Defamation is a deliberate untruth spoken for the purpose of harming your reputation, it causes material harm by diminishing your capacity to earn, your feelings about it are irrelevant. You cannot accidentally defame someone, you cannot defame anyone if you or they do not have a reputation to protect. Google does not deliberately defame until it refuses to take down a defamatory association, if they leave it up then as the publisher with a reputation to protect they have deliberately endorsed.the defamatory association. As it is now a competitor with enough money can hire someone to game the system and get whatever association they want to appear in autocomplete, be it good association for themselves or bad associations for their competitors. Stronger defamation laws would help remove some of the most egregious propaganda currently plaguing the MSM.
"Delicious" is an opinion, not a fact. It can't be false but it can be offensive, "offensive" is also an opinion. My own opinion is that the US goes too far with free speech and Germany does not go far enough.
Corporations pay tax and the people who own the corporations make all of its decisions, corporations do not have a vote since that would be "double dipping" for the owners. I'm not from the US but it makes me sick to see the FF industry can buy a lying sack of shit like senator Inhofe and put him in charge of a federal environmental committee, but social organizations such a businesses, churches, unions, special interest groups, private watchdogs, mass media, suicide cults, etc, etc, are what makes us a civilization as opposed to a tribe, silencing one particular type of organization won't fix anything. What needs to be done in the US has been pointed out by others - cap campaign spending and force political ads to comply with "truth in advertising" style laws. Taking the megaphones and amplifiers away from groups that can afford them allows others to be heard. Drowning out a speaker is one of the oldest political tactics in existence, we should not be making it easier for wealthy groups to use it.
It's not all bad in the US, "town hall" style politics is still alive and kicking and with modern communications it's much easier to see what a particular politician is telling different audiences. The US also has many of the worlds top scientist, engineers, etc, working for (or with) their public service in support of evidence based policy.
If they don't taste good, or if you can't gin up appealing recipes for them, nobody'll eat'em
I accidentally ate chocolate coated ants once. My wife had left half a mars bar neatly wrapped in the console, I spotted it while driving and with one deft movement popped the whole thing into my mouth without taking my eyes off the road. At first I thought I had hair on my face but it soon became apparent some ants were also feasting on the chocolate. I wound down the window and spat the ball of half chewed insects and toffee out the window. For the next half hour if felt like I had hair stuck at the back of my throat.
"H will be stripped from H2O in the upper atmosphere and bleed into space, the O2 will bond with C to form CO2"
I'm obviously not a chemist, WP will put you straight on what I'm trying to say.
The long term trend for our planet, human influence aside, appears likely to be a virtual elimination of atmospheric CO2 as it becomes trapped in landmasses.
You really should study WP in a bit more depth, the following is mainly from Attenbourough's documentaries but the terms are all in WP. Between 450 -500mya we went from a near dead "snowball earth" to the advent and explosion of multi-cellular life that lead to you, me, and every other animal alive today. What melted the ice was a build up of volcanic CO2 that could not be subducted due to the global ice coverage. Melting glaciers carved nutrients off the continents and (re)-formed the oceans, algae sucked up CO2, incoporated the carbon into their body and spat out O2 - collagen (the stuff that hold cells together in animals) can only form in an O2 rich environment. Our O2 rich environment is a bi-product of plant life.
The long-term fate of the Earth's climate is fairly well established science (humans or no humans), it's similar to that of Venus, our magnetic field will decay, H will be stripped from H2O in the upper atmosphere and bleed into space, the O2 will bond with C to form CO2 warming the planet, the oceans will start to steam, then boil, eventually even the limestone will burn off the surface- it's called a "runaway greenhouse" and it's not due for another 500million years but when it does all traces of life will be obliterated. On the bright side, a billion years is not a bad innings for we animals.
Disclaimer: I've been interested in reading this sort of science since the 70's, I'm not an expert but I do think there is way too much ignorance of how our life support systems operate and way, way, too much hypocrisy when it comes to accepting the results of Science (with a capital 'S'). This entire thread is a prime example, right now at least 2/3 of the comments look like they were written by drunken teenage trolls wielding crayons.
He believes that global warming has something to do with desertification, but doesn't have a model that explains the data
Yes cutting down trees can exacerbate the problem but land use is not the primary cause of AGW, it's not even in the top three. It's also true that AGW is expanding the subtropical deserts via convection currents known as "Hadley cells", scientists call this phenomena "positive feedback". The feedback simultaneously increases monsoonal rains and broadens the sub-tropical deserts. The entire thing is driven by warmer tropical sea surface temps which is a direct result of increased CO2 concentration, in this situation scientists call increased CO2 a "forcing".
