The race to the bottom argument is a logical fallacy. Let's suppose this: If you race the prices to the bottom (i.e. everything becomes so cheap that anybody can afford it anyways) then who cares how much money you have? You can't eat money, and you can't use money: You can only spend it.
What you need to look at is purchasing power, and you need to understand the distinction between money and wealth.
I'd rather live in a world where I make $10 an hour with my lunch costing only $4 than live in a world where I make $20 an hour and the same lunch costs $20. And as time goes on, this is the reality we live in.
In the world we live in, yes, the rich become wealthier, but the poor also become wealthier. In fact, the poor are wealthier than they've ever been at any point in history. This is an indisputable fact. Most of today's poor, even in third world countries, own cell phones, TV's, and have ample access to food. In fact food is now cheaper than it has ever been, so where that was a problem in the past it almost no longer exists.
I remember in the 80's, you were one wealthy SOB if you owned a personal computer, a big screen TV and a carphone. Now try to find somebody who doesn't have these things, and the ones they have are FAR better than the ones the rich had in the 80's. And in spite of this, people like you come around insisting that things are only getting worse for the poor, and it's all the fault of capitalism. You simply look at dollar figures and say "adjusted for inflation, this person now makes less" and with that information alone you conclude that capitalism is the problem, and you wrongly conclude that we're on this race to the bottom where everybody is worse off than they were before. It's just not true, not even close to being true.
I don't know what your motivations are, but I do know this: When people like you see these things as being wrong, they lobby for the government to "fix" things, and the "fixes" almost always end up making things worse for everybody. Case in point: Smoot-Hawley was supposed to "fix" unemployment, and it did the opposite. We're fine the way we're going now. Technology keeps advancing, and food and luxury items keep getting cheaper.
Protectionism is why sugar prices are so high in America that we use high fructose corn syrup whereas the rest of the world uses ordinary sugar. Protectionism, not the stock market, caused the great depression (Smoot-Hawley tariff act). Protectionism causes domestic steel prices to go up, which makes goods we export cost more than foreign goods.
I could go on with a ton of examples of why protectionism does far more harm to our economy than good. When trade restrictions are lifted on the other hand, we win.
A lot of people think we're getting the shaft from China, but it's really the other way around. They give us nice LCD screens, smartphones, and even capital goods (capital goods being tools used to build our infrastructure) and in return we give them useless little pieces of paper that we basically charge them interest on (inflation.)
Reputation for what? Isn't wikileaks supposed to be about opening all secrets? What secrets is wikileaks hiding that he traitorously revealed?
Just FWIW: I'm against this whole NSA thing and support Snowden, so I'm neither pro-spying nor pro big-brother. But, wikileaks has built its reputation upon lying about stuff. It's first claim to fame was the collateral murder video where it tried to paint some US soldiers as murderers when indeed the people they killed were in fact armed combatants. I have zero tolerance for lies on these matters no matter who does it, and therefore think wikileaks deserves whatever the hell they get. I also think it is far more of a stretch to believe that Sweden wants Assange so that they can turn him over to the US - the UK is far more likely to turn them over than he is, because they're far more in bed with the US government. Assange is nothing but an attention whore, and I'm sick of hearing his sob story. From what I gather, a lot of people in wikileaks left for the exact reasons I just described.
If you need an underdog to support, support Snowden. He's a patriot, and so is the guy who "betrayed" wikileaks.
The main difference between TCP and UDP can be described thus:
- TCP is guaranteed data integrity and in-order data payload delivery at the transport layer, along with congestion control to make sure packets aren't being sent too fast for the receiving end to process (either because the device is too slow to process it, or because the pipe is saturated.)
- UDP is just spit the data across the pipe without actually checking anything. UDP offers lower packet overhead and lower latency (no need to wait for ACK's and dropped packets don't need to be retransmitted) and is more forgiving during congestion. Internet Protocol does the same, by the way - UDP and TCP get encapsulated into the Internet Protocol packet.
