Any scientist or group of scientists that could produce a body of work demonstrating that AGW is not happening would make a fucking fortune. There is no incentive for climate scientists to "toe a party line", and a gigantic carrot hanging out there for any of them that don't. Yet still the consensus remains.
They would make barely a dime. Research into a phenomenon that endangers the planet gets lots of research funding (logically). But if you prove it's not happening... nobody's going to give you money to keep researching it, because you just proved it's not a problem.
Now look at the institutions receiving research grant money for global warming. They keep getting more and more funding as the issue becomes higher profile. The researchers get paid from this money. Plus they get more and more prestige as being the leaders in the field. Don't you think retaining their jobs and prestige is a huge incentive to "toe a party line"? Even if it's not an intentional deception, don't you think it might cloud their judgment?
I'm not saying these guys are doing anything malicious. But neither are they neutral, independent observers of the situation. They've got a lot on the line.
The suggestion that a random person of the street could make useful comments on the validity of either without years of study is utterly laughable.
Nobody's suggesting you pick someone at random. But there probably is some person, somewhere, without a PhD in Physics who has educated themselves enough to make a constructive contribution. For your physics problem, maybe they have a PhD in Mathematics, which (depending on their specialty) might go a long way. For AGW, maybe they're a statistician.
But more to the point, science is science because it relies on empirical validation. Others can examine the evidence. They can attempt to replicate the experimental data on their own. They need not rely merely on the authority of a given practitioner. Because that way lies religion.
Most "Christians" don't believe much of what "Christ" said.
I'm not so sure they're disagreeing with Christ, so much as disagreeing with each other over what He actually said, given that it was over 2000 years ago and they didn't have video cameras.
One challenge is the fact that the Bible has been translated through various languages to get to the (often) English text many of us read today. Who knows how many translation errors have crept in.
Another is that sometimes the speech is literal, and sometimes figurative, and it can be difficult to figure out which he meant. (especially 2000 years later in a rather different societal context).
Hence we have all sorts of very devout Christians who believe very different things about what Christ said (not to mention prior events like the creation).
What exactly is wrong with diminishing our emissions of CO2? It also usually comes with a more power-efficient, less polluting source of energy. Whether you think AGW is bullshit or a message for heaven, following the suggested courses of action is still good.
The problem with erring on the side of reducing CO2 is that it is not necessarily the "safe" side, because:
1. You have to reduce CO2 emissions by huge amounts to affect the climate significantly.
2. Carbon-based energy is cheap. None of the alternatives (currently) come even close to being competitive.
3. The entire economy relies on cheap energy. If you transition to other sources at the pace desired by the activists, you will cause serious economic harm to billions of people, as every single good and service becomes much more expensive.
This is why we have not seen much global action to reduce CO2.
IMHO the prudent approach is to invest heavily in research to make alternative fuels more cost-effective. That way if and when you do make the switch, it's not such an economically damaging thing. And it gives time for the science to mature and the emotions to cool.
It is clear to me that religious people cannot be trusted. They are liars. They lie to themselves. They CHOOSE to believe in fantasy instead of established, observable facts.
I've seen plenty of non-religious people lie to others, themselves, and choose to believe in fantasy instead of observable facts too.
People tell themselves this time is their last drink, last affair, last lie. They tell their spouse they love them, even as they're cheating on that spouse. They tell themselves their spouse loves them even when they know he/she sleeps around. They tell themselves a charismatic political leader is going to solve all their problems.
They tell themselves that people with different world views are deceitful and selfish, while those who agree are honest and altruistic.
You don't need to be religious to have beliefs untethered to reality.
Putting an import duty on a manufactured good produced by child labor using business practices which despoil the environment is more than fair.
So do you suppose that the parents in these countries care less about their own children than we do? Or might they be choosing the least of the available evils to prevent their family from starving?
We've pressured some countries to ban child labor with disastrous unintended consequences. One big one is an increase in child prostitution, drug dealing, etc, since they can't survive without the kids' income and all the legitimate work is now illegal. A life of crime is far more dangerous to the kids than even the poor conditions they find in factories or on family farms.
It's important to make sure the adults in these countries can earn enough to live before sanctioning them for child labor. I worry that our politicians, eager to curry favor with local industry, will seize on pushing other countries to use the same laws we have as an excuse for protectionism. And as a result we'll destroy those kids' lives in the name of saving them - either by sanctions that destroy their source of income, or by labor laws that push them into prostitution.
Ditto for environmental concerns. The Western world has spent hundreds of years polluting the planet in the name of economic expansion. Now we're rich enough we can afford to spend more so we pollute less. These Third World countries can't. They're struggling just to survive and don't have extra cash to have the same environmental laws we do. It seems hypocritical to punish these people for doing the exact same thing we did when we were in their shoes.
Agreed the hyperbole and untruths about the bill (death panels, etc) have gotten out of hand.
I agree that most of the bill is reasonably centrist now. But I think the amount of effort expended trying to get a government-run insurance plan turned a lot of people against the bill before this provision was removed.
A lot of negotiations rely on feeling like the other side will take your concerns seriously, and that you can trust their motivations. When the leadership pushed so hard for the government-run insurance, which they knew was vehemently opposed by several moderate Democrats and virtually all the Republicans, they gave the appearance of wanting to simply ram through their own preferences. This made it much more difficult for the others to work together with them and compromise. (The similar history of poor cooperation and rancor in the Bush years didn't help either).
And when so much of the debate was consumed with contentious debate over the "public option", that shaped perception of the bill as a whole, even though (as Obama correctly noted) it was only one piece of the proposed reforms.
So now we have this situation where everyone's dug in their heels and nobody wants to give ground. Which is ridiculous when you consider that A) 80% of what's in the bill both sides could probably agree on, and B) while the public view of the current bill is low, everyone views the system as needing improvement. It shouldn't be this hard.
