I strongly disagree. The cherry picking answer is key.
The first article did NOT make an argument. Instead it attempted to convince everyone he was correct by saying how X,Y and Z arguments are false. But there are 100's of arguments for global warming. OF COURSE some of them are false.
The first article was a poorly thought out piece of crap, because it did NOT do what science must do: present disprovable data. Instead it simply disproved a small portion of other people's arguments.
That is called Cherry Picking. It is a stupid way to argue, I can use it to prove anything.
Here: Some people (my 3 year old nephew) claim that Communists killed Jesus. This is patently false, because Jesus was killed and ressurected years before Communism was invented. Others (my 10 year old niece) claim that Communists killed their father. I have here a signed affadaivit that her father is alive and well, and living with a 19 year old stripper in Miami. Finally, some people (my insane neighbor), claim that Communists are poisoning our water supply with fluride, but I have here ten studies, all double blind, showing that Fluride is not harmfull in the quantities placed in our water.
Therefore Communists do not kill people.
This is EXACTLY what the first article did. It picked a VERY few articles, that may or may not have been false, and attacked them. This is called Cherry Picking. Such a methodology is foolish and proves nothing.
This is the same crap that astronauts have to deal with, nothing more.
Yes, radiation is OCCASIONALLY an issue, when the sun starts to get excited, so you have a shielded area that you restrict movement to when that happens. The sun telegraphs it's bad moves, generally giving us more than enough time to get to shelter. It is what they do on every Space Station ever created, and there is no reason they could not do the same on the elevator.
Spider Robinson has some nice stories of his own. I particularly like the earlier Callahan's Place short stories. I dislike the later novels, as he often had the characters make bad assumptions, ignoring other possiblities. In addition, he tended to blame the bad guys for things the good guys did.
But some of his short stories are fantastic, even the ones that had no science fiction in them. One of my favorites was the Time Traveller who used a prison cell as his time machine to the future.
Did you read his post, or just automatically repeat something you heard before? Your idea is correct, but your wording is wrong.
Hydrogen itself IS a fuel. Morevover, it actually IS relatively common in fuel form, just not on the planet earth.
The problem with using Hydrogen is that on Earth, to make it, it costs more energy than we get from burning it. Which is eactly the point he was discussing.
Yes, everything you said was correct.
But it was also completely irrelevant to what he was talking about.
30 years ago, we did not have the technology to create cheap solar panels. They were very expensive. The need for pure silicon in the computer industry forced us to develop cheap methods of manufacturing pure silicon, which is perfect for solar panels.
But the demand for silicon in the creation of computers, has kept the price high. It is an ironic, catch 22 situation.
But there is hope. If we ever switch to non-silicon based computers, the price of pure silicon is expected to drop to a level low enough to make cheap solar panels a reality.
This article left out key data. Anyone knowledgable about pollution knows that the produciton of concrete is the 2nd biggest source of carbon di-oxide, after burning fossil fuels. Granted, we are talking about only 2.5% of total world-wide emmissions, but it is still the 2nd biggest source. The rough estimate is that 0.498 pounds of CO2 is released into the air for every pound of cement made. That comes out to about 560 million tons/year of CO2 from cement production.
The question they forget to discuss is how long it takes for one ounce of this stuff to counter the carbon dioxide created by making one ounce of it. If it takes less than 1 year, then it is worthwhile. If it takes 100 years, most likely the building will be torn down before this is helpfull.
It's not that hard to tell the difference between a creature that slowly moves around, bumping into walls of a maze and the creature that easily walks down the center of the maze.
Your method is one of several ways to do the election. It gives greater power and control to minority beliefs. That can be an advantage and a disadvantage. In effect, it gives power to he who shouts the loudest, as opposed to he who focuses on the moderate.
The US system is basically designed to PREVENT the government from doing things. That is the whole idea of checks and balances.
Your system, encourages small groups to band together, giving them more power, and thus making the government more likely to do things. In has the danger of creating a congress with radically prejudiced people of opposing views fighting it out. They could push through special interest rules that most people object to, simply by grouping themselves together.
p>It is at heart something opposed to the US mindset, of doing as little as possible, and only if most people want it done.
