Just a wild guess, but it may have been using memory-mapped files for sharing data with other processes. If it was temporary data (i.e. a cache of some sort) and was never intended to be saved, then they may not have actually mapped a file, in which case they would have been using virtual memory, or as you call it, swap space. It's a fairly advanced technique and pretty complicated to get it right when not using an actual file, so I could imagine if you disabled virtual memory it would cause problems.
People need to need to realize that virtual memory is more than just a RAM overflow buffer. Modern OS's use it for moving idle process's memory onto disk, freeing RAM up to speed up program load times and the like, and it effectively expands the useable amount of RAM available. Programs can sit idle with their data "in memory" and ready for use, while the OS can remove the data out of physical RAM until it is actually needed. This makes RAM usage much more efficient and generally speeds up the machine unless you have significantly more RAM available than your system actually uses.
In other words, you'll never see a performance boost from turning off virtual memory, it doesn't make any sense why you would, unless your OS sucks at it (i.e. it moves data to cache that is regularly accessed). Also, if you are using a 32 bit OS with virtual memory off and regularly use 3 gigs of RAM, you probably crash a lot. The most useable physical RAM available in that setup is just over 3 gigs due to the 32-bit addressing limit and the needs of other devices to have physical address space, so with VM off you will get all sorts of lock-ups.
Many years ago it made sense to turn off virtual memory, because back in the days of windows 98 and 2000 and the like the process wasn't very refined. It is today, and if you see any change in performance after disabling virtual memory in any OS newer than WinXP sp2 (sorry, Windows is my metric for such things) it will almost certainly be a negative impact unless there are other very serious issues with your computer. This goes for pretty much every OS out there, if anyone is behind on this issue I'd expect it to be Linux, but I'd still be surprised if it was behind at all.
They also aren't quite as sensitive as the high-end standard Wacom tablets for many times the price.
Yeah, it's slick as hell, but as a graphic artist if you've already learned to separate your physical hand location from what your eye is looking at (i.e. watching a screen while drawing on a tablet), it doesn't seem like that big of an advantage at a massive cost.
If you're really cheap (relatively speaking) and enterprising you can actually make a Cintiq clone with an old LCD and an appropriately sized tablet (the drawing surface needs to be the same size as the LCD) for a lot less - though that will still set you back hundreds of dollars, and if you screw up you might as well have gone out and bought the Cintiq.
Note that I am not an artist, but my roommate is a helluva digital artist. All of my experience is second hand.
There is also the on-screen keyboard; I don't know if they have gotten any better in recent years, but if it is running Android it should be pretty good. Assuming the touch-screen is high enough quality, of course.
What's the point of a tablet with a keyboard? In my mind, that defeats the whole purpose. If it has a keybaord attached, it's not a tablet anymore, it's a laptop with a touchscreen.
You would use something like this while walking around and taking notes, which, if you've never tried it before, is very difficult to do with a laptop. Combine it with handwriting recognition technology, which is getting pretty good, and you've got a pretty damn awesome and versitile notepad - one with massive amounts of storage and infinitely more usefulness than a pad of paper.
There are also thousands of other niche applications that a tablet like this can and is used for. You could use an actual tablet like this for with spreadsheets and inventory-type software on the tablet, for example, and then either plug it in to a dock of some sort or just send the data via wi-fi to a standard desktop or laptop for further work. Using a notepad and pen you've still got to transcribe the information before you do anything with it. Field diagnostic software for industrial vehicles and heavy equipment is another great use for something like this. In other words, any application where a computer would be useful but sitting at a table with a keyboard and monitor is not possible or is inconvenient would be where you would use a tablet PC.
In other words, you would never use this as a replacement for a laptop. It's not something you'd be playing WoW on, and movies would be at the very edge of its usefullness. If you have no use for a pure tablet, why would you want one? And just because you don't see a use for it, doesn't mean other people are not desparate for a good, cheap tablet. If you want a laptop, buy a laptop. If you want a laptop with a touchscreen, buy a laptop with a touchscreen - though, if you've noticed, there aren't a whole lot of them around any more, and that's because they are not all that useful since you have a keyboard and mouse attached.
