The whole point of the pseudo skeptic movements, whether they been anti-AGW, tobacco company "research", sugar industry "research" and the like isn't really to convince people that their dangerous products are safe, but rather to create just enough doubt so that people will continue their existing habits. It doesn't have to convince people the legitimate researchers are out and out wrong, it just has to create enough uncertainty to prevent people from wholesale change.
Every year the sugar industry is pushing far more sugar into Westerners' digestive tracts than is safe, and every year the oil industry can stave off carbon pricing and other anti-fossil fuel initiatives, is another year of profits. Both industries know much as the tobacco industry must have known, that the reckoning will come, but so long as investors can make a return, and senior management can reap the bonuses, the tactic continues.
The sugar industry and food manufacturers have been essentially doping our food with sugar. They put sugar in damned near everything. The only real way to avoid it is to stay far away from processed foods.
I don't disagree with the notion of personal responsibility, but like smoking, when corporate interests put their profits ahead of human wellbeing, and then compound their sins by actively subverting public health and legislative solutions to keep the cash flowing in, I think the penalties should be massive. Quite frankly, in a properly functioning world, there wouldn't be a tobacco company left in the Western world, and their boards, senior management and their researchers would be rotting in jail cells.
Except that tobacco companies spent years not only funding bullshit research to minimize the effects of first hand and second hand tobacco smoke, but had other scientists sorting out ways to make it even more addictive, not to mention marketing to teenagers.
But I get it, we should never hold commercial interests responsible for the vile and immoral things they do. That's what ordinary people are for, the little people that make rich industrialists even richer by consuming their products, whether they die or fuck up the environment in the process.
It's Michael "Evil Enviro-overlord" Mann. He's the one, the Emperor Palpatine, who has attacked those poor little multinational oil companies and their tireless small handful of tireless champions of truth like Roy Spencer and Judith Curry (also a champion against those evil evolutionists). Of course, we would be amiss if we didn't mention billionaire playboys Charles "Dark Knight" Koch, and his brother and trusty sidekick David "Robin" Koch. Whenever there is an outbreak of acceptance of climate change, the Wall Street Journal's champion of climate truth, Commissioner L. Gordon Cravitz lights up the sky with the mighty Oil Barrel symbol, and the Dark Knight rains down piles of cash to assist in the endless battle against the evil climatologists lead by the Evil Enviro-overlord, The Mann.
I think all fines should be based on gross income or revenue. For instance, a first offence could be 1% of Univeral's gross earnings. Next offence would be 5%. And after that it goes up in 5% intervals until the company is destroyed.
Lowering a standard to assure some entity meets the standard hardly seems useful to me. Human language has certain aspects that set it apart from all other observed animal communication systems. Now I'm not denying that these results could represent a breakthrough in demonstrating another species has similar linguistic abilities, but I am saying that I remain skeptical until it is in fact demonstrated.
How is it you feel that requiring another species' communication have features like displacement and productivity is somehow creating a high bar? That is, after all, a key feature of fully formed languages. Without displacement, for instance, a language cannot communicate concepts that are displaced in time. Without productivity, a language would be too inefficient to encode a near infinite number of ideas.
It is true that languages do shape the cognitive landscape, and can limit perception to some degree. For instance, the Inuit have numerous words for snow, based upon various types of snow that they find in their environment, whereas Indo-Europeans tend to have only one word for snow, from the PIE root *sneigh. But I think you greatly overstate your case in the more general sense of the word. I think it is far to say that if a communication system does not have a regular grammar, and is not capable of displacement and productivity, then it is not a full language.
That's not to despair completely. There are proto-languages, creoles and pidgins, at least in their earliest forms, are examples of languages bereft of certain key features of full language, which are still far more complex than most animal communication systems. If dolphins were shown to even possess a proto-language, that would be pretty damned extraordinary.
Not at all. Nothing would please me more than animals besides H. sapiens possessing our linguistic capabilities. But sadly the history of animal linguistic research has had a few overly optimistic studies that turned up short.
Language has a rather specific meaning to scientists. There are any number of complex communication systems that are still not full language. For a communication system to be a language it must do more than simply transmit information; it must also be productive and capable of displacement. The article is paywalled Telegraph article, so I can't assess it directly, but unless researchers have determined that these key features are present, then while it may be a very complex communication system, it still wouldn't be language.
There have been a lot of false starts investigating the language capabilities like dolphins and apes. While they seem capable of some degree of language, some of the more incredible reports of advanced human-like language have often turned out to be more wishful thinking than fact.
Measuring a brain purely on size is very misleading. At least a fair portion of the relative size difference of brains in different species has to do with body size, perhaps because larger bodies have more sensory cells and larger numbers of nerves, which necessitate more basic processing power for sensory input, as well as sending commands to various parts of the nervous system. Where the brain is larger in comparison to body mass, there is a tendency to find more intelligent animals, so the key here, at least in part, is that ratio.
Perhaps you could point out which part of an engineer's or doctor's code of conduct is unconstitutional? You do understand, I trust, that these professions would largely cease to exist if there weren't enforceable rules about conduct.
