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Ahh no. [posts link to site funded by ALEC, Exxon Mobil, and Richard Mellon Scaife] But yes keep telling yourself that the warm periods weren't global and miraculously just materialized where people could record it.

Ahh no., I didn't just tell myself.

For example (based on the Redpill IDT technique): Detecting the Presence of Virtual Machines Using the Local Data Table

It's actually pretty clever, though I doubt it works anymore.

It isn't corroborated by reality since global average temperatures have not followed the predictions of that model.

You seem to think that MBH 1998 made predictions. What they did was a reconstruction of past temperatures. As you can see from the paper.

They are now too busy coming up with theories for where the missing heat went and saying it went down a whole (literally).

I'm not aware of work by any of the authors of MBH that look at energy balance. Dr Trenberth is an important researcher in that field.
This Nature news article might be as good a place as any to start reading about that. Note that 2014 was the hottest year on record when you read the end: “You can’t keep piling up warm water in the western Pacific,” Trenberth says. “At some point, the water will get so high that it just sloshes back.” And when that happens, if scientists are on the right track, the missing heat will reappear and temperatures will spike once again.

Well why didn't it go down a hole before too?

If you mean why haven't the oceans changed temperature before, or ice melted, then the answer is that they have.

A lot of us think this is much more easily explained by solar activity but of course what matters to these people is an insignificant amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

I suspect that you're over-counting if you think that "a lot" of people think a lower solar activity, and particularly the current very weak solar cycle would cause a warming.

But there are other reasons why it is obviously not the sun.
The current warming is greater at night and winter, in line with greenhouse warming, but the opposite of what you would expect from solar activity, as the sun warms things when it is shining.
The current warming is accompanied by a cooling of the stratosphere, an obvious consequence of trapping the heat below, but impossible to explain with solar activity.
The spatial distribution of the warming, being greater at the poles and less at the tropics, also aligns better with the greenhouse effect than the sun.

Do you know there is some evidence that if global temperatures went up the world's deserts would actually recede?

I know that rainfall requires evaporation or transpiration, so it will generally be heavier in a warmer world. This is not generally true on a regional scale, where changes to wind patterns have a dominating effect on precipitation.

Even if the temperature wouldn't rise as much the arctic would become navigable just like it was in the Middle Ages when the Novgorod Republic was a major trading power and Iceland was colonized. That's what the scaremongerers won't tell you.

A navigable Arctic is of some economic benefit. But there are many economic disbenefits, that greatly outweigh the benefits plus the cost of moving to a low carbon economy.

The findings are meaningless only if they don't reflect the objective reality they are reporting.

If you're concerned about the data and methods for Mann, et. al.'s hockey stick graph they have been available for a decade at least. You can find them here. Back when the paper was first published in 1998 the internet was still pretty young and getting stuff like that online wasn't that common yet.

It certainly is possible to use different methods to arrive at the same conclusion.

Ross Anderson and 1996 came calling. And the cypherpunk movement had reasonable implementations of such an Eternity Service for a decade or two already. This is, of course, not to say that the first implementations have ever been winners in technology sphere. However, rather than "Wowz, there's this rad completely new idea of renting out your storage space!", I'd like to hear what new features they actually bring to the table -- besides marketing.

When the good doctor and his associates release all this data that was used to create their model, he is guilty of cherry picking data points and data manipulation. All the secrecy and denial of data release makes his conclusions suspect, regardless of their accuracy.

Michael Mann has not created a climate model. The 1998 hockey stick graph he produced is a reconstruction of temperatures going back about 1000 years based on paleoclimate proxies (primarily tree rings). The data and methods he and his coauthors used to produce it is available here.

The study focuses solely on siliceous scoria droplets, says they were made from local rock in high temperature but conventional fires. Well, that's great to know, but the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis has agreed on that all along anyway. Those scoria were indeed local and made in fires - like the vast fires that spread everywhere after the airburst. The best evidence for the very high temperature and pressure associated with impact is not the siliceous scoria droplets, but the hexagonal-structure nanodiamonds (lonsdaleite) found all over the large zone sampled: http://test.scripts.psu.edu/de...

You're pretty behind the times. Much if not most of the code is available now. The NASA/GISS Model E, one of the main Global Climate Models is available here. The data and code for Michael Mann's original hockey stick graph are available here.

For a comment on the code in your original code see here.

http://www.esm.psu.edu/about/w...

http://www.engineering.pitt.ed...

http://engineering.berkeley.ed...

Seems like a few known colleges would disagree with your assumption.

In chronological order looking forward:

MacTech Boot Camps - http://www.mactech.com/bootcam...
Small, local, inexpensive. Check to see if there's one close to you.

MacTech Conference - http://www.mactech.com/confere...
Larger, both sysadmin and developer tracks

MacIT - http://www.macitconf.com/
Larger, multiple tracks and levels of knowledge

WWDC - https://developer.apple.com/ww...
The granddaddy of them all, but next to impossible to get into these days. Mostly developer focused. May not be useful if you don't already have a deep knowledge base.

MacAdmins - http://macadmins.psu.edu/
The most education-focused of the conferences. Very knowledgeable presenters.

FWIW, I've been a presenter at MacTech Boot Camps, MacIT, and WWDC.

--Paul

Here is a better summary of the paper. http://news.psu.edu/story/3178...

It's not a relationship, it's a coincidence, and a false one at that. It could not hold for the "entire venus cloud region", because you can't compare it to Earth's atmosphere past 1 atm. The "full amount of available information" includes a lot of data about how Venus actually absorbs and radiates heat (see previous link), but you seem to be willing to ignore that entirely for no reason in particular. You're basing your theory on a single data point, ignoring the error bars on that, ignoring other measurements [3](pdf)(which seem to cluster closer to 350K at 1 atm), picking a random point inside the cloud layer, and crying foul on "mainstream" science. Even if there were a "relationship" it clearly does not hold true for any other body in the Solar system.