For live streaming, usually UDP is preferred, and the error correction is handled at either layer 6 or 7. Generally the application will use parity whereby so long as you get an arbitrary number (say 95% of the data) you'll see the whole thing uninterrupted, even if some packets arrive out of order, though in some applications this isn't even needed.
UDP is almost universally used for VoIP and video conferencing. Games used to only use UDP for this reason back in the dialup days, though many newer ones (e.g. world of warcraft I know of) uses TCP, and it does come at the expense of added latency. I don't know what netflix uses, but since it isn't "live" per se and it does buffer, I imagine it would be easier to program it in TCP.
BitTorrent now uses a really neat variation of UDP that they call uTP. Although it *is* UDP, they added some TCP functions without most of its drawbacks. TCP only makes congestion control corrections *after* the link is already congested, whereas uTP is less aggressive and monitors the link to scale itself so that it doesn't cause latency spikes on your link.
The "tech labor shortage" isn't for EE or CS, rather it is for IT in particular. Many people foolishly go into school thinking they're going to find a good job designing computer components and/or writing software, but the vast majority of businesses don't need that sort of thing. What they actually need is implementation, i.e. not how does the technology work, rather how it applies to business and economics. In my experience talking to most EE/CS majors, they have little grasp of either of those (just the mere fact that many of them are disgusted by the idea that economics is a science tells a lot about why they aren't needed.)
If you want a good tech job, don't necessarily mess with electrical engineering, look more towards something like enterprise resource planning or software defined networking/datacenters. THAT is where the jobs are.
This wouldn't be the first time people have had issues with Cogent having saturated peering links. A common complaint among Cox customers is that latency is high to certain WoW servers, and saturated Cogent links has been found to be the cause - and they don't seem particularly interested in fixing it.
The ignorance of money on slashdot is rather shocking (or maybe not...? Slashdot tends to have a anti-capitalist slant.)
Money gets created out of thin air all the time, in fact it happens quite possibly in the millions of times per day. When banks issue large loans, they notify the reserve who increases their reserves - the bank itself doesn't actually have to have that money, in fact there is no printing of any kind involved. When the loan matures the money is removed from whence it came, but the bank keeps the interest. This happens in basically every country with a central bank reserve system.
This isn't a bad thing by the way - it serves its purpose to rather good effect, in spite of the fed's general mismanagement problems.
HFT does nothing similar to this anyways. With HFT no money is being created - it came from somebody else's bank account, and the size of the reserve (be it cash or non-cash) never changed. And it's not as if it was robbed either as the buyer agreed to pay it.
The only way I could see HFT as being bad is for people who just absolutely despise the idea that you spend money to make money. Holding this view is the bad thing though - the economy is heavily built around this. As another poster mentioned for example, if you've ever bought something and then turned around and sold it for more, then you've effectively made money with money.
I'm baffled why anybody would mod this troll - the question of whether or not surgery is an ethical course of action is a very valid one. Thanks for posting it.
So having sex listed in a database offends transgendered people, but I imagine that taking it out would offend affirmative action feminists even more. (I.e. they fear they'll lose their ability to track "fairness".) That and oh so many things critical to the economy (e.g. Market data) need important information such as this.
That and some people (such as feminists) consider their sex to be a defining and prideful aspect of their lives, probably far more so than the number of transgendered.
I'm having a hard time therefore reasoning that we should change a system that already suits its purpose because a fraction of a percent of the population finds it embarrassing. If we got rid of every little thing that might offend somebody, life would be pretty bland.
Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff.
Marx was pretty clear that private property should be abolished, yet everybody who has tried to push for communism ultimately came to the realization that you actually do need to be able to own stuff, because people tend to abuse and misuse that which has no personal cost to them. Because of that, communism ultimately will never work. The reason that it is imprinted as evil is simple: Those who still believe in abolition of personal property want to take from the haves, which even includes the poor, almost always by means of violent revolution, and nobody will stand for that. In fact, I can't think of a single incidence where a change to communism didn't involve at the very least some kind of re-education camps or "work for free or suffer the consequences" camps.
