Like I said, the risk is too high, even for most private investors. One could make the argument that this is the kind of investment that the government should be making, where there isn't enough profit to be made by companies, even though the cost to everyone in the future would be much greater. Whether or not our government is currently making intelligent decisions with regards to such investments is of course an entirely separate issue.
I'll bite. What competitive advantage will we have, exactly?
In theory, it would reduce the amount (in cost, if not necessarily weight) of fuel we have to import from countries that we aren't exceptionally friendly with.
And if using renewable power is so advantageous, why do we require legislation to make it happen? If it were profitable, wouldn't those people who are concerned solely with money be leaping in to reap the economic benefits?
Unfortunately, the economic culture in the United States has shifted significantly away from next decade's profit and towards this quarter's profit. The risk and time before profitability are too high for any shareholders, even though the cost in the future will be much higher than it would be today.
They might be imperfect, but when exactly was the last time that large scale pollution ending up being a good thing? Most of the time such stuff has nasty consequences in the long run, so cutting exhaust down doesn't seem like such a bad idea, even if the exact consequences might not be known. On top of that, oil will run out, so no matter if global warming is real or not, we have to change to alternative energy sources anyway, so why not do it sooner and leave some oil for future generation, maybe they'll have better use for it then just burning it.
All of which is a much better argument for moving to other sources of energy than "omg we all gonna die TOMORROW!!1!". It's unfortunate that reason has to take a back seat to fear in so many discussions.
Strangely enough, I am still convinced that the evidence behind evolution is much less than watertight.
For one thing, there is abviously no chance to have a double blind experiment, since we only have one earth. Second, on the timescales we are arguing about, we are trying to extrapolate judgements from a very small data set.
See how that works?
First, evolution has been observed in laboratory experiments with simple organisms. Second, evolution by natural selection is called a theory, and it's somewhat debatable if it should be called such or if it should still be considered a hypothesis. So yes, anyone who calls human-caused climate change a fact is clearly not a legitimate scientist.
I find human causation of global warming to be unproven.
The problem is with people who think it's been proven, or can be proven, that humans cause specific changes to the climate. Mathematicians deal in proofs; scientists don't. Human-caused climate change is a perfectly valid hypothesis, there's plenty of evidence to support it, and it may very well be true. My annoyance is with people who treat it as some unquestionable fact that is more fundamental than gravity or conservation of energy.
Instead of changing over hundreds of millenias (which is very rapid indeed by geological standards)
This statement costs you a fair amount of credibility. The last significant ice age was approximately 10,000 years ago*, which is only one-tenth of your "hundred millenia" that you claim would be a "very rapid" change. The difference in temperature between then and now is also quite a bit more than 2 degrees.
* I know, it's more like 12,000, but I figured I'd round to the one significant digit in every other number here.
They are "neo-conservatives", as socialist as modern liberals.
It also helps that what we generally call "liberals" in the United States aren't really socialists, they're just not as corporatist as what we call "conservatives".
Well, in the United States, truth is a valid defense against defamation, and journalists are generally less vulnerable to defamation lawsuits than average citizens. In your example, the journalist is reporting a fact that they can reasonably expect to be true. If the statement is false, the anonymous source would be the one subject to a libel suit, not the journalist who reported it. Unfortunately, journalists have been coerced by the threat of lawsuits into adding "alleged" to every sentence.
I've had some discussions about that in regards to free speech. Somebody told
me, that if you were to say to a cop "You're an asshole!" you'd be guilty of
defamation or whatever the legal term for it is and he'd have legal recourse
against you. If, OTOH, you'd say "In my opinion you're an asshole!" you'd be
covered under the first Amendment of free speech. Anyone know more about that?
Yes, it's incorrect. Slander and libel only apply to statements of fact, and they apply to statements of fact regardless of how you try to pass them off as opinions. "That police officer assaulted me" is defamation. "I think that police officer assaults people" is still defamation. "That police officer is an asshole" is not a statement of fact and is therefore not defamation, unless you're claiming that the officer is literally only an anus, in which case you'd probably get brought in and tested for a few drugs.
Can we please stop repeating this? Adding "I think" to a statement of fact does not magically change the nature of the statement. Saying "I think Mr. Smith sells cocaine to school children" does not make you any less liable to a defamation lawsuit than saying "Mr. Smith sells cocaine to school children."
I thought Net Neutrality was to prevent ISPs from filtering and controlling content, not protocols and speeds?
That's true, but if the summary is accurate (I know, I know), they appear to be throttling certain HTTP traffic because the site supposedly uses too much bandwidth.
