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What excuse did your parents use allow their kids to be ignorant?

4 days ago on Men diagnosed with ADHD as children have higher obesity rates, study finds 1 reply

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You’re right. The fMRI and biochemical studies that show people with ADHD actually have brains that work differently are wrong.

Scientists should just ask you, rather than try to use tests and data to learn things. You are clearly intelligent.

4 days ago on Men diagnosed with ADHD as children have higher obesity rates, study finds

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All of your issues are things that will improve in time as technology improves. The exception is perhaps #7.

1 – Will get lower in time, the first cell phones cost thousands of dollars (far more today with inflation), and didn’t see mass adoption until the mid-late 90s. Size, manufacturing, design all improve in time.
2 – This is improving constantly and google is already the leader in mobile voice recognition.
3 – early in the product life, interoperability will improve.
4 – see 3 and 1
5 – Already changing as beta testers create apps.
6 – problem, but will again improve in time.
7 – If you are in a public place, you are already likely to be recorded.
8 – Brain-wave control is improving constantly, and again, as technology improves, it will become smaller and more accurate. Combined with iris tracking, it’s feasible that glass will eventually respond to simple thoughts and eye movement. This is the long game.
9 – no argument there, it’s clunky and a bit ugly.
10 – bone conduction works pretty well if implemented correctly, but I haven’t used glass, so I don’t know how well it works here.

I am not seeing Glass as a consumer product – I am seeing it as an open beta that has a lot of long term potential, but needs to be in people’s hands so they can give better feedback as to use and . Google might be setting themselves up for failure by trying to push it to the public, but I can look past everything you are worried about because I simply don’t see it the same way as you do. I highly doubt Google expects any mass adoption for the first decade. They are just doing what they have to in order to get the word out there and try and normalize the next generation to the idea.

7 days ago on Will Google Glass create information heroes or new-wave Bluetooth dorks?

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Right, because there is no such thing as Spring in the southern hemisphere…

8 days ago on Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels reach milestone high as global warming worsens

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You are dense. Yes, they have done studies with CO2, many many studies. Hell, high schoolers do this sort of thing in chemistry classes. Scientists do similar, but much larger scale studies and it’s trivial to show that modest increases in CO2 without any other changes in the experiment results on increased temperature. I’d link some, but I doubt you can even understand the classroom experiment linked.

Models aren’t created to support theories, models are created from mathematics. As the models are tested, the theory is derived from the results, not the other way around. You are confusing theory with hypotheses. A common occurrence with armchair ‘scientists’. Gravity is a theory, nuclear physics is all theories, even the source electricity is a theory, yet nobody will claim that gravity, nuclear bombs or computers aren’t real because they are based on theories. You know what else is a theory? Thermodynamics: free energy, entropy… things we understand pretty damn well and used to develop our understanding of climate change.

Hate to break it to you, but you aren’t as smart as 99% of the National Academy of the Sciences members and Nobel Laureates. Whatever silly ideas you have about the world, you simply lack the education or ability to understand the data that is out there. It’s been tested, it’s a settled matter to those of us that can actually read and interpret an actual scientific study.

8 days ago on Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels reach milestone high as global warming worsens 1 reply

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You are right, we should trust Microsoft, who only cares about our privacy. or maybe we’d be better off trusting Facebook, whose founder famously called people “dumb fucks” for trusting him with their data.

I’ll choose the company that is at least transparent about the data they collect, how long they hold it, what they do with it, and when the government requests it.

8 days ago on Leaked Scroogled video sees Microsoft parody Google's Chrome ad 1 recommend

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What you fail to realize is that almost every single electronic bit you transmit is already collected and stored. The agencies involved don’t yet have the capability to go through all the data, but it’s being collected/stored and only a matter of time before the data-mining centers are complete and operational (Utah being the most publicized, but only one of a few). The entire backbone of the internet runs through data centers that intelligence agencies have free reign over. I realize this sounds like some crazy conspiracy theory nonsense, but it’s pretty well documented in respectable publications and whisleblowers from within the NSA like William Binney.