Doctors are not supposed to diagnose patients they haven't seen. The celebrity doctors, to some extent, get away with this by at least partially generalizing their "observations" with qualifiers like "could be" or "it's possible that". Frankly, I don't even think they should be allowed to do that. If you have not seen a patient, then, no matter how much your expertise may allow you guess at a possible diagnosis, you cannot make an accurate diagnosis. It's just purely unethical.
This is nothing more than a reheating of the vile way Rove and his evil minions destroyed McCain in 2000. Fortunately, this time, the target's competitor is possibly the worst candidate for president in half a century.
The polls will tighten, to be sure, but Clinton will be elected President at the end of it. And even if she does kick the bucket after that, the Constitution does have mechanisms in place, and Tim Kaine seems like he'd be up to the job.
They may have that right, but the professional organizations that certify them also have the right to hold them to account when they act unethically. Freedom of speech is about state intrusion upon free expression, not about whether the professional organization one VOLUNTARILY joins doing an investigation into ethics. If you want to be a lawyer, accountant, engineer, medical doctor or a psychologist, you have to agree to upholding certain ethical standards, and if you do not, then you can be held to account and even stripped of your right to act in the capacity of your chosen field.
Since the AAPS is basically a hyperconservative quack science organization, I don't think they feel very beholden to ethics at all. The real problem is when other people give this fucking lunatics a platform, and Slashdot should be completely ashamed of itself.
I've seen a couple in the wild at conferences, which is usually a good place to get a notion of what's out in the wild. The overwhelming majority of tablets were iPads, with a few Androids out there.
Having used a Windows 10 mobile device (an 8" tablet), all i can say is I now fully understand why Windows smart devices are collecting dust. The interface is, for lack of a better colorful metaphor, just plain fucking awful on small devices. I have a 13.3" Dell ultralight where the touch display is fairly usable as a tablet, but below, say, 10 inches, Windows 10 is by far the worst touch experience I've ever had, and that includes the really low end shitty touch displays. At the moment, my only real plan is to hook it up to my TV and a portable 2tb external drive and a Bluetooth keyboard and use it as a media machine, because, compared to my four year old Nexus 7, it is a supreme steaming pile of shit as a tablet.
Slashdot Mirror
The whole point of the pseudo skeptic movements, whether they been anti-AGW, tobacco company "research", sugar industry "research" and the like isn't really to convince people that their dangerous products are safe, but rather to create just enough doubt so that people will continue their existing habits. It doesn't have to convince people the legitimate researchers are out and out wrong, it just has to create enough uncertainty to prevent people from wholesale change.
Every year the sugar industry is pushing far more sugar into Westerners' digestive tracts than is safe, and every year the oil industry can stave off carbon pricing and other anti-fossil fuel initiatives, is another year of profits. Both industries know much as the tobacco industry must have known, that the reckoning will come, but so long as investors can make a return, and senior management can reap the bonuses, the tactic continues.
The sugar industry and food manufacturers have been essentially doping our food with sugar. They put sugar in damned near everything. The only real way to avoid it is to stay far away from processed foods.
I don't disagree with the notion of personal responsibility, but like smoking, when corporate interests put their profits ahead of human wellbeing, and then compound their sins by actively subverting public health and legislative solutions to keep the cash flowing in, I think the penalties should be massive. Quite frankly, in a properly functioning world, there wouldn't be a tobacco company left in the Western world, and their boards, senior management and their researchers would be rotting in jail cells.
Except that tobacco companies spent years not only funding bullshit research to minimize the effects of first hand and second hand tobacco smoke, but had other scientists sorting out ways to make it even more addictive, not to mention marketing to teenagers.
But I get it, we should never hold commercial interests responsible for the vile and immoral things they do. That's what ordinary people are for, the little people that make rich industrialists even richer by consuming their products, whether they die or fuck up the environment in the process.
It's Michael "Evil Enviro-overlord" Mann. He's the one, the Emperor Palpatine, who has attacked those poor little multinational oil companies and their tireless small handful of tireless champions of truth like Roy Spencer and Judith Curry (also a champion against those evil evolutionists). Of course, we would be amiss if we didn't mention billionaire playboys Charles "Dark Knight" Koch, and his brother and trusty sidekick David "Robin" Koch. Whenever there is an outbreak of acceptance of climate change, the Wall Street Journal's champion of climate truth, Commissioner L. Gordon Cravitz lights up the sky with the mighty Oil Barrel symbol, and the Dark Knight rains down piles of cash to assist in the endless battle against the evil climatologists lead by the Evil Enviro-overlord, The Mann.
Translation: they're poorly supported devices that no one writes apps for.
I think all fines should be based on gross income or revenue. For instance, a first offence could be 1% of Univeral's gross earnings. Next offence would be 5%. And after that it goes up in 5% intervals until the company is destroyed.
Lowering a standard to assure some entity meets the standard hardly seems useful to me. Human language has certain aspects that set it apart from all other observed animal communication systems. Now I'm not denying that these results could represent a breakthrough in demonstrating another species has similar linguistic abilities, but I am saying that I remain skeptical until it is in fact demonstrated.
