The point is not that Obama is innocent, but rather that he is guilty because of the way the system works
I have not noticed him speaking out against that system so, sorry, but that means he either tacitly agrees with it or has given up any hope of trying to fix it and decided to accept it. Either way this makes him part of the problem and, I would argue, as guilty as the rest. This seems to be the achilles heal of US government - their founding fathers set up a fantastic system at the time but they were too worried about mob rule and put so many checks and balances in that the system is extremely inflexible and unable to adapt quickly enough to changing circumstances like most other modern democracies.
Still I suppose that is how things usually work - the first to invent/implement something has the advantage of being first but those who follow end up with a better design by benefitting the existing experience.
That's an excellent idea - and an excellent use of modern technology to literally let the people monitor their government since the press seem to have completely fallen down on the job! The only significant flaw would be ensuring that the whole meeting is recorded and that there are no out-of-band communications (e.g. the prior emails and messages to set it up) to prevent promises of cash/holidays/jobs away from public scrutiny. So sadly I think in practice it would be unworkable - but I like the intent!
When you write a letter to your congressman, that's lobbying.
....but when you include cash, fancy holidays, job offers etc. with it (as many lobbyists worldwide do) that's bribery and the only reason it isn't illegal is because it directly benefits those passing the laws.
It's usually OK to make a sizable donation to a candidate and give them a wink, wink nudge, nudge about what you want.
True but this should not be ok any more that it should be ok for lawyers to make sizeable donations to jurors in a court case and then give them a wink, wink, nudge, nudge about the verdict they should return. In both circumstances evidence and verbal arguments should be the only means of persuasion allowed. I'm not suggesting that lobbying should become as restricted and formalized as a court but some basic, ethical ground rules need to be enforced.
Actually I would argue that JUST lobbying is fine i.e. putting an argument to a politician that a law should be changed. It's when the lobbying involves large amounts of cash, fancy holidays and expensive gifts that it stops being lobbying and becomes bribery.
if they are having a problem with recruiting that happens to be discrimination-related, how could you expect them NOT to take a stand on the issue?
If this is the problem they are having I would expect a more fact-ladened presentation. Their role as a corporation should be to inform the public debate with facts i.e. we had X people turn us down and take jobs in Europe/Canada after expressing a concern over same-sex rights. Since corporations do not vote they should stick solely to informing the debate with facts and not trying to take sides and argue people around.
If you are still not convinced think about this. MS is a US corporation but how would you feel about a Canadian corporation campaigning for national health care (easier to recruit people, saves company health insurance costs) or a Chinese-owned corporation supporting some legislation? The problem with corporations is that it can be very hard to find out who is pulling the strings so having them involved in public debates is not a good thing since they wield considerable resources.
Who is being protected by allowing two people to get a better tax return for being married?
Worse than that who is being better served by having corporations getting involved in debates such as this. If governments have no place in the bedrooms of their nation then corporations certainly have no business being there. Are we really getting to the point where every political debate is going to have corporations butting in, even if you actually agree with the argument they are making? Can't they at least leave us the illusion of having a meaningful public political debate without their interference and just stick to their usual tactic of lobbying/buying the legislative votes which is sadly all that counts in the end?
Yes there is a reason - the cost to ship a prebuilt house from the Earth to the moon and then assemble it. It would be far cheaper if you could ship a robot which can use materials already on the lunar surface to make a "concrete" house, run off solar energy and not die from long term exposure to radiation.
So in addition to shipping in concrete, insulation and wiring, etc, you have to bring in the gigantic robot that runs on rails(it looks like)? and power it?
I agree it might not be the most cost effective, at least initially, on Earth but what about environments where humans cannot easily go to build shelters e.g. ocean floor, surface of the moon etc. Having a robot construct the initial external structure which can then support a more human friendly environment might be far more efficient that having humans do it.
While I agree with your sentiments, the scientific evidence on the subject is about as solid as it gets.
If that is as solid as your facts get then you need to talk to a scientist! I agree that what you say is a reasonable supposition but it is not as simple as that. Increasing heat trapped in the atmosphere can lead to more clouds which increase the albedo - so it is not completely clear that increasing CO2 will increase temperatures. Ocean currents have been shown to have significant impact as well. The climate is extremely complex and simplified models may be very wrong. Yes more heat is being trapped but it is not completely clear that CO2 is the cause, just likely that it is.
