Presumably if that crap is in the waste then electronics manafacturers put it there and needed to buy it from somewhere. Pity there isn't a CERN style organisation with the requisite international funding to could come up with a profitable all in one recycling plant that can recycle more than just the easy to get at metals.
Nice quotes, here's another one for you and everyone else who jumps at shadows - "We have nothing to fear, excpet fear itself".. Or another - "A man who figths dragons for too long, becomes a dragon".
OP's reaction is not unreasonable
Yes it is. When he was presented with facts he just waved his hands and said "frogs", worse still idealogues such as yourself then call him 'insightfull' or leap to his defense with your own pile of carefully selected quotes.
"The Price of Liberty is Eternal Vigilance." - As I said, great quotes. Note that there is nothing in it about beating up on people you don't like because you suspect they might be thinking about doing something you don't like, at some unspecified point in the future. In your soundbite language that behaviour is known as persecuting people for "thought crimes".
PS: As others have pointed out, paranioa is by definition illogical, and "slippery slope" arguments are a logical fallacy
There's a lot of talk about frogs on this issue but very little about accusing people of "thought crimes", which is what most of the frog posts boil down.
The three crimes you listed are all illegal and we all know the law is an ass, but that's were the similarity ends. The third is a victimless crime which leaves a lot of people like me scratching their heads as to WHY it is illegal in the first place. Laws are supposed to be made to benifit "the people", prohibition benifits nobody except the well organised thugs on both sides of the "war". We learnt that lesson with alcohol and it still baffles me that just after dismantiling alcohol prohibition because of it's detrimental effects on society, they turn around and do it again! As one would expect the same "cure" has caused same social tragedy as it did the first time around, this is evidenced by the fact that the US has 500K prisoners held for drug offences, whereas the EU with almost twice the population has a mere 600K prisoners held in total (that's all offrenses, not just drug offences). This is the primary reason why the US has the highest per-capita incaceration rate of ANY nation on the planet, including China and Saudi Arabia.
Evidently, the theory behind nuclear fusion reactions is not nearly as good as that behind the Higgs boson. That is the point of my snarky remark.
The theory is solid in both cases and at the most fundemental level is actually the same theory, not only that but the LHC found the Higgs by sifting through the debris of trillions of tiny fusion reactions.
There are no dingos in Tasmania, and Tassie cops eat apples. But yes, Lindy was telling the truth and she finally has the death certificate to prove it.
I'm impressed. You managed to put in a link to your sources this time. Sadly it's to a site trying to flog a book but the fact you managed to link to a source is an improvement.
Cap and trade seemed like a very reasonable modest measure.
Here's the thing I don't get, "conservatives" have been leading the anti-science movement against these measures for 20yrs, yet their "hero" Ronald Reagan (prompted and supported by Thatcher who graduated as a Chemist from Oxford) enthusiastically campagined for a solution to acid rain, he was successful and his international cap and trade system on sulphur emmissions has been up and running for over 20yrs now.
Here's another quote from Dyson; "my objections to the global warming propaganda are not so much over the technical facts, about which I do not know much, but it’s rather against the way those people behave and the kind of intolerance to criticism that a lot of them have.".
In other words his argument is not based on facts, it's based on the way he percieves the behaviour of climate scientists ( coincidently that perception matches the propoganda put out by "for hire" anti-science lobbyists, not heretics). Don't get me wrong, I admire Dyson, however wrt climate science, he is the one clinging to dogma in a field of study "about which [he does] not know much".
Climate is not mathematically chaotic, exept on geologic time scales. Climate is the statistics of (mathematically chaotic) weather patterns, without man-made forcings it is remarkably stable on human time scales.
got people started actually thinking about greenhouse gasses and climate
That started a little over a century ago, however for the first 50yrs the killer argument was that the H2O absorption spectrum overlapped that of CO2. This was not resolved until the 50's when better spectoraphs were built for reasearch into heat seeking missiles. The role of CO2 as the main driver of Earth's climate came about from trying to work out what caused the ice ages, even though the discovery of the Milankovich cycles eventually explained the timing of the ice ages, it could not explain the maginitude of the change without including CO2 feedbacks (such as melting permafrost).