CO2 has a somewhat unusual property in that it can be both a forcing (industrial/volcanic emissions) and a feedback (melting permafrost, larger forest fires).
Usually the Israelis are pretty defiant but they have been unusually spooked
Unusual? How quickly we forget the cold war. Nations are standing back and watching Syria because in my youth Syria was to the east what Israel was to the west, nobody wants to be seen to be militarily supporting one side or the other since that risks dragging everyone into a much broader conflict. Both sides of the old "east/west"political divide want to contain the fighting within the borders of Syria much more than they want to their "dog" to win. This is why Israeli strikes on Syria and arms supplies to either side in Syria spook everyone.
UN voting patterns on subjects concerning Syria and Israel still more or less follows the patterns established during the cold war. Saddam was politically simple by comparison, he was our loose cannon and the old "red team" of nations didn't mind us taking him out, Gadaffi was dead the minute the revolt erupted, he had no powerful friends left, much less an influential voting block in the UN watching his back.
We are living in a golden scientific age, in the 50 odd years I've been walking the planet mankind's knowledge of the universe around him has exploded like no other time in history. Sure some powerful economic groups such as the coal industry would like to keep certain results hidden from the public but corporate anti-science propaganda is nothing new and nobody in the west is lobbying to shut the whole thing down for fear of terrorism. The journal model may seem antiquated and expensive in an age of instant answers but history indicates the practice has not been a significant impediment to conducting research in the past.
Also few, if any at all, recent terrorist attacks were informed by sophisticated scientific inputs.
They may have attacked with box cutters but they were trained to fly in a state of the art flight simulator and performed a sophisticated engineering analysis to find the towers Achilles heel. War and scientific knowledge go hand in hand, all sides have been using science for military advantage since the first ape man put a turd in a sling shot.
Yes and no, during the cold war Syria was to the soviets as Israel was to the west, UN voting patterns on resolutions concerning Syria and Israel did not change after the collapse of the soviet union. The crippling third world debt concentrated in north African countries was eventually dropped after the successful Geldof/Bono campaign of the 80's, the crippling debt was also an artifact of the cold war. Both sides had installed/bought puppet governments and then gave them huge amounts of money in the form of loan guarantees to buy weapons to fight the proxy wars. Israel still receives something like $10billion in loan guarantees from the US every year which it is obliged to spend on US weapons. Syria not so much in "aid" these days but it still has some moral support in the UN from Russia, China, and most of the other former soviet allies.
Perhaps the revolution ISN'T for the good of the Syrian people, but good for the US, EU, and Israel?
There's no reason it can't be both, there's also no reason to mod your factual observations as "flamebait". We are going to have to wait a decade or more to find out if the "Arab spring" changed anything for the better, I clearly recall people (as opposed to governments) in the west celebrating because Mugabe had come to power in Zimbabwe (Rhodesia), Stevie Wonder went so far as to sing about it. Their moral reasoning was sound at that time in history, but with 20/20 hindsight Stevie's claim that "Peace has come to Zimbawe" sounds foolish.
The political cynic in me thinks that western governments see two enemies fighting each other on their own territory. they are in no hurry to pull them apart.
Depends on how you measure "freedom", if you choose to mesure it by the size of the prison population the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world, more than China and 7X that of the EU. The current incarceration rate in the US is comprable to that of pre-WW2 soviet union under Stalin (albeit not as inhumane). Most of the extra inmates in the US are in jail because they chose to smoke a joint rather than drink a beer.
Forget the long-standing problems that make this approach a non-starter.
Did you actually watch IBM's "Watson" beat the snot out of the best Jepordy champions humanity could muster? I can't believe that anyone who knows anything about computers and AI is not blown away by Watson's demonstration, I know I was. My significant other who has a phd in marketing just shrugged and said "it's looking up the answers on the internet, so what?". In other words if your not impressed by Watson's performance, it's because you have no idea how difficult the problem is.
Coverity doesn't need to see the source code, they just need the client to send them the numbers their tool spat out. Many will, some won't, but I don't think that has anything to do with wanting to hide poor results, communisim, or greed.
And the assumption you're making is that proprietors will select only their best code for independent review. Having been in the industry for over 20yrs that assumption does not match my experience.
Wow you sure put a lot of thoughts into other people's heads. I don't know about the US but here in Australia contributing to a well known OSS project is something you put on your CV, not something you hide like a drug habit. Many OOS devs are also commercial devs in their day job (or would like to be), hardly surprising they write similar quality code for both endeavors.