There are other systems, such as a ranking system. In that system, if there are 5 candidates, you rank each one, 1 through 5. Then the man with the lowest score wins. This stops radicals that people hate, yet allows people to vote 'for' someone besides the 'top two' candidates and still have their voice count. It is much closer to something the US might accept, as unlike yours, it does not give power to minority groups that most people in the country disagree with.
That is, the article attacked many claims made by environmentalists, but did not itself make any claims.
That is easy to do with ANY argument, just go looking for a few morons that believe it.
Example: Here are 3 'arguments' about why it is impossible to travel faster than the speed of light: 1)Einstein said so. 2) The Angel Gabriel pulls you over and gives you a ticket when you hit 0.5 warp. 3) As your speed increases, mass also increases, so more and more energy is required to attain the same speed increase, so it would take infinite energy to accelerate you to Warp 1.
How would you react to someone that attacked argument 2 and left argument 1 and 3 alone?
Similarly, the author of this piece may or may not have done a good job picking apart the statements he has attacked. So what? It proves nothing. To win, he must make a viable argument that we can not prove wrong, not simply pick apart some, but not all of our statements. He made no arguments, just attacked others. He is not convincing at all, for that reason. The facts continue to be that 1) weather has been observably warmer. 2) we KNOW humans can cause radical changes in the environment (ozone, artificial chemicals, measured air and water pollution), 3) as of yet we do not have proof about how much of #1 is a coincidence 4) As of yet we do not have a definitive prediction about the future temperature. Everything else is just a question of how bad it will be, and there is a LOT of evidence that he did not attack that indicates it will get a lot worse.
Yes, the naysayers might be right - we might be OK. But the radical changes in the environment that we have already seen mean we would be morons to assume that is the case. The safest course is to assume we are heading off a cliff so we should SLOW DOWN and take a long look ahead.
Your argument basically assumes that there will be no checking done. Simple random tests can prevent the issues you complain about.
If something is Open-Source and unsecret, then we can, in the middle of the election, take a machine off line and check the software currently running on it.
We can also have periodic vote total printed off, so we can tell if something changes the vote afterwards.
Yes, it will require a technical 'preisthood' as you accuse, but that is a neccesity in any technical society.
All on paper makes some things better, but other things harder. Blind people for example need to have someone they trust put down their votes.
Obviously, the ability track changes over time in wiki - entrys would be helpfull. Comparing entrys from even 10 years back with today's would be helpfull. (terrorist for example might radically change from 2000 to 2002).
But we are talking about archeology, which generally deals with ANCIENT things. In a mere 100 years, (minute amount of time for an archeologist), I don't expect any wiki to still be around. By then they should be out-dated and replaced with some newer, better version that might very well not carry over data from the old out dated wikipedia.
Debit cards have an unfortunately bad reputation for NOT resturning stolen money. As you already 'paid' the bank, they tend to think anything that happens to it is now fine.
I once had a total MORON tell me that "No, you don't need to know who we sent this $50 from your account, because we have a signed agreement from you that lets us take money from your account and send it one specific person."
The fool seemed to to think that if I gave authorization for one transfer, it meant I authorized everyone to take money from my account.
Here is an article in a local Texas newspaper discussing the same thing happening in a small town in Texas. Texas, being mostly republican, might have been a 'test' case.
Texan article
Another reason you might buy these sites is that you hate the company.
If you are trying to put criticism about citi-bank, then you buy www.citi-bank.com and put up your sob story about how citi-bank forclosed on your mortgage, and auctioned it off for 1/2 what it was worth and gave you nothing back, despite the fact that you offered to buy the home from them at 3/4 of it's current value.
1) Written words do not really have intent. People have intent. If two people say the same thing, they may have different intent. When you have a large group (Congress) agreeing to say x words, then you have a whole bunch of DIFFERENT intents. Sometimes those disents are contradictory. Part of the art of getting a law passed is to write one that can satisfy different intents. You want more explicitid stuff, but that would have made it harder, if not IMPOSSIBLE to get approved. A key example are the words about religious freedom. Some people voted it in to prevent the government from stopping people from praying. Others voted it in to prevent the government from forcing people to pray.
