Cyanogenmod's implementation is buggy - apps force close all the time when you use it. I use LBE Privacy Guard - for whatever reason when it blocks access the app works fine. I suspect it is because the latter lies to the application, and the former generates errors or whatever. Cyanogen for some reason is morally opposed to lying to applications.
...these sorts of technologies in the labs: wireless is often overrated unless you really need it.
It makes sense for your tablet. It doesn't make so much sense for that balance that needs to be leveled and calibrated anytime you shift it an inch anyway. Just use reliable wired connections for these sorts of things.
That doesn't mean hooking up a wire to your tablet. If the balance is wired to a network, and your tablet is wirelessly connected to a network, then they are already connected.
And, for any kind of serious data collection you don't want the instrument directly talking to a tablet anyway. The instrument should be talking to a server somewhere that is always running and capturing data, and then your tablet can connect to that server when it needs data. Oh, and if you're at home you can connect to it as well that way.
I can't tell you how many installations I've seen where some scientist got some money to have some consultants set up some kind of fancy data acquisition system in their lab. Inevitably it stores all its data on some PC that has no backups of any kind sitting in the lab. Of course, chances are the reason that they did it that way was that they're used to people in corporate IT just impeding progress, so they work around them. The right solution of course is cooperation - let the consultants handle their software and instruments, and have corporate IT provide the secured servers that they store data on. If your IT department is really sharp maybe they can actually help you work through what kinds of data is being collected where and help get it properly connected so that you aren't drowning in excel spreadsheets on flash drives.
However, all of this is a pipe dream. Small companies often don't have the resources to do something like this right, and big companies usually have managers who are too interested in their own empires to exhibit the kind of cooperation that I describe here. So, everybody micro-optimizes their piece of the puzzle and crosses their finger that there isn't a fire.
And what would happen if he resisted efforts of the authorities to make him exit the secured area? What would happen if he just tried to walk around the guards?
The same thing would happen as what would happen if a police officer said "you're under arrest" and you tried to walk away. Out would come the tazers. No doubt some might argue that a man quivering on the ground is somehow not subject to any kind of arrest or detention.
What would happen if he just kept walking forward and ignored shouts to stop? Suppose he just walked the wrong way through the exit area past security? He would be merely travelling towards his destination of Washington, and thus not subject to arrest/questioning.
People like to use euphemisms these days, but I'm pretty sure that if the people who wrote the constitution witnessed what happened they'd probably say that it was EXACTLY what they were intending to prohibit. The guy was trying to get to his office, and the government interfered.
Well, it would seem a valid way to evaluate whether the population worships technology with religious fervor. Wouldn't such a populace be expected to demand high-tech news, since they apparently demand high-tech everything else?
His point wasn't that their nuclear plants were poorly designed. His point was that the Japanese view of technology isn't really that much different than it is anywhere else...
Then don't sell it there, but don't block it either. Go ahead and sell an Australian version or whatever, and if people want to smuggle in the Chinese version or whatever more power to them.
However did we ever manage to publish books that could be read without any ability to block the wrong people from reading them...?
As is the fact that they'll lose a ton of money just in depreciation. There is something wrong with the justice system when you are financially ruined simply for being accused of a crime. When the SEC investigates some bank, I doubt that they seize every single computer in the entire bank, as well as every single piece of paper, and anything else that could contain information, as well as any backups stored anywhere, and then hang onto it for a few years.
This is process, surely, but it is not due process.
Sounds like those tilt-bits in action! That was a "design feature" - better to have the whole thing break than make it easier to stick some kind of bus sniffer in-between. Of course, that was silly since by the time HDMI took off it became easy to build go-between hardware that would have no issues syncing (well, any moreso than anything else).
One of these days enough hardware keys will get leaked and the HDCP system will be completely cracked. Then maybe we can implement a software driver or something and eliminate HDCP from the hardware layer entirely.
Believe it or not I just replaced by game-port-using Sidewinder Force Feedback Pro only a few weeks ago. I used an SB Live PCI card for the interface - my upgraded motherboard did not have PCI slots this time around.
I imagine that windows will support it just fine though - XP did at least. Can't vouch for Win7.
"Makers" are apparently people who have built 3D printers and think that this is the be-all and end-all of manufacturing technology.
Sure, the fact that you can build one for $100 now is pretty neat. However, CAD/CAM was in vogue back when I was in high school. It indeed has changed the world, but not because anytime somebody wants a widget they take 3 hours to have some laser mill carve it out of steel.
3D printers, and CAM in general are great for prototyping, but they're not going to make a dent in the cost of finished goods. Right now maker bots can only make 99 cent plastic toys - which some guy in China can already make for two cents, and which probably costs $1.50 in materials to make using a 3D printer. If you want to make new gears for your bike then you're going to need something capable of cutting through hard steel, and that isn't going to be $50 and made out of plastic. About the only thing you'd save making such things yourself is any patent rights for the design, and those aren't much compared to manufacturing costs.
