By not using nukes, we are using nukes. Ever wondered why there was never another major war between superpowers since WWII? They are a deterrent.
Plus, they are not the only thing subject to social engineering. How about air strikes? Regular missiles? Those can do some serious damage, and could lead to WWIII. Especially if nobody has Mutually Assured Destruction to worry about.
So, would you like to pay for slashdot and [Random Website You Have Account On]'s cert? No? Then you're in no place to be complaining.
Self-signed could be an answer, not perfect but a step up from plain-text on sites where the owner already think they're spending too much for what the site is worth to them (most). Yet here we have browsers "educating" the users on how dangerous those are. Sort of like killing yourself because you found out you have a terminal illness and a few years to live.
Breeder reactors can not only extend the life of fuel substantially, but also decrease waste to almost nothing. Nothing is a permanent option, but nuclear is by far the best currently. Believe me, I've read much more on it than your average slashdotter.
While this is not really the place for another pointless discussion on global warming, I would say we have plenty of proof it is indeed going to happen. It is a fact that CO2 in the atmosphere increases global heat. It is also a fact humans are adding massive amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere. We cannot predict the outcome, but there will certainly be one. It's not just going to go away.
It will be gradual, and perhaps even reversible with better technology. However, we're still betting a lot on that by doing nothing. If it turns out to be less gradual than expected (and as you say, we've never observed this happening before, so we cannot be sure how fast it will be), we could be looking at a disaster, as we won't have time to come up with ways to mitigate the damage.
I've never seen anyone suggest that water levels could rise astronomically overnight. But the fact is, we can only guess how fast they will rise. 50 years before major land losses? 30? 10? How long will it take to prevent mass death from flooding, starvation, exposure? How much will it COST?
Like so many else, you only look at here-and-now. Like a CEO running a company into the ground for short-term profits, unchecked CO2 will, in some form, hurt the human race some day. And for what? Cheap gas, air conditioning, and irrational fear of the alternatives?
It's not a happy situation, that's for sure, but hiding your head in the sand and yelling "hoax" is not going to do anything to help people when it happens. I for one am glad there are enough people out there that don't ignore facts because they are inconvenient.
Greenpeace is largely to blame for our current energy problems. Their vilification of nuclear power has greatly hindered its adoption (politicans are already irrationally afraid of it, because of BIMBY and "terrorists"), and their pushing of so-far dead-end technology like wind and solar has caused us to be stuck with coal and oil. If they, and the average environmentalist, had enough of a brain to understand the concept of the lesser evil, we would probably not be so worried about global warming. But, logic never stopped them from crying about things.
Now we have everyone against the rational answer to the problem, and everyone shelling out billions to try to develop what simply isn't coming. Solar and wind have been around for a very long time; short of a massive breakthrough, it is never going to be as economical as the CO2-creating alternatives. Meaning, we're stuck with them until some sort of government regulation comes along... and we all know how much THAT usually helps.
Our economy is being run into the ground by power costs, and peak oil means it will just get worse. Wind and solar are not becoming more economical, and the government's answer of taking even more money out of the system is just going to make a bad situation horrible. If global warming turns out to even be half as bad as claimed, we'll be in essentially a second dark ages.
We could have built enough nuclear plants to power the entire world, and thus avert all these problems, with the money Obama threw away; but here we are, the construction of a single plant is news-worthy.
Sometimes I wonder if it would really be so awful if humanity killed itself off. We're not really getting any better... perhaps we shouldn't go and pollute space with our stupidity.
"For example, if lack of proof for IS proof against, let me make the assertion that there is no god. I have no proof in favor of this assertion. Therefore, it must be untrue, and there is a god."
You cannot prove a negative. EVERYTHING exists if you do not assume assertions of a positive nature are false. That include unicorns, martians, Vishnu, honest politicians, and every other idea contradictory to reason ever asserted as true. Thus, there is a great difference between "x exists" and "x does not exist", because if there was not, you'd be opening the floodgates of anything even remotely possible.
"This kind of thing doesn't get you anywhere. Look, the whole matter is just silly - you can't prove that the chair you're sitting on exists, so how do you think you're going to prove that God does or doesn't exist using logical argument?"
