The trouble is that these "animal protection" outfits (themselves large multinational corporations) aren't filming actual incidents, but rather, are *staging* incidents for the purpose of filming them. So yes, the "protectionists" are actually abusing animals to demonstrate abuse.
I see. So, "animal protection" outfits are lying and defaming (which they can be sued under libel/slander laws) and committing animal abuse (which is already a criminal offense), so we need new laws to ban undercover videos (which wouldn't cover staged abuse films, since clearly they're not undercover) because....
Next up, we can ban unpopular reporting about politicians because The Onion likes to make up wildly exaggerative satire.
There are two possible reactions to telling the IT guys about the exploit: (1) you give them enough information to harden their systems proactively (adobe flash scripting has a problem when dealing with flibberjabber elements) or (2) you give them vague information (there's a bug in flash somewhere).
The first is probably enough to give the bad guys enough of a clue for them to figure out the vulnerability and you've just created a 0day. The second isn't enough information for the IT guy to figure out how to protect their systems.
I don't know. The second one seems to be enough information for most IT guys. It means either blocking external flash (except possibly through trusted partners) through all avenues including web and email or blocking flash outright. Yes, for some companies that doesn't provide enough granularity, but for the vast majority it's enough.
To make a probably bad analogy, software patches/exploits is like avoiding pregnancy. To adequately protect yourself, your best bets are to not use exploitable software at all or to take proper countermeasures before an exploit is likely to be deployed against you. Waiting on patches, scheduled or unscheduled, as some sort of salvation is attempting to race the clock to abort any possible ongoing attack.
To that end, the best protection if you want to actually use software is to actually known about the existence of exploits in software and deploy countermeasures then, not to have a patch dropped on your doorstep be it on day 1 or day 10 and only then work to deal with it as quickly as possible. That was my main point. It wasn't about the manageability of 1 vs 10 patches. Because at that level, there should already be a process in place that makes the above more a point of the degree of tedium in testing and deploying patches, not one of security. As a question of tedium, I think IT folks would best prefer software that just wasn't exploitable in the first place, although I can see month patch release as a compromise.
We're always seeing people eating strange things, whether it be fish that may or may not be lethal, to tasties like cow brains and pig testicles, this will be no different.
Well, you do realize that seeds/beans are plant ovum, right? And that fragrant gift of flowers to your loved one is a great way for them to inhale tons of plant sperm/sniffing a plant's vulva. Then there's mushrooms, which have tons of spores which are basically baby mushrooms. And there's things like cheese which are the product of an enzyme from either mammal stomachs, proteases, or apparently some vegetarian-friendly sources. Alcohol is the waste of yeast. Etc.
I'm not saying I'd be gun-ho about eat pig testicles, but that's more a psychological/cultural thing than a particularly sensical one. After all, no one really bats an eye about eating plant testicles.:/
As I understand it, the risk is that once the patch is published, the bad guys reverse engineer the patch and publish exploits for those patches (usually within 6 hours). So if you delay patching after a patch is made, you put your machines at increased risk. So scheduling an update so that IT folks have time to react is a good thing.
That doesn't really make sense, though. If what you say is true and it's the patch itself that is used to make the exploit, it doesn't matter if you release the patch on day 1 or day 10. It'll still be patch day + 6 hours before an exploit is in the wild. The real issue, actually, is not telling IT folks about the exploit (not necessarily details but enough to know to not use the product or to use a work around to limit/block the exploit) before the patch is released. Presuming that it takes days between announcing there's an exploit and releasing the patch, that should give IT folks the time to mitigate the risk and then deal with the patch when it comes. All a vendor having a time table does is allow them to group many exploits together to allow them to pretend the amount of exploits that exist are smaller than there are. IT folk, having to deal with multiple vendors with multiple patch day schedules, have to develop their own schedule for accepting patches, testing them, and applying them, anyways, so I don't really see how it helps them.
The one exception is when the exploit is published *before* the patch is published. In that case, it makes sense to push an out-of-band patch and to hell with the sysadmins schedule.
Which still means telling IT folk about the exploit and not waiting for the patch to actually be made. As much as the exploit might be the wild, that doesn't mean every black hat has enough information about the exploit to use it. Hence, releasing the patch to everyone still has a lot of the above mentioned +6 hour risk.
If flip-flopping in American politics were generally a byproduct of "adapting your position to changing realities" and not "voting for government spending towards my constituents to increase my reelection chances, pledges about supporting less government spending or statements of a core belief in the futility of government involvement in anything economic be damned" or "voting for more unsupervised government intrusion, despite my claims that such government supervision is evil", I'd agree. Oddly enough, of course, the American propaganda I most associate with "flip-flopping" was the former. The latter doesn't get called out as much because it's SOP, and few in Washington act like they really want to change things.
I entirely agree. This all does sound like something that should be worked into the OS in a more generic fashion. Certainly, there's lots of programs that strive to be clever when it comes to caching one thing or another, be it textures for models, web pages, etc. The only thing I can think of that might work generically is a combination of mmap to allocate a memory area as transient and removable at will by the OS and a means to mark a mmap area as non-transient when its used then transient again when done.
That still requires some work on the application side, but it removes a lot of the guess work of what should be removed. Unfortunately, it also still leaves the burden on what to add or how much to attempt to add to this transient memory pool. I don't see a real way around this since in many ways virtual memory and swap space were designed primarily to try to magically solve those dilemmas by just allowing programs to allocate as much as they want. And obviously, that just leads to heavy swapping at time which is brutally inefficient.:/ At some level, it'd seem like the most effective approach would require giving the OS the opportunity to call back into applications to tell it when to fill its OS granted cache space and further when it was going to lose some of that cache. Effectively, that'd be a per-app balloon driver.
Of course, with something like Firefox, it'd seem a better approach anyways would be multiple processes (to avoid internal fragmentation and allow for cleaning dangling handles given how buggy web browser are) and a centralized cache manager much like Chrome.
User: Ack! My account!
Sony: Yeah, it was trashed by those three guys. I think they were called the "Something Brothers".
User: You were watching?
Sony: Uh-huh!
User: Then Sony, why didn't you tell me about it?
Sony: But I did tell you. I told you just now!
A large chunk of Pakistan is "war lord wilderness", and OBL wasn't found there, he was found in a middle class neighborhood in a city known for military training establishments and academic institutions.
So, he was the last play the CIA bothered to look? And perhaps Pakistani intelligence as well, presumably they were trying?
It's well known that the Pakistani intelligence community assists the Taliban and Al Qadea, hence the CIA and SOCOMs inability to find OBL.
I didn't realize Pakistani intelligence was a suborganization of the CIA and hence the CIA was fully reliant upon them for intelligence gathering. Oh, right, they're not. Yes, Pakistani intelligence not helping or outright hindering CIA efforts certainly is something that could get in the CIA's way, but the CIA still managed to find OBL and it sounds like it finding or not finding OBL had really nothing to do with Pakistani intelligence except in so far as Pakistani intelligence might have known and not bothered to tell the CIA. So, great, we can fault Pakistani intelligence for being unhelpful. But, again, that doesn't explain why it took the CIA so long on its own to find OBL.
Yeah except the U.S. has given Pakistan over $20 billion in aid over the past 10 years. Or was that just to show we like them? Also, the Taliban didn't just 'not look hard enough' for bin Laden, they sheltered him and allied with him. They refused to turn him over first to the Saudi's then later to the United States. I don't know what kind of false history world you are living in, but there is no connection between Pakistan and Afghanistan here.
