or go back to horses. That is of course assuming that some 22nd or 23rd century invention doesn't make fossil fuels seem ridiculously primitive. If we haven't invented our way out of the problem by the 25th century when we start running out of nuclear fuel then we will really be fucked, but the few extra degrees of warmth and the extra foot of sea level will be the least of our worries and in any case the "problem", primarily for the fat cats who own oceanfront homes, will be temporary and self-limiting.
So it's sort of like Pascal's Wager then? Do you also believe in God for the same reason? If you disbelieve in him and he is real you will be punished for all of eternity. If you disbelieve in him and he is not real nothing happens. So it's better to bet on him being real. That sort of thing?
It's funny. The last time I was in school (in the early 90s) AGW was treated as an unproven, controversial, hypothesis. Nothing has really changed since then in terms of the evidence, but beliefs have definitely changed. Even my meteorology professor didn't believe in AGW. He didn't disbelieve it either, but he felt the evidence wasn't in. If you want something to be universally accepted as true, just teach it in schools and fail anyone who does not accept it as true.
The question is: Why do you reject basic scientific facts?
What scientific facts? And please be specific. I can present direct evidence that the earth is spherical. You can verify it for yourself. Can you present direct evidence of AGW? Not only that CO2 concentrations have risen by a tiny amount or that temperatures have risen, then fallen, then risen again based on unreliable temperature data, but also that these trends were in fact caused by combustion?
If you want to talk science then you are talking about experiments and experimental data. And, no, computer simulations are not the same thing as data. I assume that most of us here have programming experience and are familiar with Garbage In Garbage Out. A computer program cannot create evidence for anything. It just does what the programmer asks it to do. You can adjust a computer program to tell you whatever you want it to tell you. If it doesn't say what you want it to say then it is a "bug". For a real simulation the computer program would have to be nearly as complex as the earth itself. And it would be extremely difficult to verify that it was working correctly anyway, making it somewhat useless.
Yes, replacing coal with fission and (eventually) fusion would have an up-front cost, but fission has a much lower cost per watt than coal AND doesn't have a negative impact on other industries, so in net you'd actually save money.
Bullshit. Can you cite even one part of the world in which nuclear generated electricity costs less than coal generated electricity? In every example that I can think of nuclear generated electricity is far, far more expensive than coal generated electricity. We are talking like 6 cents per kwh compared to 18 cents. So I guess it's not that bad. Nuclear is only 3 times more expensive than coal. Oh wait. We haven't factored in nuclear waste disposal costs and the inevitable disaster cleanup. Fukushima-like disasters are inevitable. They will always be with us. I don't see that as a reason to avoid nuclear power, but pretending that it is not a cost is just silly. It is an additional cost to nuclear generated electricity and that needs to be accepted. So nuclear electricity is far more expensive and it's only "clean" in the sense that Chernobyl is "clean".
It won't eliminate cars, but you could easily achieve 20% of current CO2 production without breaking into a sweat. And you would again have very little cost and might even make a profit.
Any evidence for that?
The real question is how do you plan to stop people from burning stuff or driving cars or flying private planes? How much do you plan to invest in new prisons to keep them? I suspect that the war against combustion will be about as successful as the war against drugs. Well, unless you want a worldwide police state and even if you do that will also be very expensive and all the helicopters and patrol planes and drones will burn a lot of fuel.
Did you find those definitions in a dictionary or did you just pull them out of your ass? Any skeptic can be called a denier by someone who believes. If you believe there is only one true god, then polytheists and atheists are 'deniers'. It has nothing to do with "facts". In fact none of this discussion has anything to do with facts. If it did you'd actually see them discussed. The problem is that the true believers do not actually know the science themselves. They don't have the raw data at their fingertips. Nor can they cite it. If asked for a citation they present a link to the thoughts of another true believer. Again no unbiased, raw data is presented.
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Have they tried Scrabble tiles?
Prison life is racist. It's not very politically correct but, from what I've read real prison rape is most often multiracial with whites most often on the receiving end. Rape is not as common in US prisons as it once was, but it still happens from time to time. I'm just reporting what I read from real prisoners. It may be unpleasant, but the rapists in US prisons are usually black (who are usually the largest racial group anyway) and the victims are almost never black themselves. I've read that it's partly a racial revenge kind of thing. In prison movies you often see whites raping other whites, but I've read that it doesn't happen nearly as much in real life. I personally wouldn't care whether my rapist was black or white or hispanic. I'd do my best to kill him regardless of his skin color. I just mentioned the race issue because from what I've read it is a more realistic scenario. Well except for the gang thing. Presumably it would be just one guy.
So you want to convict people of just thinking about terrorism? You do realize that the definition of "terrorism" is going to continue to expand? Eventually it will include some activity that you think about.
Perhaps the fact that it is considered a crime is the point. We have so few actual terrorists that we need to start arresting people who merely fantasize about it. Whatever happened to "sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me."
Frankly I'm not sure we should be letting them pass laws at all. They've already proven they can't be trusted with such power. I think it's about time they were punished by only allowing them to repeal laws. After a decade maybe we can give them another chance to not act like a bunch of corrupt mentally retarded fascist fucks. If they abuse their law passing privileges again we make them only repeal laws for 2 decades the next time. If they abuse them again then their job titles will be permanently changed from law passers to law repealers.
