For a DIY hobby project maybe. Somehow, I don't find it very comforting that this is the mindset of people who are entrusted with everyone's private information (things like banking data, medical records, private correspondence, news interests, political leanings, whereabouts etc.). It kind of gives the impression that it's just a game to them.
The ice story was particularly idiotic. The ice cover of 2012 was at an extreme low; this years it's pretty much spot on the (downward) trend line, which happens to lie 60% above the 2012 record. Drawing any long-term conclusion from that difference is like saying there will be no winter this year, because it was warmer today than yesterday.
Peter Hadfield summarised it quite nicely in a video.
So, you bring up two different questions; I will try to respond to both, one at a time.
First, there is Hans von Storch's interview with Der Spiegel.
Hans von Storch is a German climate scientist. As far as being "the lead author" of "the IPCC report" is concerned, I'm not really sure which report you are referring to. Each of the 11 chapters of IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (the most recent one) has around ten or more lead authors, and as far as I can tell Storch isn't among them. He isn't even among the even larger group of contributing authors. Nevertheless, as a climate scientist who has been in the field for a long time, he raises some valid points.
Storch is discussing temperature data from the last 15 years (not 20 as you first said -- when he mentions 20 years, he is talking about the hypothetical scenario that the current trend would continue for another 5 years, and what that could mean).
Essentially, his point is that we are currently observing a slower increase in surface temperature than many of the models had predicted. While we are certainly talking about a rather short time period on a geological time scale, the models used by Storch's team indicate that these observations are unlikely to have occurred through random fluctuations. Hence, he concludes there is probably something going on that hasn't been modelled properly.
At the same time as we are seeing this reduced increase in surface temperatures, other climatological changes, such as rising sea levels and ocean water temperatures, have carried on.
Based on measurements of incoming and outgoing radiation, it has also been observed that the Earth absorbed more net energy between 2004 and 2008 than surface temperatures would suggest. This has led researchers to wonder where this energy has gone.
One suggested explanation is that heat is being transferred to deep ocean water, to a greater extent than previously anticipated. (Since water has a very high heat capacity, the oceans can buffer a significant portion of the thermal energy.) A recent study by Balmaseda, Trenberth and Källén concludes that this is in fact happening, and that it is the result of certain weather phenomena in recent years, such as El Niño.
In fact, Storch brings the heating ocean water explanation up himself, further down in the same interview.
The thing is though, if increased heat transfer to deep ocean water is happening, it doesn't actually change our long-term fate. Deep ocean water is expected to heat as we reach a new thermal equilibrium, just not this early. In other words, assuming this theory proves to hold water (no pun intended), the end result is the probably more ro less the same; things just heat up in a slightly different order.
Throwing CO2 out of the equation, on the other hand, isn't really anywhere on the map. It would immediately make historical data inexplicable and put into question a lot of fundamental physics. And nor is Storch suggesting any such thing. What we can hope for is that the Earth's sensitivity to CO2 forcing has been overestimated somewhat -- that could make the soon hopelessly out of reach maximum 2 degrees warming target perhaps more attainable.
All in all, I think it would be fair to say that the jury is still out on exactly how the recent apparent stagnation in surface temperature increases should be interpreted. We should not get carried away. No doubt, the coming few years will shed light on the issue. Additionally, it's not exactly like the current pace of climate negotiations will get around to doing
If the RNGs aren't producing numbers as "random" as claimed, then it's not working.
Unless you have access to the AES key in the RNG chip, the numbers are effectively random. Even if an attacker knows that the numbers only jump around in for example a 32-bit subspace of the N-bit key space, they don't know which subspace, unless they break AES. On the other hand, if you do have the key, as you probably would if you are the one who tampered with the chip, then you're in a whole new position.
I guess that's the "nice" thing about the attack -- only the one who planted it can exploit it. Useful if you for instance want to spy on your countrymen, without at the same time exposing them to a foreign adversary.
