No, now you're being deliberately wrong. They plan to send out scouts (Fireflies) in 2015. In 2016 they plan to bring back very light samples (Dragonflies). They don't even give an estimated time to begin production mining (Harvesters).
Deep Space Industries asteroid mining proposal begins in 2015 when the company plans to send out a squadron of 55lb cubesats called Fireflies that will explore near-Earth space for two to six months looking for target asteroids
Then in 2016, Deep Space said it will begin launching 70-lb DragonFlies for round-trip visits that bring back samples. The DragonFly expeditions will take two to four years, depending on the target, and will return 60 to 150 lbs of asteroid materiel....
A much larger spacecraft known as a Harvestor-class machine could "return thousands of tons per year, producing water, propellant, metals, building materials and shielding for everything we do in space in decades to come.
As usual, Slashdot summary is wrong. They're not starting mining in 2015, they're sending out their "scout" sats to find potential candidates. You'll find that information in the second sentence, neatly contradicting the first sentence.
What normal user is gonna be able to max out a Phenom I triple?
who do video transcoding while running accurate physics simulations of sound propagation for commercial acoustic design and/or industrial noise abatement
Australia burns down every December. We always have fires, droughts, storms, heatwaves and floods, and most of them caused far less damage than comparable events in the past. Sorry to disappoint your shrill alarmism, but every storm, flood, tsunami or volcanic eruption (yes, I've seen tectonic events blamed on climate change) isn't a point in favour of AGW - not unless you can show how they significantly differ in degree or quantity from previous events. Climate change science has predicted everything from a heat-scorched planet where the dams will never be full again (Hi Flannery!), to another ice age, and everything in between. It's easy to fulfil a single prophecy when you can pull it out of a basket of a thousand false ones. Sorry that that messes with your liberal guilt, humanity-is-the-scourge-of-the-earth self-flagellating philosophy, but the world isn't ending today, Chicken Little.
Uh-huh, big whoop. We've had heaps of models that fit the historical data - that's the easy part. It's all there, you can tweak your model as you like until it fits the historicals just right. The value of a model isn't in how well it fits the historical data, but how well it predicts future data.
So crank a prediction or two out of this puppy and get back to us in a decade.
Tax regulations are complicated for the exact same reason that code gets complicated over time. It starts out simple and then people find bugs and exploits that need to be fixed. What you end up with is lots of targeted fixes in response to specific problems with the initial version.
That's true. But what the politicians consider a bug (e.g. "the corn lobby gave me lots of money in campaign contributions and are still paying lots of tax") everyone else considers a feature.
Don't bother looking at what the government says you should pay, because according to the OP, that's irrelevant - according to his argument, you can pay exactly what the government says you owe, but still be behaving immorally in regards to your taxes.
Where does a sale occur when it's made over the internet for a non-tangible item? The place the customer is located in? The place the server is located in? The place the business operating the service is located in?
And are you saying Google doesn't operate in Ireland?
Hometown,work, education history - all have a little widget next to them that you can use to select what audience can see them. Pages you like can only be controlled on a per-category basis (of which "interests" is one), but you can still choose whether to make them public or not. And it's only searchable if it's public.
Depends. The price of construction was £1 billion - but the price of the land wasn't mentioned, and that's a decent chunk of some pretty expensive real estate.
Say the product in Spain sells for 100 dollars but really costs 10 to produce in China. Then Ireland buys it from China for 10 and sells it to Spain for 99.99. The sale in Spain then to the consumer is for 100, giving the Spain division a 1 cent profit.
So you're saying that the only moral course of action is to find the area that has the highest tax rate, the least subsidies and support, and operate entirely out of there, so as to pay the maximum tax you possibly can.
Because everything else is tax avoidance and therefore immoral?
The unfortunate fact is that tax laws are fucking complex, and contain loopholes smart people can find and exploit.
And why are there loopholes? Look into it, and you'll find that it's basically a massive patchwork of hacks to maintain favourable exemptions for certain industries that are politically important/give politicians a lot of money. The tax system could be massively simplified to eliminate those loopholes, but it's in nobody who counts' interest to do so - companies would pay more tax, politicians wouldn't be able to manipulate the system to scratch the back of companies' "lobbying" them, and individuals, well, since when have they counted anyway?