How is it you feel that requiring another species' communication have features like displacement and productivity is somehow creating a high bar? That is, after all, a key feature of fully formed languages. Without displacement, for instance, a language cannot communicate concepts that are displaced in time. Without productivity, a language would be too inefficient to encode a near infinite number of ideas.
It is true that languages do shape the cognitive landscape, and can limit perception to some degree. For instance, the Inuit have numerous words for snow, based upon various types of snow that they find in their environment, whereas Indo-Europeans tend to have only one word for snow, from the PIE root *sneigh. But I think you greatly overstate your case in the more general sense of the word. I think it is far to say that if a communication system does not have a regular grammar, and is not capable of displacement and productivity, then it is not a full language.
That's not to despair completely. There are proto-languages, creoles and pidgins, at least in their earliest forms, are examples of languages bereft of certain key features of full language, which are still far more complex than most animal communication systems. If dolphins were shown to even possess a proto-language, that would be pretty damned extraordinary.
Not at all. Nothing would please me more than animals besides H. sapiens possessing our linguistic capabilities. But sadly the history of animal linguistic research has had a few overly optimistic studies that turned up short.
Language has a rather specific meaning to scientists. There are any number of complex communication systems that are still not full language. For a communication system to be a language it must do more than simply transmit information; it must also be productive and capable of displacement. The article is paywalled Telegraph article, so I can't assess it directly, but unless researchers have determined that these key features are present, then while it may be a very complex communication system, it still wouldn't be language.
There have been a lot of false starts investigating the language capabilities like dolphins and apes. While they seem capable of some degree of language, some of the more incredible reports of advanced human-like language have often turned out to be more wishful thinking than fact.
Measuring a brain purely on size is very misleading. At least a fair portion of the relative size difference of brains in different species has to do with body size, perhaps because larger bodies have more sensory cells and larger numbers of nerves, which necessitate more basic processing power for sensory input, as well as sending commands to various parts of the nervous system. Where the brain is larger in comparison to body mass, there is a tendency to find more intelligent animals, so the key here, at least in part, is that ratio.
You seem to be describing sociopaths, not autistic people.
Perhaps you could point out which part of an engineer's or doctor's code of conduct is unconstitutional? You do understand, I trust, that these professions would largely cease to exist if there weren't enforceable rules about conduct.
I've broken blood vessels in my eyes. Nobody said I had a stroke.
Doctors are not supposed to diagnose patients they haven't seen. The celebrity doctors, to some extent, get away with this by at least partially generalizing their "observations" with qualifiers like "could be" or "it's possible that". Frankly, I don't even think they should be allowed to do that. If you have not seen a patient, then, no matter how much your expertise may allow you guess at a possible diagnosis, you cannot make an accurate diagnosis. It's just purely unethical.
This is nothing more than a reheating of the vile way Rove and his evil minions destroyed McCain in 2000. Fortunately, this time, the target's competitor is possibly the worst candidate for president in half a century.
So you think an organization that denies HIV causes AIDS uses methodologies?
The polls will tighten, to be sure, but Clinton will be elected President at the end of it. And even if she does kick the bucket after that, the Constitution does have mechanisms in place, and Tim Kaine seems like he'd be up to the job.
It underlines once again that some people seem to believe freedom of speech also means freedom from consequences.
They may have that right, but the professional organizations that certify them also have the right to hold them to account when they act unethically. Freedom of speech is about state intrusion upon free expression, not about whether the professional organization one VOLUNTARILY joins doing an investigation into ethics. If you want to be a lawyer, accountant, engineer, medical doctor or a psychologist, you have to agree to upholding certain ethical standards, and if you do not, then you can be held to account and even stripped of your right to act in the capacity of your chosen field.
Since the AAPS is basically a hyperconservative quack science organization, I don't think they feel very beholden to ethics at all. The real problem is when other people give this fucking lunatics a platform, and Slashdot should be completely ashamed of itself.
I'm not sure I can refute the claim that you're a pedophile.
Hmmm....
It's hard to tell whether you're just a blathering moron, or just trying to be funny.
I've seen a couple in the wild at conferences, which is usually a good place to get a notion of what's out in the wild. The overwhelming majority of tablets were iPads, with a few Androids out there.
The Big Bang wasn't an explosion. There was no center because all space began expanding.
Having used a Windows 10 mobile device (an 8" tablet), all i can say is I now fully understand why Windows smart devices are collecting dust. The interface is, for lack of a better colorful metaphor, just plain fucking awful on small devices. I have a 13.3" Dell ultralight where the touch display is fairly usable as a tablet, but below, say, 10 inches, Windows 10 is by far the worst touch experience I've ever had, and that includes the really low end shitty touch displays. At the moment, my only real plan is to hook it up to my TV and a portable 2tb external drive and a Bluetooth keyboard and use it as a media machine, because, compared to my four year old Nexus 7, it is a supreme steaming pile of shit as a tablet.