You're thinking of kinetic energy. What's relevant here is potential energy: mgh. But realistically, it's not even a physics problem - you have to find the floor at which the marble breaks. If you wanted an approximate answer, you're on the right track, but I'm guessing they want the exact floor at which the marble breaks. Now it could break at 60mph, or 60.000001mph, that doesn't matter, the units you're working with are floors of the building, ergo you have to find a way of testing each floor as efficiently as possible. The way to do this is to use marble 1 to eliminate as many floors as possible by skipping many of them and using marble 2 to fill in the floors in between starting at the lowest non-break floor +1. (I believe going 14-27-39-50 etc etc with marble 1 will do this best, as you need about 9 drops on average to find the right floor).
You're assuming a background euclidean geometry. This doesn't have to exist. Now, if we allow space to curve (eg surface of the earth) we can form triangles whose angles don't add to 180 - eg you can do a triangle with three right angles on the earth - start at north pole, go to equator, turn 90 degrees, got 1/4 of way around earth, turn 90 degrees, back to north pole. You can say that it isn't a "triangle" in your common notion of the word, but from a non-euclidean geometry perspective it actually is - three straight lines on a sphere (called geodesics) joined by three angles.
Now, Pi is a constant for circles drawn in our euclidean space. But that presumes that we can measure a circumference and radius and take a ratio. There's nothing in maths to stop Pi being any value you like, it just happens to be what it is in our geometry. If you like, you can define Pi as being the circumference to diameter ratio of the most efficient way to capture area with a given length of rope. That is a perfectly good definition of a circle in our standard geometry. But if you make some changes to geometry there's no reason that it shouldn't change - the radius of a circle drawn on the surface of the earth, measured along the surface, compared to its circumference measured in the same way may in fact vary. Suppose you put a rope around a large mountain - the radius measured across the mountain (sticking to the surface) will be very large, as will the area contained, even though the circumference (measured around the base of the mountain) will be relatively quite small.
Oh, and as a side note, e isn't a physical constant, it's a mathematical one. It's Sum (n=0 to infinity) 1/n! To some extent you could argue it's just as fundamental as Pi.
Ah, but we can help humans here in the USA. Stop voting in far right governments that don't fund social welfare programs. Vote for someone who'd put money into schools, health care and training for the unemployed. Just think how good a school system we could have gotten for the cost of the Iraq war, and how much it would have positively benefited the economy in the long run.
But then again, Diebold isn't a teachers union, and politicians don't get big bucks from the education sector, so I guess nothing will change.
ET got a HUGE number of players with its free release. It was immense for a while back there, and it was actually quite an innovative and fun game. Now its probably going to cash in a lot of its goodwill when ET:Quake-Wars comes out, making money for Activision. I don't know if the extra interest it'll generate will pay for the development costs of ET, but I'd imagine it might - without ET I don't think Quake Wars would have quite the interest it does. This model does seem to happen quite a bit - see Counter-Strike and Counter-Strike Source, Team Fortress to TF Classic and TF2. Even single player games are acting similarly - They Hunger was originally a free Half-Life mod (originally on PC Gamer disks, the released for free IIRC) and the new version is a full commercial game.
That's right, because we ALL want an MPAA for games...
Sheesh, some things are best done by a government. The MPAA is an unelected body enforcing its own set of laws. Frankly, I'd rather that I got to VOTE on which people make and enforce laws upon me. Do you really think the MPAA could get away with the crap that it does if we could tie it to a politician whose picture was shown every time there's an "MPAA goes after computer-less granny" story? The MPAA is the OPPOSITE of a free market - it's an agreement between would-be competitors to not do certain things. A free market would involve no such agreements.
"If a cop runs a light and there's an accident, investigate it" What if he drives drunk? Or what if I run a red light and don't have an accident? Only on accidents do we investigate? No, we enforce laws to prevent accidents, not just punish people for having them. There should be well defined situations in which running a red light is an acceptable risk. Otherwise, a cop should be subject to exactly the same laws the rest of us are. It would be incredibly simple just to have some automation of the "sirens are on now" - a time stamp in the car for example. Then just disregard tickets during that time period. The cure is very simple, this is just a case of cops wanting privileges that the law does not, and should not afford them.
