I don't know why you brought child-raping, school-nuking terrorists into this. Seems like argument ad absurdum to me. I said I would fall back on principles, not stick to them rigidly no matter the situation.
In a society so poor that "freedom" and "capitalism" results in the extreme suffering and death of 98% of the population...
Are you making these numbers up, or do you have a specific example in mind?
A feudal society is only quasi-slavery: you're effectively "free" in that you can live your life as long as you produce...
For what definition of "free"? Yours? That you're simply still alive? There are people "living their lives" under extreme oppression today.
...which is like America, where you're only "free" until you're a lazy hippie who doesn't get a job and tries to smoke pot all day and leech the system that's there for people who are TEMPORARILY down, not permanent willful parasites
What point are you trying to make here? Sounds like you have an axe to grind, but I think this is the wrong stone, friend.
Anyway, there is more to liberty than simply being alive.
In feudalism, obviously you can't go on vacation; you can't leave your land.
That's the kind of non-freedom I'm talking about. Ok, you're alive. Ok, you have a job. Ok, maybe you have a place to live in--though it may be a bug-infested dump. Ok, maybe you have food to eat--though it may be just the same rice and bug-infested bread every day. Some people may be satisfied with that. Some of them might not have tasted freedom before, so they might not know better. Some other people would rather die than live like that.
On the other hand, extremely scarce resources are managed somewhat better via feudalism...
That's just an unsubstantiated assertion. And what is "better"? Under centralized control? Not openly fought over? Benefited from by those in power?
...so folks get by under appreciable hardship rather than starving and rotting as a society. Sometimes the hardship even gives way to a tolerable, somewhat enjoyable, but not very exciting way of life.
Some people would say that such a society is starving and rotting--if not from lack of food, then from lack of liberty and free will. And do you have experience with this "tolerable, somewhat enjoyable, but not very exciting way of life," or are you just speculating on whether people really enjoyed life during feudal times, and whether they even had a notion of what life could be like in other places?
Haha, ok. Well, obviously it's not workable for everyone. But there are probably lots of people (e.g. teenagers, college students, people with part-time jobs, and retirees) who could spend some time on such projects and supplement their income without giving up the rest of their lives.
Well, I've never read someone advocate modern feudalism before. I don't know what to say in response. We're both talking about hypotheticals and generalizations, anyway.
I'll fall back on principles, such as freedom being more valuable than tyranny, and a free, poor life being more worth living than an enslaved ("owned"), less-poor life. At least a free, poor society has a chance to develop into a free, prosperous one. But an enslaved population basically must have a violent revolution to gain its freedom back.
1. This "first" fallacy. As we discussed, online backups sometimes take a while to complete the initial backup. You can do this while continuing to make local backups to external media, and you should. So this whole point is silly and moot.
2. Cost effectiveness. Ok, you want concrete costs. Here we go: I can buy a 1 TB external drive for about $100 on NewEgg. It has a 3 year warranty. So that's about $33/year for 1 TB.
But that's only one drive. Dropbox and CrashPlan, just two examples I'm very familiar with, have redundancy. So let's buy 3 of those external drives. That's $300, raising the cost to $100/year. Note that I've also increased the chance of having a drive failure and having to replace one before 3 years is up.
But I've got all those drives in one place. So let's put one in a safe-deposit box at the bank. I honestly don't know how much that costs. Let's say $15/month. $180/year. (If this figure is way off, please correct me.) Now we're up to $280/year total cost.
But now I have to drive to the bank every so often and swap drives. That's a big hassle, and most people will not keep up with this regularly. (Again, average users.) Time is also "money."
Also, now I have less redundancy for current data, unless I buy a fourth drive to keep at home. That would raise the yearly cost to about $310/year.
On top of all that, I have to manually monitor the drives, maintain them, make sure their filesystems are intact, free space not run out, etc. I also have to make sure they are in a secure environment where kids or pets or minor environmental disasters like leaky roofs won't damage them. And average users don't even know what a filesystem is or what SMART is.
And I also have to guard against theft. If I don't swap drives with my safe deposit box regularly, I risk losing all my recent data, having to restore from an old backup.
On top of all that, if any drive fails prematurely or is stolen or otherwise damaged, I have to replace it at my expense. This will almost surely happen now and then, even if not every 3 years, so that further increases the yearly cost beyond $280/310.