So what are the moral implication of funnelling money through a tax haven that has no real purpose other than to reduce tax load? It may be legal, but is it moral?
Um, none? Tax isn't a moral issue, it's a legal and economic one. It's like asking if there's a moral issue with not paying $110 against a $100 charge. The government calculates your tax bill. If you pay what it says you owe, you've discharged your obligation. If there are "loopholes" in the tax law, then the government has put them there, and presumably is ok with you using them.
There are some people that go even further than that. They roam around Europe with no fixed abode, claim non-domiciled status and can avoid the majority of dividend tax. There is more to being honest than staying within the boundaries of the law.
If they have no fixed address and keep moving around between countries, it's quite likely they're not receiving any benefits their taxes would ostensibly go to pay for.
Oh, absolutely. Poor infrastructure isn't the cause of famine, it's just the reason why the west can't feed these nation with their leftovers. Like I said, local production is key, and you can't have local production without stability. I'm just sick of the whole white-guilt "we're starving the poor brown people" rhetoric. It really is the modern acceptable version of the white man's burden.
Sure, there's stuff we could be doing to help, but it's not supplying food and creating a benefactor-dependant relationship. We should be helping them stabilise their region through diplomacy, educating their people in modern agriculture, and supplying what they need to get started. That way they can eventually stand on the world stage as our equals, instead of the poor cousins constantly in need of help.
Look at the causes. Hypercapnia is not caused by atmospheric CO2. Even if the AGW guys are right, you're still off by orders of magnitude before that even became a problem.
http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/idlh/10028156.html. Oh no! Better get rid of all that atmospheric ozone as well! CO2 composes ~400ppm of the atmosphere. That fact sheet lists toxicity at 40000ppm. Scare-mongering much?
People who suffered smoke inhalation often have lifelong breathing problems for example.
Yeah - but not because they've ingested CO2. It's usually due to lung damage from the particulates they inhaled.
Furthermore - everything that produces CO2 also produces CO - cars in fact produce MOSTLY CO - which is much more toxic
Yeah - and when's the last time you heard someone complain about carbon monoxide emissions? Not lately I'll, because everyone's fixated on CO2.
If we reduce the oxygen levels in the atmosphere by just 1% the results would already be catastrophic for ourselves...How likely is this ? Well let's do the math. CO2 is one carbon atom and 2 oxygen atoms. That scales up directly - so if we burn one ton of coal, we reduce the atmospheric oxygen by 2 tonnes and increase the atmospheric CO2 by 3 tonnes. That's an exponential equation - if it was a software program it would be running at O(n^3) - which is bloody insane !
There's around 1.2 quadrillion metric tonnes of oxygen in the atmosphere. At the current rate, that'd take around a few thousand years to make a 1% difference in atmospheric oxygen. Not that that's relevant, because we'll run out of crap to burn long before that point. And it's not an exponential rate, it's geometric. It has a constant ratio of 1:2.
Yes, because I'm that fucking stupid.
Well, what you said was that fucking stupid, and there are plenty of people who have said that or something similar. Even with your addendum, it's still stupid. Outlaw any emission of fossil-fuel derived CO2? Civilization would shut down. Maybe in a couple of decades if we ramped up nuke production. Maybe in a century when we've had time to increase the efficiency of our renewable technologies and developed decent storage technology. But in the near future? If it were enforced worldwide, that would cause more damage than AGW is predicted to.
Hard to calculate since it's an externality, and hard to prove. The kid in Cape Town who gets asthma could be getting it due to pollution in China ! But you can probably take at least the vast majority of respiratory illnesses.
Except, again, CO2 doesn't cause respiratory illness.
This statement is false. CO2 is toxic at fairly low levels actually.
Any source to back this up? The conventional wisdom appears to say otherwise.
I read about it on theregister.co.uk - look it up yourself.
Yeah, right, I'm supposed to exert effort to dig up articles defending your position? If you can't be bothered to provide details, I can't be bothered arguing against it.
