Very interesting read, thanks. They wiggled around a lot at the end to move the figure from 106 to 250. Most of those bits I disagree with. CO2 is CO2 no matter if a rich person or a poor person produces it, so it makes no sense to charge variably. Wars have a proximate human cause (aggression) so I don't think it makes sense to "charge" that to CO2. Adding in Ocean acidification makes perfect sense (though I'd prefer a better estimate than their hand wave) and of course adjusting from 2005 to 2013 dollars is necessary. Sound more like $150 per ton. Great, we have a starting point. It's been a while so it'd be worth reexamining with the additional years of data, but that will ever be the case.

As for implementing it, yeah that could be a tough sell. Just to reduce the shock, you'd probably want to phase it in, say 20% a year or something (and you may want to swing to 120% for a while before coming back down to 100% to allow for cleanup of preexisting pollution). And you'd have to do it as a treaty otherwise one country fixes theirs and everyone else becomes a free rider since we all pretty well share a single atmosphere and hydrosphere.

Of course the polluters would raise their prices. That's the whole point. When prices reflect the real total costs people will make more optimal decisions about where to allocate resources at every level.

In your power plant example, a power plant being taxed means maybe it's worth cleaner technologies. Since they can estimate the monetary costs of implementing those as well as the monetary benefits in tax savings they can make efficient operating decisions. But the costs they bear are guaranteed to go up, and those will be passed along to consumers. But now the consumers see a bill that more accurately reflects real costs of the electricity, and they make decisions about whether to buy more efficient appliances, go without certain luxuries, etc.

That court approval is called a warrant, "and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause..." Since they don't have probable cause, the warrants are themselves illegal, and knowingly using an illegal warrant makes you complicit.

The hypothesis to base limiting carbon dioxide emissions on is that they cause damage to the commons.

Fine, if that's so then limiting them is a bad solution. I understand that it may be worth it for the benefits of the activity. That's fine too. Why is any harm allowed free of cost? Publicly fund research to put a dollar figure on the current marginal damage done by carbon dioxide emissions as well as on the cost to cleanup. Take the minimum of those two values and just tax the emissions at that rate, plus maybe a small percentage markup, right from the start. That way costs are borne by the people causing the harm. They are incentivized to minimize harm even at rates under what would have been the cap. Market forces will determine whether it's worth it and by how much and what amount should be prevented versus cleaned.

The two weaknesses here are monitoring, which is just as much a problem with capping, and determining the cost. The research wont come to a perfect solution, but we can improve it over time. It'll have to be reevaluated periodically anyway since the cost is probably non-linear. In any case I don't see how that's more questionable than coming up with the cap figure. Liberals should be happy with this solution since it more strictly limits than what we have today. Conservative should be happy because everyone pays his fair share and the market gets to work. In reality liberals would hate it because it murders the Earth, and conservatives would hate it because it murders jobs. Both hating it seems just as good as both loving it.

Even callous, willful disregard for the safety of innocent bystanders can't be murder or manslaughter if you don't actually kill anyone, and if you're going to try someone for them you need good evidence of death as well as good evidence that people knew what they were doing would likely lead to death. The most you have realistically tried them for would be more akin to public endangerment.

So in summary we should execute people who don't want to try and save everyone. Does that include people who think we should execute people for not trying to save everyone?

I don't know, but I'm curious too. I was speaking more theoretically. I think that practically you're far more likely to see deaths directly resulting from pollution to be tried as involuntary manslaughter. The difference between involuntary manslaughter and "depraved indifference" murder seems kind of nebulous to. Both cases result in a death, but in neither case was the death the actually intent of the person being convicted. I think the difference is a matter of degree. If you do something dangerous that you know could end up killing someone that's manslaughter. If you do something so dangerous it probably will kill someone and you just don't care, that's murder 2. I guess in pollution terms that's something like dumping all your asbestos in a drinking well to avoid paying to dispose of it. I think there was a pollution manslaughter case with the BP oil spill wasn't there? Or was the manslaughter part about worker safety?

That scenario really isn't different from murder. In the US you could be tried for second degree murder for something like that.

If you can quickly cycle the pinholes open and closed then you could put a speaker on the other side and dynamically control where the sound apparently originates.

It's both bad and illegal. Since you agree on bad I'll explain legal.

Here will be the base law for the argument:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

1. That's in the US constitution.
2. Electronic messages are a person's "papers and effects."
3. Because of #2, those electronic messages are protected from "unreasonable searches."
4. A search requires a warrant.
5. A warrant shall not issue "but upon probable cause,... particularly describing the place to be searched."
6. "Because the messages are being sent" is not "probable cause."
7. "The entire data and voice network" is not "particularly describing the place to be searched."
8. Therefore, because of 6 and 7, no warrants shall issue.
9. Since no warrants shall issue, any warrants that are issued are invalid.
10. Since no legal warrants have been issued, no search is permitted.
11. The US Constitution is the supreme law of the land. Therefore any other law contradicting it is itself invalid.
12. Therefore no law can permit the searches.
13. Therefore they are illegal.

So the searches are clearly invalid. Whether they are criminal depends somewhat on state of mind. There's no way any of the judges can be unaware that they are supplying warrants without proper grounds to do so. I have a hard time believing that the people using the illicit warrants think they are legitimate, but I suppose it's possible. If you are knowingly executing illegitimate warrants, then you are culpable as well.

You are confusing systems administration with operations.

Sysadmins take care of the internally facing pieces of a company's technological infrastructure. They control the workstations, the intranet, manage e-mail systems, and, yes, often offer help to users. This should be clear from just about every other item listed in the article. Operations takes care of the externally facing pieces of a company's technological infrastructure. Operations runs the production environment, or, better, manages the production environment in such a way as to make it safe and easy for developers to control their own bits of it.

"7. You test code on production systems"

WTF are you doing having your sysadmins touching the production systems? Why does he care or even know how and where you test your code? I have a lot of respect for the sysadmins and the job they do keeping us productive. But that's like giving the nurse the scalpel and letting him have a go at the patient.

Nu-uh. It says it right there in the summary. Snowden leaked information about PRISM because "5. You make urgent, last-minute requests." It had nothing whatsoever to do with having evidence of a massive, illegal, covert surveillance operation being conducted against the American people by its own government.