About the only thing manufacture-at-home is likely to be cost-effective at is counterfeiting currency - since its value is almost entirely fiat. I saw a neat documentary about some guy who was doing just that with casino chips. The neat thing about it was that when they finally traced him they couldn't arrest him since he lived in a state that didn't have legalized gambling and forging casino chips was consequently not considered a crime. He wasn't using 3d printers though - this was serious die-pressing equipment/etc.
Yup, and at work I just deployed a multi-million dollar COTS application that among other things has serial port interfaces to other devices.
RS232 is the lowest common denominator - EVERYBODY uses it for non-consumer-oriented stuff. No drivers, etc.
My state-of-the-art cable tuner that gets digital video off of coax after being transmitted to the house over fiber uses RS232 to change the channels.
And that is nothing compared to the number of VGA-only monitors out there. Monitors can last decades - VGA won't be going away anytime soon. If they stop putting VGA ports on monitors tomorrow people will need to use VGA for 20 more years.
Actually, this news should make us all VERY happy if we don't like defective-by-design.
You have millions of perfectly working monitors that are about to become obsolete, unless you use an HDMI-to-VGA converter.
That looks like a huge market, and products always come out for huge markets. Every corporate interest in America except for the MPAA is going to be in favor of being able to display full-resolution on their existing VGA displays.
I'm typing this on a CRT monitor attached to a VGA cable. My LCD display at work as a VGA port. I just bought a brand new LCD with only VGA (it was cheap). I doubt that anybody is going to be able to make it completely obsolete in only 5 years...
Anyway, climate change or not, reducing pollution by getting rid of fossil fuel should be a top priority.
Why?
What negative impact does pollution have, compared to all the other issues out there (like national healthcare, the social security crisis, and any number of other issues)?
Also, what about other forms of pollution, like in groundwater/etc?
I'm all for lowering pollution, but it costs money and since money is fungible you have to prioritize it against all the other things that are also good ideas. Air is now very clean in general compared to what it was 30 years ago. Pollution also is almost completely unrelated to global warming - if anything particulate pollution tends to reduce the impact of global warming. What really drives global warming is CO2, and that isn't a pollutant.
So how do you test gravity? OK, you dropped that thing and it fell. But will it fall tomorrow? Or a hundred years from now? Or on another planet? Prove it! Why did it fall?
Perhaps it won't surprise you then to hear that to some degree these sorts of questions are still being asked about gravity. How do you know the gravitational constant is in fact a constant at all points in the universe? If I stuck you in a big box with a uniform electromagnetic field across it you'd come up with some voltage constant of the universe completely neglecting the fact that electric fields can vary.
Theories of climate change are tested exactly the same way you test gravity. You create a model, you make predictions, and you make observations to see if those predictions are correct. And if you read the scientific literature, you'll find that a huge amount of observations have already been accumulated testing the predictions of climate theory.
Yeah, but most of this data suffers from the same flaws gravity suffers from - we are greatly limited in our perspective. You can't measure the acceleration of masses in some other galaxy, and you can't test how the earth as a whole reacts under any conditions we might be interested in - we can only see how it has reacted in the past and try to work out what the conditions were at the time.
Gravity is much more easily tested than climate change, and hence we have a lot broader acceptance regarding how it works (to the point where lots of people are willing to spend their own money on things that rely on this understanding).
The problem with climate modeling is that it is very limited in its ability to collect new data. Most models are developed using existing data, and then applied to more-or-less the same existing data, and unsurprisingly they fit.
In any case, no doubt over time this stuff will continue to get refined and at some point we'll all look back at one side or the other and scratch our heads. The issue comes when people want to change public policy. I could care less what anybody wants to believe regarding global warming, but if you want me to pay for it then you're going to have to convince ME (with no credentials in climate science at all) to support it or I'll be calling my representatives telling them not to. Repeat that a hundred million times and you have the mess you see today.
In other words, all the folks whose job it is to make predictions about what could go wrong and prepare for those things think that we're running such an experiment, and that it won't end well.
Yup, but until the experiment actually ends, you can't be certain how it will turn out. Also, the experiment is not controlled, so regardless of how it turns out everybody will still be debating what the cause was.
That is the big difference between climate change and evolution. You can stick fruit flies in a test tube and see how their allelic frequencies change over time. You can't stick an Earth in a test tube and vary the CO2 output of factories.