Oh, is that why the lead author of the IPCC report explicitly said that their models don't match reality over the last 20 years?
Care to provide a source for that? What did he say, exactly?
Reality has proven the models wrong.
Again, according to what data? Something you read on a blog, or can you point to actual measurements (and please without cherry-picking endpoints -- that way you can manufacture any trend)?
Oh, I don't know, maybe the sun?
The sun is accounted for! We can measure the solar irradiation, and it hasn't increased recently. The sun has been in the models all the time, and it needs to be to for them to match measured data, for obvious reasons. What kind of idiots do you take climatologists for? Yes, the sun has caused some of the warming, primarily during the first half of the 1900s. Now, it's the CO2. That's old news, so what's your point?
And please point to some actual research instead of an op/ed if you want to prove your points. As you so succinctly put it yourself in a different post: "Opinions are not proof."
Look here if you want a summary (with references to peer-reviewed research, if you want to verify any of it).
I'm not exactly sure what you are trying to say, but you seem to have misunderstood what the consensus is about. It is not a consensus as in "we are all conjecturing the same thing in lack of proof", it is a consensus that there is proof. It's exactly the same thing as with Einstein's more recent theory of relativity (you do know that the greenhouse gas models are older than the theories of relativity, right?): physicists have a consensus that Einstein was correct, based on measurements, observations and calculations.
- Empirical Science isn't a democracy. [...] Somebody once created a pamphlet called 100 Authors Against Einstein, where they wanted to gather enough opinions to discredit Einstein. Einstein simply said "If I were wrong, one would be enough."
And they all failed to prove Einstein wrong, in the same way everyone who has tried to prove the climate models (fundamentally) wrong have failed. For anyone who isn't a physicist, don't you agree that it is relevant to note that the vast majority of physicists agree that Einstein's theories of relativity are correct?
- Patrick Moore left greenpeace (which he helped create) because it bothered him that the entire movement was basically hijacked by socialists. [...]
Then don't listen to Greenpeace! It doesn't matter what they say, listen to what climate scientists say. Forget about Greenpeace.
[...] This means we could have periods just like the ones we are in now where there's a sudden heat spike, followed by cooling, and what we're seeing now may even be something that happens all the time. [...]
For what reason would there be? If that were the case you suddenly have two new problems to find explanations for: 1) There would have to be a mechanism that can cause sudden spikes in the Earth's energy exchange at a planetary scale, other than greenhouse gases; and 2) You need to find a reason why the current increase in greenhouse gases, which should have exactly that (heating) effect based on pretty basic physics, for some reason doesn't.
- Besides all of that, we already have well known periods where the earth was so much hotter than it is now and had a CO2 PPM ten times what we have now, and very large scale life thrived pretty damn well. In fact, quite possibly the "greenest" period in history:[...]
Apart from the somewhat dubious claim that it was the "greenest" period in history, then yes, there has been periods with much higher CO2, and consequently a much warmer climate (despite a weaker solar radiation back then). Nobody, who knows what they are talking about, is claiming that a hotter climate precludes life -- that isn't the issue. The issues are that: 1) Many current organisms will not be able to adapt that quickly to a climate change, meaning we will lose much biodiversity for some millions of years until new species have developed. This isn't a problem for "life" itself, but a loss for humanity. 2) Human societies will take a pretty big hit in adapting to a hotter world. For one thing, during such warmer periods as you refer to, the sea level was 50 to 70 meters higher than it is today. We are of course not talking about any such increases in the near term, and we could probably adapt to even such extreme changes without going extinct if we had to, but the cost of for example moving portions of coastal cities (to name one of a long range of potential consequences) just so we can continue to use oil for a few decades longer than we otherwise would have (since it runs out anyway), is completely disproportionate. There are other energy sources.
By the way, I find it somewhat interesting that you say we have "well known periods where the earth was so much hotter", talking about periods hundreds of millions of years ago, a few sentences after you declare your distrust for historical temperature records because "we weren't actually there to measure it proper thousands or millions of years ago". Which way do you want to have it?
