Um, no. The graph shows that nearly 100% of the voters past the initial 50% turnout voted for Putin's party. Is it really rational to suggest that the first 50% of the voters who showed up were split 50%/50% for and against Putin's party, and then the next 50% were close to 100% pro-Putin? I don't think so.
In general one would expect the dots to form vaguely horizontal bands across the graph. In other words, in districts where there was 50% turnout, 50% of the votes would be for Putin's party, and in districts with 90% turnout, approximately the same percentage (50%) of votes would be for Putin's party. That's what you wold expect from fair voting.
On the other hand, if voter turnout was, say 40-60%, and you were stuffing the ballot boxes with an additional 0-30% votes - all of them for Putin's party, you would get the kind of pattern you see in that graph. You could also get this pattern if people were being forced to go and vote for Putin's party.
I'm sorry, but with so many whack-jobs in the world, it doesn't surprise me in the least that some people are banned from wikipedia. It's been one of the enduring complaints about wikipedia that anyone can edit it - editing existing content, removing real information, and adding their dumb ideas to the encyclopedia. I'm sure some people are ridiculously tenacious about adding bad information to the pages, and think that the rest of the world is wrong about Autism/ Bigfoot/ the Kennedy Assassination/ psychics/ global warming/ whatever. Not to mention all the publicity that occurred when the IPs tracing back to politician's offices or large corporations were caught changing pages to make their opponents look bad / make themselves look good. It doesn't surprise me that some wikipedia higher-ups feel like some particular users are like bulls in their china shop, and rather than running behind them trying to clean up the mess, think it's simply easier and better to ban certain people.
You can't simultaneously complain that wikipedia is vulnerable to edits by ignorant/malicious/troll/pro-spin users, and complain that wikipedia takes action against those users by identifying them and banning them.
In this case, one of the higher-ups banned a user who seems to be a productive contributor - which is essentially an abuse of power. But, I fail to see how the "secret mailing list" is controversial.
The laptops are given as charity. They're trying to make them as inexpensive as possible so more of them can be given. You simply can't expect good tech support when you're trying to keep the price as low as possible. Do you think Intel and Microsoft are going to have any patience with tech support calls for their "Classmate" computer? No way. They don't make enough money to bother.
Besides, the incentive for computer companies to provide support is so that their customers become repeat customers. In the case of the XO and Classmate, the computer consumer is a different party than the computer purchaser. This means the companies don't have much incentive for tech support because the customer with the tech support problem is unlikely to be purchasing a computer in the future anyway.
It should've ended with:
"We tend to think people have an explicit agenda to rewrite history to make themselves look right, but that's an outsider's perspective. This experiment shows that there isn't always much conscious thought going on," said one researcher who was using his skills of rationalization in order to impress others.
Back in the early 20th century, the mob used to run a kind of informal lottery. It was called a "numbers game". There were places (like barbershops) where people could pick a number from 1 to 1000, and if their number came up, they won. The mob typically paid out between 800-to-1 and 600-to-1. This meant that the mob paid out 60-80% (and kept 20-40%) of the money people initially paid. On the other hand, most state lotteries only pay out about 50% of earnings, making them a worse bet than going with the mob. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_game http://marketplace.publicradio.org/features/underground/1114undergroundpm.html
So, I guess this means that FEMA's lesson from Katrina was that they needed better press coverage?
Anyway, besides Jeff Gannon, we've seen this before. Here's another case:
March 29, 2005 Despite a rising chorus of condemnation from journalists and media critics, the George W. Bush administration shows no signs of abandoning its distribution of taxpayer-funded "news" to U.S. newspapers, radio and television stations.
Free press advocates are up in arms about what they say is the covert dissemination of propaganda by government agencies.
In one case, the administration -- seeking to build support among black families for its education reform plans -- paid a prominent African American pundit, Armstrong Williams, 240,000 dollars to promote the "No Child Left Behind" law on his nationally syndicated television show and through his newspaper column, and to urge other black journalists to do the same.
Two other nationally known journalists, Maggie Gallagher and Michael McManus, have also admitted accepting thousands of dollars to endorse government programs.
Since 2001, the Army and Air Force Hometown News Service has fielded 40 reporters, producers and public affairs specialists to create "good military news" to be beamed to home audiences via local news stations. The service's "good news" segments have reportedly reached 41 million Americans via local newscasts -- in most cases, without the station acknowledging their source.