Either way - the subsidies you're claiming is "overgenerous" is far less than the subsidies on fossil fuels already. I'd be quite happy to say "let the market sort it out" but then it must be JUST the market, no subsidies for ANY energy at all
I'd be happy with this too, as long as the money that used to go to subsidizing energy companies was instead refunded to tax-payers as a tax cut - otherwise you'd just be bumping up the cost of energy for households, and letting the politicians add a bucket of money to their slush fund.
AND externalized costs (which includes AGW) internalized by making all air-pollution outright illegal.
You consider CO2 to be a pollutant, and you want to make all pollution "outright illegal". You do realise this would outlaw breathing, right?
Firstly - that's bullshit, the money saved on healthcare costs alone will be far larger than what is spent on additional energy costs even if you were right.
What exactly are the health care costs of carbon dioxide?
To get the TRUE price of fossil fuels we would have to demand they run with zero-pollution, only then are we internalizing the costs that pollution is exerting on the consumer. Do you really think coal power plants would still cost so little if they had to filter every pollutant out and store it safely instead of pumping it into the air and making us pay for the results ?
The GP wasn't talking about pollution - he was talking specifically about global warming. There are plenty of unhealthy pollutants that do not contribute to global warming, and plenty of contributors that do not have health consequences (like CO2). This, in fact, is one of the points I was making. If you spend all your efforts ensuring CO2 is minimized, you have a greater chance at letting the unhealthy non-warming agents slip through due to monomania.
In Australia there is already measure being proposed to tax people who generate some of their power off-grid from solar.
I live in Australia, and I have solar panels. All other things being equal, it's still not a very good investment. The thing that tips it over is government subsidy. When I got my panels, the government pretty much paid for the first 1.5kw, and I paid around $2500 for the remaining half a kilowatt I got. The government also guaranteed that they'd pay 60c per kilowatt hour, roughly three times the market value, for 7 years. They've since dropped it to 20c because they realised they were being insanely over-generous. My solar panels paid for themselves in under a year. If I'd had to pay full price for the panels, and I was being given market rates for the generated power they'd take around 20 years to pay for themselves.
So, I'd really like to see that bill that you say is going to tax solar generators, as it'll affect me. I'm not aware of it though - the only measures I've heard were about the government trying to renege on it's 60c rate guarantee because the people not on solar were pissed off at subsidising people who are on solar.
1. It's hard work to extract phone numbers from the white pages in order to do reverse lookups, in some countries it's even prohibited.
It's actually pretty dang easy. All the data's there, it just needs to be indexed - and there have been such indexes floating around online for years.
2. The white pages includes, at most, name, address and phone number, frequently the name is just initials and surname.
If you care about privacy, your Facebook profile can contain, at minimum, name. In fact, if you care at all about privacy, you can make your phone number non-public, and the whole issue becomes moot, as it's non-searchable. Complaining that the default settings are too open is ridiculous - if you want to give a site your personal details, and yet can't be bothered managing who can access them, you deserve whatever you get.
3. You can opt out of having your name in the white pages, on Facebook other people can opt you back in.
The only way people can "opt you in" to Facebook is by tagging you in their photos. This doesn't make you searchable by phone number (or any other means) on Facebook, and it doesn't even let you filter photos. The same criticism could be levelled against any photo site that allows you to add captions to your photos.
Rather, the problem is that you could use this technique to build up a database of phone numbers and associated accounts without targeting any specific phone number or account. Not only would you know the names associated with each of the numbers, you could associate the phone number with anything else that was discoverable from the person's Facebook profile - which usually includes their location, their interests, and the names of their other friends.
Wow, you could spend all that effort to recompile the white pages. Um, woohoo? I think people forget that most of this information (name, phone number, location) is already available in a publicly-accessible directory. Sure, you can't get their friends-list from the WP, but if you have their name and location, you can probably find their FB account without too much trouble anyway.
This seems to be the reverse side of the "...but on the internet!" effect Slashdot complains about en masse in patent stories. This information has been available for decades in meatspace, but once it's "on the internet" it's a privacy violation.
This reminds me of a cartoon [about.com]. Caption: "What if global warming is a hoax and we create a better world for nothing?"
