bascule

Reviewing the thread, I suppose you have: Wow. You do realize that there is evidence of positive feedbacks all over the place occurring right now, especially in regard to sea ice in the Northern Hemisphere, right? If they're wrong, that makes them politicians? Where do you get off making remarks like that? If physicists were to discover some pressing problem that could potentially result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and the suffering of millions more, don't you think they would be "alarmist" as well?

Le sigh. I give up. I'd just like a straight answer on your thoughts regarding climate science, but it's pretty clear to me at this point you don't want to give one.

I see nothing in the proposed legislation about "cutting CO2 emissions to 20% of 1990 levels in 40 years". Perhaps you can point out the particular section you're referring to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Clean_Energy_and_Security_Act You're claiming this question, which I've asked you repeatedly and you are yet to answer, is vague? Whaaa?

What legislation is this referring to? Also, I guess you're never going to get back to me on the validity of climate science, after all that blustering about "belief".

As far as I'm concerned such a bill is unconstitutional. What in the Constitution gives the federal government the power to do this?

Using nanotechnology, you could dismantle a person at one location, recording as information the structure of their body. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle wouldn't come into play in this case, as you'd physically rip their body to shreds, recording the positions of each of the individual molecules at the time you did this. Once you have translated a person from matter into information, you can transmit this information as photons to another machine located elsewhere. This machine would use the "blueprint" to build an exact copy of the original person at another location.

Yeah, turning the tables is a good strategy. I would ask them if they have the requisite knowledge of climate science needed to make such assertions.

A compiled program is stored on disk. When you launch a program, the CPU instructs your hard disk controller to retrieve the program and store it in RAM. The hard disk controller then talks to a microcontroller on your hard drive, which moves the drive head back and forth and reads the program off of disk into your hard drive's cache. The program is then transferred from your hard drive's cache into the system RAM by the hard disk controller. Once the program is in RAM, the CPU will then load instructions from it into its registers and execute them. Every single step of this process involves electrical signaling between components.

No, it's a tired conservative cliche. Someone is robbing the public treasury here. That someone is the insurance industry.

Sure! Now will you please confirm the validity of climate science?

I sure hope the next Ubuntu release is named after Meerkats or Mongooses.

Muslims could improve their self-image if they would unilaterally come out against and reject radical Islamicism, espousing the core tenants of Islam: PEACE. Until then... no, Muslims cannot improve their self-image, because the radical contingent dominates world affairs. Note this applies equally well to chickenhawk Christians who apparently do not follow the principle of peace espoused by their central deity, Jesus Christ.

Perhaps FDIC insured banks shouldn't be trading in derivatives, hmmmmmmmm?

Yes, this is the case. Instead climate scientists create a hypothesis about the various radiative forcings based on their best understanding of the climate system to date, and use these as inputs to climate models. The experiment takes the form of whether or not the provided radiative forcings, as inputs to the climate model, result in an accurate reconstruction of the instrumental record. Yes, that's right, it's hard to obtain accurate measurements as to the thermal fluxes of the climate system, because it's the largest complex dynamical system on earth that humans have attempted to study and skillfully predict. Because we have models of how the climate system operates, and can use hypotheses about the radiative forcing effects as climate model inputs. If these inputs do not accurately reconstruct the historical temperature record, then either they're wrong, or the models are wrong. It's a Herculean effort to accurately reconstruct the historical record within a climate model, but when we do, it tells us we're on to something. Climate scientists are doing their best given the difficulty of studying a complex dynamical system full of nonlinearities and feedback loops. I think it requires a relatively nuanced understanding of the problem to even come to the realization that the climate system can, in fact, be modeled. If you have an axe to grind, you should be arguing that multi-decadal GCM reconstructions are not yet skillful enough to produce realistic outputs. But please, don't trivialize decades upon decades of atmospheric science research. These are not satellite photos, they are a GCM in action: tbXwRP0CQNA

Well would you, please?