Let's see how well of a false history world I'm living in. The Taliban were semi-rulers over a bunch of war lords in Afghanistan. Some of those war lords were sheltering bin Laden and his followers. If the Taliban had tried to simply went along, blindly, with the US's request, bin Laden would have likely been hidden by the war lords in much the same way he was hidden by the war lords when the US came in or how he was sheltered in Pakistan. However, the Taliban was an evil theocracy with views the US didn't like. The Taliban didn't exactly morn 9/11, either. So, we went into Afghanistan with anger in our hearts to destroy the Taliban, as a bin Laden ally, because we hated them and that action likely aided bin Laden in escaping--I say this because we could have, oh, gathered intelligence for months or years then sent in a strike team with say two black hawk helicopters resulting in a much quick capture time for bin Laden.
Meanwhile, recently bin Laden was possibly found--we had only circumstantial evidence of his position--and possibly sheltered by yet another country, this time Pakistan, who was been receiving financial aid for around a decade specifically to find and turn over bin Laden and his allies. Instead of making threats against Pakistan, ordering bin Laden handed over, etc, we sent in a strike team because we apparently didn't trust the Pakistani government enough.
There seems to be a connection there, and it seems to revolve around bin Laden, a lack of trust of governments in the region, and the choice of action in dealing with the capture of an individual. Of course, it's too simply to say that because bin Laden and al Qaeda aren't synonymous. Invading Afghanistan has certainly resulted in the death of many al Qaeda members. If that was the goal, well, even Pakistan's failing to hand over bin Laden isn't a big deal because he's more a figurehead then anything--his death meaning the need for a replacement figurehead, not a death or real harm to the organization.
In the end, it seems we went after al Qaeda not because they killed so many of our people but because they had the audacity to attempt such a thing and actually succeeded. And we didn't simply attack the Taliban because they were shelterers of our enemies but because they had the audacity to not bend to our will through either money or threat of force. A war or two do not seem the appropriate response except as a means to force other countries or organizations to respect the authority of the US in the world.
The more pragmatic response would seem to be more akin to what Mossad does. It's dirtier and eviler in many ways, but we're already there in many ways with the CIA. We've been there for decades.
So, I guess I really just don't understand things at all.
Pakistan entered into a counter terrorism relationship with the United States after 9/11, in part to keep the United States from invading Pakistan on the way to Afghanistan, and they had captured hundreds of Al Qadea members over the last 10 years. Before that, the US and Pakistan had closer relations during the 1960s and 1980s with alot of US military and intelligence assistance going to Pakistan.
So...Pakistan was bribed and coerced into helping the US find and capture bin Laden, which is precisely why the CIA failed for 9 years. Oh, right, none of that matters to the point that the CIA failed for 9 years.
Al Qadea had conducted operations against the Pakistani government after 9/11, however some factions of the Pakistani government, the intelligence service and some of the Army, favor the political and religious stance of Al Qadea over the more liberal leanings of the majority of urban Pakistanis.
Yes, while most of Afghanistan pre-9/11 was war lord wilderness, only a sliver of Pakistan was. To appease that group (and its followers in the government), very little work was done to directly attack Al Qadea in that sliver. But, Pakistan kept being pushed by the US and eventually started taking actual action, which resulted in Al Qadea finally responding with attacks in 2007 (Bhutto's assassination, possibly) and later. So, only after that point would I see Pakistan's government actually really caring about Al Qadea as a threat. Of course, none of that against explains why the US failed in finding and capturing bin Laden.
Pakistan had a legal responsibility to find bin Laden and other Al Qadea members, the fact that his compound was a couple hundred meters from a major Pakistan military academy makes it hard to believe they didn't know where he was.
And the US "knew" bin Laden was in Pakistan, yet it wasn't until after the raid on the compound that they were certain bin Laden was there. Leon Panetta even made it very clear in a recent interview that the belief that bin Laden was there was based entirely on circumstantial evidence. There was no direct proof. But, yea, I'm sure a few Pakistani military academy troops, from the virtue of being nearer, would intrinsically do a better job.
In short, no matter how much of a case you can make that Pakistan could and should have done a better job, it's still deflecting from the real point that US Intelligence took over 9 years to find bin Laden. The failure of Pakistan, taken in that perspective, seems a rather moot point. After all, Pakistan isn't exactly a super power, didn't until more recently even have a personal interest in finding bin Laden, and if Pakistan was as untrustworthy in relaying information as you imply then actually relying upon them in the hunt was mildly foolish at best if not outright fool hearty. The point isn't that Pakistan is excused because it did a piss-poor job. It's that Pakistan's piss-poor job doesn't excuse the US's piss-poor job, especially if you're seeking to find someone to blame. Personally, I'm not.
Off-topic, I know, but it reminds me of how US Senators are trying to scapegoat Pakistan over not finding and handing over bin Laden. Last I checked, bin Laden's organization attacked the US and it was the US who was actively pursuing bin Laden for over 9 years. That Pakistan might not have found him in 5 years seems a moot point. And that doesn't even begin to point out how quickly we blamed the Taliban when they couldn't (or wouldn't, since it might upset their delicate power balance with the war lords) find and hand over bin Laden in a few months.
Of course, these are politicians I'm talking about. Expecting some sort of responsibility or accountability out of them is like expecting responsibility or accountability out of a company. But, oh no, we should never regulate companies. That would interfere with the free market and then those companies wouldn't be quite as efficient!
... Woz is off-base on this one. Not much, but he is off-base.
Besides, the hope that RCA wasn't exploring television technology in the 60s is a faint hope indeed. Their LCD work was prescient, superceded only by Sharp and their success in making it commercially viable (emphasis mine).
But, that's precisely Woz's point. If RCA wants to have a patent on LCD technology, that's great. But it should be used to prevent others from cloning their commercially viable LCD technology, not to inhibit Sharp from coming up with commercially viable technology or charging Sharp precisely because Sharp, in making commercially viable technology, ran across one of the obvious problems and solutions which a company like RCA ran into earlier when they failed to make commercially viable LCD technology--not to say RCA ever did either of these things with Sharp.
In essence, Woz seems to be arguing against being able to patent basic research or failed products. I can't say I entirely disagree with him. However, I do feel that one has to consider that sometimes products fail because they weren't adequately capitalized. For example, if Apple had just happened to not manage to obtain enough investors for the Apple II development and production because there was a short-term slump in the economy, the Apple II would have quite possibly been a failure. If another company, say IBM, had then decided to clone the Apple II or something very similar to it, I might not sure Woz would be particularly agreeable to that; I'm a bit conflicted on that myself.
At least in the RCA case, it sounds like a much more clear example of decades of relatively obvious development for which RCA didn't work hard enough on utilizing in their own products, at least within the personal computer industry sphere. After all, there's no clear reason RCA couldn't have made an "RCA II" before Apple did, especially given they already had the patent for a problem in development. Instead, RCA wasn't focused as heavily on computer development and exploited the patent system not in protecting their own products but in taxing someone else's. That clearly doesn't have much to do with a goal to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings"; after all, the character-generator was invented multiple times but exclusive rights were only granted to one of the inventors who wasn't even using it in a way that would particularly promote the progress of science or the useful arts.
Windows XP is almost 10 years old. Find me a Linux distro that supports 10 year old versions, on the desktop.
Granted, that's definitely an issue with Linux if you want that sort of thing.
No one cried foul when Windows 98 was EOLed, after only 8 years. That was because they liked XP.
Actually, there's plenty of people who cried foul when WIndows 98 went EOL as the Win NT line dropped a lot of DOS support as well as VDX and other things. Beyond that, Windows 98 is a much leaner way to create a Win32 environment for running programs in a VM. So long as you don't connect to the internet in the VM you're probably fine, but otherwise the lack of security updates is a concern.
Microsoft has pushed back the EOL on Windows XP multiple times due to complaints, but it's time to move on.
Invariably, that's MS's choice. And it's that choice that makes people like me avoid Windows as their main OS.
If you dislike Vista and 7, use something a different operating system. Don't pretend Microsoft should support 10 year old software.