All this was known to science in the late 50's when the NAS first warned the US government that emmisions were causing the climate to warm. Areosols are much more complex, some (sulphur compounds) have a cooling effect because they reflect sunlight, others such a soot absorb sunlight and dump it into the ocean as heat. This complexity is reflected in the error bars put around it's contribution to climate change. This complexity and uncertainty is also the origin of the canard "they predicted global cooling in the 70'", it's true that ~30% of the papers that did attempt a climate prediction in the 70's, predicted the wrong sign. However that was 40yrs ago and there is no scientifically valid support for such a view now, particularly since Reagan pushed for and won a (successful) international cap and trade system on sulphur emmissions to combat acid rain.
they believe that doing due diligence isn't part of their job
And judging by the financial deregulation over the last 20yrs or so, they have convinced the US government (and a lot of their citizens) that belief is true.
We don't know that, and Eathy contamination would make it more difficult to find out if there are any natives. However as someone else has said Mars has already been contaminated by Earth via past metor impacts. Also if there are martian bugs they're going to be evolved to live on Mars and are likely to simply eat any offworld intruders.
My major concern is the handwaving about the greenhouse which is a common thread in all these "can do" stories. Since the 1970's people on Earth have experimented by building enourmous greenhouses that are sealed off from the outside world, these "biodomes" are intended to sustain 2-6 people indefiniely. None of these experiments have managed to sustain the humans for more that a year or so, the system always collapses into organic slime. However our plucky hero is going to feed 4 people for (say) 50yrs using 50M^2 of what is basically an advanced dope growing kit.
Sorry, but if they want smart astronughts for their TV show they will have to either demonstrate their dubiuos technical solutions here on Earth or drop the "smart" requirement.
Yes, the guy I call "my lawyer" has been doing comon legal stuff (such as conveyancing, etc) for our family for the last 30yrs, I've never seen him so outraged and it's also the first time I've seen him write a letter for free.;)
And there's the catch, it was a verbal agreement (we will write up a proper quote later). At the end of the job the (easily confused) mother was presented with a bill that had $3K of extra's she had supposedly agreed to while the daughter was overseas, the "extra's" were bullshit things like super-duper sealant and paint. Another catch was if it did go to court we had to be sure it really was only worth $6K on the open market but that could be done by a building assesor for maybe $50-100 since all they did was replace the tiles and guttering (there was no structural work involved and a million other companies advertise the same thing for around the $6K mark).
Getting the bullies off the old woman's back was easy, in the letter the daughter took responsibility for the disputed debt and then threaten to sue if they contacted her mother about what was now her personal business dealings.
The only way to make money in this game is to piss off the users as you slap them in the face with the reality that they aren't customers.... they are the product...[snip]....Google is making money giving stuff away, anyone else?
That's kind of a narrow way of looking at how to extract money from social media. For example I saw a TV ad less than an hour ago for a social media site for car lovers and rev heads. The site itself is owned and operated by Shannons a specialist insurer for collectable cars and bikes but the content is generated by users uploading pictures, etc, to their virtual garage.
In other words the insurance company is using it's existing repuation as a well known specialist to cut out the middle men. They are trying to entice their target market to come and play in a walled garden that they own, rather than just renting space inside someone else generic garden that does not go out of it's way to attract motoring geeks. Getting your brand in the mind of your target market is basically what all that data mining is about, if someone turns up at the Shannons site then Shannons already know they are interested in collectible cars/bikes and a large portion of them will be owners who will need to buy insurance from somebody in the next 12months. In a way it's very much like old school targeted marketing where a company like Shannons would sponser (say) a vintage car rally in an attempt to herd it's potential customers into one place.
Note that slashdot itself is owned by Geeknet, Inc, presumably their target market is 'people who self-identify as geeks'. I'm registered geek #624760 and have been here for over a decade, so they must be doing something right. I can't put my finger on what that might be, but it's certainly not the editing;).
Yes negotiating justice saves time and money, OTOH it's probably a major contributing factor to the following statistics...
The US has a population of 300M of which 500K prisoners are being held for drug offences.