Or...
I could use CrashPlan. For $60 a year I get unlimited capacity. They handle redundancy. It's off-site. They fix and replace hardware at no extra charge. They guard against theft and environmental problems. I don't have to manually swap drives. The software is automatic and guards carefully against corruption and bitrot. So far it's 20-25% the cost of the local, manual backup strategy.
The tradeoff is having to fit the data through a thin pipe over the Internet. Depending on how much data you have and how fast your Internet connection is, this can be a minor issue or a major one. It won't suit everybody's needs.
And for most users, 1 TB is way overkill anyway, so other providers like Dropbox can also be effective and even simpler.
So for the average user, it seems quite obvious to me that the most cost-effective solution is online backup. And one can throw in an external drive, too, for local backups, and still save a ton of money vs. going all local.
So I've countered your assertions and ridicule with data and logic. I think this "utterly destroys your argument."
So most non-programmers can't estimate how long the work really takes. Not surprising--the same is true for any field of endeavor.
Curious, have you ever tried giving a realistic estimate to someone who's asked you to do something like that?
Also, are you familiar with Joey Hess's work on git-annex, his Kickstarter-funded year of development, and his second year of privately-crowdfunded-not-through-Kickstarter development? Interesting food for thought.
I see. That's very interesting. I also have a distaste toward organized religion.
I'm curious about what qualifies as "organized religion" though. I think that the church that Christ originally established doesn't compare to, for example, what has become the Catholic church. Paul planted churches that simply followed Christ. It wasn't until much later that it became so centralized and authoritative.
Also, do you think Christianity differs from other religions only in mere details? It's the only religion that claims to be founded by a man who was raised from the dead, who was God in human flesh walking among us. That's extremely different from the fundamental concepts behind other religions like Buddism or Hinduism.
First of all, we know very well that CO2 increases planetary temperatures. For it not to do so, it would have to act differently in Earth's atmosphere than it does in a laboratory, or in Venus's atmosphere for that matter.
Nope. Historical data sometimes shows CO2 increasing after the temperature increases. At the very least it means that we don't truly understand the enormously complex mechanisms at work. And therefore we should not panic and make drastic changes based on the idea that CO2 will heat up our planet and ruin it.
You are missing my point. The original poster was in effect arguing that if we don't know *everything*, we essentially know *nothing*. My point is that much of the limitations of our knowledge have to do with precision. What *precisely* will happen if global temperatures increase by, say, 0.8 degrees? It's unknowable *precisely* until it happens. By "precisely" I mean exactly what will happen in every region of the Earth. It's unreasonable to expect a scientific theory to predict *everything*. But one can predict some things, and one can certainly paint a pretty accurate "net" picture well before you can paint a finely detailed one.
More generalization. "Pretty accurate 'net' picture" is simply meaningless, unquantified, unqualified babble. "We can't be precise, but we can be accurate!" I hope most people see through these word games. What I wonder is, do you realize you're playing them, or are you deluding yourself, too?
As for some of the effects of warming being positive, I'll go further than you do. It will almost certainly include some positive effects, by which I mean effects that will benefit *some* people. But it will also include some effects that are *negative*. If you spent much time in nature studying it, you'd know that the bulk of effects will be unfortunate.
Nope, that's just another unsubstantiated assertion. You are presupposing based upon unproven hypotheses, and you seem to be generalizing from your "time in nature" to most of the entire planet's multitude of ecosystems. I have the impression that you're reasoning from emotional attachment to "nature"--those poor, "unfortunate" animals and plants whose habitats will not be exactly the same forever!
It's not because of warmer temperatures per se; it would be true of rapidly cooling temperatures as well. It's rapid widespread change *in itself* that's a problem for the environment, not necessarily the direction of that change.
So what? You're just presupposing, again, that there will be a "rapid widespread change." And you're generalizing again to the entire "environment," as if there were a single one. And you're basically painting yourself into a corner, saying that either way, whether the planet warms or cools, we're in for it, so we have to do something! More unsubstantiated assertions and presuppositions.
Life adapts to change; a very gradual warming would only move habitats around, on average to the north in latitude and to higher elevations. The problem with rapid change is that few species can move as rapidly has humans; in fact the differences in adaptability tip the balance of power toward weeds and pests.
