The reason the U.S.' gross military spending is so high is simply because its economy is so huge compared to the rest of the world. As a % of GNP, U.S. military spending is actually not much more than that of the U.K. and France.
They're trying to take away your right to make a backup copy. Not directly, but by making it illegal to distribute anything that's capable of making a backup copy. By encrypting the DVD and claiming DMCA violations, they can outlaw any tools you may use to make backups. You still have the right to make backups, you just can't obtain any tools to exercise that right.
Believe me, if this stands, all music in whatever format that replaces CDs will have encryption as well. CDs just happened to be first on the scene and so the data was stored in raw, uncompressed, unencrypted format (actually, it's uncompressed because it gave the RIAA an excuse for not putting more than an hour of music on a single CD, but that's another issue).
eh, that's not how the industry execs see it. you are not buying a plastic circle, or a license, but only what they are willing to sell you: namely the *specific* plastic item in your hand that you forked cash over for.
If that were the case, the studios wouldn't be able to put restrictions on how you use your one copy of that plastic circle. But right smack dab in the beginning there's a warning that you're not allowed to use it for public performances. That's a license, not a single copy purchase.
What the studios want is to have their cake and eat it too. They want to restrict your use of the info on the plastic disk as if it were a license, but if the physical media fails they want you to have to buy a new one at full price.
If the book later becomes available as a searchable PDF you have no automatic rights to that either: it's a separate product entirely. You also don't get free rights to the movie version of the book. Just like buying a ticket to a film doesn't grant you a "license" to come back tomorrow and see it again; you got what you came for, now get out.
If a book becomes available as a searchable PDF, that's a product that provides capability and value over the original book (it's searchable), and thus requires a new purchase. Same reason you weren't entitled to automatic upgrades for your music collection from cassettes to CDs - the digital format provided additional value over the old analog format.
When you go to a theatre, you're purchasing rights to a one-time viewing. When you buy a DVD, you're purchasing rights to infinite viewings. If something happens to inpede your right to infinite viewings, it's the studio's responsibility to restore that right - that's what you paid them for. This is why they've been trying to market products that give you rights to limited viewings (Divx, those DVDs that turn black after a few days). They're trying to shirk the responsibility to keep up their end of the bargain.
Its like that in most "industries". The farmer who grew the corn in your $3 box of corn flakes is lucky to get 10 cents for the corn that went into the box. Figure the cost doubles every step up the chain as "value" is added and you come up about right.
The corn example you cite is actually a pretty good example of the markups on a physical commodity. It takes a lot of work and resources to prep and move a physical commodity from production to the customer. It creates a three-tiered business model: production -> distribution -> retail sales.
Music, books, and software are different though - they're virtual commodities. For thousands of years they were closely tied to physical media so they could be treated as a physical commodity. The three-tiered business model still applied.
With the advent of mechanical reproduction (the printing press, phonograph, mimeograph, etc), the cost of reproducing the virtual commodity dropped. It was still tied to a physical medium so the distribution cost stayed the same, but the the production cost dropped. The people in the first two stages of the business model loved this because it meant more money for them. Their costs dropped, but the physical product was the same so they could charge the same price to the end customer under the guise of distribution costs, while they got fat on the profits.
Now, with the advent of tape recorders, cd-burners, computers, and the Internet, the other shoe has dropped. The revolution that started with the printing press has reached its conclusion - virtual commodities are now completely unencumbered by any physical media or distribution costs. The new business model for virtual commodities is going to be production -> sales, with maybe a small marketing role in the middle. Suddenly those middlemen who were profiteering for centuries off the distribution portion of the model are going to be out of a job, and they're scared.
The days where distributors could eat up most of the profits for virtual commodities are going to be over soon. It's already happened with travel agencies, it's happening with banking (check processing is being supplanted by online bill paying), and it's going to happen to music, books, software, and movies for the simple reason that it's a more efficient business model. Those who've set themselves up comfortably in the old business model see the writing on the wall, and they're fighting tooth and nail to delay the inevitable - throwing up every legal, financial, and PR roadblock they can to try to slow it down so they can milk their positions for a few more bucks.
If the power load becomes too much for one station, it's deliberately designed to shed load to adjacent stations rather than risk burning out its equipment. Worst case you get a blackout which can be fixed in a few hours or days. If you burn out your equipment, you're looking at a few months before being back online.
