"People who believe that humans are causing global warming make death threats against anyone who disagrees, so how much can I really trust them?"
Of course that isn't a logically correct statement or a valid scientific argument against humans causing global warming, but that won't stop average people from thinking it. It doesn't make the theories right or wrong, it just makes the group look bad. People have tendencies to judge a group by the most vocal members, and that's probably the biggest problem in the whole debate.
Except that creationism isn't science because it isn't falsifiable. In theory, you could conduct an experiment on the Earth where you control the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and measure the changes in temperature. If the results don't match what the skeptics say they should be, then you've provided evidence that their model is not accurate and hence falsifiable.
As for a flat Earth, it's quite a bit less complicated to take a picture from orbit and show the sphericalness (do I get credit for coining that word?) of Earth. Of course, I'm sure you can find some geometric system where the Earth really is flat.
MOST scientists agree that humans have impacted the environment and are a major contributer to global climate change.
I'll risk the flamebait and/or starting an off-topic argument and say this anyway. Most people also believe that God created the Earth in less than a week only 6,000 years ago. Most people believed Iraq had large-scale weapons and ordered terrorist attacks on the United States. Most people seem to believe that homosexual marriage will cause the complete disintegration of society. Most people believe that Windows is better than Linux, or even believe that Windows is the only operating system a computer can possibly have. As much as we might sometimes like to think we can, getting enough people to believe something doesn't necessarily make it the truth.
I remember reading a paper back in the early 1990's about what happened in a small environment when the amount of carbon dioxide was increased. The atmospheric concentration didn't change, but the rate of plant growth increased rather dramatically. A great way of reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere is to stop hacking down every forest we find.
I think what bothers me the most about this whole debate is all the people that are looking for the cause of climate change, as if there can be only one. Some scientists predict that the average temperature will increase by 2 degrees (estimated for the sake of argument), and people start making claims about what's causing the increase of 2 degrees. It seems like nobody is considering the possibility that there's some factor causing an increase of 0.2 degrees, some other factor causing an increase of 0.1 degrees, maybe some feedback caused by the combination of the two causing an additional increase of 0.1 degrees, etc. Climate is a complex system, and if humans are having an impact on it, there's still nothing that says humans have to be the only thing having an impact.
I dunno, I think most congressmen openly acknowledge funding for pet projects that their interns slip into defense spending bills. How else can they brag about it to their constituents?
In that case, though, it's the radioactive material that's being spread, not radioactivity itself. The only way I can think of offhand that radioactivity could be contagious is if you got bombarded enough that a significant number of atoms in your body were converted to radioactive isotopes. I am in no way, shape, or form a biologist, so I don't really know the human body contains the type and number of atoms that you'd need to become radioactive.
You get busted because you're the one planning it. Ergo, your thoughts are illegal.
I think that's bit of a logical leap. Your thoughts and/or purely mental intent don't constitute conspiracy. The action of soliciting a hit-man (even if it's an undercover cop pretending to be one) is what gets you convicted of conspiracy.
Psychohistory made predictions based entirely on statistics. The premise was that, in enough situations, it doesn't matter at all who does something, only that the probability of somebody doing it was very close to 1. Psychohistory was particularly bad at handling anomalous individuals, which is exactly why the Mule screwed up the predictions so much.
In a perfect world, sure. In the real world, intent is all you need. Ever heard of conspiracy?. An overt "precursor" act (i.e. meeting with a hit-man, in the case of conspiracy to commit murder) is required to prove conspiracy, but that precursor act is basically just proof of intent, like this mind-reading device.
I'm not a lawyer either, but I think being convicted of conspiracy to commit a crime still requires some sort of action, especially one that is an obvious and immediate precursor to committing the crime. Thinking about killing someone is not conspiracy. Telling a friend "I wish that person was dead" is most likely not conspiracy. Offering someone money to kill someone is just about where the line is.
I'm gonna have to agree with Opera on this one. onunload is the source of annoying pages and advertisements that can only be closed by killing your browser process.
If carbon dioxide has a large impact, one good way to pull it out of the atmosphere is to stop whacking every forest within reach. You can pump quite large amounts of carbon dioxide into an environment if you give the trees the chance to eat all of it.
Just because it isn't federal law, that doesn't mean it isn't illegal. And just because you aren't taking physical property, that doesn't mean it isn't theft. Look into your state's laws regarding Theft of Services. Whether or not using an illegitimate Windows key falls under theft of services may be debatable, but the oft-repeated statement that "it isn't theft if the other person doesn't lose a physical object" is not true in all states.
You seem to have a mistaken impression that such photosensitive cells suddenly develop out of nothing. Evolution is an incremental process. Plenty of species have very simple cells that are photosensitive. An organism that has a mutation that improves the ability of such a patch of photosensitive cells, even by a small amount, is more likely to reproduce and create a large population with that mutation.
What is the chance of this cell (a cell is very complex) forming in the first place? randomly mutating into this functional entity.
It doesn't have to be very high at all. Most organisms, especially in the past, do not have the ~25 year generations that humans do. The probability could be one in a billion, and bacteria that reproduce on the order of hours will hit that mutation in a relatively small number of years.
For example, I have osteogenesisimperfecto. Inherited from my mother and a 50% chance of passing to my children. It does not effect re productivity and has negligible mortality.