No, they're going to start obeying the law that their job says they should obey. Or get fired. It'll be a simple form to fill in, could even be automated, when your lights are on and the dispatcher sent you - done electronically you could have the dispatcher push the authorize squad car xxxx to break the limits/lights laws and any tickets generated by automatic detection will be stopped. Hell, you could even wire up a radio signal that says "siren/lights on" and so stops all automatic tickets from coming. Then just occasionally spot check to make sure the sirens/lights were justified. Filling out an event report (which I believe cops do after each call-out etc) should be enough 99.9% of the time to get any automatic tickets disregarded.
True, but if you're at PSU, I can tell ya that it cuts both ways: Just find a computer on the university network (eg in the english dept. grad lounge) copy its MAC add. as your own and d/c it. Voila, you can connect to the network, and everyone will think you're a grad student in English if they come looking for you. Tried and tested got me around the max bandwidth quotas and all kinds of things:)
Who all worked a damn site harder in college than most US students did. OK, mean generalizations aside, there are a lot of foreign grad students because they're the ones who've worked VERY hard for it all the way through college. For me college was a full time (60 hours a week) job. Of course, I loved it, but I see few (about none) students here who take it that seriously.
As a grad student in physics, no way in hell. Sorry, I have a masters in math, and am getting a PhD in physics, and there is not one snowball's chance in an inferno that I would stand in front of a group of squabbling kids and try to maintain order, let alone teach for the amount that they would be willing to pay. Teaching college students is hard enough, takes a lot out of you, and they've opted to be there. Teaching the conscripts, never. I made my way as a TA before, now I'm a lucky RA so I don't have to teach at the moment. But even as a TA I was probably pulling in the same pay (per hour) that an ordinary high school teacher makes (especially when you count that tuition and benefits are included etc).
You want my abilities? Pay me the going rate for them. People I graduated with earn around 80k/year, when you want to match that rate of pay, give me a call. Until then, I'm not going to do one of the most demanding and least rewarding jobs around. (Yes, you get some students who might make it worthwhile, but for the most part you get a lot of crap for trying to teach - both parents are high school teachers, and I've been promised a bullet if I ever go that way...)
No no no, come on, if you're going for the statistics joke you've got to make it sound more plausible - "98.6% of all statistics are made up on the spot". I think it was Vic Reeves who came up with this one, but anyway, detail (in this case precision) is important to this joke. 70% is just too round a number, so not as funny. It sounds convenient. But say 56.3 is not round, it indicates some kind of big survey...
OK, first up by "you", you should read "one" - I'm not speaking about you specifically. I do believe that there are much more carbon efficient ways to live, one of which is to drive less (more public transport/shared transport). Of course, flying less would also be key, given its rate of growth and fuel inefficiency. A good rail system might be able to cope with a lot of domestic flights, but international is something that's going to be a problem.
Anyway, food production: Yes, at the moment we have a surplus of food. Much is grown in the bread-basket of North America, and believe me, I'm the first to agree that our current problems with food distribution are geopolitical and not those of production. But there are a lot of studies which show that most of our current farming methods will prove insufficient in the face of an altered climate. Of course, we can adapt somewhat, but I'm not sure that we'll be able to sustain the population with this.
"Here's what we need to do": Yes, I'm afraid, that is science. You come to me with a question - how does man get to the moon? And I tell you "What you need to do is...". Perhaps I should have said "This is how to avoid it" or "Here's what we need to do, if you want to stop this". But really we're into semantics now, the point I was making is that we do have solutions. When you make a scientific model, you can test what changing certain parameters does. Thus you find out the outcomes of possible changes to your system, and hence can suggest a course of action. When your skydiving instructor says "You need to open your parachute now" he's not really saying that you have to do it, but what he's suppressing is "If you want to slow your descent toward the ground and hence avert your high probability of dying...". But by the time he gets through that you're paste.
