Explain to me, how is arguing against assisted suicide as opposed to switching to palliative treatment (which you can already request, and which normally leads to a painless death) the same thing as causing Scott Adams' father an awful death? I don't know the background, but it sounds to me more like Scott's father didn't make his will clear when he was able to, and now Scott is angry because society won't allow him to euthanise his father.

And if someone would dare to suggest that they actually like the idea of hospitals not being places of euthanasia, they don't deserve to live, and should die painfully?

In most places, it is already legal to request that healthcare abstain from treating you or keeping you alive, and only give you morphine or other such substances to relieve pain and anxiety, which usually leads to a rather quick and painless death. Why is this not enough? And moreover, why does anyone suggesting that this is enough deserve a "fuckin painful death"? That if someone does not actively support legalising certain forms of killings, they shouldn't be allowed to live? Really, that is what you are saying.

I personally don't want it to be legal for anyone to kill me under any circumstances whatsoever. If you think I deserve a "fuckin painful death, asap" for simply making that argument, I recommend you go find some fascist dictatorship to live in where you belong.

I think "obvious to someone skilled in the art" is actually a lousy test. What's interesting is whether the invention will surface even without granting a state-sanctioned monopoly on it. If there is a million engineers worldwide working in a certain field, and an invention is non-obvious to 99% of them, there are still 10000 who could do something similar. To grant a single one of them a 20 year monopoly on it is hardly a win for society. It might have been different back in the olden days, when skilled engineers were actually rare.

Just a note: That isn't how the laws are written in all countries, though. In Sweden, for instance, it is illegal for the police to "provoke" someone to commit a crime, regardless of what the subject of the action believes or not. The idea is that it is not the job of the police to prosecute anyone with a potential to commit a crime, as that would probably include a large portion of the entire population, most of which would otherwise live peacefully their entire lives. Their job is only to step in when a crime is actually at hand; about to be committed or in progress. They are however allowed to actively facilitate an ongoing crime in order to gather more evidence, but that's where the line is drawn.

The relevant question for any sane person is: Would it have happened anyway?

What's interesting from a societal standpoint isn't whether an average engineer, at that particular time in history, would have thought of the same idea. What's interesting is whether the same "invention" will arise and gain society without the help of a state-granted monopoly. If Google's business model was crafted only a short while later, without them knowing about that particular patent (I don't know if that's the case), then that would strongly suggest that the patent doesn't benefit society, and should in principle be invalid, in my opinion.

The law may not agree, of course.

Yes, it may be appropriate to take a call in such situations, and it would then be accompanied with "I apologise, this is an important call, and I really need to take it" followed by the person leaving the room while taking it as to not disturb the others. People will understand and accept that if it's really the case, and you didn't plan for it to happen during the meeting. This is of course the same as with any situation -- there can always be exceptional circumstances that override what would normally be seen as appropriate social behaviour. I don't think that's what TFA is about, though.

But that's what they are already doing! It's all about quantifying -- the primary mechanism has been known for some 150 years, the rest of it has been a long history of quantifying things, with increasing precision.

I challenge you to name a single credible objection relating to "natural changes" that hasn't been, or isn't being studied.

Yes! They are so intimately part of climate change models that it would be impossible to not study cyclical properties. That is why the statement doesn't make sense to me -- it would be like saying "we want you to study climate and focus on molecules", or some other completely generic and inseparable property abundant in every aspect it. And then they call it "cyclical climate change", as if there existed some kind of separate theory of the climate that is purely cyclical. As opposed to what? Linear climate change? Like you said yourself: "You simply can't even begin to have a valid theory if you do not take them into account".

The only plausible reason I can see why they would give that kind of directive to the researchers, is that they have read a claim from someone that "it could all be cyclical" (insinuating somehow not caused by the huge increase in greenhouse gases), and instead of actually trying to understand some of the science, or even the scientific process in general, they buy into those kind of vague, unspecified myths, and now want the scientists on "their" payroll to "investigate" them, nonsensical as they may be.

Either that or pure malice, but since I firmly subscribe to Hanlon's razor, I'm going for scientific illiteracy over malice.

You can't, which is of course why that is pretty much all climate research consists of -- separating and modelling different forcings and interactions, some of them caused by human activity, most of them natural. Really, how did you figure climate researchers arrived to the conclusions there are today? Have you even looked at any research?

I don't even know what they mean by "cyclical climate change". There are multiple factors affecting the average energy in the climate system, greenhouse gases (primarily carbon dioxide) and solar irradiation being the most important ones. You need both to explain temperature trends, not only the current ones but historical. It has been studied by many researchers to great detail, and it is being studied still more.

By telling the researchers to "look at 'cyclical' climate change", you are telling them to lock in to a conclusion, that climate changes cyclically, instead of studying and understanding the mechanisms that causes change. It is probably one of the most blatant and ignorant attempt and controlling science for political motives I have seen.

What is your point, actually? Are you suggesting that having stability and thereby attracting service providers justifies using those service providers to spy on people? And if you don't live in a country with an economy comparable to the US, you deserve to be spied upon, because it's your own fault for not "solving it"? It's "easy to solve", after all.

I'm not really a fan of those FTFY kind of comments, but for the sake of your own education:

I can assure you, that is not what is the controversy elsewhere.

If you want daylight-like colour, there are other alternatives than LEDs. Ceramic metal halide lamps, for example, have excellent colour rendering and about the same efficiency and life expectancy as LEDs, at a significantly lower cost. The main drawback is that they take a while to fire up, but that isn't really a problem with street lights.

I can't speak for biology since I've only had superficial contact with that field, but the fields related to my profession are far from isolated ecosystems. Not to say there aren't problems with the system of scientific research and the way it's funded that should be addressed, but from my experience, bottom line is that it works.

And I presume you can back that description up somehow, or is it all conjecture? You see, I'm the kind of person who actually do check sources, thoroughly.

How you say it works doesn't match my experience. If you discover something that's actually relevant and useful, your results will be replicated, one way or another. There is no getting away from that. If for no other reason, it will happen as soon as someone tries to build upon or improve it. And until your results have been verified by someone else, your conclusions are just going to remain in a sort of "unconfirmed" state in the scientific community. Simply being published doesn't make something a scientific fact.

But you gain recognition and get published if you prove someone else wrong. And your academic progress is hampered if someone shows your results to be flawed. I think you are ignoring the competitive element.

That said, there is a problem with the current trend of grants being based strongly on the number of published papers, as it waters down the content of each paper and gets in the way of basic, long term research where there is no guarantee for "quarterly research results".

I'm sure that if they had not destroyed the docs, it would have been spun something like: "Even though the government informed them that these documents were sensitive to national security, they kept them. So they knew what they were doing was wrong." (See, you can get to the same conclusion either way, if you really want to.)