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Comment: Re:How can the primary input not be relevant? (Score 1) 552

by raodin (#45774245) Attached to: Sun Not a Significant Driver of Climate Change

Obviously the sun is relevant, but the sun does not "radically dwarf" everything else.

Don't believe it? Look up the surface temperatures of Mercury and Venus.

Venus is the hottest planet in our solar system, yet it is roughly twice as far from the sun as Mercury.

Atmospheric composition has an enormous impact on surface temperatures.

Comment: Re:Dawkin's is a piss poor social scientist (Score 1) 862

As for "beheading", can you name something within Darwinian Naturalism that argues against it, if it increases the propagation of the behead-ers DNA?

Congratulations on mistaking a scientific theory - an attempt to explain observed evidence - for a codified belief system.

Comment: Re:Slashdotters torn by conscience? (Score 1) 173

I'm not a huge fan of many of Microsoft's business practices, but the whole browser bundling issue was always pure bullshit.

Windows includes a lot of other bits of software that step on the toes of third-party software companies, too. MS correctly realized that a web browser was becoming an essential, ubiquitous piece of software. It is absurd to suggest they should have distributed a competitor's software in place of their own, and absurd to suggest that they should simply stay out of the market because there was competition. What business do governments have deciding what should or shouldn't be a core feature of an OS?

Comment: Re:Social Media? or a fanciful discussion of war (Score 1) 572

by raodin (#41711731) Attached to: What tech would you un-invent?

Iraq and Afghanistan aren't exactly at a 1700s level of technology or military training, either.

I'd expect the technological gap between a terrestrial civilization and an interstellar civilization to be far greater than 300 years. The reality is we have NO capability of retaliating against any space based weapon system outside of LEO - and even in low orbit a species that has mastered interstellar travel would likely have effectively impenetrable countermeasures for anything we could throw at them. If their goal is simply to wipe out life and harvest resources from our planet's carcass, there is absolutely nothing we could do to stop them. Even if the goal is to eliminate just the human population and leave a habitable planet, what would you propose we could do to stop precisely targeted kinetic strikes from an opponent in orbit?

Things get more interesting if the goal is to conquer or enslave the human population - that's a much closer analogy to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Comment: Re:Unfortunately... (Score 1) 1774

So what point is he making? "we need engineers, but only for a little while, until they built good enough robots" -- ?

Ridiculous. Robots don't replace engineers, they replace laborers.

Teaching science to children helps create objective, rational adults. Important traits for "voters that don't fall for deception." It's only part of the picture, but that doesn't make it unimportant.

Comment: Re:Let's look at the larger picture (Score 1) 1010

by raodin (#40810941) Attached to: Political Science Prof Asks: Is Algebra Necessary?

You make a good point, in that schools tend not to teach a lot off important life skills. That doesn't mean we should skimp on foundation skills like math. What point is there teaching someone about real estate, if they can't even handle algebra? Understanding concepts like interest rates requires more than basic arithmetic.