More than 20 different federal agencies used taxpayer funds to produce television news segments promoting Bush administration policies. These "video news releases," or VNRs, were broadcast on hundreds of local news programs. without disclosing their source.... http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0329-12.htm
Pretty soon, you'll be hearing this at the office:
"Damn copier! First, I got a paper jam. I finally got that fixed - but my hands are all covered in toner. Now, all my documents are coming out in a different language! What's going on? I can't even tell what language this is! Grrrrrr"
I'm not sure that the idea is true. Similarly, it seems logical that a human could not create a program that plays chess better than the programmer does. But, humans have created chess-programs that play chess better than any of its programmers, and better than any human alive.
I haven't heard of a whole genome being inside another species. Although, the mitochondria (which are small energy producing factories inside most life - including mammals) have their own DNA which is separate from our nuclear DNA. Its DNA sequence resembles the sequence of single-celled organisms, which hints that there was a fusion of two different organisms hundreds of millions of years ago. Additionally, plants have chloroplasts (which do photosynthesis), and these are similar - they appear to have been cyanobacteria (independent organisms) that fused with another organism and became organelles within those cells. There are also bits of viral DNA in our own genome - it apparently fused into our DNA long ago. (In fact, you can trace evolutionary relationships by comparing the sequence and positions of these viral bits of DNA across species. Unsurprisingly, humans and apes share a remarkable number of matching viral DNA chunks.)
Real Climate replies to that "bug". Based on the information provided by RealClimate.com, this glitch affects only US temperature measurements (which is only one part of the global temperature measurements).
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007 /08/1934-and-all-that/
Additionally, when you look at the graphs in the RealClimate article, it's clear that there is an temperature increase over time. Comparing those graphs to the statement below, it seems like the text below is attempting to deliberately obscure the fact that warming is happening.
"NASA has now silently released corrected figures, and the changes are truly astounding. The warmest year on record is now 1934. 1998 (long trumpeted by the media as record-breaking) moves to second place. 1921 takes third. In fact, 5 of the 10 warmest years on record now all occur before World War II. Anthony Watts has put the new data in chart form, along with a more detailed summary of the events."
Maybe some patents are money-makers
on
Patents Don't Pay
·
· Score: 1
on average patents cost companies more than they earned them.
"On Average"? We are all aware of the way software companies will create patent "minefields" to entangle other companies, and I have to think that the word "on average" means that SOME patents are money-makers for companies, but a large number of patents (perhaps the ones they use to entangle competitors) might cost more money than their worth. If that's the case, then the article isn't really an argument against patents per se, but an argument against the patent-frenzy that some companies are involved in. It's an argument against excessive patenting - in contradiction to the title of this post: "Patents Don't Pay".
Seems to me, this list of miscreants accounts for about 80% of the spam my filters catch. Tell me again why I should give a shit that some viagra insurance spammer trying to steal my identity with some phishing scheme shouldn't be gone after?
Something tells me that the government really doesn't have to go looking in other people's email to get those viagra emails.
Very true. A quick look at climate history will show that the climate has been changing since the Earth had a climate to begin with, well before the SUV was invented and Bush was elected.
And my health has been fluxuating since the day I was born. So, don't you tell me that I can't eat lead paint!
It will also show that we are actually in a cool period and global warming will get us back to where we need to be!
Actually, we're in a warm period. Looking at this graph of temperature variations over the past 400,000+ years shows that the temperature has fluxuated between 2C hotter than modern temperatures (for brief periods) and 10C cooler than modern temperatures. We're definitely on the warm end of those historical temperatures. Global Warming is not going to "get us back to where we need to be".
http://www.daviesand.com/Choices/Precautionary_Pla nning/New_Data/
The winners of war are the ones profiting on war, and by that I mean convert it into cash (territory/resources can be retaken).
So, your idea is that Halliburton and other US companies won the war? I exclude the US from that list because the US (as a nation) is certainly not profiting from the Iraq War. Sure, the price of oil is high (making the capture of Iraq seem like a valuable asset), but the US is still paying to buy Iraqi oil, and dumping large sums of money into the country. And, if you think the US government had some secret plan to enrich US companies, it seems like paying them directly would've saved a whole lot of money. The US has spent $434 billion on the war already, and I doubt the US companies involved in building can count even one-tenth of that dollar amount in profits as a result of the war.
