> What was targeted was the hosting provider that was hosting 95% of child pornography in the deep web, and that hosting provider also happened to host Tormail and a bunch of other non child pornography websites.
What the government did was the equivalent of show up at the houses of everyone who used a particular post office and forcibly finger print them because that post office routed 95% of the child porn magazines in the US (regardless of what percentage of their traffic that actually was, which you don't even mention besides 'there were other sites, too').
That would be a clear abuse of powers, as is this.
Depends on what you mean by "thrive." Many of them will "thrive" in conditions that it would be illegal to put a human into. I'm not sure if I call that "thriving."
Many humans "thrive" in conditions that are illegal to put humans in to.
I don't really see your point, since it doesn't even remotely talk about the relative rates of the two populations or compare what would happen with humans to what would happen without for any of the species.
It seems to be contentless objection to what I said, despite the fact that humans are known to greatly increase the prevalence of all of those species, many of which seem to be getting by just fine for many of their members.
> humans are known to greatly increase the prevalence of all of those species
Based on this definition the American colonies helped Africans 'thrive' on the American continent by bringing them over as slaves, and allowing them to reproduce.
I could agree with you in the case of wild animals that mooch off of humans (racoons, crows, rats, etc), but in the case of livestock, or animals raised for the sole purpose of being tested on in laboratory settings (and possibly killed immediately after), I don't think you can really spin that as a positive thing from the perspective of those species.
It would be like an alien species taking humans away to 'domesticate' them and raise them as livestock on another planet. And then hand-waving away concerns about all life on Earth going extinct because the "livestock humans" are 'thriving' because they are bred in large numbers in captivity (and even trying to make it sound like putting them in captivity for such a purpose was actually better for them then letting them live their own lives).
Quote: "There have been five past great mass extinctions during the history of Earth. There is an ever-growing consensus within the scientific community that we have entered a sixth mass extinction. Human activities are associated directly or indirectly with nearly every aspect of this extinction."
>> ... the fact that humans are known to greatly increase the prevalence of all of those species ...
> Not only is that not a fact, but the opposite is the truth. Humans are wiping out other species at an incredible rate.
Okay, now I'm definitely confused: Is English not your native language? Are you very young, perhaps in high school? You don't seem to be reading the claims that you are with such great confidence declaring to be wrong.
FWIW, the phrase "all of those species" in context pretty clearly referred to THIS list of species:
> raccoons, crows, cows, pigeons, rats, mice, dogs, house cats
The child's parents were, a fact you seem to be ignoring in your analysis; I expect we'd see international headlines at the kidnapping of Michael Jackson's child or the kidnapping of the new son of the Duke of Cambridge.
So you honestly believe that if someone kidnapped the Duke of Cambridge's newborn son, it wouldn't be international news, because "it happens too often"?
I routinely get stories about single families in China who have had their kids kidnapped for organ theft, even if it's not all of them. I find it HIGHLY unlikely that an international celebrities child would be kidnapped without it being major news.
You're going to have to do better than bald assertion for me to be convinced of that.
Um, can you give any example of these "too common" events? Kidnapping is essentially nonexistent in the US today. And I'm really struggling to think of anybody as famous as Lindberg, but if somebody ever kidnapped for ransom the child of Angelina Jolie or Steve Jobs or Michael Jackson I think we'd have heard about it in the newspaper. Nobody would say "ho-hum, it's just another celebrity kidnapping story..."
I should have clarified, I meant kidnapping for money, like the Lindbergh situation. Taking a little kid and leaving a ransom note, hoping to get money from the parents. That almost never happens in the US today, in large part due to the Lindbergh kidnapping. The FBI mades that sort of kidnap an extremely high priority and got quite good at solving such cases, to the point that in the US - unlike many other countries - it is not in any way a sensible business opportunity.
(In Mexico, on the other hand, it is a major business opportunity.)