1) Current manufacturing process are struggling to get transistors any smaller than millions of molecules each, and Benzine, the molecule specifically used here, is not very big.
2) Any manufactured product using this discovery is yet to be invented. Such a product is still a decade or two away. In other words, nothing other than the existance of a molecular transister is a reality, and everything else is a possibility. Duh. "Interesting Possibilities" drive science, it's mostly what these guys look for. They leave actually producing things with their discoveries to engineers.
If you'd read the entire summary it would have answered your question: a decade or two.
This is the initial breakthrough discovery, a useable product will be a long way off. I think the summary underestimates the drive to maintain or beat Moore's Law a bit, and we'll see the molecular transistor in action in less than 20 but more than 10 years.
I hate to break it to you, but it could only be "vaporware" if they had actually announced a product.
This is what is commonly referred to as "scientific research". It will, in and of itself, never produce a product. However, what WILL happen is Bell Labs begins working on turning this accomplishment into a manufacturable product. As was noted in the article, this is probably still a decade or more away from reality.
When Bell scientists produced the first vacuum tube transistor in 1947, they didn't suddenly have super-computers in 1948. It took years of developement after that initial breakthrough to produce computers at a realistic price (millions of dollars at the time for less computing power than a $2 calculator).
The same thing will happen here, and in a decade or two our world will yet again be unrecognizeable from what it is today.
3. Never heard of this one before, and I can't find anything about it either way. It seems unlikely to be true since fluorescent lights put out more visible light and less "other" light than incandescent bulbs -- that's the very reason they are more efficient.
That's simply ignorance of how flourescent's work. The plasma in the flourescent bulb produces UV light pretty much exclusively. A coating of phosphors line the tubes which "flouresce" when hit by UV light, causing them to glow in the visible spectrum. That's why flourescent bulbs are never clear - you'd never see anything if they were, their light is invisible to us. Check the wikipedia entry for more about flourescence.
The glass tubes filter much, but not all, of the UV light that gets past the phosphorous coating.
There is a current cholesterol drug on the market that took 17 years to make it from concept to sellable product. If we started their patent clock from the day they applied (probably 10-12 years before they made it to market, in order to protect their investment), or if they had a 3 year limit, the drug would not be sold today because nobody would have bothered in the first place. They'd get a couple years of patent protection and then it's fair game, hardly enough to make the almost 20 years of work worth it.
To make inventions, particularly new drugs, happen you can't just give people enough to recoup their costs from inventing the thing. They need to see a significant return on their investment (double, triple the investment, at least) in order to make it worth it. The hope is that we are essentially paying them in advance for the next invention, while putting their inventions out there in great detail so new people can innovate based on what the original inventor designed.
That's the whole point of the patent system, to get the designs for those new methods and innovations out to the public. If they think they can make some great new use for it, wonderful! They pay the original guy a royalty and off they go!
I'm starting to believe the real problem is the buying and selling of patent rights. Not right to use, but ownership rights. There is a grey area where I think there is some justification for some companies to own patents that their employees produce, particularly if that were the entire purpose of their employment and it was spelled out in a contract well before the discovery was made, but I don't think the patents should be able to be sold to a third party that had no involvement in the original disocovery/innovation.
That would solve a lot of problems, I think, but certainly not all of them by any means.
I should clarify, synchronised clocks are very important - the clocks are very accurate relative to their speed, it's just that the speed causes the clock to run slower from the perception of an observer on earth.
GPS is glaring proof of general relativity - in fact without Einstein we would have figured it out as soon as we put satalites in orbit. That he was able to deduce it before then is simply amazing, and is a real testament to his genius.
For those of you who don't know, all the clocks in GPS satalites must be re-set daily in order for the positions to be accurate, because they run several seconds slower than the exact same clock on earth runs due to the fact that they are travelling faster in orbit than we are just spinning on the surface of the earth. For those of you unaware of how GPS works, it operates on timing the signals recieved from the GPS device to calculate distance, and 3 satalites with distances can then triangulate location. Accurate clocks are extremely important.