It's not just about laws though. It's about the abuse of laws. About the character of law enforcement people. The US has some of the most violent and just plain evil LEOs in the world. I've heard that Russian police are also pretty bad, but there aren't many places where the people making use of the laws are quite so angry and sadistic. WWII Germany perhaps? Regardless of the paper laws the US feels like one of the least free countries I have ever lived in. I think it has something to do with our anti-intellectual culture which worships stupidity and violence.
Did you read the whole summary? It mentions that the FBI wants all communications on the internet to be redesigned to allow them to listen in more easily.
Your UID implies you are female. Women's prisons are like country clubs compared to men's prisons in the US. So it's easy for you to say. Nevertheless I quite seriously would rather die than cooperate with the FBI in any way whatsoever. I would definitely go to prison before doing so. Even if it meant getting assraped by a gang of huge black guys. The FBI and American law enforcement in general is the purest form of evil. Grown up school yard bullies with the brains of a retarded monkey but with Glocks, assault rifles, shotguns, tasers, pepper spray, bulletproof vests, and an irresistible urge to beat, torture, and humiliate people, and lock up everyone in cages.
Late 20th century Democrats believed in keeping the government out of our personal lives while allowing them to control our bank accounts. New Democrats believe in allowing the government to control both our personal lives and our bank accounts. At least they are consistent now.
Late 20th century Republicans believed in keeping the government out of our bank accounts while allowing them to control our personal lives in nearly every way. New Republicans believe in allowing the government to control both our personal lives and our bank accounts. At least they are consistent now.
The founders of our country were definitely Libertarians and the republic they dreamed up was a Libertarian one. Still, I have to wonder if, even then, Libertarians were a minority. It takes quite a lot of thinking to be a Libertarian or a Socialist. To believe in any non-dominant political philosophy requires too much thinking for most people. And people want to feel like they belong. So people with Democrat parents tend to be Democrats and people with Republican parents tend to be Republicans.
Well technically I believe they only disproved one particular 'implementation' of an aether. It could still exist in a way that is currently beyond our ability to detect. The idea of a wave that propagates without a medium has always bothered me. It's what all the evidence indicates, but it would be awfully nice if one day we do find that there is some kind of medium after all.
Exactly. If the government wants to 'do something' they could start by making the cockpit doors even stronger and more impenetrable.. I'd rather they throw their money at that than at hiring more pedo child molesters to rape, grope, and peep. When part of the job description is "finger fucking 5 year old Sally and exploring little Johnny's butt crack and balls" it's pretty easy to predict what kind of sick fucks you are going to be hiring for the job.
The government could also work on making better explosive detection machines. Not imagers, which are an inherently bad idea, but actual chemical detectors that are effective. Or they could just use Sulimov dogs trained to sniff explosives and only explosives.
The puffer machines were actually a good idea. Targeted at the only thing that really takes down airplanes: high explosives. The only problem was that they didn't work. That doesn't mean you have to give up on the whole idea of explosive detection though.
Secure cockpit doors, old fashioned metal detectors and Sulimov dogs are all the security necessary. You could replace the dogs with machines if anyone ever invents an effective one. Dogs are probably more cost effective than million dollar mass spectrometers, but, among other problems, many people are allergic to them. Robot dogs with built-in mass spectrometers might be a good alternative though.
To be fair, the attack on Afghanistan had nothing to do with WMDs.
What people are you talking about?
Actually, as an atheist I'd like to think of myself as a heretic as well.
And a naturally-occurring disease like Ebola could get into a major international airport and have much the same effect?
We now have a pretty effective Ebola vaccine and even before the vaccine the virus just wasn't all that contagious. People sick with the disease have traveled in crowded cities and crowded aircraft without a single recorded case of transmission.
Ebola is a very nasty disease if you haven't had the vaccine and certain varieties have very high mortality rates, but all of the outbreaks have been self-limiting and there haven't been any confirmed cases of airborne transmission of any of the strains that affect humans.
Smallpox would be make a very nasty weapon, but remember that humanity has dealt with the disease before. It did not wipe out our species. And because it only affects human beings it is vulnerable to mass vaccination programs. We killed it off once. We may be able to do so again.
Actually nuclear winter is far from proven. Your own wiki link talks about all the conflicting computer models. One computer model assumption would result in a nuclear winter. Another would result in only very temporary local cooling only at the bomb sites. The actual bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as evidence from nuclear tests seem to indicate that the climate effects would not be so severe.
With enough ICBMs you could target every major city in the world and reduce the earth's population by 80 or 90 percent, but whether you would wipe out humanity is far from certain. People living in remote areas would probably survive. And would anyone bother to bomb Africa or Australia or Indonesia?
Of course the effects from the fallout on a global scale are hard to predict. There's really only one way to find out. You have to try it. No doubt many people would die from the indirect effects of the radioactive material.
There extensions that revert the current Firefox version to the 3.6.28 UI? I'm quite happy with FF 3.6.28 for now, but they haven't stopped supporting it yet.
