[US Supreme Court Strikes Down Spending Limits]

In US law, corporations are classified as people and have most rights that a living breathing human does.

That is not what your quote says. What you quote says the use of word "person" in laws is intended to include legal entitities unless explicitly stated otherwise. It is nothing but a short hand notation designed to make the laws more readable. They could have simply replaced the word person with 'legal entity' and defined an entity to include a person.

The point is corporations are not defined to be people under law. They have the same rights/obligations as people in many cases but that is not the same as saying they are defined to be people. For example, corporations do not have the right to vote in elections. That is a right reserved for people.

[Discussion of Canadian democracy]

Eventually folks get tired of the ugly mess that minorities are, and someone comes out on top.

I am not that dissatified with this minority largely because I see no pressing issue that requires the federal government to pass contentious legislation. A minority government that stumbles a long doing nothing significant is fine with me be it liberal or conservative. I would not be surprised to find that many other Canadians feel the same way.

[Discussion of Canadian democracy]

Parliament has the right to test a government's confidence.

The opposition does not have the right to call for a confidence vote on demand. The have to wait for 'opposition days' and procedural moves can be used to delay those as we saw in 2005 as Martin sought to avoid defeat. In this case, prorogation delayed the vote by a few weeks - BFD. If the opposition wanted to topple the government they could have but they changed their mind which tells me the delay was the right thing to do (i.e. if they could not stay united for 4 weeks they had no business asking to run the country).

[Discussion of Canadian democracy]

2) Removal or maximum restriction of undemocratic powers and prerogatives. E.g prorogation only be effectuated by consent of the Parliament.

That means you are ok with prorogation when Chretien did it because he had a majority?

3) Formal procedure ensuring that the Parliament is consulted on each and every occasion of non confidence motion, and the will of majority of the House is observed.

Hindsight tells us that a prorogation saved us from a either disasterous Dion led coalition or a election in the middle of a financial crisis. That is one example where the system worked to ensure Canadians have good government.

[OnLive]

And even with Steam being an online client. You can still play in Offline mode for all the single player games.

This is the key feature for me and would not have gone the 'steam' route if that was not an option.

From what I understand is that you don't need to keep all the hardware up to date because most of the graphical processing is done by OnLive's servers.

You can get a video card that can handle the latest games for <$200. I don't see any market for a service that cannot save you more than $200 in h/w costs. Especially once you factor in the lower quality and the potential for network issues.

I think it is a different market alltogether.

I am saying their putative target market does not exist and if they wish to survive they will have to become like a glorified flash game provider.

[US Supreme Court Strikes Down Spending Limits]

This is what you get for allowing the State to get away with defining corporations as being people too.

Corporations and unions are not defined as people. They are legal entities which can be punished for their misdeeds even if the managers that made those decisions are long gone. If these legal entities are legally responsible for their misdeeds it follows that they should be entitled to protect their interests.

[Discussion of Canadian democracy]

Here's the situation: the majority in the Parliament decided that they have no confidence in the government in power and create a coalition. The government in power shuts down the Parliament and later threatens an election over non confidence. Unelected "viceroy" decides whether to uphold the will of the majority, or the minority faction that is in power.

You are still whinging about that? The coalition could have easily taken power after parliament resumed but the coalition fell apart. The fact that it fell apart demonstrates that the GG's decision was the best one for Canada and whingeing about 'democracy being denied' is ridiculous.

It works because it works, right? She "intruded" twice already within a scope of one calendar year, and it's still "pointless"?

She did not "intrude" - she took the advice of the prime minister. In these situations, rejecting his advice would have been an "intrusion".

[OnLive]

I will still buy games myself, just because I like having the box displayed on my shelf !!

I finally got tired of games that use the CD for copy protection and now download them from places like steam. I see Steam as the future of games distribution.

The cost of outfitting a computer that could handle OnLive to handle games installed on the PC is marginal at best (<$200). The console market has ensured that PC graphics hardware lasts at least 2 years.

The OnLive servers don't come free and I would rather pay a small upfront cost and have the better quality and the option of playing games without access to a high speed internet connection.

I suspect this kind of service will only compete with the existing market for flash-based web games.

[H1N1 and Climate Change]

We should not be dumping toxins in our oceans, in our atmosphere and we shouldn't be creating more and more landfills for our never ending stream of garbage.

Agreed. We need alternatives.

Why not force companies to make products that must be recyclable and green(or as much as possible) and the product must be created in a green manner.

There are three problems. 1) What does 'green' mean 2) Depending on your definition recycling is often less 'green' than throwing stuff away 3) What does 'possible' mean?

Companies have to make a profit. If government regulations make their products too expensive they will shut their doors. You cannot force a company to produce a product that they lose money on. This puts a limit on any regulations that a government can impose. Especially since it is impossible to convince all governments in the world to be equally strict.

What happens when the air that we breathe becomes air that we choke?