Beyond that, Google doesn’t store your information for very long, it’s in their privacy policy. If you care about privacy, I wouldn’t use any of the big providers. Stick with VPNs and Tor if you have something you’d rather people not know about at some point.

8 days ago on Leaked Scroogled video sees Microsoft parody Google's Chrome ad

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BUT BUT BUT, privacy!

8 days ago on Leaked Scroogled video sees Microsoft parody Google's Chrome ad 1 reply

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So your argument is that since MS fails at it, it’s ok for them?

8 days ago on Leaked Scroogled video sees Microsoft parody Google's Chrome ad

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Microsoft is trying to monetize Bing, which is the whole point of their ads. If they get the traction, they will get and use just as much information as Google does. The difference is that Google is extremely transparent with what they collect, when, and for how long it is kept. You can argue it’s too much, and for you it may be, but you don’t have to use their products either. Microsoft has a pretty terrible track record with not only user privacy/security (which they are trying to change, though the Skype tracking makes one wonder) but also transparency.

Not saying google is better, just saying they are equally bad when it comes to collecting data for profit.

8 days ago on Leaked Scroogled video sees Microsoft parody Google's Chrome ad 1 recommend

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In a different letter, Congressional aides were telling General Dynamics that they were going to shut Google down and give GD the contract for ‘assault recorder protective eyewear’ for the National Guard and police forces across the nation. They are like Google Glass but only in black and camo versions, and cost a mere $37k each.

8 days ago on Congress asks Google CEO if Glass infringes 'on the privacy of the average American' 1 recommend

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No worries, I had you pegged for a neo-conservative, so apologies if I offended. I don’t subscribe to Libertarianism because I feel like it, much like pure communism, is great in theory but easily corruptible due to flaws inherent to a subset of humanity that will do whatever they can to gain power/control. Pure Libertarianism doesn’t have the checks and balances needed to keep a level playing field for very long. I am a liberal in the classic sense (not in this Fox news definition), though I tend to favor some Progressive causes like Environmental protection, because there are times where erring on the side of too cautious is better than not cautious enough, and single payer healthcare, simply because it works better and it’s cheaper than our current system. Otherwise, you are probably right, we likely agree on more than we disagree on, I am a big fan of individual rights and privacy.

And don’t get me wrong, I am skeptical of some claims involving climate change (or at least, skeptical of the certainty some people hold on how it will impact us), but I don’t doubt that we are causing changes to the environment and climate. Way I see it, the worst case scenario if climate change scientists are wrong, is that our economy doesn’t develop as quickly. Worst case scenario if they are right and we do nothing, we risk destroying the only planet we have, or at the very least, changing it in such a way that it’s not livable in the same way it has been for all of modern history.

11 days ago on Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels reach milestone high as global warming worsens

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Science is decided by formulating hypotheses and testing them. The more people that test a hypothesis and find themselves in agreement, the more likely the hypothesis is correct. The better the accuracy of the hypothesis, the more likely models that they inform are valid.

But of course you know all that, you are a ‘scientist’.

And the flat earth thing is a an embarrassing red herring no real scientist would ever claim. It was known the earth wasn’t flat for almost 2000 years before Columbus sailed.

12 days ago on Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels reach milestone high as global warming worsens 1 reply

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No, that was the church and religious fundamentalists. The earth was known to be round hundreds of years before Christ, but the religiously inclined, which have forever benefited from ignorance, denied it (much as they largely deny climate change). Eratosthenes calculated the Earth’s circumference with a high degree of accuracy in 200 BC. The Persians are believed to have calculated it even before that. It was the scientific process by which Galileo discovered that the earth rotated around the sun (a claim made by the religious and philosophers, neither of which are scientists), and the religious process by which he was persecuted as a heretic.

In addition, Science is not immune to being incorrect. The difference between science and religion (or whatever flavor of ignorant belief you follow) is that science willingly changes in light of new evidence and provides models which are testable, can be used to make predictions and can be replicated. If they are poor models, they don’t predict well and are either refined or scrapped. So far, the models of what will happen to the climate are showing to be accurate and predictions are increasingly accurate.

