The value from copying will be far greater than the loss of value from it. I'm not gonna worry my pretty little head trying to calculate numbers, but I'm sure the math is solid.
Mathematically, I can also show that the best "value" to society is to take your car and house and give them to other people who will use them better. Are you willing to give them up now?
I think there are plenty of situations like this. Example: people shouldn't have to pay for concert tickets, movie tickets, Las Vegas shows, clubs, etc etc.
Out of curiosity, couldn't you also (truthfully) say things like "car theft is your best transportation value" or "laptop theft is your best computing value"? From the standpoint of "value", doing illegal things is always better than doing things the legal way.
The Tea-Party could get a lot further if they weren't so full of hyperbole and paranoia. I hear these guys talking about high taxes and socialism. If you look at capital gains taxes and the percentage-rate of the highest taxes bracket, the US is historically paying very little in taxes. Out of curiosity, I looked up the highest tax rates historically. Currently, the highest tax bracket is 35%. Since 1936, there were 45 years where the top income tax bracket was between 69% and 94% (all of them were before 1980) - in other words, for 60% of the last 75 years, the tax rate was double or more of what it is today. Yet, Oreilly talks about leaving his job if taxes go up because there's no point in working. And Tax Partiers invoke "John Galt" - as if taxes in this day and age are so oppressive, they'd might as well disappear. There were only 5 years when the top tax bracket was lower than it is today (it was 1988-1992). Yet, Obama is a socialist for wanting to increase it slightly - even though the national debt is going up, and has been going up significantly under every Republican administration going back to Reagan. Tea-Partiers have no sense of history.
Einstein had an idea of a vaguely defined, mathematically-literate creator. He didn't believe in any religious texts. It's actually pretty trivial to make religious views compatible with science under those conditions, because there isn't a lot of content in the religious side of the equation and it's always capable of changing and evolving.
Just so you know, there's very low acceptance of evolution in Muslim countries. Maybe scholars and academics believe evolution and their religion aren't in conflict, but acceptance of evolution among the population is quite low in Muslim countries. "A 2007 study of religious patterns found that only 8% of Egyptians, 11% of Malaysians, 14% of Pakistanis, 16% of Indonesians, and 22% of Turks agree that Darwin's theory is probably or most certainly true, and a 2006 survey reported that about 25% of Turkish adults agreed that human beings evolved from earlier animal species... While Muslims accept science as fully compatible with Islam, and most accept microevolution, very few Muslims accept the macroevolution as held by scientists, especially human evolution." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_views_on_evolution
Science is the empirical study of how things are.
Religion is the normative study of how things should be.
Exactly. And this is also the reason there are not, nor has there ever been, any arguments over creationism.
Theoretically, religions could just talk about how things "should be", but when you read religious texts, you see an awful lot of history in there. When religious texts say things happened a certain way, but we know from science that they didn't (e.g. earth was created 6000 years ago, a global flood happened 4000 years ago, the languages of the world were caused by God because he was angry about the Tower of Babel), then there ends up being conflict.
And if you get into Mormonism, you can find a whole lot more counter-historical stuff - like the idea that Native Americans were descended from a tribe of Jews (genetic testing shows this to be false).
> Who says the rules are so strict they can't be followed?
You should go back and read all the religious laws, or ask a Jew about all the nuances they learned about their religious law. Or, you can read what Jesus said (Matt 5:20): "For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven." (The Pharisees were known to go out of their way to try to follow the minutest details of Jewish law.)
> Jesus said, "Be thou perfect, as thy father is perfect."
Oh, is that all we have to do? You realize this doesn't help your case, right? "It isn't hard to follow the rules, just be perfect all the time for your whole life."
> "It's a simplification, not an over-interpretation. Jesus himself said those two commandments are the most important (as you say) and that *everything else in the Bible is based on those two principles*. You're forgetting the second part, there."
So, if "everything else in the Bible is based on those two principles" to "(1) Love God (2) Love Other People As Much As Yourself.", then Old Testament law is really just describing the details on how to do those things. Which means you can't ignore the OT laws. For example, OT law to kill witches and adulterers are based (somehow) on loving God and others, which means they're still in effect, otherwise you're breaking one or both of the two most important principles.
...and that in turn is a story intended to show that you shouldn't make rash promises. Everyone also knows that.
