I think Ratigan's summary is quite accurate for describing pre-9/11 motivation. Saudi promoted Wahhabi-ism can certainly be blamed for drawing stark divisions between Shia and Sunni Islam and fueling inter-Islamic conflicts in the region. Funds from Saudi benefactors (who have profited handsomely from the US/West's collaboration with Saudi Arabia due to its oil reserves) have certainly fueled terrorist groups.

Today, I would suggest that terrorist attacks are basically publicity, recruitment and funding campaigns for a militia based land battle by ISIS in the Middle East. Take for example the beheading of Americans that arguably escalated the US involvement in the conflict. it would seem that in terms of their survival this would have been counterproductive. I can only assume that a successful terrorist/militia organisation like ISIS is acting quote-unquote rationally in its own interests if it is as successful as it is. That forces me to conclude that the recruitment and funding that it gets from these publicized actions actually outweighs the cost of being attacked militarily by global powers like the US/EU.

While religion is certainly used to motivate the foot soldiers of these insurgents, I would not at all be surprised if the likes of the al-Baghdadi's of the conflict are purely in it for money and power. Kind of reminds me of how insurgents in Africa post-colonialism had to reinvent themselves to remain relevant and became either religiously or otherwise racially sectarian militias / factions.

Yes they did.

Found a press release.
http://www.renovomotors.com/marty-press-release/

"MARTY was built in collaboration with Renovo Motors, an automotive start-up based in Silicon Valley that specializes in building advanced electric vehicle technology. Working closely together gave the Stanford team early access to a brand new platform derived from Renovo’s electric supercar that delivers 4,000 pound-feet from on-motor gearboxes to the rear wheels in a fraction of a second – allowing precise control of the forces required to drift."

A friend of mine is a PhD student in Astronomy and he sometimes observes at Arecibo in Puerto Rico (a single radio telescope). And his collaboration will generate so much data that it's faster and cheaper to send by mail on external hard drives than through any sort of network!

@newtboy

#1 and #2, fine, if you won't go there to read it's now pasted in full for you:
Arctic tundra soils serve as potentially important but poorly understood sinks of atmospheric methane (CH4), a powerful greenhouse gas1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Numerical simulations project a net increase in methane consumption in soils in high northern latitudes as a consequence of warming in the past few decades3, 6. Advances have been made in quantifying hotspots of methane emissions in Arctic wetlands7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, but the drivers, magnitude, timing and location of methane consumption rates in High Arctic ecosystems are unclear. Here, we present measurements of rates of methane consumption in different vegetation types within the Zackenberg Valley in northeast Greenland over a full growing season. Field measurements show methane uptake in all non-water-saturated landforms studied, with seasonal averages of − 8.3 ± 3.7 μmol CH4 m−2 h−1 in dry tundra and − 3.1 ± 1.6 μmol CH4 m−2 h−1 in moist tundra. The fluxes were sensitive to temperature, with methane uptake increasing with increasing temperatures. We extrapolate our measurements and published measurements from wetlands with the help of remote-sensing land-cover classification using nine Landsat scenes. We conclude that the ice-free area of northeast Greenland acts as a net sink of atmospheric methane, and suggest that this sink will probably be enhanced under future warmer climatic conditions.

#3, regardless of if it make's sense to you, and regardless of if it means a 10C warming by 2100, the IPCC scientists collaborative summary says it anyways. If you want to claim otherwise it's you opposing the science to make things seem worse than they are, not me.

#4, To tell them those things would sound like this. The IPCC current best estimates from climate models project 2100 to be 1.5C warmer than 2000. This has already resulted in 2000 being 0.8C warmer than 1900. Summer arctic sea ice extent has retreating significantly is the biggest current impact. By 2100 it is deemed extremely unlikely that the Greenland and Antarctic iccesheets will have meaningfully reduced and there is medium confidence that the warming will actually expand Antarctic ice cover owing to increased precipitation from the region. That's the results and expectations to be passed on from the 5th report from an international collaboration of scientists. Whether that fits your world view or not doesn't matter to the scientific evidence those views are founded on and supported by.

