It's free (actually, "rather cheap") to the recipient.
...involuntary contributions, taken by force, known colloquially as taxes...
That bit of libertarian soundbite was somewhat funny 20 years ago, when I first heard it. It has not aged very well, though.
Few people like paying taxes. Still, most actually do accept that taxes are necessary, and pay them voluntarily. Essentially, it's like a condo fee. You cannot opt out of the elevator and the janitor, but have the pool and the cable TV. Take the whole package or leave. But you do get to vote for the board every 4 years or so....
Free healthcare: In Western European countries, health care is, on average, much better than in the US. Heck, for a long time it was better in Cuba. US healthcare is excellent if you can pay for it, but many can't. European healthcare is rather good if you can't pay (and you don't have to!), and excellent if you can.
College-Level education: You must be joking. The US education in the top universities is good. But why do you guess half of your faculty is imported from elsewhere?
Unemployment: You may be up to something, but then, maybe not. The systems and circumstances are very different. I doubt that unemployment benefits cause a significant amount of unemployment. And they do keep people from getting desperate - look at the crime rates.
My pages can't be valid and function how I want. So if I have a choice I'll make the pages work how I want them to. [...] What I'd really prefer is for all the browser makers to agree on a standard and follow it.
Unless you use non-standard plug-ins like Flash, I bet you can get it to work within the standards. It's probably not even hard. Standard Java(ECMA)Script, DOM, (X)HTML and CSS are fairly powerful these days. I've seen action games written in nothing but...
And the W3C standards are what all the browser makers support (or at least claim to try to support). Just avoid proprietary extensions, and you safe all the porting work, too!
[...]but on the other hand what about volcanoes, cow manure and all the other natural things we can't control? They contribute far more to global warming than cars do.
Currently, CO2 emissions are dominated by human burning of fossil fuels. The cow manure is part of the biological carbon cycle - whatever comes out of the cow has gone in, and usually in the form of recently grown plant matter. It is a problem (because the cows produce methane, not CO2), but not that bad. And CO2 from volcanos is negligible in the short term (i.e. thousands of years). In the long term, geological processes to become important, but then again, in the long term there are balancing geological processes that remove carbon from the atmosphere.
Back up your answer with facts. All of the scientific consensus in the world has yet to produce a climate model that can *predict* the climate for *any* century in the past.
Well, yes, it is very hard to predict anything for the past. But current climate models do indeed achive excellent fits on holdout sets (i.e. use data up to 1950 for fitting, compare extrapolations to 2000 with real data).
(hydrogen enthusiasts, water vapor is a greenhouse gas too)
Do you all read the same Rush Limbaugh web site for your scientific background? Yes, water vapour is a greenhouse gas (and indeed, one of the most important ones). But, partly due to those rather big salty lakes that cover about 70% of the Earth's surface (let's call the oceans) and that illegally evaporate into our atmoshpere, water vapour is an a dynamic equilibrum. The relative humdity is more or less constant - extra water vapour condenses and rains out of the atmosphere, shortfalls are made up by evaporation. The average lifetime of an H2O molecule in the atmosphere is short (hours to days). Since water vapour does not accumulate over long periods, the amount put into the atmosphere by humans is negligible compared to natural evaporation. Of course, if the atmosphere warms, the absolute humidity in the atmosphere goes up (warmer air can carry more water), and hence we get an amplification of the original warming.
Set up identical vehicles differing only in powerplant and fuel.
Run each of them for 5000 km at 100km/hr while measuring and recording the emissions. This is what real scientists call an "experiment".
No, that is what real scientists call "redundant". You seem to be unaware of the fact that essentially all the carbon in the fuel is turned into CO2 while burning it in an engine. Since we know how much carbom there is in different fuels, we know how much CO2 is produced by using it. Thus, it boils down to how much fuel is burned, and that is what EPA MPG numbers are already telling you. You may criticize the experimental conditions under which these are obtained, but at least it is a standard process.
As for your "consensus conspiracy" theory, please be anywhere outside this evening at 11 p.m. eastern standard time. Our black helicopters will pick you up for an exciting and rewarding trip.
I've been bouncing this idea in my head for a while now and I can't see why this MAY not be true.
It MAY also be caused by invisible angels getting all nervous about our sins and hence increasing the wing frequency, adding energy to the atmosphere.