What's important to me, from a moral perspective (and these are my own, and I don't claim to speak for anyone else), is providing a minimum standard of care for those in need so that we aren't leaving people to die on the streets. Above that system we'll always have the capitalist system wherein those who are better off can go elsewhere to get more care. But I see it as important, morally, culturally, and economically, to raise the bottom and limit how far people can fall.
I think most in the US share this view (myself included).
But we have a hard time getting a solution for this in the US because of two things.
1. The Republicans neglected this issue when they were in power. 2. Both parties over the last decade or so have adopted a political strategy of proposing the most controversial, partisan solutions to problems deliberately. This is to get the other party on record as opposing a solution to a given problem, even when the other party would support a more politically moderate solution. And since the party in power controls what legislation makes it to the floor of the Congress for a vote, the other party can't really showcase its solutions.
You saw it with the Bush tax cuts - they targeted the tax cuts specifically to those areas they knew the Democrats would oppose, so that they could label the Democrats as favoring high taxes.
And you see it with health care - the Democrats propose regulation-heavy, government-run solutions they know the Republicans would oppose, so they can label the Republicans as anti-health-care.
If they would all start acting like adults, we could easily pass health-care reform to eliminate discrimination by pre-existing conditions, and subsidize those who can't otherwise afford coverage so that nobody need go without basic care.
But instead, our elected representatives spend years playing games while people suffer.
And you can't blame media companies for catering to the majority of their customers.
Sure you can. Journalism is about more than feeding the lowest common denominator. I understand the need to add some tabloid butter to your serving of journalism vegetables. And exposing more people to the world outside their little corner is good for the civic structure of our society, even if you do it as a side effect of them seeing the headlines while looking for your coverage of Paris Hilton's escapades.
But when all you put on the plate is a big pile of butter, you need to reassess whether you can really call it journalism anymore. And that's what's been happening in the news business. They've been cutting out the news because the news costs more to produce, and their income has been hurting lately. I understand it short-term, but long term they need to rediscover how to serve the sizable population of people who actually want real news. Real news, as in context, details, and the key behind-the-scenes information, not just some 30-second soundbyte from some spokeperson.
It's important for our society to be educated. And it's important for the industry not to leave this niche unserved. It may require a consolidation in the industry to fewer players, so that they have greater funds over which to amortize the cost of true journalism. But I think there is money to be made there - people are willing to pay for quality (at least if it's not available for free, which is our current but likely unsustainable condiition).
where the minority party is currently capable of pretty much stopping one branch of government from working,
Well, given that for over a year (up until a few days ago), the majority party held super-majorities in both houses capable of overcoming any possible procedural obstacles, it's an odd argument to blame the minority party for the lack of progress. The majority party had the power to pass whatever bills it wished.
What has caused lack of progress it that the liberals and moderates in the majority party couldn't agree amongst themselves about what to put in the health care legislation.
A big part of the problem is being dependent upon a bureaucracy to begin with. If someone else controls the decision of whether you get treatment or not, you're screwed. Doesn't matter who cuts the bureaucrat's paycheck, they still will think they know better than you what *you* need.
You'll still have all the horror stories about people denied care. So what will happen in the government insurance is the same thing that happened with the private insurance (HMOs). At first they try to hold the line on spending, which means they start denying you the ability to get the more expensive treatments. Which upsets everyone and creates all sort of political pressures and/or legislation about what must be covered. So then the insurers start denying less care, but have to charge people more to cover those added costs. So then you have less complaints about denied care, but more and more people who can't afford coverage at all.
So then you have to extend government subsidies to more and more people so they can get covered. But you soon get to the point where you're subsidizing nearly everyone. Subsidizing everyone is the same as subsidizing nobody - the money's just flowing out through our taxes and back in via the subsidy.
You hit the brick wall of reality that we don't have as much money in the whole system as we have health needs. The demand is effectively infinite and our funds are not.
So we are faced with a choice: either we try to centrally plan who gets what care, or we give people the amount of money we can spare for their condition and let them decide how best to spend it. Either you decide what's the best care you can get for the available money, or the bureaucrat does. But one way or the other, we're not going to get all the care we want. And that's what no politician is willing to admit to us.
The owner of said computer is negligent and should have their connection isolated until the computer engaged in infraction is cleaned.
Calling the owner negligent is assuming a lot. Don't get me wrong - plenty of them probably are. But you can have your box automatically downloading patches, run a top-tier antivirus package, avoid visiting shady websites, and still get yourself infected by some 0-day exploit served off an ad server used by a respectable website (say, CNN).
Disconnecting infected users is a worthwhile idea. Though wonder if malware writers won't adapt to that - detect disconnections or unusually slow throughput, go into a temporary hibernation, let the user show how his box isn't doing anything bad anymore, then wake up and resume.
We all know that 99.9% of these botnet zombies are all running some version of M$ windoz
That is true... but if every n00b out there starting running Linux tomorrow I can guarantee you there would be a massive upswing in Linux malware. We'd have all the same problems. No operating system, web browser, or other complex software is completely free of security holes. Nor are they likely to ever be, given that they're continually adding new features which means adding new bugs too. Botnets are so profitable their authors will simply shift their attention to exploiting whatever platform is most popular. Maybe it'll raise the bar versus Windows, but not enough to matter in the long run.
the weakest link is actually the sysadmin, who isn't enforcing appropriate password complexity, length, age, etc...
There is value in those things. There is also a point after which you get diminishing returns, and in fact may make your security worse. For example:
1. If you make the age requirement too short, then nobody can remember their passwords. So they start working around it by picking less secure passwords, writing them on stickies, or flooding your helpdesk with password-reset requests.
2. Complexity requirements are good up to a point, but when you start requiring too many different types of characters you just get people resorting to the equivalent of P4ssword! so they can actually remember the stupid thing. That may meet your complexity metric but a dictionary attack program will probably crack it quickly.
