I disagree, but then neither of us are climate scientists so our opinions are pretty worthless.

I don't get the focus on whether or not the warming is anthropogenic. Should we ignore all problems that we didn't make?

Supposing that the warming isn't primarily anthropogenic, there's still plenty of reason to believe that the greenhouse gases we're adding are making it worse, and in fact we can even make some reasonable estimates of how much worse they're making it.

At the end of the day, you'd really better hope that you're wrong about our ability to modify the climate. Because the current climate of Earth is not typical. In fact, there isn't really a "typical" climate for the planet. Ice core histories show us that it swings between much hotter than it is, and much, much colder (by "colder", think "equatorial oceans frozen 30 feet deep for millenia"). Both extremes will be unpleasant for us, and I say "will", not "would", because it's gonna happen. When? We have no idea. We know that climate changes can happen very rapidly (couple of decades), even without an obvious precipitating event (big meteor, supervolcano eruption, etc.), and that they come at apparently-random intervals.

So if we want this planet to be nice for us long-term, we'd better learn to engineer our climate. Or get even better at adapting our local environment. Or both.

Try to sell the Galaxy Nexus across India in volume and maybe you can tell us the answer :)

Yep. In the long run, the climate will change no matter what we do... unless we learn to actively manage it. Similarly, we will get hit by a catastrophically-destructive meteor, unless we develop the technology need to identify and deflect dangerous asteroids. It's worth noting that while without our intervention the climate may stay as it is for thousands of years, it may also change in decades. The ice core records tell us that the planet is capable of warming or cooling as much as 7C in as little as 20-30 years, even without any obvious catastrophic event, and even faster given a supervolcano eruption, or a big meteor. It WILL happen.

IMO, while it certainly makes sense to take reasonable steps to limit greenhouse gas production, we really need to focus on investing heavily in climate research, with an eventual goal of learning not only to understand but to manage our planet's climate. Actually, we should also invest a little in more strategies to cope with unpleasant climate. I say "more" strategies, because we already have a lot of them. The regions of Earth in which humans can survive comfortably without technological assistance are really small. The "natural" human carrying capacity of most of the places people live is basically zero, but we're very good at modifying our environment to adapt it to our needs. When the planet warms substantially, no doubt we'll have to apply more of those skills, so we should be thinking about which ones and how to improve our capabilities.

And yet... that 80% mark is probably correct to some degree. Some villages only have one cell phone that everyone shares, but in the cities, that's how people communicate.

So think of it as each person in India putting out $1100 for their phone, which they use in lieu of land line, TV and computer. Assuming it lasts as long as the Nokia phones they used to have, I can see this getting a high adoption rate, with a new phone, say, every 5 years.

I'd argue that the rule of law is a result of applying the scientific method to social structure and governance.

The scientific method really consists of making conjectures and analyzing them critically. Some of the criticism comes from experimentation and analysis, but most conjectures never reach that point because simple thought can identify reasons they should be discarded. This process is closely related to (but vastly more powerful than) the mutation and selection process of evolution. At bottom, both are about creating and testing ideas, and selecting the ones that are objectively better (for the relevant definition of "better"). The scientific method does the selection through a tradition of criticism, natural evolution does it via replication (favoring the gene that replicates itself better).

How does this apply to the rule of law? Three ways. First of all, applying the same principle of progress to social structure, trying new methods and keeping those which work well while discarding those which don't, will lead to rule of law because it clearly is a superior social structure "technology". Second, without the rule of law, you really can't apply the scientific method to social structures, because there is no defined structure beyond the whim of the ruler(s). You have to fix the rules firmly so you can see what the outcomes are, and you can observe how to vary them. So any attempt to apply scientific reasoning to governance demands rule of law.

Third, and most important, the tradition of criticism inherent in and necessary to scientific progress inevitably leads people to criticize their government and to demand, among other things, the ability to understand the rules by which they're governed. I don't believe it's possible for any society with a significant number of scientific thinkers with any sort of influence to remain governed by fiat.

I think history bolsters my argument, too, simply based on the sequence of events. The Enlightenment was all about scientific reasoning and learning how to apply it to nearly all areas of human endeavor, not just science, and the Enlightenment came before the spread of the rule of law, not after.