So by that logic the DPRK (N.Korea) must be a democratic republic, it says so right there in the official name. There's also the "Democratic Republic of the Congo", in fact the word "democratic" in a nations name appears to be a strongly correlated with the most oppressive and impoverished nations in the modern world.
You see, the socialists mean well but it turns out that they have the opposite of the Midas Touch.
Yeah right, modern day Scandinavia is an impoverished hell hole, has been for decades. You are the victim of propaganda, someone painted a picture of an enemy and labeled it "socialist", you bought it. Pull your head out of your arse and dare to peek outside the bubble of hate the TV has conveniently provided for you.
The same mindset leads the same socialists to excuse bad behavior for troublemakers when they are young, which eventually leads them into incarceration.
The appalling incarceration rate in the US is a direct result of the inhumane "war on (some) drugs" pursued by both side of US politics, a war that has tens, (if not hundreds) of billions of taxpayer dollars to prosecute. Remove the risk of being locked up in the US for a drug crime and the per-capita numbers between the two sides of the pond look remarkably similar.
I can see organizations such as the BBC warming to this, I'd pay $2/mo for access to the BBC Earth archives and I'm sure UK taxpayers would gladly take it.
PS: Looked into the monitoring networks a bit deeper. A good data source with some excellent visualizations of this sort of thing can be found at the US DOE, the link comes from the excellent compendium of climate data archives at realclimate.
As a personal anecdote I first became interested in climate science in the early eighties, in that time it has gone from 340 to 400. OTOH, millions (if not billions) of people like myself have come to accept that it is a genuine problem. Same thing happened with "pea-soup" fog and acid rain, the economy won't die but unless the coal industry really can produce "clean coal" it will rapidly become obsolete, they read the writing on the wall 25yrs ago but what does that mean to an industry that held back "clean air" legislation for almost a century, stalling that cost 10's if not 100's of thousands of premature deaths across Europe?
Slashdot Mirror
Their feelings were hurt after all.
Defamation is a deliberate untruth spoken for the purpose of harming your reputation, it causes material harm by diminishing your capacity to earn, your feelings about it are irrelevant. You cannot accidentally defame someone, you cannot defame anyone if you or they do not have a reputation to protect. Google does not deliberately defame until it refuses to take down a defamatory association, if they leave it up then as the publisher with a reputation to protect they have deliberately endorsed .the defamatory association. As it is now a competitor with enough money can hire someone to game the system and get whatever association they want to appear in autocomplete, be it good association for themselves or bad associations for their competitors. Stronger defamation laws would help remove some of the most egregious propaganda currently plaguing the MSM.
Then you would be busted for false advertising
"Delicious" is an opinion, not a fact. It can't be false but it can be offensive, "offensive" is also an opinion. My own opinion is that the US goes too far with free speech and Germany does not go far enough.
Corporations pay tax and the people who own the corporations make all of its decisions, corporations do not have a vote since that would be "double dipping" for the owners. I'm not from the US but it makes me sick to see the FF industry can buy a lying sack of shit like senator Inhofe and put him in charge of a federal environmental committee, but social organizations such a businesses, churches, unions, special interest groups, private watchdogs, mass media, suicide cults, etc, etc, are what makes us a civilization as opposed to a tribe, silencing one particular type of organization won't fix anything. What needs to be done in the US has been pointed out by others - cap campaign spending and force political ads to comply with "truth in advertising" style laws. Taking the megaphones and amplifiers away from groups that can afford them allows others to be heard. Drowning out a speaker is one of the oldest political tactics in existence, we should not be making it easier for wealthy groups to use it.
It's not all bad in the US, "town hall" style politics is still alive and kicking and with modern communications it's much easier to see what a particular politician is telling different audiences. The US also has many of the worlds top scientist, engineers, etc, working for (or with) their public service in support of evidence based policy.
If they don't taste good, or if you can't gin up appealing recipes for them, nobody'll eat'em
I accidentally ate chocolate coated ants once. My wife had left half a mars bar neatly wrapped in the console, I spotted it while driving and with one deft movement popped the whole thing into my mouth without taking my eyes off the road. At first I thought I had hair on my face but it soon became apparent some ants were also feasting on the chocolate. I wound down the window and spat the ball of half chewed insects and toffee out the window. For the next half hour if felt like I had hair stuck at the back of my throat.
"H will be stripped from H2O in the upper atmosphere and bleed into space, the O2 will bond with C to form CO2" I'm obviously not a chemist, WP will put you straight on what I'm trying to say.