IMO we need to move away from such a heavy reliance on passwords, and towards some sort of two-factor system. When an individual has to create dozens of different passwords for their work systems, banks, retailers, email providers, and who knows what else, it becomes way too much to manage, and people take shortcuts as a result. They share passwords among different entities, or create weak passwords, etc.
Even if the business and/or customers complain about "impact", there's always a way to win the argument for establishing and enforcing IT policies that make sense. You have to be willing to save users from themselves.
This is the sort of statement that drives even security-conscious users nuts. Concern about "impact" is not "complaining". It is acknowledging that security policies can have a big impact on people's abilities to do their job effectively. A policy that makes IT sleep easier at night may also be the policy that grinds a worker's progress to a halt. Good security is a collaborative process between IT and their users to find the right balance for the circumstances.
If any progress at all is to be made, you need to fight the disease, not the symptoms. You have to ask "Why are these people doing this in the first place?" and address that as the root problem.
The first step in understanding the "why" is recognizing that "these people" are not a homogeneous group. There are several different organizations in several countries. Even the ones that call themselves "Al Qaeda" are really several different groups that adopt the same name, more like a franchise system than one organization. They don't all have the same motivations.
The second step is recognizing that these are not purely political or ideological groups. While that is the face they present to the world, and some of their members believe in such causes, there is another side to these organizations. They are criminal business enterprises, often in areas with weak governments. They smuggle drugs and other contraband internationally for profit. As a result, many of their recruits join for the same reasons people join criminal gangs in the US: profit, prestige or social acceptance, protection from other gangs.
So if you want to attack the ability of these organizations to carry out terrorist attacks, go after their ability to make money. That will reduce their ability to recruit, and their ability to finance operations.
As for solving the more ideological "root causes", there are some issues to consider:
1.. Because the groups are not purely ideological, they may not cease operations just because you do whatever political action they wanted. That drug money and prestige is hard to give up, so they may just find some other area of political disagreement and make that their new cause against the West. The blackmail may never end.
2. Some of the ideological causes are reactions to the "invasion" of a liberal Western culture into conservative societies. A lot of this has to do with the West's loose sexual values and more individualistic "do whatever you want" mindset. Short of reforming our own culture, or violating our own values through censorship, there is not a lot the West can do to prevent exposing people in these countries to our culture (even if you make the gigantic assumption that exposure to our culture is a bad thing).
3. For many of the political causes where we *could* change things, the change these folks want is unacceptable. Take, for example, the common complaint that we have troops in the Middle East. If we withdraw our troops from our Middle Eastern allies, they are now much more at the mercy of the tyrants in Iran, who is the big local power. Given the strategic importance of the area, we would find abandoning our allies unacceptable. And even if we did, that would be likely to create a nuclear arms race in the region, which is a truly scary thought
4. The other political cause some claim is a "root cause" is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While certainly this is an area where the West could (and should) do more to further negotiations, it is also the one area where we have the least power. Getting two groups of people who have been killing each other and sowing hatred for generations to stop is really hard. Worth doing, but really hard. It depends heavily on public sentiment among those two peoples for peace, as well as strong leaders in both camps. These are not things that have occurred at the same time very often (for example, there is no strong leader among the Palestinians at the moment). Also, some of the neighboring countries like Syria and Iran benefit from Israel being tied up by the conflict. They may act through their proxies to damage any peace process. So solving this problem is a long shot, and thus cannot be our (only) attempt at a solution to terrorism.
I don't mean to sound to pessimistic about our chances. I think we can do a lot against terrorism. But it will be through actions that attack these groups' abilities to operate much more than by granting them their political or religious desires.
Most "free market enthusiasts" do not define a free market as anarchy. Thus we would be perfectly fine with the government establishing an appropriate safety/testing regulation to cover things like this. There's a wide spectrum between having no police (bad), having the right amount of police (good), and having a police state (bad).
Please don't allow a vocal minority to redefine free markets as zero government intervention, rather than the minimum necessary intervention. As with most things in life, striking a balance is key.
Take your example search engine. Did you take bribes from companies to get their rankings higher? Did you artificially remove something from your search engine because you didn't like it?
Few people would object to restricting bribery. Bribery is well-defined, it's easy to avoid violating such a rule, and the rule would do little to restrict innovation.
But your next sentence illustrates the potential pitfalls of a regulatory scheme on search. What constitutes "artificially removing" something - is it human intervention? What type of not-liking a result is permissible grounds for action - for example, what if the human intervention is making the results more relevant to the intended audience? Who gets to define the intended audience? Who gets to define relevancy or quality of results? Who gets to determine whether the intervention was appropriate? If we define the offense as human interference with the algorithmic results, then what about an algorithmic tweak that accomplishes the same result? You can usually devise some algorithm to get the result you want. Can someone sue you every time your intervention drops their rankings? Even if they would lose the case, you still spend vast sums of money on your legal defense.
Once you get lawyers involved in micromanaging technology, you force technology companies to spend their limited resources hiring lawyers to understand increasingly complex rules, hiring lawyers to defend against inevitable lawsuits, hiring lawyers to lobby the regulators for more favorable terms, buying legal insurance, employing burdensome processes and procedures to ensure compliance with either the law, or certification regimes intended to reduce the risk of violating a regulation, etc. All these are ways of spending money on things that don't create innovations or products people want.
Regulations are best-suited to circumstances that don't change frequently and that have demonstrated serious problems society needs to address. Search is neither - it's a space that is continually innovating and changing, and lacks any significant cases of search engines abusing their positions. Regulating search would thus be a solution in search of a problem, likely to create more headaches than it solves.
