"Agreed. Obviously before humanity, all climate drivers were non-anthropogenic. The addition of humanity obviously does not make those drivers disappear, so the null hypothesis is that modern climate variation is driven by the same non-anthropogenic drivers as previously caused climate variation."

This is a straw man argument. It's not simply a case of climate changing that is the problem being studied, it's the rate of change that is of concern to cause study. Yes the climate has always changed, no we don't have any record of it changing as fast as it is without there being some clear and apparent factor (such as a massive volcanic eruption).

You really shouldn't be wasting people's time by discussing this topic with them when you don't even understand what the basic underlying phenomenon being studied is.

"If anyone is telling you they fully understand all the natural factors of climate variation and how they interact, they're lying to you."

Yet that's exactly what you've done. By claiming that human caused CO2 emissions are most definitely not the overriding factor in causing climate change you must be definition know what it is, because if you don't, then you cannot possibly rule out human made CO2 emissions. You've done exactly that though, so please, the world awaits, tell us what the overriding cause of climate change is and provide us all your evidence, it's the only possible conclusion one can reach based on what you've said.

Unless of course, you're lying to us and should never have made such a silly claim as you did that humans as a factor in climate change via CO2 is a false hypothesis.

I think I know which one I'll place my bet on - that you're the very type of liar that you're trying to deflect others away as passing off your personal opinion as scientific fact when it's anything but.

To be fair, if you're not American, the attack on Pearl Harbour is quite the irrelevance in the grand scheme of things such that no, it probably isn't in most kids history lessons, there's just too much other far more important stuff from other nations histories than that part of American history. If they go near American history at all it tends to focus on the war of independence, the war of 1812 or the American civil war.

Certainly here in the UK Pearl Harbour was never on the agenda, we got taught about the American war of independence and the American civil war but that's it. In terms of World War teaching it was focussed either on World War I, or the European and African fronts. We didn't even really get taught much about the war in Asia and places like Australia, despite these being far more relevant to our commonwealth history than Pearl Harbour either. There's just too much other stuff to fit in to make room for even the majority of British history, let alone much overseas history on top - especially events that are again in the grand scheme of things pretty irrelevant to the global perspective compared to many other much larger events in history.

"Does the idea of no God or afterlife bring you joy or any feelings (besides smugness?)"

Yes, because it means we're part of a natural system so incredibly vast and complex that I find it to be a far more fascinating proposition than "the magic man in the sky did it" and there's more scientific evidence for it too which is equally fascinating to read about, certainly more so than old fairy tales that got taken too seriously. The bible gives me joy in the way Lord of the Rings give me joy, interesting entertainment, but I wouldn't want to waste more of my life on it than necessary by dedicating my life to fruitlessly searching for Gandelf, Frodo, and the shire.

"I've had both a wife and son die. It really brings me sadness and feels me with emptiness to think that there is no after."

Absence of belief in god doesn't mean there is no after, it just means there's no anthropomorphisation of after. There's every possibility that when you pass, you will be buried, or your ashes dispersed where you wife and son were only to decay with parts of you becoming nutrients that comprise part of a tree together. In hundreds of years that tree may die, and what was once part of you maybe your wife and son too will become parts of many other plants or animals, in millions of years you may become part of a fossil together, in billions of years you may come together as part of a new planet or a star.

You don't need god to realise that the universe is a beautiful thing that you and your deceased wife and son will always be part of in one way or another.

"Of course they have no problem hiring brown foreigners for dirt-cheap labor,"

But they're not hiring dirt-cheap labour, in fact, they're paying well above the average. So that comment is obviously false, for example, Google:

http://www.immihelp.com/h1b-sp...

I'm not exactly sure what the point of your link is? A bitch fight between a bunch of bloggers that seems to have no relevance to silicon valley in general? One or two people with an axe to grind don't exactly act as proof of a problem. with the companies themselves.

"I don't think an incredibly skewed ethnic or gender makeup is concrete evidence of discrimination, but it's definitely an indicator that something is wrong."

Yes it is, and that was the point the person you originally responded to was making, that something is wrong, but not necessarily with the companies themselves, or even silicon valley. That it could be a fundamental issue with say, the education system for example which they have no real control over fixing.

At the point they forget that that also means they can't sell ads in Europe without having a European operation such that they're shutting themselves out of the world's largest economy (the European Union) I would imagine.

So sure they could do that, but they'd rapidly lose the race to global competitors who are willing to simply play ball with privacy and data protection law in Europe and it would be goodbye silicon valley, enjoy your trip into irrelevance.

I'm not sure anyone in silicon valley actually wants that. There's far more profit in behaving themselves and playing global than being isolationist dicks.