There are always multiple actions and circumstances that lead up to an accident. Labelling some as faulty and some as correct is principally a philosophically arbitrary choice, and while sometimes useful, often tends to oversimplify the situation. If you furthermore limit yourself to select a single action or party as "the responsible", you have mentally eliminated all the other factors that perhaps should be addressed.
I'm not saying that blame or responsibility as a concept is useless. Quite the contrary. The threat of blame can keep people from being negligent, at least to an extent. However, sometimes something is just the result of a long range of less than optimal decisions and circumstances, any one of which isn't obviously the single cause. And sometimes you just have bad luck, due to factors out of anyone's control (or like the saying goes: "shit happens"). If we at every instance force ourselves to define who is the culprit, we risk missing what is really important: the bigger picture.
It's pointless anyway against the NSA. Seriously. Every single modern operating system (including on routers) has tons of unpatched exploit vectors. There's even a black market for them. The NSA can just infect your machines and ex-filtrate your data and/or the encryption keys...
If you are individually targeted by the NSA, then yes, you probably don't stand much of a chance. But they couldn't use that kind of attack vector en masse without it being discovered fairly quickly, so it still helps against dragnet fishing.
Yes, to the extent that we need to blame a single party, it would those who had poor judgement. Unfortunately, that doesn't necessarily help us very much. People are, and always will be, imperfect. The way I see it, this is more of a system failure.
And to add to that, by the way: Here there may (again) be a problem with the legal tradition in the US. Presumably, writing something broad like "improper use can lead to injury or death" is safer from a culpability reduction perspective than being specific, since then you have covered any possible way someone may hurt themselves. Otherwise, someone can argue that you didn't describe exactly the way they got hurt. It is, on the other hand, probably more likely that someone actually will hurt themselves, than if you are specific with the dangers.
Well, I'm of the opinion that everything in this world doesn't have to be "somebody's fault". Or more precisely; placing blame isn't necessarily very interesting or useful to solve a problem. Sometimes, it's just better to look at things as they are, objectively without judgement, to identify the most constructive course of action.
I'm certainly not trying to argue that this is the manufacturers fault. The parents shouldn't let their children play with such things, so if you must choose a single party to point at, it would probably be them. But the reality of it is that people are going to make mistakes. Not everyone is going to realise all potentials dangers all the time. Doing something as extreme as prosecuting the parents for child abuse in this situation isn't actually going to help anybody, unless they force-fed their kids magnets. And in all likelihood, those parents already got a number of sleepless nights and enough feelings of guilt to very careful selecting toys in the future, which is about as much as you can realistically hope to achieve.
From a more systemic point of view (and without having seen exactly how the warning used to read), I am guessing that the best solution to reduce the number of accidents, if that's what we want to do, would be to explain more clearly why the magnets are dangerous to children. People are usually more inclined to follow instructions if they fully understand the logic behind them. For example: "If accidentally swallowed, these magnets will get stuck in the intestines, probably tearing a hole in them. Treat them like poison. Keep them away from children." would be more effective than for example: "This is not a children's toy. Improper use can lead to injury or death."
Hypothesis:
1. Manufacturers generally get sued for all kinds of crazy reasons, when people have been stupid while using their products.
2. Manufacturers slap on "not safe for kids" and similar labels all the time, just to be safe.
3. The label loses any semantic meaning, since it is always there. People start to ignore it, and try to rely on their own judgement.
4. Parents see a box of funny little magnets. How can they be dangerous? There is lack of imagination as to what happens with more than one of those in a small child's intestines.
5....
6. Visit to the ER.
That kind of voids the idea of limited liability, though. And it gets even more problematic if you were to extend it to the individuals hired by the company to make the actual decisions (i.e. not the owners) -- suppose for example that some engineers employed by Samsung would be required to pay a billion dollars to Apple for patent infringement, personally, because they were the ones that chose to implement certain features. Suddenly it becomes extremely risky to make a career in R&D.