More presupposing about rapid change. And I strongly disagree about the ability to move rapidly: animals don't suffer from economic problems and they don't have to build houses and infrastructure. Compared to humans, animals just go and do.
And what's wrong with weeds and pests? They are just part of the ecosystems, like anything else. Animals eat them too. Maybe they need to "go first" so the rest can follow. Besides, what even are "weeds" and "pests"? As defined by you? So now you're telling me that CAGW is going to mean more weeds growing in my garden?
For example there's a large grove of magnificent Canadian Hemlocks (Tsuga canad
I don't know why I'm replying to an AC, but I just hate to see illogical reasoning.
One question for all those javascript-off-by-default peoples. Do you use video streaming sites like youtube, netflix, amazon instant video? If so, what makes you think they're any safer than wewillstealyouridentity.com? Their primary interest is making money, not providing a secure system for users to access safely...which means their admin passwords are probably 8 characters or less...
"Their admin passwords"? You're saying that the only thing standing between me and full control of YouTube itself is an 8-character password?
What is wewillstealyouridentity.com supposed to represent?
You're conflating the use of JavaScript at all with giving personally-identifying information to random web sites.
You think the only reason to disable JS is because of paranoia? How about BLOAT? How about 12 external scripts loading 15 more external scripts before the page will even finish loading? How about bloating memory usage from a few megs for a page to 50 megs because of all the JS? How about heating up my laptop and killing its battery life because of running JS in the background just so I can be a statistic on some graph?
Security is an issue with JS, but it's the least of my reasons for disabling it.
Mod this up for truth. Linus is a tough sell; he doesn't pull anything into his tree unless it's done right (for his definition of right, which is pretty harsh).
So much false dichotomy out there:
"Look at how many people work on the kernel! If there were any backdoors, they'd be spotted." "Yeah, but when did YOU last look at the source? When did someone last sit down and review EVERY LINE at once?"
Those standards arer arbitrary. Sure, if we had superhuman abilities and could do that, great. But as it stands, the kernel dev process is so much better than anything closed-source. It's silly to say that unless you personally review every line of the kernel, it's no more secure than Windows or OS X or whatever. That's extreme and unrealistic.
I think all the warming/no-warming climate-change/no-change argument misses an important point. There may be controversy and uncertainty, but it's got to be to our advantage to act prudently and reduce emissions.
No! You've presupposed that reducing emissions: 1) can reduce or stop or reverse global warming; 2) is possible at all, given that other nations will do what they want (e.g. China, India); 3) would result in an overall benefit to quality of life given the costs involved.
You have placed the burden on those advocating caution and study, rather than placing the burden on those demanding radical, immediate change. Do you really not have a clue what prudence is?
It's a shame this has been reduced to politics instead of objective science.
It's a shame that people like you don't have a clue what objective science is, and that other people fall for your balderdash. Look at this you said:
In other words, do we dare take a chance?
That is exactly like Chicken Little: "The sky is falling! We have to do something now!" It's no different. Shame on you for panicking and demanding that others panic as well.
Now my question is, are you truly so ignorant, or are you a liar and deceiver?
No, we do not know for certain that CO2 levels increase temperature significantly.
And we do not know for certain what the net effect of a small temperature increase would even be.
I'll turn your analogies around on you. We know that in drinking water, an arsenic level of 0.01 mg/L poses a risk of 6 in 10000 chance of lifetime skin cancer risk. We do not know for certain how little is "safe"--we do not even necessarily agree on what a "safe" risk level is. The WHO may say one thing, but when you discover arsenic in your backyard, you may not feel the same way.
But it's as if you're advocating spending enormous amounts of money to reduce the arsenic level to 0.0001 mg/L just in case it might make us healthier. Because, hey, we might find out in a few years that 0.01 mg/L results in a cumulative effect much worse than 6:10000!
Never mind that the money it would cost to do that would result in an overall reduction in quality of life and other aspects of health.
And the analogy really falls very short, because if human-generated CO2 were to actually contribute significantly to the global temperature, we still don't know what the net effect of a temperature increase would be. It could be positive! But arsenic is a known poison.
So your analogies are fuzzy at best, and deceptive at worst.
Your definition of "limited" requires quantifying.
What is not sensible is bankrupting the world economies by forcing a change to much more expensive energy sources while we still have puh-lenty of the "limited" resources left.