Now, maybe. Go back a million years, though. I think you'll find that such diseases cause many more problems than they do in modern society, where you can avoid situations in which the disease would affect mortality. If you do the math, you'll see that a mutation that alters the chance to successfully reproduce to even just 51% or 49% will relatively quickly lead to the success or extinction of your species. It's a very interesting debate about how much, if any, modern society is causing human evolution to grind to a halt.
I think the lawsuits against tobacco companies had more to do with them lying about the health dangers of smoking, adding chemicals to make them more addictive, and other such dishonest stuff. It would be a better comparison if Bic made pens that sneak out in the middle of the night and write slanderous material on telephone polls, the whole time claiming that their pens did no such thing.
Microsoft's.NET library may not work across platforms, but Mono does. As long as Mono doesn't get squashed by an army of lawyers, I'll continue to like.NET.
...allowing you to give a user pretty much unrestricted access on his personal space without being able to interfere with the system.
That is true, but if it's a computer that's only used by one person (as in user account), wrecking that user's personal space isn't much better than wrecking the whole system. A virus that deletes all of the documents of the only user on a *nix system isn't really any different than a virus that deletes all of the documents on a Windows system. As far as a lot of people at home would be concerned, the one user's personal space is the system.
Slashdot Mirror
"People who believe that humans are causing global warming make death threats against anyone who disagrees, so how much can I really trust them?"
Of course that isn't a logically correct statement or a valid scientific argument against humans causing global warming, but that won't stop average people from thinking it. It doesn't make the theories right or wrong, it just makes the group look bad. People have tendencies to judge a group by the most vocal members, and that's probably the biggest problem in the whole debate.
Except that creationism isn't science because it isn't falsifiable. In theory, you could conduct an experiment on the Earth where you control the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and measure the changes in temperature. If the results don't match what the skeptics say they should be, then you've provided evidence that their model is not accurate and hence falsifiable.
As for a flat Earth, it's quite a bit less complicated to take a picture from orbit and show the sphericalness (do I get credit for coining that word?) of Earth. Of course, I'm sure you can find some geometric system where the Earth really is flat.
I remember reading a paper back in the early 1990's about what happened in a small environment when the amount of carbon dioxide was increased. The atmospheric concentration didn't change, but the rate of plant growth increased rather dramatically. A great way of reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere is to stop hacking down every forest we find.
I think what bothers me the most about this whole debate is all the people that are looking for the cause of climate change, as if there can be only one. Some scientists predict that the average temperature will increase by 2 degrees (estimated for the sake of argument), and people start making claims about what's causing the increase of 2 degrees. It seems like nobody is considering the possibility that there's some factor causing an increase of 0.2 degrees, some other factor causing an increase of 0.1 degrees, maybe some feedback caused by the combination of the two causing an additional increase of 0.1 degrees, etc. Climate is a complex system, and if humans are having an impact on it, there's still nothing that says humans have to be the only thing having an impact.
Try adding an extra 'm'. I think you'll figure it out.
I dunno, I think most congressmen openly acknowledge funding for pet projects that their interns slip into defense spending bills. How else can they brag about it to their constituents?
In that case, though, it's the radioactive material that's being spread, not radioactivity itself. The only way I can think of offhand that radioactivity could be contagious is if you got bombarded enough that a significant number of atoms in your body were converted to radioactive isotopes. I am in no way, shape, or form a biologist, so I don't really know the human body contains the type and number of atoms that you'd need to become radioactive.
People at Best Buy know stuff about DNS?
Oh, wait, the dictionary didn't know it was a real word either.
Psychohistory made predictions based entirely on statistics. The premise was that, in enough situations, it doesn't matter at all who does something, only that the probability of somebody doing it was very close to 1. Psychohistory was particularly bad at handling anomalous individuals, which is exactly why the Mule screwed up the predictions so much.
I'm gonna have to agree with Opera on this one. onunload is the source of annoying pages and advertisements that can only be closed by killing your browser process.
If carbon dioxide has a large impact, one good way to pull it out of the atmosphere is to stop whacking every forest within reach. You can pump quite large amounts of carbon dioxide into an environment if you give the trees the chance to eat all of it.
Just because it isn't federal law, that doesn't mean it isn't illegal. And just because you aren't taking physical property, that doesn't mean it isn't theft. Look into your state's laws regarding Theft of Services. Whether or not using an illegitimate Windows key falls under theft of services may be debatable, but the oft-repeated statement that "it isn't theft if the other person doesn't lose a physical object" is not true in all states.
What about PCP? It'd be great if we could get more of that through recycling the used stuff.
It doesn't have to be very high at all. Most organisms, especially in the past, do not have the ~25 year generations that humans do. The probability could be one in a billion, and bacteria that reproduce on the order of hours will hit that mutation in a relatively small number of years.
I think the lawsuits against tobacco companies had more to do with them lying about the health dangers of smoking, adding chemicals to make them more addictive, and other such dishonest stuff. It would be a better comparison if Bic made pens that sneak out in the middle of the night and write slanderous material on telephone polls, the whole time claiming that their pens did no such thing.
Microsoft's .NET library may not work across platforms, but Mono does. As long as Mono doesn't get squashed by an army of lawyers, I'll continue to like .NET.