I can prove him wrong with two words: commercial satellites.
Oh really? What do you figure he said that this proves wrong? You know, because he specifically argues that private companies does things like transporting stuff into space better than government can. You'd known that if you bothered to watch TFV -- I know, this is Slashdot, what am I expecting?
What he is talking about is missions to push the frontiers, like mapping planets and such, where it's hard to find a clear ROI for a private investor.
Very likely? I'll give you that it is possible that a "random slashdot poster" is more intelligent and insightful than "one of the brightest minds of our time", but you can't honestly think it is usually the case?
It seems most posters in this story haven't really bothered to watch TFV (go figure). Unlike the impression you can get from TFS, Tyson says he thinks there is too little private enterprise in the space industry, and that it's taken too long for them to get there.
The point he is making is that when it comes to pushing the frontiers, mapping planets and such, the business case is tricky. So he thinks there will continue to be a need for governments to fund this, if it is to continue, much like basic research.
I'd say that the presumption that private enterprises will always do everything better is the biased opinion, if anything.
And obviously you didn't watch TFV. Quote from it: "The first Europeans to the New World were not the Dutch East India Trading Company. It was governments funding government missions. Columbus drew the maps, established where the trade winds were. Where are the hostiles? Where are the friendlies? Is there food there? Can you breathe the air? They come back with this information. Then you can establish a capital market evaluation. 'Cause now you know there are riches here but not there; you can go here by this route but not that one. Then you can turn it into a profitable enterprise."
He thinks private companies should do more of the work in space, he just thinks there are too many unknowns for it to make business sense for anyone to push the frontiers.
Heh, yes of course, you don't have to support your claims if you don't want to. That's entirely up to you.
Although, I must say the fact that you thought it worth spending six full sentences only to say that you don't want to tell me even what country you are referring to, because you are not "here for me", makes it awfully inviting to assume that you simply have no reliable sources withstanding scrutiny, and don't want to admit it. But, by all means, I'm happy to end it at that.
It is a perfectly valid argument, since it was in response to a suggestion that "saving" (the word holophrastic used) future generations should have no bearing on current decision making. The negative future effect was thereby already implied in the original statement. My counterargument, based on the same premise, was that future consequences affect current value. Now, if you want to argue about what those future consequences are (positive or negative), then that's a whole other discussion.
As much as I'd like to go into the details here, I'm sorry to say I'll not have the time, but let me just note that discount rates of future costs are pretty much artificial by nature. I mean, it's basically just the relevance we currently ascribe to costs that occur in the future. Moral arguments can be made to that. The 1,4 % discount rate used in the Stern Report means that we count costs that occur 50 years into the future at half their value, which I and many (but certainly not all) economists think is reasonable.
So replace the word "murder" with any other crime of your choice if you don't like it then. It is a reductio ad absurdum of your suggestion that only members of your community are relevant to the moral and legal consequences of your actions. Jeez, how much do I need to dumb this down?
I get the distinct impression that you're not really interested in having a rational discussion. It may sound catchy to throw around expressions like "most scientists believe" and "start reading", but if you actually had wanted me to read about any of that you would a) given some references to relevant articles, and b) stated what freaking country you are even talking about.
What I believe, for that matter, isn't relevant to this discussion. Why? Because what I have been challenging all along is your presumption that democracy means that, because you don't care about the consequences of X, you shouldn't have to be bothered to refrain from X. Democracy does not imply that, in support of which I have given two counterexamples, none of which you apparently accept for reasons you haven't really explained. Well, other than that I "crossed lines" (whatever that means).
Specifically, where am I wrong? And what am I ignoring by stating that future costs are relevant to current evaluation? Please try to argue the subject matter instead of making cheeky insinuations.
Slashdot Mirror
For a DIY hobby project maybe. Somehow, I don't find it very comforting that this is the mindset of people who are entrusted with everyone's private information (things like banking data, medical records, private correspondence, news interests, political leanings, whereabouts etc.). It kind of gives the impression that it's just a game to them.