Let the "unlimited" resources continue developing until they become cost-effective. Then we can start switching, and then we all truly will benefit.
There's no need for two-steps-backward, one-step-forward.
There is a lot of active research in climate science.
So what? There's a lot of active research into how people use Facebook.
But this article doesn't discuss what they all are. It shows that with better modelling of wind-sea interactions in the southern ocean, we can get a much better handle on what is happening to the southern sea ice.
"Yeah, yeah, yeah, we aren't perfect at understanding and predicting global climate systems...but we're this close!"
I might be hypersensitive to the climate conspiracy theorists on the internet, but I read "therefore cannot accurately predict what will happen in the future", as the common wrong argument that therefore trying to reduce emissions is not justified, and this is why you try to hit this point despite its irrelevance to the article?
Oops, "wrong" is an assertion, not an argument. You also generalize all emissions as harmful.
And if you think that there are not conspiracies abound regarding AGW/climate change--on both sides of the issue--then you are naive.
Higher uncertainty of the regional effects of global warming is not a good argument for not taking action...
Oops, again: you turned it into a regional issue, while there is also uncertainty about the global climate.
unless those regional effects have a very significant effect on global costs of adjustment.
Not just significant, but "very" significant. Wow. I guess we'd better be completely, absolutely, 110% sure that these "adjustment" costs are negative before we tell people to not make adjustments.
Remind me again, why is change the default choice? Why isn't the burden on those demanding change?
The CBR is running at about $10 in benefit for each $1 in emission reduction costs at the moment. With the developing world bearing most of the disbenefit of inaction, and that coupled with the least ability to finance
That's absolute balderdash. It would drive the cost of energy through the roof, which would most strongly affect the "developed world"--the ones who most depend on energy. The "developing world" would feel the least impact.
And China would keep on smoking up the place no matter what the rest of the world does. (Do you think China cares? Go for a walk in one of their big cities without a mask.)
So the net effect would be to make the "developed world" poorer. Which would reduce the gap. Which is what the whole agenda is really about. Guilt.
Gotta punish those evil fossil fuel burners! How dare they be more prosperous and have a higher standard of living than those poor people in other places! Let's make their lifestyle too expensive to sustain! That'll teach 'em! That'll reduce world poverty!...oh, wait...
If they knew it was a planted NSA backdoor, would they tell the NSA if someone found it? Or would they sell it to everyone else for a higher price first?
I wonder if one of the big news outlets could subscribe through a front...then some interesting data might be "leaked"...
You did a good job of strawmanning the Libertarians there. They do not believe that that never happens, nor that such people should receive no assistance. Libertarians simply believe that government is not the best outfit to handle charity. If you want proof of government incompetence, overreach, and deception...well, hey, you are reading Slashdot--turn the page.
You might argue that private charities could not or would not be equal to the task. Neither of us can prove nor disprove that. But think about this: as long as government is doing it--and keeps trying to do more of it--there's little perceived need for private charities to do it (although there are still ones that do). Maybe if government got out of the charity business, charities would get back into it. Chicken? Egg? Who knows. I think we should try to be guided by principles and nudged by practicalities; the principles here being small government and personal responsibility, and the practicalities being the exceptions and edge cases where, for example, one has no family or private charities who can help. But unless we strive for the ideals inspired by principles, we'll never have a chance of reaching them, and the exceptions and edge cases will become the norm. People will tend to live up to our expectations of them--and if we expect nothing, we can expect to get nothing.
Another issue is the gradual decline of the nuclear--and therefore extended--family. If families were stronger, they'd take better care of each other. That's not an issue government can fix, as much as they may put up "Be a dad!" billboards on the street. In fact, if our culture is taking cues from the government, rather than vice versa, I'd say we have already lost.
Anyway, we can't expect government to fix everything. We are having it shoved in our faces how bad the government is at it. If we want positive change, we have to step up to the plate ourselves.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know why you brought child-raping, school-nuking terrorists into this. Seems like argument ad absurdum to me. I said I would fall back on principles, not stick to them rigidly no matter the situation.
In a society so poor that "freedom" and "capitalism" results in the extreme suffering and death of 98% of the population...
Are you making these numbers up, or do you have a specific example in mind?