I think the editorial is not due to their ideological bent, but rather about big media's desire to reduce the power of search engines. Consider:
1. The big newspapers used to have little competition, as their markets were heavily localized. The Internet, and specifically news search and aggregation services like Google, have reversed that dynamic. Newspapers are now heavily dependent on companies like Google to drive online traffic (and thus ad revenue) to them, rather than to their many competitors. They resent this loss of power greatly.
2. The big newspapers would like to get back to the old model where their brand was central to the news consumer, rather than being just one of many commodity suppliers. This requires an assault on the operators of news search and aggregation. Hence Ruport Murdoch's recent noises about how papers should collectively delist from Google.
3. But the newspapers realize that if they get in a battle with the major search engines, they could lose big. One, since the search engine is most people's first stop on the Internet, this gives the engines an incredibly powerful platform to push an editorial perspective, such as one critical of big media. If not over-used, this could be an effective weapon that media companies would like the government to neutralize. Second, if a big newspaper got in a fight with a big search engine, it would be trivial for the search engine to simply stop listing results from that site. If Google stopped listing content from the NY Times on Google News or its search results, most Google users wouldn't care as there are still many other sources of the same information available. But the NY Times would take a big hit to ad revenue.
That's why the NY Times is calling for government restrictions on search operators. It's to neutralize the search companies' abilities to fight back in the upcoming conflict.
You're right, how dare websites be economically viable.
The Wallstreet Journal, Slashdot, Google, Youtube, Facebook, and the smaller (and much smaller) websites should be free to view AND advertising free.
Nobody said anything of the sort. If I'm getting a product for free, I don't mind the inclusion of many ads because I understand someone's gotta pay the piper. Similarly, I don't mind paying a subscription fee for a quality publication that has at most a handful of ads. For example, I happily subscribe to the Wall Street Journal.
What annoys me is when the publisher double-dips by charging me a hefty subscription fee AND then provides a product that's more advertising than substance.
For example, I pay a sizable sum for satellite TV. Yet every channel has tons of ads, making use of a DVR a necessity to get a decent viewing experience. What kind of customer experience requires users to employ a device to throw away half the "content"? If it weren't for the fact that the satellite company has a monopoly that makes them my only option for watching my original hometown's NFL games, I wouldn't put up with it.
the now-obvious idea that when there are large gender imbalances, it's probably sexism at root
And that claim is far from obviously true to many of us.
Don't get me wrong - there is sexism out there. I just think it's a stretch to assume that a large gender imbalance for a given profession is necessarily because of actual sexism.
There are so many factors involved - risk tolerance, work-life balance, money, prestige, community, etc. that it seems like a massive leap of faith to say that for every issue people's preferences will distribute exactly evenly across gender lines. I just don't think we know enough about the biology, the societal influences, or their interaction to make such assertions.
No, I don't buy that. When you just throw up your hands and say they're all like that you basically let the problem continue. You have to hold people and groups accountable for their actions.
We should hold people accountable for their own actions. Holding someone accountable for someone else's actions is a totally different beast.
If you fail to pay your taxes (e.g.. Obama's Treasury Secretary Geitner) or accept a bribe (e.g.. Democratic Congressman Jefferson), you should pay the consequences, not me. Even if we're the member of the same political party. Sharing a view on foreign policy, bank bailouts, or job creation doesn't make someone responsible for another's transgressions.
Part of why we have such rancor in our politics is that people are willing to believe this idea that the folks who disagree (namely The Other Party) must be evil or unethical or uncaring or bought off. Most people are not these things, they just have genuine differences of opinion on how to solve problems or what problems government ought to be solving. All these personal attacks are a just a distraction from the real issues at hand.
Personally, when a politician starts spewing personal attacks, I start wondering what problems in their own policies they're trying to distract us from. That rule of thumb seems to have worked well for both parties over the past decade or so.
So what conclusion do you draw from that study? That the gender ratio difference in programming is natural and not worth challenging?
We should challenge gender ratios IF they are the result of discrimination (including societal norms that say a given gender cannot or should not take a given profession).
But that is a big "if". The study shows that we should be careful not to assume that we know the cause of differing gender distributions, and not to assume that identical distributions should necessarily be our societal goal. If a non-50/50 distribution is due to people expressing their own career preferences (whether influenced by biology or simply their personal tastes), free from discrimination, then that's perfectly acceptable.
It's a job where the President consults you for your opinion and takes action based on your advice.
I suspect only the first part of that statement is really true, which is why this isn't a good job for those who want to actually solve the problems, not just pontificate on how one could solve the problems. I say this because:
1. Fundamentally cyber is not a Presidential priority at this time. Jobs, health care, global warming, education - those are the things the President will be judged on, and thus what he is going to prioritize. Your advice will likely be heard, but it is unlikely the power of the presidency will be used to fight for the difficult decisions you will ask for. The political capital is simply needed elsewhere.
2. Because you don't get massive government bureaucracies to change course easily. You certainly don't get it to happen if you can't control anyone's budget allocations and lack any statutory authority over those involved. If your recommendations are inconvenient (say they involve contested turf between two agencies) the bureaucracies involved can just stall until you're gone. Yet an appropriate response to cyber requires close coordination among those very agencies.
Mental illness runs in the family and affects economic status.
True enough.
So poor parents pass on their mentally ill genes to their kids thus their kids are more likely to be mentally ill and on some kind of treatment. My own personal experience registers this is as true. I see a lot of emotional problems, especially mood instability, with poorer people
An alternative explanation is that if you have poor emotional skills - unable to control your own emotions or understand those of others - you are less likely to succeed. And lacking emotional skills yourself, you are unable to teach your kids those skills.
While it could be genetic, it could equally be a function of poor parenting. There are probably plenty of cases in both categories, so I'd urge caution before assuming it's a genetic problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Any scientist or group of scientists that could produce a body of work demonstrating that AGW is not happening would make a fucking fortune. There is no incentive for climate scientists to "toe a party line", and a gigantic carrot hanging out there for any of them that don't. Yet still the consensus remains.
