Funny that you accuse the OP of logical fallacies whithout actually saying what the fallacy is. At the same time you're yourself "conduct" a logical fallacy yourself. Just because a news source as some (perceived) bias does not mean they are not correct, even correct in most of the cases. When will people learn that the truth is not always in between two extremes, but might be just as well at one extreme side. Also some source in the middle (moderate if you want to) has just as many motives as any source at the extremes, bottom line always double check.

Also how is double checking sources related to making ad hominem attacks acceptable? Yes double checking sources is good, especially if you are doubtful about their motives. However, even someone with doubtful motives can be correct. An ad hominem attack avoids the argument altogether and instead just attacks the person. So the OP was fully correct, it seems you should be doing some reading.

Wavelengths, we're pretty much always talking near-infrared. The most often used wavelength range is the so-called C-band (1530–1565 nm). This is mainly because this is where Erbium-doped fibre amplifiers work, which are necessary to create very long links without repeaters (also this is where the absorption minimum of fibres is). Less common is the L-band 1565-1625 nm. There's also the O and E band this are AFAIK mainly legacy bands which were used at the beginning of fibre optic communications. (Dense) Wavelength division multiplexing WDM/DWDM systems have channel spacings of 100 or 50 GHz bandwidth, i.e. ~1 or 0.5 nm at 1550 nm (look up ITU grid for more info). Today they usually carry 10 Gb/s data, however more and more 40 Gb/s and the next standard is 100 Gb/s (this actually uses multi-level phase and amplitude coding). About the pushing microwaves over optic lines, that's not really desired, absorption is too high, you also need diameters on the scale of a wavelength (depending on your index contrast) and finally you would not gain much, the bandwidth of your channels depends on your carrier frequency at microwave wavelengths the carrrier frequency is a couple of 100 GHz max. so that's the full bandwidth you get. compared to the C-band which contains about 70 channels at 100 GHz bandwidth each. So really no point.

For god's sake how's this modded insightful? They haven't come up with a falsifiable hypothesis?! Well tell me what the theory of AGW is? Also what's the point about about that they prove their assumptions by adding more data, you make it sound like they are searching for more data that supports their theory, like the data just magically appears out of thin air or something. Get a clue, the data comes from real sources, and yes they have added more and more data from more and more different sources and guess what it all supports the assumptions of AGW. That IS how you do science! And that is also how you come up with a scientific consensus. The anti-AGW folk or what you call them, have really had it easy in comparison, yes they only needed to come up with a clear falsification of AGW, but they haven't managed to do this. Instead they always repeat the same myths over and over again, "but, but ... the mid-evil warming period, ... sunactivity ..." all of which have been debunked over and over again. But fortunately thanks to "climategate" they don't need to make up scientific sounding arguments, they just shift to attacks on the integrity of the scientists

Quoted from an earlier post:

Yes clearly shows a strong environmentalist bias!

Have you ever looked at the sheer amount of knowledge that doctors have to know (and actually do know)? Yes they are learning baby physics and baby chemistry. We have physicists and chemists to do the non-baby physics and chemistry. You could also say the same thing for other sciences. I know friends who've taught physics to chemistry students and that was baby-physics which the chemists struggled to understand. Similarly I've had to learn chemistry for my physics degree and have pretty much forgotten almost anything about it, that didn't prevent me from getting a PhD in physics.
I wonder how much of the physics or chemistry out of your field of expertise you still remember.

Back to the topic of doctors, a lot of the stuff that doctors do is purely knowing things, but they need to do a lot of it. They don't necessarily know exactly how a drug works, they just know when to give that drug. So a lot of their work could be done with a very big flowchart, except for the fact that quite a lot is actually observation not just what you tell them.

I think you don't have a clue how doctors work. Do you really think doctors evaluate the effectiveness of a medicine by reading through scientific articles and possible even recalculating the results? No, they follow guidelines which are written by other medical people who's job is evaluating this sort of stuff. That is a good thing, because the people who make the guidelines actually do know their stuff and I trust them do to the statistics more than some doctor. The doctor's job is to know what tests to run, what symptoms to look for etc. Not to do a statistical analysis about the likelihood that you have disease X or Y.