Technically, "net neutrality" refers to the traffic being completely agnostic about what a packet is--phone, video, http, etc.
No, it absolutely does not. Net Neutrality only refers to filtering or throttling based on source or destination. Prioritizing VoIP traffic over BitTorrent traffic is not a Net Neutrality issue. Throttling Vonage's VoIP traffic to make your ISP's VoIP service more attractive is a Net Neutrality issue.
Come on now, let's be fair. A lot of them climbed the corporate ladder by simply kissing the ass of the person above them and shitting on the people below them. You can't always give all of the credit to mommy and daddy.
Incredibly, these people would rather trade a legal mess for a PR mess.
That's not incredible at all. Legal messes cost large amounts of money. Something like this, which most people won't hear about, and those that do will forget about within a week, does not create the kind of PR mess that costs money to fix.
There's a difference between calling them a name, and asserting to an audience that they are what you say that they are. The latter is what happened here. It's called defamation - the clue is in the summary - and the law predates the Constitution, let alone the First Amendment. I'd thought you may have heard of it.
The issue in this case is whether or not the author made a false statement of fact about the model. "Psychotic" may be borderline, since it technically could refer to a diagnosis by a professional psychiatrist. "Skanky" is clearly not a statement of fact. "Ho" may be almost borderline. Personally, I wouldn't consider this libel, since I find it hard to believe that your average reader would interpret it as someone claiming that the model is a prostitute that has been diagnosed as psychotic. A good lawyer might be able to convince a judge and/or jury that these were intended as statements of fact, but I sure hope not.
Slashdot Mirror
Samba? That's a pretty common file system. But yeah I get what you mean.
Samba isn't the kind of file system he was talking about. Did you mean NFS?
Like I said, the risk is too high, even for most private investors. One could make the argument that this is the kind of investment that the government should be making, where there isn't enough profit to be made by companies, even though the cost to everyone in the future would be much greater. Whether or not our government is currently making intelligent decisions with regards to such investments is of course an entirely separate issue.
Or some other ill-conceived "common goal" contradictory to the goals and values of present, living individuals?
Yeah, not having a significant amount of the population get mercury poisoning is such an "ill-conceived common goal".
I'll bite. What competitive advantage will we have, exactly?
In theory, it would reduce the amount (in cost, if not necessarily weight) of fuel we have to import from countries that we aren't exceptionally friendly with.
And if using renewable power is so advantageous, why do we require legislation to make it happen? If it were profitable, wouldn't those people who are concerned solely with money be leaping in to reap the economic benefits?
Unfortunately, the economic culture in the United States has shifted significantly away from next decade's profit and towards this quarter's profit. The risk and time before profitability are too high for any shareholders, even though the cost in the future will be much higher than it would be today.
They might be imperfect, but when exactly was the last time that large scale pollution ending up being a good thing? Most of the time such stuff has nasty consequences in the long run, so cutting exhaust down doesn't seem like such a bad idea, even if the exact consequences might not be known. On top of that, oil will run out, so no matter if global warming is real or not, we have to change to alternative energy sources anyway, so why not do it sooner and leave some oil for future generation, maybe they'll have better use for it then just burning it.
All of which is a much better argument for moving to other sources of energy than "omg we all gonna die TOMORROW!!1!". It's unfortunate that reason has to take a back seat to fear in so many discussions.
Strangely enough, I am still convinced that the evidence behind evolution is much less than watertight.
For one thing, there is abviously no chance to have a double blind experiment, since we only have one earth. Second, on the timescales we are arguing about, we are trying to extrapolate judgements from a very small data set.
See how that works?
First, evolution has been observed in laboratory experiments with simple organisms. Second, evolution by natural selection is called a theory, and it's somewhat debatable if it should be called such or if it should still be considered a hypothesis. So yes, anyone who calls human-caused climate change a fact is clearly not a legitimate scientist.
Global warming with manmade causes as a major factor, is the most supported scientific theory by a large margin.
Really? I would expect that honor to go to something like universal gravitation, conservation of energy, entropy, or relativity.
I find human causation of global warming to be unproven.
The problem is with people who think it's been proven, or can be proven, that humans cause specific changes to the climate. Mathematicians deal in proofs; scientists don't. Human-caused climate change is a perfectly valid hypothesis, there's plenty of evidence to support it, and it may very well be true. My annoyance is with people who treat it as some unquestionable fact that is more fundamental than gravity or conservation of energy.
Instead of changing over hundreds of millenias (which is very rapid indeed by geological standards)
This statement costs you a fair amount of credibility. The last significant ice age was approximately 10,000 years ago*, which is only one-tenth of your "hundred millenia" that you claim would be a "very rapid" change. The difference in temperature between then and now is also quite a bit more than 2 degrees.