They would make barely a dime. Research into a phenomenon that endangers the planet gets lots of research funding (logically). But if you prove it's not happening... nobody's going to give you money to keep researching it, because you just proved it's not a problem.
Now look at the institutions receiving research grant money for global warming. They keep getting more and more funding as the issue becomes higher profile. The researchers get paid from this money. Plus they get more and more prestige as being the leaders in the field. Don't you think retaining their jobs and prestige is a huge incentive to "toe a party line"? Even if it's not an intentional deception, don't you think it might cloud their judgment?
I'm not saying these guys are doing anything malicious. But neither are they neutral, independent observers of the situation. They've got a lot on the line.
The suggestion that a random person of the street could make useful comments on the validity of either without years of study is utterly laughable.
Nobody's suggesting you pick someone at random. But there probably is some person, somewhere, without a PhD in Physics who has educated themselves enough to make a constructive contribution. For your physics problem, maybe they have a PhD in Mathematics, which (depending on their specialty) might go a long way. For AGW, maybe they're a statistician.
But more to the point, science is science because it relies on empirical validation. Others can examine the evidence. They can attempt to replicate the experimental data on their own. They need not rely merely on the authority of a given practitioner. Because that way lies religion.
Most "Christians" don't believe much of what "Christ" said.
I'm not so sure they're disagreeing with Christ, so much as disagreeing with each other over what He actually said, given that it was over 2000 years ago and they didn't have video cameras.
One challenge is the fact that the Bible has been translated through various languages to get to the (often) English text many of us read today. Who knows how many translation errors have crept in.
Another is that sometimes the speech is literal, and sometimes figurative, and it can be difficult to figure out which he meant. (especially 2000 years later in a rather different societal context).
Hence we have all sorts of very devout Christians who believe very different things about what Christ said (not to mention prior events like the creation).
What exactly is wrong with diminishing our emissions of CO2? It also usually comes with a more power-efficient, less polluting source of energy. Whether you think AGW is bullshit or a message for heaven, following the suggested courses of action is still good.
The problem with erring on the side of reducing CO2 is that it is not necessarily the "safe" side, because:
1. You have to reduce CO2 emissions by huge amounts to affect the climate significantly.
2. Carbon-based energy is cheap. None of the alternatives (currently) come even close to being competitive.
3. The entire economy relies on cheap energy. If you transition to other sources at the pace desired by the activists, you will cause serious economic harm to billions of people, as every single good and service becomes much more expensive.
This is why we have not seen much global action to reduce CO2.
IMHO the prudent approach is to invest heavily in research to make alternative fuels more cost-effective. That way if and when you do make the switch, it's not such an economically damaging thing. And it gives time for the science to mature and the emotions to cool.
It is clear to me that religious people cannot be trusted. They are liars. They lie to themselves. They CHOOSE to believe in fantasy instead of established, observable facts.
I've seen plenty of non-religious people lie to others, themselves, and choose to believe in fantasy instead of observable facts too.
People tell themselves this time is their last drink, last affair, last lie. They tell their spouse they love them, even as they're cheating on that spouse. They tell themselves their spouse loves them even when they know he/she sleeps around. They tell themselves a charismatic political leader is going to solve all their problems.
They tell themselves that people with different world views are deceitful and selfish, while those who agree are honest and altruistic.
You don't need to be religious to have beliefs untethered to reality.
Putting an import duty on a manufactured good produced by child labor using business practices which despoil the environment is more than fair.
So do you suppose that the parents in these countries care less about their own children than we do? Or might they be choosing the least of the available evils to prevent their family from starving?
We've pressured some countries to ban child labor with disastrous unintended consequences. One big one is an increase in child prostitution, drug dealing, etc, since they can't survive without the kids' income and all the legitimate work is now illegal. A life of crime is far more dangerous to the kids than even the poor conditions they find in factories or on family farms.
It's important to make sure the adults in these countries can earn enough to live before sanctioning them for child labor. I worry that our politicians, eager to curry favor with local industry, will seize on pushing other countries to use the same laws we have as an excuse for protectionism. And as a result we'll destroy those kids' lives in the name of saving them - either by sanctions that destroy their source of income, or by labor laws that push them into prostitution.
Ditto for environmental concerns. The Western world has spent hundreds of years polluting the planet in the name of economic expansion. Now we're rich enough we can afford to spend more so we pollute less. These Third World countries can't. They're struggling just to survive and don't have extra cash to have the same environmental laws we do. It seems hypocritical to punish these people for doing the exact same thing we did when we were in their shoes.
Agreed the hyperbole and untruths about the bill (death panels, etc) have gotten out of hand.
I agree that most of the bill is reasonably centrist now. But I think the amount of effort expended trying to get a government-run insurance plan turned a lot of people against the bill before this provision was removed.
A lot of negotiations rely on feeling like the other side will take your concerns seriously, and that you can trust their motivations. When the leadership pushed so hard for the government-run insurance, which they knew was vehemently opposed by several moderate Democrats and virtually all the Republicans, they gave the appearance of wanting to simply ram through their own preferences. This made it much more difficult for the others to work together with them and compromise. (The similar history of poor cooperation and rancor in the Bush years didn't help either).
And when so much of the debate was consumed with contentious debate over the "public option", that shaped perception of the bill as a whole, even though (as Obama correctly noted) it was only one piece of the proposed reforms.
So now we have this situation where everyone's dug in their heels and nobody wants to give ground. Which is ridiculous when you consider that A) 80% of what's in the bill both sides could probably agree on, and B) while the public view of the current bill is low, everyone views the system as needing improvement. It shouldn't be this hard.