It was verified on the space shuttle, but GPS clock adjustments are a daily reminder of GR in action. I believe it is Specific Relativity that is still partially unverified or uncertain, something like that. I think it is Special Relativity that requires the gravity particle.
He also couldn't figure out how to tie his shoes, and his parents thought him mentally handicapped because he did not learn to speak until he was 11 or 12 years old. He also pretty much failed all of his math classes from the get-go. I don't recall if it got any better after he actually made it in to college.
Good thing we don't listen to idiots like THAT any more.
(5) http://www.sepp.org/publications/NIPCC_final.pdf where proxy data shows the global warming folks are seriously out to lunch The Heartland Institute? seriously? they are such a blatant shill for Big Oil and Big Business it's not funny.
Man, you were doing so well too, why do you have to finish with a classic logical fallacy? Just because Big Oil and Big Business might be behind them (as opposed to who, Big Environmentalism and Big Carbon Credit sellers?) does not mean any research they perform is wrong. If they are using standard, trusted scientific techniques for handling and verifying their data there is no reason to trust it less than anybody elses. And it is good to have them, because Big Oil and Big Business are going to ask different questions than a university researcher would apply for a grant to research.
One fact you may not know, is that "Big Oil" employs a large number of honest to god field scientists who are often far more qualified than their academic counterparts due to the vast amount of field studies they do. These are usually geologists and chemists, but their research experience kicks the pants off your average university research scientist. They may be collecting their data for a certain purpose (finding more oil), but they collect that data all over the world and it can be applied to many different areas of research.
Anyway, I find most of the rest of your post reasonable. You just flubbed point 5 pretty hard.
Al Gore also happens to be full of shit, and willing to use any piece of research - proven, disproven, or unconfirmed - to prove his point. Just look at his movie, it has been so punched full of holes it puts swiss cheese to shame. He also hasn't done a lick of studying on his own, he goes and picks out whatever research fits his agenda and flys that in his private jet around the world.
He also tells people to cut their consumption, reduce their carbon footprint, yadda yadda yadda, but his own carbon footprint (not counting his private jets, mind you) is 20-30 times higher than the average American's. I'd be surprised if he even recycles. Throw in his private jet rides - which are COMPLETELY unneccesary, going commercial would drastically cut the pollution his jets cause - and he is in a league of pollution few people in the world can touch.
And yet, he is the hero of environmental causes. Please. He's a hypocrite, through and through. He has an agenda, and he's using global warming as a tool. Anybody who takes him at face value is a fool.
Let him go chase down man-bear-pig and leave the rest of us alone.
That is not to say I am against conservation and caring for our planet, quite the opposite. I think we have the potential to do serious damage, and as we are the only creatures capable of consciously affecting the health of the entire planet we have a duty to take care of it. But people like Al Gore piss me off, and trying to portray him as someone who has "been studying and involved with global research since the late 1960's" is bullshit. He had a college class once, that's about all the studying he has done on the subject, and that is nothing like what scientists do when they study the climate. The rest has been agenda pushing via politics, regardless of what the actual research showed.
What's really funny is that 20-30 years ago the earth was apparently cooling for all the man-made reasons it is warming now.
What's really happening, is science evolves and as new data comes in the general accepted opinion changes from time to time. But when politicians and activists get along, the question is not "What is the truth?", the question becomes "What can I use to get my pet agenda accepted." This is why you see the exact same groups touting the exact same answers for a problem that has been re-identified over many decades.
There was a big stink when the hole in the Ozone Layer over Antarctica was huge, but nobody said a word when it shrunk back up and nearly disappeard. I'll bet most people think it's just getting bigger.
This is just another area where climate scientists got it wrong, changed their mind about the whole thing, and the rest of the world just pretends nothing changed.
Scientists aren't pushing Global Warming, activists are. Scientists are busy trying to figure out why, and whether or not it is a long term trend or a short term cycle. Nobody debates the earth is in a warming period, but a lot of people debate whether or not it will go back down on its own, and whether or not man is contributing more than their fair share to the problem. If anybody tries to tell you the debate is over, that should be a red flag that they are full of shit. We don't have 100% knowledge of what is happening, and until we do the debate will never be over. There are simply prevailing theories.
