He was rich before he ran for office. The "nanny state" thing is a hobby for him.

-jcr

It makes it impossible for delegated authorities to negotiate. Representatives are chosen to obtain results, perhaps by compromise, but to obtain results. When every last detail of a politician's position at every point in a negotiation is publicly verifiable, the incentives for "sticking to principle"* outweigh the incentives for obtaining a pareto optimal solution.

The delegated authorities may never enact a policy, they may never reform bad ones, nothing may happen at all -- but as long as they maintain a verifiable agenda that never gives an inch, they're guaranteed to keep their jobs.

* Read: slavishly adhering to constituent opinion and exercising minimal independent thought.

No where in any of this is there actually a single reference to a single IP, person, or company that is interfering with research.

I agree, it is entirely unclear from the article whether any IP claims have been put forth, or if this is some kind of pre-emptive action. I think gene patents are truly evil, and pharma companies can be truly sleazy at times, but I'd like to see some actual evidence before pointing fingers in this case.

It's not a war on science.

It's definitely not in the interests of science; I've seen more than few defense cuts characterized as a "War on the Troops."

The "War on..." rhetorical trope has a long and proud tradition, and I personally don't see a serious moral imbalance between paying for national defense and paying to measure sea levels, fisheries health, pollutants, seismic activity...

Of course it is, it's a completely falsifiable proposition.

A non-scientific statement would be, "It is right to reduce carbon emissions," or "It is not in our best interest to restrain global warming regardless of the cost."

None of the claims in the linked articles are in dispute, and the Brietbart article simply recaps a local Cincinnati Fox TV reporter, who's "Rogue IRS Agent" story is a strawman, which he does not attribute to any source -- he cannot, since nobody reputable has claimed this. It's dutiful, rather mild and uninformative reporting that has a provocative headline and unsubstantiated lede, for the purpose of headline trolling, which is about all most conservative news sites are good for.

Ed Rogers calls attention to his own unsubstantiated innuendoes thus:

I sat in a White House chief of staff’s office every day for more than two years. The only reason the legal counsel would tell the chief of staff about an impending report or disclosure would be so the chief of staff could tell the president.

He of course gained this valuable White House experience by doing damage control during the congressional investigations of Iran-Contra. If anyone could understand how a president simply isn't responsible for every bad act that happens under his authority, you'd think he would :)

If Microsoft want to make a home media device for use in people's main living rooms, that's fine. It's actually quite a good idea. But such a device cannot be principally viewed as a games console.

I don't know about the rest of you, but aside from the occasional multiplayer split screen session, I play console games on a dedicated screen, either in a bedroom or computer room. I cannot play a game in a main living room, on a screen which in in demand by others for watching TV, films, or even browsing the internet. It's nice that this device can do so much, but flipping "channels" to whatever everyone else wants to watch is not conducive to the 4-6 hour gaming sessions I would like to have.

Maybe they're going for the complete casual gaming market here, people who will flick over to Angry Birds or whatever. But even the most passé of run-of-the-mill gamers is going to spend an hour or so playing shooters online, and are not going to be inclined to flip over to daytime TV, or browse the web in the middle of their frag session. I just cannot see this working en masse.

Some may call it anti-social, but to me playing video games is closer to reading a book than watching TV; it's principally an individual experience, and the living room is not the place to have it unless you are specifically playing co-op. I don't think Microsoft are serious about the Xbox One as a gaming console. It appears to be principally oriented around completely orthogonal capabilities.

There's a third possibility: doctors and contractors are just acting independently in their own interest. Most of them harm and overcharge you while firmly believing that they are helping you.

That's fine, that's what's called a hypothesis. It's an internally-consistent account of what's going on, but we don't accept hypothesis as fact, you actually have to go out and prove that climate scientists are misrepresenting the truth, either by omission or commission.

• - Systematically. En masse.
• - For at least the last thirty years, though fifty years would be more likely. Thousands of scientists have literally gone to their deathbed without spilling the beans.
• - Across every country of the first and second world.
• - Graduating from universities throughout the developed world, receiving grants from innumerable governmental and private benefactors.
• - Publishing in dozens of journals, in as many again languages, distributed throughout the educated world.
• - And for all this, only making a college professor's salary in compensation, while they could make twice their going rate with the paychecks any number of "Clean Coal" think tanks would pay them.

I humbly submit that if such a level of false consciousness was possible, it would call into question the reliability of objective knowledge and the very cause of human civilization. I mean even if we took extreme cases like the Nazis or Stalin, they kept secrets, some big, but none SO big and for SO long, even when they were in power, and they had utter supremacy over the intellectual life of their respective countries.

The name sucks.

No word yet on always-online or used-game restrictions. Sony were quick to rule these out for the PS4; that MS haven't makes me suspect that they're going to do them. That's a mistake (the latter in particular).

The hardware inside the box seems ok on the limited information we have to go on so far. 8 gigs of RAM is good.

Improved voice and gesture controls are a good thing, actually. They worked really well on the second-generation 360 dashboard. Just a pity they're much less useful on the latest dashboard.

Controller looks ok. Probably slightly better than the PS4 controller.

Not much of interest to me in the game announcements bar Forza (and maybe Remedy). But then, given I'm not into non-driving sports games or spunkgargleweewee, I wasn't particularly expecting there to be. Launch titles (with a few honourable exceptions) are usually crap anyway, so not going to get too worried about that.

Blu-Ray drive is a good thing.

Not really enough information here to make a judgement call. However, the continuing worry over always-online and used-restrictions, tied with a sense that MS isn't really interested in gamers outside of the dudebro fraternity (or indeed gamers at all, rather than people who want to watch TV), makes me suspect that MS have missed quite a few tricks here. Sony's PS4 reveal inspired more confidence and I suspect they've set themselves up for a better launch.

I admit I went to go watch it after I saw this here.

However, the movie is in subtitles, no red-blooded American will sit through 30 seconds of it :)

Also I'm not sure that any of the claims in the film are very earth shattering or new -- very few people get their movies from TPB, almost none rely on it, everybody knows that it exists in this legal grey area and the protagonists seem to revel in this. It preaches to the converted.

the potential for some conspiratards to see themselves as they talk about "the government"

because it's all the same paranoid bullshit

I understand your insecurity, it takes a lot of character to admit when you don't understand everything and probably never will. We're all in that position from time to time; I wouldn't second guess my doctor, and I'd avoid second guessing my air conditioning guy, frankly, and he's a heck of a lot less specialized than a climatologist.

Second guessing such people with little more than "I don't get it" is an error you should be expected to be called out on, unless you want to allege that they're all in league or conspiring to defraud us or something.

I also looked at climate science in the same way and found it to be an utter mess.

Unless you're a climatologist, I don't know if you're qualified to make that claim; I appreciate that you agree with scientific opinion on evolution, but unless you're a microbiologist or an evo-bio, I'm not sure you're qualified to make any claims on that count, either.

You're just using your Dunning-Krugerized acceptance of evolution to justify your Dunning-Krugerized denial of AGW consensus. Your acceptance of evolution may be in accord with scientific consensus (let wether it's an accurate account of nature or not), but it cannot justify the contention that you have examined the theory and exhaustively acknowledge its findings, you're simply not qualified. We have professionals for that, you need only be knowledgeable about what they say, your agreement is irrelevant, Nature proceeds without it.

The idea that the median, "reasonable person" should be able to understand and evaluate complex scientific claims is pseudo-skeptical and querulous. It's great when people do, and it is the motivation for science education, but we do receive these fact on qualified authority, they are not for argument or debate by casual observers, in the way that moral or political questions are.