You don't have to claim that there is no greenhouse effect, the source you got this idea from already did. It's a novel way out of the climate crisis, but it has nothing to do with reality. You can't just handwave away absorption spectra or albedo, and mumbling about blackbodies does not a theory make. You need to be able to explain all other observations. "Everything we know about radiative transfer is fictional" is a non-starter.

Another study in Gene Expression Magazine entitled "Intercourse and Intelligence" confirms this data, citing research that shows a bell-shaped relationship between IQ scores and sex.

According to the research, an adolescent with an IQ score of 100 was 1.5 to 5 times more likely to have had intercourse than an adolescent with an above average score of about 120 to 130.

http://www.collegian.psu.edu/a...

We could assume they're more likely to be asexual, but I'd doubt that. Fluff sells, not brains.

The study at Wellesley also broke the research down by majors. It found that no studio art majors were virgins while 72% of biology majors and 83% of biochemistry and math majors were virgins.

We shouldn't even have ice in the arctic in summer at this point in time according to Mann, Gore and Hansen.

Northern summer sea ice volume has dropped 60% over the past 35 years.

But I wonder if you have misinterpreted projections of Mann and Hansen.

I notice Mann was an author on a paper about the Antarctic Ice Sheet, but I can't find the one about the Arctic Ice that your refer to. Do you have a citation?

I got to thinking about the Bolo story series that centered on the development of autonomous tanks into an intelligent 'companion' as humans spread through the stars

Found a paper titled 'Well Behaved Borgs, Bolos and Berserkers" written in 1998 by a D Gordon of Naval Research Laboratory
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/v...

They discuss using certain algorithms to control behavior without limiting reaction time or learning ability
Seems like people have been looking into this for a while now, you have to wonder what they have accomplished in the past 15 odd years

As per http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/v... ERAM is implemented in ADA, no chance for a malfunction.

Do you mean that making a graph using a temperature proxy measurement, tree rings, then switching to recorded temperatures only at the point they diverge rapidly, without mentioning this change, is proper?

Actually, it was mentioned in the notes immediately below the graph in the IPCC report where that was done.

Is it also proper to use one specific type of tree as the basis of the graph, if that one type is the least likely to show historic temperature changes?

Well according to the paper in question, they used 12 proxies, of which 9 were various tree-based proxies and 3 are ice-core based proxies.

Wouldn't it be better to use results from trees that more accurately show historic temperature changes?

As previously noted, 9 different tree proxies were used and they were likely the best available proxies at the time. It's not like we all have 2000 year old trees lying around in our backyards.

This improper normalization procedure tends to emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppress all data that do not. To demonstrate this effect, McIntyre and McKitrick created some meaningless test data that had, on average, no trends. This method of generating random data is called Monte Carlo analysis, after the famous casino, and it is widely used in statistical analysis to test procedures. When McIntyre and McKitrick fed these random data into the Mann procedure, out popped a hockey stick shape!

You might want to read this explanation of the events your mention. To make a long story short, McIntyre and McKitrick made critical mistakes that exaggerated their findings (which were published in a social science journal that doesn't do peer review). Subsequent hockey stick graphs have been generated using the same data with different methods, different data with the same methods and different data with different methods.

Do people here really know that when they mod for false reasons, they're breaking the rules?
Just wondering.

You did a fine job. They are not aware that they are modding for false reasons, they just think you're crazy, welcome to the club. And they haven't read enough on the subject.

The Greenhouse Effect page at Wikipedia doesn't help much here. It canonizes Fourier as the effect's founding father but fails to mention -- as you have correctly tried to point out -- that he carried out experiments with 'real greenhouse' apparatus with a physical barrier, (correctly) identified convection as the heating mechanism yet also (incorrectly) envisioned there might be an atmospheric phenomenon that also acted as a true barrier. To discover this you must visit Fourier's own page and see that "Fourier concluded that gases in the atmosphere could form a stable barrier like the glass panes."

So to them there is only one Greenhouse Effect and your definition does not fit, so it's a 'taking the Lord's name in vain' kinda thing.

Fourier deserves no ire for this disproved hypothesis, though it does present a challenge to modern editors and mules of consensus: there are two Greenhouse Effects. To honor Dr. Seuss we'll call them Thing One (Fourier's greenhouse) and Thing Two (the re-radiation explanation).

Once upon a time in the dark age of science, January 24, 2005, the Greenhouse Effect Wiki page was short and sweet. Thing One and Thing Two had equal billing in the introduction, although Thing Two "is a matter of some dispute". Then a section "The natural greenhouse effect" which actually described Thing Two and a section "Real greenhouses" for Thing One.

But the "Real Greenhouses" section is undergoing revision. here is the first round of edits and the page as it was then. It features a link to the provocative page Bad Greenhouse which dismisses the term re-radiation as 'nonsense' from a thermodynamical viewpoint and other Crazy Talk.

The Wikipedia discussion pages of these and subsequent edits are interesting and read like a heated Slashdot discussion (on a good day): Talk2, Talk3, Talk4, Talk5, Talk6. Some even wanted to abolish Thing One, or re-state both as 'conflicting' hypotheses. When the dust clears Thing One must describe the greenhouse for which it was named. And it would be really embarrassing to admit in the 21st century that we don't know how a greenhouse works.

All in all I'm pretty comfortable with Wikipedia's definition of Thing One. Thing Two I still consider to be -- as the Wiki page said back in 2005, "a matter of some dispute". CO2 is rising sharply and temp not so much or at all, depending where you look, and how closely you examine the 'adjustments' that have been made. And there are mechanisms unexplored as I've pointed out in other threads ... but as yet these are cautious days for science. People are crowing and squawking about almost-infinitesimal delta in a very complex system.

Joseph Fourier may have nailed Thing One and only glimpsed Thing Two but he really knew his way around noise and how sligh

A better LIDAR sensor is needed. Something more like the Advanced Scientific Concepts flash LIDAR. Right now, it costs too much (about $100K) but that's because they're hand-made in Santa Barbara for DoD and space applications. It has custom ICs made in volumes of tens. Volume production would bring that way down. You don't get the full circle field of view of the Velodyne, so it may take multiple sensors.