You mean like Abraham's "rash promise" to sacrifice Issac? Or maybe God should've sent a goat (like he did with Abraham) so "God's servant" wouldn't have to sacrifice his child.
You did know that the story of Abraham and Isaac was intended to explain why the Hebrew deity doesn't require child sacrifice, right?
Ok, I'll bite: how does the story of Abraham and Issac explain why God doesn't require child sacrifice? The story, as far as I can tell, just says that God wanted to make sure Abraham was willing to sacrifice his child, but doesn't end in any actual sacrifice. But, I don't see anywhere how it explains that God doesn't or won't require any child sacrifice in the future from anyone else. To put it another way: If God demanded child sacrifice somewhere else in the Bible, I wouldn't see the story of Abraham and Issac as being in contradiction with the command for child sacrifice.
> "How many suicide bombers have attacked Switzerland?"
Out of curiosity, did you begin by writing "How many terrorists have attacked England?" Ah, crap. "How many terrorists have attacked Spain?" Oops. "How many terrorists have attacked Germany?" [http://www.france24.com/en/20110913-germany-salafist-funadamentalism-islam-terror-attack-plot-internet-propaganda-rise] Um. No wait. "How many terrorists have attacked France?" [http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,176139,00.html]...
Seriously, though, I'd take your suggestion a little more seriously if muslim terrorists weren't involved in attacking so many different countries. At a certain point, you have to ask yourself if everyone is in a conspiracy against muslim nations, or if something else is going on. Here's a quick count: US, England, France, Spain, attacks by muslims against muslims in muslim nations (in Egypt, Iraq, Pakistan, etc), Nigeria, Pakistani terrorists attacking India, attacks against Russia, attacks in China [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_People%27s_Republic_of_China], attacks in southeast asia [http://www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/item/2005/0103/palm/palmer_seaterr.html], attacks in the Phillipines [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_Philippines]. There have been documents also showing that Osama Bin Laden hated the UN because the UN treated all religions equally (which was offensive because Islam was clearly superior) and he hated the universal declaration of human rights.
> "the guys who funded Spotify's recent move to the U.S., also still happen to own a significant percentage of Facebook?"
Heck, you don't even have to get that conspiratorial about it. Even if this connection didn't exist, Spotify wants to be able to post on your Facebook wall as free advertizing to your friends. Facebook might want to know what you're listening to (and tailor ads to that). There's plenty of benefits Spotify and Facebook could get by sharing information about you - and that requires linking your Spotify account to your Facebook account.
> "Oh and treat the election like this, this is a job interview and you are the boss. Grill them and then pick."
The problem with that is the fact that we aren't the one's asking questions. It's the journalists asking questions. And the politicians have a tendency to punish "bad" reporters who ask them questions they don't want to answer (with those "gotcha" questions), and flee to the "News" channels that are going to soft-peddle them like FOX News does to Republicans. It's like conducting a job interview where the interviewer is hired by the job applicant, and we just get to listen.
... And best of all, you don't have to pay those poor saps doing all that hard work for you. If you're lucky, maybe you can make them all go bankrupt. Then you'll really be living the high life.
Stop screwing creators. We deserve to get paid for our work, and your desire to get other people's valuable hard work for free is not only unfair, but it's ultimately self-destructive (just like forcing doctors and teachers to work for no pay will come back to haunt you in the long run despite the desire that healthcare and education be free).
(And, no, I'm not defending the long-copyright terms or the large fines imposed on pirates.)
Don't worry about getting paid. Do it for the benefit of society, citizen! Just like teachers, doctors, and bus drivers.
Wait, what? Those people get paid for their work? fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu.
Seriously, though: you write a product wanted by a corporation - like Google giving hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for Mozilla Development, or companies spending millions on Linux development. Donation-based money from consumers is basically a way to poverty. So, I guess that pretty much limits developers to making a few software products for big corporations if you want to earn a living -- which is not only a small slice of the software development world, but leaves most of the software people want (like pretty much all games) undeveloped. (Oh, but if you can get to the top of the free-software, like Stallman, then people will give you big donations for your contributions to society. But, you'll still look like you live under a bridge and can't afford a razor or deodorant. But, you'll be well-liked by college students everywhere because free - whether it's software or pizza - is always appreciated.)