Just wait until the current president is voted out of office and the next republican is in office. You will be doubly-sorry this stuff was started then when it's used to chase down and out women who have had abortions, people that don't go to church, and all kinds of other sinners.
I really don't see that being the case at all. Federal republicans talk about jesus about 33% more than the democrats, but they don't seem to ever force jesus on you. I've never felt in the slightest danger of being forced to go to church for example, which would bother me if it happened given I'm atheist and all.
However the current administration is definitely the least transparent, openly hostile to opposing views (see IRS), and has the worst domestic spying program to date. Also uses drones as terror weapons, which I'm sort of mixed about (I love the thought of blowing up mullah's, but I'm not sure if terrorism is the answer to terrorism.)
Actually it's pretty common for atheists (including myself) to vehemently support the second amendment. Ironically the deeply religious types I run into seem to have the most issue with them (e.g. jesus doesn't approve of violence.)
There are normally plenty of unplanned interrupts. Babies in cars cause them all the time for example. Under that reasoning, babies should be banned from cars.
It's possible that if you were distracted that easily from the road that you have to look at the phone right that second, you have some sort of neurological anomaly, for example autism spectrum where sudden actions in your periphery will instantly grab your attention. But most people aren't like this, and it isn't at all fair to make everybody else change to fit your lifestyle (brings images of schools of 500 students who ban peanut butter because of one child with peanut allergies.)
I answer my phone all the time while on the road without ever actually having to take my eyes off of the road, and I don't even use a hands free kit - I just do the whole thing by feel, and in fact it is easier to pick up a 4 ounce phone off of my dash and answer (pick up, slide my thumb - that's it) than to pick up a 32 ounce soda and then find the straw.
nobody ever said it was immoral until you just did.
Obama used words to that effect a few years back. Worse is that in his election campaign he hired unpaid interns without offering them any kind of food, transportation, or other stipends of any kind. Basically they were just his work slaves, and his current stance that this is perfectly acceptable so long as they are working for either a nonprofit or the government. However if they intern for a private enterprise...well that's just plain evil.
If you don't want to work for zero pay, then don't. The purpose is to gain first hand experience into the career field without somebody having to take the risk of hiring somebody who is a complete unknown. Really this wouldn't be a problem if there weren't so many damn laws, regulations, and costs that make it hard to fire people who aren't worth a shit. The problem is that politicians as well as so called "workers rights" types expect to have it both ways, and then wonder why many people have a hard time starting a career. They think they're doing the average Joe a service, but instead all they're doing is making things more difficult.
An internship I had last year was one of the most beneficial things I received towards my career ever, and now the government wants to kill them off unless they are a one way benefit to the student? An internship is supposed to be a two way benefit, not a charity.
In being fair to the judge here, they aren't the first person to think this. Obama himself made similar statements, a manifesto of sorts, about internships needing to benefit only the student and basically be nothing but a burden to the employer.
If the overall goal here is to harm the future economy, then this is certainly a step in the right direction.
The real desktop/laptop performance measurement is iops at low queue depth. Large sustained rates are meaningless for all but servers. (I mean really, how often are you going to copy files big enough for these speeds to matter, and what are you going to copy it to that can keep up? Certainly not cloud storage or a USB drive.)
Hmm...based on the moderation of this post, it seems slashdot believes that libertarians are just a big racist movement who hates all forms of taxes.
When you get called a racist, you immediately lost the debate. Nobody should listen to you. It doesn't matter if you're actually racist or not, but still nobody should listen to you. Clearly well known libertarians like Thomas Sowell and Penn Jillette must be racist as well.
And libertarians by and large are fine with taxes. What they're not fine with is taxes that support stupid wasteful causes, like the NEA, Title IX, Social Security (I mean seriously, why can't I opt out of the damn thing? My personal retirement plan is guaranteed to pay off before I die, whereas Social Security in all likelihood will pay back nothing I put into it. I'm not even rich, but I already manage my own savings much better than the government does, thank you very much. Hell, the government can't even manage its own debts, nevermind savings. If I could take my money out of social security and add that to my own savings, I'd be even better off.)
