Of course, it should be obvious that Watts is wrong just by even a rudimentary look at the surface warming trends. Notice where they're strongest, generally? Sparsely populated areas. We're supposed to believe that the extreme warming of Siberian or Canadian tundra is due to a "urban heat island effect" not visible in, for example, New York, Tokyo, London or Los Angeles?
From the press release (didn't you say you read it?):
Other findings include, but are not limited to:
* Poorly sited station trends are adjusted sharply upward, and well sited stations are adjusted upward to match the already-adjusted poor stations. * Well sited rural stations show a warming nearly three times greater after NOAA adjustment is applied.
There are examples of civil disobedience bringing about change. Women's suffrage and civil rights are good examples. But many, many more changes have been brought about by working within the system than by working against it.
Have you actually verified that? The only way to progress a society is to break existing laws. If no one ever does, the society becomes static. Behavior changes first, laws describing the changed behavior comes afterwards.
Agreed, that is something that they're rightfully getting bugged about over and over. So far I think the only thing they've said is that auditing would be a solution: https://forum.wuala.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=1207#p4894
No, it wasn't hacked, and that won't change just because you keep repeating it. If you don't select a bad password on purpose (LastPass rates it) you have nothing to fear from brute force tools. Rainbow tables don't help with services that understand salting - and LastPass most definitely know their stuff as compared to a lot of other services.
No LastPass accounts were compromised from the incident that _maybe_ happened. I fail to understand why you seem to purposely want to misrepresent the facts. Your two links have not supported your statements, at all.
LastPass + Wuala is still the best, and most secure, way to solve the question asked.
No, LastPass wasn't hacked (and just like Wuala your passwords are client sided encrypted and thus cannot be copied off LastPass' servers).
As to cloud vendors disappearing, sure, but they only need to stay up for a few weeks at the most after your own demise - after that the family has had plenty of time to make backups if needed.
Hmm. I'm not sure that's my takeaway after having read that whole list. On the contrary, I've experienced nothing in my life time that's as extreme as listed there having happened numerous times during the last few centuries.
I think I was after the anecdote vs data angle - although all the data we have that far back are anecdotes;)
I've been alive since the Eisenhower administration and I've never seen
Extreme weather events over the last 2000 years. "Happy" reading:
"462 A.D. The Black Sea froze completely"
"An extreme weather event took place in 535-536. The effects were widespread. It caused unseasonable weather, crop failures and famines worldwide."
"680 A.D. In England, there was famine from a drought that lasted for three years."
"In 1063, the River Thames in England was frozen over for thirteen weeks. All the rivers of the continent were frozen, and even south of the Alps, the Po River in northern Italy and many other streams were blocked by ice."
"1113 A.D. In England, it was 'so hot that grain, and some forests of wood, took fire.'"
"In 1125, excessive constant daily rains the whole summer in England. Hence the most terrible famine through the whole nation on man and beast. "
There's also a lack of Rackspace-blaming here. The hacking was discovered in progress, and Zhou asked Rackspace to terminate all logged in sessions - which they couldn't do (!). Thus they suspended all instances, which still did not stop the hacker from being able to delete them.
All consumer electronics become cheaper over time. Their value deflates. Your argument claims that no one would ever buy computers, since they could just wait and get more for their money tomorrow.
Deflation rewards those that buy what they need, now. Inflation rewards those that buy what they don't need, now.
Those saying storms will likely get more frequent and/or severe have theory on their side, but little/no data
They have a hypothesis, with no support in data. There are hypotheses that say that equalized temperature over the globe will lessen the intensity of storms as well (less severe fronts). Until we have more data, it's scientifically wrong to make claims either way.
(2) As a division within the Department of Commerce, NOAA is undoubtedly subject to various political pressures to toe the party line. That doesn't necessarily mean that their study is compromised, but I would want to see a confirming study from an independent group before I ascribe much weight to it.
Who's independent? JPL (below)? I'm not sure what you're getting at.