The long term trend for our planet, human influence aside, appears likely to be a virtual elimination of atmospheric CO2 as it becomes trapped in landmasses.
You really should study WP in a bit more depth, the following is mainly from Attenbourough's documentaries but the terms are all in WP. Between 450 -500mya we went from a near dead "snowball earth" to the advent and explosion of multi-cellular life that lead to you, me, and every other animal alive today. What melted the ice was a build up of volcanic CO2 that could not be subducted due to the global ice coverage. Melting glaciers carved nutrients off the continents and (re)-formed the oceans, algae sucked up CO2, incoporated the carbon into their body and spat out O2 - collagen (the stuff that hold cells together in animals) can only form in an O2 rich environment. Our O2 rich environment is a bi-product of plant life.
The long-term fate of the Earth's climate is fairly well established science (humans or no humans), it's similar to that of Venus, our magnetic field will decay, H will be stripped from H2O in the upper atmosphere and bleed into space, the O2 will bond with C to form CO2 warming the planet, the oceans will start to steam, then boil, eventually even the limestone will burn off the surface- it's called a "runaway greenhouse" and it's not due for another 500million years but when it does all traces of life will be obliterated. On the bright side, a billion years is not a bad innings for we animals.
Disclaimer: I've been interested in reading this sort of science since the 70's, I'm not an expert but I do think there is way too much ignorance of how our life support systems operate and way, way, too much hypocrisy when it comes to accepting the results of Science (with a capital 'S'). This entire thread is a prime example, right now at least 2/3 of the comments look like they were written by drunken teenage trolls wielding crayons.
I've had a few bong hits, his ideas are hilarious.
He believes that global warming has something to do with desertification, but doesn't have a model that explains the data
Yes cutting down trees can exacerbate the problem but land use is not the primary cause of AGW, it's not even in the top three. It's also true that AGW is expanding the subtropical deserts via convection currents known as "Hadley cells", scientists call this phenomena "positive feedback". The feedback simultaneously increases monsoonal rains and broadens the sub-tropical deserts. The entire thing is driven by warmer tropical sea surface temps which is a direct result of increased CO2 concentration, in this situation scientists call increased CO2 a "forcing".
CO2 has a somewhat unusual property in that it can be both a forcing (industrial/volcanic emissions) and a feedback (melting permafrost, larger forest fires).
Usually the Israelis are pretty defiant but they have been unusually spooked
Unusual? How quickly we forget the cold war. Nations are standing back and watching Syria because in my youth Syria was to the east what Israel was to the west, nobody wants to be seen to be militarily supporting one side or the other since that risks dragging everyone into a much broader conflict. Both sides of the old "east/west"political divide want to contain the fighting within the borders of Syria much more than they want to their "dog" to win. This is why Israeli strikes on Syria and arms supplies to either side in Syria spook everyone.
UN voting patterns on subjects concerning Syria and Israel still more or less follows the patterns established during the cold war. Saddam was politically simple by comparison, he was our loose cannon and the old "red team" of nations didn't mind us taking him out, Gadaffi was dead the minute the revolt erupted, he had no powerful friends left, much less an influential voting block in the UN watching his back.
pure unadulterated horseshit
We are living in a golden scientific age, in the 50 odd years I've been walking the planet mankind's knowledge of the universe around him has exploded like no other time in history. Sure some powerful economic groups such as the coal industry would like to keep certain results hidden from the public but corporate anti-science propaganda is nothing new and nobody in the west is lobbying to shut the whole thing down for fear of terrorism. The journal model may seem antiquated and expensive in an age of instant answers but history indicates the practice has not been a significant impediment to conducting research in the past.
Also few, if any at all, recent terrorist attacks were informed by sophisticated scientific inputs.
They may have attacked with box cutters but they were trained to fly in a state of the art flight simulator and performed a sophisticated engineering analysis to find the towers Achilles heel. War and scientific knowledge go hand in hand, all sides have been using science for military advantage since the first ape man put a turd in a sling shot.
Don't ask me, I'm too busy playing WoT, got a free T-shirt as a reward for my addic..err, dedication.
Yes and no, during the cold war Syria was to the soviets as Israel was to the west, UN voting patterns on resolutions concerning Syria and Israel did not change after the collapse of the soviet union. The crippling third world debt concentrated in north African countries was eventually dropped after the successful Geldof/Bono campaign of the 80's, the crippling debt was also an artifact of the cold war. Both sides had installed/bought puppet governments and then gave them huge amounts of money in the form of loan guarantees to buy weapons to fight the proxy wars. Israel still receives something like $10billion in loan guarantees from the US every year which it is obliged to spend on US weapons. Syria not so much in "aid" these days but it still has some moral support in the UN from Russia, China, and most of the other former soviet allies.