The ice story was particularly idiotic. The ice cover of 2012 was at an extreme low; this years it's pretty much spot on the (downward) trend line, which happens to lie 60% above the 2012 record. Drawing any long-term conclusion from that difference is like saying there will be no winter this year, because it was warmer today than yesterday.
Peter Hadfield summarised it quite nicely in a video.
So, you bring up two different questions; I will try to respond to both, one at a time.
First, there is Hans von Storch's interview with Der Spiegel.
Hans von Storch is a German climate scientist. As far as being "the lead author" of "the IPCC report" is concerned, I'm not really sure which report you are referring to. Each of the 11 chapters of IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (the most recent one) has around ten or more lead authors, and as far as I can tell Storch isn't among them. He isn't even among the even larger group of contributing authors. Nevertheless, as a climate scientist who has been in the field for a long time, he raises some valid points.
Storch is discussing temperature data from the last 15 years (not 20 as you first said -- when he mentions 20 years, he is talking about the hypothetical scenario that the current trend would continue for another 5 years, and what that could mean).
Essentially, his point is that we are currently observing a slower increase in surface temperature than many of the models had predicted. While we are certainly talking about a rather short time period on a geological time scale, the models used by Storch's team indicate that these observations are unlikely to have occurred through random fluctuations. Hence, he concludes there is probably something going on that hasn't been modelled properly.
At the same time as we are seeing this reduced increase in surface temperatures, other climatological changes, such as rising sea levels and ocean water temperatures, have carried on.
Based on measurements of incoming and outgoing radiation, it has also been observed that the Earth absorbed more net energy between 2004 and 2008 than surface temperatures would suggest. This has led researchers to wonder where this energy has gone.
One suggested explanation is that heat is being transferred to deep ocean water, to a greater extent than previously anticipated. (Since water has a very high heat capacity, the oceans can buffer a significant portion of the thermal energy.) A recent study by Balmaseda, Trenberth and Källén concludes that this is in fact happening, and that it is the result of certain weather phenomena in recent years, such as El Niño.
In fact, Storch brings the heating ocean water explanation up himself, further down in the same interview.
The thing is though, if increased heat transfer to deep ocean water is happening, it doesn't actually change our long-term fate. Deep ocean water is expected to heat as we reach a new thermal equilibrium, just not this early. In other words, assuming this theory proves to hold water (no pun intended), the end result is the probably more ro less the same; things just heat up in a slightly different order.
Throwing CO2 out of the equation, on the other hand, isn't really anywhere on the map. It would immediately make historical data inexplicable and put into question a lot of fundamental physics. And nor is Storch suggesting any such thing. What we can hope for is that the Earth's sensitivity to CO2 forcing has been overestimated somewhat -- that could make the soon hopelessly out of reach maximum 2 degrees warming target perhaps more attainable.
All in all, I think it would be fair to say that the jury is still out on exactly how the recent apparent stagnation in surface temperature increases should be interpreted. We should not get carried away. No doubt, the coming few years will shed light on the issue. Additionally, it's not exactly like the current pace of climate negotiations will get around to doing
If the RNGs aren't producing numbers as "random" as claimed, then it's not working.
Unless you have access to the AES key in the RNG chip, the numbers are effectively random. Even if an attacker knows that the numbers only jump around in for example a 32-bit subspace of the N-bit key space, they don't know which subspace, unless they break AES. On the other hand, if you do have the key, as you probably would if you are the one who tampered with the chip, then you're in a whole new position.
I guess that's the "nice" thing about the attack -- only the one who planted it can exploit it. Useful if you for instance want to spy on your countrymen, without at the same time exposing them to a foreign adversary.
Science is about reproducible results, about proof. Opinions are not proof. Truth is truth whether anyone knows it or believes it or not.
Well, you are right about that at least.
