On the one side, you have practically every reputable scientist on the planet.
When the definition of "reputable" includes "accepts human-generated global warming as fact", then of course one side of the argument is "reputable" and the other is not.
You mean like the fossil records going back billions of years?
Until you understand the difference between "fossil records" and "climate data", you will never understand the debate. The simple fact is that we don't have climate data for more than a very short period of the earth's history. The rest is guesswork.
And the other fact you need to face is that modelers spends hours and hours tweaking their models until they "look right", and if "humans are the cause of global warming" is what looks right to them (and they get paid to get that result) then that is what the models say. Models need real data to work right (which we don't have) and real understanding of the processes (guess wrong and you get the wrong answer.)
I remember one NOAA model that came out a few years ago showing a sudden upturn in temperatures just about to happen. CALAMITY! WOE! This was supposed to be the latest and most accurate model. Proof beyond all doubt that we were ruining the planet!
I have had Dish for 4 years, so I feel compelled to defend them.
I had Dish for many years, from back before they heavily subsidized the hardware. I don't anymore.
They sent me a letter last year telling me I had earned (their word) a free upgrade to a DVR-522. I called them to take them up on the offer. They pretended they had no idea what I was talking about, but if I faxed them a copy of the letter, they'd get back to me. They never did.
They added a bunch of useless, duplicate audio channels to the service, without asking, and then decided to raise rates. I sent them a letter reminding them about the free DVR-522 they owed me and asking to talk to someone to resolve the issues, and the person they had call me didn't have any authority to do anything but "gather feedback". What a waste of time.
This same "feedback gatherer" demanded I fax her a copy of the letter saying I had earned a DVR. I did. Never heard back from her, either.
And Dish Network had the balls to call me a "valued customer"! I'd hate to see how they treat the ones they don't value. Charlie puts on a good show of being the friendly, down-home pal, but when push comes to shove, the customer gets the shove.
Why in the world anyone would ever buy memory from dell continues to confuse me.
You haven't been in an institutionalized environment, then. Like, for example, a state government or college.
We have buying departments. They go out and justify their existances by creating contracts with certain businesses for buying things. The upside for the business is they get a good lock (not 100%, but close) on the entire organization's business for that kind of product. The upside for the buying department is they justify their existance.
And before we forget this, there is an upside for the user. We can buy things without having to go through a set of paperwork hoops, because the vendor is officially blessed as the official vendor. Otherwise we need to justify buying whatever it is for whatever price we find it at from whatever company we locate. That justification process is not just because we want to buy from someone else, but would be in place for the contract company if they weren't contracted.
Another upside is that the contracted company already has the organization's account details and we can often just say "send me one of X and two of Y and bill it to account Z" and it gets done.
This takes place for all sorts of things, ranging from computers and supplies to chemical supplies to travel.
Of course, the downside is when you want to try to keep consistency in what you buy over a few year period, and the contracted computer supplier likes to sell the latest hardware...
"It's a virgin soil and it has to remain so : we have to much to learn about it instead of polluting it : When Mankind can prove it can live in equilibrium oni Earth, then it can spread elsewhere."
Who's to say that (evolution --or-- our maker, depending on your beliefs) didn't intend for us to do exactly that?
More importantly, who's to say that the condition it is in RIGHT NOW is the one, true condition that it must remain in for the remainder of our existance?
People in general have this really silly notion that the way they see something today is 1) the way it has always been, 2) the way it always must be, and 3) the right way for things to be.
Example 1: coast of Oregon. There's a wonderful spit of sand on the ocean side of a river bay. The spit came into existance when the river mouth moved north. Rich people have built million dollar homes on that spit. It wasn't there 40 years ago; there is a really good chance that the river will wash it away again in another 40 years -- but the people who own homes there think "this is the way it MUST be" and will expect taxpayers to help protect them.
Example 2: images from Mars show large areas where it looks like flowing water has eroded the surface. There is no flowing water today. Is "flowing water" the "right" condition and today's arrid nature an anomaly, or is the arrid nature the "right" condition and flowing water the anomaly?
Consider that the attempt at terraforming will yield interesting and novel scientific results that may be directly applicable to the Earth, and it becomes a no-brainer. That it might convert Mars BACK to something it once was is just a beneficial side-effect. At WORST, if everything goes horribly wrong ON MARS, the place will STILL be uninhabitable. "Can't live there now, can't live there then, but learned a lot in the process"
is still a positive result.
They forget that the Constitution was designed to be an evolving document interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court,
No, it was designed to be a document enforced by the Supreme Court, with whatever interpretation being based on the intent of the authors and not the johny-come-lately revisionism of personal opinions of justices (or the interference of foreign concerns regarding the "right" way our government should operate.)
The fact remains that the US Constitution does NOT call for "separation of church and state", only for the state not to be involved in the establishment of religion. The original authors had no problem at all having religious materials and icons involved in the government (e.g., a congressional chaplain or religious mottos on the Supreme Court building), just with the government saying "this is the correct religion for YOU to practice."
And, despite complaints to the contrary, the words "under God" in a pledge of allegiance is not saying anything close to "this is the correct religion for YOU". If you object to the words, just don't say them. Problem solved. When you are actually forced to say them, you've got a complaint.
Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another.