It's the same entity with one hand destroying infrastructure/society in a warzone, and the other getting the contracts for rebuilding.
I can only guess that you think the US government is destroying infrastructure/society "with one hand", while "the other hand" (US companies) is getting contracts for rebuilding. The problem is that it costs the US government money to destroy things, and costs the US government to rebuild them (US companies are not a part of the US government). Even if we pretend US companies and the US government are one entity, it's still a net loss. Look at it this way: imagine you are the US government, and you pay $1000 for your soldiers to destroy a building. Then, you pay $1000 for a US company to rebuild that building. That US company pays its employees $600 and pockets $400. Now, imagine that because you are "the US", you get to keep the profits from that US company (you don't get to, but pretend you do). That means that you paid-out $2000, and then put $400 back into your pocket. That's still a net loss of $1600. If you could get lots of foreign money for rebuilding, you might be able to turn a profit when you pay the US companies to rebuild - but there isn't much foreign money coming in. If the US was outright stealing the Iraqi oil, that's another way to make a profit, but the US is still paying for Iraqi oil. Besides, even if the US was outright stealing the oil, the profits from Iraqi oil still aren't enough to overturn the net loss.
1: Human Error
Unless you proud willing to believe that we can remotly observe something billions of lightyears away without any error at all. Even if it is true that we can, are their factors that can mess with the dating meathod they use?
Yes, that's a common one I see from creationists. Of course, the "human error" explanation is a very powerful way to allow anyone to believe anything. Invoking this too often and it begins to smell like someone's selling you something. Having seen a wide variety of creationist arguments, I should also point out that creationists often oversimplify the science in order to bring up facts that contradict that oversimplified science, and appear as if "human error" and hubris is a reasonable explanation. Usually, the fuller scientific explanation proves to be deeply damaging to their argument.
2: God created the stars mature for a purpose.
During their helium-burning phase, very high mass stars with more than nine solar masses expand to form red supergiants. They expand in size and could possibly be used to shield the other galaxies from oncoming debris from astroids or other things when drawing it into them with their stronger gravitational field at the time indirectly protecting us from the certin doom of an astroid impact. There is also a posibility that he made them for his own enjoyment (although you are probobly not going to take that as a valid answer).
Keep in mind that most stars are nowhere near the earth. The "shield the other galaxies from oncoming debris from astroids" explanation doesn't hold much weight when the closest star to earth is still 4+ light years away. Further, why would God need to shield the earth from the earth from asteroids that He himself created (why not just not create the asteroids)? Additionally, according to virtually every creationist, Jesus is returning soon. The universe, therefore, will have a total lifespan of about 6 thousand years. Considering the vastness of the universe, there's not much "debris" that could reach earth in 6,000 years - even if those asteroids were capable of anything approaching light-speed (and they aren't).
3: The evolutionists who descovered are lying to us.
Hey could be a posibity. Who knows what for though.
Yes, a vast conspiracy from a wide variety of fields - including Christians who are scientists. I've tracked down genetic data from medical databases to compare them to evolutionary predictions. Scientists would have to falsify genetic data on public databases so that they match evolutionary predictions - and they did this just in case someone looks up the data to test it against evolutionary theory? That seems a little bit too much to believe.
4: Creation is a lie
This is the one you might accept. That their is no God, only chance... Wait, would that make chance a god? This belief basicly states that creation is a fairy tale.
Well, the two options are not "the universe is old, evolution is historical, God does not exist" versus "the universe is 6,000 years old, life created by fiat, God exists". But, yes, I would say that creationism is a fairy tale.
I've seen a lot of mental gymnastics going on with creationists. They might claim that things had the 'appearance of age' when they were created. For example (supposedly), Adam and Eve were created as full-grown human beings without childhoods. They use this same sort of argument with stars (although, it doesn't stand up as well since God would've had a reasonable motive for creating full-grown humans, the reason for creating other things with the appearance of age is not at all clear - unless God were trying to fool us). One of the *new* claims a few creationists have been making is that somehow relativity allows the rest of the universe to actually be 14 billion years old even though the universe was created 6,000 years ago. They claim that something like time-dilation allowed a single-day passed on earth while the rest of the universe aged 14 billion years. The moral of the story? If you have an immutable belief in something + an all powerful God that can do whatever He wants, then all other evidence can be bended or ignored in service of that single immutable belief. Want to believe that God created the universe 10 seconds ago? No problem: God created you with memories of events that never occurred 'earlier' in your life, old newspapers with realistic-sounding events, light from the stars and the Sun were created partway in transit to the earth, etc etc. God can do that 'cuz He's all-powerful, don't ya know?