You said the ocean's may be unfishable in 20 years, and the best support you came up with was a news article quote claiming that by 2040 most of the Arctic would be too acidic for Shell forming fish. Cherry picked by the news article that also earlier noted that was dependent on CO2 concentrations exceeding 1000ppm in 2100, and even that some forms of plankton under study actually faired better in higher acidity in some case. In a news article that also noted that the uneven distribution of acidity makes predicting the effects very challenging. If news articles count as evidence I then want to claim we'll have working fusion power to convert to in 5 years time from Lockheed Martin. I'll agree with your news post on one count, the world they talk about, where CO2 emissions continue accelerating year on year, even by 2100, is bad. It's also a bit hard to fathom with electric cars just around the corner, and if not solar and wind, fusion sometime before then too, that we'll still be using anywhere near today's emissions let alone still accelerating our use.

by 2025 it's estimated that 2/3 of people worldwide will live in a water shortage.
And you link to a blog, and a blog that provides exactly zero references to any scientific sources for the claim. Better yet, even the blog does NOT claim that the access to water will be limited because of climate change, the blog even mentions multiple times how other forms of pollution are destroying huge amounts of fresh water(again with zero attributions).

Here's the IPCC best estimates for 2100 impacts regionally:
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Chapter14_FINAL.pdf

You'll find it's a largely mixed bag if you can be bothered to read what the actual scientists are predicting. Just bare in mind they regularly note that climate models still have a lot of challenges with accurate regional estimates. I guess your blogger isn't hindered by such problems though. If you don't want to bother I'll summarize for you and note they observe a mixed bag of increased precipitation in some regions, notably monsoons generally increasing, and other areas lowering, but it's all no higher than at medium confidences. But hey, why should uncertainty about 2100 prevent us from panicking today about more than half the world losing their drinking water in 10 years. I'll make you a deal, in ten years we can come back to this thread and see whether or not climate change has cause 2/3 of the world to lose their drinking water already or not. I'm pretty confident on this one.

Northern India/Southern China is nearly 100% dependent on glacial melt water, glaciers that have lost 50% in the last decade
Lost 50% since 2005? That'd be scary, oh wait, you heard that from the same blog you say? I've got a hunch maybe they aren't being straight with you...
Here are a pair of links I found in google scholar to scientific articles on the Himalaya's glaciers:
http://cires1.colorado.edu/~braup/himalaya/Science13Nov2009.pdf
I you can't be bothered to read:
Claims reported in the popular press that Siachin has shrunk as much as 50% are simply wrong, says Riana, whose report notes that the glacier has "not shown any remarkable retreat in the last 50 years" Which looks likely that your blogger found a popular press piece about that single glacier and then went off as though it were fact, and across the entire mountain range .

http://indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/files/glaciers%20and%20climate.pdf
Here's another article noting that since 1962 Himalayan glacier reduction is actually about 21%.

If you go back and read the IPCC links I gave earlier you can also find many of the regional rivers and glaciers in India/East China are very dependent on monsoons and will persist as long as monsoons do. Which the IPCC additionally notes are expected to, on the whole, actually increase through 2100 warming.

I've stated before up thread that things are warming and we are the major contribution, but merely differed from your position be also observing the best evidence science has for predictions isn't catastrophic. That is compounded by high uncertainties, notably that TOA energy levels are still not able to be predicted well. The good news there is the latest IPCC estimated temps exceed the observed trends of both temperature and TOA imbalance, so there's reason for optimism. That's obviously not license for recklessly carrying on our merry way, as I've noted a couple times already about roads away from emissions that we are going to adopt one way or another long before 2100.

Late to the comment party here, but Slashdot had an interesting explanation of *why* so many of the robots had trouble like this:
"DARPA deliberately degraded communications (low bandwidth, high latency, intermittent connection) during the challenge to truly see how a human-robot team could collaborate in a Fukushima-type disaster. And there was no standard set for how a human-robot interface would work. So, some worked better than others. The winning DRC-Hubo robot used custom software designed by Team KAIST that was engineered to perform in an environment with low bandwidth. It also used the Xenomai real-time operating system for Linux and a customized motion control framework. The second-place finisher, Team IHMC, used a sliding scale of autonomy that allowed a human operator to take control when the robot seemed stumped or if the robot knew it would run into problems."

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/15/06/10/038224/why-so-many-robots-struggled-with-the-darpa-challenge

Nothing wrong with a little collaborative elaboration. ;-)

I just meant to point out that it's not just the IMAGE they allow 'bad cops' to dominate, instead, by capitulating and covering for them they become bad cops, and so allow bad cops to dominate reality.

This is certainly hate speech. I hate muslims; not islam, muslims.