Your accountability point is about implementation. Well, that IS a political issue. All the climatologists seem to be saying is "We need to reduce our CO2 / methane emissions (if we want to not bugger up the planet)" amongst other things. Implementation is political, and will probably involve a lot of changes to lifestyles (the rapid industrialization of China being one of the major ones). But, for the same reason that people starve whilst we have a surplus of food, we'll probably screw up the planet when it would be comparatively very favourable not to.
Yes, I was boiling it down, so sue me. But to compare, say, a couple of decades of scientific work and evidence to that of a couple of politicians in a power grab isn't exactly fair. People who don't use half-covered insults (a.k.a "grown-ups") tend to make a better point. I've read a few of the papers, and whilst climate change isn't my field (quantum mechanics) the case is compelling that the cost of not acting will be quite large. The predicted changes to the gulf stream alone would cause a massive problem for arable land, melting icecaps (yes, we have a lot of evidence of this) would cause vast problems also, not just in the you'll-be-underwater sense, but also in terms of food production. Politicians have their own agendas, so in your comparison are you really claiming the climatologists are reporting their results for personal profit, telling us of global climate change to further some selfish cause? Or was it just a cheap jab at scoring points with absolutely no relevance? No-one's said "without question" - the questions have been asked and answered within the field, but of course you'd quite like to ignore that so long as you can put up your own story. Some people still believe the world is flat. Others that it was created 6000 years ago. Now, there is "doubt" on the round-world theory, and all of physics. The same doubt exists about climate change. So no not "support my idea without question", more "look, here's some evidence, here's more, here's a model, here's more, these people independently verified my work.... now here's what we need to do". In other words, science.
Now, I could care less about critters, trees, etc, etc so long as I have a habitat in which I can survive. Yes, it sounds a bit self centered, but it's honest. But tell me - how do engineers know when to reinforce a bridge? Well, you have done experiments (or seen them done, or heard of them) scientifically, gathered evidence, and concluded that there is a "doomsday" scenario, with. So you tell people "Reinforce the bridge, or when you cross it you'll die" - support my idea or die a horrible death. Then, you present evidence, sure, and some geniuses come on Slashdot and decide that they're going to weigh up the costs and benefits of reinforcing the bridge. Of course, some people come along and say "but nature is also corroding the bridge, so we can't be to blame". But does that mean you don't reinforce it? No. You do, because the science is known, and the reinforcements are necessary.
Here, the science IS known. Yes, there are a lot of people who would like it not to be true, because it would be awkward for them to change their lifestyle a little. So they claim it would destroy the economy etc etc.
We're standing on the bridge. It's going to collapse. Some people will probably die as a result. It will mean paying for reinforcement, putting in some work. That's the cost/benefit of the bridge.
With climate change, the cost is cutting down globally on our emissions. Burning fewer fossil fuels. It will mean economic change on a large scale. The manufacturing industry will have to be redeveloped. You'll probably have to stop driving your penis-replacement. The benefit is that is that we minimize the impact, maintain more food production, reduce the likelihood of famine and disease.
Accountability - well, that's a hard one. If it works, people will claim it was unnecessary anyway. If it doesn't work, lots of people die. If we don't try it, and we come out alive (contrary to all the science) well, yes, some scientists will look pretty foolish. If we don't try, and it does all go wrong, we die. So yes, accountability is hard. Tell you what, I'll buy you a drink if we don't try it and survive, or (in the afterlife of your choosing) if we don't do it and die. Vice-versa for if we do try and it works, or we don't try and we die. Good enough? 'cause that's all you can get really.
Benefit: We continue to live. Cost: Well, it almost doesn't matter, now, does it? Tell me, what cost is NOT going to justify having a habitable planet?