(1) "It's supposed to be a secret that CO2 accounts for less than 10% of greenhouse gases"
When these gases are ranked by their direct contribution to the greenhouse effect, the most important are:
Gas / Greenhouse Gas Contribution (%)
Water vapor (H2O) 36 – 72 %
Carbon dioxide (CO2) 9 – 26 %
Methane (CH4) 4 – 9 %
Ozone (O3) 3 – 7 % http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas
It's also generally accepted that these are not independent, since increases in CO2, CH4, and O3 increase the temperature, which increases the water vapor: "The average residence time of a water molecule in the atmosphere is only about nine days, compared to years or centuries for other greenhouse gases such as CH4 and CO2. Thus, water vapor responds to and amplifies effects of the other greenhouse gases."
(2) "and that the amount generated by human activity is further less than 10% of that CO2."
The CO2 in the atmosphere has increased from 270-280 ppm a century ago to 390 ppm today (and it was down to 180 ppm in the last ice age). 390/280 = 40% increase. And, before you say that not all the 110 ppm increase is due to human activity, I submit this graph showing that CO2 levels over the past 600,000 years have never been above 300 ppm until the 20th century ( http://static-www.icr.org/i/articles/af/does_carbon_dioxide_fig3new.jpg )
You know: I'd think there was a lot more to climate change denial if the facts presented by climate deniers weren't almost always wrong.
I would be interested to know, though, how they think this would lower the temperature - for example: if water vapor at different elevations have different effects.
> "It makes little difference in either context... a minority of trials have found people CAN distinguish"
A minority of trials may have been setup badly (for example, not double blind). Also a minority of trials might've had positive results by chance. If people are completely unable to detect electromagnetic radition, then by pure random chance, you'd expect 50% of all trials to come up with results that are at least slightly positive, and 1 out of 20 trials will come up with statistically significant results.
Imagine it this way: you try to guess how many times you can guess whether a coin will come up head or tails. If you have no psychic abilities, then you'd average about 5 out of 10. There will be some random variation around that number, however, so sometimes you'll come up with 8 right guesses out of 10. This doesn't mean you're actually psychic, even though that trial (of ten coin flips) came up with positive results. (This is why you can't say "a minority of coin-flipping trials have found that people can predict coin flips".)
> What they need to do is filter out the ones who can't, and keep retesting the ones who can. All you need is ONE person that can do it a majority of the time.
That's a fair statement, but it seems at odds with your earlier statement that "a minority of trials have found people CAN distinguish", which is false since you haven't established that a minority of people can distinguish. Positive trials are positive due to some combination of bad methodology, random chance, and real WIFI detecting ability.
Capitalism makes things cheaper. Blame something else.
Per capita, the United States spends more money on healthcare than any other country in the world. The country paying the second most is Norway. The US spends 50% more money per capita than Norway. The US ranks 36th in longevity. The majority of countries which have longer longevity than the US have per-capita healthcare costs that are less than half of what the US pays.
Per-capita healthcare costs by country: http://www.kff.org/insurance/snapshot/OECD042111.cfm
Longevity by country: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy
The idea that capitalism makes things cheaper is *generally* true, but it's certainly not true in all cases. There are plenty of reasons that things can be cheaper or more expensive. In general, people don't want to go cheap with their healthcare, for fear of the repercussions. This makes it a sellers market, even when spending half as much produces the same or almost the same results. And there are plenty of other reasons why US healthcare is so expensive.
Art is dead. It's all about doing something to make yourself famous, like getting it on Slashdot. Congrats, this "artist" won.
> I'd like this to be an exhibit at every trial in which gigantic money damages are claimed for copyright infringement.
Why? And would you support a hard drive full of child porn at a pedophile's trial? Would you support a hard drive full of spam at a spamlord's trial? What's the point?
It's pretty annoying that the Pirate Party and the Pirate Bay are working to make Piracy the de-facto standard around the world by giving everyone access to pirated stuff (damn be the creators who worked their asses off creating it), and then to have the Pirate Bay send insulting letters to creators when they want their work removed. I'd consider the US to be a pathetic lapdog if it sat around doing nothing to protect creators from thieves.
> "In fact, I see this as government interference with business... the very same interference that these businesses claim to be against!"
I'm pretty sure that the "no government interference with business" group of people still support government laws against theft. I don't think there's any contradiction in that. (Similarly, people who want to live in a free society still want laws against theft, murder, etc. - and that's also not a contradiction.)