AGW in general is only a decades-old theory, and it is based on modeling/etc. I wouldn't really compare it with gravity which is a hard physical science and you can test it at will with something as simple as a Cavendish apparatus. Evolution falls somewhere in-between - its predictions can be tested in a lab setting, although working out how it happened in the past is more of a modelling exercise. Both have a century or more of support behind them.
Yeah and what DOES determine truth ? The process of science , the scientific method.
Well, no, the truth is what it is. Nobody determines truth. Science is just a very effective way to figure out what the truth is.
I don't have big issues with global warming per se, but its being right has nothing to do with scientific consensus. Scientific consensus should probably help to convince us that it is right, but whether it truly is right is something that can never be known with 100% certainty.
The main problem with the global warming debate is that it isn't purely a scientific debate - it is loaded with bias and interests (something that impacts all science to some degree, but global warming to a very large degree). It is also being used to defend policy decisions that have huge ramifications. So, it isn't surprising that it is a big mess.
Obviously the issue is too important to just throw on the back burner. However, while science is at the core of the issue ultimately climate change is as much a political issue as anything. When you want millions of people to do something differently or pay for something, then those millions of people end up having a say in it...
I can see the argument for the Pentagon, but not for the WTC.
I will agree that it is stretching international law governing war to apply it to terrorists. However, most of those rules of war basically say that people acting like combatants not in uniform are basically fair game all the time. If captured in a combat situation they can generally be executed on the spot as well.
Risk to American lives and large collateral damage are the only things that merit concern in your book?
This is a combat situation, and hitting a legitimate military target is perfectly fine. Minimizing the risk to friendly and collatoral lives are of course desirable.
If the guy were in some first world city I'd say that we should inform the local police and have them picked up and given due process. However, these guys were not within the jurisdiction of an allied government. Most of these strikes are happening in what is a de facto no-mans-land - nobody has effective police control of these areas. In the case of somebody like OBL they were well within Pakistani jurisdiction, but there was good reason to suspect that the local government would not be cooperative. Given in that case that we spent billions of dollars and about a decade trying to find the guy, it probably was prudent to mount a military operation vs taking the risk that tipping off the Pakistani would lead us to spend another decade and a few more billions looking for him again.
You mentioned the US Constitution, the Geneva Conventions, and general human rights earlier - I don't really see where they are being violated. The Constitution only applies within US jurisdiction or to US citizens. The Geneva Convention does not afford rights to unidentified combatants. As far as human rights go - the guy is getting about as much due process as is possible in the middle of the desert. If he wants to present himself at US Customs, or at any EU state I'm sure he'll get more due process. If I thought the US government had me on a kill list tracking me with drones and such, and that perhaps I was being treated unjustly, I'd probably find the closest French or Swiss embassy and surrender myself. In this case the best that would have gotten him most likely is life in prison, which is likely all he'd get in the US as well (I don't think the US has executed many of its terrorism detainees).
If the guy wants to be subject to the Geneva Convention then he can don an official uniform issued by a nation state and wear it at all times. If he gets into an extended battle he could then waive a white flag and he would be treated as a POW until the end of hostilities (ie until whatever nation state he is from is now a US ally), at which point he'd be turned over to that state. However, soldiers walking around in the desert are completely legitimate military targets, and nothing in the Conventions says that the first shot has to be a warning shot.
According to the official announcements coming from the administration (in so far they even admit the UAV "secret" use), is that there due to high drone accuracy there had been no civilian casualties whatsoever. Not once. How do you feel about that theory?
Sorry - I was thinking of just the European theater and in particular the contrast between Germany in WWI and WWII. Clearly Japan was an aggressor as well.
You could argue that Germany was the first to start firing in WWI as well. Those convoluted alliances were a problem and everybody else was eager for war, but Germany didn't have to declare war so quickly, and chances are that nobody really wanted to be the first to flinch so waiting could have avoided the war.
I'd say you are right about WW2. In WW1 everybody had relatively authoritarian governments and there was a much greater sense of nationalism/etc back then. In the middle ages if one king called the daughter of another king ugly ten-thousand serfs would die in a few battles and life would move on. WW1 was really just a more modern extension of that, and it wasn't until it was ending that people realized just how insane it was. The thugs that won blamed the thugs that lost for the war, setting the stage for WW2.
WW2 was different since Germany was clearly the aggressor (though it did have legitimate grievances it too was swallowed by nationalism and clearly sought to do more than right wrongs). WW1 was basically a free-for-all.
Come on, the reason the US is prosperous is due to adequate leadership and coming out of both world wars far better off than any of the pre-war powers.
Certainly true, but at least in the case of WW1 you could argue that those other pre-war powers made catastrophic failures. In the case of WW2 you could argue that for Germany, but the other countries didn't seek that war out.