The 27 nations of the EU have a population of 500M of which 600K prisoners are held in TOTAL for ALL crimes.
Having said that a guilty person should be shown some leniency for assisting authorties and admitting guilt. But not as part of any formal bargain, it would be considered by the judge as "signs of remorse" when passing sentence.
I always thought, that the fairest court of all, would be the one where the "prosecutor" (for lack of better term) would be searching for the "truth", not necessarily going for "conviction". This would remove the adversarial nature of the whole court process, it would be about discovering the "truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth".
Problem is, the most efficient way we know of getting to the "truth" based on reason and physical evidence is inherently adversarial, ie: create a model of the truth and attack/defend it untli it matches reality beyond reasonable doubt. Prosecuters (particularly in the US where the role is more politicized) should not be thrown in jail for being over-zealous but technically within the law, the political system needs to change it's notion of what a "sucessful prosecution" actual means to redirect the priorities of the prosecuters, to me a "sucessful prosecution" means justice has been served, not negotiated.
That's why you instruct a good lawyer to write them a " So sue me, motherfucker!" letter for $100 tops, then do nothing unless they actually proceed with their bluff (which in the US is a small but non-zero risk)*. Enaging them by responding to subsequent threats allows you (or your lawyer) to say something silly and them to get a foot in the door of the negotiating room. There's and excellent TED talk on precisely this subject that I'm too lazy to look for but it doesn't just apply to copyright. I had personal experience of a roof tiling company who attempted to take advantage of a freind's elderly mother by charging her $9K for what was a $6K job on the open market. They were at the point of harrasing her with heavy handed debt collectors. A properly worded letter from my lawyer which he kindly did for FREE and a cheque for the $6K she and the family had originally agreed to was sent to the roof company by registered mail, we never heard another word about it.
*In most western countries outside of the US, this sort of behaviour is called "extortion".
Slashdot Mirror
Presumably if that crap is in the waste then electronics manafacturers put it there and needed to buy it from somewhere. Pity there isn't a CERN style organisation with the requisite international funding to could come up with a profitable all in one recycling plant that can recycle more than just the easy to get at metals.
OP's reaction is not unreasonable
Yes it is. When he was presented with facts he just waved his hands and said "frogs", worse still idealogues such as yourself then call him 'insightfull' or leap to his defense with your own pile of carefully selected quotes.
"The Price of Liberty is Eternal Vigilance." - As I said, great quotes. Note that there is nothing in it about beating up on people you don't like because you suspect they might be thinking about doing something you don't like, at some unspecified point in the future. In your soundbite language that behaviour is known as persecuting people for "thought crimes".
PS: As others have pointed out, paranioa is by definition illogical, and "slippery slope" arguments are a logical fallacy
There's a lot of talk about frogs on this issue but very little about accusing people of "thought crimes", which is what most of the frog posts boil down.
It has become part of the culture and popular language usage.
That's because it's an easy cop out that cannot be falsified, eg: the OP used it used in response to facts that did not support his parinoia.
Yeah right, Sweden and Norway are chock full of death camps.
they are the same
The three crimes you listed are all illegal and we all know the law is an ass, but that's were the similarity ends. The third is a victimless crime which leaves a lot of people like me scratching their heads as to WHY it is illegal in the first place. Laws are supposed to be made to benifit "the people", prohibition benifits nobody except the well organised thugs on both sides of the "war". We learnt that lesson with alcohol and it still baffles me that just after dismantiling alcohol prohibition because of it's detrimental effects on society, they turn around and do it again! As one would expect the same "cure" has caused same social tragedy as it did the first time around, this is evidenced by the fact that the US has 500K prisoners held for drug offences, whereas the EU with almost twice the population has a mere 600K prisoners held in total (that's all offrenses, not just drug offences). This is the primary reason why the US has the highest per-capita incaceration rate of ANY nation on the planet, including China and Saudi Arabia.
This is a case of IP law working very well
No, this is a case of someone forcing the MAFFIA a eat their own dog food.
Evidently, the theory behind nuclear fusion reactions is not nearly as good as that behind the Higgs boson. That is the point of my snarky remark.