Oh, is that why the lead author of the IPCC report explicitly said that their models don't match reality over the last 20 years?
Care to provide a source for that? What did he say, exactly?
Reality has proven the models wrong.
Again, according to what data? Something you read on a blog, or can you point to actual measurements (and please without cherry-picking endpoints -- that way you can manufacture any trend)?
Oh, I don't know, maybe the sun?
The sun is accounted for! We can measure the solar irradiation, and it hasn't increased recently. The sun has been in the models all the time, and it needs to be to for them to match measured data, for obvious reasons. What kind of idiots do you take climatologists for? Yes, the sun has caused some of the warming, primarily during the first half of the 1900s. Now, it's the CO2. That's old news, so what's your point?
And please point to some actual research instead of an op/ed if you want to prove your points. As you so succinctly put it yourself in a different post: "Opinions are not proof."
Look here if you want a summary (with references to peer-reviewed research, if you want to verify any of it).
I'm not exactly sure what you are trying to say, but you seem to have misunderstood what the consensus is about. It is not a consensus as in "we are all conjecturing the same thing in lack of proof", it is a consensus that there is proof. It's exactly the same thing as with Einstein's more recent theory of relativity (you do know that the greenhouse gas models are older than the theories of relativity, right?): physicists have a consensus that Einstein was correct, based on measurements, observations and calculations.
- Empirical Science isn't a democracy. [...] Somebody once created a pamphlet called 100 Authors Against Einstein, where they wanted to gather enough opinions to discredit Einstein. Einstein simply said "If I were wrong, one would be enough."
And they all failed to prove Einstein wrong, in the same way everyone who has tried to prove the climate models (fundamentally) wrong have failed. For anyone who isn't a physicist, don't you agree that it is relevant to note that the vast majority of physicists agree that Einstein's theories of relativity are correct?
- Patrick Moore left greenpeace (which he helped create) because it bothered him that the entire movement was basically hijacked by socialists. [...]
Then don't listen to Greenpeace! It doesn't matter what they say, listen to what climate scientists say. Forget about Greenpeace.
[...] This means we could have periods just like the ones we are in now where there's a sudden heat spike, followed by cooling, and what we're seeing now may even be something that happens all the time. [...]
For what reason would there be? If that were the case you suddenly have two new problems to find explanations for: 1) There would have to be a mechanism that can cause sudden spikes in the Earth's energy exchange at a planetary scale, other than greenhouse gases; and 2) You need to find a reason why the current increase in greenhouse gases, which should have exactly that (heating) effect based on pretty basic physics, for some reason doesn't.
- Besides all of that, we already have well known periods where the earth was so much hotter than it is now and had a CO2 PPM ten times what we have now, and very large scale life thrived pretty damn well. In fact, quite possibly the "greenest" period in history:[...]
Apart from the somewhat dubious claim that it was the "greenest" period in history, then yes, there has been periods with much higher CO2, and consequently a much warmer climate (despite a weaker solar radiation back then). Nobody, who knows what they are talking about, is claiming that a hotter climate precludes life -- that isn't the issue. The issues are that:
1) Many current organisms will not be able to adapt that quickly to a climate change, meaning we will lose much biodiversity for some millions of years until new species have developed. This isn't a problem for "life" itself, but a loss for humanity.
2) Human societies will take a pretty big hit in adapting to a hotter world. For one thing, during such warmer periods as you refer to, the sea level was 50 to 70 meters higher than it is today. We are of course not talking about any such increases in the near term, and we could probably adapt to even such extreme changes without going extinct if we had to, but the cost of for example moving portions of coastal cities (to name one of a long range of potential consequences) just so we can continue to use oil for a few decades longer than we otherwise would have (since it runs out anyway), is completely disproportionate. There are other energy sources.
By the way, I find it somewhat interesting that you say we have "well known periods where the earth was so much hotter", talking about periods hundreds of millions of years ago, a few sentences after you declare your distrust for historical temperature records because "we weren't actually there to measure it proper thousands or millions of years ago". Which way do you want to have it?