Plus it seems pretty clear that GCHQ is in breach of the Data Protection Act in the UK, which makes allowance for law enforcement, but obviously by harvesting all data GCHQ goes beyond that. The specific exemptions in law are:

- the prevention or detection of crime;
- the capture or prosecution of offenders; and

Obviously harvesting data of innocent non-crime committing people achieves neither of these things. Which is why I suspect GCHQ's acts wont survive subsequent court challenges anyway - even if they succeed in national courts, they'll get slapped down at European level as whilst the creation of the UK's supreme court has created a puppet for parliament in the judiciary they still have no way of manipulating the European Court of Justice.

So it's a multi-pronged approach. Saying "Well there's no point fixing this, because that is broken" is stupid when "that" is also being targeted for fixing also. As you imply, just because there's more than one issue doesn't mean we should deal with none of them, it just means they have to be dealt with as separate cases.

I'm intrigued, care to elaborate?

From what I've seen they seem to be some of the few companies willing to actively campaign for gay rights equality and so forth for example and they don't seem to have any qualms hiring people from different ethnicities overseas, and in fact have been campaigning for more.

Is your suggestion that because the numbers aren't 50/50 that they're obviously discriminatory or something?

I think that's the problem, I think this law was enacted in an era where off-shore communications were rare, such that any mail sent to somewhere like Russia during the cold war might be a bit suspicious. Although not everyone, not by a longshot, the ratio of legitimate overseas communications to subversive ones would have been much lower when this law was written. There was also no trivial way to blanket intercept all postal mail, open it, and record it automatically without greater risk of the recipient and sender being aware either.

The problem is now it's being applied when everyone and anyone now communicates overseas on a daily basis. There is a far greater ratio of innocents to threats, and collection is arbitrary of everyone. That means the law is being used well beyond it's originally intended purposes which were actually more likely the two examples you cite.

Wow, I always thought Forbes was a fairly professional business oriented publication like The Financial Times, but if their writers can't even grasp the difference between revenue and profit and show absolutely no understanding of the fact that taxes are paid before profit what hope is there?

I guess I'll avoid Forbes in future, I didn't realise it was quite such an amateur and clueless operation.

As for your point, well 1000101, it's really quite simple. An overseas company is defined as one that doesn't have it's headquarters in the UK. Doing business in a country does not make a company resident in that country, even though it makes it liable for tax in that country on revenue earned in that country post other deductions on revenue.

But most importantly in this case it's primarily the routing of communications that matters in GCHQ's argument, and if the data is crossing out of the UK then of course it's overseas data.

Which isn't to defend the practice, it's disgusting and unacceptable, but if we're going to argue against it we need to stick to arguments that actually make sense and that hold up in the face of counter arguments.

You haven't demonstrated why I'm wrong because you can't demonstrate why I'm wrong because you can't dispute the law as it's written is not written as it's written as that creates a paradox, hence, you are still wrong. Get over it.

Please elaborate, I'm intrigued, what exactly do you think it is? An agricultural company? A financial services company? An automotive company?

What about Facebook as a business makes it not an information technology company when it's whole business is built around technology that deals with information?

"It is an indisputable fact that violence goes down in well armed states. It is a fact. You may not like the fact, but it is a fact nonetheless."

Of course, that's why Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, and Afghanistan are the most peaceful nations on earth, because of the massive proliferation of arms.

Obviously you're more than just a little bit dumb.

"Regarding your first link, it's unlcear what the chart is depicting. The vertical axis is labelled "Numbers", with each data series corresponding to a different kind of weapon. Are these numbers of weapons? Numbers of violent crimes committed with these weapons? Numbers of homicides committed with these weapons? The chart, on its own, doesn't make that clear."

Sorry, I should've posted the full link. It's the number of recorded incidents:

http://www.publications.parlia...

"In the end, I'm curious as to why there's an apparent discrepancy between the claims made by the WSJ and BBC. It's sad that even with an issue that's so thoroughly documented, it's hard to get a straight answer."

I don't know why either, but personally I'd be inclined to consider that the WSJ article is an opinion piece by someone who seems to have a history of being a bit of an anti-gun control zealot and provides absolutely no citations, whilst the BBC article is an actual news report reporting on the actual ONS figures. It wouldn't be like it's the first time that Dr. Malcolm had just made stuff up on violent crime:

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoi...

I know I know, this is an ad-hominem argument against her, but without citations to consider or dispute what is left? Honestly, it's gotten to the point where I almost just discount US sources automatically because the debate there is so polarised and so full of dirty tactics on both sides. I shouldn't of course, because there's the danger in discounting sources of only ending up with one side of the picture, but when it comes down to outright lies (again as is the case with The Daily Mail) it becomes ever harder to give such sources just consideration.

As an aside, the first article looks a bit dodgy too, I only just bothered to read it, i.e.:

"Moreover, another massacre occurred in June 2010. Derrick Bird, a taxi driver in Cumbria, shot his brother and a colleague then drove off through rural villages killing 12 people and injuring 11 more before killing himself."