The theory is solid in both cases and at the most fundemental level is actually the same theory, not only that but the LHC found the Higgs by sifting through the debris of trillions of tiny fusion reactions.
There are no dingos in Tasmania, and Tassie cops eat apples. But yes, Lindy was telling the truth and she finally has the death certificate to prove it.
I'm impressed. You managed to put in a link to your sources this time. Sadly it's to a site trying to flog a book but the fact you managed to link to a source is an improvement.
Cap and trade seemed like a very reasonable modest measure.
Here's the thing I don't get, "conservatives" have been leading the anti-science movement against these measures for 20yrs, yet their "hero" Ronald Reagan (prompted and supported by Thatcher who graduated as a Chemist from Oxford) enthusiastically campagined for a solution to acid rain, he was successful and his international cap and trade system on sulphur emmissions has been up and running for over 20yrs now.
Here's another quote from Dyson; "my objections to the global warming propaganda are not so much over the technical facts, about which I do not know much, but it’s rather against the way those people behave and the kind of intolerance to criticism that a lot of them have.".
In other words his argument is not based on facts, it's based on the way he percieves the behaviour of climate scientists ( coincidently that perception matches the propoganda put out by "for hire" anti-science lobbyists, not heretics). Don't get me wrong, I admire Dyson, however wrt climate science, he is the one clinging to dogma in a field of study "about which [he does] not know much".
Climate is not mathematically chaotic, exept on geologic time scales. Climate is the statistics of (mathematically chaotic) weather patterns, without man-made forcings it is remarkably stable on human time scales.
got people started actually thinking about greenhouse gasses and climate
That started a little over a century ago, however for the first 50yrs the killer argument was that the H2O absorption spectrum overlapped that of CO2. This was not resolved until the 50's when better spectoraphs were built for reasearch into heat seeking missiles. The role of CO2 as the main driver of Earth's climate came about from trying to work out what caused the ice ages, even though the discovery of the Milankovich cycles eventually explained the timing of the ice ages, it could not explain the maginitude of the change without including CO2 feedbacks (such as melting permafrost).
All this was known to science in the late 50's when the NAS first warned the US government that emmisions were causing the climate to warm. Areosols are much more complex, some (sulphur compounds) have a cooling effect because they reflect sunlight, others such a soot absorb sunlight and dump it into the ocean as heat. This complexity is reflected in the error bars put around it's contribution to climate change. This complexity and uncertainty is also the origin of the canard "they predicted global cooling in the 70'", it's true that ~30% of the papers that did attempt a climate prediction in the 70's, predicted the wrong sign. However that was 40yrs ago and there is no scientifically valid support for such a view now, particularly since Reagan pushed for and won a (successful) international cap and trade system on sulphur emmissions to combat acid rain.
Why would your strawman "lefty" deny it?
there's no such thing as a perm job in the US
Comprehension tip: The job is permanent, not the employee.
they believe that doing due diligence isn't part of their job
And judging by the financial deregulation over the last 20yrs or so, they have convinced the US government (and a lot of their citizens) that belief is true.
You're an idiot.
there are no natives
We don't know that, and Eathy contamination would make it more difficult to find out if there are any natives. However as someone else has said Mars has already been contaminated by Earth via past metor impacts. Also if there are martian bugs they're going to be evolved to live on Mars and are likely to simply eat any offworld intruders.
My major concern is the handwaving about the greenhouse which is a common thread in all these "can do" stories. Since the 1970's people on Earth have experimented by building enourmous greenhouses that are sealed off from the outside world, these "biodomes" are intended to sustain 2-6 people indefiniely. None of these experiments have managed to sustain the humans for more that a year or so, the system always collapses into organic slime. However our plucky hero is going to feed 4 people for (say) 50yrs using 50M^2 of what is basically an advanced dope growing kit.
Sorry, but if they want smart astronughts for their TV show they will have to either demonstrate their dubiuos technical solutions here on Earth or drop the "smart" requirement.