To deal with rain and snow, you need "first and last" return data. This is used in air to ground sensing to sense both the top of tree cover and the ground underneath. With that, and a good frame rate, you'll be able to distinguish rain and snow noise from solid objects. You'll lose range in heavy rain and snow, and will have to slow down. That's OK; humans can't see through it either.

Radars can. What's Google doing on the radar front? Off the shelf automotive radars are getting pretty good. Modern millimeter radars can see pedestrians. The older units from the Grand Challenge days could only see car-sized obstacles, maybe motorcycles.

What sort of data do you think is available in emails. As far as data and methods for Mann's 1998/99 hockey stick graph it's available here and Mann has provided the link to the court.

But Mann - the scientist who warns us that global warming is real and dangerous based on a computer model - refuses to give out the computer code and data that he used to form his assertions. To me, this doesn't sound very scientific or very honest.

Exactly. But...well...I think he needs to work on hiding stuff. Because...I mean, whenever I try to hide something I don't make a website about what I'm trying to hide and post it on the internet: http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann...

Do you know how to use a search engine?

Almost all router bandwidth management is shit.

Bandwidth management schemes currently used by everything you mention are all base on rate limiting packet delivery based on some mythical QoS value, and they ignore the actual problem that the people who are using these things are attempting (and failing) to address.

The problem is that the point of a border routers is to hook a slower border uplink to a faster interior connection; on the other end of the slower uplink, you have a faster ISP data rate. In other words, you have a gigabit network in your house, and the ISP has a gigabit network at their DSLAM, but your DSL line sure as hell is *NOT* a gigabit link.

What that means is that software that attempts to "shape" packets ignores an upstream-downloads or a downstream-uploads ability to overwhelm the available packet buffers on the high speed side of the link when communicating to the low speed side of the link.

So you can start streaming a video down, and then start an FTP transfer, and your upstream router at the ISP is going to have its buffers full of untransmitted FTP download packets worth of data, instead of your streaming video data, and it doesn't matter how bitchy you are about letting those upstream FTP packets through your router on your downstream side of the link, it's not going to matter to the video stream, since all of the upstream router buffers that you want used for your video are already full of FTP data that you don't want to receive yet.

The correct thing to do is to have your border router lie about available TCP window size to the router on the other end, so that all intermediate routers between that router and the system transmitting the FTP packets in the first place also lie about how full the window is, and the intermediate routers don't end up with full input packet buffers with nowhere to send them in the first place.

Does your border router do this? No? Then your QoS software and AltQ and other "packet shaping" software is shit. Your upstream routers high speed input buffers are going to end up packed full of packets you want less, and you will be receiver live-locked and the packets that you *do* want won't get through to you because of that.

You can either believe this, or you can get a shitty router and not get the performance you expect as the QoS software fails to work.

Then you can read the Jeffrey Mogul paper from DEC Western Research Labs from 1997 here: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/v... ...after which, you should probably ask yourselves why CS students don't read research papers, and are still trying to solve problems which were understood 27 years ago, and more or less solved 17 years ago, but still have yet to make their way into a commercial operating system.

BTW: I also highly recommend the Peter Druschel/Guarav Banga paper from Rice University in 1996 on Lazy Receiver Processing, since most servers are still screwed by data buss bandwidth when it comes to getting more packets than they can deal with, either as a DOS technique against the server, or because they are simply overloaded. Most ethernet firmware is also shit unless it's been written to not transfer data unless you tell it it's OK, separately from the actual interrupt acknowledgement. If you're interested, that paper's here: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/v... and I expect that we will be discussing that problem in 2024 when someone decides it's actually a problem for them.

Almost all router bandwidth management is shit.

Bandwidth management schemes currently used by everything you mention are all base on rate limiting packet delivery based on some mythical QoS value, and they ignore the actual problem that the people who are using these things are attempting (and failing) to address.

The problem is that the point of a border routers is to hook a slower border uplink to a faster interior connection; on the other end of the slower uplink, you have a faster ISP data rate. In other words, you have a gigabit network in your house, and the ISP has a gigabit network at their DSLAM, but your DSL line sure as hell is *NOT* a gigabit link.

What that means is that software that attempts to "shape" packets ignores an upstream-downloads or a downstream-uploads ability to overwhelm the available packet buffers on the high speed side of the link when communicating to the low speed side of the link.

So you can start streaming a video down, and then start an FTP transfer, and your upstream router at the ISP is going to have its buffers full of untransmitted FTP download packets worth of data, instead of your streaming video data, and it doesn't matter how bitchy you are about letting those upstream FTP packets through your router on your downstream side of the link, it's not going to matter to the video stream, since all of the upstream router buffers that you want used for your video are already full of FTP data that you don't want to receive yet.

The correct thing to do is to have your border router lie about available TCP window size to the router on the other end, so that all intermediate routers between that router and the system transmitting the FTP packets in the first place also lie about how full the window is, and the intermediate routers don't end up with full input packet buffers with nowhere to send them in the first place.

Does your border router do this? No? Then your QoS software and AltQ and other "packet shaping" software is shit. Your upstream routers high speed input buffers are going to end up packed full of packets you want less, and you will be receiver live-locked and the packets that you *do* want won't get through to you because of that.

You can either believe this, or you can get a shitty router and not get the performance you expect as the QoS software fails to work.

Then you can read the Jeffrey Mogul paper from DEC Western Research Labs from 1997 here: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/v... ...after which, you should probably ask yourselves why CS students don't read research papers, and are still trying to solve problems which were understood 27 years ago, and more or less solved 17 years ago, but still have yet to make their way into a commercial operating system.