An RTG is only a problem if it lands on your head, those things are designed to withstand an uncontrolled reentry from space.
Perhaps the revolution ISN'T for the good of the Syrian people, but good for the US, EU, and Israel?
There's no reason it can't be both, there's also no reason to mod your factual observations as "flamebait". We are going to have to wait a decade or more to find out if the "Arab spring" changed anything for the better, I clearly recall people (as opposed to governments) in the west celebrating because Mugabe had come to power in Zimbabwe (Rhodesia), Stevie Wonder went so far as to sing about it. Their moral reasoning was sound at that time in history, but with 20/20 hindsight Stevie's claim that "Peace has come to Zimbawe" sounds foolish.
The political cynic in me thinks that western governments see two enemies fighting each other on their own territory. they are in no hurry to pull them apart.
Depends on how you measure "freedom", if you choose to mesure it by the size of the prison population the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world, more than China and 7X that of the EU. The current incarceration rate in the US is comprable to that of pre-WW2 soviet union under Stalin (albeit not as inhumane). Most of the extra inmates in the US are in jail because they chose to smoke a joint rather than drink a beer.
Forget the long-standing problems that make this approach a non-starter.
Did you actually watch IBM's "Watson" beat the snot out of the best Jepordy champions humanity could muster? I can't believe that anyone who knows anything about computers and AI is not blown away by Watson's demonstration, I know I was. My significant other who has a phd in marketing just shrugged and said "it's looking up the answers on the internet, so what?". In other words if your not impressed by Watson's performance, it's because you have no idea how difficult the problem is.
Coverity doesn't need to see the source code, they just need the client to send them the numbers their tool spat out. Many will, some won't, but I don't think that has anything to do with wanting to hide poor results, communisim, or greed.
And the assumption you're making is that proprietors will select only their best code for independent review. Having been in the industry for over 20yrs that assumption does not match my experience.
Wow you sure put a lot of thoughts into other people's heads. I don't know about the US but here in Australia contributing to a well known OSS project is something you put on your CV, not something you hide like a drug habit. Many OOS devs are also commercial devs in their day job (or would like to be), hardly surprising they write similar quality code for both endeavors.
National *Socialist* German Workers Party. Right?
So by that logic the DPRK (N.Korea) must be a democratic republic, it says so right there in the official name. There's also the "Democratic Republic of the Congo", in fact the word "democratic" in a nations name appears to be a strongly correlated with the most oppressive and impoverished nations in the modern world.
You see, the socialists mean well but it turns out that they have the opposite of the Midas Touch.
Yeah right, modern day Scandinavia is an impoverished hell hole, has been for decades. You are the victim of propaganda, someone painted a picture of an enemy and labeled it "socialist", you bought it. Pull your head out of your arse and dare to peek outside the bubble of hate the TV has conveniently provided for you.
The same mindset leads the same socialists to excuse bad behavior for troublemakers when they are young, which eventually leads them into incarceration.
The appalling incarceration rate in the US is a direct result of the inhumane "war on (some) drugs" pursued by both side of US politics, a war that has tens, (if not hundreds) of billions of taxpayer dollars to prosecute. Remove the risk of being locked up in the US for a drug crime and the per-capita numbers between the two sides of the pond look remarkably similar.
I can see organizations such as the BBC warming to this, I'd pay $2/mo for access to the BBC Earth archives and I'm sure UK taxpayers would gladly take it.
The Discovery Channel? - With a veritable smorgasbord of mind-numbing drivel to choose from you picked the Discovery Channel?
LOL, great link!
PS: Looked into the monitoring networks a bit deeper. A good data source with some excellent visualizations of this sort of thing can be found at the US DOE, the link comes from the excellent compendium of climate data archives at realclimate.
As a personal anecdote I first became interested in climate science in the early eighties, in that time it has gone from 340 to 400. OTOH, millions (if not billions) of people like myself have come to accept that it is a genuine problem. Same thing happened with "pea-soup" fog and acid rain, the economy won't die but unless the coal industry really can produce "clean coal" it will rapidly become obsolete, they read the writing on the wall 25yrs ago but what does that mean to an industry that held back "clean air" legislation for almost a century, stalling that cost 10's if not 100's of thousands of premature deaths across Europe?
So, which one is Pink?