I seemed to recall the Hadley CRU was refusing to release their data for the sole purpose that they didn't want skeptics to detract from their cause. I don't think that is a valid reason: Anybody should have access to that kind of information if we're supposed to alter our lives based on it, especially given that much of it was obtained via taxpayer funds by both the US and British governments. They've even evaded freedom of information requests, which violates the law.
They wouldn't have to be bombarded if they simply made all of the data public to begin with for anybody to look at. If this is something really truly important that we must all make life altering decisions, then why is it such a closely guarded secret? Empirical science depends on peer review. How the hell are you supposed to peer review top secret data?
falsifying science for the sake of money when they're smart enough to know that their falsification will eventually be discovered utterly destroying their scientific reputations?
It can and does happen, though usually they expect to get away with it.
I'm not sold on the drought idea. Hell, the article itself even points to increased humidity and water levels as being a "problem". Global warming periods have also always resulted in larger arable landmass (that is, land that is neither too cold nor too dry to farm on) whereas cooling always results in the opposite, which has fared badly for biodiversity.
Considering that the most green and bio-diverse period in earths history was when CO2 levels were at 3,500 PPM basically everywhere (as opposed to the current 400 peak PPM in limited areas) and the climate was far warmer, I'm not sure what it is we're worried about, whether it is man made or not.
If you actually look at what they're doing, making plants roundup ready requires very little change to their genome. On the other hand, selective selection (the process used since time immemorial to modify plants to our liking) modifies the plant's entire genome.
I mean there's a tiny change that you're protesting, but you're just fine with big changes which have an even larger category of unknowns. I can already think of a number of weeds that are resistant to roundup, and that just occurred through natural selection. But a GM plant that does it with hardly any change at all is evil?
Slashdot Mirror
The race to the bottom argument is a logical fallacy. Let's suppose this: If you race the prices to the bottom (i.e. everything becomes so cheap that anybody can afford it anyways) then who cares how much money you have? You can't eat money, and you can't use money: You can only spend it.
What you need to look at is purchasing power, and you need to understand the distinction between money and wealth.
I'd rather live in a world where I make $10 an hour with my lunch costing only $4 than live in a world where I make $20 an hour and the same lunch costs $20. And as time goes on, this is the reality we live in.
In the world we live in, yes, the rich become wealthier, but the poor also become wealthier. In fact, the poor are wealthier than they've ever been at any point in history. This is an indisputable fact. Most of today's poor, even in third world countries, own cell phones, TV's, and have ample access to food. In fact food is now cheaper than it has ever been, so where that was a problem in the past it almost no longer exists.
I remember in the 80's, you were one wealthy SOB if you owned a personal computer, a big screen TV and a carphone. Now try to find somebody who doesn't have these things, and the ones they have are FAR better than the ones the rich had in the 80's. And in spite of this, people like you come around insisting that things are only getting worse for the poor, and it's all the fault of capitalism. You simply look at dollar figures and say "adjusted for inflation, this person now makes less" and with that information alone you conclude that capitalism is the problem, and you wrongly conclude that we're on this race to the bottom where everybody is worse off than they were before. It's just not true, not even close to being true.
I don't know what your motivations are, but I do know this: When people like you see these things as being wrong, they lobby for the government to "fix" things, and the "fixes" almost always end up making things worse for everybody. Case in point: Smoot-Hawley was supposed to "fix" unemployment, and it did the opposite. We're fine the way we're going now. Technology keeps advancing, and food and luxury items keep getting cheaper.
Protectionism is why sugar prices are so high in America that we use high fructose corn syrup whereas the rest of the world uses ordinary sugar. Protectionism, not the stock market, caused the great depression (Smoot-Hawley tariff act). Protectionism causes domestic steel prices to go up, which makes goods we export cost more than foreign goods.
I could go on with a ton of examples of why protectionism does far more harm to our economy than good. When trade restrictions are lifted on the other hand, we win.