The reason it spread so far was the amount of load that was shifted was more than the adjacent stations could handle. So they took themselves offline to protect themselves, and redistributed the load causing it to just get bigger and bigger like the proverbial snowball rolling down the hill. As for why the adjacent stations weren't able to handle the additional load, you're looking at management decisions not to increase capacity, and government/electorate decisions to prevent building of new power plants.
The system worked as designed by the engineers to prevent a far worse calamity than a blackout that lasted only a few days.
So it is kinda analogous to the genericness of "Microsoft Windows," at least with respect to how Lindows is doing in non-english countries (at least the ones which don't use the term "window" to describe a GUI element).
The U.S. has some strict requirements for the durability of paper money. One of the tests any potential bill has to pass involves rolling it tightly, then crushing the roll down its long axis. This is repeated like a dozen times. If a new feature doesn't survive this torture, it doesn't make it into the final bill. Holograms couldn't survive this test, so holograms aren't on U.S. currency. A plastic imbed would probably fail it too.
That's not to say these requirements aren't in need of updating. But they're the reason you don't see a lot of "cutting edge" stuff on U.S. currency.
"Microsoft" is a play on the word "software." So just because they're arguably the best known softwre company, should they have the right to prohibit other companies from naming themselves [prefix]-soft? That's the issue here, not what you get at:
They are clearly out to get people to switch from Windows to LindowsOS by imitating MicroSoft's product. They are clearly out to get people to switch from Windows to LindowsOS by imitating MicroSoft's product.
Then file a look and feel lawsuit. The fact that Microsoft hasn't seems to indicate the similarity between the two products is not an issue. So all you're left with is whether or not a common generic industry term is trademarkable.
Wouldn't we all be up in arms if Microsoft (sorry my $ key is broken) came out with something related to the name of a Linux distribution? Slackdows, Windrake
This is nothing like the examples you give. This would be like if Slackware trademarked the term "Slackware Distribution" and then sued when Microsoft decided to name its distribution "Mistrobution" or "Wistro." The play on words is on a common generic term used in the industry. It's Microsoft's own fault for picking a name based on a generic industry term. If they want to sue Lindows because it looks and feels like Windows, then they file a look and feel lawsuit.
"Bapple" isn't anything at all like this. This is like if Apple had decided to market their computer as the "Apple Computer," and Intel later decided to produce similar computers named I-puters, and Apple sued for trademark infringement. The problem is only coming up because Microsoft didn't choose a real name for their GUI OS, they hijacked an industry standard term.
Given the way Lindows looks and feels, I can see merit if Microsoft launched a look and feel lawsuit against it (history has not been kind on those). But trademarking a common industry term and suing when other companies in the industry use it is just silly ("windows" in a GUI was around long before Microsoft Windows). The US courts so far have understood this, so I'm puzzled why the European courts have been having problems getting it.
One of the consequences of relativity is that simultaneity is also relative. Events at different locations which may be simultaneous in one reference frame can happen at different times in another. So saying things happened 10 minutes earlier isn't really accurate either. It happened 10 minutes earlier in Earth's reference frame, but there's a moving reference frame where it happened 5 minutes earlier, another where it happened 15 minutes earlier. (It always happened earlier in all reference frames though, else cause and effect are violated.)
True, you have to be moving pretty fast to get discrepancies of this magnitude in simultaneity. But correcting a misconception by replacing it with another misconception in the name of education isn't really productive IMHO.
The notion that "putting restrictions in software is inappropriate" is in itself a restriction, and thus invalidates itself. You claim that because freedom is more important, there shouldn't be restrictions in how software is used. I can claim that because freedom is more important, there shouldn't be any restrictions on what Adobe can put in their software - including restrictions on how their customers can use it.
The only way to rationalize those two positions is to decide that freedom isn't more important in one of those cases. So who should have more freedom - the people who write the software, or the people who use it? (At this point I'll cite conflict of interest and bow out since I'm a programmer.)
The problem with trying to come up with universal absolutes is that there are no universal absolutes. Except for this one.;)
Putting restrictions in software is never appropriate.
Not only because it cannot really work correctly, but because freedom is more important than such anti-crime measures, especially when they're so futile.
Replace "software" with "networks" or "servers" or "actions" or "use of my personal info" and I think you'll see the fallacy of your statements.