Calling this "the gene that makes us human" is quite a stretch, isn't it? Not only are there plenty of mutations all over the genome (like the FOXP2 gene that is associated with speech and appeared within the last 200,000 years in the human lineage), but slashdot summary seems to undermine it's own summary when it says, "Introducing this mutation into chimpanzee DNA resulted in the creation of type II neuropsin." If this was "the gene that makes us human", then shouldn't that last sentence read: "Introducing this mutation into chimpanzee DNA resulted in the creation of a human"?
In the 1800's, when the americans were a developing nation, they had no qualms in pirating foreign intellectual properties and technologies. People like Charles Dickens (British) etc., complained that this practice was hurting them, but the US did not see it to their benefit to respect foreign claims and piracy thrived. When the U.S. had developed more and there was a local market for their own authors etc., they came up with copyright protection for their own citizens while still not extending the same protection to foreign works. Only, when there was a significant market in Europe etc. for American works, did the U.S. move towards international copyrights. In a nutshell, when they were developing, they ignored copyrights; and when the role was reversed, they sought to protect their works.
Source: http://wccftech.com/forum/america-and-piracy-some- history-t9724.html
In any case, more and more of the world's economies are moving towards intellectual property, rather than tangible property. That makes comparisons to past history a little difficult. Take a piece of software, for example. Software can involve the involvement of millions of man-hours. It results in no physical product at all. In contrast, historically, the products of labor have been a mixture of intellectual property and physical property. Cars are designed, but they also have to be built. Books lean a little more towards intellectual property, but you still have to physically create them. Contrast that with something like software. Even drugs (while being a physical product) spend much more on development than actual production. As the developed world moves to heavy intellectual property development, countries like China are not only stealing the intellectual property, but doing it at a time when developed countries' economies are built much more heavily on intellectual property and while China maintains large trade surpluses over those same developed countries because they produce physical products (rather than intellectual property).
Also, while intellectual property is a big deal to me (as a software developer, who produces absolutely NOTHING except for intellectual property), I think it's also important to maintain a distinction between what type of intellectual property these countries are stealing. If they steal drug recipes in order to save lives, well, it's stealing, but it's understandable to a certain degree (it's about life or death, like stealing from a pharmacy in order to save someone's life if you really can't afford the price). If they steal a spreadsheet or wordprocessor, it's less understandable and more about economics. If they steal the viagra recipe, video games, or cartoon characters, it's more about greed and shafting the 1st world developers. Why the distinction? Because entertainment is not some essential product that makes a life-or-death difference. In many cases (like entertainment products), there isn't much of a reason they could give that mitigates the stealing itself.
Reminds me of an old story about FOX news and Monsanto - although this one involves legal threats rather than advertising dollars, it shows (like the PC World story) how companies with money can distort the news. FOX News hired some reporters to be "The Investigators". When the reporters did a story critical of a Monsanto product, Monsanto started with legal threats. FOX decided to that they wanted to either rewrite the story to make it more Monsanto-friendly, or kill the story altogether. FOX even tried to bribe the reporters - part of that bribe involved the reporters not talking about the Monsanto story (including not bringing it to another news organization), not talk about the Monsanto product anywhere, and not talk about FOX' suppression of that story. Ultimately, FOX delayed and delayed the story with rewrites (83 versions) until they fired the reporters once a window appeared in their contract. Ultimately, they brought FOX to court, but appeals courts found that *falsifying news is not actually against the law*. (It's funny to hear some FOX news reporter's report at the end where the words are carefully chosen to make it sound like FOX was completely in the right, and makes it sound like the reporters were just making up inaccurate claims against FOX. When you control the news, you get to tell everyone how it happened, I guess.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RlAiTprpXc
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, okay. You're right. And speaking of researching things, did you happen to check if if someone else posted the same comment before you did?
The "commercial" for Brawndo seems to be a big rip-off of the Powerthirst "commericals", except not as well done. Powerthirst: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRuNxHqwazs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0geWjLI5dM
Um, no. The graph shows that nearly 100% of the voters past the initial 50% turnout voted for Putin's party. Is it really rational to suggest that the first 50% of the voters who showed up were split 50%/50% for and against Putin's party, and then the next 50% were close to 100% pro-Putin? I don't think so.