So while the evidence for increasing temperatures is overwhelming the evidence for the driving cause is not as clear. Certainly I would argue that humans carry some of the blame but all of it? The problem is that the cost of reducing green house gas emissions is so high that we are really only going to do it if there is conclusive evidence that we need to do it...and with the climate being so complex I don't know when, if ever, we will get the level of evidence needed.
No, you cannot influence it, but it WILL have an effect on you.
True, but will it be a bad effect? There is the concern over pressure for copycat legislation but, if that does not happen, then it might be a good thing for non-US people in the long run. If this legislation ham-strings US technology companies it means that non-US tech companies will get a boost. For example if Google search results become unreliable due to censoring what's to stop a non-US search company starting up to fill the void which Google leaves? The huge advantage with the web is that switching to a new search engine is trivially simple - there is no MS-style lock in. Certainly in the short term it will cause problems for everyone but in the long term I do not think it is so clear.
The UK should have thought about that when it insisted on signing the Berne Convention!
While your point is valid the treaty in question is the US-UK extradition treaty, not the Berne Convention. As for "the UK" the only defence we have is that it was the government who signed it and we kicked it out at the last election. With the financial collapse people have been talking about the failure of capitalism but my concern is that this is just a symptom of the underlying failure of western democracy to provide governments that act in the best interests of the people as evidenced by the UK-US extradition treaty, the financial collapse and SOPA/PIPA. At least with the latter you may have caught it in time to do something about it but the overall trend is concerning.
X-rays are created by chemical or mechanical processes and gamma rays are created by nuclear processes or processes involving elementary particles.
Sorry but that is not correct. A electron is an elementary particle. If I have a 100 keV electron and I fire it into a metal target the photons it produces would traditionally be called X-rays. However if I take an electron with 100 GeV of energy in the middle of the ATLAS detector and it hits a sheet of metal in the detector we call the photons it produces gammas. Both of these are mechanical processes involving elementary particles and I've never heard of any chemical process even coming close to the energy needed for X-rays. So really the distinction between X-rays and gamma rays is very blurred: it is partly production mechanism, part context and part energy.
Would you agree or disagree that "there is no climate change" is a valid talking point?
It is a valid point for introducing the concept - it would be a good way to introduce the evidence in a thought provoking way and get the students to think about whether there is a better explanation for the data than climate change. Of course to do this you need teachers capable of really understanding the observations so they can point out flaws in arguments.
However I've noted that the climate change proponents are just as guilty of anti-science rhetoric as their opponents. For example an A-level physics question in the UK once showed a plot of remaining fossil energy reserves (decreasing) and energy demand (increasing) and asked how this plot showed that the UK must develop renewable energy sources. Of course the graph did not show that - it just showed that eventually fossil energy sources would not be enough given current demand predictions. This is also solvable by developing other non-renewable sources (e.g. nuclear) or simply by being more energy efficient and reducing demand.
So opponents of climate change may be anti-science by denying evidence but the proponents are often just as anti-science by ignoring other solutions and just pushing the "green" political agenda they want to see enacted. Neither side seems to be actually interested in what science really has to say when it is not what they want to hear... which is precisely when you should listen to science because that is when you learn the most!
Gamma radiation I could see, but X-Rays have a GREAT deal of difficulty penetrating metal.
There is no real distinction between X-rays and Gamma rays in terms of their properties. They are named based on how they were produced and their application. Create them by accelerating electrons into a metal target in a hospital and you call them X-rays. Create them in nuclear or particle decays and they are called gamma rays. In fact if you create them by smashing high energy electrons into a metal target in a particle physics lab we'll call them gamma rays as well.
As for penetrating metal we make calorimeters designed to measure photon energies which consist of plates of dense metal - like lead, depleted uranium etc. As the photon penetrates these metal sheets it makes a shower of particles and we count the particles in the gaps between the metal plates. Such detectors are usually metres thick for GeV photon energies (probably at least 1,000 times higher than what these machines use - I hope!). But the point should be clear - give a photon enough energy and it penetrates lead and depleted uranium - so the thin sheet metal in a car is not an issue. However I'd not want to be driving a car which is being subjected to that.