Note that RAND can mean quite a lot of things and usually it is not exactly specified what RAND exactly means. IIRC there's been quite a few patent cases over what RAND is or not is. Also so far we don't have any proof that Apple really tried to license the GSM patents and Nokia indeed did want to charge "outrageous" fees, this is simply what Apple says and I'm inclined to take everything what either company says with a large grain of salt.
My personal suspicion is (and I don't really have anything to back this up), Nokia tried to licence the patents for a percentage of the revenue or the cost of the iphone, they possibly even do that for all phone makers. However because of Apple's comparetively high prices they would actually by significantly more than almost all other licencees. Now, is "1% of your phone price" reasonable and fair? I'd say you can argue both ways. What is actually also quite interesting, IIRC in Apples own documents they admit that they only approached Nokia for licences of the patents sometime after the iphone came out (I think it was actually a significant time after), that would mean they at least admit to having used Nokia patents for quite a while without a licence no matter what. I don't know what the usual policy for this sort of thing is though.

Yeah right, have a search for Schacht Asse in Germany, that's a salt mine where they stored all kinds of radioactive waste (without proper approval) and they've had water leaking into it for years, but the nuclear industry and the government covered it up for decades. Salt+water+nuclear waste is not a really good mixture.

Well except for the fact that reprocessing is very energy inefficient and you actually produce several times the amount of nuclear waste you had before, just instead of being highly radioactive relatively short half-life time waste it's now medium radioactive very long half-life time waste.

Yeah and salt mines are a very bright idea. Because you know what happens if you mix water with salt don't you? And you know what that does to the metal containers which are usually used for storing the waste?

It's funny how a lot of people are falling all over themselves because google introduces something new. Now they've introduced a new DNS service and say it's to make the internet experience faster. Turns out in benchmarks they are slower than peoples ISP DNS servers (not really surprising), but also significantly slower than services like OpenDNS, which does the same thing. So why are people switching to google??? It's not better than existing services, there's serious privacy and security concerns (it's a lot easier to force one company to change their DNS records than forcing thousands of companies in lots of different countries to change their records), but still everybody is suddenly declaring "I'm switching to googleDNS". The scary thing is the people are not the typical fanboys, but usually sceptical geeks. Somehow though as soon as google does something it switches the scepticism off in a geek brain.

Somehow I'm reminded about the whole Android thing. Google really seems to have the urge to only do their own thing. Same thing with android where they have thrown out the whole "Linux" userspace to reinvent the wheel (only not as good, see Harald Welte's Blog for a rant about it). Here it seems the same thing they just do their own thing without merging back and disregarding experiences others might have had.

On a side note, their problems with the Completely Fair Scheduler should be a good argument for pluggable schedulers. It shows one scheduler can't fit all use cases, but I doubt Linus will listen.
C

This statement actually smacks of a naivity that I find amazing in a Federal Court judge. "Everyone does it, rich and poor alike..." yeah right, the poor have an army of accountants working for them trying to find every loophole in the tax system. In reality the poor and middle class do not have the resources to evade taxes like the rich do. Thus the current tax system significantly favours the rich and they end up paying less to no taxes, while the middle class is carrying most of the tax burden. And unfortunately this is the case in a lot of countries not just the US.

Thanks for your reply

Cheers
C

And X is probably a prime example of software who's progress was hindered by it's choice of licence and would have done better with the GPL (read the recent article on LWN). Note, I'm not disagreeing with you otherwise.

Hey Bruce,

sorry for hijacking this thread, but could you give your opinion on the Vernor vs AutoDesk case, and the "threat" this is supposed to have on Free Software, as PJ on groklaw and more recently Nimmer have been writing. Do you believe that software being sold not licensed poses a significant threat to FOSS?

Cheers
Cyco