A lot of people think we're getting the shaft from China, but it's really the other way around. They give us nice LCD screens, smartphones, and even capital goods (capital goods being tools used to build our infrastructure) and in return we give them useless little pieces of paper that we basically charge them interest on (inflation.)
Yes, the free market is the way to go.
Reputation for what? Isn't wikileaks supposed to be about opening all secrets? What secrets is wikileaks hiding that he traitorously revealed?
Just FWIW: I'm against this whole NSA thing and support Snowden, so I'm neither pro-spying nor pro big-brother. But, wikileaks has built its reputation upon lying about stuff. It's first claim to fame was the collateral murder video where it tried to paint some US soldiers as murderers when indeed the people they killed were in fact armed combatants. I have zero tolerance for lies on these matters no matter who does it, and therefore think wikileaks deserves whatever the hell they get. I also think it is far more of a stretch to believe that Sweden wants Assange so that they can turn him over to the US - the UK is far more likely to turn them over than he is, because they're far more in bed with the US government. Assange is nothing but an attention whore, and I'm sick of hearing his sob story. From what I gather, a lot of people in wikileaks left for the exact reasons I just described.
If you need an underdog to support, support Snowden. He's a patriot, and so is the guy who "betrayed" wikileaks.
I think it would be fine only if *every* implementation worked with *any* browser on *any* platform. Otherwise, don't add it.
If that means you have to do some kind of architecture independent bytecode interpreter or whatever, fine, but it *has* to work.
The main difference between TCP and UDP can be described thus:
- TCP is guaranteed data integrity and in-order data payload delivery at the transport layer, along with congestion control to make sure packets aren't being sent too fast for the receiving end to process (either because the device is too slow to process it, or because the pipe is saturated.)
- UDP is just spit the data across the pipe without actually checking anything. UDP offers lower packet overhead and lower latency (no need to wait for ACK's and dropped packets don't need to be retransmitted) and is more forgiving during congestion. Internet Protocol does the same, by the way - UDP and TCP get encapsulated into the Internet Protocol packet.
For live streaming, usually UDP is preferred, and the error correction is handled at either layer 6 or 7. Generally the application will use parity whereby so long as you get an arbitrary number (say 95% of the data) you'll see the whole thing uninterrupted, even if some packets arrive out of order, though in some applications this isn't even needed.
UDP is almost universally used for VoIP and video conferencing. Games used to only use UDP for this reason back in the dialup days, though many newer ones (e.g. world of warcraft I know of) uses TCP, and it does come at the expense of added latency. I don't know what netflix uses, but since it isn't "live" per se and it does buffer, I imagine it would be easier to program it in TCP.
BitTorrent now uses a really neat variation of UDP that they call uTP. Although it *is* UDP, they added some TCP functions without most of its drawbacks. TCP only makes congestion control corrections *after* the link is already congested, whereas uTP is less aggressive and monitors the link to scale itself so that it doesn't cause latency spikes on your link.
The "tech labor shortage" isn't for EE or CS, rather it is for IT in particular. Many people foolishly go into school thinking they're going to find a good job designing computer components and/or writing software, but the vast majority of businesses don't need that sort of thing. What they actually need is implementation, i.e. not how does the technology work, rather how it applies to business and economics. In my experience talking to most EE/CS majors, they have little grasp of either of those (just the mere fact that many of them are disgusted by the idea that economics is a science tells a lot about why they aren't needed.)
If you want a good tech job, don't necessarily mess with electrical engineering, look more towards something like enterprise resource planning or software defined networking/datacenters. THAT is where the jobs are.
This wouldn't be the first time people have had issues with Cogent having saturated peering links. A common complaint among Cox customers is that latency is high to certain WoW servers, and saturated Cogent links has been found to be the cause - and they don't seem particularly interested in fixing it.
The ignorance of money on slashdot is rather shocking (or maybe not...? Slashdot tends to have a anti-capitalist slant.)
Money gets created out of thin air all the time, in fact it happens quite possibly in the millions of times per day. When banks issue large loans, they notify the reserve who increases their reserves - the bank itself doesn't actually have to have that money, in fact there is no printing of any kind involved. When the loan matures the money is removed from whence it came, but the bank keeps the interest. This happens in basically every country with a central bank reserve system.