A likely source of the decrease is the change in measurement of MSLP with the cessation of routine aircraft reconnaissance in 1987. There is no significant trend in intense storms either before or after 1987 when the two periods are analyzed separately. - http://www.mdpi.com/2073-4433/3/1/124/pdf
A possible clue to the apparent discrepancy is that the increase in overall tornado reports roughly matches that of the U.S. population over this time, suggesting that the trend may be an artifact of greater tornado detection due to increases in population density, awareness of severe weather threats, and modern technological advances such as Doppler radar. At the current time, it is therefore not possible to anticipate even the sign of any climate change in tornado occurrence or strength. - NASA, same earthzine link as above.
I agree. Anyone who thinks Bitcoin is about "making money" should stay away. It's a monetary agent. It's as much for "making money" as using Western Union is, without anyone being able to say "no" to whom you want to send money.
I've used it to donate to Wikileaks, among other things (all legal, incredibly enough).
you can clearly see a gradual increase in the number of both hurricanes and tropical storms over the last hundred years
Due to humans seeing more of the world, humans expanding settlements over larger parts of the world and thus reporting of storms has increased. Not the actual number of storms.
A NOAA-led team of scientists has found that the apparent increase in the number of tropical storms and hurricanes since the late 19th and early 20th centuries is likely attributable to improvements in observational tools and analysis techniques that better detect short-lived storms.
it doesn't take a rocket scientist to correlate increased number of storms with increased damage, even if the individual storms aren't becoming more damaging, which I'll admit is a question still under some debate.
Now what do we say about correlation and causation?
A team of scientists have found that the economic damages from hurricanes have increased in the U.S. over time due to greater population, infrastructure, and wealth on the U.S. coastlines, and not to any spike in the number or intensity of hurricanes.
Why would you claim that when it's not anywhere near the truth? We have no problems with overpopulation on Earth. In fact, we could easily sustain a tenfold increase in numbers - although that's irrelevant. The rate of population increase has gone done over the last few decades and the medium UN projection is for us to never even reach 10 billion but to max out slightly below that in the ~2070 timeframe.
Overpopulation is not an issue. People who claim it is scare the crap out of me. What's the agenda?
Quantum computers speed up brute forcing of symmetric ciphers. But not dramatically so. If you use AES256 we're still talking "until the heat death of the universe" time spans for brute forcing.
In Transparency International's 2010 Corruption Perceptions Index all five Nordic countries were ranked among the 11 least corrupt of 178 evaluated countries
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, it should be obvious that Watts is wrong just by even a rudimentary look at the surface warming trends. Notice where they're strongest, generally? Sparsely populated areas. We're supposed to believe that the extreme warming of Siberian or Canadian tundra is due to a "urban heat island effect" not visible in, for example, New York, Tokyo, London or Los Angeles?
From the press release (didn't you say you read it?):
Other findings include, but are not limited to:
* Poorly sited station trends are adjusted sharply upward, and well sited stations are adjusted upward to match the already-adjusted poor stations.
* Well sited rural stations show a warming nearly three times greater after NOAA adjustment is applied.
The BEST study that made headlines all over the globe, including here on Slashdot just a few days ago, isn't peer reviewed yet either.
Both should thus be treated with the normal caveats for pre-prints.
There are examples of civil disobedience bringing about change. Women's suffrage and civil rights are good examples. But many, many more changes have been brought about by working within the system than by working against it.
Have you actually verified that? The only way to progress a society is to break existing laws. If no one ever does, the society becomes static. Behavior changes first, laws describing the changed behavior comes afterwards.
Try raising the sea level by a couple of hundred metres today, and see what happens.
Why?
The mean projection from the latest IPCC report is a few decimeters rise over this century. That's not much more than we've already seen last century.
No, but I know crypto. Salt protects against rainbow tables even when leaked.