There are always multiple actions and circumstances that lead up to an accident. Labelling some as faulty and some as correct is principally a philosophically arbitrary choice, and while sometimes useful, often tends to oversimplify the situation. If you furthermore limit yourself to select a single action or party as "the responsible", you have mentally eliminated all the other factors that perhaps should be addressed.
I'm not saying that blame or responsibility as a concept is useless. Quite the contrary. The threat of blame can keep people from being negligent, at least to an extent. However, sometimes something is just the result of a long range of less than optimal decisions and circumstances, any one of which isn't obviously the single cause. And sometimes you just have bad luck, due to factors out of anyone's control (or like the saying goes: "shit happens"). If we at every instance force ourselves to define who is the culprit, we risk missing what is really important: the bigger picture.
It's pointless anyway against the NSA. Seriously. Every single modern operating system (including on routers) has tons of unpatched exploit vectors. There's even a black market for them. The NSA can just infect your machines and ex-filtrate your data and/or the encryption keys...
If you are individually targeted by the NSA, then yes, you probably don't stand much of a chance. But they couldn't use that kind of attack vector en masse without it being discovered fairly quickly, so it still helps against dragnet fishing.
Yes, to the extent that we need to blame a single party, it would those who had poor judgement. Unfortunately, that doesn't necessarily help us very much. People are, and always will be, imperfect. The way I see it, this is more of a system failure.
And to add to that, by the way: Here there may (again) be a problem with the legal tradition in the US. Presumably, writing something broad like "improper use can lead to injury or death" is safer from a culpability reduction perspective than being specific, since then you have covered any possible way someone may hurt themselves. Otherwise, someone can argue that you didn't describe exactly the way they got hurt. It is, on the other hand, probably more likely that someone actually will hurt themselves, than if you are specific with the dangers.
Well, I'm of the opinion that everything in this world doesn't have to be "somebody's fault". Or more precisely; placing blame isn't necessarily very interesting or useful to solve a problem. Sometimes, it's just better to look at things as they are, objectively without judgement, to identify the most constructive course of action.
I'm certainly not trying to argue that this is the manufacturers fault. The parents shouldn't let their children play with such things, so if you must choose a single party to point at, it would probably be them. But the reality of it is that people are going to make mistakes. Not everyone is going to realise all potentials dangers all the time. Doing something as extreme as prosecuting the parents for child abuse in this situation isn't actually going to help anybody, unless they force-fed their kids magnets. And in all likelihood, those parents already got a number of sleepless nights and enough feelings of guilt to very careful selecting toys in the future, which is about as much as you can realistically hope to achieve.
From a more systemic point of view (and without having seen exactly how the warning used to read), I am guessing that the best solution to reduce the number of accidents, if that's what we want to do, would be to explain more clearly why the magnets are dangerous to children. People are usually more inclined to follow instructions if they fully understand the logic behind them. For example: "If accidentally swallowed, these magnets will get stuck in the intestines, probably tearing a hole in them. Treat them like poison. Keep them away from children." would be more effective than for example: "This is not a children's toy. Improper use can lead to injury or death."
Hypothesis: ...
1. Manufacturers generally get sued for all kinds of crazy reasons, when people have been stupid while using their products.
2. Manufacturers slap on "not safe for kids" and similar labels all the time, just to be safe.
3. The label loses any semantic meaning, since it is always there. People start to ignore it, and try to rely on their own judgement.
4. Parents see a box of funny little magnets. How can they be dangerous? There is lack of imagination as to what happens with more than one of those in a small child's intestines.
5.
6. Visit to the ER.
That kind of voids the idea of limited liability, though. And it gets even more problematic if you were to extend it to the individuals hired by the company to make the actual decisions (i.e. not the owners) -- suppose for example that some engineers employed by Samsung would be required to pay a billion dollars to Apple for patent infringement, personally, because they were the ones that chose to implement certain features. Suddenly it becomes extremely risky to make a career in R&D.