Well, they'd better be good then. When I was back in high school, we had cameras installed to watch certain areas. They were pretty much useless, as their field of view was easy to avoid. And they were subject to a lot of pranks - at first the obvious ones - walking past them backwards etc, or having three people walk past them backwards, then one walk past forwards in an unnatural way to make it look like he was walking backwards on rewind. They got turned to face the walls etc. At one stage, we actually faked a gang-style execution - two of us walked up behind a friend, faked cutting his throat with a knife, had him fall down, then dragged off his "dead" body from the screen. We got in trouble for that one:) I wonder just how much of this a "smart" camera could pick up on... I doubt there's much AI that couldn't be fooled by someone who thought for five minutes.
Oh, and the best one was the one to "stop smoking" - all it ever saw was a cloud of smoke from the group of kids standing directly below it smoking and blowing their smoke onto its lens. Classic. It didn't help that the first one we got was about one frame per second, so any "fights" it recorded consisted to two kids walking towards one another, the one walking away whilst the other was on the ground...
Enjoy your bliss, then. The fourth Geneva convention regards the treatment of civilians in the time of war. I quote:
"1. Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria.
To this end the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons:
(a) Violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture; (b) Taking of hostages; (c) Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment; (d) The passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples."
Abu Ghraib? Guantanamo Bay? The Geneva conventions have been violated. You don't like it, so you do the newspeak and call them "illegal combatants" or other such terms, but you're either dealing with civilians or soldiers, and in either case the rights afforded to them under this are being ignored. Hell, some would even argue that Saddam's rights were violated under section d - just look what a shambles of a trial he had (who was the judge etc etc).
When I get overbooked, I get a free flight out of it, usually upgraded to business class, or some money, etc. What is my ISP offering me? How about a "Your connection dropped below xxxx / ping went up to yyy so here's next month for free and we're sorry"? There are RULES about what happens when an airline overbooks.
From my experience of the US education system (TA, Grad student) the class sizes seem to be very big. In fact, the class I was a TA for had over 1100 students in it, one professor, and an army of grad student TAs who taught the class sections and labs (it was intro physics). As an undergrad in the UK (Oxford), I had three or four hour long 2/3 on one meetings with professors each week (different ones for different areas), along with the big lectures. The cost involved to a US student is actually comparable with going to a private institution here.
There are a few differences though - I had picked my "major" before I went (maths -note the S because I was in the UK), in fact it was the only subject I studied, which gave me a bit of a jump on all my fellow grad students here. The social life was a lot of fun, the academic staff were very willing to help - a literal conversation with one of my tutors about quantum mechanics - "I don't understand what means by.... in the book" "Yes that is a little vague, hang on I'll call him" (2 mins of phone call later) "OK, he describes it as..... but if you're confused he can meet you tomorrow at 10:00". This was something that the students I TA for could only dream of - they barely get chance to come close to a professor in most of their courses. Friends who studied engineering had a similar experience - lots of direct contact. Yes, they expect you to work like crazy, and the transition from high school to university is tough, but I feel like the attention and guidance I got was much more than my colleagues, all of whom were at high ranked US institutions.
Now, for research, on the other hand, it's a different matter, but as an undergrad, think about it.
In that case, it would be near financial suicide for an individual to sue a company. Sure, you might win, and get that $10k you think they owe you, or you might lose and have millions of dollars of debt. My health insurance company made noises about not paying my wife's claim a while back, so I kindly explained where it was in the contract, and that I'd sue them if they didn't. Had I gone and lost under your system (and lets face it, it CAN happen, with a few skilled lawyers on the company's side), I would have had to pay their millions of dollars of fees, thus bankrupting me. Or I could have won and got the $5k that they were refusing to pay, and they would have to pay my relatively small legal fees.
This may sound simple, but look at it this way: I had $5k to gain, and millions to lose. They had a risk of (say) $10k if they lost, or $5k if they didn't. So they could probably just intimidate a lot of people out of suing. And hey presto, I'd not get good health coverage as a result (provided by employer, not like I can change it, but that's a whole other problem).