WW1 was basically the last old-European war, fought with much more modern technology. Europe has a long history of various families (today we'd nearly call them warlords) with concentrated power getting into turf wars for whatever reason, and then a bunch of people die over a few years or maybe a generation or two, and then the borders get re-drawn. For the average serf life didn't change much - the lords fought over who got to bully who for tax payments. Even with the advent of democracy in Europe that mentality took a while to go away, and WW1 was really the war that broke this habit as such insane levels of destruction resulting from petty matters of national pride and honor were simply unsustainable.
In the end some random dissident shot a royal couple and before you know it everybody in Europe is losing parents, siblings, and children. A failure of leaders to understand the nature of modern warfare made the whole problem a LOT worse, as did a tradition of people blindly heading off to war at the call of some nobleman as had been done for centuries before.
WW2 was basically a result of Germany being plundered after the war and millions of people collectively figuring that it couldn't possibly get worse so who cares who we elect into power (they were wrong), combined with the general tendency of people to go along with the crowd no matter where it is headed. No doubt a more just resolution to WW1 could have helped prevent it.
I don't think things have really improved much since - it must be the human condition to elect idiots like ourselves into office and follow them blindly. I think the only thing that has prevented additional wars on a national scale has been the advent of nuclear weapons - those with the power to make war are no longer so sheltered from their effects. As was pointed out in the recent Mission Impossible movie, war can be profitable but not nuclear war (though the preparation for it is no doubt lucrative).
That is purely a matter of scheduling. However, it really doesn't change my argument. Previously you spent x minutes with the patient, and y minutes in your office writing things up. Now you spend x+y minutes with the patient. Other than y minutes moving from an asynchronous to synchronous model I don't really see that big a difference. If you do need to spend more time with patients then don't schedule so many in a day, and create a few more med schools to keep the prices down.
As you point out natural selection has worked, but it has worked to make humans work well in environments they no longer live in. Also, from an evolutionary perspective people dying at age 60 is a feature and not a bug. People at age 60 do not generally raise children, but they do compete with them for resources. However, as a society we have chosen to reject this utilitarian position and try to extend lifetimes. Since longevity long after child-bearing years has little beneficial impact on the birth and survival of progeny this is a fight against evolution.
Now, if we want to just leave the elderly to their own devices as "nature intended" then we can have cheap healthcare and let people breed as much as they want, since nature is effectively on our side. However, if we want to engineer our society to have long lifetimes, then it probably makes sense to engineer our genepool accordingly.
As far as evolution working on population and not individuals goes - obviously this is the case, but it doesn't really help your argument. Eugenics will do nothing to extend the life of anybody living today - it can extend the life of people living a generation or two from now. Individuals will vary, but the mean will steadily move in accordance with selective pressure.
As far as diversity goes - I agree, but that is more of an argument against naive applications of eugenics than eugenics itself. You don't need to base selection on only one or two attributes - you could take a weighted sum of many attributes. You could also use a Nivenesque "birthright lottery" for the sake of diversity, but keep this to a low portion of the population.
From a purely natural selection standpoint, long term health outlook probably isn't important. After all, look at bacteria and insects - they are very successful despite having very short lifetimes - they just have to live long enough to reproduce. You could apply the same to people and the human race would grind on just fine if we all died in our 40s after having kids shortly after puberty. However, society is not constrained to following a purely natural path - we can engineer a society that we want to live in, if we wish. I'm not really sure what "natural" even means when the human brain is as much a part of nature as any ant or antelope.
I think the real problem is that the standards aren't performance-based. Fuel is required to be oxygenated, rather than requiring that it has some level of emissions in some reference test. If the standard were performance-based then the refiner could use a number of different means to accomplish the standard rather than just adding one or two particular substances - both of which are expensive and have certain drawbacks (environmental and otherwise).
However, ethanol in gas is more about agribusiness subsidies and the environment is just a red herring. At work they go on about the environment as well, but I've noticed this tends to be only in situations where environmental interests are strongly correlated with corporate financial interest. Saving on pounds of CO2 on an airline ticket tends to mean lower airline costs which means lower ticket prices. Saving on pounds of CO2 from power use means less power use which means a lower electric bill. No harm in it, but the appeal to the environment sounds disingenuous. If I found some more renewable supplier of paper for an extra $3 per ream it isn't like they'd be tripping over themselves to buy it.
When would they fill out the chart otherwise? If they have time to fill it out later, why not just fill it out now? They could just spend the extra time with the patient and get anything that comes up resolved before the patient walks out?
I just don't get it - if before it took 30 minutes with the patient plus 15 minutes in the office, just spend 45 minutes with the patient now.
For people who can't read English I agree that the benefit is marginal, but I don't think that we can write healthcare policy around fringe cases unless somebody is being harmed...