If the protection prevents my fair use of a product and so does DRM, what's the difference? Whether it's the government or a private company - they are covertly disabling perfectly legitimate use of the product.
The private company is trying to protect its profits.
The government is trying to protect one of the pillars that our modern economic society is based on (cash). Unless you want to go back to lugging around gold coins...
This isn't spyware. Spyware reports back your activities to another party, hence spyware. This is simply a use restriction. While it may be tempting to misuse a term to take something you don't like and try to lump it with something most everyone doesn't like, it's intellectually dishonest. If it catches on it just causes confusion in future use. If you activitely promote this type of misuse, you have no grounds for complaining about similar misused terms, like the hacker/cracker dichotomy that came up because early media misused the term "hacker."
This is like Burger King hiring people to suggest Burger King as an alternative every time their friends/co-workers talk about eating at McDonalds. Companies target ads at their competitors' customers all the time. This is no different except it's using indexed keywords to determine who those customers are. If the owner of the trademark wants to buy that keyword from a competitor, then I could see an argument for forcing the competitor to sell it to the trademark holder. But to only allow search engines to sell keywords to the trademark holder is just wrong on many levels.
I could see it being a trademark violation if the search engine doesn't clearly distinguish between search results and ads. But if the search engine clearly distinguishes between those two, then the ads for keywords should go to the highest bidder.
I could also see it possibly being a trademark violation if the trademark is a made-up word, like Clie or Linux. But for generic words like windows or playmate, prohibiting search engines from targeting ads based on common words that are also trademarked is essentially saying the trademark holder owns part of the English language.
When you color correct a picture, you are not making it appear as it would if you were there looking at it with your eyes. You're making it appear as it would if it were lit by a laboratory-calibrated white light source. This is useful because if you see an interesting rock, you can see that it's not just "muddy red," it's a particular shade of red characteristic of a certain chemical composition that warrants further investigation.
But Mars is not lit by a laboratory-calibrated white light source. It's got an atmosphere and lots of dust which changes the color of sunlight. So completely color correcting the pictures against a color grid will actually produce a picture very different from how it'd look to our eyes.
You know those glorious red sunsets that cast dramatic shadows and coloring onto everyone and everything around you? If you color correct those, they turn into boring "normal" scenes with apparently white lighting.
Color is a figment of your brain's imagination. In some situations, a proper white balance will make the picture closely match what your brain perceives (else people would have green skin under fluorescent lighting). In other situations (like sunsets), a proper white balance makes the picture look completely different from what your brain perceives.
This issue came up with the pictures from the Viking landers. The first pictures sent back, before color calibration, had a blue sky. IIRC the color correction NASA did wasn't a pure white balance, but something to more closely reflect how the scene would look to your eyes (and brain) if you were there.
I think it is a bizarre US issue that driving is somehow a god-given right... it is legal to drive a five times the legal intoxication limit of many european countries, while shaving, watching TV, reading a book, fiddling with the GPS, talking on the phone, etc... meanwhile we have a realitively high road mortality rate?
The motor vehicle mortality rates are pretty much the same in the US and Europe, with the US being slightly safer.
Overall US fatality rate for 1999 (PDF file) is 1.5 per 100 million vehicle miles, or 9.3 per billion km. That makes the US vehicle fatality rate lower than all the EU nations except the UK and Sweden.
Personally, I'd attribute the difference to the greater density and complexity of European roadways (US roads tend to be laid out in an easy-to-navigate grid) before blaming one for having worse drivers than the other. I'd also suggest you resist the urge to make up facts in your desire to bash the US. Given the above statistics, someone using the flawed reasoning you just did would conclude that using cell phones, GPS, watching TV, shaving, or being intoxicated while driving are actually attributes of safer drivers.
Sigh. This is exactly what Crighton is talking about. Did you RTFA? You cannot simply say, "well, a lot of smart people say it is true, so it must be true." Science is about making testable hypotheses and then demonstrating the truth or falsehood of those hypotheses.
In the case of global warming, it is scientifically impossible to assign any cause to a past trend in global temperature. In order to do so, you would need to have a controlled experiment, where you take two identical Earths, remove a hypothetical cause of global warming from one, and then observe the long-term climate change in each. At the end of the experiment, you could say whether or not the difference in initial conditions between the two Earths was the cause of global warming. That is science.