Muslims, like jews, christians and neo-nazis, are by definition not decent people. It's islam that we're concerned with in particular, and islam is substantially the worst of those ideologies.

It's easy, isn't it, lazily to accuse your opponents of ignorance - but I'm obliged to wonder how much you actually know about islam, its texts and its history.

It is a historical and scriptural fact that mohammed was a rapist and promoter of rape among his followers, as well as being a slaver and warlord and murderer of many thousands of people. All muslims know this, and all have chosen to endorse his crimes and follow his teachings and are, as a fundamental tenet of the islamic faith, expected to emulate his behaviour.

Can you dispute even a single word of what I've just asserted? All muslims are guilty of mass-rape. All muslims are guilty of mass-murder.

It's sad to see those who flatter themselves that they're progressives descend into rape-apology and collaboration with genocidal fascism.

Odd, in the last 3 years Beck has won 5 times the awards that Kanye has...and Kanye only won in 2013 because he collaborated with JZ and JZ won....so if Beck's not worthy of the best album award, Kanye must not be worthy of any award....besides, he's just a gay fish married to a photo shopped hobbit, there's no award for that.

A Bruno Mars collaboration would be divine! Never heard of Haim either. Thanks for the quality Newt

I could see this being an excellent instrument for film scoring. Wouldn't work as well in an orchestral setting. The reverb appears to have a specific frequency which would severely limit the tempo of any collaborative effort - it would need to match or be a multiple of the yaybahar's inherent beat.

The results are still reproducible. It just turns out that sometimes the difference is hard to spot on a single result set. Meta analysis can provide a clearer overall picture.

It's not without its problems (it's ultimately open to interpretation), but overall it does more good than harm. One of the largest groups doing meta analysis is the Cochrane Collaboration. If you want an example of how meta analysis can provide a tangible benefit read about their logo

I'm quite familiar, Eric. Have been working in collaboration with MAPS since 2002.

Thanks.

I know, a cheap argumentative shot. I seldom cite others to prove a point, unless I first state facts, then give a link for collaboration.

I also apologize for jumping from an argument is support of the RLN to arguments in support of ID (par. 3 - 7), two related, but separate issues.

Regarding Kirk Cameron's banana fervor, I somewhat agree. I see design inferences where most others don't, including various synergistic relationships which are generally attributed to convergent evolution, but which I sometimes attribute to design, or in the case of change over time, re-design.

Most speciation events are simply naturally occurring adaptive alterations, to adapt to a changing environment. But more radical body-plan revisions, land mammal to aquatic cetacean for example, show signs of designer input, much of which could have been 'cut-and-try', rather than 'poof' style modifications. Thus, the uncovering of intermediates, and the lengthy time periods involved.

It is my assumption that the creation of a true AI will more or less come hand in hand with our own post-humanism. As you say, man vs machine would be a collaboration, rather than a conflict.

Perhaps it is a naive sentiment of mine to assume that in order to develop advanced and potentially ruinous technology we, in the development process or by virtue of its creation, advance ourselves to the point where we can mostly avoid destroying ourselves. mostly. Hey! The Bomb has worked out fine! so far.

Thanks for the links. I'm new to advocating for states' rights

> "What is the optimum size political unit for you?"
My main concern is SENS and reprogenetics for everyone who wants them. Making my purpose in life to be building my career maximizes my odds of making it to SENS. I'm fine with living in huge nations as long as taxes are low, law and order are maintained, and the government is fiscally sound. But I think all 3 of those issues are going to be under increased pressure.

>"Would you consider yourself Right-wing?"
No, I just consider myself a science and tech nerd. When I debate with right-wing people, they think I'm a hippy. I'm too self-reliant and career and family-focused to really care much about politics. I think we'll eventually have a Star Trek world. I dislike any trends that seem to make that outcome less likely.

But I read enough science to know that wool has been pulled over our eyes about human evolution and inequality.

>"What would you consider to be a meritocratic utopia?
I think Silicon Valley is the closest thing we have to a meritocratic utopia.

>"Why not scale it down to counties and municipalities?"
In my work, I collaborate with people on the other side of the country. It's best for us to work with them than with cheaper people in Ukraine or India because we share a cultural background and are within the same legal environment. It'd be much harder to take legal action against someone in other countries, and that means parties can't have the level of trust afforded by shared legal protections. Commerce increasingly interconnects the world, and dividing large jurisdictions into many smaller jurisdictions would be a drain on commerce.