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Cyanogenmod's implementation is buggy - apps force close all the time when you use it. I use LBE Privacy Guard - for whatever reason when it blocks access the app works fine. I suspect it is because the latter lies to the application, and the former generates errors or whatever. Cyanogen for some reason is morally opposed to lying to applications.
...these sorts of technologies in the labs: wireless is often overrated unless you really need it.
It makes sense for your tablet. It doesn't make so much sense for that balance that needs to be leveled and calibrated anytime you shift it an inch anyway. Just use reliable wired connections for these sorts of things.
That doesn't mean hooking up a wire to your tablet. If the balance is wired to a network, and your tablet is wirelessly connected to a network, then they are already connected.
And, for any kind of serious data collection you don't want the instrument directly talking to a tablet anyway. The instrument should be talking to a server somewhere that is always running and capturing data, and then your tablet can connect to that server when it needs data. Oh, and if you're at home you can connect to it as well that way.
I can't tell you how many installations I've seen where some scientist got some money to have some consultants set up some kind of fancy data acquisition system in their lab. Inevitably it stores all its data on some PC that has no backups of any kind sitting in the lab. Of course, chances are the reason that they did it that way was that they're used to people in corporate IT just impeding progress, so they work around them. The right solution of course is cooperation - let the consultants handle their software and instruments, and have corporate IT provide the secured servers that they store data on. If your IT department is really sharp maybe they can actually help you work through what kinds of data is being collected where and help get it properly connected so that you aren't drowning in excel spreadsheets on flash drives.
However, all of this is a pipe dream. Small companies often don't have the resources to do something like this right, and big companies usually have managers who are too interested in their own empires to exhibit the kind of cooperation that I describe here. So, everybody micro-optimizes their piece of the puzzle and crosses their finger that there isn't a fire.
And what would happen if he resisted efforts of the authorities to make him exit the secured area? What would happen if he just tried to walk around the guards?
The same thing would happen as what would happen if a police officer said "you're under arrest" and you tried to walk away. Out would come the tazers. No doubt some might argue that a man quivering on the ground is somehow not subject to any kind of arrest or detention.
What would happen if he just kept walking forward and ignored shouts to stop? Suppose he just walked the wrong way through the exit area past security? He would be merely travelling towards his destination of Washington, and thus not subject to arrest/questioning.
People like to use euphemisms these days, but I'm pretty sure that if the people who wrote the constitution witnessed what happened they'd probably say that it was EXACTLY what they were intending to prohibit. The guy was trying to get to his office, and the government interfered.
Well, it would seem a valid way to evaluate whether the population worships technology with religious fervor. Wouldn't such a populace be expected to demand high-tech news, since they apparently demand high-tech everything else?
His point wasn't that their nuclear plants were poorly designed. His point was that the Japanese view of technology isn't really that much different than it is anywhere else...
Then don't sell it there, but don't block it either. Go ahead and sell an Australian version or whatever, and if people want to smuggle in the Chinese version or whatever more power to them.
However did we ever manage to publish books that could be read without any ability to block the wrong people from reading them...?
As is the fact that they'll lose a ton of money just in depreciation. There is something wrong with the justice system when you are financially ruined simply for being accused of a crime. When the SEC investigates some bank, I doubt that they seize every single computer in the entire bank, as well as every single piece of paper, and anything else that could contain information, as well as any backups stored anywhere, and then hang onto it for a few years.
This is process, surely, but it is not due process.
Sounds like those tilt-bits in action! That was a "design feature" - better to have the whole thing break than make it easier to stick some kind of bus sniffer in-between. Of course, that was silly since by the time HDMI took off it became easy to build go-between hardware that would have no issues syncing (well, any moreso than anything else).
One of these days enough hardware keys will get leaked and the HDCP system will be completely cracked. Then maybe we can implement a software driver or something and eliminate HDCP from the hardware layer entirely.
Believe it or not I just replaced by game-port-using Sidewinder Force Feedback Pro only a few weeks ago. I used an SB Live PCI card for the interface - my upgraded motherboard did not have PCI slots this time around.
I imagine that windows will support it just fine though - XP did at least. Can't vouch for Win7.
"Makers" are apparently people who have built 3D printers and think that this is the be-all and end-all of manufacturing technology.
Sure, the fact that you can build one for $100 now is pretty neat. However, CAD/CAM was in vogue back when I was in high school. It indeed has changed the world, but not because anytime somebody wants a widget they take 3 hours to have some laser mill carve it out of steel.
3D printers, and CAM in general are great for prototyping, but they're not going to make a dent in the cost of finished goods. Right now maker bots can only make 99 cent plastic toys - which some guy in China can already make for two cents, and which probably costs $1.50 in materials to make using a 3D printer. If you want to make new gears for your bike then you're going to need something capable of cutting through hard steel, and that isn't going to be $50 and made out of plastic. About the only thing you'd save making such things yourself is any patent rights for the design, and those aren't much compared to manufacturing costs.