This isn't a bad thing by the way - it serves its purpose to rather good effect, in spite of the fed's general mismanagement problems.
HFT does nothing similar to this anyways. With HFT no money is being created - it came from somebody else's bank account, and the size of the reserve (be it cash or non-cash) never changed. And it's not as if it was robbed either as the buyer agreed to pay it.
The only way I could see HFT as being bad is for people who just absolutely despise the idea that you spend money to make money. Holding this view is the bad thing though - the economy is heavily built around this. As another poster mentioned for example, if you've ever bought something and then turned around and sold it for more, then you've effectively made money with money.
I'm baffled why anybody would mod this troll - the question of whether or not surgery is an ethical course of action is a very valid one. Thanks for posting it.
So having sex listed in a database offends transgendered people, but I imagine that taking it out would offend affirmative action feminists even more. (I.e. they fear they'll lose their ability to track "fairness".) That and oh so many things critical to the economy (e.g. Market data) need important information such as this.
That and some people (such as feminists) consider their sex to be a defining and prideful aspect of their lives, probably far more so than the number of transgendered.
I'm having a hard time therefore reasoning that we should change a system that already suits its purpose because a fraction of a percent of the population finds it embarrassing. If we got rid of every little thing that might offend somebody, life would be pretty bland.
Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff.
Marx was pretty clear that private property should be abolished, yet everybody who has tried to push for communism ultimately came to the realization that you actually do need to be able to own stuff, because people tend to abuse and misuse that which has no personal cost to them. Because of that, communism ultimately will never work. The reason that it is imprinted as evil is simple: Those who still believe in abolition of personal property want to take from the haves, which even includes the poor, almost always by means of violent revolution, and nobody will stand for that. In fact, I can't think of a single incidence where a change to communism didn't involve at the very least some kind of re-education camps or "work for free or suffer the consequences" camps.
Just wait until the current president is voted out of office and the next republican is in office. You will be doubly-sorry this stuff was started then when it's used to chase down and out women who have had abortions, people that don't go to church, and all kinds of other sinners.
I really don't see that being the case at all. Federal republicans talk about jesus about 33% more than the democrats, but they don't seem to ever force jesus on you. I've never felt in the slightest danger of being forced to go to church for example, which would bother me if it happened given I'm atheist and all.
However the current administration is definitely the least transparent, openly hostile to opposing views (see IRS), and has the worst domestic spying program to date. Also uses drones as terror weapons, which I'm sort of mixed about (I love the thought of blowing up mullah's, but I'm not sure if terrorism is the answer to terrorism.)
Actually it's pretty common for atheists (including myself) to vehemently support the second amendment. Ironically the deeply religious types I run into seem to have the most issue with them (e.g. jesus doesn't approve of violence.)
There are normally plenty of unplanned interrupts. Babies in cars cause them all the time for example. Under that reasoning, babies should be banned from cars.
It's possible that if you were distracted that easily from the road that you have to look at the phone right that second, you have some sort of neurological anomaly, for example autism spectrum where sudden actions in your periphery will instantly grab your attention. But most people aren't like this, and it isn't at all fair to make everybody else change to fit your lifestyle (brings images of schools of 500 students who ban peanut butter because of one child with peanut allergies.)
I answer my phone all the time while on the road without ever actually having to take my eyes off of the road, and I don't even use a hands free kit - I just do the whole thing by feel, and in fact it is easier to pick up a 4 ounce phone off of my dash and answer (pick up, slide my thumb - that's it) than to pick up a 32 ounce soda and then find the straw.
nobody ever said it was immoral until you just did.