The false assumption there is that the cost of "creating a better world" is zero. It also implies that, for some reason, a world with less CO2 emissions is a good thing, even if turns out CO2 emissions don't do anything bad. Looking at the measures countries are taking with AGW, it looks like the "better world" will consist of one where power producers are taxed more, and household power bills increase. Um, yay?
It's likely that, if global warming turns out to be a non-issue, the measures taken to combat it will have created a worse world due to the impacts they've had on economics, diplomacy, diverting resources away from other problems, etc. This case is actually an example - focus is so much on CO2 as a greenhouse gas (which, other than that, is largely harmless) that we're ignoring other pollutants that are not only also greenhouse gasses but impact human health as well.
I always saw the petition site as a way to force a response from the administration on some topic, not a way to force them to change their minds on that stance.
You've got to get 25,000 signatures to get them to re-iterate their policy position?
Making jokes out of serious attempts to make political headway on important issues
Ah hahahahahahaha.
Wait, you're serious? The jokes are the only ones getting attention because people have realised just how pointless putting a real issue up for debate is. Bring up anything remotely important, and all you'll get is the canned response about how the current policies are best.
Sort of offtopic but I'm a little disappointed that this unfortunate affliction for this person is being spun as a possible "fountain of eternal youth" in the article. Come on, people. We should be working to better understand this so we can help people
I dunno, is there any indication that she's in any physical or psychological pain, or that her lifespan is going to be significantly reduced from normal? Besides, if the cause is directly genetic (that is, it's not a genetic disorder that then modifies, say, hormone levels, which cause the disorder) then it's not likely a treatment is even plausible.
My oracle: 3D printing machines will be required by law to have a whitelist of checksums for the patterns they're allowed to print, or some-such. Very expensive exemptions will be available, so we don't have told hold corporations to the same standards as lesser citizens. The whitelist mechanism will be trivially circumvented, but circumvention itself will be a crime.
Slashdot Mirror
No, now you're being deliberately wrong. They plan to send out scouts (Fireflies) in 2015. In 2016 they plan to bring back very light samples (Dragonflies). They don't even give an estimated time to begin production mining (Harvesters).
Deep Space Industries asteroid mining proposal begins in 2015 when the company plans to send out a squadron of 55lb cubesats called Fireflies that will explore near-Earth space for two to six months looking for target asteroids
Then in 2016, Deep Space said it will begin launching 70-lb DragonFlies for round-trip visits that bring back samples. The DragonFly expeditions will take two to four years, depending on the target, and will return 60 to 150 lbs of asteroid materiel. ...
A much larger spacecraft known as a Harvestor-class machine could "return thousands of tons per year, producing water, propellant, metals, building materials and shielding for everything we do in space in decades to come.
As usual, Slashdot summary is wrong. They're not starting mining in 2015, they're sending out their "scout" sats to find potential candidates. You'll find that information in the second sentence, neatly contradicting the first sentence.
What normal user is gonna be able to max out a Phenom I triple?
who do video transcoding while running accurate physics simulations of sound propagation for commercial acoustic design and/or industrial noise abatement
You have an odd definition of normal.
Australia burns down every December. We always have fires, droughts, storms, heatwaves and floods, and most of them caused far less damage than comparable events in the past. Sorry to disappoint your shrill alarmism, but every storm, flood, tsunami or volcanic eruption (yes, I've seen tectonic events blamed on climate change) isn't a point in favour of AGW - not unless you can show how they significantly differ in degree or quantity from previous events. Climate change science has predicted everything from a heat-scorched planet where the dams will never be full again (Hi Flannery!), to another ice age, and everything in between. It's easy to fulfil a single prophecy when you can pull it out of a basket of a thousand false ones. Sorry that that messes with your liberal guilt, humanity-is-the-scourge-of-the-earth self-flagellating philosophy, but the world isn't ending today, Chicken Little.
Uh-huh, big whoop. We've had heaps of models that fit the historical data - that's the easy part. It's all there, you can tweak your model as you like until it fits the historicals just right. The value of a model isn't in how well it fits the historical data, but how well it predicts future data.