About the only thing manufacture-at-home is likely to be cost-effective at is counterfeiting currency - since its value is almost entirely fiat. I saw a neat documentary about some guy who was doing just that with casino chips. The neat thing about it was that when they finally traced him they couldn't arrest him since he lived in a state that didn't have legalized gambling and forging casino chips was consequently not considered a crime. He wasn't using 3d printers though - this was serious die-pressing equipment/etc.
Yup, and at work I just deployed a multi-million dollar COTS application that among other things has serial port interfaces to other devices.
RS232 is the lowest common denominator - EVERYBODY uses it for non-consumer-oriented stuff. No drivers, etc.
My state-of-the-art cable tuner that gets digital video off of coax after being transmitted to the house over fiber uses RS232 to change the channels.
And that is nothing compared to the number of VGA-only monitors out there. Monitors can last decades - VGA won't be going away anytime soon. If they stop putting VGA ports on monitors tomorrow people will need to use VGA for 20 more years.
Actually, this news should make us all VERY happy if we don't like defective-by-design.
You have millions of perfectly working monitors that are about to become obsolete, unless you use an HDMI-to-VGA converter.
That looks like a huge market, and products always come out for huge markets. Every corporate interest in America except for the MPAA is going to be in favor of being able to display full-resolution on their existing VGA displays.
I'm typing this on a CRT monitor attached to a VGA cable. My LCD display at work as a VGA port. I just bought a brand new LCD with only VGA (it was cheap). I doubt that anybody is going to be able to make it completely obsolete in only 5 years...
Anyway, climate change or not, reducing pollution by getting rid of fossil fuel should be a top priority.
Why?
What negative impact does pollution have, compared to all the other issues out there (like national healthcare, the social security crisis, and any number of other issues)?
Also, what about other forms of pollution, like in groundwater/etc?
I'm all for lowering pollution, but it costs money and since money is fungible you have to prioritize it against all the other things that are also good ideas. Air is now very clean in general compared to what it was 30 years ago. Pollution also is almost completely unrelated to global warming - if anything particulate pollution tends to reduce the impact of global warming. What really drives global warming is CO2, and that isn't a pollutant.
So how do you test gravity? OK, you dropped that thing and it fell. But will it fall tomorrow? Or a hundred years from now? Or on another planet? Prove it! Why did it fall?
Perhaps it won't surprise you then to hear that to some degree these sorts of questions are still being asked about gravity. How do you know the gravitational constant is in fact a constant at all points in the universe? If I stuck you in a big box with a uniform electromagnetic field across it you'd come up with some voltage constant of the universe completely neglecting the fact that electric fields can vary.
Theories of climate change are tested exactly the same way you test gravity. You create a model, you make predictions, and you make observations to see if those predictions are correct. And if you read the scientific literature, you'll find that a huge amount of observations have already been accumulated testing the predictions of climate theory.
Yeah, but most of this data suffers from the same flaws gravity suffers from - we are greatly limited in our perspective. You can't measure the acceleration of masses in some other galaxy, and you can't test how the earth as a whole reacts under any conditions we might be interested in - we can only see how it has reacted in the past and try to work out what the conditions were at the time.
Gravity is much more easily tested than climate change, and hence we have a lot broader acceptance regarding how it works (to the point where lots of people are willing to spend their own money on things that rely on this understanding).
The problem with climate modeling is that it is very limited in its ability to collect new data. Most models are developed using existing data, and then applied to more-or-less the same existing data, and unsurprisingly they fit.
In any case, no doubt over time this stuff will continue to get refined and at some point we'll all look back at one side or the other and scratch our heads. The issue comes when people want to change public policy. I could care less what anybody wants to believe regarding global warming, but if you want me to pay for it then you're going to have to convince ME (with no credentials in climate science at all) to support it or I'll be calling my representatives telling them not to. Repeat that a hundred million times and you have the mess you see today.
In other words, all the folks whose job it is to make predictions about what could go wrong and prepare for those things think that we're running such an experiment, and that it won't end well.
Yup, but until the experiment actually ends, you can't be certain how it will turn out. Also, the experiment is not controlled, so regardless of how it turns out everybody will still be debating what the cause was.
That is the big difference between climate change and evolution. You can stick fruit flies in a test tube and see how their allelic frequencies change over time. You can't stick an Earth in a test tube and vary the CO2 output of factories.