Well, this statement is patently absurd, since the US Government has laws which "aid all religions" and routinely aids established mainline religions over cults or whackos. (Try complaining that your "religion" requires human sacrifice and see if you get off a murder charge. But the laws against murder clearly hinder your free exercise of your religion.)
The Supreme Court is obviously not infallable; unfortunately, the only "court" which could say they were wrong is themselves, and when they choose to be wrong they aren't going to say they are.
...you'll find out that burning a flag is actually the only proper way to get rid of one when you have to...
I think the distinction between "old, worn out flag being burned in a quiet, private ceremony" and "brand new flag being burned during a protest march, with the unburned parts being trampled on, as a means of expressing 'free speech'" is not too hard to make. Not to say that either should be illegal, just that bringing up the proper way to discard of a worn out flag as proof that "flag burning", in the normal context, should be legal, is a red-herring.
...when hardly any of them can explain what "callories from fat" means.
I'm not sure I know what "callories" are, either.
When food "calories" (actually kilocalories) are determined, they use one of two methods. The first involves taking a chunk of whatever it is, putting it in a "bomb calorimeter", and burning it. The bomb calorimeter is a sealed container that is pressurized with oxygen and contains a small fuse to light the chunk of stuff on fire. The rise in temperature is measured; the number of calories released by the chunk is divided by 1000 and reported as the food's "calories". The second method is to simply calculate how much of what things are in some food item and add up the calorie contents for those items as they were determined by the bomb.
In the bomb, everything goes to CO2 and water (and some nitrogen and sulpher and etc. oxides.) In your body, the reactions are not so drastic, and follow different pathways depending on what kind of food is being processed. Not all foods end up as CO2 and water. That's why pretending that all "calories" are the same is erronious.
Further, "fat" doesn't go straight from fat in food to fat in body cells. It takes a roundabout path, and if that pathway is blocked or doesn't operate, then the fat doesn't get stored.
And that, dear fellow Slashdotter, is the basis for Atkins. It works. I've done it.
The executive order does not withold funding from the just harvesters of stem cells. It witholds funding from the entire organization that an experiment using those cells is a part of. In other words, if your university's biochemistry department is doing such an experiment, the entire university can lose funding
That's just patently and deliberately untrue. It does no such thing. Why this lie keeps being repeated is just, well, beyond comprehension.
I'm sure there were plenty of other posts that warranted your flame
It wasn't a flame, nor was it a "troll", as some misguided moderator seems to think. I quoted the part of your post that was applicable; the part where you said it wasn't well known.
If other parts were not quoted, then I wasn't responding to them. I was, as I said, reviewing the facts surrounding the discussion. I could either post 103 times correcting the same mistakes over and over again, or I could do it once and assume that people who read it would understand what it was.
I was speaking of course of the issue of the contamination of the existing stem cell lines, not that the order was some how hushed up.
Yes, I see now that could be one interpretation of what you wrote, and is probably the one you intended. It all depends on what you refer to by "this" -- and "the executive order" makes sense, since you refer specifically to the executive order.
On second thought... one last thing... I think you owe me an apology for your ill-informed attempt to bite my head off...
Since, as you acknowledge, most of what I wrote was not directed at anything YOU wrote, you need to stop pretending I was biting YOUR head off. If I didn't say you wrote it, then don't assume I said you wrote it. I'll accept that you intended to say that "the contamination was known but not well known..." and I saw a different interpretation, but as for the apology for biting your head off when I did not, no.
If Bush is in favor of destroying existing resources (human tissues) instead of using them to advance science and save lives,...
Bush is not in favor of destroying human tissues. To claim that he is is simply "tenuous" and "illogical".
This is an ethical dillema along the same lines as whether medical data gathered by the Nazi doctors using Jewish "volunteers" should be used. To some, using the data legitimizes the collection method. To others, it's just data. To wave your hands and claim there is no ethical issue at all is simply "tenuous" and "illogical".
If this research is immoral, why only ban government funding, as opposed to all funding,...
Because the question of morality is an individual matter. Private funding comes from people who have decided that it is moral to do this. Tax funding comes from everyone, even those who are morally opposed to the activity. A ban on federal funding honors the feelings of those who oppose the research while also honoring the feelings for those who accept it. If you want to support such research, write a check. If you don't, you ought not have the feds take your money away from you for such purposes.
If you want to use war protestors as a counter example, then you need to be arguing that THEY should get the same consideration, not that nobody ought to get it. But you'll lose that argument, because public funding of the military is a task outlined in the Constitution for the US government; public funding of stem cell research is not.
If you get federal dollars for anything at the facility, you can't do the research, period.
Incorrect. That is not what the order says.
Now, the type of stem-cell reseach being debated uses discarded eggs from In-Vitro Fertilization.
Incorrect again. That is not the only source of embryonic stem cells, but it is the only source for which federal funding is allowed.
Apparently, many people (including a bunch of folks here on/.) believe that stem-cell research is a crime because babies get killed in the process.
Apparently the/. editor thinks it is a crime, but that's because he didn't read the order and doesn't understand what it says.
Where's the logic here ? If stem-cell research should be banned...
Nothing in the executive order says that research has been banned. Where's the logic of twisting a ban on federal funding of research into a ban on that research? Private funding is still allowed, and certainly "federal" funding by other governments than the US is still allowed. How is this suddenly a "ban" on research?