Actually, I think you and Crighton (and the public) are missing a subtle distinction here. What you are describing is the second half of science. The first half is coming up with the hypothesis.
In the old days, people would dream up whatever hypotheses came to mind. Birds have wings, birds can fly, ergo if you put wings on man, man can fly. If they were a Newton, they could make an instinctive good guess at what a correct hypothesis should be. If they were a Galileo, their instincts weren't quite so good so they relied on experiments to provide them with numerical data, which they could then use to create a fine-tuned hypothesis. That hypothesis could then be tested with similar but slightly different experiments for verification.
Nowadays, most of the "obvious" science has already been discovered. It takes a brilliant mind to come up with something mindshatteringly new. So most of the science that goes on does things Galileo's way - collecting data to form a basis for a hypothesis, then testing that hypothesis against further data. This is where statistical correlation and computer modeling research comes in. Instead of dreaming up a thousand hypotheses that X_n causes lung cancer (where n ranges from 1 to 1000) and wasting time devising and running a thousand experiments to test for a causal relationship, you do an epidemiological study. Lo and behold, smoking is strongly correlated with lung cancer. So you concentrate on making and testing the hypothesis that smoking causes lung cancer.
The point of harvesting long-term global temperature data, making climatic models, etc. isn't to test the hypothesis that manmade CO2 causes global warming. It's to fine-tune the hypotheses that (1) manmade CO2 is a significant contribution relative to natural sources, and (2) CO2 levels are a causal factor in changes to average global temperatures. Neither of these hypotheses are at the "test to prove/disprove it" stage yet, but it's being reported by the media (and those with an agenda) as if it were and the results already confirmed the hypotheses. The scientists aren't doing anything wrong, it's just that what they're doing is being misrepresented (deliberately or not) to the public.
I agree with Crighton that shunning and gagging those who hold "unpopular" views at the hypothesis-making stage is wrong. But I disagree that anything which doesn't test a hypothesis is pseudo-science. Sometimes the hard part is testing the hypothesis. Sometimes the hard part is coming up with the hypothesis. Sometimes (as with global warming) both parts are hard.
Regarding the metric/imperial -- who the fuck knows how that happened? But that's not bad engineering, that's bad project planning.
I wouldn't even go so far as to blame the project managers. The first thing they ground into us in my undergrad engineering college was that numbers without units are meaningless. If you write a number, always include the units.
The aerospace industry is entrenched in imperial units. The scientific community uses metric units. Some low-level guy somewhere didn't put units on his numbers, assuming everyone would know it was imperial because that's what his field used. Another low-level guy somewhere didn't question the lack of units, assuming it was metric because that's what his field used.
When a manufacturer knowingly continues a practice that is harmfull, it will become liable.
News flash: Sunlight is harmful to your health.
Maybe if all you liability freaks would lock yourselves indoors, the rest of us could get on living our lives. People like hot coffee. Deal with it. A 700 in 17 billion accident rate is, literally, safer than crossing the street. Heck, the fatality rate for lightning (73 per 300 million) is 6x worse. Are you going to sue everyone that owns open outdoor space because it's 6x more dangerous than McDonalds coffee?
"Insisting on absolute safety is for people who don't have the balls to live in the real world." - Mary Shafer, SR-71 Flying Qualities Lead Engineer
These benefits are not contingent on producing offspring (though that can have different benefits). Marriage is a legal recognition that two people have chosen to commit to each other in financial, social, and legal ways and have common interests in these areas (such as owning a home, sharing credit and debt, legal guardianship of children, etc.).
The benefits are not contingent on children, but are based on the assumption that the couple can produce children. For this reason, if gay "marriages" are allowed, I'd like to see it in the form of new legislation authorizing "domestic partnerships." Usurping the currently existing body of legislation built upon the assumed definition of marriage (two people joining to start a family) is not a safe legal practice IMHO. The last time it was done on this scale, corporations became legally recognized as "persons," and we know all the inanity that has caused.
Laws are made to address specific situations. One should think very carefully before assigning en masse an existing set of laws to a situation which is mostly similar but not exactly the same. These things have a way of coming back to bite you in ways you hadn't thought of. I can see the appeal of usurping an existing definition (it leaves no room for double standards), but I would urge caution before proceeding. Legislation through redefinition is a dangerous business.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.nationmaster.com/red/graph-T/mil_exp_pe r_of_gdp&int=-1
Japan's military expenditure as a % of GNP by comparison is way down near the bottom at #136.