2) Progress happens. Things change. We have to INTEREPRET the old ideas to see how they should apply to the new things. When the bill of rights was created, weapons did NOT include fully automatic weapons. At the time, a Wooden masted battle ship was the best weapon available. Not a single one of the framers of the consittion would have claimed that the 2nd ammendment let you own a wooden battle ship and dock it on the potomoac near the white house. A modern machine gun has more firepower, yet some fools say the 2nd amendment lets you carry one on the street right outside the white house.
3) People make mistakes. At one point a majority of people thought some 'races' were inferior, not entitled to the 'inalieanable rights'. When we realized we were wrong, we did NOT have to re-write the entire constition. Instead we simply applied the correct, new understanding of what we had already written.
It is for these three reases that we need to interpret the laws, not simply read them. The heart of all laws are the principle behind them, NOT the intent of the writer. We must shift through the words for the basic principles that all agreed on, not simply what some (but not all) intended. We must apply old principles to new ideas. And we must apply those principles to our CURRENT understanding of the world, ignoring the mistakes that our ancestors may have made, out of respect for the wisdom of the things they got right.
1) Stat out what you want on their resume. No one shows up, because people with exactly what you want already have a job, one that usually pays MORE than what you want to spend.
2) Stat out what someone that is going to LEARN to do the job already needs to know. The people that are sent/brought in by recruiters should all have jobs slightly worse than the one you are offering. Go through them, weeding out the lies and looking for the smart people that are UNDEREMPLOYED and are more than capable of learning your job.
Hire them, teach them, and boom, you got a great deal for a smart man that that likes your company (you trained them). Best of all, he will probably NOT be qualified for any equivelent job in another company - you trained him to do the job at YOUR place, not trained him to do all jobs of that level.
Of course, this requires A) a Smart boss, B) a good company that people will want to stick around, instead of taking the training and going someplace else, C) the ability to take an actual risk,
Next year, his algorithm, running on a standard desktop will do it in 3 hours. By 2015, a standard computer using his algorithm will do it in that same minute or two.
Some of those things are myths. Some of them rest are rumored to be 'covers' for black ops spending. The remaining ones are specialized things, such as $500 toilet seats for long range bombers that are integreated into the pilot's seat.
Give them a form that requires their signature and the signature of the person involved. Make it quite clear that signing is voluntary. Make it also clear that both the employee and the manager will have their web sites posted.
I think that no one should be legally allowed to write their own click-wrap EULA.
Instead, if people want to use a click-wrap, it should be approved by an outside agency.
That way, you don't have to read 50,000 of the silly things.
You just read say 10 or 20 of them and know that you can agree to click on the EULA approved by "Consumer Protections Association", but not the one from "Record Publisher's Stealing House".
Slashdot Mirror
I.E. To disprove the theory that the world is flat, you prove that the world is instead spherical.
The first article did NOT make an argument. Instead it attempted to convince everyone he was correct by saying how X,Y and Z arguments are false. But there are 100's of arguments for global warming. OF COURSE some of them are false.
The first article was a poorly thought out piece of crap, because it did NOT do what science must do: present disprovable data. Instead it simply disproved a small portion of other people's arguments.
That is called Cherry Picking. It is a stupid way to argue, I can use it to prove anything.
Here: Some people (my 3 year old nephew) claim that Communists killed Jesus. This is patently false, because Jesus was killed and ressurected years before Communism was invented. Others (my 10 year old niece) claim that Communists killed their father. I have here a signed affadaivit that her father is alive and well, and living with a 19 year old stripper in Miami. Finally, some people (my insane neighbor), claim that Communists are poisoning our water supply with fluride, but I have here ten studies, all double blind, showing that Fluride is not harmfull in the quantities placed in our water.
Therefore Communists do not kill people.
This is EXACTLY what the first article did. It picked a VERY few articles, that may or may not have been false, and attacked them. This is called Cherry Picking. Such a methodology is foolish and proves nothing.
Yes, radiation is OCCASIONALLY an issue, when the sun starts to get excited, so you have a shielded area that you restrict movement to when that happens. The sun telegraphs it's bad moves, generally giving us more than enough time to get to shelter. It is what they do on every Space Station ever created, and there is no reason they could not do the same on the elevator.