I can prove it exists in relation to other objects, which is all that can be proved of anything. God is an assertion of fact in relation to other objects (ie, he created the universe). Thus, I can can say god exists or not in relation to those objects. If you remove any frame of reference at all, you end up with a funny sort of reverse nihilism where nothing, including you, exists.
The universe is subject to the same rules you would apply to god. God cannot logically exist unless it violates the rules applied to the universe. The usual claim is that the universe could not always have existed, but god could have. This is nonsense; inconsistent, irrational, and could support many ideas other than a god.
Ethics exist for a simple reason: beings that harm each other stand less a chance of survival than those that work together and help each other, which boils down to evolution. God is in no way, shape, or form, an explanation for ethics, since according to the bible we all have free will to do good or bad. If god created us to have ethics, yet gave us free will to decide to do good or evil, god went and created a sort of logical paradox that may explain things like the platypus...
Self-ness? I don't know what you mean there, so I'll ignore that one. It doesn't matter, since even one solid and indisputable fact supporting god would not be the extraordinary evidence needed for such a claim, and I am sure it's anything but indisputable.
Before attempting to forge evidence for your preconceived notions, you should at least make sure they haven't already been used and debunked millions of times in the past. There are many things in hard sciences that could SUGGEST a god, but as an atheist, I always keep hearing this same BS. You're not convincing anyone.
(No, I won't tell you about the things that may suggest a god. See it as a reason to go and understand science with a clear mind.)
Does anyone here - anyone - actually understand that you start with "false" and work up? You cannot go around defining things as unknown because there is a miniscule percentage of a possibility it is true. Doing so means you cannot be sure of anything! Will the sun rise tomorrow? It has every other time in history, but you know, there is a CHANCE it will not.
Lack of proof for IS proof against. In the absence of any proof ether way, the rational assumption is the assertion is false. Something doesn't get to be "maybe" or "probably true" until there is extraordinary evidence for it. As I said in another post, god requires more evidence than any other theory in the history of man-kind to be even a "maybe". How much of that exists?
Agnostics - from my personal experience - are OFTEN those with religious up-bringings who cannot stop believing in god completely. So do yourself a favor - abandon your past teachings on the subject, read a lot on the scientific method, and then go evaluate the claims of religions again, and the idea of god itself. If you're not an atheist then, I don't know what to say.
You can reach an almost certain conclusion in the absence of fact, advocate that conclusion, and not even approach zealotry.
Science states that until proof exists, a given statement should be assumed to be false. It also states that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Let me show you why;
"On Pluto, there is a race of mole-people living just beneth the surface, with hyper-advanced technology, and they are plotting our destruction, which will take place on 2012."
Can you prove that's not true? No, you can't. But I'd bet dollars to donuts, you don't believe that. Why are you such a zealot???
That is why we assume things to be false.
Therefore, we cannot know if a god exists or not, but we can be damn sure in an assumption one doesn't, for one reason. Zero proof - the universe over. Zero proof, when such a claim would require more than ANY OTHER THEORY POSTULATED IN HISTORY to be taken as true.
It is not a "belief", it is not a guess; it is the reasonable, default position for any assumption: "I don't believe you, but I may reconsider if you show me enough proof that you're right." God is no special case.
Thus, there are 3 kinds of agnostics:
1. I think there is a god, but I don't know which one it is.
2. I don't know if there is a god or not, and do not understand the scientific method.
3. I don't know if there is a god or not, and I don't want to apply the scientific method.
Say what you will, it's ether wall-sitting or failure to understand the basic tenants of science.
Actually, that would be a great protest. Of course, it would get the Amish labeled as terrorists, so it may not have the desired effect, but the irony itself would be the power behind it.
The fact of the matter is, as long as the MPAA/RIAA/MS use something to fight us, we can ether use it to fight back, or die. Personally, I'll take being a little ironic and hope that someday I won't have to be, over letting the concept of free software die forever because some shills claim it's wrong to misuse copyright that way.
It is not the nature of Communism to allow dictators. It is the nature of lower-class revolutions to allow dictators. Unfortunately, when the lower classes do eventually break out of their grind and rebel, they will start to believe whoever they replace the old order with. Look at the French Revolution, where a small, tyrannical group could keep control and do awful things, because they were riding on the wave of lower-class hatred.
