I suggest YOU read the document, and explain how one = most. Only the first amendment uses that language. Read it yourself before suggesting others do so.
Hmmmm. You're correct. Serves me right for relying on my memory while I'm focused on the first one. But the point about established churches remains. How did we go from official state churches to the complete removal of religion from the public sphere without any relevant change to the document?
Google "patriot act unconstitutional" and you'll get news stories about a federal court declaring part of it unconstitutional. I assume they heard a legal argument they thought made sense when they made the ruling.
Sigh. I guess I wasn't being specific enough. What I meant, specifically was section 215, which is the one I've seen everone complaining about since the January ruling.
You're either a troll or an idiot. Most likely both.
This comment ties back to my original post about the Democratic party. How do you ever expect anybody to take you seriously? I know your emotional response is "well, I don't care if you agree with me", but if you don't intend to persuade people, why are you bothering? Why is it when you disagree with someone on slashdot, he's a troll? I find it sad, particularly when we have points of agreement (referencing your comment on the tenth amendment). A lot of really smart people don't bother with this site anymore as a result of this kind of discourse.
Incidentally, you addressed two technical points of my post, but after reading your comment on the 10th amendment I'm curious as to what you think of the substance of my argument against Roe v Wade and federalization (is that a word?) of gay marriage.
You claim to be a atheist Republican which confuses me because other than the religious topics that the Republicans have been using to divide our country (abortion and homosexuality) what draws you to that party?
I don't understand why you think something like principled opposition to abortion is "dividing our country". Personally, I would like to see Roe v Wade struck down. Not because I think abortion should be illegal, but because the decision was a spectacular case of the expansion of federal power through judicial lawmaking. The denizens of the court created (by fiat) a right that isn't found anywhere in the constitution and used it to strike down a completely constitutional state law. Do you realize 70% of the states at that time permitted abortion with varying amount of restiction? That is exactly the kind of issue the framers intended to be settled at the state level. So I guess you could say the main reason I vote Republican is the GOP is the party least likely to use the courts to change social policy. The framers left that to the states, and that's where it should be. Abortion would never have been a "wedge" issue if it had been addressed democratically.
Gay marriage is a similar issue. People will accept it eventually if it isn't rammed down their throats by an activist judiciary. For one thing, legal marriage is entirely a construct of state law. There's no reason people in South Carolina should be force to recognize a marriage (gay or not) made in New York. Eventually they will, though, if you don't try to force them. This didn't have to be a wedge issue, but the left, through the judiciary, made it a wedge issue.
It can't be fiscal responsibility, they abandoned that in the 90's
I see no concrete difference between the Democrats and Republicans when it comes to fiscal responsibility. They both spend as much as they can get away with, because that's how you win elections in a democracy. I wish it weren't true. This is my favorite quote (from A.F. Tytler):
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess of the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.
It can't be love of the Constitution. Other than the 2nd Amendement, there's not a lot of support for the Constitution among the GOP.
Here's where we disagree. I don't see any evidence the Republicans are "trashing the Constitution". Why do you think so? I realize here on/. the PATRIOT act is unpopular, and people claim it's unconstitutional, but I've never heard a legal argument that made any sense. And neither have the courts. I already outlined my reasons for thinking the left has done the most damage to the Constitution through activist judges.
Also, if you read the document you'll see most of the rights start with the phrase "Congress shall make no law...". There was a presumption at the time that states could make laws regarding those issues. For many decades after the constitution was ratified there were "established" (state supported) churches at the state level. And it wasn't unconstitutional. The more history I understand the more I realize the framers would consider today's federal government an abomination - a tyranny of unelected bureaucrats wearing black robes.
It's certainly isn't a respect for the environment.
I agree with you here. I wish the Republicans would be a little more "eco". I would hasten to add, however, in recent years the Dems have supported mostly feel-good environmentalism that didn't have much substance (like battery powered cars, for instance). There was no support for the Kyoto protocols on either side o
Yeah, but there's a substantial portion of the population that doesn't "pirate". ROI in Hollywood has been rock-steady (for the industry as a whole) for years at about 30%. These people are making money hand-over-fist. In fact, I could argue the reason so much of it is trash has to do with the industry making too much money.