So what? The US position defending copyright is the correct position. Falkvinge and the Pirate Party are motivated by what benefits themselves - who cares about the creators when they get all the free pirated stuff they want? Since when did the interests of thieves become the correct position? Oh sorry - there are a lot of pirates on Slashdot who want the Pirate Party and the Pirate Bay to succeed for their own selfish reasons, so people are going to attack the US' actions as "foreign meddling".
I've never heard of the tricorder app before. After finding some information about it ( http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/turn-your-android-phone-into-a-real-star-trek-tricorder/ ) and looking at what it does: "sense environmental factors like magnetic flux, acceleration, sound waves and even solar activity...", it seems to me that saying the project has been "killed" by CBS seems a bit premature. The interface and name ("Tricorder") is certainly drawn from Star Trek inspiration, and while I don't see how this harms the Intellectual Property (read: I don't know why CBS won't just let it go, other than a typical corporate knee-jerk response to crackdown on using IP; although I suppose, since it's under Trademark, CBS might have to actively defend their trademark or else they lose it), I also don't see any reason why the Tricorder can't change the interface and name and continue life as usual. Saying that the project is "killed" seems a bit melodramatic when the reality is that the Tricorder app is suspended until they change the name and interface.
(BTW, I thought the "look and feel" of interfaces wasn't covered by Intellectual property. Although, even if true, I suppose the Tricorder creators might not have the cash on hand to defend their case in court, even if they would win.)
I'd bet a billion dollars that, if you told the companies responsible for global warming that the government was going to pay them to correct global warming, they'd flip 180 degrees and admit that the science for global warming is solid. Afterall, it was only the lust for money that they denied it in the first place. (The oil companies stand to reap a hundreds trillion of dollars* worth of money in oil revenue -- which is far larger than any money earned by climate scientists. So, if you're going to being up the "shilling for money" argument against global warming, you've got far, far, far larger problems if you're supporting the oil-companies talking points.)
* There's an estimated 1.2 trillion barrels of oil still in the ground. At $90 / barrel (roughly the average over the last year), that works out to over $100 trillion in revenue. Depending on the source, a large percentage of that can be profit (it costs a few dollars / barrel to pull the oil out of Saudi Arabia).
Slashdot Mirror
The value from copying will be far greater than the loss of value from it. I'm not gonna worry my pretty little head trying to calculate numbers, but I'm sure the math is solid.
Mathematically, I can also show that the best "value" to society is to take your car and house and give them to other people who will use them better. Are you willing to give them up now?
I think there are plenty of situations like this. Example: people shouldn't have to pay for concert tickets, movie tickets, Las Vegas shows, clubs, etc etc.
Out of curiosity, couldn't you also (truthfully) say things like "car theft is your best transportation value" or "laptop theft is your best computing value"? From the standpoint of "value", doing illegal things is always better than doing things the legal way.
The Tea-Party could get a lot further if they weren't so full of hyperbole and paranoia. I hear these guys talking about high taxes and socialism. If you look at capital gains taxes and the percentage-rate of the highest taxes bracket, the US is historically paying very little in taxes. Out of curiosity, I looked up the highest tax rates historically. Currently, the highest tax bracket is 35%. Since 1936, there were 45 years where the top income tax bracket was between 69% and 94% (all of them were before 1980) - in other words, for 60% of the last 75 years, the tax rate was double or more of what it is today. Yet, Oreilly talks about leaving his job if taxes go up because there's no point in working. And Tax Partiers invoke "John Galt" - as if taxes in this day and age are so oppressive, they'd might as well disappear. There were only 5 years when the top tax bracket was lower than it is today (it was 1988-1992). Yet, Obama is a socialist for wanting to increase it slightly - even though the national debt is going up, and has been going up significantly under every Republican administration going back to Reagan. Tea-Partiers have no sense of history.
Einstein had an idea of a vaguely defined, mathematically-literate creator. He didn't believe in any religious texts. It's actually pretty trivial to make religious views compatible with science under those conditions, because there isn't a lot of content in the religious side of the equation and it's always capable of changing and evolving.