Slashdot Mirror
You're thinking of kinetic energy. What's relevant here is potential energy: mgh. But realistically, it's not even a physics problem - you have to find the floor at which the marble breaks. If you wanted an approximate answer, you're on the right track, but I'm guessing they want the exact floor at which the marble breaks. Now it could break at 60mph, or 60.000001mph, that doesn't matter, the units you're working with are floors of the building, ergo you have to find a way of testing each floor as efficiently as possible. The way to do this is to use marble 1 to eliminate as many floors as possible by skipping many of them and using marble 2 to fill in the floors in between starting at the lowest non-break floor +1. (I believe going 14-27-39-50 etc etc with marble 1 will do this best, as you need about 9 drops on average to find the right floor).
You're assuming a background euclidean geometry. This doesn't have to exist. Now, if we allow space to curve (eg surface of the earth) we can form triangles whose angles don't add to 180 - eg you can do a triangle with three right angles on the earth - start at north pole, go to equator, turn 90 degrees, got 1/4 of way around earth, turn 90 degrees, back to north pole. You can say that it isn't a "triangle" in your common notion of the word, but from a non-euclidean geometry perspective it actually is - three straight lines on a sphere (called geodesics) joined by three angles.
Now, Pi is a constant for circles drawn in our euclidean space. But that presumes that we can measure a circumference and radius and take a ratio. There's nothing in maths to stop Pi being any value you like, it just happens to be what it is in our geometry. If you like, you can define Pi as being the circumference to diameter ratio of the most efficient way to capture area with a given length of rope. That is a perfectly good definition of a circle in our standard geometry. But if you make some changes to geometry there's no reason that it shouldn't change - the radius of a circle drawn on the surface of the earth, measured along the surface, compared to its circumference measured in the same way may in fact vary. Suppose you put a rope around a large mountain - the radius measured across the mountain (sticking to the surface) will be very large, as will the area contained, even though the circumference (measured around the base of the mountain) will be relatively quite small.
Oh, and as a side note, e isn't a physical constant, it's a mathematical one. It's Sum (n=0 to infinity) 1/n! To some extent you could argue it's just as fundamental as Pi.
Ah, but we can help humans here in the USA. Stop voting in far right governments that don't fund social welfare programs. Vote for someone who'd put money into schools, health care and training for the unemployed. Just think how good a school system we could have gotten for the cost of the Iraq war, and how much it would have positively benefited the economy in the long run.
But then again, Diebold isn't a teachers union, and politicians don't get big bucks from the education sector, so I guess nothing will change.
"Of course with 1440000000 ms ping times, I wouldn't try playing Battlefield 2 over that connection."
Obviously never had Verizon, have you?
ET got a HUGE number of players with its free release. It was immense for a while back there, and it was actually quite an innovative and fun game. Now its probably going to cash in a lot of its goodwill when ET:Quake-Wars comes out, making money for Activision. I don't know if the extra interest it'll generate will pay for the development costs of ET, but I'd imagine it might - without ET I don't think Quake Wars would have quite the interest it does. This model does seem to happen quite a bit - see Counter-Strike and Counter-Strike Source, Team Fortress to TF Classic and TF2. Even single player games are acting similarly - They Hunger was originally a free Half-Life mod (originally on PC Gamer disks, the released for free IIRC) and the new version is a full commercial game.
That's right, because we ALL want an MPAA for games...
Sheesh, some things are best done by a government. The MPAA is an unelected body enforcing its own set of laws. Frankly, I'd rather that I got to VOTE on which people make and enforce laws upon me. Do you really think the MPAA could get away with the crap that it does if we could tie it to a politician whose picture was shown every time there's an "MPAA goes after computer-less granny" story? The MPAA is the OPPOSITE of a free market - it's an agreement between would-be competitors to not do certain things. A free market would involve no such agreements.
Or:
1+2) Because you're (as a society) not willing to pay enough to attract GOOD teachers.