A feudal society is only quasi-slavery: you're effectively "free" in that you can live your life as long as you produce...
For what definition of "free"? Yours? That you're simply still alive? There are people "living their lives" under extreme oppression today.
...which is like America, where you're only "free" until you're a lazy hippie who doesn't get a job and tries to smoke pot all day and leech the system that's there for people who are TEMPORARILY down, not permanent willful parasites
What point are you trying to make here? Sounds like you have an axe to grind, but I think this is the wrong stone, friend.
Anyway, there is more to liberty than simply being alive.
In feudalism, obviously you can't go on vacation; you can't leave your land.
That's the kind of non-freedom I'm talking about. Ok, you're alive. Ok, you have a job. Ok, maybe you have a place to live in--though it may be a bug-infested dump. Ok, maybe you have food to eat--though it may be just the same rice and bug-infested bread every day. Some people may be satisfied with that. Some of them might not have tasted freedom before, so they might not know better. Some other people would rather die than live like that.
On the other hand, extremely scarce resources are managed somewhat better via feudalism...
That's just an unsubstantiated assertion. And what is "better"? Under centralized control? Not openly fought over? Benefited from by those in power?
...so folks get by under appreciable hardship rather than starving and rotting as a society. Sometimes the hardship even gives way to a tolerable, somewhat enjoyable, but not very exciting way of life.
Some people would say that such a society is starving and rotting--if not from lack of food, then from lack of liberty and free will. And do you have experience with this "tolerable, somewhat enjoyable, but not very exciting way of life," or are you just speculating on whether people really enjoyed life during feudal times, and whether they even had a notion of what life could be like in other places?
Haha, ok. Well, obviously it's not workable for everyone. But there are probably lots of people (e.g. teenagers, college students, people with part-time jobs, and retirees) who could spend some time on such projects and supplement their income without giving up the rest of their lives.
Well, I've never read someone advocate modern feudalism before. I don't know what to say in response. We're both talking about hypotheticals and generalizations, anyway.
I'll fall back on principles, such as freedom being more valuable than tyranny, and a free, poor life being more worth living than an enslaved ("owned"), less-poor life. At least a free, poor society has a chance to develop into a free, prosperous one. But an enslaved population basically must have a violent revolution to gain its freedom back.
1. This "first" fallacy. As we discussed, online backups sometimes take a while to complete the initial backup. You can do this while continuing to make local backups to external media, and you should. So this whole point is silly and moot.
2. Cost effectiveness. Ok, you want concrete costs. Here we go: I can buy a 1 TB external drive for about $100 on NewEgg. It has a 3 year warranty. So that's about $33/year for 1 TB.
But that's only one drive. Dropbox and CrashPlan, just two examples I'm very familiar with, have redundancy. So let's buy 3 of those external drives. That's $300, raising the cost to $100/year. Note that I've also increased the chance of having a drive failure and having to replace one before 3 years is up.
But I've got all those drives in one place. So let's put one in a safe-deposit box at the bank. I honestly don't know how much that costs. Let's say $15/month. $180/year. (If this figure is way off, please correct me.) Now we're up to $280/year total cost.
But now I have to drive to the bank every so often and swap drives. That's a big hassle, and most people will not keep up with this regularly. (Again, average users.) Time is also "money."
Also, now I have less redundancy for current data, unless I buy a fourth drive to keep at home. That would raise the yearly cost to about $310/year.
On top of all that, I have to manually monitor the drives, maintain them, make sure their filesystems are intact, free space not run out, etc. I also have to make sure they are in a secure environment where kids or pets or minor environmental disasters like leaky roofs won't damage them. And average users don't even know what a filesystem is or what SMART is.
And I also have to guard against theft. If I don't swap drives with my safe deposit box regularly, I risk losing all my recent data, having to restore from an old backup.
On top of all that, if any drive fails prematurely or is stolen or otherwise damaged, I have to replace it at my expense. This will almost surely happen now and then, even if not every 3 years, so that further increases the yearly cost beyond $280/310.
Or...
I could use CrashPlan. For $60 a year I get unlimited capacity. They handle redundancy. It's off-site. They fix and replace hardware at no extra charge. They guard against theft and environmental problems. I don't have to manually swap drives. The software is automatic and guards carefully against corruption and bitrot. So far it's 20-25% the cost of the local, manual backup strategy.