The earth magnetic field has been fluctuating since time immemorial (geological sense, not Common Law sence). It also has frequently flipped, even in a semi-regular fashion (and we may for another flip in a geologically short time frame, i.e. thousands of years or more). There is no indication that this influences temperature. Photons (the "subatomic particles" that transfer heat from the sun) are not charged, and hence not influenced by the magnetic field.
The solar output will also fluctuate (and, in the medium term (5 billion years) go up - in the long term (15 billion and up) it will become miniscule). None of these changes happen fast enough to significantly affect our current climate.
[...] Apple UNFAIRLY will get a bad reputation from bugs on these cheap, cruddy PCs will be blamed on OS X.
Do u understand that you cant call applecare to say that iSight on OS X doesnt work on your beige box ?
It does not matter. People will see OS X on a generic PC, it will run (kinda), and if it crashes or is slow because of lousy, hacked drivers, they will still blame the OS. They will be wrong, but that's small consolation.
First of all, 13B is ONE YEAR. Next year is paid for by ANOTHER 13B.[...]
That's what, less than a week of the Iraq quagmire?[...]
That's what I found interesting. Burried in the article is an estimate that the manned moon project will cost as much as one year of the war in Iraq (200 billion). Seen the other way round: End that war, and we can be on the moon next year. And NASA can use all of its normal budget for robot missions and earth science, too!
The money would even be going to roughly the same companies...
Ask scientists how long life on earth has been around... and they will probably answer, "Millions of years!".
Well, I hope they will answer "Billions of years". It's been several hundreds of millions since the Cambrian explosion (and 65 million years since a big one wiped out the dinosaurs).
FYI the moon is not tidally locked and your telescope would only be usable about 1/3 -1/2 of the time, this is the same reason why you'd need 3 beaming stations for lunar based solar power.
Of course the moon is tidally locked to the Earth. Earth is not (yet) locked to the moon. But the far side of the moon is named for a reason.
A telescope still would have to deal with the sun, though. At lunar night, there should be no problem at all (no significant scattering without a real atmosphere). During lunar day, the question is how close to the sun you can point the telescope and still get good images (and avoid damage to the optics and sensors in the worst case).
Ghandi acheieved his goals not by brandishing signs of "The English are Imperialistic Nazis."
Actually, he did rather similar things (or had them done). He created situations in which the English saw themselves as "Imperialistic Nazis", and he was not shy of pointing that out over and over again.
Given that the Bush regime already kidnaps foreign citizens in souvereign states, mistreats them, operates at least one extralegal prison camp (and probably multiple more), operates prisons where prisoners of war and others are mistreated to a degree that everybody else calls torture, and imprisons foreign and US citizens without any remotely plausible legal theory, part one is well taken care of. Part two remains to be done...
It's not as if the Bush regime just ignores some arbitrary rules that British terrorists^Hrevolutionaries and pinko-commie frenchmen invented out of the blue a mere 250 or so years ago. They openly flaunt rights set forth in the Magna Carta, the very foundation of civil rights in anglo-saxon law (although admittedly the barons who enforced its adoption would be very surprised about that interpretation;-).
...And frankly, I'm a lot more afraid of WW3 than global warming. While I'm all for alternative energy, recycling, minimizing fossil fuel consumption, and what not, all the bullshit from BOTH SIDES of the global warming argument have made me extremely cynical of wether or not it should be taken seriously.
Frankly (and I have absolutely no credentials to back up my opinion) I think the sea levels rising several meters of more in the next 20-30 years has about as much chance of occuring...
...except that noone serious proposes that. I would suggest to get some information about the state of the science. The IPCC Third Assessment Report gives a good overview. It is a bit dated now (published in 2001), but available online for free. The Fourth Assessment Report should come out next year. And no, the IPCC is not some front organization of Black Helicopters United, but an organization whose reports are generally supported by the scientific community, including most individual researchers as well as formal bodies like the national academies of science. Wikipedia also has a number of good articles - start at global warming.
...as Bush resigning from office so he can star in the next gay cowboy movie.
Why did you assume a variable time? What was that assumption based on?
Well, the alternative is a constant time, and I know that that was (and is) wrong (see below for a more serious answer).
Just because your news server had a 5 day retention does not mean they all do. That retention limit was a limit based on storage space and bandwidth, not a standard. No where in any NNTP draft or RFC will you see ANY mention of a retention time limit standard what so ever. There never was one. Your assumption was technically and completely wrong and was never implied.