The vast majority of "missing kid" events you hear about are related to custody battles - the noncustodial parent runs off without permission of the court. There are also a few (though it's quite rare) events of the sort in that list - usually teenagers or adults abducted for sexual purposes.
> There are scores of kidnappings in this list, and it only covers ten years.
There are 26 kidnappings in that list, but nearly half weren't in the US - it includes events in Baghdad, Columbia, Spain, England, and various other places. The 15 events in the US in ten years establish that it happens at least 1.5 times a year in this country of 313 million people.
Meanwhile about 1,000 americans per year are struck by lightning and 100 of those are killed by it. So kidnapping even of all varieties is an exceedingly rare event that we are in all likelihood WAY too afraid of. (In the US, anyway)
Lindbergh was, though. Both before and after the kidnapping.
"In the coming days, Lindbergh became the most photographed, most filmed, and most famous living person on earth."
"On June 13, Lindbergh was greeted by over four million people at events honoring him in New York City."
"At the center stood the two most famous men in America: President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who championed the interventionist cause, and aviator Charles Lindbergh, who, as unofficial leader and spokesman for America’s isolationists, emerged as the president’s most formidable adversary"
We're not seeing any mass deaths which are sufficient to even slow the population growth rate, and instead, seem to simply be seeing more statistically unlikely events as the population grows larger - which is what we would expect.
There have been several articles posted here recently on the health of the oceans, specifically how the oxygen levels are decreasing leading to a decrease in sea-life (with the exception of species like jellyfish that thrive in that environment). While I'm sure the human race could survive as vegetarians, I think it's also important to protect the systems that convert CO2 back into oxygen ... we're still going to need to breath.
Of course, there's the whole global warming debate (which I won't get into) as well ... what effect will that have on plant-life and agriculture?
P.S. I like seafood, so I'd also prefer we manage to keep the oceans habitable.
The question of what to do is not science. And it seems silly to assume that we're starting at an optimal temperature considering the wild swings the planet has had in the past.
CO2 levels are increasing ... that's science. The question of whether we can actually stop the trend, much less reverse it is both science and debate. The question of what each person, company and country should do is purely debate. Those of us in rich industrialize countries will not want to give up our way of life. Those burning the rain-forests are (from what I remember) doing it to subsist.
I'm also a steam-locomotive buff (install sl on all your Linux machines), and it's interesting to follow their decline in the US and other first world countries. China used steam power longer than most (http://www.david-longman.com/China.html), since they had vast reserves of coal and other more important infrastructure to build. But it appears China is just now recognizing the types of pollution that led to the 1970s/1980s "super-fund" sites in the US. I suspect that countries that want to join the ranks of the financial superpower will progress through similar stages where they won't be inclined to agree to pollution limits.
This article does make a point about what to do. It gives a set of solutions for global warming that are more in line with what keeps humans alive. After all, if we do what the laws suggest : go below the carrying capacity of the earth for human population, the human population should drop to ~ 10 million to stop global warming, and the remainder should live without so much as heat from a campfire. Needless to say, striving for that is cruel, useless and completely insane. Just like the previous followers of Malthus were.
Instead the article argues we should use the tactics that humans have always used for survival to compensate global warming:
* introduce a species that solves the problem for us. Right now the most efficient co2->o2 species are ~3% efficient. The difference need not be big, by the way. If we introduce a form of algae that's 3.2% efficient into the oceans, global warming will reverse in about a year. Note that some theories say that earlier in the planet's history, there were such more efficient species, which should mean they can easily come back without intervention and may suddenly solve out problem for us. The same goes for trees. It would not be a huge adaptation for trees to become more green, although it would take more time.
* find another fuel to burn (e.g. a more complete switch to uranium, or solar panels. Although solar panels still necessitate competing with nature, which is bound to have ecological consequences if the usage goes up. Both pose the problem of moving the fuel around)
I would like to add that somehow the UN's policies and all the "green" policy efforts have moved the world away from nuclear power, and into coal power. Whatever the green movement is doing, it needs to learn that there are consequences to decisions. Moving away from nuclear means coal power plants. Why ? Look at the energy prices. Moving away from coal means nuclear power plants. Until this is understood widely, the green movement will continue to make things much worse by insane unconditional opposition to anything that doesn't completely satisfy their demands, including the demand that there can't be any impact on their lifestyle. I find it very weird that given such horrible results, the movement has any standing in society at all.