I don't think they'll ever really lose out to file sharing. People who don't own a computer for other reasons aren't going to spend $1000 so they can save $20/month on netflix.
Yeah, I read that peice by Bill Moyers too. I think Moyers knows more about the Yanomamu tribe of the Amazon than he does about people in the U.S. This is why Democrats lost the election. You take the absolute fringiest if fringies in the Christian right and paint them as mainstream Christians. I have a clue for the left: lots of Christians are inclined to your way of thinking, but they'll vote Republican as long as they're made to feel like pariahs by the Democrats. Take, for example, Catholics, who traditionally voted Democrat, but are deserting the party in droves.
Of course, I'm a Republican, so on one level it causes me to laugh my ass off. The Democratic Party is circling the drain of the American political bathtub, and they're response to getting trounced in the election (look at what matters - the House and Senate) is to tell the voters "we lost because you're ignorant and stupid."
Unfortunately, while it may feel good for you to vent your anger and frustration, what you're actually doing is putting another nail into the coffin of the only opposition party in the United States. Even as a Republican I can it's not healthy for the Republic to have such a sickly opposition party. If the Democrats lose any more Senate seats they'll be totally irrelevant in national policy discussions. The Republicans in Congress won't even bother to talk to them. That would be bad.
Anyway, the point is: Knock it off. Realize reasonable people can disagree, and if you procede from the position that the other guy is stupid you'll simply be ignored.
By the way, I'm not a Christian. I'm actually pretty much an atheist. But I know a lot Christians who are intelligent, decent people, and if you got out a little more you would too. Democrats are always accusing Republicans of being ignorant about the world, but as your post makes amply clear you're pretty ignorant about most of your own country.
This would never work at my company. If you mistype your password three times your account gets disabled and it takes all day to get it re-enabled. I figure passphrases would last about, well, one day.
Except for that Indian guy in the next office who never misses a key. Should have been a pianist.
I've always found Oracle's licensing to be pretty wrong-headed at every turn.
I think their licensing is pretty rational, actually. It's the same way car companies sell cars - they quote you a huge list price, and then let you bargain them down to a more reasonable level.
Once, while buying a car, the salesman quoted me the sticker price for a car I was interested in. I laughed and said "Nobody pays the sticker price!" He looked really serious for a minute and said "you'd be surprised". Turns out lots of folks just won't bargain, and the car companies know it. So they pay, what, 20-40% extra?
One of my previous employers bought Oracle licenses at 10% of list. We made more money reselling Oracle to our customers than we made selling our product.
Let them quote whatever they want. They'll come down if they have to.
Repeating the old comment, but anything MS can do to keep SCO in the game is indirectly beneficial to them because it sustains or increases FUD about Linux.
I'm in total agreement with you, but you missed my point. SCO's share price has nothing to do with their ability to "stay in the game." When it goes down, it's the investors that take the hit, not SCO's balance sheet. They can continue as long as they have operating capitol, regardless of the stock price.
Now, the stock price has an effect on what it costs to raise additional capital, but that won't matter until they run out of money. The Baystar Capital deal was a much better example of how Microsoft can keep SCO afloat - they don't need to throw away lots of money buying worthless stock.
...that there's no accountability (and "other bloggers" don't count).
What does that mean - "No accountability"? What accountability did CBS take for the obviously trumped-up Bush National Guard story? Anybody get sued?
Oh, sure, some people got fired. But not the right people. What about Seymour Hersch and all his "anonymous" (made up from whole cloth) sources?
I see much higher quality news from blogs. The networks and newspapers don't check facts, they don't dig into stories, and they don't print retractions unless they're forced to.
Bill Moyers out-and-out slandered James Watt in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Did they print a retraction? No. They never do if they can get away with it.