You do realize that not all armed drones are remote-piloted, and that the X-47B autonomous drone is already in service, right?
No I did not - thank you for the correction. I agree this is a lot more scary. Having any autonomous machine armed with lethal weapons is just insane....even without deliberate intent they have a system where a coding error can literally kill.
Freezing the edge of a lava flow to divert it is one thing. It is relatively simple conceptually - cool the leading edge and hope the rock wall formed will divert the flow. The general worse case scenario is that it doesn't work and whatever you were trying to divert it away from gets destroyed.
Injecting high pressure water into rocks around a dormant volcano is different. First there is no initial danger - the volcano is dormant and not erupting - so the consequences of a mistake are bad. Second you are injecting water into a complex and active underground geological system. Fracking has been shown to cause earthquakes in areas which are geologically stable because water is an excellent lubricate. While you are not trying to "frack" the volcano you are injecting a lubricant and cooling parts of an active system.
So we should pursue this but with caution and it should be lead by academics who are in a better position to be able to speak truthfully about the risks with fewer consequences - this being the whole point of tenure.
US courts tend to be far more patriotic, in protecting US citizens and interests -... - they ignore the terms of the agreement.
So in other words US courts are breaking US law. Hmmm... can you take a court to court? More seriously though I'd be concerned about this - yes this is a stupid treaty but if your legal system can decide which laws they want to enforce then your government has really been replaced by judges and the careful balance between the legislative, executive and judicial branches which your founding fathers set up is way out of alignment.
Drones don't refuse to carry out orders or object on moral, humanitarian, or legal grounds.
You do realize that drones are still piloted by human pilots right? They might not be sat in the aircraft but they are still in control and morally responsible.
Regarding the taking control of the drones I'd be far more concerned about them just jamming the signal. It is far easier to imagine an enemy doing that that figuring out how to decrypt a secure link on the fly.
A First World country wherein thousands of people die simply because it was hot outside? What's wrong with this picture?
Perhaps you should ask the people in the Chicago? The difference is that a lot of Europe rarely (or at least it used to be rarely) gets hot enough to require air conditioning in contrast to parts of the US that trace their population growth to the invention of air conditioning due to the stifling heat (at least that's what Atlanta claimed in some of it tourist literature several years ago).
I would hazard a guess the the main reason for this is that the US is at a lower latitude that much of Europe and lacks the moderating influence of the ocean (no Mediterranean, Rockies block air from Pacific), but I am by no means an expert in such matters. Whatever the cause the US does seem to be, on average, hotter than much of Europe in the summer and colder in the winter. Europe does get hot but not for the prolonged months that the US seems to suffer. This means that not only is air conditioning a lot less common but heat waves occur far less frequently and are typically less severe so, when bad ones do happen, there are far more vulnerable people around because their population has not been reduced by frequent heat waves and there is little/no air conditioning available to help.....of course this does not explain the deaths in Chicago but I'll let you figure out why they happened.
Since we know the middle finger will get banned, why not try to do as many of the other gestures as possible?
That should not be hard since some groups e.g. Hutterites hold photography of people as violating religious laws....although since they are on a web site I'm guessing not many of them will notice. Which probably explains why so many pictures turn up for Hutterites when you do a Google image search since I'm sure Google would have blocked those images if asked due to their highly offensive nature.
"I'm sorry for being a hostile, juvenile...." is expected, but is impossible to figure out if it's true or not.
Did he ever actually say that (paraphrased I realize!)? If so I certainly missed it. In fact the whole thing did not read like any sort of apology at all.
If this is "not all that bad", I really need to see an example that fits your definition of "that bad".
Clearly it is bad...but there is worse: Gerald Ratner's after dinner speech. Ratner's used to be a high street jewelry store in the UK. This one speech wiped ~500 million pounds (possibly over $1 billion dollars with the 1991 exchange rate - even more in today's money allowing for inflation) off the value of the company, almost causing it to collapse.
...so even when it comes to disasters this guy is still not all that great!