The tradeoff is having to fit the data through a thin pipe over the Internet. Depending on how much data you have and how fast your Internet connection is, this can be a minor issue or a major one. It won't suit everybody's needs.
And for most users, 1 TB is way overkill anyway, so other providers like Dropbox can also be effective and even simpler.
So for the average user, it seems quite obvious to me that the most cost-effective solution is online backup. And one can throw in an external drive, too, for local backups, and still save a ton of money vs. going all local.
So I've countered your assertions and ridicule with data and logic. I think this "utterly destroys your argument."
So most non-programmers can't estimate how long the work really takes. Not surprising--the same is true for any field of endeavor.
Curious, have you ever tried giving a realistic estimate to someone who's asked you to do something like that?
Also, are you familiar with Joey Hess's work on git-annex, his Kickstarter-funded year of development, and his second year of privately-crowdfunded-not-through-Kickstarter development? Interesting food for thought.
50% Insightful
50% Troll
I think that means I'm onto something.
I see. That's very interesting. I also have a distaste toward organized religion.
I'm curious about what qualifies as "organized religion" though. I think that the church that Christ originally established doesn't compare to, for example, what has become the Catholic church. Paul planted churches that simply followed Christ. It wasn't until much later that it became so centralized and authoritative.
Also, do you think Christianity differs from other religions only in mere details? It's the only religion that claims to be founded by a man who was raised from the dead, who was God in human flesh walking among us. That's extremely different from the fundamental concepts behind other religions like Buddism or Hinduism.
First of all, we know very well that CO2 increases planetary temperatures. For it not to do so, it would have to act differently in Earth's atmosphere than it does in a laboratory, or in Venus's atmosphere for that matter.
Nope. Historical data sometimes shows CO2 increasing after the temperature increases. At the very least it means that we don't truly understand the enormously complex mechanisms at work. And therefore we should not panic and make drastic changes based on the idea that CO2 will heat up our planet and ruin it.
You are missing my point. The original poster was in effect arguing that if we don't know *everything*, we essentially know *nothing*. My point is that much of the limitations of our knowledge have to do with precision. What *precisely* will happen if global temperatures increase by, say, 0.8 degrees? It's unknowable *precisely* until it happens. By "precisely" I mean exactly what will happen in every region of the Earth. It's unreasonable to expect a scientific theory to predict *everything*. But one can predict some things, and one can certainly paint a pretty accurate "net" picture well before you can paint a finely detailed one.
More generalization. "Pretty accurate 'net' picture" is simply meaningless, unquantified, unqualified babble. "We can't be precise, but we can be accurate!" I hope most people see through these word games. What I wonder is, do you realize you're playing them, or are you deluding yourself, too?
As for some of the effects of warming being positive, I'll go further than you do. It will almost certainly include some positive effects, by which I mean effects that will benefit *some* people. But it will also include some effects that are *negative*. If you spent much time in nature studying it, you'd know that the bulk of effects will be unfortunate.
Nope, that's just another unsubstantiated assertion. You are presupposing based upon unproven hypotheses, and you seem to be generalizing from your "time in nature" to most of the entire planet's multitude of ecosystems. I have the impression that you're reasoning from emotional attachment to "nature"--those poor, "unfortunate" animals and plants whose habitats will not be exactly the same forever!
It's not because of warmer temperatures per se; it would be true of rapidly cooling temperatures as well. It's rapid widespread change *in itself* that's a problem for the environment, not necessarily the direction of that change.
So what? You're just presupposing, again, that there will be a "rapid widespread change." And you're generalizing again to the entire "environment," as if there were a single one. And you're basically painting yourself into a corner, saying that either way, whether the planet warms or cools, we're in for it, so we have to do something ! More unsubstantiated assertions and presuppositions.
Life adapts to change; a very gradual warming would only move habitats around, on average to the north in latitude and to higher elevations. The problem with rapid change is that few species can move as rapidly has humans; in fact the differences in adaptability tip the balance of power toward weeds and pests.
More presupposing about rapid change. And I strongly disagree about the ability to move rapidly: animals don't suffer from economic problems and they don't have to build houses and infrastructure. Compared to humans, animals just go and do.