I was there during the change from Bnews to C-News, when INN was just a twinkle in Rich Salz's brain (if that). We always assumed that news messages eventually expire. And looking at RFC850:
2.2.5 Expires This line, if present, is in a legal
USENET date format. It specifies a suggested expiration
date for the article. If not present, the local default
expiration date is used.
This certainly strongly suggests that an expiry date does indeed exist.
However, even without a written standard, in most systems of law, customs play a large part in the legal system. If there is a strong custom, the presumption is that transactions follow it. The custom for Usenet was (and is) that messages expire after a reasonably short time.
When DejaNews started to archive all of Usenet they created quite a stir - not particularly for political reasons or privacy concerns (although that came up), but mainly fo the sheer technical achievement. At that time, 500MB was was an OK drive, and 2GB was about as big as you could get. Few people had thought about the possibility of archiving all of Usenet (as opposed to some individual groups).
The real stupiud thing is that if he used USENET, he would have almost had to understand how the USENET network works... i.e. that you read and submit articles to one server that comminicates in turn with other server peers, eventually copying your article all throughout the world, and doing the same for everyone else's, and it all happens automatically. This is the way it was designed. It's supposed to do that! By using the service you pretty much concent to the fact that this is going to happen! Going after Google for saving copies of articles is like suing your ISP because their UUCP server "freaked out" and magically distributed your "original works" all over the globe.
While I agree that this lawsuit is bogus, your reasoning does not hold up. When I post to usenet, I implicitely agree that my posting is distributed via NNTP and is stored for some variable time on news servers all over the world. I do not agree that someone stores these messages for all eternity, indexes them, and offers them over another protocol to the great unwashed masses of the future.
What might let Google out is that they honour the X-NO-ARCHIVE header, i.e. I do have a way of stop them from collecting my postings.
Calling this a failure is really dependent on the assumption that their primary goal is to have "a much more powerful trade position and a more vibrant economy." I would submit that the Swedish people have decided other things are more important.
Actually, given that nominal GDP per capita is nearly the same for Sweden and the US, the Swedish economy seems to be vibrant enough.
The US is doing better in effective purchase power (as prices are higher in Sweden), but Sweden is doing quite well there as well. And given that wealth is distributed much more evenly in Sweden, nearly all Swedes have more purchase power than nearly all US Americans (but of course quite some Americans have more purchase power than nearly all Swedes, as well).
I'm not so sure that the "Egyptians" of legend have all that much to do with the current occupants of Egypt. My understanding is that the Egyptian culture died out and the current occupants are a nomadic latecomer.
The first part of this statement ("Egyptian culture died out") is arguable, the second is wrong. There were significant breaks between the old, middle, and new kingdoms, and another break after Alexander conquered Egypt and the whole country was helenized under the Ptolemaic dynasty. Later, it became a Roman colony, and then it was conquered in the first wave of Muslim expansion.
However, none of these breaks was associated with a massive transfer of population. The lower classes lived through all this with very little change. The ruling classes changed, but again without a massive outflow of old population - essentially a new ruling class was established, and the old one, somewhat diminished, adapted to the new ways. The bulk of the population remained more or less the same.
The very idea of a company as something that limits liability of the owners and operators is a very anti-free market construct.
How so? It would appear to be orthogonal to the freeness of a market.
It distorts the market by creating a free rider problem. Consider the average VC. He funds 10 companies, knowing that (on average) 7 will go bust, 2 will toddle along, and one will strike it it big. He will make his money out of the last one. But the 7 bankruptcies will cost other people money. In a perfect market, he would have to bear the full risk of his investments.
It should be pointed out that Unions in America are not an example of completely free market action. They depend on the government to enforce certain rules via National Labor Relations Board.
This cuts both ways. The very idea of a company as something that limits liability of the owners and operators is a very anti-free market construct. That's not to say that companies are a bad idea. The limitation allows people to enter business with a calculated risk. But if the allegedly free market is already warped that way (for the benefit of capital owners), it needs to be warped back some way to compensate for this advantage.
Why not 6 times, or 8 times? Is 7 a magic number? Sheesh just overwrite it with your favorite byte, end of story.
7 is indeed (or at leasr used to be) the magic numbe here. Overwriting things once is fine to avoid simple undeletion. But to twart a real (and really expensive) forensic analysis, you need to override the data more than once. The problem is that the read/write head is not perfectly aligned, i.e. that data tracks do not perfectly overlap earlier tracks. With the proper equipment you can read the residual magenetism just "off-track", and (sometimes) reconstruct the old data. Of course this requires openig the drive, installing a much more precise read-write head, and a lot of extra work.