This is something that was known, albeit not well known at the time of the executive order.
Incorrect. Everyone who had an interest in the topic at the time was aware of the order. I don't have a direct interest in the order and even I knew about it. It's only now, when it gets twisted into some horrible anti-Bush propoganda, that some people want to pretend it was a secret.
Let's review the facts:
It is not a LAW, it is an executive order.
It does not outlaw PRIVATE harvesting of embryonic stem cells nor the use of PRIVATE money to do research on same.
It says nothing about NON-EMBRYONIC stem cells. Those are the cells that many researchers freely admit have much more potential for positive results.
It wasn't a secret.
It deals only with how FEDERAL funds are used.
For many years, political anti-war activists have been demanding the right to not have their tax dollars used to support "the military-industrial complex", to the point that they just don't pay taxes. Why is it so bad when those who object to the use of unborn children in medical research want the same kind of control over their money? Is it just jealousy, because one group didn't make a convincing argument and the other did?
For those who claim that private money could not possibly be enough to do anything, keep in mind the incredible amounts of money to be made by private companies when they can fulfill the Kerry/Edwards promise to "make the cripples walk". Let the capitalists alone and see what happens; don't hold your breath waiting for the socialists to get anything done.
Or, if you cannot do that, at least stop spreading politically-motivated misinformation.
So, Microsoft shouldn't let people write Windows programs,
Hello, anonymous coward.
Yes, let's ignore the fact that Windows is an OPERATING SYSTEM, which, by definition, is used to support all kinds of user programs, and a digital camera is A DIGITAL CAMERA, which is intended to TAKE PICTURES and not be a general purpose computing platform.
If only a very few people are interested in trying this, noone will see the failed pictures that result from it...
I guess we've forgotten about this thing called the World Wide Web, where even one person who puts up a page pronouncing camera X a rotten piece of crap because the "hardware sucks" can reach an audience of millions of people. Nobody will see bad pictures unless they get posted to the web where EVERYONE can see them.
Plus, being an open platform is probably a selling point for more people than you think. There's a small but significant market that buys a product solely because of its hackability.
Which is it, a small market or "more people than you think"? And does this small number outnumber those who wouldn't buy it because they hear it is "bad hardware", even if the reason it is "bad hardware" is because it is difficult to hack properly?
The author, Cory Doctorow, was directed to an AA 'security counter' before checking in at the AA counter in Gatwick airport, not on arrival in the U.S., was interogated by an AA security officer...
That's normal.
The airlines pay for the security people (other than the armed ones who wear military uniforms and carry machine guns) at Gatwick and Heathrow, and they are the ones who question you prior to checking in. The government there makes them.
On one memorable trip back through Heathrow, I had just gotten off the tube and was dragging my bag to the check-in. The security fellow seemed interested in the fact that I was sweating more than the average traveller. I pointed out "I'm fat, I'm out of shape, my bag is heavy, it's warm, and it's a long way from your tube station to this damn checkin counter." That seemed to placate him. Until we got to the "any electronic devices" question, where I had to list every piece I was carrying...
If you are starting from scratch, there is a lot to screw up.
Yep. And when you screw it up, you're likely to blame the camera manufacturer for making "bad hardware" or not describing the hardware well enough, and when people see the poor pictures YOU are getting from that camera, they are unlikely to buy one for themselves. The camera company loses sales due to bad word of mouth.
If they thought that the chances were really good that someone would come out with hot new freeware, they'd be quite happy to sell more cameras to people who install the new software. The only thing they'd not be happy about is bad software causing people to blame them for the problem, and tieing up their support hotlines. And they see the chances of the latter being much greater than the chances of the former.
so their presence on the books is a violation of separation of church and state regardless of what the stickers actually say.
Here's this mythical "separation of church and state" again.
The constitution says "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;...". It does NOT say that religious beliefs must not be the motivation for saying something that it patently obvious.
The sticker being discussed does nothing to establish any religion, nor does it prevent anyone from the free exercise of the religion of their choice. Thus, it falls well within constitutional limits, and certainly does not violate any fabricated "separation" requirement. In fact, I'd say that the sticker is mandatory, to help prevent the establishment of the religion known as Evolution -- which is not just "species change" as someone else wrote, but that "species change into other species and that is how humans came to exist". Yes, the latter "evolution" is just as much a religion as anything else, since nobody saw how humans came to exist and thus "faith in things not seen" is exactly what "evolutionists" have.
Maybe they could get together and work things out.
So "they" work things out, but where does that leave the poor fellow who just wants to listen to the distant FM station that he's paid good money to put up an antenna to pick up? Oh, well, the pirate's walkman doesn't pick up anything on the frequency, so it must be clear!
This may very well bring back the concept of "pinning", which used to apply to CBers who were lids, but could be applied to lid FM pirates, too. The only bad thing about pinning one of these FM pirates would be that there isn't enough power in the signal to start the transmitter on fire. Maybe a new product: pins for FM pirates that inject a few hundred watts of RF so the transmitter DOES smoke.
There are some things that are fine if only a few people do them, but start to cause problems when it becomes common. Cutting across someone's lawn. Putting a poster on a telephone pole. Transmitting your favorite tunes on the FM broadcast band.