* I know, it's more like 12,000, but I figured I'd round to the one significant digit in every other number here.
While they're at it they should vote to make PI equal to three. That would simplify an awful lot of engineering calculations.
It would greatly help the post office, too.
They are "neo-conservatives", as socialist as modern liberals.
It also helps that what we generally call "liberals" in the United States aren't really socialists, they're just not as corporatist as what we call "conservatives".
Nope, you're thinking of sovereign glue.
</ubergeek>
Well, in the United States, truth is a valid defense against defamation, and journalists are generally less vulnerable to defamation lawsuits than average citizens. In your example, the journalist is reporting a fact that they can reasonably expect to be true. If the statement is false, the anonymous source would be the one subject to a libel suit, not the journalist who reported it. Unfortunately, journalists have been coerced by the threat of lawsuits into adding "alleged" to every sentence.
I've had some discussions about that in regards to free speech. Somebody told me, that if you were to say to a cop "You're an asshole!" you'd be guilty of defamation or whatever the legal term for it is and he'd have legal recourse against you. If, OTOH, you'd say "In my opinion you're an asshole!" you'd be covered under the first Amendment of free speech. Anyone know more about that?
Yes, it's incorrect. Slander and libel only apply to statements of fact, and they apply to statements of fact regardless of how you try to pass them off as opinions. "That police officer assaulted me" is defamation. "I think that police officer assaults people" is still defamation. "That police officer is an asshole" is not a statement of fact and is therefore not defamation, unless you're claiming that the officer is literally only an anus, in which case you'd probably get brought in and tested for a few drugs.
However, Google is like any other American corporation when it comes to deciding whether or not to set a very bad precedent
The very bad precedent of complying with a valid court order? I think the precedent of complying with court orders was set a long time ago.
All you have to do are insert some weasel words
Can we please stop repeating this? Adding "I think" to a statement of fact does not magically change the nature of the statement. Saying "I think Mr. Smith sells cocaine to school children" does not make you any less liable to a defamation lawsuit than saying "Mr. Smith sells cocaine to school children."
I thought Net Neutrality was to prevent ISPs from filtering and controlling content, not protocols and speeds?
That's true, but if the summary is accurate (I know, I know), they appear to be throttling certain HTTP traffic because the site supposedly uses too much bandwidth.
Technically, "net neutrality" refers to the traffic being completely agnostic about what a packet is--phone, video, http, etc.
No, it absolutely does not. Net Neutrality only refers to filtering or throttling based on source or destination. Prioritizing VoIP traffic over BitTorrent traffic is not a Net Neutrality issue. Throttling Vonage's VoIP traffic to make your ISP's VoIP service more attractive is a Net Neutrality issue.
99% are "higher ups" because of birth right.
Come on now, let's be fair. A lot of them climbed the corporate ladder by simply kissing the ass of the person above them and shitting on the people below them. You can't always give all of the credit to mommy and daddy.
6.40 inches ought to be enough for anybody.
I know there's a "your mom" joke here somewhere...
Hmm.
"Clone the package source code from version control" -> "The page you are trying to access is restricted to members of the Symbian Foundation."
Yes. I am still confused.
Did you purchase a copy of Symbian or a phone that runs it? Remember that "open source" does not necessarily mean "available to the general public".
is there anything that you can name that can do more than Linux?
Chuck Norris
Incredibly, these people would rather trade a legal mess for a PR mess.
That's not incredible at all. Legal messes cost large amounts of money. Something like this, which most people won't hear about, and those that do will forget about within a week, does not create the kind of PR mess that costs money to fix.
There's a difference between calling them a name, and asserting to an audience that they are what you say that they are. The latter is what happened here. It's called defamation - the clue is in the summary - and the law predates the Constitution, let alone the First Amendment. I'd thought you may have heard of it.
The issue in this case is whether or not the author made a false statement of fact about the model. "Psychotic" may be borderline, since it technically could refer to a diagnosis by a professional psychiatrist. "Skanky" is clearly not a statement of fact. "Ho" may be almost borderline. Personally, I wouldn't consider this libel, since I find it hard to believe that your average reader would interpret it as someone claiming that the model is a prostitute that has been diagnosed as psychotic. A good lawyer might be able to convince a judge and/or jury that these were intended as statements of fact, but I sure hope not.
I don't always call people I don't know bad names on the internet, but when I do, I drink Dos Equis.---The most anonymous man in the world
And thus a new meme is born. I'll have to remember this one; there's a lot of potential here.