After this email scandal, a lot of people would disagree with you.
How do you know that what a climatologist tells you actually means anything in the long run? That was more my point. They can only guess what it means, how can politicians be so sure of what it means?
You know why, it's because they have an agenda, and "Global Warming" is a means to an end, just like "Global Cooling" was just a few decades ago. New research comes in, and scientific opinion changes, but the agenda never does. Hell look at China, the biggest polluter in the world - they were able to sign the Kyoto Treaty with an exemption that meant they did not have to lift a finger to reduce their own greenhouse gass emissions; they got a pass. If anybody actually tries to do something about the problem, groups like GreenPeace block them. Look at the guys who were trying to sequester atmospheric carbon by ocean seeding to boost sealife populations (by boosting plankton levels - the base of the sea food chain). They were planning to do this in areas where sea life has dropped in recent years - you'd think GreenPeace would be on board, but they managed to get them blocked at every port.
Obviously, GreenPeace isn't filled with scientists, they are activists who use climate science as a gun to hold to the head of as many people as they can. They also happen to be very selective about which science they use and which they conveniently ignore.
Al Gore, mister I-never-read-the-emails-but-I-know-there-is-nothing-misleading-in-them is a prime example of people who use good science in ways good science was never meant to be used.
Since I doubt you are actually reading the research yourself (my apologies if you are), you're actually trusting one of these guys over what some random dude on/. says.
Scientists are still viewed as a whole society, which they are - if only loosely.
We do the same thing with Economists, Politicians, Consumers, etc. It is people who fit a certain set of criteria, and often identify themselves as such.
Watch some TV for a little bit, and you'll hear all over the place "Scientists say..." this that and the other thing. Scientists are viewed as impartial researchers seeking the truth. If the start to be viewed as partial and manipulating data to manipulate the public, then scientists -EVERYWHERE- will be damaged for it.
Frankly, it is going to take years for the scientific community to fully recover from what these few piece of shit researchers were talking about doing.
Indeed, 20 years ago the big scare was "Global Cooling".
My how things change, why we're almost as hot as we were 5,000 years ago! What a disaster! Wait a sec, it used to be a lot hotter? Then it got colder? Odd, well obviously it will never get cold again, current trends (i.e. in the last 20 years) tell us so!
Frankly, the stuff we hear in the news is all the bullshit from science and none of the actual research. Scientists / climate modelers with the trendy viewpoint gets the most play, regardless of the fact that they dont' really know what it means going forward. They can only guess, just like the rest of us.
However, for a long time what the lay person thought when they heard "Scientist say X" was "Huh, that's pretty neat" or "Man, I need to change what I'm doing" etc. Most people recognize that science is not perfect, but most people also believe the science of today is better than the science of yesterday.
With the so-called "Climategate" (and why the fuck is everything compared to Watergate? They aren't even close to the same thing! anyway...), the water has been muddied, and just about everything a scientist says for the next few years will be taken with a much larger grain of salt. Now people think "Maybe the old science was better, and the new science has been twisted for personal agendas?"
It doesn't really matter that these scientists didn't actually manipulate the data - they were talking about doing it, and since it's the scientists themselves we trust as impartial researchers to give us sound data. If the scientists are untrustworthy, then the data is less trustworthy as well.
It isn't really a bad thing either, people are people, people have agendas, most scientists do good work without their political or social biases get in the way, but such biases will ALWAYS color the research a scientists does to some small degree. It is unavoidable, but if we recognize it we can put such biases in their proper place.
Lastly, scientists who discuss manipulating data, or who are caught purposefully manipulating data, should pretty much be ostricized from the scientific community if we are to restore faith in the community as a whole. Police yourselves, don't defend these assholes, and we'll all be better off.
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Just a wild guess, but it may have been using memory-mapped files for sharing data with other processes. If it was temporary data (i.e. a cache of some sort) and was never intended to be saved, then they may not have actually mapped a file, in which case they would have been using virtual memory, or as you call it, swap space. It's a fairly advanced technique and pretty complicated to get it right when not using an actual file, so I could imagine if you disabled virtual memory it would cause problems.