What's important to me, from a moral perspective (and these are my own, and I don't claim to speak for anyone else), is providing a minimum standard of care for those in need so that we aren't leaving people to die on the streets. Above that system we'll always have the capitalist system wherein those who are better off can go elsewhere to get more care. But I see it as important, morally, culturally, and economically, to raise the bottom and limit how far people can fall.
I think most in the US share this view (myself included).
But we have a hard time getting a solution for this in the US because of two things.
1. The Republicans neglected this issue when they were in power.
2. Both parties over the last decade or so have adopted a political strategy of proposing the most controversial, partisan solutions to problems deliberately. This is to get the other party on record as opposing a solution to a given problem, even when the other party would support a more politically moderate solution. And since the party in power controls what legislation makes it to the floor of the Congress for a vote, the other party can't really showcase its solutions.
You saw it with the Bush tax cuts - they targeted the tax cuts specifically to those areas they knew the Democrats would oppose, so that they could label the Democrats as favoring high taxes.
And you see it with health care - the Democrats propose regulation-heavy, government-run solutions they know the Republicans would oppose, so they can label the Republicans as anti-health-care.
If they would all start acting like adults, we could easily pass health-care reform to eliminate discrimination by pre-existing conditions, and subsidize those who can't otherwise afford coverage so that nobody need go without basic care.
But instead, our elected representatives spend years playing games while people suffer.
And you can't blame media companies for catering to the majority of their customers.
Sure you can. Journalism is about more than feeding the lowest common denominator. I understand the need to add some tabloid butter to your serving of journalism vegetables. And exposing more people to the world outside their little corner is good for the civic structure of our society, even if you do it as a side effect of them seeing the headlines while looking for your coverage of Paris Hilton's escapades.
But when all you put on the plate is a big pile of butter, you need to reassess whether you can really call it journalism anymore. And that's what's been happening in the news business. They've been cutting out the news because the news costs more to produce, and their income has been hurting lately. I understand it short-term, but long term they need to rediscover how to serve the sizable population of people who actually want real news. Real news, as in context, details, and the key behind-the-scenes information, not just some 30-second soundbyte from some spokeperson.
It's important for our society to be educated. And it's important for the industry not to leave this niche unserved. It may require a consolidation in the industry to fewer players, so that they have greater funds over which to amortize the cost of true journalism. But I think there is money to be made there - people are willing to pay for quality (at least if it's not available for free, which is our current but likely unsustainable condiition).
where the minority party is currently capable of pretty much stopping one branch of government from working,
Well, given that for over a year (up until a few days ago), the majority party held super-majorities in both houses capable of overcoming any possible procedural obstacles, it's an odd argument to blame the minority party for the lack of progress. The majority party had the power to pass whatever bills it wished.
What has caused lack of progress it that the liberals and moderates in the majority party couldn't agree amongst themselves about what to put in the health care legislation.
A big part of the problem is being dependent upon a bureaucracy to begin with. If someone else controls the decision of whether you get treatment or not, you're screwed. Doesn't matter who cuts the bureaucrat's paycheck, they still will think they know better than you what *you* need.
You'll still have all the horror stories about people denied care. So what will happen in the government insurance is the same thing that happened with the private insurance (HMOs). At first they try to hold the line on spending, which means they start denying you the ability to get the more expensive treatments. Which upsets everyone and creates all sort of political pressures and/or legislation about what must be covered. So then the insurers start denying less care, but have to charge people more to cover those added costs. So then you have less complaints about denied care, but more and more people who can't afford coverage at all.
So then you have to extend government subsidies to more and more people so they can get covered. But you soon get to the point where you're subsidizing nearly everyone. Subsidizing everyone is the same as subsidizing nobody - the money's just flowing out through our taxes and back in via the subsidy.
You hit the brick wall of reality that we don't have as much money in the whole system as we have health needs. The demand is effectively infinite and our funds are not.
So we are faced with a choice: either we try to centrally plan who gets what care, or we give people the amount of money we can spare for their condition and let them decide how best to spend it. Either you decide what's the best care you can get for the available money, or the bureaucrat does. But one way or the other, we're not going to get all the care we want. And that's what no politician is willing to admit to us.
The owner of said computer is negligent and should have their connection isolated until the computer engaged in infraction is cleaned.
Calling the owner negligent is assuming a lot. Don't get me wrong - plenty of them probably are. But you can have your box automatically downloading patches, run a top-tier antivirus package, avoid visiting shady websites, and still get yourself infected by some 0-day exploit served off an ad server used by a respectable website (say, CNN).
Disconnecting infected users is a worthwhile idea. Though wonder if malware writers won't adapt to that - detect disconnections or unusually slow throughput, go into a temporary hibernation, let the user show how his box isn't doing anything bad anymore, then wake up and resume.
We all know that 99.9% of these botnet zombies are all running some version of M$ windoz
That is true... but if every n00b out there starting running Linux tomorrow I can guarantee you there would be a massive upswing in Linux malware. We'd have all the same problems. No operating system, web browser, or other complex software is completely free of security holes. Nor are they likely to ever be, given that they're continually adding new features which means adding new bugs too. Botnets are so profitable their authors will simply shift their attention to exploiting whatever platform is most popular. Maybe it'll raise the bar versus Windows, but not enough to matter in the long run.
the weakest link is actually the sysadmin, who isn't enforcing appropriate password complexity, length, age, etc...
There is value in those things. There is also a point after which you get diminishing returns, and in fact may make your security worse. For example:
1. If you make the age requirement too short, then nobody can remember their passwords. So they start working around it by picking less secure passwords, writing them on stickies, or flooding your helpdesk with password-reset requests.
2. Complexity requirements are good up to a point, but when you start requiring too many different types of characters you just get people resorting to the equivalent of P4ssword! so they can actually remember the stupid thing. That may meet your complexity metric but a dictionary attack program will probably crack it quickly.