AGW in general is only a decades-old theory, and it is based on modeling/etc. I wouldn't really compare it with gravity which is a hard physical science and you can test it at will with something as simple as a Cavendish apparatus. Evolution falls somewhere in-between - its predictions can be tested in a lab setting, although working out how it happened in the past is more of a modelling exercise. Both have a century or more of support behind them.
Yeah and what DOES determine truth ? The process of science , the scientific method.
Well, no, the truth is what it is. Nobody determines truth. Science is just a very effective way to figure out what the truth is.
I don't have big issues with global warming per se, but its being right has nothing to do with scientific consensus. Scientific consensus should probably help to convince us that it is right, but whether it truly is right is something that can never be known with 100% certainty.
The main problem with the global warming debate is that it isn't purely a scientific debate - it is loaded with bias and interests (something that impacts all science to some degree, but global warming to a very large degree). It is also being used to defend policy decisions that have huge ramifications. So, it isn't surprising that it is a big mess.
Obviously the issue is too important to just throw on the back burner. However, while science is at the core of the issue ultimately climate change is as much a political issue as anything. When you want millions of people to do something differently or pay for something, then those millions of people end up having a say in it...
Who in the WTC is a known combatant?
I can see the argument for the Pentagon, but not for the WTC.
I will agree that it is stretching international law governing war to apply it to terrorists. However, most of those rules of war basically say that people acting like combatants not in uniform are basically fair game all the time. If captured in a combat situation they can generally be executed on the spot as well.
Risk to American lives and large collateral damage are the only things that merit concern in your book?
This is a combat situation, and hitting a legitimate military target is perfectly fine. Minimizing the risk to friendly and collatoral lives are of course desirable.
If the guy were in some first world city I'd say that we should inform the local police and have them picked up and given due process. However, these guys were not within the jurisdiction of an allied government. Most of these strikes are happening in what is a de facto no-mans-land - nobody has effective police control of these areas. In the case of somebody like OBL they were well within Pakistani jurisdiction, but there was good reason to suspect that the local government would not be cooperative. Given in that case that we spent billions of dollars and about a decade trying to find the guy, it probably was prudent to mount a military operation vs taking the risk that tipping off the Pakistani would lead us to spend another decade and a few more billions looking for him again.
You mentioned the US Constitution, the Geneva Conventions, and general human rights earlier - I don't really see where they are being violated. The Constitution only applies within US jurisdiction or to US citizens. The Geneva Convention does not afford rights to unidentified combatants. As far as human rights go - the guy is getting about as much due process as is possible in the middle of the desert. If he wants to present himself at US Customs, or at any EU state I'm sure he'll get more due process. If I thought the US government had me on a kill list tracking me with drones and such, and that perhaps I was being treated unjustly, I'd probably find the closest French or Swiss embassy and surrender myself. In this case the best that would have gotten him most likely is life in prison, which is likely all he'd get in the US as well (I don't think the US has executed many of its terrorism detainees).
If the guy wants to be subject to the Geneva Convention then he can don an official uniform issued by a nation state and wear it at all times. If he gets into an extended battle he could then waive a white flag and he would be treated as a POW until the end of hostilities (ie until whatever nation state he is from is now a US ally), at which point he'd be turned over to that state. However, soldiers walking around in the desert are completely legitimate military targets, and nothing in the Conventions says that the first shot has to be a warning shot.
According to the official announcements coming from the administration (in so far they even admit the UAV "secret" use), is that there due to high drone accuracy there had been no civilian casualties whatsoever. Not once. How do you feel about that theory?
It is wrong.
Sorry - I was thinking of just the European theater and in particular the contrast between Germany in WWI and WWII. Clearly Japan was an aggressor as well.
You could argue that Germany was the first to start firing in WWI as well. Those convoluted alliances were a problem and everybody else was eager for war, but Germany didn't have to declare war so quickly, and chances are that nobody really wanted to be the first to flinch so waiting could have avoided the war.
I'd say you are right about WW2. In WW1 everybody had relatively authoritarian governments and there was a much greater sense of nationalism/etc back then. In the middle ages if one king called the daughter of another king ugly ten-thousand serfs would die in a few battles and life would move on. WW1 was really just a more modern extension of that, and it wasn't until it was ending that people realized just how insane it was. The thugs that won blamed the thugs that lost for the war, setting the stage for WW2.
WW2 was different since Germany was clearly the aggressor (though it did have legitimate grievances it too was swallowed by nationalism and clearly sought to do more than right wrongs). WW1 was basically a free-for-all.
Come on, the reason the US is prosperous is due to adequate leadership and coming out of both world wars far better off than any of the pre-war powers.
Certainly true, but at least in the case of WW1 you could argue that those other pre-war powers made catastrophic failures. In the case of WW2 you could argue that for Germany, but the other countries didn't seek that war out.