But some of his short stories are fantastic, even the ones that had no science fiction in them. One of my favorites was the Time Traveller who used a prison cell as his time machine to the future.
Hydrogen itself IS a fuel. Morevover, it actually IS relatively common in fuel form, just not on the planet earth.
The problem with using Hydrogen is that on Earth, to make it, it costs more energy than we get from burning it. Which is eactly the point he was discussing.
Yes, everything you said was correct. But it was also completely irrelevant to what he was talking about.
But the demand for silicon in the creation of computers, has kept the price high. It is an ironic, catch 22 situation.
But there is hope. If we ever switch to non-silicon based computers, the price of pure silicon is expected to drop to a level low enough to make cheap solar panels a reality.
The question they forget to discuss is how long it takes for one ounce of this stuff to counter the carbon dioxide created by making one ounce of it. If it takes less than 1 year, then it is worthwhile. If it takes 100 years, most likely the building will be torn down before this is helpfull.
Every month or so, my local newspaper runs a story about how drug dealers were arrested at a schol.
Does that mean it is a Hoax? It could not possibly be that, yes, people commit crimes every month and yes, cops arrest them every month.
It's not that hard to tell the difference between a creature that slowly moves around, bumping into walls of a maze and the creature that easily walks down the center of the maze.
It should take you less time to become informed than you to worry about not being informed.
You don't have to vote for all the issues/people. You can leave some 'unvoted'.
While yes, it is true that usually the business was transacted on the internet, that is a side issue, not the main issue of the bill.
The US system is basically designed to PREVENT the government from doing things. That is the whole idea of checks and balances.
Your system, encourages small groups to band together, giving them more power, and thus making the government more likely to do things. In has the danger of creating a congress with radically prejudiced people of opposing views fighting it out. They could push through special interest rules that most people object to, simply by grouping themselves together. p>It is at heart something opposed to the US mindset, of doing as little as possible, and only if most people want it done.
There are other systems, such as a ranking system. In that system, if there are 5 candidates, you rank each one, 1 through 5. Then the man with the lowest score wins. This stops radicals that people hate, yet allows people to vote 'for' someone besides the 'top two' candidates and still have their voice count. It is much closer to something the US might accept, as unlike yours, it does not give power to minority groups that most people in the country disagree with.
That is easy to do with ANY argument, just go looking for a few morons that believe it.
Example: Here are 3 'arguments' about why it is impossible to travel faster than the speed of light: 1)Einstein said so. 2) The Angel Gabriel pulls you over and gives you a ticket when you hit 0.5 warp. 3) As your speed increases, mass also increases, so more and more energy is required to attain the same speed increase, so it would take infinite energy to accelerate you to Warp 1.
How would you react to someone that attacked argument 2 and left argument 1 and 3 alone? Similarly, the author of this piece may or may not have done a good job picking apart the statements he has attacked. So what? It proves nothing. To win, he must make a viable argument that we can not prove wrong, not simply pick apart some, but not all of our statements. He made no arguments, just attacked others. He is not convincing at all, for that reason. The facts continue to be that 1) weather has been observably warmer. 2) we KNOW humans can cause radical changes in the environment (ozone, artificial chemicals, measured air and water pollution), 3) as of yet we do not have proof about how much of #1 is a coincidence 4) As of yet we do not have a definitive prediction about the future temperature. Everything else is just a question of how bad it will be, and there is a LOT of evidence that he did not attack that indicates it will get a lot worse.
Yes, the naysayers might be right - we might be OK. But the radical changes in the environment that we have already seen mean we would be morons to assume that is the case. The safest course is to assume we are heading off a cliff so we should SLOW DOWN and take a long look ahead.
While I agree it does not belong in Wikipedia, and should be removed, I do not think it is 'vandalism'.
If something is Open-Source and unsecret, then we can, in the middle of the election, take a machine off line and check the software currently running on it.
We can also have periodic vote total printed off, so we can tell if something changes the vote afterwards.