Believe me, if this stands, all music in whatever format that replaces CDs will have encryption as well. CDs just happened to be first on the scene and so the data was stored in raw, uncompressed, unencrypted format (actually, it's uncompressed because it gave the RIAA an excuse for not putting more than an hour of music on a single CD, but that's another issue).
If that were the case, the studios wouldn't be able to put restrictions on how you use your one copy of that plastic circle. But right smack dab in the beginning there's a warning that you're not allowed to use it for public performances. That's a license, not a single copy purchase.
What the studios want is to have their cake and eat it too. They want to restrict your use of the info on the plastic disk as if it were a license, but if the physical media fails they want you to have to buy a new one at full price.
If the book later becomes available as a searchable PDF you have no automatic rights to that either: it's a separate product entirely. You also don't get free rights to the movie version of the book. Just like buying a ticket to a film doesn't grant you a "license" to come back tomorrow and see it again; you got what you came for, now get out.
If a book becomes available as a searchable PDF, that's a product that provides capability and value over the original book (it's searchable), and thus requires a new purchase. Same reason you weren't entitled to automatic upgrades for your music collection from cassettes to CDs - the digital format provided additional value over the old analog format.
When you go to a theatre, you're purchasing rights to a one-time viewing. When you buy a DVD, you're purchasing rights to infinite viewings. If something happens to inpede your right to infinite viewings, it's the studio's responsibility to restore that right - that's what you paid them for. This is why they've been trying to market products that give you rights to limited viewings (Divx, those DVDs that turn black after a few days). They're trying to shirk the responsibility to keep up their end of the bargain.
The corn example you cite is actually a pretty good example of the markups on a physical commodity. It takes a lot of work and resources to prep and move a physical commodity from production to the customer. It creates a three-tiered business model: production -> distribution -> retail sales.
Music, books, and software are different though - they're virtual commodities. For thousands of years they were closely tied to physical media so they could be treated as a physical commodity. The three-tiered business model still applied.
With the advent of mechanical reproduction (the printing press, phonograph, mimeograph, etc), the cost of reproducing the virtual commodity dropped. It was still tied to a physical medium so the distribution cost stayed the same, but the the production cost dropped. The people in the first two stages of the business model loved this because it meant more money for them. Their costs dropped, but the physical product was the same so they could charge the same price to the end customer under the guise of distribution costs, while they got fat on the profits.
Now, with the advent of tape recorders, cd-burners, computers, and the Internet, the other shoe has dropped. The revolution that started with the printing press has reached its conclusion - virtual commodities are now completely unencumbered by any physical media or distribution costs. The new business model for virtual commodities is going to be production -> sales, with maybe a small marketing role in the middle. Suddenly those middlemen who were profiteering for centuries off the distribution portion of the model are going to be out of a job, and they're scared.
The days where distributors could eat up most of the profits for virtual commodities are going to be over soon. It's already happened with travel agencies, it's happening with banking (check processing is being supplanted by online bill paying), and it's going to happen to music, books, software, and movies for the simple reason that it's a more efficient business model. Those who've set themselves up comfortably in the old business model see the writing on the wall, and they're fighting tooth and nail to delay the inevitable - throwing up every legal, financial, and PR roadblock they can to try to slow it down so they can milk their positions for a few more bucks.
The reason it spread so far was the amount of load that was shifted was more than the adjacent stations could handle. So they took themselves offline to protect themselves, and redistributed the load causing it to just get bigger and bigger like the proverbial snowball rolling down the hill. As for why the adjacent stations weren't able to handle the additional load, you're looking at management decisions not to increase capacity, and government/electorate decisions to prevent building of new power plants.
The system worked as designed by the engineers to prevent a far worse calamity than a blackout that lasted only a few days.
Even if you compute in a foreign language, most programming APIs are based on English, and most GUI APIs will use the term "window."
So it is kinda analogous to the genericness of "Microsoft Windows," at least with respect to how Lindows is doing in non-english countries (at least the ones which don't use the term "window" to describe a GUI element).
One day after I lose my mod points too...
That's not to say these requirements aren't in need of updating. But they're the reason you don't see a lot of "cutting edge" stuff on U.S. currency.
They are clearly out to get people to switch from Windows to LindowsOS by imitating MicroSoft's product. They are clearly out to get people to switch from Windows to LindowsOS by imitating MicroSoft's product.