So crank a prediction or two out of this puppy and get back to us in a decade.
Falsehood modded insightful, verifiable truth modded down. Gotta love this place.
Tax regulations are complicated for the exact same reason that code gets complicated over time. It starts out simple and then people find bugs and exploits that need to be fixed. What you end up with is lots of targeted fixes in response to specific problems with the initial version.
That's true. But what the politicians consider a bug (e.g. "the corn lobby gave me lots of money in campaign contributions and are still paying lots of tax") everyone else considers a feature.
Ok. What's the moral amount to pay in taxes?
Don't bother looking at what the government says you should pay, because according to the OP, that's irrelevant - according to his argument, you can pay exactly what the government says you owe, but still be behaving immorally in regards to your taxes.
Where does a sale occur when it's made over the internet for a non-tangible item? The place the customer is located in? The place the server is located in? The place the business operating the service is located in?
And are you saying Google doesn't operate in Ireland?
Lies.
Hometown ,work, education history - all have a little widget next to them that you can use to select what audience can see them. Pages you like can only be controlled on a per-category basis (of which "interests" is one), but you can still choose whether to make them public or not. And it's only searchable if it's public.
Depends. The price of construction was £1 billion - but the price of the land wasn't mentioned, and that's a decent chunk of some pretty expensive real estate.
Say the product in Spain sells for 100 dollars but really costs 10 to produce in China. Then Ireland buys it from China for 10 and sells it to Spain for 99.99. The sale in Spain then to the consumer is for 100, giving the Spain division a 1 cent profit.
So you're saying that the only moral course of action is to find the area that has the highest tax rate, the least subsidies and support, and operate entirely out of there, so as to pay the maximum tax you possibly can.
Because everything else is tax avoidance and therefore immoral?
The unfortunate fact is that tax laws are fucking complex, and contain loopholes smart people can find and exploit.
And why are there loopholes? Look into it, and you'll find that it's basically a massive patchwork of hacks to maintain favourable exemptions for certain industries that are politically important/give politicians a lot of money. The tax system could be massively simplified to eliminate those loopholes, but it's in nobody who counts' interest to do so - companies would pay more tax, politicians wouldn't be able to manipulate the system to scratch the back of companies' "lobbying" them, and individuals, well, since when have they counted anyway?
So what are the moral implication of funnelling money through a tax haven that has no real purpose other than to reduce tax load? It may be legal, but is it moral?
Um, none? Tax isn't a moral issue, it's a legal and economic one. It's like asking if there's a moral issue with not paying $110 against a $100 charge. The government calculates your tax bill. If you pay what it says you owe, you've discharged your obligation. If there are "loopholes" in the tax law, then the government has put them there, and presumably is ok with you using them.
There are some people that go even further than that. They roam around Europe with no fixed abode, claim non-domiciled status and can avoid the majority of dividend tax. There is more to being honest than staying within the boundaries of the law.
If they have no fixed address and keep moving around between countries, it's quite likely they're not receiving any benefits their taxes would ostensibly go to pay for.
Oh, absolutely. Poor infrastructure isn't the cause of famine, it's just the reason why the west can't feed these nation with their leftovers. Like I said, local production is key, and you can't have local production without stability. I'm just sick of the whole white-guilt "we're starving the poor brown people" rhetoric. It really is the modern acceptable version of the white man's burden.
Sure, there's stuff we could be doing to help, but it's not supplying food and creating a benefactor-dependant relationship. We should be helping them stabilise their region through diplomacy, educating their people in modern agriculture, and supplying what they need to get started. That way they can eventually stand on the world stage as our equals, instead of the poor cousins constantly in need of help.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercapnia [wikipedia.org]
Look at the causes. Hypercapnia is not caused by atmospheric CO2. Even if the AGW guys are right, you're still off by orders of magnitude before that even became a problem.
http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/idlh/124389.html [cdc.gov]
http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/idlh/10028156.html. Oh no! Better get rid of all that atmospheric ozone as well! CO2 composes ~400ppm of the atmosphere. That fact sheet lists toxicity at 40000ppm. Scare-mongering much?
People who suffered smoke inhalation often have lifelong breathing problems for example.