BTW: I also highly recommend the Peter Druschel/Guarav Banga paper from Rice University in 1996 on Lazy Receiver Processing, since most servers are still screwed by data buss bandwidth when it comes to getting more packets than they can deal with, either as a DOS technique against the server, or because they are simply overloaded. Most ethernet firmware is also shit unless it's been written to not transfer data unless you tell it it's OK, separately from the actual interrupt acknowledgement. If you're interested, that paper's here: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/v... and I expect that we will be discussing that problem in 2024 when someone decides it's actually a problem for them.

Fail. SSH has been researched and discovered to not work.

We monitored SSH logs to analyze user behavior when our system adminis- trators changed the SSH host key on a popular server within our department. The server’s public key had remained static for over two years and thus expected to be installed at most user’s machines. Over 70 users attempted to login over the server after the key change during the monitored period. We found that less than 10% of the users asked the administrators if there was a key change and none verified the actual key.

SSL is a hell of a lot better at stopping MITM attacks than anything else humanity has created. Certainly SSH does not even qualify.

Has it ever occurred to you that I don't keep a mountain of references for every little study I've seen in a book, in a library, on the odd web site, etc.? Maybe I should start running to Wikipedia and adding citations for facts not readily available from there so I can use them in debate.

The stock answer for "I didn't know that" is "you're making that up." Like how "Natural flavor" is the secretion from a raccoon's anal glands. People are like, "You're making that up, that's not true." This was even lamp shaded in an early episode of Red vs Blue, where Grif explains to Sarge that there's a big cat called a puma. "... You're makin' that up." "I'M TELLING YOU, IT'S A REAL ANIMAL!"

There are multiple studies showing that murder rates in states without capital punishment are lower than murder rates in states with capital punishment. These studies attempt to argue that capital punishment increases murder rates, i.e. arguing a causal relationship flowing from state executions to violent crime, rather than flowing from violent crime to state execution. But these studies don't adequately compare similar socio-economic environments; to do that, you must show a state that has abolished the death penalty, and the immediate effects in the next 2-4 years. Even that may not be enough, as social and economic factors change rather quickly in many places.

Then you have graphs like this, but with the long time scale and confounding factors the data is vulnerable to Simpson's Paradox and so this graph is somewhat misleading (false evidence does not support my argument because it can be dispelled).

Then there's scientific studies, showing that i.e. Rhode Island has abolished the death penalty twice, and always reinstated it because the murder rate immediately increased. The murder rate, of course, immediately decreased after reinstatement. Which was my original argument--citation granted. This one's actually legitimate and carries weight.

So again: if the socio-economic environment is such that the death penalty is the primary deterrent, then the death penalty is a deterrent. If the socio-economic environment is such that the death penalty is not the primary deterrent--that is, if capital crimes carry an inherent risk of fatality so high as to make state executions a significantly minor proportion of actual deaths experienced by criminals as consequence for their crimes--then it is insignificant and does not act as a deterrent. Apparently at the time Rhode Island attempted to abolish the death penalty people were more likely to die by state execution than by bullet-to-the-face while committing crimes that would get them executed.

OK then...

milliCent->Ditigal Gold currencies (eGold, e-Buillion)->Liberty Reserve Dollars-> NetBill->Bitcoin

The gizmo they're describing is for acoustic transmission along a single axis. i.e. you have a pipe between points A and B, and A can hear B but B can't hear A.

You can do the same with impedance changes if A and B are in different mediums. The impedance difference due to the density change causes asymmetrical transmission to reflection ratios (bottom two animations). Consequently, if you're underwater in a swimming pool, you can hear all the noise from people talking in the air. But if you're outside the water, you can't hear sound originating in the water.

So you're suggesting that we need to flood room A full of water so room B can't hear them?

I like the idea in the TFA better.

The gizmo they're describing is for acoustic transmission along a single axis. i.e. you have a pipe between points A and B, and A can hear B but B can't hear A.

You can do the same with impedance changes if A and B are in different mediums. The impedance difference due to the density change causes asymmetrical transmission to reflection ratios (bottom two animations). Consequently, if you're underwater in a swimming pool, you can hear all the noise from people talking in the air. But if you're outside the water, you can't hear sound originating in the water. (You can hear it a little, but nowhere near as well as sound from the air transmitted into the water.)

You can also do it with refraction changes if sound is allowed to propagate along two or more axes. The ocean creates a natural acoustic waveguide this way. If you're in the middle of the waveguide, you can easily hear things at the edge of the waveguide. Sound from the thing at the edge of the waveguide spreads radially, and consequently about half of it captured by the waveguide. Whereas sound from the middle of the waveguide reaches that point at the edge only at a very specific angle. Consequently the listener inside the waveguide gets greater amplification. (A conceptually easier example is a megaphone if you use it to try to communicate with someone standing far away. If you speak through it, all your acoustic energy is directed in one direction, before it reaches the end of the megaphone and is allowed to spread radially. Most of it continues in the direction you pointed the megaphone. If you listen through it though, the acoustic energy from the other person spreads radially first, then the tiny bit captured by the broad end of the megaphone is concentrated. Consequently the megaphone is much more effective as a speaking amplifier than it is as a listening amplifier.)

I don't think any of these methods allow for a perfect "one-way mirror" though, where someone at A can hear B, but B cannot hear anything from A.. I can see the device in TFA getting close. It uses moving air to guide sound one way - move the air faster than the speed of sound and in theory it can't go backwards. But I have to think there will be some sound transmission back along the stationary frame used to contain the moving air (not to mention in their device the air is moving in a circle).

If CO2 and water vapor did not cause the Earth to warm then liquid water would not exist on the Earth's surface. Any child can verify that CO2 absorbs radiation in a certain band with nothing more than a thermometer and glass container. A spectroscope would prove this to anyone's satisfaction. Any difference between incoming radiation and outgoing radiation must necessarily be measured as heat. If you increase the partial pressure (with regard to nitrogen and h20) of CO2 in any closed system then it will absorb more radiation in certain spectra that, again, your spectroscope can tell you.