The air in north america and europe is cleaner than it was 50 years ago. The improvements came as governments mandated technologies as they became affordable. Governments that ignore the cost of technologies before mandating them will only hurt the economy.

[H1N1 and Climate Change]

while also addressing this rather inconsequential WG2 volume comment.

Spin, spin. You, of course, fail to realize the real issue: this is yet more evidence that the IPCC is a hopelessly biased body that will accept made up numbers if they happen to help the IPCC political agenda. Just like the IPCC allowed Jones to first refuse to include the MM paper and then when it was include the IPCC allowed Jones to add editorial text that was nothing other than his unsubstantiated opinion.

Here is a link that discusses some of the other misrepresentations in the IPCC report.

How many more of the these revelations will it take for people like you to admit that the so-called authorities reporting the science of climate are biased?

[H1N1 and Climate Change]

Guess what, it doesn't matter if climate change is happening or not, we shouldn't be polluting this planet either way.

CO2 is plant food - not pollution. Mixing CO2 in with real pollution like smog makes it impossible to have a rational discussion on pollution.

It's every country making its own laws that will end pollution(not just CO2) and force industry to go green.

All environmental regulations must be balanced against their costs. There are many regulations that are relatively inexpensive to implement but blanket mandates to 'go green' are a waste of time.

Solutions don't have to take 50 years like they want us to believe.

Solutions for what? Renewable energy? We could spend 100 billion a year for the next 50 years building renewable power but it still would not meet more than small fraction of our energy needs. If you disagree then show us some business plans that layout the cost of building and deploying the massive infrastructure required. Statements like 'Solutions don't have to take 50 years' are meaningless without a concrete business plan.

[H1N1 and Climate Change]

the DailyMail/David Rose... probably the pinnacle of recognized biased denier publication/writer....

Yawn. It seems like when you run out of things to cut and paste you invariably attack the messenger. It does not really make a difference who reported the graphs the fact is the graphs are correct and leaving the decline out significantly changes the impression a reader gets from the graph. That makes it deceitful no matter how much BS is added to the text.

As I said, honest scientists would have included the data AND explained the divergence in the text. The fact that the alarmists scientists at RC and other places continue to defend this dubious practice is one of the reasons why their scientific judgement cannot be trusted.

[H1N1 and Climate Change]

I find it remarkable that there is a vestige of intentionally ignorant who cling to old propaganda surrounding climate change.

Who decides what is old propoganda and what are facts? The IPCC? Real Climate? Al Gore? If you looked at the issue objectively you would realize that most of the 'old propoganda' is coming from the alarmists who regularily exagerrate the problem.

It remains to be seen what effects there will be

Well that is the entire problem. We don't know what the effects will be and there is a good chance that negative effects will be too small to justify the huge expense of reducing CO2 emissions. Too many alarmists seem to believe in magic technology fairies that will deliver us to a CO2 free existance that requires no sacrifices. That is not true. We don't have the technology today and no amount of political will is going to change that. This means the only way to reduce emissions to the levels demanded is to reduce our standard of living to the level if the average Haitian before the quake.

but anybody who outright denies the existence of a scientifically verified concept is immune to reason and logic.

What exactly are you claiming is 'scientifically verified'? The idea that adding CO2 to the air causes the planet to warm? If so you will find that no one on this forum disputes that. What is being disputed is how much warming is caused by CO2 and the reality is no one is able to provide experimental evidence that allows us to determine how much warming will likely occur and recent temperature trends suggest that the effect of CO2 is likely less than claimed by the IPCC.

[H1N1 and Climate Change]

Seems there is more than one example of sloppy science going on at the IPCC.

Here is another example where the IPCC misrepresented the science on hurricanes.

So not only did the IPCC AR4 WGII egregiously misrepresent the science of disasters and climate change, but when questions were raised about that section by at least one expert reviewer, it simply made up a misleading and false response about my views. Not good.

The IPCC report is extremely misleading in many ways because the people who prepared it viewed it as a partisan document intended to promote a single political point of view.

[H1N1 and Climate Change]

Apparently... the Riverwind definition of deliberate misleading deceit is to pointedly leave a graphic line indicator visibly hanging/ending

My definition is the definition that most honest people have. It is only in climate science where alarmists believe they have a right to deceive people because they are 'saving the planet'.

Here are some illustrations that clearly indicate how odious the deception is.

[H1N1 and Climate Change]

Up to this point the discussion wasn't about the robustness of the proxy... it was about your parroting of the "hide the decline" meme.

They are one in the same. Hiding the decline was unethnical since it hid information that a reader needed to understand the nature of what is being presented.

Did my preceding post reinforcing Briffas acknowledgment/understanding of divergence his published paper on it make an impression on you?