Now doubt can be removed without opening of a mouth!!
Nah, that's not new tech. It's demonstrated every day here on/., except by those whose lips move when they read the preview of their postings. Ok, I guess maybe it is new tech after all.
Ex: you can't purchase a scanner that will tune to cell phone frequencies, but a software radio would have no such limitations.
Writing the software to decode/encode signals is not a trivial task for those who do not understand such things. For example, most of the population.
Just as computing divides the planet into three classes (knows how to do it on their own, knows where the power switch is, and doesn't give a shit), SDR will create the same three classes. The technically capable will be able to write or modify the available software so it does what they want, the ones who know where the power switch is will use what they were sold, and the rest of the planet will go "so what?".
This is not a new situation. Whilst you may not legally purchase a scanner capable of receiving AMPS cellular calls, the circuitry you need to add to one to receive them is pretty trivial -- well within the abilitites of the "technically capable". The rest of the planet either receives what they are allowed to or doesn't care.
The MAIN difference is that now you are talking software instead of hardware. Software may be easier to distribute, but it would still fall under the ECPA limits when combined with the hardware.
And yes, I did say "sold". The new buzzword for shortwave listening is DRM. As I understand it, DRM is patented technology with a watchful organization selling licenses. The only way you can legally have a DRM radio without paying the license fee is if you write the code yourself, and that's not trivial even for those who DO know how to do it. The rest of the world gets to pay for the software.
...wouldn't it be better if this energy spent discussing the viability went towards some experiments to determine the validity?
Why waste energy disproving something that is so patently ridiculous? I mean, ADDITIONAL energy over what everyone has already learned about how spammers operate by watching them flood their mailboxes for years.
If this were something like cold fusion where there was some infinitesimal possibility that it might work through some unknown quantum mechanical glitch in the real world, perhaps. But this is a system that thousands of people understand, and they know that his starting premise is crap. Turning off a mail server does not make mail start bouncing immediately. Thus, these nonexistant bounces could not possibly be related in any way to the reduction in spam he is reporting.
Had Pons and Fleischman claimed to have seen cold fusion and in the same press conference said that they increased the temperature of the system by using a blowtorch, then everyone would have rightly said "you are full of crap, the heating you are seeing came from the blowtorch, not cold fusion". This fellow says "we turned off the mail server so we could change the mail server software" and you want people to keep from saying "you are full of crap, the spam prevention comes from using updated server software and not because of non-existant bounces that didn't happen when you turned off the server"?
I mean, the fact that he didn't investigate the server software on his own FIRST pretty much shows his talents at determining cause and effect are pretty limited. Presenting this nonsense as if it were some magic new solution is just ridiculous, and instead of asking why we aren't spending more time checking it out, we all ought to be flaming him mercilously for wasting everyone's time already. If I hadn't already participated in this discussion, I'd be modding you down as a troll. The fact it got accepted as an article calls into the question just how much "news for nerds" this really is.
During that time, all the mails sent to my mail account were of course bouncing.
Of course they were NOT. During that time, emails sent to your account were being held at the sending server, or, in the case of spammers who aren't using open relays, there was a timeout during the connection to port 25 on your server. Neither results in a bounce. Most intelligent email systems are set up with a 5 day queue.
In other words, it will take 5 days for bounces to start being sent. That's for real email. For the spam, the bounces will be sent to fake addresses and the spammers will never see them.
I've had systems in place on many of my accounts for YEARS that bounce (reject with "unknown user" errors) spam and the same spammers keep sending the same shit over and over again. I've waatched the mail logs on my domain's servers where 99% of the incoming email is undeliverable spam (it ALL bounces) and the same spammers keep sending the same shit over and over again. Spammers simply either DO NOT CARE if they get a bounce, or do not see the bounces anyway.
There must be a different explanation for the reduction in spam. A new spam filter on the server, for example. Spammers seeing bounces and stopping is patently ridiculous.
For starters, how many papers were rejected from the peer review process is almost entirely irrelevant.
Not so. When the current definition of "bunk" or "junk science" includes "anything that doesn't toe the Human Devastation of the Planet" theory of Global Warming, it is completely relevant.
You also rant about how these papers are only published because people don't want to lose funding by being perceived as anti-environment. It seems fairly evident that the current government establishment would be most served by producing strong evidence that global warming is not a serious issue --
I see that you call opinions that differ from yours 'rants'. Ok. Noted.
You are once again incorrect. What would happen if someone proved beyond all doubt that the current global warming was 1) not human caused and 2) not human fixable? The "current government" doesn't really gain much at all. They aren't "served" by this information. It isn't their money they are spending on this, it is ours.
But who is NOT served by such knowledge? Every current recipient of government (and private) money who is working on either proving human fault or finding human solutions. They lose ALL their funding. There is no longer a panic-hysteria about trying to solve something that cannot be solved.
So, yes, every researcher who is funded to find global warming has a vested interest in finding it. Every researcher who is funded in the area who reviews a paper that says his work shouldn't be funded is not going to cut his own throat by giving it a positive review.
If people wanted "safe" conclusions to ensure their funding, they would be saying that global warming is no big deal.