There was an analysis a few years back that showed that 7 is indeed the number of overwrites it needs to be reasonably sure the data is really gone. But drive technology has changed a lot since then, so it it unclear if this still holds.
My argument is that the Christianity, with the rest of the world has changed in the past few centuries, but that an abnormally large number of Muslim extremists have not also changed. As you consider the state of the world right now and going forward, I believe my statement is accurate.
Ermmm..last few decades would be more of an argument. If you go back centuries, we get nice things like the Opium wars ("Christian" powers forcing the Chinese to open their markets to a dangerous drug), the Amritsar Massacre, nice little World War I (fought for secular reasons, but eagerly blessed by priests on all sides)...
Even in the last decades we have nice things like the Irish civil war (or struggle for freedom or terrorism) and the Basque civil war (or struggle for freedom or terrorism). It the very recent past we do have:
Hutu vs. Tutsi (Same language, same religion for both sides)
Serbs vs. Croats (Christians between each other, mostly)
Serbs vs. Bosnians (aggressors are Christian)
That seems to be clear evidence that it is not religion, but situation and circumstance that make people behave like idiots to each other.
When are we going to put our foot down on this Muslim scourge?
Well, there are roughly one billion Muslims quitely going along and living there lives. Maybe a few thousand are rioting, and no doubt quite a few are real assholes about this issue. But to condem the whole faith for the acts of a few is both stupid and unproductive. Islam is not sigificantly better or worse than "Christianity" (and about as diverse).
Look at you Stephan, you took that quote entirely out of context to fit the point you're trying to make. You didn't even lead on with any... or anything like that. Very unprofessional.
Ermm....all the context is upstream. I just kept what I replied to. As opposed to someone else, who just cut out all of the context...
... (to make you happy)
There is no difference between supporters and researchers that support one theory over another. There is certainly an abundance of anti-globalization activists within the scientific community. By supporters, I take that the article is referring to researchers who've taken a position on the issue. That report was funded by the UN and obviously has an agenda, job security being the most obvious aspect.
You have implied that the lack of supporters for alternate theories is a problem because "little attention is paid to the possibility that it may be natural variation.". That is wrong. Attention has been paid and is being paid. But scientist who do this end up discarding the alternative theories because the evidence strongly points somewhere else, namely to an enhanced greenhouse effect caused by human CO2 emissions.
"That report" is the International Panel on Climate Change's Third Assessment Report, produced as the consensus of the scientific community. It has been endorsed by all the most prestigeous national academies of science (including the US National Academy of Sciences, which, by the way, has produced an independent review arriving at the same result). If you believe that all these people are paid by the UN to protect its Black Helicoper Launch Sites, further discussion if probably useless.
2) why didn't the massive early-industrial era pollution have such an effect? After all, we've cleaned up the air a LOT since then.
Because we are not talking about general polution, but about greenhous gases, primarily CO2. We have reduced particulate emissions (e.g. soot) and other stuff, but we have increased the burning of fossil fuels and hence carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We are just burning it a lot cleaner now. But cabon dioxide is not a classical pollutant, but the unavoidable product of burning fossil fuels.
Indeed, it now seems as if man-made aerosols ("pollution") have been responsible for partially holding global warming back to some degree. That is why the warming trend has been more pronounced after the first-world countries installed cleaner-burning factories and scrubbers.
At present, none of these has more than a small number of supporters within the climate science community.
That pretty much illustrates a problem, if you ask me. That little attention is paid to the possibility that it may be natural variation. There was an ice age in the not-too-distant past, remember
Well, geologically speaking we actually are in an ice age at the moment (although in an interglacial period of the current ice age).
You are confusing "supporters" and "researchers". Climate scientists to indeed look for natural and other causes. If you look at recent climate reconstruction, they analyse the different contributions. They just have found that "most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities".
Slashdot Mirror
Few people like paying taxes. Still, most actually do accept that taxes are necessary, and pay them voluntarily. Essentially, it's like a condo fee. You cannot opt out of the elevator and the janitor, but have the pool and the cable TV. Take the whole package or leave. But you do get to vote for the board every 4 years or so....
College-Level education: You must be joking. The US education in the top universities is good. But why do you guess half of your faculty is imported from elsewhere?
Unemployment: You may be up to something, but then, maybe not. The systems and circumstances are very different. I doubt that unemployment benefits cause a significant amount of unemployment. And they do keep people from getting desperate - look at the crime rates.