Yeah - but not because they've ingested CO2. It's usually due to lung damage from the particulates they inhaled.
Furthermore - everything that produces CO2 also produces CO - cars in fact produce MOSTLY CO - which is much more toxic
Yeah - and when's the last time you heard someone complain about carbon monoxide emissions? Not lately I'll, because everyone's fixated on CO2.
If we reduce the oxygen levels in the atmosphere by just 1% the results would already be catastrophic for ourselves...How likely is this ? Well let's do the math. CO2 is one carbon atom and 2 oxygen atoms. That scales up directly - so if we burn one ton of coal, we reduce the atmospheric oxygen by 2 tonnes and increase the atmospheric CO2 by 3 tonnes. That's an exponential equation - if it was a software program it would be running at O(n^3) - which is bloody insane !
There's around 1.2 quadrillion metric tonnes of oxygen in the atmosphere. At the current rate, that'd take around a few thousand years to make a 1% difference in atmospheric oxygen. Not that that's relevant, because we'll run out of crap to burn long before that point. And it's not an exponential rate, it's geometric. It has a constant ratio of 1:2.
Yes, because I'm that fucking stupid.
Well, what you said was that fucking stupid, and there are plenty of people who have said that or something similar. Even with your addendum, it's still stupid. Outlaw any emission of fossil-fuel derived CO2? Civilization would shut down. Maybe in a couple of decades if we ramped up nuke production. Maybe in a century when we've had time to increase the efficiency of our renewable technologies and developed decent storage technology. But in the near future? If it were enforced worldwide, that would cause more damage than AGW is predicted to.
Hard to calculate since it's an externality, and hard to prove. The kid in Cape Town who gets asthma could be getting it due to pollution in China ! But you can probably take at least the vast majority of respiratory illnesses.
Except, again, CO2 doesn't cause respiratory illness.
This statement is false. CO2 is toxic at fairly low levels actually.
Any source to back this up? The conventional wisdom appears to say otherwise.
I read about it on theregister.co.uk - look it up yourself.
Yeah, right, I'm supposed to exert effort to dig up articles defending your position? If you can't be bothered to provide details, I can't be bothered arguing against it.
Either way - the subsidies you're claiming is "overgenerous" is far less than the subsidies on fossil fuels already. I'd be quite happy to say "let the market sort it out" but then it must be JUST the market, no subsidies for ANY energy at all
I'd be happy with this too, as long as the money that used to go to subsidizing energy companies was instead refunded to tax-payers as a tax cut - otherwise you'd just be bumping up the cost of energy for households, and letting the politicians add a bucket of money to their slush fund.
AND externalized costs (which includes AGW) internalized by making all air-pollution outright illegal.
You consider CO2 to be a pollutant, and you want to make all pollution "outright illegal". You do realise this would outlaw breathing, right?
Firstly - that's bullshit, the money saved on healthcare costs alone will be far larger than what is spent on additional energy costs even if you were right.
What exactly are the health care costs of carbon dioxide?
To get the TRUE price of fossil fuels we would have to demand they run with zero-pollution, only then are we internalizing the costs that pollution is exerting on the consumer. Do you really think coal power plants would still cost so little if they had to filter every pollutant out and store it safely instead of pumping it into the air and making us pay for the results ?
The GP wasn't talking about pollution - he was talking specifically about global warming. There are plenty of unhealthy pollutants that do not contribute to global warming, and plenty of contributors that do not have health consequences (like CO2). This, in fact, is one of the points I was making. If you spend all your efforts ensuring CO2 is minimized, you have a greater chance at letting the unhealthy non-warming agents slip through due to monomania.
In Australia there is already measure being proposed to tax people who generate some of their power off-grid from solar.
I live in Australia, and I have solar panels. All other things being equal, it's still not a very good investment. The thing that tips it over is government subsidy. When I got my panels, the government pretty much paid for the first 1.5kw, and I paid around $2500 for the remaining half a kilowatt I got. The government also guaranteed that they'd pay 60c per kilowatt hour, roughly three times the market value, for 7 years. They've since dropped it to 20c because they realised they were being insanely over-generous. My solar panels paid for themselves in under a year. If I'd had to pay full price for the panels, and I was being given market rates for the generated power they'd take around 20 years to pay for themselves.