Liquid water covers 70% of the globe, and with little provocation it will undergo a phase change to a gaseous state. The atmosphere can be considered to be saturated with water vapor, more or less beyond our ability to control. However, we can and have released gigatonnes of another substance, which happens to selectively absorb outgoing long-wave radiation. We have already increased the partial pressure of this gas in the atmosphere considerably and show no signs of stopping. Further information on radiative transfer in the atmosphere may be found here, including a history of discoveries related to the matter. Assuming that you're not fool enough to argue a physical phenomenon that again, can be detected by anyone, and measured with the simplest of laboratory equipment, one can ask what method of heat transfer you imagine would suffice to remove this excess heat?

The degree of warming, of course, is a complicated matter, and well beyond your ability to describe. However, you could probably, as also detailed on the aforementioned website, use a single-layer model to get an order-of-magnitude of the change. For more accurate calculations, you may consult the model and data from Mann et al, or read the IPCC summary. Or you could listen to your betters instead of people who are trying to confuse the scientific matter with political shit. The science is descriptive, not prescriptive -- argue about taxes and international policy all you like, but it has nothing to do with observations of the global carbon cycle and human effects on the latter.

For instance, it is observed that the Arctic, where I happen to live, is melting like gangbusters. We are losing on the order of a hundred cubic kilometers of glacial ice annually just in Alaska. Maybe you haven't noticed the warming where you live, but here's a big fuck you from someone whose life has been directly affected. You want your industry back? I want my glaciers back, and they were here first. More to the point, permafrost temperatures have been rising steadily, and perhaps you don't know what that is, or what it looks like when it melts, but I can assure you we will not be worrying about the emissions of the third world at that point.

It's hard to present contrary evidence if you can't get at and question the models or data.

Those who can't perform a simple Google search would be hard pressed to debate the science in any meaningful way (and should probably cease spewing BS to score political points). I found the code and data with a two minute search. - http://www.meteo.psu.edu/holoc...

Mann and others have still refused to disclose the details of their models

Complete nonsense! I found it with a two minute google search! http://www.meteo.psu.edu/holoc...

WTF Slashdot? Why am I logged in on all pages _except_ this one?!

Lutz Prechelt, "An empirical comparison of seven programming languages", 2000.

Lutz Prechelt, "Are scripting languages any good? A validation of Perl, Python, Rexx, and Tcl against C, C++, and Java", 2003.

Might be a bit off-topic, but when the system gets (for example) 5 answers from 5 different computers, how do they make sure that the program/computer that reads and verifies those 5 answers is correct and fault tolerant?

Don't know and don't know if that situation ever occurred. Any Shuttle computer systems experts out there?

In any case, here's a link to a paper titled, Redundancy Management Technique for Space Shuttle Computers

First link: "Despite this vaccine being hugely effective against B. pertussis, which was once the primary childhood killer, these data suggest that the vaccine may be contributing to the observed rise in whooping cough incidence over the last decade by promoting B. parapertussis infection." In other words, whooping cough vaccine against whooping virus (for which it was designed) may actually promote infection of a related but not identical virus. This does not say the vaccine promotes sickness.

Second link: "Despite widespread childhood vaccination against Bordetella pertussis, disease remains prevalent. It has been suggested that acellular vaccine may be less effective than previously believed. During a large outbreak, we examined the incidence of pertussis and effectiveness of vaccination in a well-vaccinated, well-defined community." In other words, the whooping cough vaccine may not last as long as thought. More boosters may be needed or a different vaccine may need to be developed. It says nothing about spreading sickness.

Third link: "Safety and shedding data from four clinical studies were included in the BLA supplement. Additionally, a publication with associated electronic datasets was submitted in support of a label claim regarding shedding in HIV positive subjects." In other words, it is shows the shedding rates of HIV infected subjects whose immune system is somewhat compromised, not the general population.

Fourth link: "RotaTeq rotavirus vaccine and vaccine-derived strains were detected actively in stool samples from 13 out of 61 (21.3%) infants having diarrhea within 2 weeks of rotavirus vaccination, and among three out of 460 (0.7%) cases with acute gastroenteritis captured via the Australian Rotavirus Surveillance Program. Six (37.5%) of these 16 vaccine-derived viral specimens were associated with a G1P[8] strain thought to be the result of genetic reassortment between two component RotaTeq strains. Although nearly half of these reassortant-associated cases had underlying medical conditions, such as severe combined immunodeficiency disorder, further study is needed to understand the relationship between shedding, viral reassortants and underlying medical conditions." So a sample size of 61 in which half the infants had other medical issues had samples of rotavirus. Again, the vaccine does not spread sickness.

Those were just the first four links. All of them say the same thing: vaccines are not 100% effective. But no scientists have ever claimed them to be. Each of the first three showed that in certain circumstances, the vaccine is not effective. In fact, the first link says that the Pertussis vaccine is not effective against another disease. Excuse for not being panicked about that.

No, it's not. *Your* argument is the incoherent one--and is refuted in http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.174.698&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Your statement is incorrect.

The difference between two unique individual humans

You don't even define how difference is measured. Your following sentence only holds water when you're measuring a single point of difference--but that's irrelevant to the topic. Multiple points of difference are highly correlated, and clusters DO show very clear separation in multidimensional space of differences that dwarfs intra-gender variations. You should have actually read the post I linked to. Edwards' paper completely destroys your statistical argument. "Human genetic diversity: Lewontin's fallacy". BioEssays 25 (8): 798–801. Full PDF at http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.174.698&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Ok so you add a unique hardware ID (burned into the card when its manufactured and unchangeable) and the data stored on the card is tied to it. If the card data is cloned, the card its cloned to wont have the correct ID and will fail to work.

Its not like the people cloning these cards to get free bus travel are going to be spending dollars on equipment that can somehow create cards with the correct unique ID for the cards they are copying. Plus, a cloned card wont have the correct transit company logos on it (unless you can replicate that too which also costs dollars to do properly) meaning inspectors or drivers looking to see your card (which happens on the transit network in my city which also has a card system) will see that its a fake.