People need to need to realize that virtual memory is more than just a RAM overflow buffer. Modern OS's use it for moving idle process's memory onto disk, freeing RAM up to speed up program load times and the like, and it effectively expands the useable amount of RAM available. Programs can sit idle with their data "in memory" and ready for use, while the OS can remove the data out of physical RAM until it is actually needed. This makes RAM usage much more efficient and generally speeds up the machine unless you have significantly more RAM available than your system actually uses.
In other words, you'll never see a performance boost from turning off virtual memory, it doesn't make any sense why you would, unless your OS sucks at it (i.e. it moves data to cache that is regularly accessed). Also, if you are using a 32 bit OS with virtual memory off and regularly use 3 gigs of RAM, you probably crash a lot. The most useable physical RAM available in that setup is just over 3 gigs due to the 32-bit addressing limit and the needs of other devices to have physical address space, so with VM off you will get all sorts of lock-ups.
Many years ago it made sense to turn off virtual memory, because back in the days of windows 98 and 2000 and the like the process wasn't very refined. It is today, and if you see any change in performance after disabling virtual memory in any OS newer than WinXP sp2 (sorry, Windows is my metric for such things) it will almost certainly be a negative impact unless there are other very serious issues with your computer. This goes for pretty much every OS out there, if anyone is behind on this issue I'd expect it to be Linux, but I'd still be surprised if it was behind at all.
They also aren't quite as sensitive as the high-end standard Wacom tablets for many times the price.
Yeah, it's slick as hell, but as a graphic artist if you've already learned to separate your physical hand location from what your eye is looking at (i.e. watching a screen while drawing on a tablet), it doesn't seem like that big of an advantage at a massive cost.
If you're really cheap (relatively speaking) and enterprising you can actually make a Cintiq clone with an old LCD and an appropriately sized tablet (the drawing surface needs to be the same size as the LCD) for a lot less - though that will still set you back hundreds of dollars, and if you screw up you might as well have gone out and bought the Cintiq.
Note that I am not an artist, but my roommate is a helluva digital artist. All of my experience is second hand.
There is also the on-screen keyboard; I don't know if they have gotten any better in recent years, but if it is running Android it should be pretty good. Assuming the touch-screen is high enough quality, of course.
What's the point of a tablet with a keyboard? In my mind, that defeats the whole purpose. If it has a keybaord attached, it's not a tablet anymore, it's a laptop with a touchscreen.
You would use something like this while walking around and taking notes, which, if you've never tried it before, is very difficult to do with a laptop. Combine it with handwriting recognition technology, which is getting pretty good, and you've got a pretty damn awesome and versitile notepad - one with massive amounts of storage and infinitely more usefulness than a pad of paper.
There are also thousands of other niche applications that a tablet like this can and is used for. You could use an actual tablet like this for with spreadsheets and inventory-type software on the tablet, for example, and then either plug it in to a dock of some sort or just send the data via wi-fi to a standard desktop or laptop for further work. Using a notepad and pen you've still got to transcribe the information before you do anything with it. Field diagnostic software for industrial vehicles and heavy equipment is another great use for something like this. In other words, any application where a computer would be useful but sitting at a table with a keyboard and monitor is not possible or is inconvenient would be where you would use a tablet PC.
In other words, you would never use this as a replacement for a laptop. It's not something you'd be playing WoW on, and movies would be at the very edge of its usefullness. If you have no use for a pure tablet, why would you want one? And just because you don't see a use for it, doesn't mean other people are not desparate for a good, cheap tablet. If you want a laptop, buy a laptop. If you want a laptop with a touchscreen, buy a laptop with a touchscreen - though, if you've noticed, there aren't a whole lot of them around any more, and that's because they are not all that useful since you have a keyboard and mouse attached.
*Facepalm*
1) Current manufacturing process are struggling to get transistors any smaller than millions of molecules each, and Benzine, the molecule specifically used here, is not very big.
2) Any manufactured product using this discovery is yet to be invented. Such a product is still a decade or two away. In other words, nothing other than the existance of a molecular transister is a reality, and everything else is a possibility. Duh. "Interesting Possibilities" drive science, it's mostly what these guys look for. They leave actually producing things with their discoveries to engineers.
If you'd read the entire summary it would have answered your question: a decade or two.
This is the initial breakthrough discovery, a useable product will be a long way off. I think the summary underestimates the drive to maintain or beat Moore's Law a bit, and we'll see the molecular transistor in action in less than 20 but more than 10 years.
However, right now, it smells like vaporware.
I hate to break it to you, but it could only be "vaporware" if they had actually announced a product.
This is what is commonly referred to as "scientific research". It will, in and of itself, never produce a product. However, what WILL happen is Bell Labs begins working on turning this accomplishment into a manufacturable product. As was noted in the article, this is probably still a decade or more away from reality.
When Bell scientists produced the first vacuum tube transistor in 1947, they didn't suddenly have super-computers in 1948. It took years of developement after that initial breakthrough to produce computers at a realistic price (millions of dollars at the time for less computing power than a $2 calculator).
The same thing will happen here, and in a decade or two our world will yet again be unrecognizeable from what it is today.
As long as you're not eating broken lightbulbs, I'd say that a week's worth of tuna sandwiches is far, far worse for you.
But nowhere near as tasty!
3. Never heard of this one before, and I can't find anything about it either way. It seems unlikely to be true since fluorescent lights put out more visible light and less "other" light than incandescent bulbs -- that's the very reason they are more efficient.
That's simply ignorance of how flourescent's work. The plasma in the flourescent bulb produces UV light pretty much exclusively. A coating of phosphors line the tubes which "flouresce" when hit by UV light, causing them to glow in the visible spectrum. That's why flourescent bulbs are never clear - you'd never see anything if they were, their light is invisible to us. Check the wikipedia entry for more about flourescence.
The glass tubes filter much, but not all, of the UV light that gets past the phosphorous coating.
There is a current cholesterol drug on the market that took 17 years to make it from concept to sellable product. If we started their patent clock from the day they applied (probably 10-12 years before they made it to market, in order to protect their investment), or if they had a 3 year limit, the drug would not be sold today because nobody would have bothered in the first place. They'd get a couple years of patent protection and then it's fair game, hardly enough to make the almost 20 years of work worth it.
To make inventions, particularly new drugs, happen you can't just give people enough to recoup their costs from inventing the thing. They need to see a significant return on their investment (double, triple the investment, at least) in order to make it worth it. The hope is that we are essentially paying them in advance for the next invention, while putting their inventions out there in great detail so new people can innovate based on what the original inventor designed.
That's the whole point of the patent system, to get the designs for those new methods and innovations out to the public. If they think they can make some great new use for it, wonderful! They pay the original guy a royalty and off they go!
I'm starting to believe the real problem is the buying and selling of patent rights. Not right to use, but ownership rights. There is a grey area where I think there is some justification for some companies to own patents that their employees produce, particularly if that were the entire purpose of their employment and it was spelled out in a contract well before the discovery was made, but I don't think the patents should be able to be sold to a third party that had no involvement in the original disocovery/innovation.
That would solve a lot of problems, I think, but certainly not all of them by any means.
I think you missed the satire in the GP's post.
Maybe equal protection has nothing to do with it?
Since equal protection is in the Constitution, it certainly should have something to do with it.
Accurate clocks are extremely important.
I should clarify, synchronised clocks are very important - the clocks are very accurate relative to their speed, it's just that the speed causes the clock to run slower from the perception of an observer on earth.
GPS is glaring proof of general relativity - in fact without Einstein we would have figured it out as soon as we put satalites in orbit. That he was able to deduce it before then is simply amazing, and is a real testament to his genius.
For those of you who don't know, all the clocks in GPS satalites must be re-set daily in order for the positions to be accurate, because they run several seconds slower than the exact same clock on earth runs due to the fact that they are travelling faster in orbit than we are just spinning on the surface of the earth. For those of you unaware of how GPS works, it operates on timing the signals recieved from the GPS device to calculate distance, and 3 satalites with distances can then triangulate location. Accurate clocks are extremely important.
It was verified on the space shuttle, but GPS clock adjustments are a daily reminder of GR in action. I believe it is Specific Relativity that is still partially unverified or uncertain, something like that. I think it is Special Relativity that requires the gravity particle.
Anyway, GPS is GR in action, interesting stuff.
He also couldn't figure out how to tie his shoes, and his parents thought him mentally handicapped because he did not learn to speak until he was 11 or 12 years old. He also pretty much failed all of his math classes from the get-go. I don't recall if it got any better after he actually made it in to college.
Good thing we don't listen to idiots like THAT any more.
... and tell you about Xenu...
Damnit shut up already!! You don't talk about Xenu until you've got them on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars you moron!
Good hubbard, who trained you?
(5) http://www.sepp.org/publications/NIPCC_final.pdf where proxy data shows the global warming folks are seriously out to lunch
The Heartland Institute? seriously? they are such a blatant shill for Big Oil and Big Business it's not funny.
Man, you were doing so well too, why do you have to finish with a classic logical fallacy? Just because Big Oil and Big Business might be behind them (as opposed to who, Big Environmentalism and Big Carbon Credit sellers?) does not mean any research they perform is wrong. If they are using standard, trusted scientific techniques for handling and verifying their data there is no reason to trust it less than anybody elses. And it is good to have them, because Big Oil and Big Business are going to ask different questions than a university researcher would apply for a grant to research.
One fact you may not know, is that "Big Oil" employs a large number of honest to god field scientists who are often far more qualified than their academic counterparts due to the vast amount of field studies they do. These are usually geologists and chemists, but their research experience kicks the pants off your average university research scientist. They may be collecting their data for a certain purpose (finding more oil), but they collect that data all over the world and it can be applied to many different areas of research.
Anyway, I find most of the rest of your post reasonable. You just flubbed point 5 pretty hard.
Al Gore also happens to be full of shit, and willing to use any piece of research - proven, disproven, or unconfirmed - to prove his point. Just look at his movie, it has been so punched full of holes it puts swiss cheese to shame. He also hasn't done a lick of studying on his own, he goes and picks out whatever research fits his agenda and flys that in his private jet around the world.
He also tells people to cut their consumption, reduce their carbon footprint, yadda yadda yadda, but his own carbon footprint (not counting his private jets, mind you) is 20-30 times higher than the average American's. I'd be surprised if he even recycles. Throw in his private jet rides - which are COMPLETELY unneccesary, going commercial would drastically cut the pollution his jets cause - and he is in a league of pollution few people in the world can touch.
And yet, he is the hero of environmental causes. Please. He's a hypocrite, through and through. He has an agenda, and he's using global warming as a tool. Anybody who takes him at face value is a fool.
Let him go chase down man-bear-pig and leave the rest of us alone.
That is not to say I am against conservation and caring for our planet, quite the opposite. I think we have the potential to do serious damage, and as we are the only creatures capable of consciously affecting the health of the entire planet we have a duty to take care of it. But people like Al Gore piss me off, and trying to portray him as someone who has "been studying and involved with global research since the late 1960's" is bullshit. He had a college class once, that's about all the studying he has done on the subject, and that is nothing like what scientists do when they study the climate. The rest has been agenda pushing via politics, regardless of what the actual research showed.
What's really funny is that 20-30 years ago the earth was apparently cooling for all the man-made reasons it is warming now.
What's really happening, is science evolves and as new data comes in the general accepted opinion changes from time to time. But when politicians and activists get along, the question is not "What is the truth?", the question becomes "What can I use to get my pet agenda accepted." This is why you see the exact same groups touting the exact same answers for a problem that has been re-identified over many decades.
There was a big stink when the hole in the Ozone Layer over Antarctica was huge, but nobody said a word when it shrunk back up and nearly disappeard. I'll bet most people think it's just getting bigger.
This is just another area where climate scientists got it wrong, changed their mind about the whole thing, and the rest of the world just pretends nothing changed.
Scientists aren't pushing Global Warming, activists are. Scientists are busy trying to figure out why, and whether or not it is a long term trend or a short term cycle. Nobody debates the earth is in a warming period, but a lot of people debate whether or not it will go back down on its own, and whether or not man is contributing more than their fair share to the problem. If anybody tries to tell you the debate is over, that should be a red flag that they are full of shit. We don't have 100% knowledge of what is happening, and until we do the debate will never be over. There are simply prevailing theories.
After this email scandal, a lot of people would disagree with you.
How do you know that what a climatologist tells you actually means anything in the long run? That was more my point. They can only guess what it means, how can politicians be so sure of what it means?
You know why, it's because they have an agenda, and "Global Warming" is a means to an end, just like "Global Cooling" was just a few decades ago. New research comes in, and scientific opinion changes, but the agenda never does. Hell look at China, the biggest polluter in the world - they were able to sign the Kyoto Treaty with an exemption that meant they did not have to lift a finger to reduce their own greenhouse gass emissions; they got a pass. If anybody actually tries to do something about the problem, groups like GreenPeace block them. Look at the guys who were trying to sequester atmospheric carbon by ocean seeding to boost sealife populations (by boosting plankton levels - the base of the sea food chain). They were planning to do this in areas where sea life has dropped in recent years - you'd think GreenPeace would be on board, but they managed to get them blocked at every port.
Obviously, GreenPeace isn't filled with scientists, they are activists who use climate science as a gun to hold to the head of as many people as they can. They also happen to be very selective about which science they use and which they conveniently ignore.
Al Gore, mister I-never-read-the-emails-but-I-know-there-is-nothing-misleading-in-them is a prime example of people who use good science in ways good science was never meant to be used.
Since I doubt you are actually reading the research yourself (my apologies if you are), you're actually trusting one of these guys over what some random dude on /. says.
What's the fucking difference?
Scientists are still viewed as a whole society, which they are - if only loosely.
We do the same thing with Economists, Politicians, Consumers, etc. It is people who fit a certain set of criteria, and often identify themselves as such.
Watch some TV for a little bit, and you'll hear all over the place "Scientists say..." this that and the other thing. Scientists are viewed as impartial researchers seeking the truth. If the start to be viewed as partial and manipulating data to manipulate the public, then scientists -EVERYWHERE- will be damaged for it.
Frankly, it is going to take years for the scientific community to fully recover from what these few piece of shit researchers were talking about doing.
Apparently the numbers that were used have been verified as accurate.
So this event damage scientists in general, and climate scientists especially, but does not have a direct effect on the current climate data.
Indeed, 20 years ago the big scare was "Global Cooling".
My how things change, why we're almost as hot as we were 5,000 years ago! What a disaster! Wait a sec, it used to be a lot hotter? Then it got colder? Odd, well obviously it will never get cold again, current trends (i.e. in the last 20 years) tell us so!
Frankly, the stuff we hear in the news is all the bullshit from science and none of the actual research. Scientists / climate modelers with the trendy viewpoint gets the most play, regardless of the fact that they dont' really know what it means going forward. They can only guess, just like the rest of us.
However, for a long time what the lay person thought when they heard "Scientist say X" was "Huh, that's pretty neat" or "Man, I need to change what I'm doing" etc. Most people recognize that science is not perfect, but most people also believe the science of today is better than the science of yesterday.
With the so-called "Climategate" (and why the fuck is everything compared to Watergate? They aren't even close to the same thing! anyway...), the water has been muddied, and just about everything a scientist says for the next few years will be taken with a much larger grain of salt. Now people think "Maybe the old science was better, and the new science has been twisted for personal agendas?"
It doesn't really matter that these scientists didn't actually manipulate the data - they were talking about doing it, and since it's the scientists themselves we trust as impartial researchers to give us sound data. If the scientists are untrustworthy, then the data is less trustworthy as well.
It isn't really a bad thing either, people are people, people have agendas, most scientists do good work without their political or social biases get in the way, but such biases will ALWAYS color the research a scientists does to some small degree. It is unavoidable, but if we recognize it we can put such biases in their proper place.
Lastly, scientists who discuss manipulating data, or who are caught purposefully manipulating data, should pretty much be ostricized from the scientific community if we are to restore faith in the community as a whole. Police yourselves, don't defend these assholes, and we'll all be better off.