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The point is not that Obama is innocent, but rather that he is guilty because of the way the system works
I have not noticed him speaking out against that system so, sorry, but that means he either tacitly agrees with it or has given up any hope of trying to fix it and decided to accept it. Either way this makes him part of the problem and, I would argue, as guilty as the rest. This seems to be the achilles heal of US government - their founding fathers set up a fantastic system at the time but they were too worried about mob rule and put so many checks and balances in that the system is extremely inflexible and unable to adapt quickly enough to changing circumstances like most other modern democracies.
Still I suppose that is how things usually work - the first to invent/implement something has the advantage of being first but those who follow end up with a better design by benefitting the existing experience.
In which case the last thing you see will literally be the blue screen of death.
That's an excellent idea - and an excellent use of modern technology to literally let the people monitor their government since the press seem to have completely fallen down on the job! The only significant flaw would be ensuring that the whole meeting is recorded and that there are no out-of-band communications (e.g. the prior emails and messages to set it up) to prevent promises of cash/holidays/jobs away from public scrutiny. So sadly I think in practice it would be unworkable - but I like the intent!
When you write a letter to your congressman, that's lobbying.
It's usually OK to make a sizable donation to a candidate and give them a wink, wink nudge, nudge about what you want.
True but this should not be ok any more that it should be ok for lawyers to make sizeable donations to jurors in a court case and then give them a wink, wink, nudge, nudge about the verdict they should return. In both circumstances evidence and verbal arguments should be the only means of persuasion allowed. I'm not suggesting that lobbying should become as restricted and formalized as a court but some basic, ethical ground rules need to be enforced.
Actually I would argue that JUST lobbying is fine i.e. putting an argument to a politician that a law should be changed. It's when the lobbying involves large amounts of cash, fancy holidays and expensive gifts that it stops being lobbying and becomes bribery.
if they are having a problem with recruiting that happens to be discrimination-related, how could you expect them NOT to take a stand on the issue?
If this is the problem they are having I would expect a more fact-ladened presentation. Their role as a corporation should be to inform the public debate with facts i.e. we had X people turn us down and take jobs in Europe/Canada after expressing a concern over same-sex rights. Since corporations do not vote they should stick solely to informing the debate with facts and not trying to take sides and argue people around.
If you are still not convinced think about this. MS is a US corporation but how would you feel about a Canadian corporation campaigning for national health care (easier to recruit people, saves company health insurance costs) or a Chinese-owned corporation supporting some legislation? The problem with corporations is that it can be very hard to find out who is pulling the strings so having them involved in public debates is not a good thing since they wield considerable resources.
Who is being protected by allowing two people to get a better tax return for being married?
Worse than that who is being better served by having corporations getting involved in debates such as this. If governments have no place in the bedrooms of their nation then corporations certainly have no business being there. Are we really getting to the point where every political debate is going to have corporations butting in, even if you actually agree with the argument they are making? Can't they at least leave us the illusion of having a meaningful public political debate without their interference and just stick to their usual tactic of lobbying/buying the legislative votes which is sadly all that counts in the end?
Yes there is a reason - the cost to ship a prebuilt house from the Earth to the moon and then assemble it. It would be far cheaper if you could ship a robot which can use materials already on the lunar surface to make a "concrete" house, run off solar energy and not die from long term exposure to radiation.
So in addition to shipping in concrete, insulation and wiring, etc, you have to bring in the gigantic robot that runs on rails(it looks like)? and power it?
I agree it might not be the most cost effective, at least initially, on Earth but what about environments where humans cannot easily go to build shelters e.g. ocean floor, surface of the moon etc. Having a robot construct the initial external structure which can then support a more human friendly environment might be far more efficient that having humans do it.
While I agree with your sentiments, the scientific evidence on the subject is about as solid as it gets.
If that is as solid as your facts get then you need to talk to a scientist! I agree that what you say is a reasonable supposition but it is not as simple as that. Increasing heat trapped in the atmosphere can lead to more clouds which increase the albedo - so it is not completely clear that increasing CO2 will increase temperatures. Ocean currents have been shown to have significant impact as well. The climate is extremely complex and simplified models may be very wrong. Yes more heat is being trapped but it is not completely clear that CO2 is the cause, just likely that it is.