Agreed, that is something that they're rightfully getting bugged about over and over. So far I think the only thing they've said is that auditing would be a solution: https://forum.wuala.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=1207#p4894
Fraunhofer's comments on cloud storage (includes Wuala):
http://wualablog.blogspot.se/2012/05/fraunhofer-study-on-cloud-storage.html
My trust comes from the things that are documented and that they're ... European. You'll find them (incl. the Cryptree paper) here: http://wualablog.blogspot.se/2011/05/wualas-encryption-revisited.html
(As to how much I trust them: That's where I back up my Bitcoin wallet)
No, it wasn't hacked, and that won't change just because you keep repeating it. If you don't select a bad password on purpose (LastPass rates it) you have nothing to fear from brute force tools. Rainbow tables don't help with services that understand salting - and LastPass most definitely know their stuff as compared to a lot of other services.
No LastPass accounts were compromised from the incident that _maybe_ happened. I fail to understand why you seem to purposely want to misrepresent the facts. Your two links have not supported your statements, at all.
LastPass + Wuala is still the best, and most secure, way to solve the question asked.
No, LastPass wasn't hacked (and just like Wuala your passwords are client sided encrypted and thus cannot be copied off LastPass' servers).
As to cloud vendors disappearing, sure, but they only need to stay up for a few weeks at the most after your own demise - after that the family has had plenty of time to make backups if needed.
Wuala - http://wuala.com/
Like Dropbox, but with actual security - i.e, client side encryption. You can also share information with groups of others etc.
LastPass - http://lastpass.com/
Solves all password problems, and all you have to make sure is that the master password is accessible after your death. Like, in your will.
My last name ends in 'berg' as well. It means 'mountain' in my native language. You'll find that to be quite common in northern Europe.
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=berg
(On the other hand, I'm not sure what you were getting at at all)
The fact that only the final assembly is being done in the US
I suggest reading the iFixIt article. It seems only two components are definitely non-US in origin.
Hmm. I'm not sure that's my takeaway after having read that whole list. On the contrary, I've experienced nothing in my life time that's as extreme as listed there having happened numerous times during the last few centuries.
I think I was after the anecdote vs data angle - although all the data we have that far back are anecdotes ;)
I've been alive since the Eisenhower administration and I've never seen
Extreme weather events over the last 2000 years. "Happy" reading:
"462 A.D. The Black Sea froze completely"
"An extreme weather event took place in 535-536. The effects were widespread. It caused unseasonable weather, crop failures and famines worldwide."
"680 A.D. In England, there was famine from a drought that lasted for three years."
"In 1063, the River Thames in England was frozen over for thirteen weeks. All the rivers of the continent were frozen, and even south of the Alps, the Po River in northern Italy and many other streams were blocked by ice."
"1113 A.D. In England, it was 'so hot that grain, and some forests of wood, took fire.'"
"In 1125, excessive constant daily rains the whole summer in England. Hence the most terrible famine through the whole nation on man and beast. "
http://www.breadandbutterscience.com/Weather.pdf
"stolen", really? :/
Now that would be interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EPICA_delta_D_plot.svg
There's also a lack of Rackspace-blaming here. The hacking was discovered in progress, and Zhou asked Rackspace to terminate all logged in sessions - which they couldn't do (!). Thus they suspended all instances, which still did not stop the hacker from being able to delete them.
That in itself is pretty amazing. In a bad way.
All consumer electronics become cheaper over time. Their value deflates. Your argument claims that no one would ever buy computers, since they could just wait and get more for their money tomorrow.
Deflation rewards those that buy what they need, now.
Inflation rewards those that buy what they don't need, now.
Those saying storms will likely get more frequent and/or severe have theory on their side, but little/no data
They have a hypothesis, with no support in data. There are hypotheses that say that equalized temperature over the globe will lessen the intensity of storms as well (less severe fronts). Until we have more data, it's scientifically wrong to make claims either way.
one of the four models examined (a respected model) predicts fewer strong hurricanes in a warmer world instead. - http://www.earthzine.org/2011/04/16/will-a-warmer-world-be-stormier/
The results suggest that storm-track intensity is not related in a simple way to global-mean surface temperature - http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/10/18/1011547107
Here's another way of extracting storm intensity values from a few decades back, by looking at damages: http://www.springerlink.com/content/v1851121221p0244/
(2) As a division within the Department of Commerce, NOAA is undoubtedly subject to various political pressures to toe the party line. That doesn't necessarily mean that their study is compromised, but I would want to see a confirming study from an independent group before I ascribe much weight to it.
Who's independent? JPL (below)? I'm not sure what you're getting at.
A likely source of the decrease is the change in measurement of MSLP with the cessation of
routine aircraft reconnaissance in 1987. There is no significant trend in intense storms either
before or after 1987 when the two periods are analyzed separately. - http://www.mdpi.com/2073-4433/3/1/124/pdf
A possible clue to the apparent discrepancy is that the increase in overall tornado reports roughly matches that of the U.S. population over this time, suggesting that the trend may be an artifact of greater tornado detection due to increases in population density, awareness of severe weather threats, and modern technological advances such as Doppler radar. At the current time, it is therefore not possible to anticipate even the sign of any climate change in tornado occurrence or strength. - NASA, same earthzine link as above.
Also, more discussion on reporting here: http://www.stanford.edu/~omramom/Diffenbaugh_Eos_08.pdf
My point is that we shouldn't make statements that do not accurately reflect the current state of science.
I agree. Anyone who thinks Bitcoin is about "making money" should stay away. It's a monetary agent. It's as much for "making money" as using Western Union is, without anyone being able to say "no" to whom you want to send money.
I've used it to donate to Wikileaks, among other things (all legal, incredibly enough).
If scientific data does not change your opinion, debate is futile. Do note my statements were well sourced.
you can clearly see a gradual increase in the number of both hurricanes and tropical storms over the last hundred years
Due to humans seeing more of the world, humans expanding settlements over larger parts of the world and thus reporting of storms has increased. Not the actual number of storms.
A NOAA-led team of scientists has found that the apparent increase in the number of tropical storms and hurricanes since the late 19th and early 20th centuries is likely attributable to improvements in observational tools and analysis techniques that better detect short-lived storms.
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2009/20090811_tropical.html
it doesn't take a rocket scientist to correlate increased number of storms with increased damage, even if the individual storms aren't becoming more damaging, which I'll admit is a question still under some debate.
Now what do we say about correlation and causation?
A team of scientists have found that the economic damages from hurricanes have increased in the U.S. over time due to greater population, infrastructure, and wealth on the U.S. coastlines, and not to any spike in the number or intensity of hurricanes.
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2008/20080222_hurricane.html
Sea levels are currently rising at about 1cm/year and accelerating
Why would you lie about something so easily disproven?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_sea_level_rise
(There's also no support in data for increased destruction from tornadoes and hurricanes, but I guess you knew that as well)
Overpopulation is certainly a huge problem
Why would you claim that when it's not anywhere near the truth? We have no problems with overpopulation on Earth. In fact, we could easily sustain a tenfold increase in numbers - although that's irrelevant. The rate of population increase has gone done over the last few decades and the medium UN projection is for us to never even reach 10 billion but to max out slightly below that in the ~2070 timeframe.
Overpopulation is not an issue. People who claim it is scare the crap out of me. What's the agenda?
Quantum computers speed up brute forcing of symmetric ciphers. But not dramatically so. If you use AES256 we're still talking "until the heat death of the universe" time spans for brute forcing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_size#Effect_of_quantum_computing_attacks_on_key_strength
Yes! Let's be more like Europe!
World Happiness report ranking:
1. Denmark
2. Finland
3. Norway
7. Sweden
And yes, us "socialist" Scandinavian/Nordic countries have perfectly healthy economies. And we would never accept your two party dictatorship.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/06/world-happiness-report-2012_n_1408787.html
No. Let's not.
Yeah well. How's that working out for you.
In Transparency International's 2010 Corruption Perceptions Index all five Nordic countries were ranked among the 11 least corrupt of 178 evaluated countries
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model
(United States: #24)