This is unfortunate, but true. Lower classes are easily manipulated, so when they attempt to seize power, the results are often disastrous. Communism has the unfortunate property that it appeals primarily to those with nothing to lose, which means they're going to be very, very angry, and they're going to be happy to have that anger pushed onto anyone other than the government they worked so hard to establish.
This is so obviously a case of God himself reaching down and dividing these species, and none of this "evolution" tripe! Open your minds, Atheists, and see the truth. Do not be misled by these Satanic, Atheist scientists who would deny His hand in our creation! God not only cares about and intervenes in your personal problems (hence we pray), he also really cares about separating species of birds. He truly works in Mysterious Ways.
You sent your service into my home without my permission, therefore you'll get over it.
Really, this is like writing my pin number on a sign in my front yard as an MD5 hash, and then getting pissed off when someone cracks it and my bank account gets drained.
I would hardly call using the signals they are beaming into my house theft of service because I had to break their encryption. What's next, getting sued because you understood some people talking in pig-latin on the radio?
The RIAA giving radio a compelling reason to play independent artists is exactly what we need. They can only hurt themselves.
I find it ironic that not too long ago payola was a serious problem, and now we have this. These are the death throws of the recording industry, and I think that is a great thing.
Just because something is illegal doesn't make it wrong. Nether does something being legal make it right. I can do many nasty things to people which are not illegal. The same vice-versa. Aside from what many people think, copyright has failed and needs to be gone. It was supposed to make it so that artists would not be beholden to other interests (at the time nobility) and would be free to work for themselves. Obviously, this is not the case, as you have to be beholden to interests (RIAA/MPAA) to stand any chance of being heard. Copyright did nothing, hurts us all, and is holding our culture at ransom. Enough is enough.
And no one, ever, has a right to profit. If they did, that would be the most non-freemarket idea in history (I am not sure if you are the posted I replied to in the first place or not). If I spend my life creating a 50 foot statue of William of Orange out of toothpicks, do I have a right to profit from that endeavor? Do I have a right to charge anyone who takes a picture of it, even if they were a quarter mile away? Do I have a right to sue anyone who builds toothpick statues of other historic Dutchmen? Some people say yes; but some people said the world was flat as well.
I, for one, am against government interference in the free market.
Since copyright has nothing to do with the free market, and is completely a government-created monopoly, I see nothing wrong with what the GP stated. If these people want to so badly abuse a system this way, they should be forced to live with their made-up prices. Otherwise, we'll just going to remain stuck with the current system of hypocrisy, and it's only going to get worse until we finally wake up and abolish the whole thing.
Except that there are still those pesky citations which link to off-site resources. Kinda hard for even the omnipotent, evil Jimmy Wales to fake all those, hmm?
I really hope you don't think that. It is far too easy to leave out citations which conflict with the administrators' viewpoints, and abuse verifiability to allow in questionable sources.
I can speak to what the GP stated, and say that wikipedia will make every attempt to stonewall your edits if you begin questioning the status quo. The goal is to run off the dissenters, and thus, have fewer prying eyes to even look at those citations. That isn't even beginning to state how often and badly they abuse things not directly in articles, like the GP's infobox.
Except this was obviously known to people, as people attempted to add the facts to the article, only to have them removed. This is not a case of your bank PIN; this is a case of Ron Paul being seen carted off by armed mobsters outside of a Starbucks. All you've done is create a strawman.
The problem here is that wikipedia's administrators knowingly and willingly suppressed information, because they were asked to by a newspaper. I don't care what was at risk, if the information was private (it wasn't), or the double-standard employed on the part of the newspaper. The only point of importance here is that wikipedia happily prevented factual information from being added to an article, after the attempts of numerous editors. In my book, that is censorship. Justify it all you want, it does not change what it was.
That said, I am not shocked about this, nor will I think any less of wikipedia. I have known for a long time of wikipedia's abuses of power. If this is even a little shocking to anyone here, I would suggest that they pay more time reading discussions on the site, or go check out wikitruth.
Slashdot Mirror
By not using nukes, we are using nukes. Ever wondered why there was never another major war between superpowers since WWII? They are a deterrent.