IMO we need to move away from such a heavy reliance on passwords, and towards some sort of two-factor system. When an individual has to create dozens of different passwords for their work systems, banks, retailers, email providers, and who knows what else, it becomes way too much to manage, and people take shortcuts as a result. They share passwords among different entities, or create weak passwords, etc.
Even if the business and/or customers complain about "impact", there's always a way to win the argument for establishing and enforcing IT policies that make sense. You have to be willing to save users from themselves.
This is the sort of statement that drives even security-conscious users nuts. Concern about "impact" is not "complaining". It is acknowledging that security policies can have a big impact on people's abilities to do their job effectively. A policy that makes IT sleep easier at night may also be the policy that grinds a worker's progress to a halt. Good security is a collaborative process between IT and their users to find the right balance for the circumstances.
his mind may not be retarded but his ethics surely are, if he thinks murdering 3000 innocent civilians is "justice".
If any progress at all is to be made, you need to fight the disease, not the symptoms. You have to ask "Why are these people doing this in the first place?" and address that as the root problem.
The first step in understanding the "why" is recognizing that "these people" are not a homogeneous group. There are several different organizations in several countries. Even the ones that call themselves "Al Qaeda" are really several different groups that adopt the same name, more like a franchise system than one organization. They don't all have the same motivations.
The second step is recognizing that these are not purely political or ideological groups. While that is the face they present to the world, and some of their members believe in such causes, there is another side to these organizations. They are criminal business enterprises, often in areas with weak governments. They smuggle drugs and other contraband internationally for profit. As a result, many of their recruits join for the same reasons people join criminal gangs in the US: profit, prestige or social acceptance, protection from other gangs.
So if you want to attack the ability of these organizations to carry out terrorist attacks, go after their ability to make money. That will reduce their ability to recruit, and their ability to finance operations.
As for solving the more ideological "root causes", there are some issues to consider:
1.. Because the groups are not purely ideological, they may not cease operations just because you do whatever political action they wanted. That drug money and prestige is hard to give up, so they may just find some other area of political disagreement and make that their new cause against the West. The blackmail may never end.
2. Some of the ideological causes are reactions to the "invasion" of a liberal Western culture into conservative societies. A lot of this has to do with the West's loose sexual values and more individualistic "do whatever you want" mindset. Short of reforming our own culture, or violating our own values through censorship, there is not a lot the West can do to prevent exposing people in these countries to our culture (even if you make the gigantic assumption that exposure to our culture is a bad thing).
3. For many of the political causes where we *could* change things, the change these folks want is unacceptable. Take, for example, the common complaint that we have troops in the Middle East. If we withdraw our troops from our Middle Eastern allies, they are now much more at the mercy of the tyrants in Iran, who is the big local power. Given the strategic importance of the area, we would find abandoning our allies unacceptable. And even if we did, that would be likely to create a nuclear arms race in the region, which is a truly scary thought
4. The other political cause some claim is a "root cause" is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While certainly this is an area where the West could (and should) do more to further negotiations, it is also the one area where we have the least power. Getting two groups of people who have been killing each other and sowing hatred for generations to stop is really hard. Worth doing, but really hard. It depends heavily on public sentiment among those two peoples for peace, as well as strong leaders in both camps. These are not things that have occurred at the same time very often (for example, there is no strong leader among the Palestinians at the moment). Also, some of the neighboring countries like Syria and Iran benefit from Israel being tied up by the conflict. They may act through their proxies to damage any peace process. So solving this problem is a long shot, and thus cannot be our (only) attempt at a solution to terrorism.
I don't mean to sound to pessimistic about our chances. I think we can do a lot against terrorism. But it will be through actions that attack these groups' abilities to operate much more than by granting them their political or religious desires.
Most "free market enthusiasts" do not define a free market as anarchy. Thus we would be perfectly fine with the government establishing an appropriate safety/testing regulation to cover things like this. There's a wide spectrum between having no police (bad), having the right amount of police (good), and having a police state (bad).
Please don't allow a vocal minority to redefine free markets as zero government intervention, rather than the minimum necessary intervention. As with most things in life, striking a balance is key.
Take your example search engine. Did you take bribes from companies to get their rankings higher? Did you artificially remove something from your search engine because you didn't like it?
Few people would object to restricting bribery. Bribery is well-defined, it's easy to avoid violating such a rule, and the rule would do little to restrict innovation.
But your next sentence illustrates the potential pitfalls of a regulatory scheme on search. What constitutes "artificially removing" something - is it human intervention? What type of not-liking a result is permissible grounds for action - for example, what if the human intervention is making the results more relevant to the intended audience? Who gets to define the intended audience? Who gets to define relevancy or quality of results? Who gets to determine whether the intervention was appropriate? If we define the offense as human interference with the algorithmic results, then what about an algorithmic tweak that accomplishes the same result? You can usually devise some algorithm to get the result you want. Can someone sue you every time your intervention drops their rankings? Even if they would lose the case, you still spend vast sums of money on your legal defense.
Once you get lawyers involved in micromanaging technology, you force technology companies to spend their limited resources hiring lawyers to understand increasingly complex rules, hiring lawyers to defend against inevitable lawsuits, hiring lawyers to lobby the regulators for more favorable terms, buying legal insurance, employing burdensome processes and procedures to ensure compliance with either the law, or certification regimes intended to reduce the risk of violating a regulation, etc. All these are ways of spending money on things that don't create innovations or products people want.
Regulations are best-suited to circumstances that don't change frequently and that have demonstrated serious problems society needs to address. Search is neither - it's a space that is continually innovating and changing, and lacks any significant cases of search engines abusing their positions. Regulating search would thus be a solution in search of a problem, likely to create more headaches than it solves.