How do you propose to practically achieve this "burned" ID?

How can you prevent the attacker from obtaining cards from a different manufacturer who doesn't do this "burning in" and lets the users to set any value in any stored field?

The whole aim of having the cards being "smart" is that they can be equipped with a protected private key that they don't allow to be read from the outside world and that these cards perform cryptographic signing internally, without letting any secret information about performed cryptography out.

That's also why there's so much effort put into making smart cards tamper-evident (see Design principles for Tamper-Resistant Smartcard Processors (1999)) and withstand electromagnetic eavesdropping (see ElectroMagnetic Analysis (EMA): Measures and Counter-measures for Smart Cards) - so that you can't just put a receiver close to them when a transaction is being performed and steal their private key.

As far as I understand, the flaws in various public transit card systems are mostly due to weak implementations of cryptography. Your proposed solution, on the other hand, is completely wide open to attacks, so it's much worse.

"Highly misleading. Rates on the "super wealthy" are far from historically low. The only people currently benefiting from historically low taxes are the poor. Taxes on everybody else are around "average" historical values: http://www.factcheck.org/2012/07/tax-facts-lowest-rates-in-30-years/ (and that article was before the December tax hike)"

You have cherry picked your timeline there my friend. I know for a fact, that corporate taxes were much higher in the 50s and this site agrees with me http://personal.psu.edu/sjh11/TCTaxBits/OtherTaxBits/TaxRates.shtml (to the tune of 90% corporate taxes, in what some white people call the golden age of american life). Taxing the rich, but especially corporations, is the way forward. Fix the loopholes in corporate tax, and make companies pay their fair share. We need to get out from under the market society, where wealth can buy anything and there is rampant inequality. (see http://blog.ted.com/2013/06/14/the-real-price-of-market-values-michael-sandel-at-tedglobal-2013/ for a newish highly topical ted talk about it)

Certain things like healthcare are a human right in most developed countries. As i understand it, the better solution of single payer healthcare was already shot down by american republicans, and obama and his right wing democrats. So this ACA is the best that the obstructionist republicans and not really leftist democrats could do to please their corporate masters.

Another good reason to up corporate taxes, take control away from the lobbyist's and corporate interests in washington. Hopefully you can agree that money should absolutely not be a part of political campaigns.

When I mentioned DNA from millenia ago, I was referring to scientists being able sequence DNA from the remains of dead, extinct animals (like the woolly mammoth genome). In the Science paper, they print the DNA onto a microchip which can be easily read out with standard DNA sequencing machines. Storing information in the DNA of a living organism would, of course, not work very well because of the low but significant error rate of DNA replication.

As far as I know most temperature proxies are done by the individual researchers and most of them are not associated with the CRU.

What did I say? "Handled, aggregated, and interpreted". I didn't say "done by". They aren't famous for researching and measuring temperature proxies (though their researchers do a bit of this), but rather for accumulating them into aggregate climate reconstructions.

Do you have any evidence that "most such temperature proxies have been handled, aggregated, interpreted by the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia" or is that just your biased opinion?

They have 150 years of instrumental measurements of surface temperatures. This is the primary link between modern climate observations and pre-industrial temperature proxies. Many climatologists still refer to standard CRU paleoclimate reconstructions like the Hadley Center/CRU series when calibrating their own temperature proxies or discussing climate phenomena in the industrial to modern period.

In addition, they have aggregated extensive collections of paleoclimate data.

In addition, this data has been processed and interpreted. There are an absurd degree of vagaries in how, when, and where the original data was collected. Various undesirable defects such as the urban heat island effect or local issues (permanent moving of weather stations from one location to a nearby but somewhat different location) can distort long temperature records.

These records are incorporated into a lot of research, for example, the famous Mann et al "hockey stick" paper which used "the collection of annual resolution dendroclimatic[eg, tree ring], ice core, ice melt, and long historical records used by Bradley and Jones" (Jones being the head of the CRU) and "Monthly instrumental land air and sea surface temperature grid-point data (Fig. 1b) from the period 1902-95" which also was provided by the same authors as before.

Here, both most of the pre-industrial records and the industrial era records were provided by CRU sources.

IPCC has often quoted such data sets and has CRU researchers on some of their committees.

There's a great deal of genuine complexity and nonuniformity in the data that the CRU collects. What they do has to be done in order to use this data effectively. But the point behind my original remark is that any bias in how the CRU does this work would affect a great deal of research and derivative models. I think it's actually happened, but YMMV. They are gatekeepers for significant parts of climatology and I think it's poor science to discount that risk.

Lavabit and silent circle inspired me to think about some kind of peer to peer distributed email system.

Although currently everyone can install an email server (e.g. there are several available in debian). It is not what would solve the problem. Not just because it requires technical expertise, but also because it requires too much dedication on your side to maintain your freshly installed server. Also to make sure it has outside access with SMTP port, and so on. Not mentioning that it needs about 100% uptime. Such solution is too much centralized.

I was thinking about p2p email more like this one which I googled right after I had this initial idea. This is a proof of concept so it can work.

Key features would be:
1) uses p2p distributed encrypted file system, like tahoe
2) each p2p node can act as email receiver/sender
3) to send email to someone you use nick@1.2.3.4 where 1.2.3.4 is any IP that is running p2pemail. Simplest would be 127.0.0.1 if you just run a p2pemail node yourself.
4) everyone can have p2pemail account, just connect via https to nearest p2pemail node. It can be running on your computer or anywhere else. Doesn't matter. This just requires setting up an account name on your side, and a lenghty password, which is also used as a sha256 seed for private key for encryption of your emails and also as a PGP signature for you emails.
5) PGP signing emails would be so easy, that it would be a new standard.
6) all encryption and decryption is done locally on your computer either in javascript or in your email client. Just make sure that your browser and computer are not compromised.
7) if any of p2pemail nodes are running compromised code (eg. like compromised tor nodes) they still cannot read your email, because they have no acces to your private key. The only hope they can have is to monitor when you are accessing your data, but only if a request to the compromised node is made.
8) even if huge NSA datacenter decided to store all p2pemail data, they still cannot read it, and have nobody to file a warrant to.