Look at the "stringers" AP uses in the West Bank. They don't even know who those people are - sometimes they report what happens, sometimes they're just propagandists for Hamas. That's fact checking?
What about Geralldo broadcasting from Pakistan and telling the viewers he was in Kabul?
I could go on and on. The reason people have this rosy idea about large news organizations is said organizations never used to get caught when they were biased, incompetant, or just plain lazy. If you compare the blogs to established news organizations instead of the lofty journalistic ideal, the come out looking pretty good.
Incidentally, why don't other bloggers count? Major media organizations don't criticize each other - look, Bill O'Reilly came to Rather's defense, for Chrissake!
But it sounds like, without issuing a ruling, he's just muttering to himself.
Judges aren't stupid (OK, well, not usually). This sort of language is highly unusual, since it all looks very bad if his (eventual) ruling runs counter to what he said earlier in the trial. My guess is he's letting SCO know they have one last chance to produce some evidence before he rules against them.
I don't see how that benefits Microsoft. Once stock is sold in the IPO, SCO doesn't make or lose any money when the valuation changes (unless they're paying expenses with stock.
Now, while the officers of the company might be losing money (on paper), if Microsoft is trying to pass money to McBride they'd be better off just hiring him at some huge salary after SCO goes belly-up. That's how it's done. Look how much money former politicians *cough*Bill Clinton*cough* make as speech honoraria. It's all legal if you're getting paid to do something (like give a speech or, in McBride's case, do some worthless "consulting").
As far as I can tell, the stock price only matters in that if it gets into the penny range it might be cheaper for IBM to just buy SCO than continue saying "what evidence?" in court. But even then, they might be better off leaving a smoking hole in Utah as a warning to other would-be SCOs.
That's not really fair. The.Net architecture actually keeps all the old dlls around, so you can specify a particular version of the dll and actually get that version instead of one that's supposed to be compatible.
I don't know if it all works, but that's the theory, anyway.
...they could undermine funding for efforts between Europe and Japan to produce a fusion generator.
Well, first of all, the US is back in ITER, so it's really Europe, Japan, and the US.
Secondly, the absolute earliest possible date we'll see commercial fusion power is 2050, even using the notoriously optimistic figures the fusion people provide. So we'll need a stop-gap for about fifty years if they ever get fusion to work at all.
And just how, pray tell, does incorporating a transducer into a device violate thermodynamic principles?
Not really sure what you mean by that, since I didn't mention a transducer. I'm not an expert at the underlying physics, but my understanding is the "universal constructor" can't work because it will fly apart if it has enough energy to do its task.
And what would those proteins be called, perchance? Dare I say "nano-scale assemblers"?
Well, we may call them "nano-scale assemblers", but they aren't what Drexler was referring to. He envisioned a self-replicating robot-like device with its own power supply, communications, and computational ability. The idea has been pretty much discredited on the old "violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics" argument. That's why I wanted to differentiate his ideas from what I believe to be the most reasonable approch to nano-fabrication.
This looks like a great leap in device technology, but we need similar advances in lithography to really use it.
It's not clear to me why we would necessarily continue to use lithography. At some point it will make more sense to start building these devices up atom by atom (or molecule by molecule). Not with Drexler's fantasy "assemblers", but probably using proteins or tailored bacteria.
I leave it up to you to read any of the many other comments on this story that relate this test to the climateprediction.net results.
In other words, you can't make a cogent argument to back up the vitriol? Maybe if you were more of a scientist and less of a fanatic, you could provide a link or two to back up your assertions? The climateprediction.net site says they're still verifying their model.
I do follow this very closely, and I have seen nothing to indicate your statement concerning the veracity of the "current models" has any validity. Is this in peer-reviewed research or are you, as I suspect, talking out your ass? If it's all so cut and dried, maybe you could address some of this gentleman's points?
Next time, try engaging your brain before hitting 'post' and embarrassing yourself in public.
This sort of idiocy doesn't belong in reasoned discourse. I find it most often from people who can't back up their assertions when challenged.
