You miss the point. The details of the Bush administration's restrictions on scientific research are irrelevant.

What is relevant is that the Bush administration crossed the line that separates Church and State by imposing a religiously-based notion of morality on our entire nation. It doesn't matter how, it only matters why the administration interfered with scientific research. Worse still, in a competitive world this put our entire nation at a profound competitive disadvantage for 8 years.

So not only were my rights to religious freedom violated by the Bush administration, my livelihood and that of my children and grandchildren has been threatened as a result. I along with millions of others believe such trampling of constitutional rights to be a crime tantamount to treason, and that the Bush administration should be prosecuted accordingly.

That's the issue.

Particulate matter that settles decreases albedo (reflectiveness) of ice, and causes heating. But airborne particulate matter and aerosol emissions _increase_ albedo, making the atmosphere more reflective. The net effect, as I understand it, seems to favor reflectivity, which suggests that cleaning up PM10 and PM20 air pollution, and especially SOx emissions, would result in more rapid warming.

Oh, there are plenty of other problems with hydrogen. It's massively corrosive, for example, and since it's comprised of just protons it's got an amazing ability to escape through microscopic cracks and holes in materials. Add those factors together with the need for 15000 psi and/or cryogenics to get it into a compressed semi-liquid or slush state, and you've got pipe connections that won't last for any significant length of time before becoming so leaky as to be more or less useless.

Hydrogen is absolutely DOA as a combustion fuel, and probably for a fuel-cell based energy source as well.

The total loss of primary energy is around 70%, meaning that, on average, for every joule of energy stored in the fuel (coal, oil, gas, uranium) only 0.3 joules gets delivered to the consumer. From well to wheel, the energy loss of transmitting electricity is considerably higher than the energy loss of transporting liquid fuel (gasoline, diesel) to the consumer. So much so, in fact, that even though electric drivetrains are much more efficient that ICEs the total fuel cycle efficiency is higher for ICE vehicles given the US's current energy mix (again, on average). When every state is like Oregon, getting most of its electricity from renewables, then it'll be a different story.

The distinction between value and utility also seems skewed. The two are not remotely the same, even in purely financial transactions. Add to that all other 'transactions' across a 'network', such as me posting this comment to slashdot, that are non-financial but which certainly have utility, and you're nowhere near a meaningful valuation of said network.

So I'm forced to agree with the cynics: this seems to be a put-up job designed to make it easier to assign $$ losses resulting from network outages in court cases.

This is probably dumb, but can't ISPs/networks put spam filtering policies in place and then monitor and enforce their connections?

Say you're Yahoo: put spam filters on all outgoing mail, in addition to those already filtering incoming mail. Now whenever Google gets mail from Yahoo's domain, if something is spam then Yahoo gets a point against it. More than, say, 10,000 points per hour and Google imposes a latency penalty on all its connections to Yahoo. Escalating penalties for ongoing violations.

Think of it like fines: if you don't take care of your spam, your network will run slow as shit when it interfaces with us. Don't like your servers having to wait 10 seconds for each packet/parity test/ping/whatever? Then filter your outgoing mail better. Can't get your filters working up to snuff? Then try making it impossible to do bulk mailing from accounts that aren't at least X months old. etc, etc, etc.

This utilizes the market dominance of the major email providers like Google and Yahoo to impose a penalty on ISPs and anonymizing services that don't police their traffic for spam.

So if you're some seedy ISP in Romania that's pumping billions of message per day into Google's servers, Google effectively caps the bandwidth from that server. If the Romanian ISP's mailserver lets users send everything through a an anonymizing service or proxy, then that anonymizing service or proxy will get hit with the cap instead. Then when the anonymizer service realizes its system is only getting 10kbps to Google, it'll ban all the crap coming from the Romanian ISP. Even if spammers chained stuff through a dozen anonymizers, it'd get back to the Romanian ISP eventually.

That's my theory. It's probably stupid.

Advance In Making Stem Cells From Skin

Don't get me wrong, I understand why this is cool. But I'd still much rather hear that there'd been a breakthrough in making skin from stem cells.

If you're really a mathematician and you disagree with the premise that economic growth cannot continue in perpetuity against a finite resource base, then you need to ask for your money back from whatever 'institution' gave you a degree.

Population growth remains the single greatest driver of unsustainability on our planet. To date there is no socially acceptable method for enforcing population growth control anywhere on Earth, whether in Africa as you so disparagingly suggest in your fruitcake allusions to the Club of Rome New World Order conspiracy theory nonsense, or right here in the United States.

Since apparently my imagination is lacking, I invite you to suggest an balancing feedback loop likely to stabilize the system in the face on continue population and economic growth drawing from a finite (and dwindling) resource base. Good luck.

Economists don't tell me what to do.