Global warming isn’t just a temperature issue, it’s the total entropy and enthalpy of the world’s systems increasing due to retained energy. This will increase the temperature, but it’s far more than that. Our descendants are going to suffer because of those who are now unwilling to think for themselves.

Guess that is how it goes though when anyone can vote. By definition half of the voting populace is below average intelligence. As is usual though, you’ll probably just claim that States with higher college education rates, higher average IQs, greater average GSP, less dependence on Federal welfare and stricter emissions laws are all just products of liberal media or something similar.

12 days ago on Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels reach milestone high as global warming worsens 1 reply 1 recommend

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Clean coal is a total misnomer. The process of mining it is extremely dirty and environmentally damaging. The radiation that it spews is dirty (and far higher than that seen at nuke plants), and the toxic sludge that results from ‘cleaning’ the emissions is absolutely disastrous as has been witnessed.

Those cartoon terms you talk about might be abused, but they do have real meaning. There are ‘green’ energy solutions that don’t involve digging up millions of years worth of buried carbon and spewing it into the atmosphere. Some of those solutions are still in their infancy, but a small fraction of the manhattan project or moon race equivalent would supply more than enough funding to scale up the technologies that are proven but lack sufficient engineering expertise/testing to mass produce. Sustainability IS possible with wind, solar, tidal and geothermal solutions – again, we just need to scale up tested technologies and/or subsidize the installations (as we in the past subsidized refineries, mines, aquaducts and coal plants). Energy independence is something that comes from the conservatives who want to promote more drilling, and has little to do with the goal of reducing greenhouse emissions.

12 days ago on Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels reach milestone high as global warming worsens

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Yes, it’s horrible. Don’t come over here. Housing prices are already too high from demand, and our economy is recovering too quickly. No more please.

13 days ago on 'Geography of Hate' maps racism and homophobia on Twitter 11 recommends

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Earth CAN manage it, but not when we are cutting down and polluting it’s management systems at unprecedented rates while at the same time pumping out CO2 at unprecedented rates. It’s a vicious cycle and is a giant positive reinforcement loop.

13 days ago on Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels reach milestone high as global warming worsens 1 reply

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Climate change is not a local phenomenon, it’s a global one. It’s a statistical one. Much of the change is currently occurring at the poles and in the deep ocean thermoclines. It’s inevitable that as the ice caps shrink, more heat is absorbed, the ocean warms more, the ice shrinks further and eventually we are going to see massive changes in climate. The changes aren’t going to be visible every day, or even every year: it’s a statistical trend and over time we are going to see increasing changes from the norm, until our inability to predict the future based on the past IS the norm.

Questions like yours are among the most ignorant in regards to climate, and ignores droughts, monsoons, ice melts, current patterns, oceanic temperatures/pH and snow storms are are straying from historical norms all over the world. It’s like every house in your neighborhood burning down, but claiming “what fire? My house looks fine from the living room.”

13 days ago on Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels reach milestone high as global warming worsens 1 reply

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82ppm is also 30+% higher than the average of the last 20 or so million years.

14 days ago on Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels reach milestone high as global warming worsens

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I didn’t vote for Romney and don’t like W8 because it’s intrusive (takes up the full screen unnecessarily), I don’t like the colored squares, and I despise the Ribbon. It’s not about disliking change, it’s about disliking bad change. I changed to Linux Mint and run W7 in virtualbox when I need to run something exclusive to Windows, which is less and less.

14 days ago on Microsoft responds to Windows 8 criticism, defends upcoming changes as 'a good thing' 4 recommends

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Who said anything about taking it away? Some of you guys are dense.

It’s simple, put a checkbox in the options to allow people to boot directly to the desktop, and another that offers a non-full screen start menu.

14 days ago on Microsoft responds to Windows 8 criticism, defends upcoming changes as 'a good thing' 1 recommend