So, I'd really like to see that bill that you say is going to tax solar generators, as it'll affect me. I'm not aware of it though - the only measures I've heard were about the government trying to renege on it's 60c rate guarantee because the people not on solar were pissed off at subsidising people who are on solar.
1. It's hard work to extract phone numbers from the white pages in order to do reverse lookups, in some countries it's even prohibited.
It's actually pretty dang easy. All the data's there, it just needs to be indexed - and there have been such indexes floating around online for years.
2. The white pages includes, at most, name, address and phone number, frequently the name is just initials and surname.
If you care about privacy, your Facebook profile can contain, at minimum, name. In fact, if you care at all about privacy, you can make your phone number non-public, and the whole issue becomes moot, as it's non-searchable. Complaining that the default settings are too open is ridiculous - if you want to give a site your personal details, and yet can't be bothered managing who can access them, you deserve whatever you get.
3. You can opt out of having your name in the white pages, on Facebook other people can opt you back in.
The only way people can "opt you in" to Facebook is by tagging you in their photos. This doesn't make you searchable by phone number (or any other means) on Facebook, and it doesn't even let you filter photos. The same criticism could be levelled against any photo site that allows you to add captions to your photos.
Rather, the problem is that you could use this technique to build up a database of phone numbers and associated accounts without targeting any specific phone number or account. Not only would you know the names associated with each of the numbers, you could associate the phone number with anything else that was discoverable from the person's Facebook profile - which usually includes their location, their interests, and the names of their other friends.
Wow, you could spend all that effort to recompile the white pages. Um, woohoo? I think people forget that most of this information (name, phone number, location) is already available in a publicly-accessible directory. Sure, you can't get their friends-list from the WP, but if you have their name and location, you can probably find their FB account without too much trouble anyway.
This seems to be the reverse side of the "...but on the internet!" effect Slashdot complains about en masse in patent stories. This information has been available for decades in meatspace, but once it's "on the internet" it's a privacy violation.
This reminds me of a cartoon [about.com]. Caption: "What if global warming is a hoax and we create a better world for nothing?"
The false assumption there is that the cost of "creating a better world" is zero. It also implies that, for some reason, a world with less CO2 emissions is a good thing, even if turns out CO2 emissions don't do anything bad. Looking at the measures countries are taking with AGW, it looks like the "better world" will consist of one where power producers are taxed more, and household power bills increase. Um, yay?
It's likely that, if global warming turns out to be a non-issue, the measures taken to combat it will have created a worse world due to the impacts they've had on economics, diplomacy, diverting resources away from other problems, etc. This case is actually an example - focus is so much on CO2 as a greenhouse gas (which, other than that, is largely harmless) that we're ignoring other pollutants that are not only also greenhouse gasses but impact human health as well.
I always saw the petition site as a way to force a response from the administration on some topic, not a way to force them to change their minds on that stance.
You've got to get 25,000 signatures to get them to re-iterate their policy position?
Making jokes out of serious attempts to make political headway on important issues
Ah hahahahahahaha.
Wait, you're serious? The jokes are the only ones getting attention because people have realised just how pointless putting a real issue up for debate is. Bring up anything remotely important, and all you'll get is the canned response about how the current policies are best.
Sort of offtopic but I'm a little disappointed that this unfortunate affliction for this person is being spun as a possible "fountain of eternal youth" in the article. Come on, people. We should be working to better understand this so we can help people
I dunno, is there any indication that she's in any physical or psychological pain, or that her lifespan is going to be significantly reduced from normal? Besides, if the cause is directly genetic (that is, it's not a genetic disorder that then modifies, say, hormone levels, which cause the disorder) then it's not likely a treatment is even plausible.
My oracle: 3D printing machines will be required by law to have a whitelist of checksums for the patterns they're allowed to print, or some-such. Very expensive exemptions will be available, so we don't have told hold corporations to the same standards as lesser citizens. The whitelist mechanism will be trivially circumvented, but circumvention itself will be a crime.