So while the evidence for increasing temperatures is overwhelming the evidence for the driving cause is not as clear. Certainly I would argue that humans carry some of the blame but all of it? The problem is that the cost of reducing green house gas emissions is so high that we are really only going to do it if there is conclusive evidence that we need to do it...and with the climate being so complex I don't know when, if ever, we will get the level of evidence needed.
Actually Wikipedia is not really blacked out. If you stop the page loading after the text appears but before the black overlay it is quite readable.
No, you cannot influence it, but it WILL have an effect on you.
True, but will it be a bad effect? There is the concern over pressure for copycat legislation but, if that does not happen, then it might be a good thing for non-US people in the long run. If this legislation ham-strings US technology companies it means that non-US tech companies will get a boost. For example if Google search results become unreliable due to censoring what's to stop a non-US search company starting up to fill the void which Google leaves? The huge advantage with the web is that switching to a new search engine is trivially simple - there is no MS-style lock in. Certainly in the short term it will cause problems for everyone but in the long term I do not think it is so clear.
The UK should have thought about that when it insisted on signing the Berne Convention!
While your point is valid the treaty in question is the US-UK extradition treaty, not the Berne Convention. As for "the UK" the only defence we have is that it was the government who signed it and we kicked it out at the last election. With the financial collapse people have been talking about the failure of capitalism but my concern is that this is just a symptom of the underlying failure of western democracy to provide governments that act in the best interests of the people as evidenced by the UK-US extradition treaty, the financial collapse and SOPA/PIPA. At least with the latter you may have caught it in time to do something about it but the overall trend is concerning.
X-rays are created by chemical or mechanical processes and gamma rays are created by nuclear processes or processes involving elementary particles.
Sorry but that is not correct. A electron is an elementary particle. If I have a 100 keV electron and I fire it into a metal target the photons it produces would traditionally be called X-rays. However if I take an electron with 100 GeV of energy in the middle of the ATLAS detector and it hits a sheet of metal in the detector we call the photons it produces gammas. Both of these are mechanical processes involving elementary particles and I've never heard of any chemical process even coming close to the energy needed for X-rays. So really the distinction between X-rays and gamma rays is very blurred: it is partly production mechanism, part context and part energy.
Would you agree or disagree that "there is no climate change" is a valid talking point?
It is a valid point for introducing the concept - it would be a good way to introduce the evidence in a thought provoking way and get the students to think about whether there is a better explanation for the data than climate change. Of course to do this you need teachers capable of really understanding the observations so they can point out flaws in arguments.
However I've noted that the climate change proponents are just as guilty of anti-science rhetoric as their opponents. For example an A-level physics question in the UK once showed a plot of remaining fossil energy reserves (decreasing) and energy demand (increasing) and asked how this plot showed that the UK must develop renewable energy sources. Of course the graph did not show that - it just showed that eventually fossil energy sources would not be enough given current demand predictions. This is also solvable by developing other non-renewable sources (e.g. nuclear) or simply by being more energy efficient and reducing demand.
So opponents of climate change may be anti-science by denying evidence but the proponents are often just as anti-science by ignoring other solutions and just pushing the "green" political agenda they want to see enacted. Neither side seems to be actually interested in what science really has to say when it is not what they want to hear... which is precisely when you should listen to science because that is when you learn the most!
Gamma radiation I could see, but X-Rays have a GREAT deal of difficulty penetrating metal.
There is no real distinction between X-rays and Gamma rays in terms of their properties. They are named based on how they were produced and their application. Create them by accelerating electrons into a metal target in a hospital and you call them X-rays. Create them in nuclear or particle decays and they are called gamma rays. In fact if you create them by smashing high energy electrons into a metal target in a particle physics lab we'll call them gamma rays as well.
As for penetrating metal we make calorimeters designed to measure photon energies which consist of plates of dense metal - like lead, depleted uranium etc. As the photon penetrates these metal sheets it makes a shower of particles and we count the particles in the gaps between the metal plates. Such detectors are usually metres thick for GeV photon energies (probably at least 1,000 times higher than what these machines use - I hope!). But the point should be clear - give a photon enough energy and it penetrates lead and depleted uranium - so the thin sheet metal in a car is not an issue. However I'd not want to be driving a car which is being subjected to that.