WW1 was basically the last old-European war, fought with much more modern technology. Europe has a long history of various families (today we'd nearly call them warlords) with concentrated power getting into turf wars for whatever reason, and then a bunch of people die over a few years or maybe a generation or two, and then the borders get re-drawn. For the average serf life didn't change much - the lords fought over who got to bully who for tax payments. Even with the advent of democracy in Europe that mentality took a while to go away, and WW1 was really the war that broke this habit as such insane levels of destruction resulting from petty matters of national pride and honor were simply unsustainable.
In the end some random dissident shot a royal couple and before you know it everybody in Europe is losing parents, siblings, and children. A failure of leaders to understand the nature of modern warfare made the whole problem a LOT worse, as did a tradition of people blindly heading off to war at the call of some nobleman as had been done for centuries before.
WW2 was basically a result of Germany being plundered after the war and millions of people collectively figuring that it couldn't possibly get worse so who cares who we elect into power (they were wrong), combined with the general tendency of people to go along with the crowd no matter where it is headed. No doubt a more just resolution to WW1 could have helped prevent it.
I don't think things have really improved much since - it must be the human condition to elect idiots like ourselves into office and follow them blindly. I think the only thing that has prevented additional wars on a national scale has been the advent of nuclear weapons - those with the power to make war are no longer so sheltered from their effects. As was pointed out in the recent Mission Impossible movie, war can be profitable but not nuclear war (though the preparation for it is no doubt lucrative).
That is purely a matter of scheduling. However, it really doesn't change my argument. Previously you spent x minutes with the patient, and y minutes in your office writing things up. Now you spend x+y minutes with the patient. Other than y minutes moving from an asynchronous to synchronous model I don't really see that big a difference. If you do need to spend more time with patients then don't schedule so many in a day, and create a few more med schools to keep the prices down.
As you point out natural selection has worked, but it has worked to make humans work well in environments they no longer live in. Also, from an evolutionary perspective people dying at age 60 is a feature and not a bug. People at age 60 do not generally raise children, but they do compete with them for resources. However, as a society we have chosen to reject this utilitarian position and try to extend lifetimes. Since longevity long after child-bearing years has little beneficial impact on the birth and survival of progeny this is a fight against evolution.
Now, if we want to just leave the elderly to their own devices as "nature intended" then we can have cheap healthcare and let people breed as much as they want, since nature is effectively on our side. However, if we want to engineer our society to have long lifetimes, then it probably makes sense to engineer our genepool accordingly.
As far as evolution working on population and not individuals goes - obviously this is the case, but it doesn't really help your argument. Eugenics will do nothing to extend the life of anybody living today - it can extend the life of people living a generation or two from now. Individuals will vary, but the mean will steadily move in accordance with selective pressure.
As far as diversity goes - I agree, but that is more of an argument against naive applications of eugenics than eugenics itself. You don't need to base selection on only one or two attributes - you could take a weighted sum of many attributes. You could also use a Nivenesque "birthright lottery" for the sake of diversity, but keep this to a low portion of the population.
From a purely natural selection standpoint, long term health outlook probably isn't important. After all, look at bacteria and insects - they are very successful despite having very short lifetimes - they just have to live long enough to reproduce. You could apply the same to people and the human race would grind on just fine if we all died in our 40s after having kids shortly after puberty. However, society is not constrained to following a purely natural path - we can engineer a society that we want to live in, if we wish. I'm not really sure what "natural" even means when the human brain is as much a part of nature as any ant or antelope.
I think the real problem is that the standards aren't performance-based. Fuel is required to be oxygenated, rather than requiring that it has some level of emissions in some reference test. If the standard were performance-based then the refiner could use a number of different means to accomplish the standard rather than just adding one or two particular substances - both of which are expensive and have certain drawbacks (environmental and otherwise).
However, ethanol in gas is more about agribusiness subsidies and the environment is just a red herring. At work they go on about the environment as well, but I've noticed this tends to be only in situations where environmental interests are strongly correlated with corporate financial interest. Saving on pounds of CO2 on an airline ticket tends to mean lower airline costs which means lower ticket prices. Saving on pounds of CO2 from power use means less power use which means a lower electric bill. No harm in it, but the appeal to the environment sounds disingenuous. If I found some more renewable supplier of paper for an extra $3 per ream it isn't like they'd be tripping over themselves to buy it.
When would they fill out the chart otherwise? If they have time to fill it out later, why not just fill it out now? They could just spend the extra time with the patient and get anything that comes up resolved before the patient walks out?
I just don't get it - if before it took 30 minutes with the patient plus 15 minutes in the office, just spend 45 minutes with the patient now.
For people who can't read English I agree that the benefit is marginal, but I don't think that we can write healthcare policy around fringe cases unless somebody is being harmed...