If you seriously think that causing a minor inconvenience warrants beating someone to pulp, then I think you're bigger threat to society than this kid is.

For three hundred years people were able to run them furnaces without the aid of computers just fine. But after the 'puter takes over, you can't do anything without it, even if the damn thing goes south... I'd say it's not a very good design.

Yes, that's the naive version of how "free market" works. In reality, since competition is not for the benefit of the companies, they do whatever it takes to not compete. Because in fully functional "free markets", it would be practically impossible to make profit, which means that the very driving force of the innovation and manufacture will diminish the better "free markets" work. The "free markets" will fail by design, by becoming unfree and uncompetitive.

And competition is not, by definition, efficient. It's immense waste of time, effort and resources. What it produces, on the other hand, might sometimes appear to be efficiency, if look only at the winner. If you look at the whole picture, it would take some mind bending acrobatics to believe that having to write the same software for three different operating systems and three different phone platform is in any way efficient use of developers' skills, time and effort.

I would like to add that often these sites quote a study that does not say what the site claims it says, usuallly the contrary. So always check out the study, too. If you don't know the lingo, or can follow the science, there's usually some discussion to be found handling the misquoting of the paper.

As there very seldom is "conclusive" studies in anything -- and especially so in a cross-discipline field covering physics, astronomy and biology -- you'd be better off starting with Spencer Wearth's Discovery of Global Warming, me thinks.

The life-cycle carbon footprint of different energy production is very extensively studied, and if eco-freaks don't cre about those, nuclear-freaks tend to come up with very fantastic numbers, manaking to make nuclear almost as clean as renewables by creative and fantastic accounting. For example, there's often some unknown technical magic happening when moving from high-grade uranium to low-grade uranium that requires no extra enrichment. Or by stroke of other kind of magic, we turn all uranium reactor to thorium or other unproved stuff reactors overnight. The biggest issue, though, the nuclear is facing in this new landscape of energy production is the fact that it's rather incompatible with the renewables in the grid. Unless it scales itself down succesfully.

The problem with nuclear, without even going close to the radiation boogeyman, is that:
- it requres huge investement before nothing happens
- it takes years to construct a power plant
- it's pretty much unflexible regarding any peaks or lows in consumption
- the latest generation concrete housings' carbon foorprint takes a decade to offset
- provided the fuel mining, enrichement and transportation is almost carbon neutral
- the nuclear plants require a lot of sweet water for cooling, 24/7, and the world is running out

Oh, and nobody is willing to foot the bill, including insurance and decomissioning, so techically greenies don't really need to freak the hell out or start screaming, because mostly nuclear power is off the table due to practical issues. Which probably is why I don't know any greenies who do run around in circles. Actually, most of the greenies I know are free-market liberals. Now, *that* doesn't make any sense...

That could be because in the real world nuclear is pretty much incompatible with renewables, being so darn inflexible in every possible way. And that is the gist of all this "baseload" power generation -- it's old thinking stemming from the fact that neither (old) coal or nuclear power plants can adjust well to the demand, so you have to run them at 80-90 percent of capacity all the time, and add some way more adjustable gas generators in to the mix to take care of the peaks.

The more the almost immediately adjustable renewables take care of the power production, the less the is room for old technology in the grid, since the whoe baseload issue goes away. And this is starting to hit the luddite utilities in the Europe who refuse to take advantage of new technology...

Most of the nogotiations are, or should not be, a game, where you try to achieve advantage over the other "partners", but try an agreement that benefits boths sides, or all, sides of the agreement.
Beides, while at least telling your subjects what you are negotiating about, would not necessarily require revealinh all your cards, au contraire, public discourse may give you other leverage, or even more opportunities for bargaining.
I don't think there's downside in open trade negotaitions. Not open trade. Or, you know, open, free markets. There are many downsides to secretive, backhanding, misinforming, lying, deceiving martkets, though.

They don't have to ban them, they can ask for money to either cover urban areas with simple beacons overwhelming the "system", or even better, have a fleet of drones circling around making these things go "bong" completely randomly...

Ahum, Stephen Hsu is a theoretical physicist, the breed that seems to think that everything else in science is a subset of their discipline and thus within their realm of understanding. Which is rarely the case.

Meanwhile, the genetic researchers have already started serious discussions about the fact that since we now can fix some defects already on the embryo level, should we? If you cull them, then that discussion will be controlled by hapless physicists...

Talk about name dropping...:-)

I hope you're not thinking all these authors contributed equally. They did not. I'd venture a (well educated) guess that most of them "merely" had part of the data, and provided that in exhange for a name in publication. Most probably made their undergrads to do the analysis, so they could only share the results for meta analysis, instead of the raw data. So the the undergrads got their names in, too.

Furthermore, all the authors are using the same method (GWAS) so it's only relevant to question that single method, not the smartness off all the authors put together. And it's apparent that even you don't think much of the method, since you require those that challenge it, to come up with the proof (actual genetic/biological/chemical mechanism) that the method provided a correct model of reality. And within a generous week, which, of course, is much less time that it took to churn this statistical model out of the data.

That doens't sound fair, me thinks. It'll take years of wet lab to find out if this model has any relevance to how the world ticks. Computers and undergrads are cheap, labs and professionsal are expensive, so we get a lot of statistical biology nowadays. It's not bad science per se, but it's a very limited approach, because it's (totally) data driven.

In a free market society they would have to disclose all information, of course. Otherwise the market would not work properly, because the consumers could not make well informed decision...

I may be protectionism, or it may be serious consern for quality. Or both. You do know that the luddites didn't oppose machines, but machines that produced poor quality stuff -- they were afraid that people would be fooled to buy third grade crap instead good quality products.

Too bad they were beaten, shot and hanged for it, and we have the world we have now...

If we started to assume that business is not supposed to behave the most sosiopathic and misantropist way possible, the world might become a better place.

In other words, the bottom line is no excuse for anything. Not even in business. A creepy bastard is a creepy bastard, even if it's for profit.

I a perfect, "special interest free", scenario we'd only get to accept or reject a whole preselected parliament, or senate, or whatever institute does the democracy theater in your country.