Then file a look and feel lawsuit. The fact that Microsoft hasn't seems to indicate the similarity between the two products is not an issue. So all you're left with is whether or not a common generic industry term is trademarkable.
This is nothing like the examples you give. This would be like if Slackware trademarked the term "Slackware Distribution" and then sued when Microsoft decided to name its distribution "Mistrobution" or "Wistro." The play on words is on a common generic term used in the industry. It's Microsoft's own fault for picking a name based on a generic industry term. If they want to sue Lindows because it looks and feels like Windows, then they file a look and feel lawsuit.
Given the way Lindows looks and feels, I can see merit if Microsoft launched a look and feel lawsuit against it (history has not been kind on those). But trademarking a common industry term and suing when other companies in the industry use it is just silly ("windows" in a GUI was around long before Microsoft Windows). The US courts so far have understood this, so I'm puzzled why the European courts have been having problems getting it.
True, you have to be moving pretty fast to get discrepancies of this magnitude in simultaneity. But correcting a misconception by replacing it with another misconception in the name of education isn't really productive IMHO.
The notion that "putting restrictions in software is inappropriate" is in itself a restriction, and thus invalidates itself. You claim that because freedom is more important, there shouldn't be restrictions in how software is used. I can claim that because freedom is more important, there shouldn't be any restrictions on what Adobe can put in their software - including restrictions on how their customers can use it.
The only way to rationalize those two positions is to decide that freedom isn't more important in one of those cases. So who should have more freedom - the people who write the software, or the people who use it? (At this point I'll cite conflict of interest and bow out since I'm a programmer.)
The problem with trying to come up with universal absolutes is that there are no universal absolutes. Except for this one. ;)
Not only because it cannot really work correctly, but because freedom is more important than such anti-crime measures, especially when they're so futile.
Replace "software" with "networks" or "servers" or "actions" or "use of my personal info" and I think you'll see the fallacy of your statements.
The private company is trying to protect its profits.
The government is trying to protect one of the pillars that our modern economic society is based on (cash). Unless you want to go back to lugging around gold coins...
This isn't spyware. Spyware reports back your activities to another party, hence spy ware. This is simply a use restriction. While it may be tempting to misuse a term to take something you don't like and try to lump it with something most everyone doesn't like, it's intellectually dishonest. If it catches on it just causes confusion in future use. If you activitely promote this type of misuse, you have no grounds for complaining about similar misused terms, like the hacker/cracker dichotomy that came up because early media misused the term "hacker."
I could see it being a trademark violation if the search engine doesn't clearly distinguish between search results and ads. But if the search engine clearly distinguishes between those two, then the ads for keywords should go to the highest bidder.
I could also see it possibly being a trademark violation if the trademark is a made-up word, like Clie or Linux. But for generic words like windows or playmate, prohibiting search engines from targeting ads based on common words that are also trademarked is essentially saying the trademark holder owns part of the English language.
But Mars is not lit by a laboratory-calibrated white light source. It's got an atmosphere and lots of dust which changes the color of sunlight. So completely color correcting the pictures against a color grid will actually produce a picture very different from how it'd look to our eyes.
Color is a figment of your brain's imagination. In some situations, a proper white balance will make the picture closely match what your brain perceives (else people would have green skin under fluorescent lighting). In other situations (like sunsets), a proper white balance makes the picture look completely different from what your brain perceives.
This issue came up with the pictures from the Viking landers. The first pictures sent back, before color calibration, had a blue sky. IIRC the color correction NASA did wasn't a pure white balance, but something to more closely reflect how the scene would look to your eyes (and brain) if you were there.
The motor vehicle mortality rates are pretty much the same in the US and Europe, with the US being slightly safer.
Overall EU fatality rate for 1999 is 15.8 per billion vehicle km.
Overall US fatality rate for 1999 (PDF file) is 1.5 per 100 million vehicle miles, or 9.3 per billion km. That makes the US vehicle fatality rate lower than all the EU nations except the UK and Sweden.
Personally, I'd attribute the difference to the greater density and complexity of European roadways (US roads tend to be laid out in an easy-to-navigate grid) before blaming one for having worse drivers than the other. I'd also suggest you resist the urge to make up facts in your desire to bash the US. Given the above statistics, someone using the flawed reasoning you just did would conclude that using cell phones, GPS, watching TV, shaving, or being intoxicated while driving are actually attributes of safer drivers.