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/72513-cantwell-sees-bipartisan-support-for-bank-breakup-bill Wow! It appears there's a bipartisan effort underway to bring back the portions of Glass-Steagall which were repealed during a streak of deregulation in the late '90s. Glass-Steagall, among other things, firmly isolated banks from financial institutions. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), who joined with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to sponsor a bill re-introducing the Depression-era law separating commercial and investment banking, said she's heard quite a bit of chatter about their effort. "I think it's going to be a bipartisan issue," she said during an interview on MSNBC. "I think it's going to be an American issue." Time magazine laid quite a bit of blame on the repeal of portions of Glass-Steagall for their role in the financial crisis: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1942834-4,00.html#ixzz0ZuWPP1Mw Historian H.W. Brands of the University of Texas points to the demise of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 as an unfortunate tipping point of deregulation. Glass-Steagall, passed in 1933, separated investment banking and plain-vanilla banking, which some experts argued made markets safer. (Certain restrictions of Glass-Steagall were repealed to allow the merger of Citicorp and Travelers. Let's just say that didn't end well.) "That was the single moment when the seeds for the bad stuff were planted," says Brands. "There was a belief that technology, the Internet and financial instruments had changed things, and the ones selling this idea and these instruments were making a lot of money."

This is worse than nothing. They dropped the public option but retained a mandatory insurance requirement for all Americans. The public option is the one thing that would make mandatory insurance actually make sense. Is it even Constitutional for the federal government to force you to buy something from the private sector? WTF...

This is all a nice ad hominem against proponents of climate science, but you never answered my question: Do you recognize the IPCC's position that anthropogenic CO2 is the foremost radiative forcing affecting the climate system as a scientifically valid one?

I've finished The Difference Engine, which was, well... a good read, albeit strange. I'm now reading The Diamond Age by Neil Stephenson, my second Stephenson book after Snow Crash. It's a story about how the advent of molecular nanotechnology will affect the word, sort of like a fictional future based on Eric Drexler's Engines of Creation.

Can I be President of Computer Science?

Why? I assume you're conjecturing that any tax-funded entitlement will be abused by its recipients until it becomes unsustainable. Can you actually demonstrate that's the case with any kind of evidence, or is this more of a "gut feeling" sort of thing? I would contrarily posit that the unsustainability of Medicare is due to recent changes in the program, largely at the behest of Republicans. Republicans created a new and rather fiscally unwise entitlement with the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act, which forces Medicare to pay retail prices for prescription drugs. And yes, you are reading that right, Republicans created an entitlement, possibly for the first time ever? I'm not certain, if someone could fact check me on that it would be great. Regardless, this is an entitlement to which I am adamantly opposed, because it's an entitlement where our government sold out to the pharmaceutical lobby. As the largest buyer of prescription drugs on the planet, Medicare cannot negotiate for bulk discounts, as other foreign prescription drug entitlement programs like Health Canada can (this is why drugs in Canada cost a fraction of what they cost in the US, and why seniors flocked to Canada and Mexico for their drugs before this huge handout to the pharmaceutical companies was passed). If you haven't already guessed, I blame this largely on the pharmaceutical lobby and its effects on certain politicians, namely Congressman Billy Tauzin, who fought vociferously against bulk discounts as part of the legislation. After passing the legislation, he left government entirely, and is now President and CEO of PhRMA, the leading pharmaceutical trade group and lobby in the US. In other words, in his role as congressman Billy Tauzin sold out the entire country at the behest of the pharmaceutical lobby, and after successfully passing the legislation considered his role as a legislator done and moved on to rake in the cash as head of the organization he sold out our country too. In a more equitable world, he'd be in jail for such shenanigans. This isn't a problem with entitlements. It's a problem with lobbying and corporate control of our government. And it's taxpayers and the national deficit that will suffer. A graph from the conservative Heritage Foundation: Note the Heritage copy on the graph is likewise retarded. Ostensibly, it's not Social Security and Medicaid whose costs are skyrocketing. It's Medicare that's taken a sudden turn for the worse. Entitlements aren't inherently bad. However, I am much more worried about corporations and trade groups robbing the public trust than Joe Sixpack.

This is something of a non-sequitur. Stress is not strictly a conscious process. Stress is often caused by the outside environment. If we were to apply the concept of "stress" to inanimate objects, stress is wholly a function of the environment. A bridge experiences stress as it undergoes the load of things crossing it. Stress in the lives of humans can be principally caused by outside factors.

http://theplumline.whorunsgov.com/health-care/howard-dean-kill-the-senate-bill/ Howard Dean says: kill it and start over in the House. I agree.

Under what useful definition of terrorism can soldiers commit acts of terrorism? Soldiers commit war crimes.

Source? You're just linking to the Geneva Convention and giving your interpretation here. Given that you're doing that, perhaps you can scroll up to Article 4 and tell me which of those groups Khalid Sheikh Mohammed falls under.