Yes, it will require a technical 'preisthood' as you accuse, but that is a neccesity in any technical society.
All on paper makes some things better, but other things harder. Blind people for example need to have someone they trust put down their votes.
But we are talking about archeology, which generally deals with ANCIENT things. In a mere 100 years, (minute amount of time for an archeologist), I don't expect any wiki to still be around. By then they should be out-dated and replaced with some newer, better version that might very well not carry over data from the old out dated wikipedia.
I once had a total MORON tell me that "No, you don't need to know who we sent this $50 from your account, because we have a signed agreement from you that lets us take money from your account and send it one specific person."
The fool seemed to to think that if I gave authorization for one transfer, it meant I authorized everyone to take money from my account.
Here is an article in a local Texas newspaper discussing the same thing happening in a small town in Texas. Texas, being mostly republican, might have been a 'test' case. Texan article
If you are trying to put criticism about citi-bank, then you buy www.citi-bank.com and put up your sob story about how citi-bank forclosed on your mortgage, and auctioned it off for 1/2 what it was worth and gave you nothing back, despite the fact that you offered to buy the home from them at 3/4 of it's current value.
1) Written words do not really have intent. People have intent. If two people say the same thing, they may have different intent. When you have a large group (Congress) agreeing to say x words, then you have a whole bunch of DIFFERENT intents. Sometimes those disents are contradictory. Part of the art of getting a law passed is to write one that can satisfy different intents. You want more explicitid stuff, but that would have made it harder, if not IMPOSSIBLE to get approved. A key example are the words about religious freedom. Some people voted it in to prevent the government from stopping people from praying. Others voted it in to prevent the government from forcing people to pray.
2) Progress happens. Things change. We have to INTEREPRET the old ideas to see how they should apply to the new things. When the bill of rights was created, weapons did NOT include fully automatic weapons. At the time, a Wooden masted battle ship was the best weapon available. Not a single one of the framers of the consittion would have claimed that the 2nd ammendment let you own a wooden battle ship and dock it on the potomoac near the white house. A modern machine gun has more firepower, yet some fools say the 2nd amendment lets you carry one on the street right outside the white house.
3) People make mistakes. At one point a majority of people thought some 'races' were inferior, not entitled to the 'inalieanable rights'. When we realized we were wrong, we did NOT have to re-write the entire constition. Instead we simply applied the correct, new understanding of what we had already written.
It is for these three reases that we need to interpret the laws, not simply read them. The heart of all laws are the principle behind them, NOT the intent of the writer. We must shift through the words for the basic principles that all agreed on, not simply what some (but not all) intended. We must apply old principles to new ideas. And we must apply those principles to our CURRENT understanding of the world, ignoring the mistakes that our ancestors may have made, out of respect for the wisdom of the things they got right.
2) Stat out what someone that is going to LEARN to do the job already needs to know. The people that are sent/brought in by recruiters should all have jobs slightly worse than the one you are offering. Go through them, weeding out the lies and looking for the smart people that are UNDEREMPLOYED and are more than capable of learning your job.
Hire them, teach them, and boom, you got a great deal for a smart man that that likes your company (you trained them). Best of all, he will probably NOT be qualified for any equivelent job in another company - you trained him to do the job at YOUR place, not trained him to do all jobs of that level.
Of course, this requires A) a Smart boss, B) a good company that people will want to stick around, instead of taking the training and going someplace else, C) the ability to take an actual risk,
Next year, his algorithm, running on a standard desktop will do it in 3 hours. By 2015, a standard computer using his algorithm will do it in that same minute or two.
Some of those things are myths. Some of them rest are rumored to be 'covers' for black ops spending. The remaining ones are specialized things, such as $500 toilet seats for long range bombers that are integreated into the pilot's seat.
Give them a form that requires their signature and the signature of the person involved. Make it quite clear that signing is voluntary. Make it also clear that both the employee and the manager will have their web sites posted.
Instead, if people want to use a click-wrap, it should be approved by an outside agency.
That way, you don't have to read 50,000 of the silly things.
You just read say 10 or 20 of them and know that you can agree to click on the EULA approved by "Consumer Protections Association", but not the one from "Record Publisher's Stealing House".