What utter nonsense. Who is going to spend lots of money trying to fix something that is "no big deal?" Nobody. Yeah, you hear all about the $60,000 "studies" that show that chocolate is brown or other similar pork-barrel nonsense, but you can't feed a lot of people on that money. It takes a global catastrophe! to bring out the big money.
Peer reviewers are not as politically motivated as you seem to suppose.
But they are every bit as "socially correctness" motivated as you can imagine. Yes, contradicting your peers is not viewed with a friendly eye. Especially when a lot of funding is peer reviewed.
A valid question, but one that is entirely irrelevant until you have shown that this fear actually exists.
I've seen it. I cannot prove it exists to you, because that would require outing people who I work with, and that would be bad news for MY funding.
paragraph three, page 1. "The first was to assume that the vote margin was due to the appearance of ghost votes...", which they then proceed to identify as fraud.
Slashdot Mirror
When the definition of "reputable" includes "accepts human-generated global warming as fact", then of course one side of the argument is "reputable" and the other is not.
Until you understand the difference between "fossil records" and "climate data", you will never understand the debate. The simple fact is that we don't have climate data for more than a very short period of the earth's history. The rest is guesswork.
And the other fact you need to face is that modelers spends hours and hours tweaking their models until they "look right", and if "humans are the cause of global warming" is what looks right to them (and they get paid to get that result) then that is what the models say. Models need real data to work right (which we don't have) and real understanding of the processes (guess wrong and you get the wrong answer.)
I remember one NOAA model that came out a few years ago showing a sudden upturn in temperatures just about to happen. CALAMITY! WOE! This was supposed to be the latest and most accurate model. Proof beyond all doubt that we were ruining the planet!
It didn't happen.
Insightful indeed.
I had Dish for many years, from back before they heavily subsidized the hardware. I don't anymore.
They sent me a letter last year telling me I had earned (their word) a free upgrade to a DVR-522. I called them to take them up on the offer. They pretended they had no idea what I was talking about, but if I faxed them a copy of the letter, they'd get back to me. They never did.
They added a bunch of useless, duplicate audio channels to the service, without asking, and then decided to raise rates. I sent them a letter reminding them about the free DVR-522 they owed me and asking to talk to someone to resolve the issues, and the person they had call me didn't have any authority to do anything but "gather feedback". What a waste of time.
This same "feedback gatherer" demanded I fax her a copy of the letter saying I had earned a DVR. I did. Never heard back from her, either.
And Dish Network had the balls to call me a "valued customer"! I'd hate to see how they treat the ones they don't value. Charlie puts on a good show of being the friendly, down-home pal, but when push comes to shove, the customer gets the shove.
And I don't miss Dish one bit.
You haven't been in an institutionalized environment, then. Like, for example, a state government or college.
We have buying departments. They go out and justify their existances by creating contracts with certain businesses for buying things. The upside for the business is they get a good lock (not 100%, but close) on the entire organization's business for that kind of product. The upside for the buying department is they justify their existance.
And before we forget this, there is an upside for the user. We can buy things without having to go through a set of paperwork hoops, because the vendor is officially blessed as the official vendor. Otherwise we need to justify buying whatever it is for whatever price we find it at from whatever company we locate. That justification process is not just because we want to buy from someone else, but would be in place for the contract company if they weren't contracted.
Another upside is that the contracted company already has the organization's account details and we can often just say "send me one of X and two of Y and bill it to account Z" and it gets done.
This takes place for all sorts of things, ranging from computers and supplies to chemical supplies to travel.
Of course, the downside is when you want to try to keep consistency in what you buy over a few year period, and the contracted computer supplier likes to sell the latest hardware ...
Who's to say that (evolution --or-- our maker, depending on your beliefs) didn't intend for us to do exactly that?
More importantly, who's to say that the condition it is in RIGHT NOW is the one, true condition that it must remain in for the remainder of our existance?
People in general have this really silly notion that the way they see something today is 1) the way it has always been, 2) the way it always must be, and 3) the right way for things to be.
Example 1: coast of Oregon. There's a wonderful spit of sand on the ocean side of a river bay. The spit came into existance when the river mouth moved north. Rich people have built million dollar homes on that spit. It wasn't there 40 years ago; there is a really good chance that the river will wash it away again in another 40 years -- but the people who own homes there think "this is the way it MUST be" and will expect taxpayers to help protect them.
Example 2: images from Mars show large areas where it looks like flowing water has eroded the surface. There is no flowing water today. Is "flowing water" the "right" condition and today's arrid nature an anomaly, or is the arrid nature the "right" condition and flowing water the anomaly?
Consider that the attempt at terraforming will yield interesting and novel scientific results that may be directly applicable to the Earth, and it becomes a no-brainer. That it might convert Mars BACK to something it once was is just a beneficial side-effect. At WORST, if everything goes horribly wrong ON MARS, the place will STILL be uninhabitable. "Can't live there now, can't live there then, but learned a lot in the process" is still a positive result.
No, it was designed to be a document enforced by the Supreme Court, with whatever interpretation being based on the intent of the authors and not the johny-come-lately revisionism of personal opinions of justices (or the interference of foreign concerns regarding the "right" way our government should operate.)
The fact remains that the US Constitution does NOT call for "separation of church and state", only for the state not to be involved in the establishment of religion. The original authors had no problem at all having religious materials and icons involved in the government (e.g., a congressional chaplain or religious mottos on the Supreme Court building), just with the government saying "this is the correct religion for YOU to practice."