Exactly. And if Microsoft doesn't want to maintain backwards compatibility, another form of supporting 10 year old software, that's their choice as well. I doubt they'd do something that stupid. But, then, I don't see why they're so inclined to push people to switch from XP anyways. So long as they're still making the same amount of money selling XP as Vista or 7, the only real issue I can think of is that XP might be more costly to support. That seems likely, but only a marginal cost.
The rest I can only presume is programmer and manager hubris, of the sort that is unwilling to support programs people like in favor of creating and supporting new things. But, that's part of the attitude that sees Linux distros unwilling to stick with supporting older versions of software. Well, except that Linux distros have the reasonable excuse that they don't direct programming of new versions/security patches for the most part and so would have to backport everything which is a huge task on a lot of programs. Meanwhile, MS does direct programming on new versions/security patches, so it's still not reasonable to think there'd be able to support multiple versions with little overhead potentially. But, I guess, it's still cheaper to just push everyone on the latest version.
Not quite. I never said that "all global warming scientists weren't scientists" as you put originally. I never claimed anyone wasn't a scientist.
You claimed that global warming researchers weren't following the tenets of science in so far as you claimed they went out of their way to avoid trying to falsify theories, which I can only deduce as being equivalent to calling them not scientists.
I changed the of what you said to make two distinct points clearer. The first was that when I referred to an "attack on science," I meant "defending research which has been proven to be false," which the OP was doing.
I understand now what you mean, but the issue is "attack on science" has a broader meaning. There are those who do no research yet claim their beliefs as science. As such, they attack science by subverting people's understanding of what is science. That clearly seems to be an attack on science.
It looked (and I'm still not sure) like you were saying that I was attacking science, and if you were, I still fail to see how. The second point was problems with global warming research, which I addressed below.
I think that's based on a misunderstanding on my part. I think it clear you meant something like "all global warming researchers are crooked" and "all scientists who use their data have been mislead". That isn't an attack on science. It's just a rather preposterous conspiracy theory involving all global warming researchers--again, it's preposterous because oil companies would at the drop of a hat hire and pay well a global warming researcher who could actually prove this conspiracy with collected evidence, not by pecking away at emails and hoping to find evidence within the bowels of the conspiracy. That's one of the many reasons why I'm more inclined to accept the idea that global warming researchers are being taken out of context and their actions miscast. After all, when you don't have evidence on your side, what choice do you have but to smear your opponent?
The problem isn't that he called it a trick. The problem is how many people his actions (remember, it wasn't just the "trick") deceived.
You mean that he kept more bad research papers out of peer review journals than would otherwise be there? Yes, I guess in that way he caused a deception in that now one can go back and point out that peer review journals only have a handful of bad global warming research papers instead of possibly a good many bad global warming research papers. I'm not saying I don't have a problem with this, exactly. I'm just saying, I can see how it could happen without a real intent to deceive.
Having said that, yes effort should be taken to look at all evidence that is used as a basis for legislation. That doesn't mean "another look". It means a decent first look. The general issue with legislation is not the lack of enough second looks but the lack of enough first looks. The latter would seem to be of a much higher priority if one cares about such things.
I would love it if we could take a better first look at this guy's 2005 report about 50 million climate refugees. I'll print out this article, you fire up the time machine
I see what you mean, but I thought you were speaking of legislation going forward. Obviously, I wasn't speaking of using a time machine. Honestly, I don't know of any legislation that was constructed to deal with "50 million climate refugees", and I'm pretty certain if there was it wasn't crafted with a "and then in 2015 we'll do whatever the '50 million climate refugees' scientists says in dealing with the next projected batch of refugees". As such, I'd imagine any legislation involving "climate refugees" has already effectively expired and so any new legislation involving "climate refugees" would involve a "first look". But, th
If scientists by definition do science and you claim all global warming scientists aren't doing science, how is such not an attack on science/scientists?
I have no idea what you're talking about here. This guy was wrong. Stating so is not an attack on science. Continuing to defend his idea, despite the fact that it has been proven wrong, is an attack on science.
Perhaps because you're selective quoting me out of context? The line you quote comes at the end of the paragraph you quote directly below which was in response to charges that all global warming scientists destroy their original data and only release intentionally manipulated results ("massaged", as you put it, implying malicious intent), a charge the stretches well beyond the scope of the one scientist or group of scientists claiming "50 million climate refugees".
You start with the presumption that all the scientists involved in global warming research aren't scientists, already have the answer, and massage the data to produce the problem. Such implies the sort of grand conspiracy that is hard to believe, most of all because there's a lot of individuals/companies who have a vested interest in proving global warming researchers wrong.
I started with the fact that there has been some violation of the scientific method in the case of some of the studies that global warming supporters point to. "Hide the decline," which I referred to, is how one global warming researcher referred to a "trick" by which he conflated temperature sources from two disparate sources to produce an alarming graph, which made the case for global warming look stronger. The same researcher convinced (conspired with?) science journals to attempt to prevent people who disagreed with global warming theories from publishing their work. We could argue about how grand a conspiracy this makes, or whether he meant "trick" in the sense of "deceive" or "a cool thing I did," but those are questions of degree. Poor scientific controls mean that maybe it's worth it to take another look at the research, or the legislation that was passed based on assuming that it was true.
In the same way we should "take another look" at basically all source code because programmers often refer to code they write as a "hack". The idea that this hints at a conspiracy with "questions of degree" is to ignore that programmers and scientists have a jargon that taken out of context can be taken to be malicious. By the same token, the idea that one high level programmer might actively push one's own company, other companies, or other programmer friends and colleagues to avoid bad code from a bad programmer isn't a conspiracy. It's an effort of convince, yes, but there's nothing remote illegal, amoral, etc about it. You do realize conspiracies have to involve an evil act and not merely a concerted effort, right? Otherwise all organizations would be conspiracies.
Having said that, yes effort should be taken to look at all evidence that is used as a basis for legislation. That doesn't mean "another look". It means a decent first look. The general issue with legislation is not the lack of enough second looks but the lack of enough first looks. The latter would seem to be of a much higher priority if one cares about such things.
The theory there would be 50 million climate refugees in the next five years is false and should be disregarded. The theory there's climate change is still going strong and should be well regarded because the long-term temperature data still strongly supports that. Thankfully, I'm sure you're not the type of person who would conflate the two theories and use the falseness of one to imply the falseness of the other.
Of course I'm not. I wrote my post because the falseness of intelligent design (which has nothing to do with the topic) should not be confla
So wait. As I understand it, the problem with Intelligent Design is that it's not falsifiable, right? There's no way to set up an experiment with observable results to disprove the statement, "A supernatural Creator created mankind." That's the problem, right?
Yes and no. The main problem with Intelligent Design is that it's a faux theory. It searches for examples of things that aren't necessarily fully explained in evolution, says "it's too complex and I don't know how exactly it came about", and then rejects any other theory that gives even a partial explanation because "an Intelligent Designer made it" is a more complete answer, even if "an Intelligent Designer made it" is the sort of answer you pull out of a hat. In short, the problem with Intelligent Design is it starts with a complete answer then looks for problems. Science is fundamentally the reverse, finding a problem then looking for answers along with as you note an acceptance of falsifiability; ie, there is an acceptance in science that your best working answer for far might be wrong.
The statements "Man is causing Global Warming" and "Man is not causing Global Warming," by contrast, are both falsifiable. A lot of the "Man is causing Global Warming" science is hard to falsify, but that's because the people doing that research are hiding their original numbers and only using massaged data to "hide the decline" in the amount of Global Warming taking place.
Ie, you start with the presumption that all the scientists involved in global warming research aren't scientists, already have the answer, and massage the data to produce the problem. Such implies the sort of grand conspiracy that is hard to believe, most of all because there's a lot of individuals/companies who have a vested interest in proving global warming researchers wrong (oil, coal, etc companies come to mind along with genuine scientists). If scientists by definition do science and you claim all global warming scientists aren't doing science, how is such not an attack on science/scientists?