I think the editorial is not due to their ideological bent, but rather about big media's desire to reduce the power of search engines. Consider:
1. The big newspapers used to have little competition, as their markets were heavily localized. The Internet, and specifically news search and aggregation services like Google, have reversed that dynamic. Newspapers are now heavily dependent on companies like Google to drive online traffic (and thus ad revenue) to them, rather than to their many competitors. They resent this loss of power greatly.
2. The big newspapers would like to get back to the old model where their brand was central to the news consumer, rather than being just one of many commodity suppliers. This requires an assault on the operators of news search and aggregation. Hence Ruport Murdoch's recent noises about how papers should collectively delist from Google.
3. But the newspapers realize that if they get in a battle with the major search engines, they could lose big. One, since the search engine is most people's first stop on the Internet, this gives the engines an incredibly powerful platform to push an editorial perspective, such as one critical of big media. If not over-used, this could be an effective weapon that media companies would like the government to neutralize. Second, if a big newspaper got in a fight with a big search engine, it would be trivial for the search engine to simply stop listing results from that site. If Google stopped listing content from the NY Times on Google News or its search results, most Google users wouldn't care as there are still many other sources of the same information available. But the NY Times would take a big hit to ad revenue.
That's why the NY Times is calling for government restrictions on search operators. It's to neutralize the search companies' abilities to fight back in the upcoming conflict.
You're right, how dare websites be economically viable.
The Wallstreet Journal, Slashdot, Google, Youtube, Facebook, and the smaller (and much smaller) websites should be free to view AND advertising free.
Nobody said anything of the sort. If I'm getting a product for free, I don't mind the inclusion of many ads because I understand someone's gotta pay the piper. Similarly, I don't mind paying a subscription fee for a quality publication that has at most a handful of ads. For example, I happily subscribe to the Wall Street Journal.
What annoys me is when the publisher double-dips by charging me a hefty subscription fee AND then provides a product that's more advertising than substance.
For example, I pay a sizable sum for satellite TV. Yet every channel has tons of ads, making use of a DVR a necessity to get a decent viewing experience. What kind of customer experience requires users to employ a device to throw away half the "content"? If it weren't for the fact that the satellite company has a monopoly that makes them my only option for watching my original hometown's NFL games, I wouldn't put up with it.
Thanks for the link! You're right - that is basically what I was saying - but Monkeysphere does it in a much more entertaining way.
the now-obvious idea that when there are large gender imbalances, it's probably sexism at root
And that claim is far from obviously true to many of us.
Don't get me wrong - there is sexism out there. I just think it's a stretch to assume that a large gender imbalance for a given profession is necessarily because of actual sexism.
There are so many factors involved - risk tolerance, work-life balance, money, prestige, community, etc. that it seems like a massive leap of faith to say that for every issue people's preferences will distribute exactly evenly across gender lines. I just don't think we know enough about the biology, the societal influences, or their interaction to make such assertions.
No, I don't buy that. When you just throw up your hands and say they're all like that you basically let the problem continue. You have to hold people and groups accountable for their actions.
We should hold people accountable for their own actions. Holding someone accountable for someone else's actions is a totally different beast.
If you fail to pay your taxes (e.g.. Obama's Treasury Secretary Geitner) or accept a bribe (e.g.. Democratic Congressman Jefferson), you should pay the consequences, not me. Even if we're the member of the same political party. Sharing a view on foreign policy, bank bailouts, or job creation doesn't make someone responsible for another's transgressions.
Part of why we have such rancor in our politics is that people are willing to believe this idea that the folks who disagree (namely The Other Party) must be evil or unethical or uncaring or bought off. Most people are not these things, they just have genuine differences of opinion on how to solve problems or what problems government ought to be solving. All these personal attacks are a just a distraction from the real issues at hand.
Personally, when a politician starts spewing personal attacks, I start wondering what problems in their own policies they're trying to distract us from. That rule of thumb seems to have worked well for both parties over the past decade or so.
So what conclusion do you draw from that study? That the gender ratio difference in programming is natural and not worth challenging?
We should challenge gender ratios IF they are the result of discrimination (including societal norms that say a given gender cannot or should not take a given profession).
But that is a big "if". The study shows that we should be careful not to assume that we know the cause of differing gender distributions, and not to assume that identical distributions should necessarily be our societal goal. If a non-50/50 distribution is due to people expressing their own career preferences (whether influenced by biology or simply their personal tastes), free from discrimination, then that's perfectly acceptable.
It's a job where the President consults you for your opinion and takes action based on your advice.
I suspect only the first part of that statement is really true, which is why this isn't a good job for those who want to actually solve the problems, not just pontificate on how one could solve the problems. I say this because:
1. Fundamentally cyber is not a Presidential priority at this time. Jobs, health care, global warming, education - those are the things the President will be judged on, and thus what he is going to prioritize. Your advice will likely be heard, but it is unlikely the power of the presidency will be used to fight for the difficult decisions you will ask for. The political capital is simply needed elsewhere.
2. Because you don't get massive government bureaucracies to change course easily. You certainly don't get it to happen if you can't control anyone's budget allocations and lack any statutory authority over those involved. If your recommendations are inconvenient (say they involve contested turf between two agencies) the bureaucracies involved can just stall until you're gone. Yet an appropriate response to cyber requires close coordination among those very agencies.
Mental illness runs in the family and affects economic status.
True enough.
So poor parents pass on their mentally ill genes to their kids thus their kids are more likely to be mentally ill and on some kind of treatment. My own personal experience registers this is as true. I see a lot of emotional problems, especially mood instability, with poorer people
An alternative explanation is that if you have poor emotional skills - unable to control your own emotions or understand those of others - you are less likely to succeed. And lacking emotional skills yourself, you are unable to teach your kids those skills.
While it could be genetic, it could equally be a function of poor parenting. There are probably plenty of cases in both categories, so I'd urge caution before assuming it's a genetic problem.