And what's wrong with weeds and pests? They are just part of the ecosystems, like anything else. Animals eat them too. Maybe they need to "go first" so the rest can follow. Besides, what even are "weeds" and "pests"? As defined by you? So now you're telling me that CAGW is going to mean more weeds growing in my garden?
For example there's a large grove of magnificent Canadian Hemlocks (Tsuga canad
I don't know why I'm replying to an AC, but I just hate to see illogical reasoning.
One question for all those javascript-off-by-default peoples. Do you use video streaming sites like youtube, netflix, amazon instant video? If so, what makes you think they're any safer than wewillstealyouridentity.com? Their primary interest is making money, not providing a secure system for users to access safely...which means their admin passwords are probably 8 characters or less...
"Their admin passwords"? You're saying that the only thing standing between me and full control of YouTube itself is an 8-character password?
What is wewillstealyouridentity.com supposed to represent?
You're conflating the use of JavaScript at all with giving personally-identifying information to random web sites.
You are being irrational.
You think the only reason to disable JS is because of paranoia? How about BLOAT? How about 12 external scripts loading 15 more external scripts before the page will even finish loading? How about bloating memory usage from a few megs for a page to 50 megs because of all the JS? How about heating up my laptop and killing its battery life because of running JS in the background just so I can be a statistic on some graph?
Security is an issue with JS, but it's the least of my reasons for disabling it.
Mod this up for truth. Linus is a tough sell; he doesn't pull anything into his tree unless it's done right (for his definition of right, which is pretty harsh).
So much false dichotomy out there:
"Look at how many people work on the kernel! If there were any backdoors, they'd be spotted."
"Yeah, but when did YOU last look at the source? When did someone last sit down and review EVERY LINE at once?"
Those standards arer arbitrary. Sure, if we had superhuman abilities and could do that, great. But as it stands, the kernel dev process is so much better than anything closed-source. It's silly to say that unless you personally review every line of the kernel, it's no more secure than Windows or OS X or whatever. That's extreme and unrealistic.
I think all the warming/no-warming climate-change/no-change argument misses an important point. There may be controversy and uncertainty, but it's got to be to our advantage to act prudently and reduce emissions.
No! You've presupposed that reducing emissions: 1) can reduce or stop or reverse global warming; 2) is possible at all, given that other nations will do what they want (e.g. China, India); 3) would result in an overall benefit to quality of life given the costs involved.
You have placed the burden on those advocating caution and study, rather than placing the burden on those demanding radical, immediate change. Do you really not have a clue what prudence is?
It's a shame this has been reduced to politics instead of objective science.
It's a shame that people like you don't have a clue what objective science is, and that other people fall for your balderdash. Look at this you said:
In other words, do we dare take a chance?
That is exactly like Chicken Little: "The sky is falling! We have to do something now!" It's no different. Shame on you for panicking and demanding that others panic as well.
Now my question is, are you truly so ignorant, or are you a liar and deceiver?
No, we do not know for certain that CO2 levels increase temperature significantly.
And we do not know for certain what the net effect of a small temperature increase would even be.
I'll turn your analogies around on you. We know that in drinking water, an arsenic level of 0.01 mg/L poses a risk of 6 in 10000 chance of lifetime skin cancer risk. We do not know for certain how little is "safe"--we do not even necessarily agree on what a "safe" risk level is. The WHO may say one thing, but when you discover arsenic in your backyard, you may not feel the same way.
But it's as if you're advocating spending enormous amounts of money to reduce the arsenic level to 0.0001 mg/L just in case it might make us healthier. Because, hey, we might find out in a few years that 0.01 mg/L results in a cumulative effect much worse than 6:10000!
Never mind that the money it would cost to do that would result in an overall reduction in quality of life and other aspects of health.
And the analogy really falls very short, because if human-generated CO2 were to actually contribute significantly to the global temperature, we still don't know what the net effect of a temperature increase would be. It could be positive! But arsenic is a known poison.
So your analogies are fuzzy at best, and deceptive at worst.
Your definition of "limited" requires quantifying.
What is not sensible is bankrupting the world economies by forcing a change to much more expensive energy sources while we still have puh-lenty of the "limited" resources left.
Let the "unlimited" resources continue developing until they become cost-effective. Then we can start switching, and then we all truly will benefit.
There's no need for two-steps-backward, one-step-forward.
Mod the man up for speaking the truth.