And, despite complaints to the contrary, the words "under God" in a pledge of allegiance is not saying anything close to "this is the correct religion for YOU". If you object to the words, just don't say them. Problem solved. When you are actually forced to say them, you've got a complaint.
Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another.
Well, this statement is patently absurd, since the US Government has laws which "aid all religions" and routinely aids established mainline religions over cults or whackos. (Try complaining that your "religion" requires human sacrifice and see if you get off a murder charge. But the laws against murder clearly hinder your free exercise of your religion.)
The Supreme Court is obviously not infallable; unfortunately, the only "court" which could say they were wrong is themselves, and when they choose to be wrong they aren't going to say they are.
I think the distinction between "old, worn out flag being burned in a quiet, private ceremony" and "brand new flag being burned during a protest march, with the unburned parts being trampled on, as a means of expressing 'free speech'" is not too hard to make. Not to say that either should be illegal, just that bringing up the proper way to discard of a worn out flag as proof that "flag burning", in the normal context, should be legal, is a red-herring.
I'm not sure I know what "callories" are, either.
When food "calories" (actually kilocalories) are determined, they use one of two methods. The first involves taking a chunk of whatever it is, putting it in a "bomb calorimeter", and burning it. The bomb calorimeter is a sealed container that is pressurized with oxygen and contains a small fuse to light the chunk of stuff on fire. The rise in temperature is measured; the number of calories released by the chunk is divided by 1000 and reported as the food's "calories". The second method is to simply calculate how much of what things are in some food item and add up the calorie contents for those items as they were determined by the bomb.
In the bomb, everything goes to CO2 and water (and some nitrogen and sulpher and etc. oxides.) In your body, the reactions are not so drastic, and follow different pathways depending on what kind of food is being processed. Not all foods end up as CO2 and water. That's why pretending that all "calories" are the same is erronious.
Further, "fat" doesn't go straight from fat in food to fat in body cells. It takes a roundabout path, and if that pathway is blocked or doesn't operate, then the fat doesn't get stored.
And that, dear fellow Slashdotter, is the basis for Atkins. It works. I've done it.
That's just patently and deliberately untrue. It does no such thing. Why this lie keeps being repeated is just, well, beyond comprehension.
It wasn't a flame, nor was it a "troll", as some misguided moderator seems to think. I quoted the part of your post that was applicable; the part where you said it wasn't well known.
If other parts were not quoted, then I wasn't responding to them. I was, as I said, reviewing the facts surrounding the discussion. I could either post 103 times correcting the same mistakes over and over again, or I could do it once and assume that people who read it would understand what it was.
I was speaking of course of the issue of the contamination of the existing stem cell lines, not that the order was some how hushed up.
Yes, I see now that could be one interpretation of what you wrote, and is probably the one you intended. It all depends on what you refer to by "this" -- and "the executive order" makes sense, since you refer specifically to the executive order.
On second thought... one last thing... I think you owe me an apology for your ill-informed attempt to bite my head off ...
Since, as you acknowledge, most of what I wrote was not directed at anything YOU wrote, you need to stop pretending I was biting YOUR head off. If I didn't say you wrote it, then don't assume I said you wrote it. I'll accept that you intended to say that "the contamination was known but not well known..." and I saw a different interpretation, but as for the apology for biting your head off when I did not, no.
Bush is not in favor of destroying human tissues. To claim that he is is simply "tenuous" and "illogical".
This is an ethical dillema along the same lines as whether medical data gathered by the Nazi doctors using Jewish "volunteers" should be used. To some, using the data legitimizes the collection method. To others, it's just data. To wave your hands and claim there is no ethical issue at all is simply "tenuous" and "illogical".
If this research is immoral, why only ban government funding, as opposed to all funding,...
Because the question of morality is an individual matter. Private funding comes from people who have decided that it is moral to do this. Tax funding comes from everyone, even those who are morally opposed to the activity. A ban on federal funding honors the feelings of those who oppose the research while also honoring the feelings for those who accept it. If you want to support such research, write a check. If you don't, you ought not have the feds take your money away from you for such purposes.
If you want to use war protestors as a counter example, then you need to be arguing that THEY should get the same consideration, not that nobody ought to get it. But you'll lose that argument, because public funding of the military is a task outlined in the Constitution for the US government; public funding of stem cell research is not.
Incorrect. That is not what the order says.
Now, the type of stem-cell reseach being debated uses discarded eggs from In-Vitro Fertilization.
Incorrect again. That is not the only source of embryonic stem cells, but it is the only source for which federal funding is allowed.
Apparently, many people (including a bunch of folks here on /.) believe that stem-cell research is a crime because babies get killed in the process.
Apparently the /. editor thinks it is a crime, but that's because he didn't read the order and doesn't understand what it says.
Where's the logic here ? If stem-cell research should be banned ...
Nothing in the executive order says that research has been banned. Where's the logic of twisting a ban on federal funding of research into a ban on that research? Private funding is still allowed, and certainly "federal" funding by other governments than the US is still allowed. How is this suddenly a "ban" on research?
