Agreeing he's an ass is different than an unchallenged assertion a foreign leader is a liar. That's potentially very serious. What's he lying about? Was he lying when he said didn't like frog legs for dinner, or lying when he said he wouldn't build more settlements?
The second one, if you have read any news.
The iPhone line on the other hand has all the products on the latest version of the OS even if every phone doesn't support the latest and greatest features. It would be nice to see a greater commitment to lasting hardware from Google and the various phone makers. I expect a mobile to last around 3 years of normal use; perhaps I'm being too optimistic in the current age of accelerated obsoleteness.
That's a reasonable expectation, but not a true statement about the iPhone line. My family has iPhones, still on the original contract, which didn't handle the rollout of iOS 4 very well and are never going to get iOS5.
On the other hand, Apple has always been good to me about replacing defective hardware fairly quickly, but with mobile OS development still happening very rapidly (read: demanding more resources as we try to cram 30 years of desktop development into our handsets), it's no surprise that long-term software support isn't as good as on equivalently priced desktop machines (my quite nice desktop cost me about the same as my wife's phone).
Data can show anything YOU or I want to prove - real science tries to eliminate the confirmation bias. That's why you make a prediction, get more data, and then compare the data to your prediction and throw out or keep the model that produced the prediction. Viola - science!
If confirmation bias is messing up your science, you're doing it wrong.
Yes, this is a REAL concern, rather than this CO2 nonsense. NOx, CO, and smog are all REAL health hazards.
You know, it's funny. I got modded troll something like a thousand times for talking about how my own calculations showed that CO2 literally couldn't cause global warming, because the heat capacity is simply too low. In fact, increasing atmospheric CO2 decrease the net heat capacity of the atmosphere (by a vanishingly small margin). Suddenly, this new data backs me up. Funny how a chemist in a totally unrelated field can show how an entire branch of science is BS. Too bad the only reaction that anyone can come up with to such challenges is "UR N IDOT".
It's great if you were right, and it's valuable to provide an informed critique of the scientific consensus, but until you publish your calculations, have them peer-reviewed and open to critique from the scientific community, you're just a guy on a message board - a message board with lots of guys who think they are smarter than everyone else, so you shouldn't be surprised if you have a hard time getting through.
Maybe this will change everything in climate science - maybe not. We'll see soon, but this is potentially VERY good news, because it's clear that we are not politically capable of preparing for worst-case climate scenarios in a way that won't kill tens/hundreds of millions. If we have fewer bad things to worry about, awesome, but there are still the other bad things, as you rightly point out.
Chemisor, that's ridiculous - tons of things happen that poll as 5% less popular than the other option. The debt crisis involves a complex series of tradeoffs, and polling along the lines of "would you rather let millionaires keep their tax cuts, or cut all services to the poor" might get us more accurate information.
After all, we could avoid raising the debt ceiling by simply instituting a serious estate tax and bringing up marginal rates on the superwealthy to something close to first-world standards. Or we could do it by getting rid of SS (but keeping the SS taxes). Or by firing all our teachers. Lots of ways to go about it, and a simple 47-42 majority in a poll you read shouldn't dictate policy the way you indicate.
We voted for him with our eyeballs and dollars. Sorry you live in a society with a belief in the freedom to express your opinions and ideas. I know you must hate it. That's why you have to come here to express your opinions and ideas. But people don't give a shit about what you say, so it's not fair. Right?
A dollar shouldn't be a relevant unit of power in a democracy.
The legal obligations of purported news sources not to lie should be stronger, so at least one distortion on our system could be reduced. You think it's just sour grapes when someone wishes they could be heard, but when they are systematically excluded due to preferential treatment given to the wealthy, it's a legitimate complaint - at least, if you believe in anything like a democratic process.
Empiric, you are a fantastic troll, if that's what you are. If not, you should not try to move so quickly between "120 is the upper limit of human (male) lifespan so far, and therefore forever," where you are already on slippery ground to "the facts that exist agree with me," as if to declare victory for all of Biblical literalism. Even if the entirety of your bizarre 120-year-limit claim is true, it proves absolutely nothing about the verity of the Bible, except that sometimes there are coincidental truths in in.
All relevant evidence which exists in the fields of biology, geology, cosmology, archaeology, and paleontology disagree with young earth creationism, which is why it has been left on the dustheap of history, where it is in its death throes.
So, it sounds like you will give up your faith if this (and, may we assume, any claim in the Bible) is shown to be inaccurate. Is that true?
It seems like a ridiculous position, but if you don't hold it, I don't know why you would bother arguing this inane 120 years point (and engaging in some extremely frustrating rationalizations in order to do so).
I don't mind people having faith - I mind when faith motivates bad reasoning.
While I realize that you aren't going to change your mind, I think it's fair to warn you that there are a lot of incorrect things in the Bible as well, so trying to say we should believe in God based upon the hit rate of scientific claims one can extract from the Bible is a fool's game and you shouldn't play it.
For instance, at least one person has lived past 120, and most don't reach that, so the claim you brought into this discussion (presumably the strongest one you know off the top of your head) is weak for most definitions of accuracy with 120 as the upper bound of lifespan.
Mod Parent Up!
Not only is the killer bee problem much less of a problem than people think it is, but the potential loss of the world's honeybees is a much WORSE problem than people think it is. It's another case of the less-sexy story being more important by orders of magnitude.
I see you're going for the rare "Redundant First Post." Bold.
Most fire departments in the US are volunteer. And the Interstate system was built to move troops and equipment quickly. Like Germany's Autobahn.
Does the equipment volunteer as well?
...before computers came along and made our lives so much -easier-?
Not fly anywhere, because it was too expensive.
Worth noting/googling: "Chromosome counts in the house mouse species (Mus domesticus) range from 2n = 22 to 40 (Nachman et al. 1994)."
It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.