"If a cop runs a light and there's an accident, investigate it" What if he drives drunk? Or what if I run a red light and don't have an accident? Only on accidents do we investigate? No, we enforce laws to prevent accidents, not just punish people for having them. There should be well defined situations in which running a red light is an acceptable risk. Otherwise, a cop should be subject to exactly the same laws the rest of us are. It would be incredibly simple just to have some automation of the "sirens are on now" - a time stamp in the car for example. Then just disregard tickets during that time period. The cure is very simple, this is just a case of cops wanting privileges that the law does not, and should not afford them.
No, they're going to start obeying the law that their job says they should obey. Or get fired. It'll be a simple form to fill in, could even be automated, when your lights are on and the dispatcher sent you - done electronically you could have the dispatcher push the authorize squad car xxxx to break the limits/lights laws and any tickets generated by automatic detection will be stopped. Hell, you could even wire up a radio signal that says "siren/lights on" and so stops all automatic tickets from coming. Then just occasionally spot check to make sure the sirens/lights were justified. Filling out an event report (which I believe cops do after each call-out etc) should be enough 99.9% of the time to get any automatic tickets disregarded.
True, but if you're at PSU, I can tell ya that it cuts both ways: Just find a computer on the university network (eg in the english dept. grad lounge) copy its MAC add. as your own and d/c it. Voila, you can connect to the network, and everyone will think you're a grad student in English if they come looking for you. Tried and tested got me around the max bandwidth quotas and all kinds of things :)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/comedy/nowshow.shtml BBC Radio4 at its finest, answers the climate change question this week....
GP Post referenced streets and protest, therefore response was about a recent, large scale street protest.
Sidenotes:
1) Britain != England. (Hint Scotland, Wales...)
2) There were other protests around the country.
Perhaps because a one or two word label is insufficient to define a complex ethical position? How do insight-less comments get modded "insightful"?
Who all worked a damn site harder in college than most US students did. OK, mean generalizations aside, there are a lot of foreign grad students because they're the ones who've worked VERY hard for it all the way through college. For me college was a full time (60 hours a week) job. Of course, I loved it, but I see few (about none) students here who take it that seriously.
(Foreign Grad Student in Physics)
As a grad student in physics, no way in hell. Sorry, I have a masters in math, and am getting a PhD in physics, and there is not one snowball's chance in an inferno that I would stand in front of a group of squabbling kids and try to maintain order, let alone teach for the amount that they would be willing to pay. Teaching college students is hard enough, takes a lot out of you, and they've opted to be there. Teaching the conscripts, never. I made my way as a TA before, now I'm a lucky RA so I don't have to teach at the moment. But even as a TA I was probably pulling in the same pay (per hour) that an ordinary high school teacher makes (especially when you count that tuition and benefits are included etc).
You want my abilities? Pay me the going rate for them. People I graduated with earn around 80k/year, when you want to match that rate of pay, give me a call. Until then, I'm not going to do one of the most demanding and least rewarding jobs around. (Yes, you get some students who might make it worthwhile, but for the most part you get a lot of crap for trying to teach - both parents are high school teachers, and I've been promised a bullet if I ever go that way...)
No no no, come on, if you're going for the statistics joke you've got to make it sound more plausible - "98.6% of all statistics are made up on the spot". I think it was Vic Reeves who came up with this one, but anyway, detail (in this case precision) is important to this joke. 70% is just too round a number, so not as funny. It sounds convenient. But say 56.3 is not round, it indicates some kind of big survey...
Well if not, my kevlar bible business is about to take off...
OK, first up by "you", you should read "one" - I'm not speaking about you specifically. I do believe that there are much more carbon efficient ways to live, one of which is to drive less (more public transport/shared transport). Of course, flying less would also be key, given its rate of growth and fuel inefficiency. A good rail system might be able to cope with a lot of domestic flights, but international is something that's going to be a problem.