For once, a scientist put out an easily falsified Global Warming theory, that is "By 2010, there would be 50 million climate refugees, and they'd come from these specific places." 2010 has come and gone, and there aren't 50 million climate refugees. Therefore, his falsifiable statement has been proven false.
The correct scientific thing to do is to discard his prediction and move on. Moving on means making changes to similar predictions that are based on the same data, or directly on his prediction. It means giving up whatever money was set aside to deal with the climate refugees. It means maybe next time, listening to the people who say that there won't be 50 million climate refugees in the next five years.
Correct. That's the appropriate response. In the future, claims of ten millions of "climate refugees" will be even further scrutinized, as they should be.
It doesn't mean mocking the people who disagreed with the original prediction for something that has nothing to do with what they said or did. A challenge to a theory isn't "an attack on science," but refusing to let go of an idea that has clearly been proven false is.
Correct. The theory there would be 50 million climate refugees in the next five years is false and should be disregarded. The theory there's climate change is still going strong and should be well regarded because the long-term temperature data still strongly supports that. Thankfully, I'm sure you're not the type of person who would conflate the two theories and use the falseness of one to imply the falseness of the other.
Sure, we live in a world where we'd expect to see arid land be arid, untreated water to be full of pathogens that make people sick, various simple ailments that left untreated result in long-term debilitating disease, etc but give me money and power for irrigation; sanitation, regulating adequate drainage, and mandating water treatment; paying for doctors and the development and buying of medicine; etc and I'll put a stop to it!
Why is the solution to every problem of the Information Age a benevolent Google dictatorship?
Because so many problems of the Information Age seem to be the product of an anti-Google dictatorship (ie, a monopoly or cartel or whatever withholding information either entirely or requiring fees and going about with the threat or act of lawsuits to enforce such fees being paid).
Yes, it's quite easy to make it the case that one's official line is mostly developed by one's own employees if one choses to incorporate one's own employees' contributions over outsiders' contributions. This is precisely why the Go-OO/LibreOffice fork formed and is precisely why when Oracle changed its rules to be even more restrictive than Sun was there was enough of a push that people wanted LibreOffice to be the official fork.
In short, trying to deny "the community" as an important part of OpenOffice's future really does miss the big picture under some bizarre idea that OpenOffice is closed source and Oracle has full say on the future of the code base. The trademark may die. The brand may die. But, that doesn't mean the program won't live on if Oracle doesn't want to be a part of it.
The real question is for Oracle's future in the long term. Who wants to buy products from a company who is so willing to let a trademark and a brand die just because it's not readily profitable? It's the Oracle brand that keeps people coming back to pay them money, even more than their products themselves. That is, they've developed a reputation which is why people haven't simply switched to a free alternative to most their products. Even if most of those free alternatives were a failure to deliver, Oracle would be crippled if enough people left them for a few years. Now perhaps killing an office suite brand doesn't matter to people because Oracle does databases, but Oracle's future might not be databases. Consider how Microsoft being so stuck on the Windows brand instead of the more general concept of developing and maintaining the Microsoft brand and sub-brands is hurting them (Windows Phone, Windows Tablet, and Microsoft Zune).
soon as you get away with it enough you get complacent and let your guard down, thinking you are better than other criminals
Yep. That quite well explains why there's regular bragging by celebrities on their drug usage on TV and nothing happens. Nah, we just treat hackers different than celebrities than sports stars even though we can already stereotype their likely nefarious actions. And every long once in a while, there's effort to go after people even when they lie to cover their crime.
Why on earth would anyone try to increase production for goods that are already cheap and have high market penetration. They need to increase production on more expensive products so that the price can come down.
Exactly my point. What percentage of the products that you demand are already cheap and have high market penetration? How many of them are expensive and ripe for expansion/price reduction?
In the US and Europe everyone still wants nicer things but just can't afford them. The majority of people are definitely not satisfied, they would buy more expensive products if they were affordable.
The majority of people want expensive products because they're expensive. That is, it's a status symbol to own the more expensive version of a product. That said, if tomorrow plasma TVs were just as expensive as LCD TVs, do you think the total number of TVs made or sold would change significantly? The only place I can see where they would are where people choose to buy more TVs to demonstrate they can afford multiple less-expensive TVs. Beyond that, I can perhaps see a small rise in the sale of TVs as people replace their "obsolete" TV with a new one and perhaps there's enough consumption there to be significant. But, I just don't see it.
Increased production make those expensive products affordable. Investment in R&D makes future products arrive earlier.
Those might be great things and all, but neither are particular good arguments in general. There's more room to be said when it comes to whole industries being commoditized, which as you indirectly note tends to happen faster with more investment. But there seems to be a rather clear limit on how much a lot of products can be commoditized (computers, TVs, etc aren't getting any cheaper) given the demands for energy in production.
At best, your R&D argument has the most merit because it suggests much more room for possibilities in the unknown. The trouble is, some companies have spent insane amounts of money on R&D (Microsoft comes to mind) with very fruitless results while other companies (Google comes to mind) have much better translated smaller sums of money. Even then, there's nothing Google has so far done that's been truly revolutionary--they're an ad-based "free" service like some TV, magazines, etc of which I'd imagine in the long-term a future incarnation will be part ad-based with pay services just like most TV, magazines, etc.
In short, yes, I can see how lower taxes could by an indirect indirect path result in long-term commoditization of yet undeveloped industries. But, that's not a particularly compelling argument to drop all taxation on corporations (and shift the tax burden on to income/sales/property taxes, since it's unlikely government would or could simply shrink to meet the change). The sort of logic entails seriously considering dropping income/sale taxes (and shift the tax burden on corporations/property taxes, since it's unlikely government would or could simply shrink to meet the change) because through some indirect indirect way such might lead to various religious and cultural changes that radical improve the well-being of many people.
Demand is unlimited, it's supply that limits how much demand is met.
Um, no. At some point, even at $0, people don't want some things even though there's abundant supply. That's why there's a thing called "trash" or "junk". Of course, that classification can usually change if there's enough resourcefulness in seeing a cheap supply of "worthless" things. Then again, some things (many types of nuclear waste, high lead soil, etc) are pretty useful for the foreseeable future.
Almost every company listed on the stock market is trying to expand, I have no idea what you are talking about. There are a couple Billion people who'd like cars and washing machines and plasma TVs.
You're right. I was thinking of the US/Europe markets being saturated, but obviously there's the rest of the world which still has very high demand in many areas for which greater supply would be beneficial. The thing is, who will fill that supply if corporations do have lower taxes? Well, odds are good they'll start up more manufacturing plants in non-US/Europe parts of the world, as that'd be closer to the customers and the cheap employees. So, that sounds great for lots of other countries, but as far as realized demand in the US/Europe, I'd imagine but a small increase as costs went down. Similarly, I'd imagine a rather negligible change in employment.
One small thing. I was under the impression a lot of new companies entered the stock market precisely because the stock market was there for expanding companies (lots of investors not expecting much in dividends but very much demanding a company expand year over year). In other words, I don't think the stock market is a good metric of the average company. It might be a good metric of overall market capital, though, since the stock market seems to tie up a lot of capital.
There are taxes paid on on every salary of every employee, including the CEO's and other exceutive's salaries, which are probably all in the highest bracket. Gains on stocks are taxed, and dividend payouts are taxed as income.
And? Clearly choosing who or what to tax is a rather subjective thing, with an intent to shape the future not only in who you take money from but making sure the money taken scales to the spending demands of a group that is covered. To that end, if corporations have significant sway in state or federal spending, trade agreement, etc, then there's little reason to believe they shouldn't be taxed something for that burden.
Profits the company makes and doesn't pay out in dividends or salaries is used for company expansion. Why tax that?