Incorrect. Everyone who had an interest in the topic at the time was aware of the order. I don't have a direct interest in the order and even I knew about it. It's only now, when it gets twisted into some horrible anti-Bush propoganda, that some people want to pretend it was a secret.
Let's review the facts:
- It is not a LAW, it is an executive order.
- It does not outlaw PRIVATE harvesting of embryonic stem cells nor the use of PRIVATE money to do research on same.
- It says nothing about NON-EMBRYONIC stem cells. Those are the cells that many researchers freely admit have much more potential for positive results.
- It wasn't a secret.
- It deals only with how FEDERAL funds are used.
For many years, political anti-war activists have been demanding the right to not have their tax dollars used to support "the military-industrial complex", to the point that they just don't pay taxes. Why is it so bad when those who object to the use of unborn children in medical research want the same kind of control over their money? Is it just jealousy, because one group didn't make a convincing argument and the other did?For those who claim that private money could not possibly be enough to do anything, keep in mind the incredible amounts of money to be made by private companies when they can fulfill the Kerry/Edwards promise to "make the cripples walk". Let the capitalists alone and see what happens; don't hold your breath waiting for the socialists to get anything done.
Or, if you cannot do that, at least stop spreading politically-motivated misinformation.
Hello, anonymous coward.
Yes, let's ignore the fact that Windows is an OPERATING SYSTEM, which, by definition, is used to support all kinds of user programs, and a digital camera is A DIGITAL CAMERA, which is intended to TAKE PICTURES and not be a general purpose computing platform.
If only a very few people are interested in trying this, noone will see the failed pictures that result from it...
I guess we've forgotten about this thing called the World Wide Web, where even one person who puts up a page pronouncing camera X a rotten piece of crap because the "hardware sucks" can reach an audience of millions of people. Nobody will see bad pictures unless they get posted to the web where EVERYONE can see them.
Plus, being an open platform is probably a selling point for more people than you think. There's a small but significant market that buys a product solely because of its hackability.
Which is it, a small market or "more people than you think"? And does this small number outnumber those who wouldn't buy it because they hear it is "bad hardware", even if the reason it is "bad hardware" is because it is difficult to hack properly?
That's normal.
The airlines pay for the security people (other than the armed ones who wear military uniforms and carry machine guns) at Gatwick and Heathrow, and they are the ones who question you prior to checking in. The government there makes them.
On one memorable trip back through Heathrow, I had just gotten off the tube and was dragging my bag to the check-in. The security fellow seemed interested in the fact that I was sweating more than the average traveller. I pointed out "I'm fat, I'm out of shape, my bag is heavy, it's warm, and it's a long way from your tube station to this damn checkin counter." That seemed to placate him. Until we got to the "any electronic devices" question, where I had to list every piece I was carrying ...
Yep. And when you screw it up, you're likely to blame the camera manufacturer for making "bad hardware" or not describing the hardware well enough, and when people see the poor pictures YOU are getting from that camera, they are unlikely to buy one for themselves. The camera company loses sales due to bad word of mouth.
If they thought that the chances were really good that someone would come out with hot new freeware, they'd be quite happy to sell more cameras to people who install the new software. The only thing they'd not be happy about is bad software causing people to blame them for the problem, and tieing up their support hotlines. And they see the chances of the latter being much greater than the chances of the former.
Here's this mythical "separation of church and state" again.
The constitution says "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;...". It does NOT say that religious beliefs must not be the motivation for saying something that it patently obvious.
The sticker being discussed does nothing to establish any religion, nor does it prevent anyone from the free exercise of the religion of their choice. Thus, it falls well within constitutional limits, and certainly does not violate any fabricated "separation" requirement. In fact, I'd say that the sticker is mandatory, to help prevent the establishment of the religion known as Evolution -- which is not just "species change" as someone else wrote, but that "species change into other species and that is how humans came to exist". Yes, the latter "evolution" is just as much a religion as anything else, since nobody saw how humans came to exist and thus "faith in things not seen" is exactly what "evolutionists" have.
So "they" work things out, but where does that leave the poor fellow who just wants to listen to the distant FM station that he's paid good money to put up an antenna to pick up? Oh, well, the pirate's walkman doesn't pick up anything on the frequency, so it must be clear!
This may very well bring back the concept of "pinning", which used to apply to CBers who were lids, but could be applied to lid FM pirates, too. The only bad thing about pinning one of these FM pirates would be that there isn't enough power in the signal to start the transmitter on fire. Maybe a new product: pins for FM pirates that inject a few hundred watts of RF so the transmitter DOES smoke.
There are some things that are fine if only a few people do them, but start to cause problems when it becomes common. Cutting across someone's lawn. Putting a poster on a telephone pole. Transmitting your favorite tunes on the FM broadcast band.
Nah, that's not new tech. It's demonstrated every day here on /., except by those whose lips move when they read the preview of their postings. Ok, I guess maybe it is new tech after all.
Writing the software to decode/encode signals is not a trivial task for those who do not understand such things. For example, most of the population.
Just as computing divides the planet into three classes (knows how to do it on their own, knows where the power switch is, and doesn't give a shit), SDR will create the same three classes. The technically capable will be able to write or modify the available software so it does what they want, the ones who know where the power switch is will use what they were sold, and the rest of the planet will go "so what?".