Plus, they are not the only thing subject to social engineering. How about air strikes? Regular missiles? Those can do some serious damage, and could lead to WWIII. Especially if nobody has Mutually Assured Destruction to worry about.
So, would you like to pay for slashdot and [Random Website You Have Account On]'s cert? No? Then you're in no place to be complaining.
Self-signed could be an answer, not perfect but a step up from plain-text on sites where the owner already think they're spending too much for what the site is worth to them (most). Yet here we have browsers "educating" the users on how dangerous those are. Sort of like killing yourself because you found out you have a terminal illness and a few years to live.
Breeder reactors can not only extend the life of fuel substantially, but also decrease waste to almost nothing. Nothing is a permanent option, but nuclear is by far the best currently. Believe me, I've read much more on it than your average slashdotter.
While this is not really the place for another pointless discussion on global warming, I would say we have plenty of proof it is indeed going to happen. It is a fact that CO2 in the atmosphere increases global heat. It is also a fact humans are adding massive amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere. We cannot predict the outcome, but there will certainly be one. It's not just going to go away.
It will be gradual, and perhaps even reversible with better technology. However, we're still betting a lot on that by doing nothing. If it turns out to be less gradual than expected (and as you say, we've never observed this happening before, so we cannot be sure how fast it will be), we could be looking at a disaster, as we won't have time to come up with ways to mitigate the damage.
I've never seen anyone suggest that water levels could rise astronomically overnight. But the fact is, we can only guess how fast they will rise. 50 years before major land losses? 30? 10? How long will it take to prevent mass death from flooding, starvation, exposure? How much will it COST?
Like so many else, you only look at here-and-now. Like a CEO running a company into the ground for short-term profits, unchecked CO2 will, in some form, hurt the human race some day. And for what? Cheap gas, air conditioning, and irrational fear of the alternatives?
It's not a happy situation, that's for sure, but hiding your head in the sand and yelling "hoax" is not going to do anything to help people when it happens. I for one am glad there are enough people out there that don't ignore facts because they are inconvenient.
Busy surrendering to a German cruise ship?
Greenpeace is largely to blame for our current energy problems. Their vilification of nuclear power has greatly hindered its adoption (politicans are already irrationally afraid of it, because of BIMBY and "terrorists"), and their pushing of so-far dead-end technology like wind and solar has caused us to be stuck with coal and oil. If they, and the average environmentalist, had enough of a brain to understand the concept of the lesser evil, we would probably not be so worried about global warming. But, logic never stopped them from crying about things.
Now we have everyone against the rational answer to the problem, and everyone shelling out billions to try to develop what simply isn't coming. Solar and wind have been around for a very long time; short of a massive breakthrough, it is never going to be as economical as the CO2-creating alternatives. Meaning, we're stuck with them until some sort of government regulation comes along... and we all know how much THAT usually helps.
Our economy is being run into the ground by power costs, and peak oil means it will just get worse. Wind and solar are not becoming more economical, and the government's answer of taking even more money out of the system is just going to make a bad situation horrible. If global warming turns out to even be half as bad as claimed, we'll be in essentially a second dark ages.
We could have built enough nuclear plants to power the entire world, and thus avert all these problems, with the money Obama threw away; but here we are, the construction of a single plant is news-worthy.
Sometimes I wonder if it would really be so awful if humanity killed itself off. We're not really getting any better... perhaps we shouldn't go and pollute space with our stupidity.
Overselling is you forcing your customer to take a risk, not you taking a risk. Your only risk is indirect.
"For example, if lack of proof for IS proof against, let me make the assertion that there is no god. I have no proof in favor of this assertion. Therefore, it must be untrue, and there is a god."
You cannot prove a negative. EVERYTHING exists if you do not assume assertions of a positive nature are false. That include unicorns, martians, Vishnu, honest politicians, and every other idea contradictory to reason ever asserted as true. Thus, there is a great difference between "x exists" and "x does not exist", because if there was not, you'd be opening the floodgates of anything even remotely possible.
"This kind of thing doesn't get you anywhere. Look, the whole matter is just silly - you can't prove that the chair you're sitting on exists, so how do you think you're going to prove that God does or doesn't exist using logical argument?"