In general one would expect the dots to form vaguely horizontal bands across the graph. In other words, in districts where there was 50% turnout, 50% of the votes would be for Putin's party, and in districts with 90% turnout, approximately the same percentage (50%) of votes would be for Putin's party. That's what you wold expect from fair voting.
On the other hand, if voter turnout was, say 40-60%, and you were stuffing the ballot boxes with an additional 0-30% votes - all of them for Putin's party, you would get the kind of pattern you see in that graph. You could also get this pattern if people were being forced to go and vote for Putin's party.
I'm sorry, but with so many whack-jobs in the world, it doesn't surprise me in the least that some people are banned from wikipedia. It's been one of the enduring complaints about wikipedia that anyone can edit it - editing existing content, removing real information, and adding their dumb ideas to the encyclopedia. I'm sure some people are ridiculously tenacious about adding bad information to the pages, and think that the rest of the world is wrong about Autism/ Bigfoot/ the Kennedy Assassination/ psychics/ global warming/ whatever. Not to mention all the publicity that occurred when the IPs tracing back to politician's offices or large corporations were caught changing pages to make their opponents look bad / make themselves look good. It doesn't surprise me that some wikipedia higher-ups feel like some particular users are like bulls in their china shop, and rather than running behind them trying to clean up the mess, think it's simply easier and better to ban certain people.
You can't simultaneously complain that wikipedia is vulnerable to edits by ignorant/malicious/troll/pro-spin users, and complain that wikipedia takes action against those users by identifying them and banning them.
In this case, one of the higher-ups banned a user who seems to be a productive contributor - which is essentially an abuse of power. But, I fail to see how the "secret mailing list" is controversial.
The laptops are given as charity. They're trying to make them as inexpensive as possible so more of them can be given. You simply can't expect good tech support when you're trying to keep the price as low as possible. Do you think Intel and Microsoft are going to have any patience with tech support calls for their "Classmate" computer? No way. They don't make enough money to bother.
Besides, the incentive for computer companies to provide support is so that their customers become repeat customers. In the case of the XO and Classmate, the computer consumer is a different party than the computer purchaser. This means the companies don't have much incentive for tech support because the customer with the tech support problem is unlikely to be purchasing a computer in the future anyway.
It should've ended with: "We tend to think people have an explicit agenda to rewrite history to make themselves look right, but that's an outsider's perspective. This experiment shows that there isn't always much conscious thought going on," said one researcher who was using his skills of rationalization in order to impress others.
Back in the early 20th century, the mob used to run a kind of informal lottery. It was called a "numbers game". There were places (like barbershops) where people could pick a number from 1 to 1000, and if their number came up, they won. The mob typically paid out between 800-to-1 and 600-to-1. This meant that the mob paid out 60-80% (and kept 20-40%) of the money people initially paid. On the other hand, most state lotteries only pay out about 50% of earnings, making them a worse bet than going with the mob.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_game
http://marketplace.publicradio.org/features/underground/1114undergroundpm.html
Here's a video of Bush defending VNRs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hR1kDMwt5Os
So, I guess this means that FEMA's lesson from Katrina was that they needed better press coverage?
Anyway, besides Jeff Gannon, we've seen this before. Here's another case:
March 29, 2005
Despite a rising chorus of condemnation from journalists and media critics, the George W. Bush administration shows no signs of abandoning its distribution of taxpayer-funded "news" to U.S. newspapers, radio and television stations.
Free press advocates are up in arms about what they say is the covert dissemination of propaganda by government agencies.
In one case, the administration -- seeking to build support among black families for its education reform plans -- paid a prominent African American pundit, Armstrong Williams, 240,000 dollars to promote the "No Child Left Behind" law on his nationally syndicated television show and through his newspaper column, and to urge other black journalists to do the same.
Two other nationally known journalists, Maggie Gallagher and Michael McManus, have also admitted accepting thousands of dollars to endorse government programs.
Since 2001, the Army and Air Force Hometown News Service has fielded 40 reporters, producers and public affairs specialists to create "good military news" to be beamed to home audiences via local news stations. The service's "good news" segments have reportedly reached 41 million Americans via local newscasts -- in most cases, without the station acknowledging their source.