I'm getting a little tired of these "sky is falling" predictions without much to back it up. Why should I believe in this model? Because it was made by "scientists"? Bah.
Look, the one easy thing they could do to validate the model is run it for a hundred years starting at 1750 or so. We have reasonably accurate data for that time period, so we know what the model should produce. As far as I know, every climate model fails this test miserably, and it's not mentioned in this article. So what steps did they take to ensure the validity of the model?
The time to get excited is when we have a model that matches observed results. Until then there's no way I'm gonna support some kind of government action that'll bankrupt me.
In any event, we could fix any CO2 problem by going 100% nuclear power and running our engines off hydrogen. When the greenies support that option, I'll know it's serious. Until then, don't wake me up.
Meanwhile, there's an unfinished space station up there, a dying orbital observatory, and a lot of scientific research that has been put on hold. The shuttle should be returned to flight ASAP and it should be used until NASA or private industry can build an adequate replacement.
We can do these things more safely and cheaply by buying Soyuz from the Russians. NASA has done quite enough damage to the idea of manned spaceflight. Let them go back to the drawing board and build something that isn't such a kluge.
Well, this is slashdot, after all. Anything bad you say about Microsoft will be accepted uncritically. Anything you say which doesn't take the appropriate anti-Microsoft tone will get you labeled an astroturfer.
Yeah they got it right. So right it flew only one test orbital flight and unmanned at that.
Ok so that's related to economics BUT you can't really judge a launch vehicle's performance and call it "right" if it never really got a chance to do its job.
It was a proof of concept. After they built it the political leaders realized something the engineers had said all along - "hey, it really is fundementally stupid to put wings on a rocket."
You see, they had a perfectly servicable, safe, and cheap way to get people into space already. The Soyuz was the most successful space vehicle from any perspective. Still is. The Russians didn't have enough money to use their space program as a giant welfare program for big aerospace companies and critical congressional districts. They had a job to do and they did it with a tenth of NASA's budget.
The exciting thing about commercial space is the financial discipline it provides. We should have solar power satellites and a permanent base on the moon for the money we've squandered on the Space Shuttle and ISS.
raising the cap on the SS payroll tax (currently at $86K) and using the substantial monies from that to pay into a general SS fund
What a rotten idea. Social Security is supposed to be a pension program, not a welfare program. If you're gonna cap my benefits when I'm old, you can cap what you're taking from me now.
taxing the substantial wealth of the plutocrats, and using that to pay for SS, and many other items. Just a small 1% tax on wealth of the rich would pay for SS, universal healthcare and college tuition for all.
This is a pretty common leftist fantasy that doesn't ever actually work in practice. Rich people aren't working 9-5 like you and me. If the tax system changes, they have the flexibility to change too. Either they'll find loopholes to avoid paying the wealth tax or they'lljust move to another country. Sigh. Maybe A.F. Tytler was right:
A democracy cannot exist as permanent form of government.
It can only exist until the voters discover they can vote themselves money, from the public treasury. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by dictatorship.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmmm. You're correct. Serves me right for relying on my memory while I'm focused on the first one. But the point about established churches remains. How did we go from official state churches to the complete removal of religion from the public sphere without any relevant change to the document?
Google "patriot act unconstitutional" and you'll get news stories about a federal court declaring part of it unconstitutional. I assume they heard a legal argument they thought made sense when they made the ruling.
Sigh. I guess I wasn't being specific enough. What I meant, specifically was section 215, which is the one I've seen everone complaining about since the January ruling.
You're either a troll or an idiot. Most likely both.
This comment ties back to my original post about the Democratic party. How do you ever expect anybody to take you seriously? I know your emotional response is "well, I don't care if you agree with me", but if you don't intend to persuade people, why are you bothering? Why is it when you disagree with someone on slashdot, he's a troll? I find it sad, particularly when we have points of agreement (referencing your comment on the tenth amendment). A lot of really smart people don't bother with this site anymore as a result of this kind of discourse.