Read above. Your same argument could be said on why no one could be taxed anything or anything because more money equals either more expansion and more spending. But, do you really support expansion and spending for expansion and spending sake? Or is there some objective of improving the economy? If it's the latter, I'd suggest actually showing how or why corporations should be given special privilege. And if it's merely the idea that everything should be flat and "fair", consider how fair it'd be to take half the food from a near starving person and half the food from a very overly fed person.
That's the exact problem we have in the USA, and we already have the highest corporate tax rate in the world. Of course these international companies are doing everything they can to get around it. Would you rather them just move their entire company offshore? It's hard to compete when your international competitors have such a large tax advantage.
Last I checked, a lot of corporations have off-shored a lot of their operations to other countries, least of which is because and most of which because of more lax ecology laws (you can pollute as much as you want anywhere in some places) and lower wages (because first world countries inherently have first world costs). As it stands, it'd seem some corporations are now more off-shore management companies, with CEOs and executives who are simply unwilling to leave their first world comfort standards, even though within the paradigm of cutting costs it'd make sense to off-shore management and cut executive salaries; of course, executives of other companies/corporations are on the board of directors so it'd be a suicide pact where they'd be all condemning each other to leave the US/Europe.
The sad fact is that the US government is making (taxing) more money from these companies than any CEO is, and more than corporate profits are.
Obviously, that depends on the company. People are mostly outraged about the Twitters of the world and how so few corporations who as you claim are being taxed so badly do so little to try to throw Twitter under the bus without demanding special breaks for themselves. In short, it's hard to really give a damn about most corporations because they're designed to behave like self-serving assholes who grab on to any excuse, no matter how petty, to try to justify bettering their own circumstance.
Taxing creators of jobs isn't an incentive to expand your business. Including state corporate taxes, it's around 40% in the US, imagine how much faster companies could expand with a 67% increase in profits (0% tax).
I'd imagine little because there wouldn't likely be a significant marked increase in demand. Consumer demand seems rather saturated in most industries (you can only lust for so much food, so many plasma tvs, etc). Consequentially, I'd imagine most such companies wouldn't expand very much. Instead, most likely CEOs and executives would see bigger bonuses and share holders would demand and get bigger dividends.
"The rest of us rely on experts to explain it, someone who has seen and understood the truth and can dumb it down for us in a language we can understand"
Because of this, for its own protection, Science should be politicaly neutral in all things.
I'm not entire sure what "politically neutral" means, though. At some level, Science is both focused on the highly theoretical (particle physics comes to mind) and the rather pragmatic (GMO and hybrid crops). Inherently, a lot of funding of the highly theoretical only comes from government because businesses and private individuals are unwilling to fund such research. As such, isn't it inherent that Science is bent by the political will of government?
It is one thing for Science to say this is happening or that is happening. It's quite another for it Science to say that we should re-order our society because of it. That is not the place of Science. And because your average individual is not able to reasonably question the science without a considerable amount of effort, if at all, they are left in a position of being told, "do this becase I'm an expert".
Yes, but doesn't Science do this inherently? If Science keeps doing research that shows cigarettes are a cancer risk, don't they inherently warp the discussion about what should be done, as to ignore all that government funded research seems a waste? What if Science had instead focused more on material science that would have improved automobile construction? The issue is, at some point even if there aren't people in Science saying to do something, the line of research inherently biases people who would listen to Science to focus on change, just as there are those who listen to those in Military or those in Business to do things even if no one person tries to order things to be done.
Only when Science is perceived to have no stake in how the science is interpreted and acted upon, vis-a-vis public policy, can it be compeletely trusted by those who don't have the means to question it.
Inherently, Science is interested in the human race not being wiped out since Science is done by humans. As such, a lot of the research that focuses on harm reduction is going to be biased if nothing else in the focus Science has on such research over other things, like the risks of methane storms on Neptune. I don't think one should have complete trust really in any authority, be it Science, Military, etc. Obviously, each have their own agenda, their inherent bias, and I do hope they try not to intentionally warp the facts as presented to others.
But, there should always be doubt and consideration and thought. Yes, this requires a reasonably amount of effort out of the average person, but that's something the average person should accept as a duty as being part of a democracy where their voice effects himself/herself and others. And that doesn't mean blindly accepting the over skepticism of some groups (those that overly paint groups as godless, liberal, conservative, a financial waste, etc). It means taking a step back, reading as much evidence as one can, and thinking for oneself. There's no real substitute for that and I think that's much more important than how "political" Science might be.
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I see. So, "animal protection" outfits are lying and defaming (which they can be sued under libel/slander laws) and committing animal abuse (which is already a criminal offense), so we need new laws to ban undercover videos (which wouldn't cover staged abuse films, since clearly they're not undercover) because....
Next up, we can ban unpopular reporting about politicians because The Onion likes to make up wildly exaggerative satire.
I don't know. The second one seems to be enough information for most IT guys. It means either blocking external flash (except possibly through trusted partners) through all avenues including web and email or blocking flash outright. Yes, for some companies that doesn't provide enough granularity, but for the vast majority it's enough.
To make a probably bad analogy, software patches/exploits is like avoiding pregnancy. To adequately protect yourself, your best bets are to not use exploitable software at all or to take proper countermeasures before an exploit is likely to be deployed against you. Waiting on patches, scheduled or unscheduled, as some sort of salvation is attempting to race the clock to abort any possible ongoing attack.
To that end, the best protection if you want to actually use software is to actually known about the existence of exploits in software and deploy countermeasures then, not to have a patch dropped on your doorstep be it on day 1 or day 10 and only then work to deal with it as quickly as possible. That was my main point. It wasn't about the manageability of 1 vs 10 patches. Because at that level, there should already be a process in place that makes the above more a point of the degree of tedium in testing and deploying patches, not one of security. As a question of tedium, I think IT folks would best prefer software that just wasn't exploitable in the first place, although I can see month patch release as a compromise.
Well, you do realize that seeds/beans are plant ovum, right? And that fragrant gift of flowers to your loved one is a great way for them to inhale tons of plant sperm/sniffing a plant's vulva. Then there's mushrooms, which have tons of spores which are basically baby mushrooms. And there's things like cheese which are the product of an enzyme from either mammal stomachs, proteases, or apparently some vegetarian-friendly sources. Alcohol is the waste of yeast. Etc.
I'm not saying I'd be gun-ho about eat pig testicles, but that's more a psychological/cultural thing than a particularly sensical one. After all, no one really bats an eye about eating plant testicles. :/
That doesn't really make sense, though. If what you say is true and it's the patch itself that is used to make the exploit, it doesn't matter if you release the patch on day 1 or day 10. It'll still be patch day + 6 hours before an exploit is in the wild. The real issue, actually, is not telling IT folks about the exploit (not necessarily details but enough to know to not use the product or to use a work around to limit/block the exploit) before the patch is released. Presuming that it takes days between announcing there's an exploit and releasing the patch, that should give IT folks the time to mitigate the risk and then deal with the patch when it comes. All a vendor having a time table does is allow them to group many exploits together to allow them to pretend the amount of exploits that exist are smaller than there are. IT folk, having to deal with multiple vendors with multiple patch day schedules, have to develop their own schedule for accepting patches, testing them, and applying them, anyways, so I don't really see how it helps them.
Which still means telling IT folk about the exploit and not waiting for the patch to actually be made. As much as the exploit might be the wild, that doesn't mean every black hat has enough information about the exploit to use it. Hence, releasing the patch to everyone still has a lot of the above mentioned +6 hour risk.
If flip-flopping in American politics were generally a byproduct of "adapting your position to changing realities" and not "voting for government spending towards my constituents to increase my reelection chances, pledges about supporting less government spending or statements of a core belief in the futility of government involvement in anything economic be damned" or "voting for more unsupervised government intrusion, despite my claims that such government supervision is evil", I'd agree. Oddly enough, of course, the American propaganda I most associate with "flip-flopping" was the former. The latter doesn't get called out as much because it's SOP, and few in Washington act like they really want to change things.