Oh, actually I think there's a fourth reason scientific thinking creates the rule of law. It's even deeper, and is probably the truly fundamental reason, though it's a harder argument to make. That is that moral values are scientifically determined (even if we don't realize it), and the rule of law is morally right. It would take me a few pages to detail how and why I think that moral rightness is a real, determinable thing, derivable from the laws of nature, and not merely an artifact of culture, so I won't bother. Note that I'm not arguing that correct morality is easy to derive. It's not, any more than it was easy to derive General Relativity by conjecturing about observations of reality. But it can be derived, and in the same method: by conjecturing moral positions and then criticizing them, both logically and experimentally, discarding positions that lead to undesirable outcomes.

Correct -- the problem occurs when that person at the front of the line suddenly drives slower, due to hitting something, not being able to react in time, seeing the traffic light at the last minute, etc.

There are a few things that affect how fast people SHOULD drive -- intersection timings (get rid of intersections, they're unsafe, and there are better soltuions), road engineering, weather, driver alertness/reflexes, chances of some obstruction such as a child suddenly veering onto the road, and people doing stupid things.

Unfortunately, you can't fix the last one.

What gets me is NOT people driving over the limit, but people rushing to the next intersection when it's obvious they'll stop at the same light I will, people inside my 2 second react-time zone (that means if you're going faster than the limit, you should be giving other cars MORE room, not less), and people who just don't understand the laws of physics.

When you speed up a car, damage on impact is exponential, not linear. Also, cars react differently on different surfaces when braking, and people's reaction times have a limit. Many cities are lazy with their speed limits, and you can often find roads that, barring stupid drivers, are safe to drive at significantly higher speeds.

But again, you can't fix stupid, so the limits get normalized. It doesn't matter how good a driver you are, the limits are there to protect you from the intersection of your reaction speed and vehicle's mass+coefficient of friction, and the other person who did something idiotic that you didn't expect.

There are often reasons road speeds are set low that are way beyond how safe the road surface is for traffic to drive on at higher speeds, and those other reasons often can't be corrected, whereas a speed limit can be easily adjusted.

We're talking V2V here -- unless the vehicle is able to read signs, I can't see the data containing more than GPS location, direction of travel, rate of accelleration. It'll still get a bunch wrong, but it'll see the cars you can't while sitting in the left hand turn lane.

What you're talking about is more like a V2N (Vehicle to network) system, where your car is always reporting what it is doing to some other location.

Is that what your contract says?

Most places I've seen measure with encapsulation, because it's easier. The problem's not with the meter, it's with the small print. If your small print states that they measure the TCP packets only though, that's deceptive advertising and also puts them in violation of their contract.

Considering how hard I have to work to get any data usage stats out of my ISP though, my guess is that the small print doesn't say one way or the other -- which could still be considered deceptive, if you're willing to spend lots of money prosecuting in court.

That's a problem. But it's a smaller problem than the one we live with now, which is that there are so many obscure laws that if anyone in a position of authority has it in for you they can find something to nail you for. The rule of law matters.

What an idiot. You kan't reed.

Of course it can be helped. Fix the laws. The application of the bad laws will motivate their correction.

Utter red herring.

The tyrannies to which you refer were fought by amending the federal constitution and enacting appropriate federal laws to curb the abuses. That's a Good Thing, both the process and the outcome. But it has nothing to do with mi's point. The things the federal government manipulates through funding are things that it has no authority to control, and for which there is no national political will sufficient to give the government that control. Hence this back door method.

If cop cameras are sufficiently important that the federal government should mandate them, then Congress should pass a law mandating them. If the courts knock the law down as unconstitutional (as they would), then we should amend the constitution to give the federal government the authority required. This sneaky backdoor manipulation of state policy via federal funding, though... it's a tool that has no essential limits and no constitutional controls. It's a bad idea, and we should stop it.

Don't even need that -- just if something happens off-cam, the officer's word means next to nothing and the ruling is heavily weighted towards the plaintiff. If officers found that their testimony in court is automatically thrown out if they don't play by the recording rules, there'd be less messing with evidence.

Are you sure about that? There are always stock charges that a camera won't pick up, and they need to show evidence of why they stopped you in the first place. I'd guess that for every charge they drop, another one is probably added.