Incidentally, you addressed two technical points of my post, but after reading your comment on the 10th amendment I'm curious as to what you think of the substance of my argument against Roe v Wade and federalization (is that a word?) of gay marriage.
You claim to be a atheist Republican which confuses me because other than the religious topics that the Republicans have been using to divide our country (abortion and homosexuality) what draws you to that party?
I don't understand why you think something like principled opposition to abortion is "dividing our country". Personally, I would like to see Roe v Wade struck down. Not because I think abortion should be illegal, but because the decision was a spectacular case of the expansion of federal power through judicial lawmaking. The denizens of the court created (by fiat) a right that isn't found anywhere in the constitution and used it to strike down a completely constitutional state law. Do you realize 70% of the states at that time permitted abortion with varying amount of restiction? That is exactly the kind of issue the framers intended to be settled at the state level. So I guess you could say the main reason I vote Republican is the GOP is the party least likely to use the courts to change social policy. The framers left that to the states, and that's where it should be. Abortion would never have been a "wedge" issue if it had been addressed democratically.
Gay marriage is a similar issue. People will accept it eventually if it isn't rammed down their throats by an activist judiciary. For one thing, legal marriage is entirely a construct of state law. There's no reason people in South Carolina should be force to recognize a marriage (gay or not) made in New York. Eventually they will, though, if you don't try to force them. This didn't have to be a wedge issue, but the left, through the judiciary, made it a wedge issue.
It can't be fiscal responsibility, they abandoned that in the 90's
I see no concrete difference between the Democrats and Republicans when it comes to fiscal responsibility. They both spend as much as they can get away with, because that's how you win elections in a democracy. I wish it weren't true. This is my favorite quote (from A.F. Tytler):
It can't be love of the Constitution. Other than the 2nd Amendement, there's not a lot of support for the Constitution among the GOP.
Here's where we disagree. I don't see any evidence the Republicans are "trashing the Constitution". Why do you think so? I realize here on /. the PATRIOT act is unpopular, and people claim it's unconstitutional, but I've never heard a legal argument that made any sense. And neither have the courts. I already outlined my reasons for thinking the left has done the most damage to the Constitution through activist judges.
Also, if you read the document you'll see most of the rights start with the phrase "Congress shall make no law...". There was a presumption at the time that states could make laws regarding those issues. For many decades after the constitution was ratified there were "established" (state supported) churches at the state level. And it wasn't unconstitutional. The more history I understand the more I realize the framers would consider today's federal government an abomination - a tyranny of unelected bureaucrats wearing black robes.
It's certainly isn't a respect for the environment.
I agree with you here. I wish the Republicans would be a little more "eco". I would hasten to add, however, in recent years the Dems have supported mostly feel-good environmentalism that didn't have much substance (like battery powered cars, for instance). There was no support for the Kyoto protocols on either side o
I don't think they'll ever really lose out to file sharing. People who don't own a computer for other reasons aren't going to spend $1000 so they can save $20/month on netflix.
Yeah, I read that peice by Bill Moyers too. I think Moyers knows more about the Yanomamu tribe of the Amazon than he does about people in the U.S. This is why Democrats lost the election. You take the absolute fringiest if fringies in the Christian right and paint them as mainstream Christians. I have a clue for the left: lots of Christians are inclined to your way of thinking, but they'll vote Republican as long as they're made to feel like pariahs by the Democrats. Take, for example, Catholics, who traditionally voted Democrat, but are deserting the party in droves.
Of course, I'm a Republican, so on one level it causes me to laugh my ass off. The Democratic Party is circling the drain of the American political bathtub, and they're response to getting trounced in the election (look at what matters - the House and Senate) is to tell the voters "we lost because you're ignorant and stupid."
Unfortunately, while it may feel good for you to vent your anger and frustration, what you're actually doing is putting another nail into the coffin of the only opposition party in the United States. Even as a Republican I can it's not healthy for the Republic to have such a sickly opposition party. If the Democrats lose any more Senate seats they'll be totally irrelevant in national policy discussions. The Republicans in Congress won't even bother to talk to them. That would be bad.