More than 20 different federal agencies used taxpayer funds to produce television news segments promoting Bush administration policies. These "video news releases," or VNRs, were broadcast on hundreds of local news programs. without disclosing their source....
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0329-12.htm
Pretty soon, you'll be hearing this at the office: "Damn copier! First, I got a paper jam. I finally got that fixed - but my hands are all covered in toner. Now, all my documents are coming out in a different language! What's going on? I can't even tell what language this is! Grrrrrr"
I'm not sure that the idea is true. Similarly, it seems logical that a human could not create a program that plays chess better than the programmer does. But, humans have created chess-programs that play chess better than any of its programmers, and better than any human alive.
I haven't heard of a whole genome being inside another species. Although, the mitochondria (which are small energy producing factories inside most life - including mammals) have their own DNA which is separate from our nuclear DNA. Its DNA sequence resembles the sequence of single-celled organisms, which hints that there was a fusion of two different organisms hundreds of millions of years ago. Additionally, plants have chloroplasts (which do photosynthesis), and these are similar - they appear to have been cyanobacteria (independent organisms) that fused with another organism and became organelles within those cells. There are also bits of viral DNA in our own genome - it apparently fused into our DNA long ago. (In fact, you can trace evolutionary relationships by comparing the sequence and positions of these viral bits of DNA across species. Unsurprisingly, humans and apes share a remarkable number of matching viral DNA chunks.)
Real Climate replies to that "bug". Based on the information provided by RealClimate.com, this glitch affects only US temperature measurements (which is only one part of the global temperature measurements). http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007 /08/1934-and-all-that/
Additionally, when you look at the graphs in the RealClimate article, it's clear that there is an temperature increase over time. Comparing those graphs to the statement below, it seems like the text below is attempting to deliberately obscure the fact that warming is happening.
"NASA has now silently released corrected figures, and the changes are truly astounding. The warmest year on record is now 1934. 1998 (long trumpeted by the media as record-breaking) moves to second place. 1921 takes third. In fact, 5 of the 10 warmest years on record now all occur before World War II. Anthony Watts has put the new data in chart form, along with a more detailed summary of the events."
on average patents cost companies more than they earned them.
"On Average"? We are all aware of the way software companies will create patent "minefields" to entangle other companies, and I have to think that the word "on average" means that SOME patents are money-makers for companies, but a large number of patents (perhaps the ones they use to entangle competitors) might cost more money than their worth. If that's the case, then the article isn't really an argument against patents per se, but an argument against the patent-frenzy that some companies are involved in. It's an argument against excessive patenting - in contradiction to the title of this post: "Patents Don't Pay".
Seems to me, this list of miscreants accounts for about 80% of the spam my filters catch. Tell me again why I should give a shit that some viagra insurance spammer trying to steal my identity with some phishing scheme shouldn't be gone after?
Something tells me that the government really doesn't have to go looking in other people's email to get those viagra emails.
Well, gee, you use a lot of fancy words and "logic", but how do you explain Kang and Kodos, Mr. Smartypants? pwned!
Very true. A quick look at climate history will show that the climate has been changing since the Earth had a climate to begin with, well before the SUV was invented and Bush was elected.
a nning/New_Data/
And my health has been fluxuating since the day I was born. So, don't you tell me that I can't eat lead paint!
It will also show that we are actually in a cool period and global warming will get us back to where we need to be!
Actually, we're in a warm period. Looking at this graph of temperature variations over the past 400,000+ years shows that the temperature has fluxuated between 2C hotter than modern temperatures (for brief periods) and 10C cooler than modern temperatures. We're definitely on the warm end of those historical temperatures. Global Warming is not going to "get us back to where we need to be". http://www.daviesand.com/Choices/Precautionary_Pl
The winners of war are the ones profiting on war, and by that I mean convert it into cash (territory/resources can be retaken).
So, your idea is that Halliburton and other US companies won the war? I exclude the US from that list because the US (as a nation) is certainly not profiting from the Iraq War. Sure, the price of oil is high (making the capture of Iraq seem like a valuable asset), but the US is still paying to buy Iraqi oil, and dumping large sums of money into the country. And, if you think the US government had some secret plan to enrich US companies, it seems like paying them directly would've saved a whole lot of money. The US has spent $434 billion on the war already, and I doubt the US companies involved in building can count even one-tenth of that dollar amount in profits as a result of the war.