Obama used words to that effect a few years back. Worse is that in his election campaign he hired unpaid interns without offering them any kind of food, transportation, or other stipends of any kind. Basically they were just his work slaves, and his current stance that this is perfectly acceptable so long as they are working for either a nonprofit or the government. However if they intern for a private enterprise...well that's just plain evil.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/blog/watercooler/2010/apr/10/obama-interns-me-not-thee/
If you don't want to work for zero pay, then don't. The purpose is to gain first hand experience into the career field without somebody having to take the risk of hiring somebody who is a complete unknown. Really this wouldn't be a problem if there weren't so many damn laws, regulations, and costs that make it hard to fire people who aren't worth a shit. The problem is that politicians as well as so called "workers rights" types expect to have it both ways, and then wonder why many people have a hard time starting a career. They think they're doing the average Joe a service, but instead all they're doing is making things more difficult.
An internship I had last year was one of the most beneficial things I received towards my career ever, and now the government wants to kill them off unless they are a one way benefit to the student? An internship is supposed to be a two way benefit, not a charity.
In being fair to the judge here, they aren't the first person to think this. Obama himself made similar statements, a manifesto of sorts, about internships needing to benefit only the student and basically be nothing but a burden to the employer.
If the overall goal here is to harm the future economy, then this is certainly a step in the right direction.
The real desktop/laptop performance measurement is iops at low queue depth. Large sustained rates are meaningless for all but servers. (I mean really, how often are you going to copy files big enough for these speeds to matter, and what are you going to copy it to that can keep up? Certainly not cloud storage or a USB drive.)
This is sounding to me like MHz myth 2.0
Hmm...based on the moderation of this post, it seems slashdot believes that libertarians are just a big racist movement who hates all forms of taxes.
When you get called a racist, you immediately lost the debate. Nobody should listen to you. It doesn't matter if you're actually racist or not, but still nobody should listen to you. Clearly well known libertarians like Thomas Sowell and Penn Jillette must be racist as well.
And libertarians by and large are fine with taxes. What they're not fine with is taxes that support stupid wasteful causes, like the NEA, Title IX, Social Security (I mean seriously, why can't I opt out of the damn thing? My personal retirement plan is guaranteed to pay off before I die, whereas Social Security in all likelihood will pay back nothing I put into it. I'm not even rich, but I already manage my own savings much better than the government does, thank you very much. Hell, the government can't even manage its own debts, nevermind savings. If I could take my money out of social security and add that to my own savings, I'd be even better off.)
I seemed to recall the Hadley CRU was refusing to release their data for the sole purpose that they didn't want skeptics to detract from their cause. I don't think that is a valid reason: Anybody should have access to that kind of information if we're supposed to alter our lives based on it, especially given that much of it was obtained via taxpayer funds by both the US and British governments. They've even evaded freedom of information requests, which violates the law.
They wouldn't have to be bombarded if they simply made all of the data public to begin with for anybody to look at. If this is something really truly important that we must all make life altering decisions, then why is it such a closely guarded secret? Empirical science depends on peer review. How the hell are you supposed to peer review top secret data?
falsifying science for the sake of money when they're smart enough to know that their falsification will eventually be discovered utterly destroying their scientific reputations?
It can and does happen, though usually they expect to get away with it.
I'm not sold on the drought idea. Hell, the article itself even points to increased humidity and water levels as being a "problem". Global warming periods have also always resulted in larger arable landmass (that is, land that is neither too cold nor too dry to farm on) whereas cooling always results in the opposite, which has fared badly for biodiversity.
Considering that the most green and bio-diverse period in earths history was when CO2 levels were at 3,500 PPM basically everywhere (as opposed to the current 400 peak PPM in limited areas) and the climate was far warmer, I'm not sure what it is we're worried about, whether it is man made or not.
If you actually look at what they're doing, making plants roundup ready requires very little change to their genome. On the other hand, selective selection (the process used since time immemorial to modify plants to our liking) modifies the plant's entire genome.
I mean there's a tiny change that you're protesting, but you're just fine with big changes which have an even larger category of unknowns. I can already think of a number of weeds that are resistant to roundup, and that just occurred through natural selection. But a GM plant that does it with hardly any change at all is evil?
I think that given MS office and LibreOffice are in XML, it shouldn't be difficult at all to reverse engineer in the future.