I can prove him wrong with two words: commercial satellites.
Oh really? What do you figure he said that this proves wrong? You know, because he specifically argues that private companies does things like transporting stuff into space better than government can. You'd known that if you bothered to watch TFV -- I know, this is Slashdot, what am I expecting?
What he is talking about is missions to push the frontiers, like mapping planets and such, where it's hard to find a clear ROI for a private investor.
Very likely? I'll give you that it is possible that a "random slashdot poster" is more intelligent and insightful than "one of the brightest minds of our time", but you can't honestly think it is usually the case?
It seems most posters in this story haven't really bothered to watch TFV (go figure). Unlike the impression you can get from TFS, Tyson says he thinks there is too little private enterprise in the space industry, and that it's taken too long for them to get there.
The point he is making is that when it comes to pushing the frontiers, mapping planets and such, the business case is tricky. So he thinks there will continue to be a need for governments to fund this, if it is to continue, much like basic research.
I'd say that the presumption that private enterprises will always do everything better is the biased opinion, if anything.
And obviously you didn't watch TFV. Quote from it: "The first Europeans to the New World were not the Dutch East India Trading Company. It was governments funding government missions. Columbus drew the maps, established where the trade winds were. Where are the hostiles? Where are the friendlies? Is there food there? Can you breathe the air? They come back with this information. Then you can establish a capital market evaluation. 'Cause now you know there are riches here but not there; you can go here by this route but not that one. Then you can turn it into a profitable enterprise."
He thinks private companies should do more of the work in space, he just thinks there are too many unknowns for it to make business sense for anyone to push the frontiers.
Heh, yes of course, you don't have to support your claims if you don't want to. That's entirely up to you.
Although, I must say the fact that you thought it worth spending six full sentences only to say that you don't want to tell me even what country you are referring to, because you are not "here for me", makes it awfully inviting to assume that you simply have no reliable sources withstanding scrutiny, and don't want to admit it. But, by all means, I'm happy to end it at that.
It is a perfectly valid argument, since it was in response to a suggestion that "saving" (the word holophrastic used) future generations should have no bearing on current decision making. The negative future effect was thereby already implied in the original statement. My counterargument, based on the same premise, was that future consequences affect current value. Now, if you want to argue about what those future consequences are (positive or negative), then that's a whole other discussion.
Yes, future benefits and future costs are relevant. I fail to see the contradiction...
As much as I'd like to go into the details here, I'm sorry to say I'll not have the time, but let me just note that discount rates of future costs are pretty much artificial by nature. I mean, it's basically just the relevance we currently ascribe to costs that occur in the future. Moral arguments can be made to that. The 1,4 % discount rate used in the Stern Report means that we count costs that occur 50 years into the future at half their value, which I and many (but certainly not all) economists think is reasonable.
So replace the word "murder" with any other crime of your choice if you don't like it then. It is a reductio ad absurdum of your suggestion that only members of your community are relevant to the moral and legal consequences of your actions. Jeez, how much do I need to dumb this down?
I get the distinct impression that you're not really interested in having a rational discussion. It may sound catchy to throw around expressions like "most scientists believe" and "start reading", but if you actually had wanted me to read about any of that you would a) given some references to relevant articles, and b) stated what freaking country you are even talking about.
What I believe, for that matter, isn't relevant to this discussion. Why? Because what I have been challenging all along is your presumption that democracy means that, because you don't care about the consequences of X, you shouldn't have to be bothered to refrain from X. Democracy does not imply that, in support of which I have given two counterexamples, none of which you apparently accept for reasons you haven't really explained. Well, other than that I "crossed lines" (whatever that means).
Specifically, where am I wrong? And what am I ignoring by stating that future costs are relevant to current evaluation? Please try to argue the subject matter instead of making cheeky insinuations.
Sorry, I didn't notice the change of author. Substitute "your" with "ColdWetDog's" in the last two sentences.