I'm guessing that you were not alive in the 70s or 80s or you would not be claiming that. People were well aware that smoking and lung cancer were related in the 1970s. The problem in the 70s was that we were all so worried about the coming ice age that we had to smoke. I distinctly remember being afraid of the coming ice age as a child. Just as children today learn to be afraid of the oceans boiling or whatever. I guess the difference is that everyone was really stupid back then and everyone is highly intelligent now. No one would ever believe in an unproven theory today. It would be impossible. People are just too damned smart.
I have found that many AGW-ists attempt to deny the idea of peak oil. Probably because if we do run out of oil or oil becomes too expensive to be a practical fuel for most things AGW won't have time to do its thing. We've warmed a fraction of a degree since the 19th century. Maybe the planet will warm another degree or two in the next century, but by that time we will have stopped burning petrol because it is too expensive. We'll have coal for a while longer, but it's not very practical to run a motor vehicle on coal. So most cars will have to be electric. The only practical fossil fuels will be coal and maybe natural gas or propane and those will be used up even faster because it's all we will have. So CO2 production will slow and by the time coal and natural gas become too expensive we'll have to either go 100% nuclear-electric or go back to horses. That is of course assuming that some 22nd or 23rd century invention doesn't make fossil fuels seem ridiculously primitive. If we haven't invented our way out of the problem by the 25th century when we start running out of nuclear fuel then we will really be fucked, but the few extra degrees of warmth and the extra foot of sea level will be the least of our worries and in any case the "problem", primarily for the fat cats who own oceanfront homes, will be temporary and self-limiting.
So the earth's atmosphere is always at 100% relative humidity such that moisture cannot be added?
So it's sort of like Pascal's Wager then? Do you also believe in God for the same reason? If you disbelieve in him and he is real you will be punished for all of eternity. If you disbelieve in him and he is not real nothing happens. So it's better to bet on him being real. That sort of thing?
It's funny. The last time I was in school (in the early 90s) AGW was treated as an unproven, controversial, hypothesis. Nothing has really changed since then in terms of the evidence, but beliefs have definitely changed. Even my meteorology professor didn't believe in AGW. He didn't disbelieve it either, but he felt the evidence wasn't in. If you want something to be universally accepted as true, just teach it in schools and fail anyone who does not accept it as true.
The question is: Why do you reject basic scientific facts?
What scientific facts? And please be specific. I can present direct evidence that the earth is spherical. You can verify it for yourself. Can you present direct evidence of AGW? Not only that CO2 concentrations have risen by a tiny amount or that temperatures have risen, then fallen, then risen again based on unreliable temperature data, but also that these trends were in fact caused by combustion?
If you want to talk science then you are talking about experiments and experimental data. And, no, computer simulations are not the same thing as data. I assume that most of us here have programming experience and are familiar with Garbage In Garbage Out. A computer program cannot create evidence for anything. It just does what the programmer asks it to do. You can adjust a computer program to tell you whatever you want it to tell you. If it doesn't say what you want it to say then it is a "bug". For a real simulation the computer program would have to be nearly as complex as the earth itself. And it would be extremely difficult to verify that it was working correctly anyway, making it somewhat useless.
Yes, replacing coal with fission and (eventually) fusion would have an up-front cost, but fission has a much lower cost per watt than coal AND doesn't have a negative impact on other industries, so in net you'd actually save money.
Bullshit. Can you cite even one part of the world in which nuclear generated electricity costs less than coal generated electricity? In every example that I can think of nuclear generated electricity is far, far more expensive than coal generated electricity. We are talking like 6 cents per kwh compared to 18 cents. So I guess it's not that bad. Nuclear is only 3 times more expensive than coal. Oh wait. We haven't factored in nuclear waste disposal costs and the inevitable disaster cleanup. Fukushima-like disasters are inevitable. They will always be with us. I don't see that as a reason to avoid nuclear power, but pretending that it is not a cost is just silly. It is an additional cost to nuclear generated electricity and that needs to be accepted. So nuclear electricity is far more expensive and it's only "clean" in the sense that Chernobyl is "clean".
It won't eliminate cars, but you could easily achieve 20% of current CO2 production without breaking into a sweat. And you would again have very little cost and might even make a profit.
Any evidence for that?
The real question is how do you plan to stop people from burning stuff or driving cars or flying private planes? How much do you plan to invest in new prisons to keep them? I suspect that the war against combustion will be about as successful as the war against drugs. Well, unless you want a worldwide police state and even if you do that will also be very expensive and all the helicopters and patrol planes and drones will burn a lot of fuel.
Did you find those definitions in a dictionary or did you just pull them out of your ass? Any skeptic can be called a denier by someone who believes. If you believe there is only one true god, then polytheists and atheists are 'deniers'. It has nothing to do with "facts". In fact none of this discussion has anything to do with facts. If it did you'd actually see them discussed. The problem is that the true believers do not actually know the science themselves. They don't have the raw data at their fingertips. Nor can they cite it. If asked for a citation they present a link to the thoughts of another true believer. Again no unbiased, raw data is presented.