You cut and paste without reading or understanding what you reference. All of Briffa's papers acknowledge that the reason for the divergance is unknown and that any claim that it is unique to the 20th century is speculative at best. The bottom line is Briffa deperately needs the divergance to be a 20th century only thing because if it is not all of his papers become junk. This fact makes him and most other dendros unreliable sources on the topic.

was much more than your called for footnote. The actual IPCC report graphic itself presents 12 reconstructions and the available instrumental temperature record, all colour-code labelled and all superimposed overtop of each other

The issue is the decline was removed the graph as part of a deliberate attempt to mislead the reader. If their intent was to inform the reader they would have left it in.

I trust the latter part of the above IPCC AR4 report quote dispenses with your reference in that regard… as the quote speaks directly to, "... a similar limit on the potential to reconstruct possible warm periods in earlier times at such sites. At this time there is no consensus on these issues".

Sure - even more evidence that removing the decline from the graphs was a deliberate attempt to deceive.

[Massachusetts Senate Race]

I was going to let this slide but it wrankled too much.

Sorry. My comments were meant to be good natured banter and not a criticism. I will leave it alone.

[H1N1 and Climate Change]

The cause of this increasing insensitivity of wood density to temperature changes is not known, but if it is not taken into account in dendroclimatic reconstructions, past temperatures could be overestimated.

If the cause is not known they cannot possibly claim that it was unique to the 20th century. If it is not unique the 20th century then any reconstruction produced with those tree rings is garbage.

IOW, your own references prove that Briffa's is pulling crap out of his a** when he claims that the divergance was unique to the 20th century and it is impossible to justify hiding the decline. The only ethical way to deal with this issue is to include the divergance in any graph with a footnote so the reader is informed of the issue and understands that the reconstruction could be complete junk.

BTW - Here is a peer reviewed paper that looks at some obvious explainations for the divergance that Briffa and co ignored because they were inconvenient.

Divergence results either because of some unique environmental factor in recent decades, because trees reach an asymptotic maximum growth rate at some temperature, or because higher temperatures reduce tree growth. If trees show a nonlinear growth response, the result is to potentially truncate any historical temperatures higher than those in the calibration period, as well as to reduce the mean and range of reconstructed values compared to actual. This produces the divergence effect. This creates a cold bias in the reconstructed record and makes it impossible to make any statements about how warm recent decades are compared to historical periods. Some suggestions are made to overcome these problems.

[Why power pricing is off the grid]

Nuclear reactors that had originally been amortized over a 50 year lifespan had to be written off in 25 years due to design flaws.

One of the problems with government sponsered technology is it is not possible to learn from failures. e.g. in the private sector companies can try a concept, fail and then some other company learn from that failure, try the same concept and succeed. Perhaps the best example of this is is the Newton computer which was a failure but was the ancestor for the PDA which was successfully marketed by Palm.

Governments can't do that because governments can't go under and sell off their assets to someone better able to use them.

[Massachusetts Senate Race]

Riverwind, this is an Internet forum and so it's more fun making open, specific predictions.

I was serious when I said being consistently wrong is as interesting as being right because it means your predictions are quite reliable - just not in the way you might like.

[Massachusetts Senate Race]

It really doesn't, it shows us your base will stay home if you don't play to them.

Winning elections by 'playing to your base' simply sets you up for failure at the next one because your base will invariably be dissappointed with what you can do and your opponent's 'base' will be energized once they realize the consequences of staying home.

[Massachusetts Senate Race]

I happen to think that Coakley will win but the margin will not be large, and the Obama Democrats will rightly interpret this as a strong wake-up call. I don't think that Obama will change his ideology or programme. But he will change his tactics.

August,

I have not done a statistical analysis of your election predictions but I have noticed that the opposite of what you predict seems to come true. Keep in mind that being consistently wrong is as interesting as being consistently right....

[Massachusetts Senate Race]

Obama you are at fault too, now stop pretending to be at the center if this is what you are getting in 3 year your better go down fighting and start doing things to change America.

This election seems to demonstrate that Americans don't particularily want radical changes and that a politician/party that makes that a primary objective will not be rewarded by the electorate.

We see the lack of desire for change in Canada too with the failed constitutional and electoral reform referendum.

[H1N1 and Climate Change]

Certainly, myata also tried to bring forward a less personalized and more targeted approach/methodology to the discussions, suggesting a proposal that would allow skeptics to bring forward their favoured challenges to the existing consensus on AGW global warming

Myata's 'offer' was joke because he insisted on unilaterally setting the terms of the discussion. If he was really interested in having a reasoned debate he would have been open to negotiating the terms of debate. By refusing he demonstrated that he was acting in bad faith and was not really interested in a reasoned debate.

As far as debating AGW goes all you seem to do is cut and paste. You don't understand the issues and when the issues are explained to you flail around and then cut and paste more stuff that has nothing to do with the point being made. You are the classic example of the Dunning-Kruger effect. I have much more interesting discussions with alarmists on other boards who understand the material enough to actually have a debate.

[H1N1 and Climate Change]

"justify Briffa in 2000". You can't even keep this discussion clear in your head.

I was responding to the post above:

http://www.mapleleafweb.com/forums//index.php?showtopic=15681&view=findpost&p=501188