Just so you know, there's very low acceptance of evolution in Muslim countries. Maybe scholars and academics believe evolution and their religion aren't in conflict, but acceptance of evolution among the population is quite low in Muslim countries. "A 2007 study of religious patterns found that only 8% of Egyptians, 11% of Malaysians, 14% of Pakistanis, 16% of Indonesians, and 22% of Turks agree that Darwin's theory is probably or most certainly true, and a 2006 survey reported that about 25% of Turkish adults agreed that human beings evolved from earlier animal species... While Muslims accept science as fully compatible with Islam, and most accept microevolution, very few Muslims accept the macroevolution as held by scientists, especially human evolution." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_views_on_evolution
Science is the empirical study of how things are.
Religion is the normative study of how things should be.
Exactly. And this is also the reason there are not, nor has there ever been, any arguments over creationism.
Theoretically, religions could just talk about how things "should be", but when you read religious texts, you see an awful lot of history in there. When religious texts say things happened a certain way, but we know from science that they didn't (e.g. earth was created 6000 years ago, a global flood happened 4000 years ago, the languages of the world were caused by God because he was angry about the Tower of Babel), then there ends up being conflict.
And if you get into Mormonism, you can find a whole lot more counter-historical stuff - like the idea that Native Americans were descended from a tribe of Jews (genetic testing shows this to be false).
> Who says the rules are so strict they can't be followed?
You should go back and read all the religious laws, or ask a Jew about all the nuances they learned about their religious law. Or, you can read what Jesus said (Matt 5:20): "For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven." (The Pharisees were known to go out of their way to try to follow the minutest details of Jewish law.)
> Jesus said, "Be thou perfect, as thy father is perfect."
Oh, is that all we have to do? You realize this doesn't help your case, right? "It isn't hard to follow the rules, just be perfect all the time for your whole life."
> "It's a simplification, not an over-interpretation. Jesus himself said those two commandments are the most important (as you say) and that *everything else in the Bible is based on those two principles*. You're forgetting the second part, there."
So, if "everything else in the Bible is based on those two principles" to "(1) Love God (2) Love Other People As Much As Yourself.", then Old Testament law is really just describing the details on how to do those things. Which means you can't ignore the OT laws. For example, OT law to kill witches and adulterers are based (somehow) on loving God and others, which means they're still in effect, otherwise you're breaking one or both of the two most important principles.
...and that in turn is a story intended to show that you shouldn't make rash promises. Everyone also knows that.
You mean like Abraham's "rash promise" to sacrifice Issac? Or maybe God should've sent a goat (like he did with Abraham) so "God's servant" wouldn't have to sacrifice his child.
You did know that the story of Abraham and Isaac was intended to explain why the Hebrew deity doesn't require child sacrifice, right?
Ok, I'll bite: how does the story of Abraham and Issac explain why God doesn't require child sacrifice? The story, as far as I can tell, just says that God wanted to make sure Abraham was willing to sacrifice his child, but doesn't end in any actual sacrifice. But, I don't see anywhere how it explains that God doesn't or won't require any child sacrifice in the future from anyone else. To put it another way: If God demanded child sacrifice somewhere else in the Bible, I wouldn't see the story of Abraham and Issac as being in contradiction with the command for child sacrifice.
> "How many suicide bombers have attacked Switzerland?"
...
Out of curiosity, did you begin by writing "How many terrorists have attacked England?" Ah, crap. "How many terrorists have attacked Spain?" Oops. "How many terrorists have attacked Germany?" [http://www.france24.com/en/20110913-germany-salafist-funadamentalism-islam-terror-attack-plot-internet-propaganda-rise] Um. No wait. "How many terrorists have attacked France?" [http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,176139,00.html]
Seriously, though, I'd take your suggestion a little more seriously if muslim terrorists weren't involved in attacking so many different countries. At a certain point, you have to ask yourself if everyone is in a conspiracy against muslim nations, or if something else is going on. Here's a quick count: US, England, France, Spain, attacks by muslims against muslims in muslim nations (in Egypt, Iraq, Pakistan, etc), Nigeria, Pakistani terrorists attacking India, attacks against Russia, attacks in China [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_People%27s_Republic_of_China], attacks in southeast asia [http://www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/item/2005/0103/palm/palmer_seaterr.html], attacks in the Phillipines [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_Philippines]. There have been documents also showing that Osama Bin Laden hated the UN because the UN treated all religions equally (which was offensive because Islam was clearly superior) and he hated the universal declaration of human rights.