This is not a new situation. Whilst you may not legally purchase a scanner capable of receiving AMPS cellular calls, the circuitry you need to add to one to receive them is pretty trivial -- well within the abilitites of the "technically capable". The rest of the planet either receives what they are allowed to or doesn't care.
The MAIN difference is that now you are talking software instead of hardware. Software may be easier to distribute, but it would still fall under the ECPA limits when combined with the hardware.
And yes, I did say "sold". The new buzzword for shortwave listening is DRM. As I understand it, DRM is patented technology with a watchful organization selling licenses. The only way you can legally have a DRM radio without paying the license fee is if you write the code yourself, and that's not trivial even for those who DO know how to do it. The rest of the world gets to pay for the software.
Why waste energy disproving something that is so patently ridiculous? I mean, ADDITIONAL energy over what everyone has already learned about how spammers operate by watching them flood their mailboxes for years.
If this were something like cold fusion where there was some infinitesimal possibility that it might work through some unknown quantum mechanical glitch in the real world, perhaps. But this is a system that thousands of people understand, and they know that his starting premise is crap. Turning off a mail server does not make mail start bouncing immediately. Thus, these nonexistant bounces could not possibly be related in any way to the reduction in spam he is reporting.
Had Pons and Fleischman claimed to have seen cold fusion and in the same press conference said that they increased the temperature of the system by using a blowtorch, then everyone would have rightly said "you are full of crap, the heating you are seeing came from the blowtorch, not cold fusion". This fellow says "we turned off the mail server so we could change the mail server software" and you want people to keep from saying "you are full of crap, the spam prevention comes from using updated server software and not because of non-existant bounces that didn't happen when you turned off the server"?
I mean, the fact that he didn't investigate the server software on his own FIRST pretty much shows his talents at determining cause and effect are pretty limited. Presenting this nonsense as if it were some magic new solution is just ridiculous, and instead of asking why we aren't spending more time checking it out, we all ought to be flaming him mercilously for wasting everyone's time already. If I hadn't already participated in this discussion, I'd be modding you down as a troll. The fact it got accepted as an article calls into the question just how much "news for nerds" this really is.
During that time, all the mails sent to my mail account were of course bouncing.
Of course they were NOT. During that time, emails sent to your account were being held at the sending server, or, in the case of spammers who aren't using open relays, there was a timeout during the connection to port 25 on your server. Neither results in a bounce. Most intelligent email systems are set up with a 5 day queue.
In other words, it will take 5 days for bounces to start being sent. That's for real email. For the spam, the bounces will be sent to fake addresses and the spammers will never see them.
I've had systems in place on many of my accounts for YEARS that bounce (reject with "unknown user" errors) spam and the same spammers keep sending the same shit over and over again. I've waatched the mail logs on my domain's servers where 99% of the incoming email is undeliverable spam (it ALL bounces) and the same spammers keep sending the same shit over and over again. Spammers simply either DO NOT CARE if they get a bounce, or do not see the bounces anyway.
There must be a different explanation for the reduction in spam. A new spam filter on the server, for example. Spammers seeing bounces and stopping is patently ridiculous.
Not so. When the current definition of "bunk" or "junk science" includes "anything that doesn't toe the Human Devastation of the Planet" theory of Global Warming, it is completely relevant.
You also rant about how these papers are only published because people don't want to lose funding by being perceived as anti-environment. It seems fairly evident that the current government establishment would be most served by producing strong evidence that global warming is not a serious issue --
I see that you call opinions that differ from yours 'rants'. Ok. Noted.
You are once again incorrect. What would happen if someone proved beyond all doubt that the current global warming was 1) not human caused and 2) not human fixable? The "current government" doesn't really gain much at all. They aren't "served" by this information. It isn't their money they are spending on this, it is ours.
But who is NOT served by such knowledge? Every current recipient of government (and private) money who is working on either proving human fault or finding human solutions. They lose ALL their funding. There is no longer a panic-hysteria about trying to solve something that cannot be solved.
So, yes, every researcher who is funded to find global warming has a vested interest in finding it. Every researcher who is funded in the area who reviews a paper that says his work shouldn't be funded is not going to cut his own throat by giving it a positive review.
If people wanted "safe" conclusions to ensure their funding, they would be saying that global warming is no big deal.
What utter nonsense. Who is going to spend lots of money trying to fix something that is "no big deal?" Nobody. Yeah, you hear all about the $60,000 "studies" that show that chocolate is brown or other similar pork-barrel nonsense, but you can't feed a lot of people on that money. It takes a global catastrophe! to bring out the big money.
Peer reviewers are not as politically motivated as you seem to suppose.
But they are every bit as "socially correctness" motivated as you can imagine. Yes, contradicting your peers is not viewed with a friendly eye. Especially when a lot of funding is peer reviewed.
A valid question, but one that is entirely irrelevant until you have shown that this fear actually exists.
I've seen it. I cannot prove it exists to you, because that would require outing people who I work with, and that would be bad news for MY funding.
"In its most recent assessment, IPCC states unequivocally that the consensus of scientific opinion
"Consensus of scientific opinion" is not "proven science". Ever hear of "geocentrism" or "spontaneouos generation"?
paragraph three, page 1. "The first was to assume that the vote margin was due to the appearance of ghost votes...", which they then proceed to identify as fraud.