Anyway, the point is: Knock it off. Realize reasonable people can disagree, and if you procede from the position that the other guy is stupid you'll simply be ignored.
By the way, I'm not a Christian. I'm actually pretty much an atheist. But I know a lot Christians who are intelligent, decent people, and if you got out a little more you would too. Democrats are always accusing Republicans of being ignorant about the world, but as your post makes amply clear you're pretty ignorant about most of your own country.
Except for that Indian guy in the next office who never misses a key. Should have been a pianist.
I think their licensing is pretty rational, actually. It's the same way car companies sell cars - they quote you a huge list price, and then let you bargain them down to a more reasonable level.
Once, while buying a car, the salesman quoted me the sticker price for a car I was interested in. I laughed and said "Nobody pays the sticker price!" He looked really serious for a minute and said "you'd be surprised". Turns out lots of folks just won't bargain, and the car companies know it. So they pay, what, 20-40% extra?
One of my previous employers bought Oracle licenses at 10% of list. We made more money reselling Oracle to our customers than we made selling our product.
Let them quote whatever they want. They'll come down if they have to.
I'm in total agreement with you, but you missed my point. SCO's share price has nothing to do with their ability to "stay in the game." When it goes down, it's the investors that take the hit, not SCO's balance sheet. They can continue as long as they have operating capitol, regardless of the stock price.
Now, the stock price has an effect on what it costs to raise additional capital, but that won't matter until they run out of money. The Baystar Capital deal was a much better example of how Microsoft can keep SCO afloat - they don't need to throw away lots of money buying worthless stock.
What does that mean - "No accountability"? What accountability did CBS take for the obviously trumped-up Bush National Guard story? Anybody get sued?
Oh, sure, some people got fired. But not the right people. What about Seymour Hersch and all his "anonymous" (made up from whole cloth) sources?
I see much higher quality news from blogs. The networks and newspapers don't check facts, they don't dig into stories, and they don't print retractions unless they're forced to.
Bill Moyers out-and-out slandered James Watt in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Did they print a retraction? No. They never do if they can get away with it.
Look at the "stringers" AP uses in the West Bank. They don't even know who those people are - sometimes they report what happens, sometimes they're just propagandists for Hamas. That's fact checking?
What about Geralldo broadcasting from Pakistan and telling the viewers he was in Kabul?
I could go on and on. The reason people have this rosy idea about large news organizations is said organizations never used to get caught when they were biased, incompetant, or just plain lazy. If you compare the blogs to established news organizations instead of the lofty journalistic ideal, the come out looking pretty good.
Incidentally, why don't other bloggers count? Major media organizations don't criticize each other - look, Bill O'Reilly came to Rather's defense, for Chrissake!
Judges aren't stupid (OK, well, not usually). This sort of language is highly unusual, since it all looks very bad if his (eventual) ruling runs counter to what he said earlier in the trial. My guess is he's letting SCO know they have one last chance to produce some evidence before he rules against them.
Now, while the officers of the company might be losing money (on paper), if Microsoft is trying to pass money to McBride they'd be better off just hiring him at some huge salary after SCO goes belly-up. That's how it's done. Look how much money former politicians *cough*Bill Clinton*cough* make as speech honoraria. It's all legal if you're getting paid to do something (like give a speech or, in McBride's case, do some worthless "consulting").
As far as I can tell, the stock price only matters in that if it gets into the penny range it might be cheaper for IBM to just buy SCO than continue saying "what evidence?" in court. But even then, they might be better off leaving a smoking hole in Utah as a warning to other would-be SCOs.
I don't know if it all works, but that's the theory, anyway.
Well, first of all, the US is back in ITER, so it's really Europe, Japan, and the US.
Secondly, the absolute earliest possible date we'll see commercial fusion power is 2050, even using the notoriously optimistic figures the fusion people provide. So we'll need a stop-gap for about fifty years if they ever get fusion to work at all.
Here is his bio. His books are interesting reading, to say the least.
And yes, it is like a cell... kind of. More like based on a cell.