If we combined that with bitcoins we would get additional (optional) features:
9) buy storage with bitcoins, while buying decide how many copies of your data you want to have (can change this anytime later). Offer any price you want, lower bids might not be taken.
10) provide encrypted storage space and get paid. If you store multiple copies of same data (might be possible before p2pemail gets popular) ensure that at least it is on different physical locations, otherwise you might be compromising security
11) create whitelists with people from whom you want to receive email, add mandatory bitcoin fees if anyone not on the whitelist wants to send you email.
12) You can create various stages if whitelisting, depending on domains you can define different prices to receive email. Or you can say that first email is free for everyone, and each next will be paid or not depending on if you received spam. Or configure spamassasin to decide for you.

PROBLEM: where do my friends send email to?
ANSWER: your_nick@p2pemail.org/net/com/info (we need to register many domains, and use many IPs to resolve those dns-es)

PROBLEM: Will my address still be the same after long time?
ANSWER: your nick in p2pemail will be the same, tell your friends that if they cant send email (eg. govt seized all p2pemail domain names), then they have to find some p2pemail node. Google it, or install one themselves. If they can't do that, you can solve this by installing a node yourself, and making sure it has the same domain name all the time. Services like dyndns can help you with that.

well maybe that's just a pipe dream. But the proof of concept implementation that I linked above gives some hope. What do you think?

It is, of course, tempting to dismiss his extreme claims as some sort of mental aberration -- perhaps resulting from his having hit the jackpot with the sale of his company for, by some accounts, between $3B and $4B to one of the most prominent credit rating agencies in the world.

On the other hand, he did sell his company for between $3B and $B to one of the most prominent credit rating agencies in the world.

Moreover, if we give the initial statement in Clark's Laws any credence: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right.", RHN's age and the fact that he is commenting on his specialization should be given some weight.

With this in mind, I would ask you to review the linked presentation -- which I located at Sandia's website (and of which I recommend you commit to memory lest it disappear down the memory hole) -- made by RHN at Sandia in 2006. Note he proposes an "Extraction System Organization" with a budget rising to $300B/year by 2015.

In particular, I found this item interesting:

Collectors and Analysts have no need to know how extraction system works (this knowledge should be highly restricted) – users need only know extraction system’s capabilities and how to use it.

CAUTION: Some obviously psychotic individuals claim there to be a deep relationship between credit card companies and the surveillance state. They should be locked up for their own safety.

Also, universities and such have a good reason to not make an API for 3rd parties to query their databases

It's also been illegal in the US since FERPA passed in 1974.

The paper assumes "that in the 100 m sprint he is able to develop a constant horizontal force F0 during the whole race", fits an air drag formula to laser measurements of an actual race, and concludes that Bolt expends 81.58kJ of mechanical work during a 100m sprint lasting 9.58 seconds. That may sound OK on the face of it, but 81.58kJ/9.58s is about 8500W (11.5HP) - more than four times the 2000W instantaneous maximum power output of elite track sprint cyclists. OK, maybe you believe in the overwhelming superiority of runners over cyclists. In that case, consider the drag of a body traveling at sprinting speeds. According to this bicycle power calculator, a non-aerodynamic rider might use as much as 500W at the maximum speed attained by Bolt. It is simply not possible that a runner's drag would be 17 times greater than an upright cyclist with knobby tires. This seems to prove that the paper's main assumption is wrong.

So what is going on? Well, we can see that there is an incredibly good fit between experimental data and the model. Clearly a combination of linear and quadratic force terms make the equation fit. However, the obvious answer is that these terms must primarily influence the force the sprinter is able to exert as a function of velocity. As I said, I'm not much of a runner, but I distinctly recall running out of leg speed when I used to attempt to sprint. Bolt's advantage seems to have more to do with muscle speed than raw power.

The failure to discuss this glaring discrepancy suggests the paper should not have been accepted for publication in its current form.

* memory management is explicit [merriam-webster.com] -- what does this mean?

Quantifying the Performance of Garbage Collection vs. Explicit Memory Management
Automatic vs. Explicit Memory Management: Settling the debate

* deterministic [merriam-webster.com] -- what does this mean?

I thought it was self evident. Here is a discussion of the matter.

* endemic [merriam-webster.com] use of a garbage collector... -- what does this mean?

Pervasive would be a better word. Languages that make garbage collected allocations for most or all things. For example in Java, aside from primitives, all allocations conceptually occur on the a garbage collected heap.

reference-counted heap objects

Reference counting: counting the number of references to an object.
Heap: an arena of memory maintained by a memory allocator. Also CPUs typically have no knowledge of how software manages heaps. You may be thinking of virtual memory
Objects: object in the generic sense of some amount of memory managed on a heap. These lecture notes show the same usage. The editors of this page also use the word 'object' in exactly the same manner when discussing pointers. It's not that hard to follow.

Putting it together we have objects on a heap for which reference counts are maintained; reference-counted heap objects.

"exchange" heap -- what does this mean?
* "local" heap -- what does this mean?

The link I provide to Patrick Walton's blog would get you there. Also, there is documentation, Sorry if discussing a new programming language involves terms you haven't heard. Computing can be like that sometimes.

(note: there is only one "heap" on most CPU architectures, so now we have added abstraction)

Now you are definitely confusing heaps and virtual memory. There are usually many, possibly thousands of heaps on a system at any given time with many distinct implementations of which the CPU is entirely ignorant. Memory allocators and virtual memory are different things.

* via an "owned" pointer -- what does this mean?

Similar to a C++ auto_ptr or unique_ptr. Again, the link I provided would get you there.