You do realize that not all armed drones are remote-piloted, and that the X-47B autonomous drone is already in service, right?
No I did not - thank you for the correction. I agree this is a lot more scary. Having any autonomous machine armed with lethal weapons is just insane....even without deliberate intent they have a system where a coding error can literally kill.
Freezing the edge of a lava flow to divert it is one thing. It is relatively simple conceptually - cool the leading edge and hope the rock wall formed will divert the flow. The general worse case scenario is that it doesn't work and whatever you were trying to divert it away from gets destroyed.
Injecting high pressure water into rocks around a dormant volcano is different. First there is no initial danger - the volcano is dormant and not erupting - so the consequences of a mistake are bad. Second you are injecting water into a complex and active underground geological system. Fracking has been shown to cause earthquakes in areas which are geologically stable because water is an excellent lubricate. While you are not trying to "frack" the volcano you are injecting a lubricant and cooling parts of an active system.
So we should pursue this but with caution and it should be lead by academics who are in a better position to be able to speak truthfully about the risks with fewer consequences - this being the whole point of tenure.
US courts tend to be far more patriotic, in protecting US citizens and interests - ... - they ignore the terms of the agreement.
So in other words US courts are breaking US law. Hmmm... can you take a court to court? More seriously though I'd be concerned about this - yes this is a stupid treaty but if your legal system can decide which laws they want to enforce then your government has really been replaced by judges and the careful balance between the legislative, executive and judicial branches which your founding fathers set up is way out of alignment.
Drones don't refuse to carry out orders or object on moral, humanitarian, or legal grounds.
You do realize that drones are still piloted by human pilots right? They might not be sat in the aircraft but they are still in control and morally responsible.
Regarding the taking control of the drones I'd be far more concerned about them just jamming the signal. It is far easier to imagine an enemy doing that that figuring out how to decrypt a secure link on the fly.
A First World country wherein thousands of people die simply because it was hot outside? What's wrong with this picture?
Perhaps you should ask the people in the Chicago? The difference is that a lot of Europe rarely (or at least it used to be rarely) gets hot enough to require air conditioning in contrast to parts of the US that trace their population growth to the invention of air conditioning due to the stifling heat (at least that's what Atlanta claimed in some of it tourist literature several years ago).
I would hazard a guess the the main reason for this is that the US is at a lower latitude that much of Europe and lacks the moderating influence of the ocean (no Mediterranean, Rockies block air from Pacific), but I am by no means an expert in such matters. Whatever the cause the US does seem to be, on average, hotter than much of Europe in the summer and colder in the winter. Europe does get hot but not for the prolonged months that the US seems to suffer. This means that not only is air conditioning a lot less common but heat waves occur far less frequently and are typically less severe so, when bad ones do happen, there are far more vulnerable people around because their population has not been reduced by frequent heat waves and there is little/no air conditioning available to help.....of course this does not explain the deaths in Chicago but I'll let you figure out why they happened.
Since we know the middle finger will get banned, why not try to do as many of the other gestures as possible?
That should not be hard since some groups e.g. Hutterites hold photography of people as violating religious laws....although since they are on a web site I'm guessing not many of them will notice. Which probably explains why so many pictures turn up for Hutterites when you do a Google image search since I'm sure Google would have blocked those images if asked due to their highly offensive nature.
"I'm sorry for being a hostile, juvenile ...." is expected, but is impossible to figure out if it's true or not.
Did he ever actually say that (paraphrased I realize!)? If so I certainly missed it. In fact the whole thing did not read like any sort of apology at all.
If this is "not all that bad", I really need to see an example that fits your definition of "that bad".
Clearly it is bad...but there is worse: Gerald Ratner's after dinner speech. Ratner's used to be a high street jewelry store in the UK. This one speech wiped ~500 million pounds (possibly over $1 billion dollars with the 1991 exchange rate - even more in today's money allowing for inflation) off the value of the company, almost causing it to collapse.
...so even when it comes to disasters this guy is still not all that great!