> "the guys who funded Spotify's recent move to the U.S., also still happen to own a significant percentage of Facebook?"
Heck, you don't even have to get that conspiratorial about it. Even if this connection didn't exist, Spotify wants to be able to post on your Facebook wall as free advertizing to your friends. Facebook might want to know what you're listening to (and tailor ads to that). There's plenty of benefits Spotify and Facebook could get by sharing information about you - and that requires linking your Spotify account to your Facebook account.
> "Oh and treat the election like this, this is a job interview and you are the boss. Grill them and then pick."
The problem with that is the fact that we aren't the one's asking questions. It's the journalists asking questions. And the politicians have a tendency to punish "bad" reporters who ask them questions they don't want to answer (with those "gotcha" questions), and flee to the "News" channels that are going to soft-peddle them like FOX News does to Republicans. It's like conducting a job interview where the interviewer is hired by the job applicant, and we just get to listen.
... And best of all, you don't have to pay those poor saps doing all that hard work for you. If you're lucky, maybe you can make them all go bankrupt. Then you'll really be living the high life.
See related topic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goose_That_Laid_the_Golden_Eggs
Stop screwing creators. We deserve to get paid for our work, and your desire to get other people's valuable hard work for free is not only unfair, but it's ultimately self-destructive (just like forcing doctors and teachers to work for no pay will come back to haunt you in the long run despite the desire that healthcare and education be free).
(And, no, I'm not defending the long-copyright terms or the large fines imposed on pirates.)
Don't worry about getting paid. Do it for the benefit of society, citizen! Just like teachers, doctors, and bus drivers.
Wait, what? Those people get paid for their work? fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu.
Seriously, though: you write a product wanted by a corporation - like Google giving hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for Mozilla Development, or companies spending millions on Linux development. Donation-based money from consumers is basically a way to poverty. So, I guess that pretty much limits developers to making a few software products for big corporations if you want to earn a living -- which is not only a small slice of the software development world, but leaves most of the software people want (like pretty much all games) undeveloped. (Oh, but if you can get to the top of the free-software, like Stallman, then people will give you big donations for your contributions to society. But, you'll still look like you live under a bridge and can't afford a razor or deodorant. But, you'll be well-liked by college students everywhere because free - whether it's software or pizza - is always appreciated.)
It's also generally accepted that these are not independent, since increases in CO2, CH4, and O3 increase the temperature, which increases the water vapor: "The average residence time of a water molecule in the atmosphere is only about nine days, compared to years or centuries for other greenhouse gases such as CH4 and CO2. Thus, water vapor responds to and amplifies effects of the other greenhouse gases."
(2) "and that the amount generated by human activity is further less than 10% of that CO2."
The CO2 in the atmosphere has increased from 270-280 ppm a century ago to 390 ppm today (and it was down to 180 ppm in the last ice age). 390/280 = 40% increase. And, before you say that not all the 110 ppm increase is due to human activity, I submit this graph showing that CO2 levels over the past 600,000 years have never been above 300 ppm until the 20th century ( http://static-www.icr.org/i/articles/af/does_carbon_dioxide_fig3new.jpg )
You know: I'd think there was a lot more to climate change denial if the facts presented by climate deniers weren't almost always wrong.
I would be interested to know, though, how they think this would lower the temperature - for example: if water vapor at different elevations have different effects.
> "It makes little difference in either context... a minority of trials have found people CAN distinguish"
A minority of trials may have been setup badly (for example, not double blind). Also a minority of trials might've had positive results by chance. If people are completely unable to detect electromagnetic radition, then by pure random chance, you'd expect 50% of all trials to come up with results that are at least slightly positive, and 1 out of 20 trials will come up with statistically significant results.
Imagine it this way: you try to guess how many times you can guess whether a coin will come up head or tails. If you have no psychic abilities, then you'd average about 5 out of 10. There will be some random variation around that number, however, so sometimes you'll come up with 8 right guesses out of 10. This doesn't mean you're actually psychic, even though that trial (of ten coin flips) came up with positive results. (This is why you can't say "a minority of coin-flipping trials have found that people can predict coin flips".)
> What they need to do is filter out the ones who can't, and keep retesting the ones who can. All you need is ONE person that can do it a majority of the time.