Anyway, food production: Yes, at the moment we have a surplus of food. Much is grown in the bread-basket of North America, and believe me, I'm the first to agree that our current problems with food distribution are geopolitical and not those of production. But there are a lot of studies which show that most of our current farming methods will prove insufficient in the face of an altered climate. Of course, we can adapt somewhat, but I'm not sure that we'll be able to sustain the population with this.
"Here's what we need to do": Yes, I'm afraid, that is science. You come to me with a question - how does man get to the moon? And I tell you "What you need to do is...". Perhaps I should have said "This is how to avoid it" or "Here's what we need to do, if you want to stop this". But really we're into semantics now, the point I was making is that we do have solutions. When you make a scientific model, you can test what changing certain parameters does. Thus you find out the outcomes of possible changes to your system, and hence can suggest a course of action. When your skydiving instructor says "You need to open your parachute now" he's not really saying that you have to do it, but what he's suppressing is "If you want to slow your descent toward the ground and hence avert your high probability of dying...". But by the time he gets through that you're paste.
Your accountability point is about implementation. Well, that IS a political issue. All the climatologists seem to be saying is "We need to reduce our CO2 / methane emissions (if we want to not bugger up the planet)" amongst other things. Implementation is political, and will probably involve a lot of changes to lifestyles (the rapid industrialization of China being one of the major ones). But, for the same reason that people starve whilst we have a surplus of food, we'll probably screw up the planet when it would be comparatively very favourable not to.
Yes, I was boiling it down, so sue me. But to compare, say, a couple of decades of scientific work and evidence to that of a couple of politicians in a power grab isn't exactly fair. People who don't use half-covered insults (a.k.a "grown-ups") tend to make a better point. I've read a few of the papers, and whilst climate change isn't my field (quantum mechanics) the case is compelling that the cost of not acting will be quite large. The predicted changes to the gulf stream alone would cause a massive problem for arable land, melting icecaps (yes, we have a lot of evidence of this) would cause vast problems also, not just in the you'll-be-underwater sense, but also in terms of food production. Politicians have their own agendas, so in your comparison are you really claiming the climatologists are reporting their results for personal profit, telling us of global climate change to further some selfish cause? Or was it just a cheap jab at scoring points with absolutely no relevance? No-one's said "without question" - the questions have been asked and answered within the field, but of course you'd quite like to ignore that so long as you can put up your own story. Some people still believe the world is flat. Others that it was created 6000 years ago. Now, there is "doubt" on the round-world theory, and all of physics. The same doubt exists about climate change. So no not "support my idea without question", more "look, here's some evidence, here's more, here's a model, here's more, these people independently verified my work.... now here's what we need to do". In other words, science.
Now, I could care less about critters, trees, etc, etc so long as I have a habitat in which I can survive. Yes, it sounds a bit self centered, but it's honest. But tell me - how do engineers know when to reinforce a bridge? Well, you have done experiments (or seen them done, or heard of them) scientifically, gathered evidence, and concluded that there is a "doomsday" scenario, with. So you tell people "Reinforce the bridge, or when you cross it you'll die" - support my idea or die a horrible death. Then, you present evidence, sure, and some geniuses come on Slashdot and decide that they're going to weigh up the costs and benefits of reinforcing the bridge. Of course, some people come along and say "but nature is also corroding the bridge, so we can't be to blame". But does that mean you don't reinforce it? No. You do, because the science is known, and the reinforcements are necessary.
Here, the science IS known. Yes, there are a lot of people who would like it not to be true, because it would be awkward for them to change their lifestyle a little. So they claim it would destroy the economy etc etc.
We're standing on the bridge. It's going to collapse. Some people will probably die as a result. It will mean paying for reinforcement, putting in some work. That's the cost/benefit of the bridge.
With climate change, the cost is cutting down globally on our emissions. Burning fewer fossil fuels. It will mean economic change on a large scale. The manufacturing industry will have to be redeveloped. You'll probably have to stop driving your penis-replacement. The benefit is that is that we minimize the impact, maintain more food production, reduce the likelihood of famine and disease.