There is a lot of active research in climate science.
So what? There's a lot of active research into how people use Facebook.
But this article doesn't discuss what they all are. It shows that with better modelling of wind-sea interactions in the southern ocean, we can get a much better handle on what is happening to the southern sea ice.
"Yeah, yeah, yeah, we aren't perfect at understanding and predicting global climate systems...but we're this close!"
I might be hypersensitive to the climate conspiracy theorists on the internet, but I read "therefore cannot accurately predict what will happen in the future", as the common wrong argument that therefore trying to reduce emissions is not justified, and this is why you try to hit this point despite its irrelevance to the article?
Oops, "wrong" is an assertion, not an argument. You also generalize all emissions as harmful.
And if you think that there are not conspiracies abound regarding AGW/climate change--on both sides of the issue--then you are naive.
Higher uncertainty of the regional effects of global warming is not a good argument for not taking action...
Oops, again: you turned it into a regional issue, while there is also uncertainty about the global climate.
unless those regional effects have a very significant effect on global costs of adjustment.
Not just significant, but "very" significant. Wow. I guess we'd better be completely, absolutely, 110% sure that these "adjustment" costs are negative before we tell people to not make adjustments.
Remind me again, why is change the default choice? Why isn't the burden on those demanding change?
The CBR is running at about $10 in benefit for each $1 in emission reduction costs at the moment. With the developing world bearing most of the disbenefit of inaction, and that coupled with the least ability to finance
That's absolute balderdash. It would drive the cost of energy through the roof, which would most strongly affect the "developed world"--the ones who most depend on energy. The "developing world" would feel the least impact.
And China would keep on smoking up the place no matter what the rest of the world does. (Do you think China cares? Go for a walk in one of their big cities without a mask.)
So the net effect would be to make the "developed world" poorer. Which would reduce the gap. Which is what the whole agenda is really about. Guilt.
Gotta punish those evil fossil fuel burners! How dare they be more prosperous and have a higher standard of living than those poor people in other places! Let's make their lifestyle too expensive to sustain! That'll teach 'em! That'll reduce world poverty! ...oh, wait...
The fact that NSA subscribes to VUPEN doesn't prove in any way, shape, or form that they do or do not have any backdoors in anything.
The NSA (mostly) isn't stupid. They have the money to cover all their bases, so they do.
If they knew it was a planted NSA backdoor, would they tell the NSA if someone found it? Or would they sell it to everyone else for a higher price first?
I wonder if one of the big news outlets could subscribe through a front...then some interesting data might be "leaked"...
Very interesting.
Not sure if serious or trolling.
Who was Neuton?
You did a good job of strawmanning the Libertarians there. They do not believe that that never happens, nor that such people should receive no assistance. Libertarians simply believe that government is not the best outfit to handle charity. If you want proof of government incompetence, overreach, and deception...well, hey, you are reading Slashdot--turn the page.
You might argue that private charities could not or would not be equal to the task. Neither of us can prove nor disprove that. But think about this: as long as government is doing it--and keeps trying to do more of it--there's little perceived need for private charities to do it (although there are still ones that do). Maybe if government got out of the charity business, charities would get back into it. Chicken? Egg? Who knows. I think we should try to be guided by principles and nudged by practicalities; the principles here being small government and personal responsibility, and the practicalities being the exceptions and edge cases where, for example, one has no family or private charities who can help. But unless we strive for the ideals inspired by principles, we'll never have a chance of reaching them, and the exceptions and edge cases will become the norm. People will tend to live up to our expectations of them--and if we expect nothing, we can expect to get nothing.
Another issue is the gradual decline of the nuclear--and therefore extended--family. If families were stronger, they'd take better care of each other. That's not an issue government can fix, as much as they may put up "Be a dad!" billboards on the street. In fact, if our culture is taking cues from the government, rather than vice versa, I'd say we have already lost.
Anyway, we can't expect government to fix everything. We are having it shoved in our faces how bad the government is at it. If we want positive change, we have to step up to the plate ourselves.
i don't know why this was modded funny. It's actually a very interesting question that I've always wondered about.
Yeah, me too.
Your sig is interesting. What does it mean?
Which one?
-1 Offtopic. Yeah. Right. Sure. It's not like anyone else had the same problem or anything...
Slashdot...I tell you what...