That's a fair statement, but it seems at odds with your earlier statement that "a minority of trials have found people CAN distinguish", which is false since you haven't established that a minority of people can distinguish. Positive trials are positive due to some combination of bad methodology, random chance, and real WIFI detecting ability.
Capitalism makes things cheaper. Blame something else.
Per capita, the United States spends more money on healthcare than any other country in the world. The country paying the second most is Norway. The US spends 50% more money per capita than Norway. The US ranks 36th in longevity. The majority of countries which have longer longevity than the US have per-capita healthcare costs that are less than half of what the US pays.
Per-capita healthcare costs by country: http://www.kff.org/insurance/snapshot/OECD042111.cfm
Longevity by country: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy
The idea that capitalism makes things cheaper is *generally* true, but it's certainly not true in all cases. There are plenty of reasons that things can be cheaper or more expensive. In general, people don't want to go cheap with their healthcare, for fear of the repercussions. This makes it a sellers market, even when spending half as much produces the same or almost the same results. And there are plenty of other reasons why US healthcare is so expensive.
Art is dead. It's all about doing something to make yourself famous, like getting it on Slashdot. Congrats, this "artist" won.
> I'd like this to be an exhibit at every trial in which gigantic money damages are claimed for copyright infringement.
Why? And would you support a hard drive full of child porn at a pedophile's trial? Would you support a hard drive full of spam at a spamlord's trial? What's the point?
It's pretty annoying that the Pirate Party and the Pirate Bay are working to make Piracy the de-facto standard around the world by giving everyone access to pirated stuff (damn be the creators who worked their asses off creating it), and then to have the Pirate Bay send insulting letters to creators when they want their work removed. I'd consider the US to be a pathetic lapdog if it sat around doing nothing to protect creators from thieves.
> "In fact, I see this as government interference with business... the very same interference that these businesses claim to be against!"
I'm pretty sure that the "no government interference with business" group of people still support government laws against theft. I don't think there's any contradiction in that. (Similarly, people who want to live in a free society still want laws against theft, murder, etc. - and that's also not a contradiction.)
So what? The US position defending copyright is the correct position. Falkvinge and the Pirate Party are motivated by what benefits themselves - who cares about the creators when they get all the free pirated stuff they want? Since when did the interests of thieves become the correct position? Oh sorry - there are a lot of pirates on Slashdot who want the Pirate Party and the Pirate Bay to succeed for their own selfish reasons, so people are going to attack the US' actions as "foreign meddling".
I've never heard of the tricorder app before. After finding some information about it ( http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/turn-your-android-phone-into-a-real-star-trek-tricorder/ ) and looking at what it does: "sense environmental factors like magnetic flux, acceleration, sound waves and even solar activity...", it seems to me that saying the project has been "killed" by CBS seems a bit premature. The interface and name ("Tricorder") is certainly drawn from Star Trek inspiration, and while I don't see how this harms the Intellectual Property (read: I don't know why CBS won't just let it go, other than a typical corporate knee-jerk response to crackdown on using IP; although I suppose, since it's under Trademark, CBS might have to actively defend their trademark or else they lose it), I also don't see any reason why the Tricorder can't change the interface and name and continue life as usual. Saying that the project is "killed" seems a bit melodramatic when the reality is that the Tricorder app is suspended until they change the name and interface.
(BTW, I thought the "look and feel" of interfaces wasn't covered by Intellectual property. Although, even if true, I suppose the Tricorder creators might not have the cash on hand to defend their case in court, even if they would win.)
I'd bet a billion dollars that, if you told the companies responsible for global warming that the government was going to pay them to correct global warming, they'd flip 180 degrees and admit that the science for global warming is solid. Afterall, it was only the lust for money that they denied it in the first place. (The oil companies stand to reap a hundreds trillion of dollars* worth of money in oil revenue -- which is far larger than any money earned by climate scientists. So, if you're going to being up the "shilling for money" argument against global warming, you've got far, far, far larger problems if you're supporting the oil-companies talking points.)
* There's an estimated 1.2 trillion barrels of oil still in the ground. At $90 / barrel (roughly the average over the last year), that works out to over $100 trillion in revenue. Depending on the source, a large percentage of that can be profit (it costs a few dollars / barrel to pull the oil out of Saudi Arabia).