It's the same entity with one hand destroying infrastructure/society in a warzone, and the other getting the contracts for rebuilding.
I can only guess that you think the US government is destroying infrastructure/society "with one hand", while "the other hand" (US companies) is getting contracts for rebuilding. The problem is that it costs the US government money to destroy things, and costs the US government to rebuild them (US companies are not a part of the US government). Even if we pretend US companies and the US government are one entity, it's still a net loss. Look at it this way: imagine you are the US government, and you pay $1000 for your soldiers to destroy a building. Then, you pay $1000 for a US company to rebuild that building. That US company pays its employees $600 and pockets $400. Now, imagine that because you are "the US", you get to keep the profits from that US company (you don't get to, but pretend you do). That means that you paid-out $2000, and then put $400 back into your pocket. That's still a net loss of $1600. If you could get lots of foreign money for rebuilding, you might be able to turn a profit when you pay the US companies to rebuild - but there isn't much foreign money coming in. If the US was outright stealing the Iraqi oil, that's another way to make a profit, but the US is still paying for Iraqi oil. Besides, even if the US was outright stealing the oil, the profits from Iraqi oil still aren't enough to overturn the net loss.
1: Human Error
Unless you proud willing to believe that we can remotly observe something billions of lightyears away without any error at all. Even if it is true that we can, are their factors that can mess with the dating meathod they use?
Yes, that's a common one I see from creationists. Of course, the "human error" explanation is a very powerful way to allow anyone to believe anything. Invoking this too often and it begins to smell like someone's selling you something. Having seen a wide variety of creationist arguments, I should also point out that creationists often oversimplify the science in order to bring up facts that contradict that oversimplified science, and appear as if "human error" and hubris is a reasonable explanation. Usually, the fuller scientific explanation proves to be deeply damaging to their argument.
2: God created the stars mature for a purpose.
During their helium-burning phase, very high mass stars with more than nine solar masses expand to form red supergiants. They expand in size and could possibly be used to shield the other galaxies from oncoming debris from astroids or other things when drawing it into them with their stronger gravitational field at the time indirectly protecting us from the certin doom of an astroid impact. There is also a posibility that he made them for his own enjoyment (although you are probobly not going to take that as a valid answer).
Keep in mind that most stars are nowhere near the earth. The "shield the other galaxies from oncoming debris from astroids" explanation doesn't hold much weight when the closest star to earth is still 4+ light years away. Further, why would God need to shield the earth from the earth from asteroids that He himself created (why not just not create the asteroids)? Additionally, according to virtually every creationist, Jesus is returning soon. The universe, therefore, will have a total lifespan of about 6 thousand years. Considering the vastness of the universe, there's not much "debris" that could reach earth in 6,000 years - even if those asteroids were capable of anything approaching light-speed (and they aren't).
3: The evolutionists who descovered are lying to us. Hey could be a posibity. Who knows what for though.
Yes, a vast conspiracy from a wide variety of fields - including Christians who are scientists. I've tracked down genetic data from medical databases to compare them to evolutionary predictions. Scientists would have to falsify genetic data on public databases so that they match evolutionary predictions - and they did this just in case someone looks up the data to test it against evolutionary theory? That seems a little bit too much to believe.
4: Creation is a lie
This is the one you might accept. That their is no God, only chance... Wait, would that make chance a god? This belief basicly states that creation is a fairy tale.
Well, the two options are not "the universe is old, evolution is historical, God does not exist" versus "the universe is 6,000 years old, life created by fiat, God exists". But, yes, I would say that creationism is a fairy tale.
I've seen a lot of mental gymnastics going on with creationists. They might claim that things had the 'appearance of age' when they were created. For example (supposedly), Adam and Eve were created as full-grown human beings without childhoods. They use this same sort of argument with stars (although, it doesn't stand up as well since God would've had a reasonable motive for creating full-grown humans, the reason for creating other things with the appearance of age is not at all clear - unless God were trying to fool us). One of the *new* claims a few creationists have been making is that somehow relativity allows the rest of the universe to actually be 14 billion years old even though the universe was created 6,000 years ago. They claim that something like time-dilation allowed a single-day passed on earth while the rest of the universe aged 14 billion years. The moral of the story? If you have an immutable belief in something + an all powerful God that can do whatever He wants, then all other evidence can be bended or ignored in service of that single immutable belief. Want to believe that God created the universe 10 seconds ago? No problem: God created you with memories of events that never occurred 'earlier' in your life, old newspapers with realistic-sounding events, light from the stars and the Sun were created partway in transit to the earth, etc etc. God can do that 'cuz He's all-powerful, don't ya know?