I can prove it exists in relation to other objects, which is all that can be proved of anything. God is an assertion of fact in relation to other objects (ie, he created the universe). Thus, I can can say god exists or not in relation to those objects. If you remove any frame of reference at all, you end up with a funny sort of reverse nihilism where nothing, including you, exists.
If the spoon is a lie, you must acquit.
The universe is subject to the same rules you would apply to god. God cannot logically exist unless it violates the rules applied to the universe. The usual claim is that the universe could not always have existed, but god could have. This is nonsense; inconsistent, irrational, and could support many ideas other than a god.
Ethics exist for a simple reason: beings that harm each other stand less a chance of survival than those that work together and help each other, which boils down to evolution. God is in no way, shape, or form, an explanation for ethics, since according to the bible we all have free will to do good or bad. If god created us to have ethics, yet gave us free will to decide to do good or evil, god went and created a sort of logical paradox that may explain things like the platypus...
Self-ness? I don't know what you mean there, so I'll ignore that one. It doesn't matter, since even one solid and indisputable fact supporting god would not be the extraordinary evidence needed for such a claim, and I am sure it's anything but indisputable.
Before attempting to forge evidence for your preconceived notions, you should at least make sure they haven't already been used and debunked millions of times in the past. There are many things in hard sciences that could SUGGEST a god, but as an atheist, I always keep hearing this same BS. You're not convincing anyone.
(No, I won't tell you about the things that may suggest a god. See it as a reason to go and understand science with a clear mind.)
Does anyone here - anyone - actually understand that you start with "false" and work up? You cannot go around defining things as unknown because there is a miniscule percentage of a possibility it is true. Doing so means you cannot be sure of anything! Will the sun rise tomorrow? It has every other time in history, but you know, there is a CHANCE it will not.
Lack of proof for IS proof against. In the absence of any proof ether way, the rational assumption is the assertion is false. Something doesn't get to be "maybe" or "probably true" until there is extraordinary evidence for it. As I said in another post, god requires more evidence than any other theory in the history of man-kind to be even a "maybe". How much of that exists?
Agnostics - from my personal experience - are OFTEN those with religious up-bringings who cannot stop believing in god completely. So do yourself a favor - abandon your past teachings on the subject, read a lot on the scientific method, and then go evaluate the claims of religions again, and the idea of god itself. If you're not an atheist then, I don't know what to say.
You can reach an almost certain conclusion in the absence of fact, advocate that conclusion, and not even approach zealotry.
Science states that until proof exists, a given statement should be assumed to be false. It also states that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Let me show you why;
"On Pluto, there is a race of mole-people living just beneth the surface, with hyper-advanced technology, and they are plotting our destruction, which will take place on 2012."
Can you prove that's not true? No, you can't. But I'd bet dollars to donuts, you don't believe that. Why are you such a zealot???
That is why we assume things to be false.
Therefore, we cannot know if a god exists or not, but we can be damn sure in an assumption one doesn't, for one reason. Zero proof - the universe over. Zero proof, when such a claim would require more than ANY OTHER THEORY POSTULATED IN HISTORY to be taken as true.
It is not a "belief", it is not a guess; it is the reasonable, default position for any assumption: "I don't believe you, but I may reconsider if you show me enough proof that you're right." God is no special case.
Thus, there are 3 kinds of agnostics:
1. I think there is a god, but I don't know which one it is.
2. I don't know if there is a god or not, and do not understand the scientific method.
3. I don't know if there is a god or not, and I don't want to apply the scientific method.
Say what you will, it's ether wall-sitting or failure to understand the basic tenants of science.
Actually, that would be a great protest. Of course, it would get the Amish labeled as terrorists, so it may not have the desired effect, but the irony itself would be the power behind it.
The fact of the matter is, as long as the MPAA/RIAA/MS use something to fight us, we can ether use it to fight back, or die. Personally, I'll take being a little ironic and hope that someday I won't have to be, over letting the concept of free software die forever because some shills claim it's wrong to misuse copyright that way.
I assume you learned that in American school...
It is not the nature of Communism to allow dictators. It is the nature of lower-class revolutions to allow dictators. Unfortunately, when the lower classes do eventually break out of their grind and rebel, they will start to believe whoever they replace the old order with. Look at the French Revolution, where a small, tyrannical group could keep control and do awful things, because they were riding on the wave of lower-class hatred.