I entirely agree. This all does sound like something that should be worked into the OS in a more generic fashion. Certainly, there's lots of programs that strive to be clever when it comes to caching one thing or another, be it textures for models, web pages, etc. The only thing I can think of that might work generically is a combination of mmap to allocate a memory area as transient and removable at will by the OS and a means to mark a mmap area as non-transient when its used then transient again when done.
That still requires some work on the application side, but it removes a lot of the guess work of what should be removed. Unfortunately, it also still leaves the burden on what to add or how much to attempt to add to this transient memory pool. I don't see a real way around this since in many ways virtual memory and swap space were designed primarily to try to magically solve those dilemmas by just allowing programs to allocate as much as they want. And obviously, that just leads to heavy swapping at time which is brutally inefficient. :/ At some level, it'd seem like the most effective approach would require giving the OS the opportunity to call back into applications to tell it when to fill its OS granted cache space and further when it was going to lose some of that cache. Effectively, that'd be a per-app balloon driver.
Of course, with something like Firefox, it'd seem a better approach anyways would be multiple processes (to avoid internal fragmentation and allow for cleaning dangling handles given how buggy web browser are) and a centralized cache manager much like Chrome.
User: Ack! My account!
Sony: Yeah, it was trashed by those three guys. I think they were called the "Something Brothers".
User: You were watching?
Sony: Uh-huh!
User: Then Sony, why didn't you tell me about it?
Sony: But I did tell you. I told you just now!
(Full pardons to Cowboy Bebop...)
So, he was the last play the CIA bothered to look? And perhaps Pakistani intelligence as well, presumably they were trying?
I didn't realize Pakistani intelligence was a suborganization of the CIA and hence the CIA was fully reliant upon them for intelligence gathering. Oh, right, they're not. Yes, Pakistani intelligence not helping or outright hindering CIA efforts certainly is something that could get in the CIA's way, but the CIA still managed to find OBL and it sounds like it finding or not finding OBL had really nothing to do with Pakistani intelligence except in so far as Pakistani intelligence might have known and not bothered to tell the CIA. So, great, we can fault Pakistani intelligence for being unhelpful. But, again, that doesn't explain why it took the CIA so long on its own to find OBL.
Let's see how well of a false history world I'm living in. The Taliban were semi-rulers over a bunch of war lords in Afghanistan. Some of those war lords were sheltering bin Laden and his followers. If the Taliban had tried to simply went along, blindly, with the US's request, bin Laden would have likely been hidden by the war lords in much the same way he was hidden by the war lords when the US came in or how he was sheltered in Pakistan. However, the Taliban was an evil theocracy with views the US didn't like. The Taliban didn't exactly morn 9/11, either. So, we went into Afghanistan with anger in our hearts to destroy the Taliban, as a bin Laden ally, because we hated them and that action likely aided bin Laden in escaping--I say this because we could have, oh, gathered intelligence for months or years then sent in a strike team with say two black hawk helicopters resulting in a much quick capture time for bin Laden.
Meanwhile, recently bin Laden was possibly found--we had only circumstantial evidence of his position--and possibly sheltered by yet another country, this time Pakistan, who was been receiving financial aid for around a decade specifically to find and turn over bin Laden and his allies. Instead of making threats against Pakistan, ordering bin Laden handed over, etc, we sent in a strike team because we apparently didn't trust the Pakistani government enough.
There seems to be a connection there, and it seems to revolve around bin Laden, a lack of trust of governments in the region, and the choice of action in dealing with the capture of an individual. Of course, it's too simply to say that because bin Laden and al Qaeda aren't synonymous. Invading Afghanistan has certainly resulted in the death of many al Qaeda members. If that was the goal, well, even Pakistan's failing to hand over bin Laden isn't a big deal because he's more a figurehead then anything--his death meaning the need for a replacement figurehead, not a death or real harm to the organization.
In the end, it seems we went after al Qaeda not because they killed so many of our people but because they had the audacity to attempt such a thing and actually succeeded. And we didn't simply attack the Taliban because they were shelterers of our enemies but because they had the audacity to not bend to our will through either money or threat of force. A war or two do not seem the appropriate response except as a means to force other countries or organizations to respect the authority of the US in the world.
The more pragmatic response would seem to be more akin to what Mossad does. It's dirtier and eviler in many ways, but we're already there in many ways with the CIA. We've been there for decades.
So, I guess I really just don't understand things at all.
So...Pakistan was bribed and coerced into helping the US find and capture bin Laden, which is precisely why the CIA failed for 9 years. Oh, right, none of that matters to the point that the CIA failed for 9 years.
Yes, while most of Afghanistan pre-9/11 was war lord wilderness, only a sliver of Pakistan was. To appease that group (and its followers in the government), very little work was done to directly attack Al Qadea in that sliver. But, Pakistan kept being pushed by the US and eventually started taking actual action, which resulted in Al Qadea finally responding with attacks in 2007 (Bhutto's assassination, possibly) and later. So, only after that point would I see Pakistan's government actually really caring about Al Qadea as a threat. Of course, none of that against explains why the US failed in finding and capturing bin Laden.
And the US "knew" bin Laden was in Pakistan, yet it wasn't until after the raid on the compound that they were certain bin Laden was there. Leon Panetta even made it very clear in a recent interview that the belief that bin Laden was there was based entirely on circumstantial evidence. There was no direct proof. But, yea, I'm sure a few Pakistani military academy troops, from the virtue of being nearer, would intrinsically do a better job.
In short, no matter how much of a case you can make that Pakistan could and should have done a better job, it's still deflecting from the real point that US Intelligence took over 9 years to find bin Laden. The failure of Pakistan, taken in that perspective, seems a rather moot point. After all, Pakistan isn't exactly a super power, didn't until more recently even have a personal interest in finding bin Laden, and if Pakistan was as untrustworthy in relaying information as you imply then actually relying upon them in the hunt was mildly foolish at best if not outright fool hearty. The point isn't that Pakistan is excused because it did a piss-poor job. It's that Pakistan's piss-poor job doesn't excuse the US's piss-poor job, especially if you're seeking to find someone to blame. Personally, I'm not.
Off-topic, I know, but it reminds me of how US Senators are trying to scapegoat Pakistan over not finding and handing over bin Laden. Last I checked, bin Laden's organization attacked the US and it was the US who was actively pursuing bin Laden for over 9 years. That Pakistan might not have found him in 5 years seems a moot point. And that doesn't even begin to point out how quickly we blamed the Taliban when they couldn't (or wouldn't, since it might upset their delicate power balance with the war lords) find and hand over bin Laden in a few months.
Of course, these are politicians I'm talking about. Expecting some sort of responsibility or accountability out of them is like expecting responsibility or accountability out of a company. But, oh no, we should never regulate companies. That would interfere with the free market and then those companies wouldn't be quite as efficient!
But, that's precisely Woz's point. If RCA wants to have a patent on LCD technology, that's great. But it should be used to prevent others from cloning their commercially viable LCD technology, not to inhibit Sharp from coming up with commercially viable technology or charging Sharp precisely because Sharp, in making commercially viable technology, ran across one of the obvious problems and solutions which a company like RCA ran into earlier when they failed to make commercially viable LCD technology--not to say RCA ever did either of these things with Sharp.
In essence, Woz seems to be arguing against being able to patent basic research or failed products. I can't say I entirely disagree with him. However, I do feel that one has to consider that sometimes products fail because they weren't adequately capitalized. For example, if Apple had just happened to not manage to obtain enough investors for the Apple II development and production because there was a short-term slump in the economy, the Apple II would have quite possibly been a failure. If another company, say IBM, had then decided to clone the Apple II or something very similar to it, I might not sure Woz would be particularly agreeable to that; I'm a bit conflicted on that myself.