In the case of global warming, it is scientifically impossible to assign any cause to a past trend in global temperature. In order to do so, you would need to have a controlled experiment, where you take two identical Earths, remove a hypothetical cause of global warming from one, and then observe the long-term climate change in each. At the end of the experiment, you could say whether or not the difference in initial conditions between the two Earths was the cause of global warming. That is science.
Actually, I think you and Crighton (and the public) are missing a subtle distinction here. What you are describing is the second half of science. The first half is coming up with the hypothesis.
In the old days, people would dream up whatever hypotheses came to mind. Birds have wings, birds can fly, ergo if you put wings on man, man can fly. If they were a Newton, they could make an instinctive good guess at what a correct hypothesis should be. If they were a Galileo, their instincts weren't quite so good so they relied on experiments to provide them with numerical data, which they could then use to create a fine-tuned hypothesis. That hypothesis could then be tested with similar but slightly different experiments for verification.
Nowadays, most of the "obvious" science has already been discovered. It takes a brilliant mind to come up with something mindshatteringly new. So most of the science that goes on does things Galileo's way - collecting data to form a basis for a hypothesis, then testing that hypothesis against further data. This is where statistical correlation and computer modeling research comes in. Instead of dreaming up a thousand hypotheses that X_n causes lung cancer (where n ranges from 1 to 1000) and wasting time devising and running a thousand experiments to test for a causal relationship, you do an epidemiological study. Lo and behold, smoking is strongly correlated with lung cancer. So you concentrate on making and testing the hypothesis that smoking causes lung cancer.
The point of harvesting long-term global temperature data, making climatic models, etc. isn't to test the hypothesis that manmade CO2 causes global warming. It's to fine-tune the hypotheses that (1) manmade CO2 is a significant contribution relative to natural sources, and (2) CO2 levels are a causal factor in changes to average global temperatures. Neither of these hypotheses are at the "test to prove/disprove it" stage yet, but it's being reported by the media (and those with an agenda) as if it were and the results already confirmed the hypotheses. The scientists aren't doing anything wrong, it's just that what they're doing is being misrepresented (deliberately or not) to the public.
I agree with Crighton that shunning and gagging those who hold "unpopular" views at the hypothesis-making stage is wrong. But I disagree that anything which doesn't test a hypothesis is pseudo-science. Sometimes the hard part is testing the hypothesis. Sometimes the hard part is coming up with the hypothesis. Sometimes (as with global warming) both parts are hard.
I wouldn't even go so far as to blame the project managers. The first thing they ground into us in my undergrad engineering college was that numbers without units are meaningless. If you write a number, always include the units.
The aerospace industry is entrenched in imperial units. The scientific community uses metric units. Some low-level guy somewhere didn't put units on his numbers, assuming everyone would know it was imperial because that's what his field used. Another low-level guy somewhere didn't question the lack of units, assuming it was metric because that's what his field used.
News flash: Sunlight is harmful to your health.
Maybe if all you liability freaks would lock yourselves indoors, the rest of us could get on living our lives. People like hot coffee. Deal with it. A 700 in 17 billion accident rate is, literally, safer than crossing the street. Heck, the fatality rate for lightning (73 per 300 million) is 6x worse. Are you going to sue everyone that owns open outdoor space because it's 6x more dangerous than McDonalds coffee?
"Insisting on absolute safety is for people who don't have the balls to live in the real world." - Mary Shafer, SR-71 Flying Qualities Lead Engineer
The benefits are not contingent on children, but are based on the assumption that the couple can produce children. For this reason, if gay "marriages" are allowed, I'd like to see it in the form of new legislation authorizing "domestic partnerships." Usurping the currently existing body of legislation built upon the assumed definition of marriage (two people joining to start a family) is not a safe legal practice IMHO. The last time it was done on this scale, corporations became legally recognized as "persons," and we know all the inanity that has caused.
Laws are made to address specific situations. One should think very carefully before assigning en masse an existing set of laws to a situation which is mostly similar but not exactly the same. These things have a way of coming back to bite you in ways you hadn't thought of. I can see the appeal of usurping an existing definition (it leaves no room for double standards), but I would urge caution before proceeding. Legislation through redefinition is a dangerous business.