This is unfortunate, but true. Lower classes are easily manipulated, so when they attempt to seize power, the results are often disastrous. Communism has the unfortunate property that it appeals primarily to those with nothing to lose, which means they're going to be very, very angry, and they're going to be happy to have that anger pushed onto anyone other than the government they worked so hard to establish.
This is so obviously a case of God himself reaching down and dividing these species, and none of this "evolution" tripe! Open your minds, Atheists, and see the truth. Do not be misled by these Satanic, Atheist scientists who would deny His hand in our creation! God not only cares about and intervenes in your personal problems (hence we pray), he also really cares about separating species of birds. He truly works in Mysterious Ways.
You sent your service into my home without my permission, therefore you'll get over it.
Really, this is like writing my pin number on a sign in my front yard as an MD5 hash, and then getting pissed off when someone cracks it and my bank account gets drained.
I would hardly call using the signals they are beaming into my house theft of service because I had to break their encryption. What's next, getting sued because you understood some people talking in pig-latin on the radio?
The fact that this post is +5 insightful just proves that all of the above posters are wrong (and that I am awesome).
Ballot, Soap, Jury, Ammo; they should be used in that order.
The RIAA giving radio a compelling reason to play independent artists is exactly what we need. They can only hurt themselves.
I find it ironic that not too long ago payola was a serious problem, and now we have this. These are the death throws of the recording industry, and I think that is a great thing.
If that were true, Oracsun would be planning to merge with Apple, but that could never... OH SHI-
Just because something is illegal doesn't make it wrong. Nether does something being legal make it right. I can do many nasty things to people which are not illegal. The same vice-versa. Aside from what many people think, copyright has failed and needs to be gone. It was supposed to make it so that artists would not be beholden to other interests (at the time nobility) and would be free to work for themselves. Obviously, this is not the case, as you have to be beholden to interests (RIAA/MPAA) to stand any chance of being heard. Copyright did nothing, hurts us all, and is holding our culture at ransom. Enough is enough.
And no one, ever, has a right to profit. If they did, that would be the most non-freemarket idea in history (I am not sure if you are the posted I replied to in the first place or not). If I spend my life creating a 50 foot statue of William of Orange out of toothpicks, do I have a right to profit from that endeavor? Do I have a right to charge anyone who takes a picture of it, even if they were a quarter mile away? Do I have a right to sue anyone who builds toothpick statues of other historic Dutchmen? Some people say yes; but some people said the world was flat as well.
Since copyright has nothing to do with the free market, and is completely a government-created monopoly, I see nothing wrong with what the GP stated. If these people want to so badly abuse a system this way, they should be forced to live with their made-up prices. Otherwise, we'll just going to remain stuck with the current system of hypocrisy, and it's only going to get worse until we finally wake up and abolish the whole thing.
Then, we can have a free market.
I really hope you don't think that. It is far too easy to leave out citations which conflict with the administrators' viewpoints, and abuse verifiability to allow in questionable sources.
I can speak to what the GP stated, and say that wikipedia will make every attempt to stonewall your edits if you begin questioning the status quo. The goal is to run off the dissenters, and thus, have fewer prying eyes to even look at those citations. That isn't even beginning to state how often and badly they abuse things not directly in articles, like the GP's infobox.
Except this was obviously known to people, as people attempted to add the facts to the article, only to have them removed. This is not a case of your bank PIN; this is a case of Ron Paul being seen carted off by armed mobsters outside of a Starbucks. All you've done is create a strawman.
The problem here is that wikipedia's administrators knowingly and willingly suppressed information, because they were asked to by a newspaper. I don't care what was at risk, if the information was private (it wasn't), or the double-standard employed on the part of the newspaper. The only point of importance here is that wikipedia happily prevented factual information from being added to an article, after the attempts of numerous editors. In my book, that is censorship. Justify it all you want, it does not change what it was.
That said, I am not shocked about this, nor will I think any less of wikipedia. I have known for a long time of wikipedia's abuses of power. If this is even a little shocking to anyone here, I would suggest that they pay more time reading discussions on the site, or go check out wikitruth.
Simple answer: it never could be.