Accountability - well, that's a hard one. If it works, people will claim it was unnecessary anyway. If it doesn't work, lots of people die. If we don't try it, and we come out alive (contrary to all the science) well, yes, some scientists will look pretty foolish. If we don't try, and it does all go wrong, we die. So yes, accountability is hard. Tell you what, I'll buy you a drink if we don't try it and survive, or (in the afterlife of your choosing) if we don't do it and die. Vice-versa for if we do try and it works, or we don't try and we die. Good enough? 'cause that's all you can get really.
Benefit: We continue to live. Cost: Well, it almost doesn't matter, now, does it? Tell me, what cost is NOT going to justify having a habitable planet?
Oh, and the best one was the one to "stop smoking" - all it ever saw was a cloud of smoke from the group of kids standing directly below it smoking and blowing their smoke onto its lens. Classic. It didn't help that the first one we got was about one frame per second, so any "fights" it recorded consisted to two kids walking towards one another, the one walking away whilst the other was on the ground...
Enjoy your bliss, then. The fourth Geneva convention regards the treatment of civilians in the time of war. I quote:
"1. Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria.
To this end the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons:
(a) Violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;
(b) Taking of hostages;
(c) Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment;
(d) The passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples."
Abu Ghraib? Guantanamo Bay? The Geneva conventions have been violated. You don't like it, so you do the newspeak and call them "illegal combatants" or other such terms, but you're either dealing with civilians or soldiers, and in either case the rights afforded to them under this are being ignored. Hell, some would even argue that Saddam's rights were violated under section d - just look what a shambles of a trial he had (who was the judge etc etc).
When I get overbooked, I get a free flight out of it, usually upgraded to business class, or some money, etc. What is my ISP offering me? How about a "Your connection dropped below xxxx / ping went up to yyy so here's next month for free and we're sorry"? There are RULES about what happens when an airline overbooks.
From my experience of the US education system (TA, Grad student) the class sizes seem to be very big. In fact, the class I was a TA for had over 1100 students in it, one professor, and an army of grad student TAs who taught the class sections and labs (it was intro physics). As an undergrad in the UK (Oxford), I had three or four hour long 2/3 on one meetings with professors each week (different ones for different areas), along with the big lectures. The cost involved to a US student is actually comparable with going to a private institution here.
.... in the book" "Yes that is a little vague, hang on I'll call him" (2 mins of phone call later) "OK, he describes it as ..... but if you're confused he can meet you tomorrow at 10:00". This was something that the students I TA for could only dream of - they barely get chance to come close to a professor in most of their courses. Friends who studied engineering had a similar experience - lots of direct contact. Yes, they expect you to work like crazy, and the transition from high school to university is tough, but I feel like the attention and guidance I got was much more than my colleagues, all of whom were at high ranked US institutions.
There are a few differences though - I had picked my "major" before I went (maths -note the S because I was in the UK), in fact it was the only subject I studied, which gave me a bit of a jump on all my fellow grad students here. The social life was a lot of fun, the academic staff were very willing to help - a literal conversation with one of my tutors about quantum mechanics - "I don't understand what means by
Now, for research, on the other hand, it's a different matter, but as an undergrad, think about it.
In that case, it would be near financial suicide for an individual to sue a company. Sure, you might win, and get that $10k you think they owe you, or you might lose and have millions of dollars of debt. My health insurance company made noises about not paying my wife's claim a while back, so I kindly explained where it was in the contract, and that I'd sue them if they didn't. Had I gone and lost under your system (and lets face it, it CAN happen, with a few skilled lawyers on the company's side), I would have had to pay their millions of dollars of fees, thus bankrupting me. Or I could have won and got the $5k that they were refusing to pay, and they would have to pay my relatively small legal fees.
This may sound simple, but look at it this way: I had $5k to gain, and millions to lose. They had a risk of (say) $10k if they lost, or $5k if they didn't. So they could probably just intimidate a lot of people out of suing. And hey presto, I'd not get good health coverage as a result (provided by employer, not like I can change it, but that's a whole other problem).