Calling this "the gene that makes us human" is quite a stretch, isn't it? Not only are there plenty of mutations all over the genome (like the FOXP2 gene that is associated with speech and appeared within the last 200,000 years in the human lineage), but slashdot summary seems to undermine it's own summary when it says, "Introducing this mutation into chimpanzee DNA resulted in the creation of type II neuropsin." If this was "the gene that makes us human", then shouldn't that last sentence read: "Introducing this mutation into chimpanzee DNA resulted in the creation of a human"?
The US completely ignored copyright from other countries up into the 60ties.
- history-t9724.html
I agree with that if by "the 60ties", you mean the 1860s.
the United States was a pirate nation that ignored copyrights for its first 100 years.
Source: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/000859
In the 1800's, when the americans were a developing nation, they had no qualms in pirating foreign intellectual properties and technologies. People like Charles Dickens (British) etc., complained that this practice was hurting them, but the US did not see it to their benefit to respect foreign claims and piracy thrived. When the U.S. had developed more and there was a local market for their own authors etc., they came up with copyright protection for their own citizens while still not extending the same protection to foreign works. Only, when there was a significant market in Europe etc. for American works, did the U.S. move towards international copyrights. In a nutshell, when they were developing, they ignored copyrights; and when the role was reversed, they sought to protect their works.
Source: http://wccftech.com/forum/america-and-piracy-some
In any case, more and more of the world's economies are moving towards intellectual property, rather than tangible property. That makes comparisons to past history a little difficult. Take a piece of software, for example. Software can involve the involvement of millions of man-hours. It results in no physical product at all. In contrast, historically, the products of labor have been a mixture of intellectual property and physical property. Cars are designed, but they also have to be built. Books lean a little more towards intellectual property, but you still have to physically create them. Contrast that with something like software. Even drugs (while being a physical product) spend much more on development than actual production. As the developed world moves to heavy intellectual property development, countries like China are not only stealing the intellectual property, but doing it at a time when developed countries' economies are built much more heavily on intellectual property and while China maintains large trade surpluses over those same developed countries because they produce physical products (rather than intellectual property).
Also, while intellectual property is a big deal to me (as a software developer, who produces absolutely NOTHING except for intellectual property), I think it's also important to maintain a distinction between what type of intellectual property these countries are stealing. If they steal drug recipes in order to save lives, well, it's stealing, but it's understandable to a certain degree (it's about life or death, like stealing from a pharmacy in order to save someone's life if you really can't afford the price). If they steal a spreadsheet or wordprocessor, it's less understandable and more about economics. If they steal the viagra recipe, video games, or cartoon characters, it's more about greed and shafting the 1st world developers. Why the distinction? Because entertainment is not some essential product that makes a life-or-death difference. In many cases (like entertainment products), there isn't much of a reason they could give that mitigates the stealing itself.
Reminds me of an old story about FOX news and Monsanto - although this one involves legal threats rather than advertising dollars, it shows (like the PC World story) how companies with money can distort the news. FOX News hired some reporters to be "The Investigators". When the reporters did a story critical of a Monsanto product, Monsanto started with legal threats. FOX decided to that they wanted to either rewrite the story to make it more Monsanto-friendly, or kill the story altogether. FOX even tried to bribe the reporters - part of that bribe involved the reporters not talking about the Monsanto story (including not bringing it to another news organization), not talk about the Monsanto product anywhere, and not talk about FOX' suppression of that story. Ultimately, FOX delayed and delayed the story with rewrites (83 versions) until they fired the reporters once a window appeared in their contract. Ultimately, they brought FOX to court, but appeals courts found that *falsifying news is not actually against the law*. (It's funny to hear some FOX news reporter's report at the end where the words are carefully chosen to make it sound like FOX was completely in the right, and makes it sound like the reporters were just making up inaccurate claims against FOX. When you control the news, you get to tell everyone how it happened, I guess.) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RlAiTprpXc
Not to mention the fact that it will be that much harder to locate the sniper. At least a gun produces a muzzle-flash and sound.