Comment Re:Suddenly, everything is a right (Score 1) 565
1. You can make a gun.
2. Arms can be considered a knife, a thick wooden branch from a tree, a rock, or (IMHO) a tank.
In some cases, a car may also be considered one of many Arms.
1. You can make a gun.
2. Arms can be considered a knife, a thick wooden branch from a tree, a rock, or (IMHO) a tank.
In some cases, a car may also be considered one of many Arms.
I can't buy access to internet service, I can only buy actual internet service once it is available.
Advocates for public education still have to deal with basically the same asinine arguments.
Wouldn't it make more sense just to do it for TWELVE hours and maybe loop it 2x per day?
The thing about electricity is that people couldn't see that it would service more than just lights.
I think it's safe to assume most people don't realize the full potential of the internet, either. Honestly, I don't feel I know much of anything myself about where the internet is going; there are just too many possibilities to forsee.
Unless you have some WAN technology I don't know about or are accepting the issues of broadband over power, I think it's hard to convince someone that a traditional infrastructure covering--say--all of the Ozarks is going to be worth a whole lot more than the few towns and cities in it that are already covered.
Actually, an interesting possibility for covering very large areas is by using waves in the upper RF ranges. These would allow for huge swaths of sparsely populates land to be covered with relatively high-speed service. Of course, it will never be top-notch service, and that's something one must accept about living in rural areas. However, saying rural areas should be relegated to use minimal or no internet service is absurd. I first managed to get my parents off of dial-up this past summer, upgrading to a wireless signal from a tower ~1 mile away. Even so, they still don't get enough bandwidth to use skype or stream youtube videos smoothly, but the alternative was sticking with terrible dial-up on failing (verizon) landlines. Simply put, we have the technology, but we need to make it profitable for someone to implement.
The current system isn't great. But under the current system I have a choice of insurance companies and plans, the option to buy services outside of my coverage, the option to not have coverage and just pay for what I want, and even a choice among employers. If there's one insurance company for everyone in the nation I lose most of those choices. Even the availability of non-covered services is threatened -- if there are *no* insurers that cover the service (and since there's only one insurer it's an all-or-nothing game) you have to believe that service would be less available than when *some* insurers covered it.
I'm certain that people believe it when a spacecraft launches,
Capricorn 1. There is a significent percentage of the prople that believe the Earth is flat, and that the moon landings were faked on a soundstage.
or their new TV is even thinner.
TV's are like computers. They run on magic, the data flows through tubes, and you can catch a computers virus.
Thing is, do they even realise that is science?
They believe that psychics are real, and those that are caught cheating were just covering for a bad day. Scientists are just geeks who use funny words. Psychics solve crimes and save people in trouble, and scientists read books while wearing coke-bottle glasses.
In their mind science is a term for the fuzzy stuff that they read about in the papers - like is a glass of wine good or bad for you? Are potatoes/fish/eggs/etc good or bad for you? And all the U-turns since. Science is the word they associate with anything that goes wrong or seems to be a stupid waste of money to research.
The media have no clue about how science is supposed to work. If a group of clueless busybodies get together to condemn all our favorite foods just to get in the spotlight, the media will happily follow them, since it fills air time and makes them seem more important when they report the horrors of our food supply.
The media has propagated this view of science, because journalists could never hack the subjects themselves, and they just want to get their own back on those people who could do it.
The media doesn't understand technology, and they follow whoever gives them the most impressive show. They're interested in getting an audience and winning awards, they aren't interested in the truth which gets them neither.
Information such as trade secrets and commercial or financial information obtained from a company on a privileged or confidential basis that, if released, would result in competitive harm to the company, impair the government's ability to obtain like information in the future, or protect the government's interest in compliance with program effectiveness.
I wonder if this is the criteria for the withholding. Could the Army have entered into a NDA with private industry? What I picture is a situation where the Army lays out the budget for the project and a company agrees to write the code (A.I. behavior comes to mind) in return for whatever the Army can pay plus an agreement to not disclose the code. It has been years since I played AA so this theory make not make sense in some aspects.
You're right that most people aren't going to read the emails, and that's a problem. This is a good story for the media: "HACKED EMAILS REVEAL SCIENTIFIC MISCONDUCT!!" Everyone loves a good juicy witchhunt - rooting out the evildoers hiding under the mask of normalcy. "HACKED EMAILS REVEAL SCIENTISTS ENGAGED IN SCIENCE AND DEBATE" doesn't quite have the same ring to it.
So the media blows it out of proportion because it draws eyeballs they can sell to advertisers, and rational people who don't have time to read the emails start to have doubts about this whole global warming thing. I mean, it wouldn't be all over the news unless there was something to it, right?
It's not so much that they don't understand reality, but they seem to make decisions based on emotion instead of logic/reality.
Perfect example is liberals trying to ban guns (because they make them uncomfortable) even though there's pretty clear evidence that armed, law abiding citizens reduce crime instead of perpetrating it.
Because heaven forbid the alternative: that they were informed they did something wrong and then voluntarily did the right thing, regardless of how enforceable the license is.
What's really funny is that 20-30 years ago the earth was apparently cooling for all the man-made reasons it is warming now.
What's really happening, is science evolves and as new data comes in the general accepted opinion changes from time to time. But when politicians and activists get along, the question is not "What is the truth?", the question becomes "What can I use to get my pet agenda accepted." This is why you see the exact same groups touting the exact same answers for a problem that has been re-identified over many decades.
There was a big stink when the hole in the Ozone Layer over Antarctica was huge, but nobody said a word when it shrunk back up and nearly disappeard. I'll bet most people think it's just getting bigger.
This is just another area where climate scientists got it wrong, changed their mind about the whole thing, and the rest of the world just pretends nothing changed.
Scientists aren't pushing Global Warming, activists are. Scientists are busy trying to figure out why, and whether or not it is a long term trend or a short term cycle. Nobody debates the earth is in a warming period, but a lot of people debate whether or not it will go back down on its own, and whether or not man is contributing more than their fair share to the problem. If anybody tries to tell you the debate is over, that should be a red flag that they are full of shit. We don't have 100% knowledge of what is happening, and until we do the debate will never be over. There are simply prevailing theories.
And of course, everybody everywhere has the time and the intellect to assess all the evidence of every scientific theory they want to form an opinion about and then form a judgement based on that evidence.
Very often when it comes to science the issues are so complex and the evidence so voluminous that one has no choice but to defer to experts: people whose lives have been dedicated to understanding and making such a judgement. They are likely to be more qualified and make a better judgement given the available evidence than me.
no paywalls on journals: put it all on an open peer reviewed internet site. allow anyone to comment (who is a serious scientist)
all internal communications, specifically related to the subject matter, placed on an open log
nothing is lost by doing this, nothing can be feared to be revealed. there's nothing to hide
the issue with hard science versus the soft sciences, or, in this case, versus political partisan hack jobs, is that hard science can withstand rigorous analysis. because such rigorous second guessing is the very essence of what science is: its nothing more than the accumulation of the most likely explanations for what we see in our natural world... until anomalous data comes along that requires a new explanation, which is what makes challenging and exciting
fanatical transparency is not a problem at all for what science is supposed to be. therefore, hard science is in a position to be the most trusted set of institutions in all of modern society, were it to actually submit itself to this regime
With your bare hands?!?