Is that right? Economists don't tell you to, say, work for below a liveable wage? That's funny because they seem to have convinced congress there's no need for a minimum wage in a 'free' market. Maybe that's why congress gave themselves raises every year or two for the last 15 years while the minimum wage stagnated until last year. Economists don't tell you that you don't need universal health care? That's funny, because last time I checked there were 50 million people in this country without health insurance and millions more who have private insurance but who can't get benefits out of their insurers, all while economists say that universal healthcare is the work of the Devil and the free market is the solution to everything. Economists don't tell you to invest in the stock market or in junk securities backed by subprime mortgages? They sure told a lot of investors to do that - millions of people who are just slightly pissed at the moment. Economists don't tell you to buy shoes made in sweatshops by children instead of shoes made sustainably here at home? That's funny, because they sure seem to trumpet the cause of globalization pretty loudly and they seem to have done a good job of convincing congress that it's more important for Phil Knight and other Nike shareholders to make money off of foreign sweatshops than for US citizens to earn a living from jobs at home.

People who see the writing on the wall about climate change and degradation of essential ecosystems services are advocating for personal responsibility. Economists advocate for maximizing self-interest, irrespective of the consequences to others or to future generations.

No one likes to be told what to do. But when our entire society has shifted into a mode where the 'right' thing to do is act like a sociopath, me-me-me-fuck-everyone-else-and-the-planet-and-anything-that-gets-between-me-and-my-latte-and-SUV then it's time to smack some sense into folks before the whole ship goes down.

I think what you mean is that economic theory has proven itself to be completely flawed. Or maybe the Wall Street collapse I recall from a few months ago is just a figment of my imagination. Or maybe the growing gap between rich and poor both in the United States itself and between rich and poor countries over the last 50 years is just a figment of my imagination, despite economic theory claiming that globalization and freeing of markets would close the socioeconomic equity gap.

The reason why climate science has had little impact on human society is that climate changes slowly. Plate tectonics is slow too. I suppose just because you can't see it happening in front of your eyes means it must be false too, right?

If you don't understand the link between humans and global warming, your internet 'research' deserves a FAIL tag on fark.com.

Here, let me save you some time and embarasment: look up "radiative forcing" on wikipedia. There's an explanation there that a 10-year-old could understand.

If you can understand why a bathtub can overflow when you leave the faucet running, even if the drain is open at the same time, then you should be able to understand why greenhouse-induced climate change is inevitable. If this is beyond your powers of comprehension, I think they're probably hiring janitors at Rush Limbaugh's radio station...

Your reference to the petition signed by "9,000 PhD's and 31,000 respected people" is total bullshit. There's no verification process, no vetting, no counter-argument with alternative peer-reviewed data sets, no nothing. For all you know, I could have signed all 9,000 of these claiming to be a PhD climate scientist.

Here's the site Moryath is referring to: www.petitionproject.org. Judge for yourself what a joke it is.

"Minimal bit of research and understanding" - yeah, I'd say that's your problem right there...

If you honestly believe there is no agreement or consensus among climate scientists and that the entire field of scientific discipline is just a sham put-up job, then I can't really help you. There's just no cure for conspiracy loons like yourself who think it's all a plot to make Al Gore and a few crackpot scientists rich.

If, on the other hand, you're actually interested in how the scientific evidence informs the issue of climate change, then you have to honestly review all of the available data - some is good, some is bad. The consensus among the thousands of climate scientists around the world is that the data overwhelmingly point in the direction of anthropogenic climate change. This is in agreement with theory both at a broad level of overarching generalization (read: simplicity), and at the finer level of detail (read: complexity).

You can cherry-pick the bad data and use them to negate the entire findings of the field if you like, but that is a logically flawed strawman argument.

I'm not a proponent of anthropogenic climate change because it's what I believe or because it's something I want to be true. I acknowledge that anthropogenic climate change is likely to be occurring because the overwhelming majority of climate scientists whose job it is to sift through all of the data, good and bad, and critic all of the theory have reached a consensus that it is a real phenomenon. In the same way, I acknowledge that evolution by natural selection seems to be a real phenomenon, despite some bad data here and there and some present uncertainties in small parts of the fossil record; as opposed to, say, asserting that evolution is a giant conspiracy by which Richard Dawkins has made himself and other biologists rich through scaremongering tactics like warning about antibiotic resistance. I don't know if you're an evolution denier also, but it's functionally equivalent.

Planets orbiting the sun can be modeled quite simply, despite the complexity of what's happening on those planets. That's the cool thing about scalar analysis, complexity theory, systems dynamics and emergent properties: you get nested levels of simplicity and complexity; nested levels of symmetry. Think of what a hurricane looks like, and then think of what a galaxy looks like. Similar simple patterns, different scale, massive complexity lying between them.

Sorry, but reality is far more interesting than your either/or kindergarten view would make it out to be.

Wrong.