* wild pointers -- what does this mean?

Dangling pointer and wild pointer are synonomous.

Use of the exchange heap is exceptional and explicit yet immediately available when necessary -- what does this mean?

I provided a link directly to a discussion of this.

Memory "management" is reduced to efficient stack pointer manipulation -- uhh, what? the language sits around modifying content at %esp and %ebp along with some offsets? sounds far from efficient)

Incrementing a decrementing stack pointer registers is very efficient. Offsets are computed at compile time and the instructions typically require one CPU cycle and no memory access, given a naive model of a CPU. These techniques are a ancient and ubiquitous. Sorry you weren't familiar with them.

or simple, deterministic destruction -- what does this mean?

Others seem

The danger is that they could think that their connection is somehow more secure than plaintext.

It is a danger *only* if the browser is giving some indication of security. If the browser does not give any indication or expectation of privacy with self signed certs then there is no danger. Most browsers already do not show the protocol being used for plaintext (no http// display).

You cannot safely fix this without determining user intent, and even the user can't usually be trusted to determine their intent.

You can safely fix it by not giving any change to normal unencrypted experience. If they intended to use HTTPS to get real security but instead were presented with a self-signed certificate, and the browser defaulted into plain text view (no ssl icon or indication of security) then the user does not need any extra warning. Of important note: This is already the default behavior if you try to use https on a website that does not support it like slashdot - the browser defaults to plain text view without any warning, any error. If the browsers were truly so worried about this problem as you claim, then there would also popup big scary messages instead of the silent redirection from https to http.

They shouldn't just continue on blithely unaware -- which is exactly what will happen if you treat it as a normal unencrypted connection.

As mentioned above, this is already the default if you punch in https on a website that does not support it. Unfortunately and in any case, research has shown repeatedly that people continue of anyway regardless (eg "Crying Wolf: An Empirical Study of SSL Warning Effectiveness"), which further strengthens the case for self signed certs being treated the same as plain text connections in every way.

At the end of the day, our data is being collected and stored en-mass. It is passing through unknown number of private companies like Booz Allen and other private third parties to the security apparatus, including unknown number of individuals who are all unaccountable in any meaningful way to how they use or abuse that data. The majority of internet traffic flows unencrypted, despite your claim that "no serious website will benefit at all from this, since they all can afford the small cost of a certificate". All the current extra "scary" warning on self signed certs is doing is effectively denying the larger part of internet traffic the ability to be encrypted - that is a much worse tradeoff than raising self signed certs to the level of plain text .

That is an "all or none" argument. If self signed certs look feel and behave the same as what unencrypted does now, then people have no reason to behave differently than they do with unencrypted. Sadly and as numerous researchers have shown (like this one - "Crying Wolf: An Empirical Study of SSL Warning Effectiveness") people quite happily transfer secure data over unencrypted connections in the current setup anyway. This further undermines your argument and the rational that treating self signed certs the same as plaintext is considered worse, especially given recent mass data passive collection revelations...

Here you go: http://lists.psu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind94&L=GOVDOC-L&P=R50365&1=GOVDOC-L&9=A&I=-3&J=on&d=No+Match%3BMatch%3BMatches&z=4

Bitcoin does not employ 'secure multiparty computation' in any part of its design

Bitcoin is a multiparty computation system. The fact that it does not build on previous work does not change what Bitcoin is, nor how it can be analyzed.

the concept of digital cash in cryptography this is also well defined

Yeah, and guess what? The security definitions of those systems assume a central bank that issues the money. You do not have to believe me; here, you can read the actual work on it:

http://rd.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F11889663_20

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.44.8279

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=5443458&tag=1

First, When posting off-topic, it's best to post anonymous to preserve your reputation. Thus why the AC posted that way.

Back on your topic. It's true that 'distribution' doesn't start at the plant and end at the wheels, though I'd say that for an EV it does tend to 'end at the wheels'. It's just that it gets very, very hairy once you start looking past the plant. Sure, you can analyze a specific source/plant/generation facility, but if you analyze a different one the numbers can be completely different. Even averages are hard to come by.

Are you looking at a solar plant or wind turbine? How much energy went into creating the system, how much do you expect to get out of it, what's that individual KwH's share?
What about Natural Gas? How much energy went into drilling for the NG, collecting and purifying it, and shipping it to the plant? 60% efficiency for the plant itself.
Coal? Most coal plants are located close to their mines for logistical reasons - it's more efficient to ship the electricity than to ship the coal. Still, mining and shipping of the coal needs to be accounted for. You're looking at 40-50% efficient for coal plants.
Nuclear? Mining and enrichment(if necessary) of the Uranium needs to be added in. 30-40% efficient.

Still, you contend that hydrocarbons are 'cheap to ship'. Well, coal isn't that cheap to ship due to the shear amount of it necessary. Natural gas either needs to be piped(and NG pipelines are expensive to run long distances), or it needs to be compressed to a liquid. This costs $1.50-$2 per mcf. This is significant, considering the wellhead price of $3 per mcf. Shipping runs $.30 per mcf.

Liquid fuels such as diesel and gasoline, of course, need to be extracted from a well, shipped as crude to a refinery, refined(~70% efficient), then shipped to the final destination. I think that you'd find that it's quite hilariously expensive from that perspective, in line with power plant costs.

The vast majority of real studies have figured that even if you use a relatively dirty coal plant for power that EVs still come out ahead energy wise due to the shear efficiency.

The grid is better than 90% efficient, on average, the charger is better than 90%, as is the battery and motor. You go beyond that if you still want to compare it to IC vehicles you have to look at energy losses in pumping out of the well, transporting to the refinery, then to the distribution point, etc...

It would take a lot of efficiency within the hydrocarbon supply chain, and a lot of inefficiency in the electric one, to make up for the difference between a ~73% efficient plant-wheel EV w/regenerative brakes vs the 20% efficient engine and 80% efficient transmission, with no regeneration of a gasoline engine.