Btw: I hate sl. Too many type errors and I didn't know how it can be interrupted until a few months ago. It takes quite a while to pass on the screen on a 30" monitor.
Quote: "The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that nearly 870 million people of the 7.1 billion people in the world, or one in eight, were suffering from chronic undernourishment in 2010-2012. Almost all the hungry people, 852 million, live in developing countries, representing 15 percent of the population of developing counties. There are 16 million people undernourished in developed countries."
> We're not seeing any mass deaths which are sufficient to even slow the population growth rate ...
Not true, and in any case, that's not how an uncontrolled population expansion works -- such a process involves more mass death accompanied by more and more people surviving at the same time. The model is the Logistic function:
The curve is nearly flat on the left because there are too few organisms available to produce a higher growth rate.
The curve is nearly flat on the right because mass death prevents enough surviving organisms able to produce a higher growth rate.
Notice about the Logistic curve that the trend is always positive -- more people, but more death, at the same time. I emphasize that the Logistic curve is matched by any number of laboratory experiments -- it's more than a hypothesis about biology, including human biology.
I am pretty sure you are living in a first world. No I am not a political nutjob. I was born in and live in a 3rd world country, I have seen all the problems, Just type Indian food security bill in Google. I mean come on,it is not even funny how the situation is in south Asia.
> I doubt having a line drawn that says you're not an adult until you're 18 years old, and until then you're still a child will keep working in this century. It worked when social dynamics between teenagers and adults were different.
I'm not sure it ever really "worked", and seems to be an idea that is less than 100 years old. If it's failing already, I'm not sure we can count the couple generations it happened to it "working".
This is the argument behind the movements for a living wage. However this is now, no early agricultural society, just first world shining light capitalism. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_wage
There are huge limits to capitalism in terms of automation. We are going to hit those limits in our lifetime and society is going to need some drastic adaptations.
I say Ballmer is a bad CEO because of the stack ranking employee evaluations and the rampant smothering of prototype technologies that later turned out to be valuable in favor of "core" technologies - you know, the two behaviors that are absolutely toxic for a tech company.
I agree with a great many criticisms of Microsoft, but this one always strikes me as nonsensical. I was an intern at Microsoft and (while I never participated in stack ranking) it never seemed particularly destructive. I went on a tour of Valve and one question that was asked during the Q&A was what kind of evaluation and ranking system they used - the answer was stack ranking. Companies have to use some form of evaluation and ranking for their employees once they grow past a certain size - it's just an organizational requirement. The alternative is upper management without quantifiable information about the many people under them, which makes it harder to allocate resources and operate efficiently. Or so I imagine, I'm not in upper management at a very large company, but that certainly seems to be the case pretty much everywhere.
Go through a stack ranking where you get a bad review simply because "there are too many good developers on the team" before you say that it is a nonsensical criticism.
Making employees feel like shit for reasons outside their control is bad management.
Anecdotal, but, I know a bunch of good developers at Microsoft, and I've never heard any one of them complain about that before. They complain about a bunch of things, many of them related to upper management, but that "lost decade" article was the first I heard anyone complaining about stack ranking.
Stack ranking has been used at Microsoft since 2006. Furthermore, he wouldn't be overly involved in deciding performance evaluations. That's more the role of Lisa Brummel, who is the EVP of HR.
What the government did was the equivalent of show up at the houses of everyone who used a particular post office and forcibly finger print them because that post office routed 95% of the child porn magazines in the US (regardless of what percentage of their traffic that actually was, which you don't even mention besides 'there were other sites, too').
That would be a clear abuse of powers, as is this.