It seems oblivious to the fact that that was committed purely with legally owned (i.e. not banned) firearms. You could just as well argue that this case is a reason to further restrict guns rather than the contrary.

"Sgt. Nightingale was given the Glock pistol as a gift by Iraqi forces he had been training. It was packed up with his possessions and returned to him by colleagues in Iraq after he left the country to organize a funeral for two close friends killed in action."

This is also not entirely true. The author is restating the defendants claim but the prosecution had other evidence and a counterclaim, such as for example additional ammunition and so forth which he eventually admitted he kept there because he couldn't be bothered to return it to the base gun lockup after doing firearms practice. It was for this reason he was initially convicted, because laziness isn't an excuse for breaking the law - he knew what it was and one has to bear in mind the police only investigated this because someone reported it, so harmless claims of "oh I forgot about it it's no big deal" are obviously not born out given the fact someone was concerned enough to report he was keeping live firearms and live ammunition. It's not as simple a case as his side of the story makes out.

The final conclusion is a bit of a stretch too:

"What to conclude? Strict gun laws in Great Britain and Australia haven't made their people noticeably safer, nor have they prevented massacres. The two major countries held up as models for the U.S. don't provide much evidence that strict gun laws will solve our problems."

Effectively he's arguing that gun control doesn't work because it doesn't correlate with reduced violent crime. This ignores the fact that it does correlate with reduced gun crime and reduced homicides. I don't think anyone has ever tried to pretend that gun control is a magic wand that fixes all crime even those unrelated to firearms, but it's dishonest of him to deny there isn't positive correlating effects that may suggest that gun crime has a positive impact, but is only part of the solution, and certainly not the whole solution.

I'm not going to pretend that this definitely means gun control in itself fixes gun crime because the whole point of my argument is that there is too many variables to possibly be sure. But fundamentally my point is that there is as much evidence for positive effects (if not more) as there is for negative effects so to suggest it's "obvious" one way or the other and dismissing the existence of another side of the story as the person I was originally referring to did is extremely dishonest.

My gut, based on the statistics I've seen for the UK, and the timing of things however leads me to suspect that gun control doesn't instantly reduce gun crime, but it does create an environment whereby it's easier for the police to remove guns from criminals and eventually reduce gun crime - post ban it looked like it took some time for police to get a handle on how to deal with inner London gun crime, but once they did being able to remove guns from gangs meant it was easier to reduce gun crime than if there was no ban, because without a ban criminals would've just been replacing seized weapons with newly bought ones. That's much harder when the route to acquiring firearms are much more risky. Of course, as I say this is just a suspicion but it seems to play out reasonably - that is, it seems realistic that gun control isn't an instant fix, but combined with effective policing to seize illegally held guns post gun-control it does indeed reduce gun crime. So the mantra of the NRA and it's ilk of "If you ban guns, only criminals have guns" actually seems somewhat true, however there's also a flip side too it - when only criminals have guns, it's much easier to find them and take them off them and to prevent them rearming afterwards.

Will this do?

http://www.publications.parlia...

The graph finishes early, but the trend has continued downwards (i.e. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-2...)

The problem is the article you cite uses The Daily Mail as it's source, I'm almost inclined to say that automatically makes it wrong, because on average if you take a Daily Mail article and say it's wrong to at least some degree you'll more often be right than not as The Daily Mail exists purely to push a political agenda that often runs against the grain of reality - more recent examples being gay marriage, when the law was going through parliament they published polls saying the majority opposed it, but that ran contrary to every other poll in existence. One of The Daily Mail's past articles (in fact it's the one linked at the bottom of the second article you linked I believe) even conflates crimes and violent crime, so it doesn't even get the absolute most basic comprehension of the numbers right but jumps to conclusions anyway.

Part the issue in comparing firearms offences in the UK is the fact that firearms offence can mean anything from a kid carrying a realistic looking toy gun in public and being told by the police you can't carry realistic looking weapons around, to someone going on a massacre. Whilst firearms themselves are defined in law as non-air weapons - i.e. what most people would see as "proper guns" a firearms offence can involve something that isn't a firearm but looks like one, through to air rifles, through to actual proper guns.

This doesn't contrast well to nations like the US and South Africa where many such offences are kept well away from firearms statistics, but in The Daily Mail's comparisons often ignore this sort of disparity because it doesn't paint the picture they want to paint. Or in other words, many UK firearms offences are actually completely non-violent crimes. Even illegal poaching leads to such offences, for example, carrying a shotgun on private farm land without permission would be an offence under the firearms act.

UK murder rates are even more encouraging now, the UK's homicide rate is below that of nations often seen as some of the most peaceful on earth:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

If you don't trust Wikipedia, the World Bank provides the same data, but the presentation is much more awful IMO:

http://data.worldbank.org/indi...