And the W3C standards are what all the browser makers support (or at least claim to try to support). Just avoid proprietary extensions, and you safe all the porting work, too!
As for your "consensus conspiracy" theory, please be anywhere outside this evening at 11 p.m. eastern standard time. Our black helicopters will pick you up for an exciting and rewarding trip.
The earth magnetic field has been fluctuating since time immemorial (geological sense, not Common Law sence). It also has frequently flipped, even in a semi-regular fashion (and we may for another flip in a geologically short time frame, i.e. thousands of years or more). There is no indication that this influences temperature. Photons (the "subatomic particles" that transfer heat from the sun) are not charged, and hence not influenced by the magnetic field.
The solar output will also fluctuate (and, in the medium term (5 billion years) go up - in the long term (15 billion and up) it will become miniscule). None of these changes happen fast enough to significantly affect our current climate.
The money would even be going to roughly the same companies...
A telescope still would have to deal with the sun, though. At lunar night, there should be no problem at all (no significant scattering without a real atmosphere). During lunar day, the question is how close to the sun you can point the telescope and still get good images (and avoid damage to the optics and sensors in the worst case).
Given that the Bush regime already kidnaps foreign citizens in souvereign states, mistreats them, operates at least one extralegal prison camp (and probably multiple more), operates prisons where prisoners of war and others are mistreated to a degree that everybody else calls torture, and imprisons foreign and US citizens without any remotely plausible legal theory, part one is well taken care of. Part two remains to be done...
It's not as if the Bush regime just ignores some arbitrary rules that British terrorists^Hrevolutionaries and pinko-commie frenchmen invented out of the blue a mere 250 or so years ago. They openly flaunt rights set forth in the Magna Carta, the very foundation of civil rights in anglo-saxon law (although admittedly the barons who enforced its adoption would be very surprised about that interpretation ;-).
However, even without a written standard, in most systems of law, customs play a large part in the legal system. If there is a strong custom, the presumption is that transactions follow it. The custom for Usenet was (and is) that messages expire after a reasonably short time.
When DejaNews started to archive all of Usenet they created quite a stir - not particularly for political reasons or privacy concerns (although that came up), but mainly fo the sheer technical achievement. At that time, 500MB was was an OK drive, and 2GB was about as big as you could get. Few people had thought about the possibility of archiving all of Usenet (as opposed to some individual groups).
What might let Google out is that they honour the X-NO-ARCHIVE header, i.e. I do have a way of stop them from collecting my postings.
However, none of these breaks was associated with a massive transfer of population. The lower classes lived through all this with very little change. The ruling classes changed, but again without a massive outflow of old population - essentially a new ruling class was established, and the old one, somewhat diminished, adapted to the new ways. The bulk of the population remained more or less the same.
There was an analysis a few years back that showed that 7 is indeed the number of overwrites it needs to be reasonably sure the data is really gone. But drive technology has changed a lot since then, so it it unclear if this still holds.
"Yahoo News is reporting that Geek archaeologists have discovered a 2,600 meter defensive Wall..."
I wonder what diet Larry follows to grow to that size...and wether he is defensive about the onslaught of Python or the delay of Perl 6.
Even in the last decades we have nice things like the Irish civil war (or struggle for freedom or terrorism) and the Basque civil war (or struggle for freedom or terrorism). It the very recent past we do have:
- Hutu vs. Tutsi (Same language, same religion for both sides)
- Serbs vs. Croats (Christians between each other, mostly)
- Serbs vs. Bosnians (aggressors are Christian)
That seems to be clear evidence that it is not religion, but situation and circumstance that make people behave like idiots to each other."That report" is the International Panel on Climate Change's Third Assessment Report, produced as the consensus of the scientific community. It has been endorsed by all the most prestigeous national academies of science (including the US National Academy of Sciences, which, by the way, has produced an independent review arriving at the same result). If you believe that all these people are paid by the UN to protect its Black Helicoper Launch Sites, further discussion if probably useless.
Indeed, it now seems as if man-made aerosols ("pollution") have been responsible for partially holding global warming back to some degree. That is why the warming trend has been more pronounced after the first-world countries installed cleaner-burning factories and scrubbers.
You are confusing "supporters" and "researchers". Climate scientists to indeed look for natural and other causes. If you look at recent climate reconstruction, they analyse the different contributions. They just have found that "most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities".