I liked netforce series a lot. It was a cool idea of what-might-be and I really hope it materializes. The way I understood VR simulaitons is they were just UI, the semi-inteligent software was doing work. But instead of staring at a console as we do, he got to play interactive 'game'. Which is kinda cool when you think about it.
Remember that scene from Jurassic Park where the little girl said "It's a UNIX system! I know this!" and proceeded to ssslloooowwwlllyyy fix the system using FSN instead of a reasonable interface? That's how that VR shit would turn out if you actually tried to do it.
Having a computer is all about being able to use the right tool for the job... and VR is very rarely the right tool.
Brilliant! Because you chose to make that particular analogy, nobody can refute your argument without being attacked by feminists regardless of how poor an analogy it is.
That is only true if the EPA is relying on faulty science that cannot survive the scientific method.
Science is not "faulty" just because its hypotheses are difficult to test or take a long time to test... but opponents of regulation would argue it is (and courts, being made of lawyers instead of scientists, would treat such claims as plausible). That's the problem!
These bills are about subverting the scientific method into a political excuse to destroy all environmental regulations -- period.
You'll have a hard time proving in a court that you made a reasonable attempt to pay.
Theft is a criminal offense, so the burden is on the prosecution to prove that you failed to make a reasonable attempt to pay. And there's nothing stopping the defense from simply putting the waiter on the witness stand and asking "did the defendant attempt to give you cash in payment?" Unless said waiter perjures himself, I have a hard time seeing how the alleged-thief could possibly be found guilty.
I think it's the term 'Quebecker' (someone from Quebec) that is confusing people.
It confused me because I'd always heard that the name for people from Quebec was "Quebecois."
"Quebecker" sounds like some kind of anti-French reactionary thing, kind of like how some feminists insist on non-standard spellings of gender-related words. (Before somebody flames me, I should also point out that I have no opinion of anything related to Quebec, and am only vaguely aware that there's some kind of language-related controversy up there.)
The problem with you idea is that you're just assuming the government is doing the right thing. Look at the crap out of the NSA these days.
And if the EPA acted lawlessly like that, they'd just keep doing it even if these bills passed, so what's the point? "Oh no, you're acting illegally! So in retaliation, we'll... make it illegal a second time?" Yeah, that'll work really well!
If the problem is government acting illegally, the fix is oversight and enforcement of existing laws.
The government does dirty stuff sometimes. And what would stop the EPA from passing regulations that hurt one company but not another because some lobbyist paid off a politician that influences that. What defense would anyone have from that? None because you've removed all due process from the situation.
No, you'd still have exactly the same defense you have now. Since these bills are only concerned with science (at least, according to your reasoning in this thread), they can't possibly affect whether the EPA can write discriminatory rules because science is not necessary in order to challenge a discriminatory rule. In other words, to defend against a discriminatory rule you don't have to prove that it's unscientific, just that it's discriminatory.
Yes, it means the EPA gets taken to court, but being taken to court is not a bad thing. It is a normal part of our government.
Of course. But the EPA's regulation should be in force for the duration of the court case, rather than allowing entities to pollute unchecked until the court rules.
Its about science being used to shape regulation being open for review and people being able to reproduce it. I can pay for a study to say anything i want, but the EPA can ignore it as long as their science is sound (available and can be reproduced).
No, it's about being able to bludgeon the EPA in court with your bogus study, in order to delay regulations for as long as possible.
Oh, wait - [Environmental Impact Statements] are generally required anyway.
Yeah, and the Republicans hate that and are trying to change it, which is the issue we're discussing. The point of the proposed bills would be to preempt things like this.
So wait, what do you mean a company should have to prove whatever [thing with substantial potential for harm] they're doing is okay for the environment?
Fuck yes! Because if it didn't have substantial potential for harm, the EPA wouldn't bother trying to regulate it in the first place.
The people fighting this sort of thing ultimately are useful idiots for fascism. You want the government to do whatever it wants without anyone being able to defend themselves in court or hold the government to basic due process.
Clearly, you have no fucking clue what fascism actually is, because "you want [corporations who have effected regulatory capture on the government] to do whatever [they want] without anyone being able to defend themselves in court or hold the [corporations] to basic due process" and are too goddamn stupid to notice that you're advocating for exactly the same damn thing you're claiming is bad!
Basically, what you're trying to argue here is that government control is somehow worse than corporate control, even though the only real difference nowadays is that corporations are motivated entirely by greed and have no oversight by the public, while government is (supposed to be) motivated to serve the public good and does have oversight by the public.
Wow. How completely stupid can you be? You can pay anyone off to say it is not reproducable and anyone can prove them wrong by simply reproducing it. FFS, is logic lost on you? All anyone would have to do is reproduce the results.
And while you're off "reproducing the results," industry has had free reign to spend a decade or so fucking everything up. You might as well change the name from "Environmental Protection Agency" to "Environmental Hindsight Agency" since all it'll be able to do is say "yup, that really was a bad idea after all" after the damage is already done!
It seems like you are scared to have work used to claim global warming opened up for anyone to inspect. Why is that?
It "seems" like you're intentionally mischaracterizing the situation to suit your own argument. The burden of proof should be on you to explain why we should run full speed ahead changing the climate, not on the EPA to explain in excruciating detail precisely why erring on the side of caution might be prudent common sense.
The EPA should be subject to due process. If they're saying they're doing something because of a study... then that study itself should be subject to examination... that includes whether it is reprroducable and therefore science at all... and then you're going to want to know where the information came from so you can audit it.
You're holding the EPA to a lower standard then a corporation that files its yearly tax return.
You've got this entirely backwards: you're trying to argue that the EPA should be required to justify erring on the side of caution by prohibiting a potentially-harmful thing, when in reality the company wanting to do the potentially-harmful thing should justify that it isn't harmful before being allowed to do it.
If you have such contempt for the political process then just come out and say it now... just say you hate democracy. Say you hate due process. Say you hate freedom of speech. Just admit it.
Sure they do... in the same way that the recent Republican-backed net neutrality bill would have preserved genuine net neutrality, and was not even slightly an Orwellian doublespeak-named poison pill stuffed chock-full of loopholes in order to accomplish exactly the opposite.
Let's take a look at HR 1030, shall we? In part, it reads:
Section 6(b) of the Environmental Research, Development, and Demonstration Authorization Act of 1978 (42 U.S.C. 4363 note) is amended to read as follows: "(b)(1) The Administrator shall not propose, finalize, or disseminate a covered action unless all scientific and technical information relied on to support such covered action is-- (A) the best available science; (B) specifically identified; and (C) publicly available online in a manner that is sufficient for independent analysis and substantial reproduction of research results."
In other words, what it really means is "the EPA is prohibited from regulating anything to reduce global warming because no possible justification would be deemed capable of 'substantial reproduction of research results' until after we've collectively finished 'proving' it by cooking the planet... or at least, all proposed regulations would be tied up in court for decades by industry shills arguing such."
And what about the other one, HR 1029? It reads, in part, that:
The Administrator shall ensure that-- (A) the scientific and technical points of view represented on and the functions to be performed by the Board are fairly balanced among the members of the Board
In other words, legitimate scientific and technical points of view must be "balanced" by industry shills.
(C) persons with substantial and relevant expertise are not excluded from the Board due to affiliation with or representation of entities that may have a potential interest in the Board's advisory activities, so long as that interest is fully disclosed to the Administrator and the public and appointment to the Board complies with section 208 of title 18, United States Code
In other words, it's trying to say "quit blocking appointment of our industry shills to the board! It's making it too hard to effect regulatory capture!"
There's more bad stuff in there -- along with some good stuff, which is unsurprising because if the bill were all bad it would be too blatantly obvious even for some Republicans to support it -- but I can't be bothered to go through and analyze the whole thing.
literally every single anti-science thing that ever originates in D.C. comes from the GOP. Every. One.
The Democrats have anti-science blind spots too, such as the folks who think GMO crops are harmful simply because they aren't "natural." or some BS (as opposed to the less unreasonable arguments that GMO crops are harmful because they're designed to produce pesticides, or that they might out-compete non-GMO things and reduce biological diversity or something).
Of course, I'm not sure that the Democratic nutjobs are prevalent enough to get legislation as far through the process as the Republican nutjobs can, so maybe what you say is still true.
You say that as if the downstream costs of coal-fired plants aren't externalized too. Nuclear waste cleanup costs are dwarfed by the costs of global warming!
Nuclear is expensive precisely because huge amounts of money are spent attempting to appease anti-nuclear nutjobs like yourself. If the engineers were allowed to simply get on with building the damn things instead of being mired in decades of frivolous lawsuits every single time, then it really would be cheap!
The job of an editor is NOT to just present stories that go along with the group-think of the day. We have Faux News and their ilk for that. Also, if they edit submissions too much "for clarity" the submitter will complain that's not what they wrote. So what are you going to do?
Well, would it be too much to ask for them to fix the typos and make sure the links work?
I could make a political point about how kickstarter and its kin are a response to laws that limit risky investments by all except the wealthy and the effect of "the closure" in Venice in the 14th centuary.
that doesn't mean it's lacking in good plot and characters
You've got to be joking. Abrams' Kirk is criminally incompetent (even in the first movie, before your "Khan wanted him to screw up" rationalization could apply). The plots of both movies have holes big enough to drive a planet through, let alone a starship. (For example, WTF is the point of starships anymore, since they can apparently just beam across the galaxy now?!)
DS9 got pretty dark (e.g. Homefront/Paradise Lost, In the Pale Moonlight), but it was good. Abrams alleged-'trek' sucked for (many, many) other reasons.
I get, and sometimes sign, online petitions from the democrat party (as well as tea party-type petitions -- liberals incorrectly think I'm a liberal; conservatives incorrectly think I'm a conservative; go figure). One of the latest ones was titled something like "OMG, the Republicans want to shut down DHS; sign this to stop them!" and all I could think was that it's about damned time -- why the fuck would I want to stop them?! Shutting down DHS is an example of the Republicans doing something right, for a change!
But of course, since the Republicans are doing that the wingnut liberal lobbyists have to oppose them, even though it makes no damn sense...
Yeah, well, Japan doesn't count. Over there, they might as well have a vending machine corollary for Rule 34 ("there is a vending machine for it -- no exceptions").
Slashdot Mirror
Considering how many of the damn things there are in syndication, that sounds like a recipe for alcohol poisoning.
Remember that scene from Jurassic Park where the little girl said "It's a UNIX system! I know this!" and proceeded to ssslloooowwwlllyyy fix the system using FSN instead of a reasonable interface? That's how that VR shit would turn out if you actually tried to do it.
Having a computer is all about being able to use the right tool for the job... and VR is very rarely the right tool.
Brilliant! Because you chose to make that particular analogy, nobody can refute your argument without being attacked by feminists regardless of how poor an analogy it is.
Science is not "faulty" just because its hypotheses are difficult to test or take a long time to test... but opponents of regulation would argue it is (and courts, being made of lawyers instead of scientists, would treat such claims as plausible). That's the problem!
These bills are about subverting the scientific method into a political excuse to destroy all environmental regulations -- period.
Theft is a criminal offense, so the burden is on the prosecution to prove that you failed to make a reasonable attempt to pay. And there's nothing stopping the defense from simply putting the waiter on the witness stand and asking "did the defendant attempt to give you cash in payment?" Unless said waiter perjures himself, I have a hard time seeing how the alleged-thief could possibly be found guilty.
It confused me because I'd always heard that the name for people from Quebec was "Quebecois."
"Quebecker" sounds like some kind of anti-French reactionary thing, kind of like how some feminists insist on non-standard spellings of gender-related words. (Before somebody flames me, I should also point out that I have no opinion of anything related to Quebec, and am only vaguely aware that there's some kind of language-related controversy up there.)
And if the EPA acted lawlessly like that, they'd just keep doing it even if these bills passed, so what's the point? "Oh no, you're acting illegally! So in retaliation, we'll... make it illegal a second time?" Yeah, that'll work really well!
If the problem is government acting illegally, the fix is oversight and enforcement of existing laws.
No, you'd still have exactly the same defense you have now. Since these bills are only concerned with science (at least, according to your reasoning in this thread), they can't possibly affect whether the EPA can write discriminatory rules because science is not necessary in order to challenge a discriminatory rule. In other words, to defend against a discriminatory rule you don't have to prove that it's unscientific, just that it's discriminatory.
Of course. But the EPA's regulation should be in force for the duration of the court case, rather than allowing entities to pollute unchecked until the court rules.
No, it's about being able to bludgeon the EPA in court with your bogus study, in order to delay regulations for as long as possible.
Yeah, and the Republicans hate that and are trying to change it, which is the issue we're discussing. The point of the proposed bills would be to preempt things like this.
Fuck yes! Because if it didn't have substantial potential for harm, the EPA wouldn't bother trying to regulate it in the first place.
Clearly, you have no fucking clue what fascism actually is, because "you want [corporations who have effected regulatory capture on the government] to do whatever [they want] without anyone being able to defend themselves in court or hold the [corporations] to basic due process" and are too goddamn stupid to notice that you're advocating for exactly the same damn thing you're claiming is bad!
Basically, what you're trying to argue here is that government control is somehow worse than corporate control, even though the only real difference nowadays is that corporations are motivated entirely by greed and have no oversight by the public, while government is (supposed to be) motivated to serve the public good and does have oversight by the public.
And while you're off "reproducing the results," industry has had free reign to spend a decade or so fucking everything up. You might as well change the name from "Environmental Protection Agency" to "Environmental Hindsight Agency" since all it'll be able to do is say "yup, that really was a bad idea after all" after the damage is already done!
It "seems" like you're intentionally mischaracterizing the situation to suit your own argument. The burden of proof should be on you to explain why we should run full speed ahead changing the climate, not on the EPA to explain in excruciating detail precisely why erring on the side of caution might be prudent common sense.
You've got this entirely backwards: you're trying to argue that the EPA should be required to justify erring on the side of caution by prohibiting a potentially-harmful thing, when in reality the company wanting to do the potentially-harmful thing should justify that it isn't harmful before being allowed to do it.
You first.
Sure they do... in the same way that the recent Republican-backed net neutrality bill would have preserved genuine net neutrality, and was not even slightly an Orwellian doublespeak-named poison pill stuffed chock-full of loopholes in order to accomplish exactly the opposite.
Let's take a look at HR 1030, shall we? In part, it reads:
In other words, what it really means is "the EPA is prohibited from regulating anything to reduce global warming because no possible justification would be deemed capable of 'substantial reproduction of research results' until after we've collectively finished 'proving' it by cooking the planet... or at least, all proposed regulations would be tied up in court for decades by industry shills arguing such."
And what about the other one, HR 1029? It reads, in part, that:
In other words, legitimate scientific and technical points of view must be "balanced" by industry shills.
In other words, it's trying to say "quit blocking appointment of our industry shills to the board! It's making it too hard to effect regulatory capture!"
There's more bad stuff in there -- along with some good stuff, which is unsurprising because if the bill were all bad it would be too blatantly obvious even for some Republicans to support it -- but I can't be bothered to go through and analyze the whole thing.
The Democrats have anti-science blind spots too, such as the folks who think GMO crops are harmful simply because they aren't "natural." or some BS (as opposed to the less unreasonable arguments that GMO crops are harmful because they're designed to produce pesticides, or that they might out-compete non-GMO things and reduce biological diversity or something).
Of course, I'm not sure that the Democratic nutjobs are prevalent enough to get legislation as far through the process as the Republican nutjobs can, so maybe what you say is still true.
You say that as if the downstream costs of coal-fired plants aren't externalized too. Nuclear waste cleanup costs are dwarfed by the costs of global warming!
Nuclear is expensive precisely because huge amounts of money are spent attempting to appease anti-nuclear nutjobs like yourself. If the engineers were allowed to simply get on with building the damn things instead of being mired in decades of frivolous lawsuits every single time, then it really would be cheap!
You fell victim to one of the classic blunders: "never get involved in a flame war on Slashdot."
Well, would it be too much to ask for them to fix the typos and make sure the links work?
That sounds interesting; go for it.
You've got to be joking. Abrams' Kirk is criminally incompetent (even in the first movie, before your "Khan wanted him to screw up" rationalization could apply). The plots of both movies have holes big enough to drive a planet through, let alone a starship. (For example, WTF is the point of starships anymore, since they can apparently just beam across the galaxy now?!)
DS9 got pretty dark (e.g. Homefront/Paradise Lost, In the Pale Moonlight), but it was good. Abrams alleged-'trek' sucked for (many, many) other reasons.
"Natural" vs. regular processed foods.
I get, and sometimes sign, online petitions from the democrat party (as well as tea party-type petitions -- liberals incorrectly think I'm a liberal; conservatives incorrectly think I'm a conservative; go figure). One of the latest ones was titled something like "OMG, the Republicans want to shut down DHS; sign this to stop them!" and all I could think was that it's about damned time -- why the fuck would I want to stop them?! Shutting down DHS is an example of the Republicans doing something right, for a change!
But of course, since the Republicans are doing that the wingnut liberal lobbyists have to oppose them, even though it makes no damn sense...
Well, with some additional plumbing you could make mead...
Yeah, well, Japan doesn't count. Over there, they might as well have a vending machine corollary for Rule 34 ("there is a vending machine for it -- no exceptions").