At least in the RCA case, it sounds like a much more clear example of decades of relatively obvious development for which RCA didn't work hard enough on utilizing in their own products, at least within the personal computer industry sphere. After all, there's no clear reason RCA couldn't have made an "RCA II" before Apple did, especially given they already had the patent for a problem in development. Instead, RCA wasn't focused as heavily on computer development and exploited the patent system not in protecting their own products but in taxing someone else's. That clearly doesn't have much to do with a goal to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings"; after all, the character-generator was invented multiple times but exclusive rights were only granted to one of the inventors who wasn't even using it in a way that would particularly promote the progress of science or the useful arts.
Granted, that's definitely an issue with Linux if you want that sort of thing.
Actually, there's plenty of people who cried foul when WIndows 98 went EOL as the Win NT line dropped a lot of DOS support as well as VDX and other things. Beyond that, Windows 98 is a much leaner way to create a Win32 environment for running programs in a VM. So long as you don't connect to the internet in the VM you're probably fine, but otherwise the lack of security updates is a concern.
Invariably, that's MS's choice. And it's that choice that makes people like me avoid Windows as their main OS.
Exactly. And if Microsoft doesn't want to maintain backwards compatibility, another form of supporting 10 year old software, that's their choice as well. I doubt they'd do something that stupid. But, then, I don't see why they're so inclined to push people to switch from XP anyways. So long as they're still making the same amount of money selling XP as Vista or 7, the only real issue I can think of is that XP might be more costly to support. That seems likely, but only a marginal cost.
The rest I can only presume is programmer and manager hubris, of the sort that is unwilling to support programs people like in favor of creating and supporting new things. But, that's part of the attitude that sees Linux distros unwilling to stick with supporting older versions of software. Well, except that Linux distros have the reasonable excuse that they don't direct programming of new versions/security patches for the most part and so would have to backport everything which is a huge task on a lot of programs. Meanwhile, MS does direct programming on new versions/security patches, so it's still not reasonable to think there'd be able to support multiple versions with little overhead potentially. But, I guess, it's still cheaper to just push everyone on the latest version.
You claimed that global warming researchers weren't following the tenets of science in so far as you claimed they went out of their way to avoid trying to falsify theories, which I can only deduce as being equivalent to calling them not scientists.
I understand now what you mean, but the issue is "attack on science" has a broader meaning. There are those who do no research yet claim their beliefs as science. As such, they attack science by subverting people's understanding of what is science. That clearly seems to be an attack on science.
I think that's based on a misunderstanding on my part. I think it clear you meant something like "all global warming researchers are crooked" and "all scientists who use their data have been mislead". That isn't an attack on science. It's just a rather preposterous conspiracy theory involving all global warming researchers--again, it's preposterous because oil companies would at the drop of a hat hire and pay well a global warming researcher who could actually prove this conspiracy with collected evidence, not by pecking away at emails and hoping to find evidence within the bowels of the conspiracy. That's one of the many reasons why I'm more inclined to accept the idea that global warming researchers are being taken out of context and their actions miscast. After all, when you don't have evidence on your side, what choice do you have but to smear your opponent?
You mean that he kept more bad research papers out of peer review journals than would otherwise be there? Yes, I guess in that way he caused a deception in that now one can go back and point out that peer review journals only have a handful of bad global warming research papers instead of possibly a good many bad global warming research papers. I'm not saying I don't have a problem with this, exactly. I'm just saying, I can see how it could happen without a real intent to deceive.
I see what you mean, but I thought you were speaking of legislation going forward. Obviously, I wasn't speaking of using a time machine. Honestly, I don't know of any legislation that was constructed to deal with "50 million climate refugees", and I'm pretty certain if there was it wasn't crafted with a "and then in 2015 we'll do whatever the '50 million climate refugees' scientists says in dealing with the next projected batch of refugees". As such, I'd imagine any legislation involving "climate refugees" has already effectively expired and so any new legislation involving "climate refugees" would involve a "first look". But, th
Perhaps because you're selective quoting me out of context? The line you quote comes at the end of the paragraph you quote directly below which was in response to charges that all global warming scientists destroy their original data and only release intentionally manipulated results ("massaged", as you put it, implying malicious intent), a charge the stretches well beyond the scope of the one scientist or group of scientists claiming "50 million climate refugees".
In the same way we should "take another look" at basically all source code because programmers often refer to code they write as a "hack". The idea that this hints at a conspiracy with "questions of degree" is to ignore that programmers and scientists have a jargon that taken out of context can be taken to be malicious. By the same token, the idea that one high level programmer might actively push one's own company, other companies, or other programmer friends and colleagues to avoid bad code from a bad programmer isn't a conspiracy. It's an effort of convince, yes, but there's nothing remote illegal, amoral, etc about it. You do realize conspiracies have to involve an evil act and not merely a concerted effort, right? Otherwise all organizations would be conspiracies.
Having said that, yes effort should be taken to look at all evidence that is used as a basis for legislation. That doesn't mean "another look". It means a decent first look. The general issue with legislation is not the lack of enough second looks but the lack of enough first looks. The latter would seem to be of a much higher priority if one cares about such things.
Yes and no. The main problem with Intelligent Design is that it's a faux theory. It searches for examples of things that aren't necessarily fully explained in evolution, says "it's too complex and I don't know how exactly it came about", and then rejects any other theory that gives even a partial explanation because "an Intelligent Designer made it" is a more complete answer, even if "an Intelligent Designer made it" is the sort of answer you pull out of a hat. In short, the problem with Intelligent Design is it starts with a complete answer then looks for problems. Science is fundamentally the reverse, finding a problem then looking for answers along with as you note an acceptance of falsifiability; ie, there is an acceptance in science that your best working answer for far might be wrong.
Ie, you start with the presumption that all the scientists involved in global warming research aren't scientists, already have the answer, and massage the data to produce the problem. Such implies the sort of grand conspiracy that is hard to believe, most of all because there's a lot of individuals/companies who have a vested interest in proving global warming researchers wrong (oil, coal, etc companies come to mind along with genuine scientists). If scientists by definition do science and you claim all global warming scientists aren't doing science, how is such not an attack on science/scientists?
Correct. That's the appropriate response. In the future, claims of ten millions of "climate refugees" will be even further scrutinized, as they should be.
Correct. The theory there would be 50 million climate refugees in the next five years is false and should be disregarded. The theory there's climate change is still going strong and should be well regarded because the long-term temperature data still strongly supports that. Thankfully, I'm sure you're not the type of person who would conflate the two theories and use the falseness of one to imply the falseness of the other.
Sure, we live in a world where we'd expect to see arid land be arid, untreated water to be full of pathogens that make people sick, various simple ailments that left untreated result in long-term debilitating disease, etc but give me money and power for irrigation; sanitation, regulating adequate drainage, and mandating water treatment; paying for doctors and the development and buying of medicine; etc and I'll put a stop to it!
Nah, fuck it. If it's natural, it must be better!
Because so many problems of the Information Age seem to be the product of an anti-Google dictatorship (ie, a monopoly or cartel or whatever withholding information either entirely or requiring fees and going about with the threat or act of lawsuits to enforce such fees being paid).
Yes, it's quite easy to make it the case that one's official line is mostly developed by one's own employees if one choses to incorporate one's own employees' contributions over outsiders' contributions. This is precisely why the Go-OO/LibreOffice fork formed and is precisely why when Oracle changed its rules to be even more restrictive than Sun was there was enough of a push that people wanted LibreOffice to be the official fork.
In short, trying to deny "the community" as an important part of OpenOffice's future really does miss the big picture under some bizarre idea that OpenOffice is closed source and Oracle has full say on the future of the code base. The trademark may die. The brand may die. But, that doesn't mean the program won't live on if Oracle doesn't want to be a part of it.