Yes, the guy I call "my lawyer" has been doing comon legal stuff (such as conveyancing, etc) for our family for the last 30yrs, I've never seen him so outraged and it's also the first time I've seen him write a letter for free. ;)
in writing
And there's the catch, it was a verbal agreement (we will write up a proper quote later). At the end of the job the (easily confused) mother was presented with a bill that had $3K of extra's she had supposedly agreed to while the daughter was overseas, the "extra's" were bullshit things like super-duper sealant and paint. Another catch was if it did go to court we had to be sure it really was only worth $6K on the open market but that could be done by a building assesor for maybe $50-100 since all they did was replace the tiles and guttering (there was no structural work involved and a million other companies advertise the same thing for around the $6K mark).
Getting the bullies off the old woman's back was easy, in the letter the daughter took responsibility for the disputed debt and then threaten to sue if they contacted her mother about what was now her personal business dealings.
The only way to make money in this game is to piss off the users as you slap them in the face with the reality that they aren't customers.... they are the product...[snip]....Google is making money giving stuff away, anyone else?
That's kind of a narrow way of looking at how to extract money from social media. For example I saw a TV ad less than an hour ago for a social media site for car lovers and rev heads. The site itself is owned and operated by Shannons a specialist insurer for collectable cars and bikes but the content is generated by users uploading pictures, etc, to their virtual garage.
;).
In other words the insurance company is using it's existing repuation as a well known specialist to cut out the middle men. They are trying to entice their target market to come and play in a walled garden that they own, rather than just renting space inside someone else generic garden that does not go out of it's way to attract motoring geeks. Getting your brand in the mind of your target market is basically what all that data mining is about, if someone turns up at the Shannons site then Shannons already know they are interested in collectible cars/bikes and a large portion of them will be owners who will need to buy insurance from somebody in the next 12months. In a way it's very much like old school targeted marketing where a company like Shannons would sponser (say) a vintage car rally in an attempt to herd it's potential customers into one place.
Note that slashdot itself is owned by Geeknet, Inc, presumably their target market is 'people who self-identify as geeks'. I'm registered geek #624760 and have been here for over a decade, so they must be doing something right. I can't put my finger on what that might be, but it's certainly not the editing
Yes negotiating justice saves time and money, OTOH it's probably a major contributing factor to the following statistics...
The US has a population of 300M of which 500K prisoners are being held for drug offences.
The 27 nations of the EU have a population of 500M of which 600K prisoners are held in TOTAL for ALL crimes.
Having said that a guilty person should be shown some leniency for assisting authorties and admitting guilt. But not as part of any formal bargain, it would be considered by the judge as "signs of remorse" when passing sentence.
I always thought, that the fairest court of all, would be the one where the "prosecutor" (for lack of better term) would be searching for the "truth", not necessarily going for "conviction". This would remove the adversarial nature of the whole court process, it would be about discovering the "truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth".
Problem is, the most efficient way we know of getting to the "truth" based on reason and physical evidence is inherently adversarial, ie: create a model of the truth and attack/defend it untli it matches reality beyond reasonable doubt. Prosecuters (particularly in the US where the role is more politicized) should not be thrown in jail for being over-zealous but technically within the law, the political system needs to change it's notion of what a "sucessful prosecution" actual means to redirect the priorities of the prosecuters, to me a "sucessful prosecution" means justice has been served, not negotiated.
That's why you instruct a good lawyer to write them a " So sue me, motherfucker!" letter for $100 tops, then do nothing unless they actually proceed with their bluff (which in the US is a small but non-zero risk)*. Enaging them by responding to subsequent threats allows you (or your lawyer) to say something silly and them to get a foot in the door of the negotiating room. There's and excellent TED talk on precisely this subject that I'm too lazy to look for but it doesn't just apply to copyright. I had personal experience of a roof tiling company who attempted to take advantage of a freind's elderly mother by charging her $9K for what was a $6K job on the open market. They were at the point of harrasing her with heavy handed debt collectors. A properly worded letter from my lawyer which he kindly did for FREE and a cheque for the $6K she and the family had originally agreed to was sent to the roof company by registered mail, we never heard another word about it.
*In most western countries outside of the US, this sort of behaviour is called "extortion".