Not really sure what you mean by that, since I didn't mention a transducer. I'm not an expert at the underlying physics, but my understanding is the "universal constructor" can't work because it will fly apart if it has enough energy to do its task.
Well, we may call them "nano-scale assemblers", but they aren't what Drexler was referring to. He envisioned a self-replicating robot-like device with its own power supply, communications, and computational ability. The idea has been pretty much discredited on the old "violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics" argument. That's why I wanted to differentiate his ideas from what I believe to be the most reasonable approch to nano-fabrication.
It's not clear to me why we would necessarily continue to use lithography. At some point it will make more sense to start building these devices up atom by atom (or molecule by molecule). Not with Drexler's fantasy "assemblers", but probably using proteins or tailored bacteria.
In other words, you can't make a cogent argument to back up the vitriol? Maybe if you were more of a scientist and less of a fanatic, you could provide a link or two to back up your assertions? The climateprediction.net site says they're still verifying their model.
I do follow this very closely, and I have seen nothing to indicate your statement concerning the veracity of the "current models" has any validity. Is this in peer-reviewed research or are you, as I suspect, talking out your ass? If it's all so cut and dried, maybe you could address some of this gentleman's points?
Next time, try engaging your brain before hitting 'post' and embarrassing yourself in public.
This sort of idiocy doesn't belong in reasoned discourse. I find it most often from people who can't back up their assertions when challenged.
Well, they haven't actually shipped it yet...
Look, the one easy thing they could do to validate the model is run it for a hundred years starting at 1750 or so. We have reasonably accurate data for that time period, so we know what the model should produce. As far as I know, every climate model fails this test miserably, and it's not mentioned in this article. So what steps did they take to ensure the validity of the model?
The time to get excited is when we have a model that matches observed results. Until then there's no way I'm gonna support some kind of government action that'll bankrupt me.
In any event, we could fix any CO2 problem by going 100% nuclear power and running our engines off hydrogen. When the greenies support that option, I'll know it's serious. Until then, don't wake me up.
That's why the Pentagon has its own weather service.
Yeah, those are those poor shlubs in lower-middle management who live in absolute fear of their jobs, since they're easily expendable.
You're better off staying in the trenches. They might not give you any raises but at least you'll get to choose your last day.
We can do these things more safely and cheaply by buying Soyuz from the Russians. NASA has done quite enough damage to the idea of manned spaceflight. Let them go back to the drawing board and build something that isn't such a kluge.
Well, this is slashdot, after all. Anything bad you say about Microsoft will be accepted uncritically. Anything you say which doesn't take the appropriate anti-Microsoft tone will get you labeled an astroturfer.
It was a proof of concept. After they built it the political leaders realized something the engineers had said all along - "hey, it really is fundementally stupid to put wings on a rocket."
You see, they had a perfectly servicable, safe, and cheap way to get people into space already. The Soyuz was the most successful space vehicle from any perspective. Still is. The Russians didn't have enough money to use their space program as a giant welfare program for big aerospace companies and critical congressional districts. They had a job to do and they did it with a tenth of NASA's budget.
The exciting thing about commercial space is the financial discipline it provides. We should have solar power satellites and a permanent base on the moon for the money we've squandered on the Space Shuttle and ISS.
What a rotten idea. Social Security is supposed to be a pension program, not a welfare program. If you're gonna cap my benefits when I'm old, you can cap what you're taking from me now.
taxing the substantial wealth of the plutocrats, and using that to pay for SS, and many other items. Just a small 1% tax on wealth of the rich would pay for SS, universal healthcare and college tuition for all.
This is a pretty common leftist fantasy that doesn't ever actually work in practice. Rich people aren't working 9-5 like you and me. If the tax system changes, they have the flexibility to change too. Either they'll find loopholes to avoid paying the wealth tax or they'lljust move to another country. Sigh. Maybe A.F. Tytler was right:
A democracy cannot exist as permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover they can vote themselves money, from the public treasury. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by dictatorship.