The real question is for Oracle's future in the long term. Who wants to buy products from a company who is so willing to let a trademark and a brand die just because it's not readily profitable? It's the Oracle brand that keeps people coming back to pay them money, even more than their products themselves. That is, they've developed a reputation which is why people haven't simply switched to a free alternative to most their products. Even if most of those free alternatives were a failure to deliver, Oracle would be crippled if enough people left them for a few years. Now perhaps killing an office suite brand doesn't matter to people because Oracle does databases, but Oracle's future might not be databases. Consider how Microsoft being so stuck on the Windows brand instead of the more general concept of developing and maintaining the Microsoft brand and sub-brands is hurting them (Windows Phone, Windows Tablet, and Microsoft Zune).
Yep. That quite well explains why there's regular bragging by celebrities on their drug usage on TV and nothing happens. Nah, we just treat hackers different than celebrities than sports stars even though we can already stereotype their likely nefarious actions. And every long once in a while, there's effort to go after people even when they lie to cover their crime.
In short, it's all pretty well fucked up.
Exactly my point. What percentage of the products that you demand are already cheap and have high market penetration? How many of them are expensive and ripe for expansion/price reduction?
The majority of people want expensive products because they're expensive. That is, it's a status symbol to own the more expensive version of a product. That said, if tomorrow plasma TVs were just as expensive as LCD TVs, do you think the total number of TVs made or sold would change significantly? The only place I can see where they would are where people choose to buy more TVs to demonstrate they can afford multiple less-expensive TVs. Beyond that, I can perhaps see a small rise in the sale of TVs as people replace their "obsolete" TV with a new one and perhaps there's enough consumption there to be significant. But, I just don't see it.
Those might be great things and all, but neither are particular good arguments in general. There's more room to be said when it comes to whole industries being commoditized, which as you indirectly note tends to happen faster with more investment. But there seems to be a rather clear limit on how much a lot of products can be commoditized (computers, TVs, etc aren't getting any cheaper) given the demands for energy in production.
At best, your R&D argument has the most merit because it suggests much more room for possibilities in the unknown. The trouble is, some companies have spent insane amounts of money on R&D (Microsoft comes to mind) with very fruitless results while other companies (Google comes to mind) have much better translated smaller sums of money. Even then, there's nothing Google has so far done that's been truly revolutionary--they're an ad-based "free" service like some TV, magazines, etc of which I'd imagine in the long-term a future incarnation will be part ad-based with pay services just like most TV, magazines, etc.
In short, yes, I can see how lower taxes could by an indirect indirect path result in long-term commoditization of yet undeveloped industries. But, that's not a particularly compelling argument to drop all taxation on corporations (and shift the tax burden on to income/sales/property taxes, since it's unlikely government would or could simply shrink to meet the change). The sort of logic entails seriously considering dropping income/sale taxes (and shift the tax burden on corporations/property taxes, since it's unlikely government would or could simply shrink to meet the change) because through some indirect indirect way such might lead to various religious and cultural changes that radical improve the well-being of many people.
Um, no. At some point, even at $0, people don't want some things even though there's abundant supply. That's why there's a thing called "trash" or "junk". Of course, that classification can usually change if there's enough resourcefulness in seeing a cheap supply of "worthless" things. Then again, some things (many types of nuclear waste, high lead soil, etc) are pretty useful for the foreseeable future.
You're right. I was thinking of the US/Europe markets being saturated, but obviously there's the rest of the world which still has very high demand in many areas for which greater supply would be beneficial. The thing is, who will fill that supply if corporations do have lower taxes? Well, odds are good they'll start up more manufacturing plants in non-US/Europe parts of the world, as that'd be closer to the customers and the cheap employees. So, that sounds great for lots of other countries, but as far as realized demand in the US/Europe, I'd imagine but a small increase as costs went down. Similarly, I'd imagine a rather negligible change in employment.
One small thing. I was under the impression a lot of new companies entered the stock market precisely because the stock market was there for expanding companies (lots of investors not expecting much in dividends but very much demanding a company expand year over year). In other words, I don't think the stock market is a good metric of the average company. It might be a good metric of overall market capital, though, since the stock market seems to tie up a lot of capital.
And? Clearly choosing who or what to tax is a rather subjective thing, with an intent to shape the future not only in who you take money from but making sure the money taken scales to the spending demands of a group that is covered. To that end, if corporations have significant sway in state or federal spending, trade agreement, etc, then there's little reason to believe they shouldn't be taxed something for that burden.
Read above. Your same argument could be said on why no one could be taxed anything or anything because more money equals either more expansion and more spending. But, do you really support expansion and spending for expansion and spending sake? Or is there some objective of improving the economy? If it's the latter, I'd suggest actually showing how or why corporations should be given special privilege. And if it's merely the idea that everything should be flat and "fair", consider how fair it'd be to take half the food from a near starving person and half the food from a very overly fed person.
Last I checked, a lot of corporations have off-shored a lot of their operations to other countries, least of which is because and most of which because of more lax ecology laws (you can pollute as much as you want anywhere in some places) and lower wages (because first world countries inherently have first world costs). As it stands, it'd seem some corporations are now more off-shore management companies, with CEOs and executives who are simply unwilling to leave their first world comfort standards, even though within the paradigm of cutting costs it'd make sense to off-shore management and cut executive salaries; of course, executives of other companies/corporations are on the board of directors so it'd be a suicide pact where they'd be all condemning each other to leave the US/Europe.
Obviously, that depends on the company. People are mostly outraged about the Twitters of the world and how so few corporations who as you claim are being taxed so badly do so little to try to throw Twitter under the bus without demanding special breaks for themselves. In short, it's hard to really give a damn about most corporations because they're designed to behave like self-serving assholes who grab on to any excuse, no matter how petty, to try to justify bettering their own circumstance.
I'd imagine little because there wouldn't likely be a significant marked increase in demand. Consumer demand seems rather saturated in most industries (you can only lust for so much food, so many plasma tvs, etc). Consequentially, I'd imagine most such companies wouldn't expand very much. Instead, most likely CEOs and executives would see bigger bonuses and share holders would demand and get bigger dividends.
I'm not entire sure what "politically neutral" means, though. At some level, Science is both focused on the highly theoretical (particle physics comes to mind) and the rather pragmatic (GMO and hybrid crops). Inherently, a lot of funding of the highly theoretical only comes from government because businesses and private individuals are unwilling to fund such research. As such, isn't it inherent that Science is bent by the political will of government?
Yes, but doesn't Science do this inherently? If Science keeps doing research that shows cigarettes are a cancer risk, don't they inherently warp the discussion about what should be done, as to ignore all that government funded research seems a waste? What if Science had instead focused more on material science that would have improved automobile construction? The issue is, at some point even if there aren't people in Science saying to do something, the line of research inherently biases people who would listen to Science to focus on change, just as there are those who listen to those in Military or those in Business to do things even if no one person tries to order things to be done.
Inherently, Science is interested in the human race not being wiped out since Science is done by humans. As such, a lot of the research that focuses on harm reduction is going to be biased if nothing else in the focus Science has on such research over other things, like the risks of methane storms on Neptune. I don't think one should have complete trust really in any authority, be it Science, Military, etc. Obviously, each have their own agenda, their inherent bias, and I do hope they try not to intentionally warp the facts as presented to others.
But, there should always be doubt and consideration and thought. Yes, this requires a reasonably amount of effort out of the average person, but that's something the average person should accept as a duty as being part of a democracy where their voice effects himself/herself and others. And that doesn't mean blindly accepting the over skepticism of some groups (those that overly paint groups as godless, liberal, conservative, a financial waste, etc). It means taking a step back, reading as much evidence as one can, and thinking for oneself. There's no real substitute for that and I think that's much more important than how "political" Science might be.