So as I have repeatedly suggested above in other sub-threads, visit AR5, chapter 9, and look at figure 9.8a. It directly compares CMIP5 to temperature back to 1870. The graph speaks for itself. Even the MME, which doesn't mean much of anything, spends roughly 90% of the time well above the actual temperature everywhere outside of the reference period, with a strong and increasing divergence starting around 15 years ago but with an equally impressive divergence that "erases" (sits well above) the temperature decrease and subsequent increase of the first half of the 20th century.
As for WWII influencing the climate -- measured CO_2 shows that the increase prior to the 1950s so small that it had at most a negligible impact on the climate. Again don't believe me -- look at the flatness of CMIP5 across the first half across the regions where it has strongly deviated from the actual temperature. That is "negligible impact".
First of all, I have endeavored to avoid snide remarks, and your reply is itself an avoidance of the issues. For one thing, so far I'm the only one that has actually proposed that anyone look at actual data, and have referenced AR5, figure 9.8 as a decent place to start (although I've also provided links to graphs in woodfortrees that anybody can generate and play with for themselves). You are not addressing the data, you are asserting that the science shows something, that the data shows something, without referencing either the data or what specifically you are referring to as "the science".
I am. The surface temperature data as presented in AR5 are not impressive evidence that the science, as represented by the general circulation models in CMIP5 that are really the sole basis for quantitative predictions of warming, is correct. I don't ask you to believe this because "scientists say so" or because there are Nobel prizes one way or the other at stake or because an entire field of science has to be overturned and this has never, ever happened before, but because if you look at the data and compare it to the predictions, the predictions suck. And figure 9.8a does not adequately represent how much they suck, because it is a single dimension of a multivariate model that predicts many dimensions of climate and deviation in additional dimensions simply adds to the suckiness. The spaghetti graph also hides the fact that some models in CMIP5 don't suck as much as others, but the models in CMIP5 that are on the way to major fail are still included in the MME mean. Or course if AR5 honestly presented each model in CMIP5, one at a time, against the actual climate data in many dimensions, a reader might be tempted to reject well over half of them in a rather pre-emptory fashion as failing a basic hypothesis test and what would that do to the mean prediction of climate sensitivity and the sense of disaster needed to motivate a claim against the entire disposable wealth of the planet for generations?
Drop it, of course. A lot. Drop it to make the science better agree with the data.
The question I'm raising is not whether or not anthropogenic warming exists. It is not about whether or not CO_2 is a greenhouse gas. As I noted elsewhere in this thread, I spend a lot of time trying to teach skeptics of the noisy but ignorant sort that the greenhouse effect is real and understandable. I can derive at least a few of the simple single layer models for it offhand on a piece of paper on demand (can you? or are you relying on what you are told, not what you know for yourself?) and I would bet that I'm one of the few people participating in the debate on/. that can. For what it is worth, I actually understand and have worked through a lot of atmospheric dynamics, both radiation coupled and convective. I could probably build a climate model myself from scratch, or could modify e.g. CAM to move it off of a silly lat/long tessellation and onto a rescalable icosahedral tessellation (for example), although that's the point where a hobby becomes serious work.
But it isn't about that. It is about whether or not the predictions of the GCMs that we will experience between 2 and 5C of total warming by 2100 are correct. It is about the possibility that humans could be causing some warming, but that the total warming produced by doubling CO_2 to 600 ppm could be no more than 1 to 1.5 C (and could be even less, or more). Note well that it is a simple fact that we are over 1/8 of the way to 2100 already and there has been no statistically significant warming in the 21st century so far. Every year that this persists increases the rate warming has to occur later to make up the difference. It is about whether James Hansen's public assertions that the oceans will rise between 1 and 5 meters -- yes, I've watched him assert a 5 meter rise as his personal opinion on TED talks, and folks, this is the ex-head of NASA GISS, the "father of
Not at all. First of all, I spend a considerable amount of time explaining the greenhouse effect to people that don't want to believe that it exists at all. I, on the other hand, can derive it at least in at the single layer model level such as the one laid out in Petty (a book that is sitting a few inches from my left elbow as I type this). If the climate had continued on the curves predicted by the GCMs, if the ocean was rising an inch a year, if the climate/temperature were completely flat before CO_2 started to increase and increased monotonically and consistently lagging CO_2 concentration, I'd very likely have a different stance than I do know, which is not, by the way, complete rejection of the catastrophic possibility but a simple downgrading of its probable truth pending some evidence that the planet is on a catastrophic climate trajectory. Now and ever, data talks, bullshit walks, because no, I do not take the GCM results terribly seriously a priori, perhaps because I have some idea of how complicated, nonlinear, and chaotic the problem is that they're trying to solve, how inadequate (and IMO insane) their spherical tessellation is, and because the GCMs were initialized/validated on monotonic data with an implicit hypothesis which is a serious mistake in any sort of predictive modeling computation. I actually think it is rather probable that the bulk of the GCMs contain a substantial warming bias and represent the wrong balance between CO_2 linked forcing, feedbacks, and natural variation. I actually think that a hell of a lot of the climate scientists who work on this are coming to the same conclusion, and you should note that AR5 backpedals relative to AR4 as a consequence. It doesn't backpedal enough, and everybody knows that as well, but at this point the words vested interest don't suffice to describe the situation. If the global average temperature doesn't start rising aggressively soon, there will be an even bigger global backlash than the one that has already begun, career enders for many, many of the participants. That's because this has never just been about the science -- it has been about the money and about a philosophy every bit as much. A premise of environmental science that those of us who grew up in the 60's, 70's, and 80's can appreciate is that humans are wrecking the environment with technology and overpopulation. Carbon dioxide makes it easy to avoid dealing with complexity and demonize civilization itself starting with its motive power: pure, inexpensive energy.
At the moment, based on the data, I am dubious that human generated CO_2 or CO_2 in general has more than a marginal impact on the global temperature. This is in accord with the physics, actually -- direct forcing is expected to be responsible for 1 to 1.5 C of warming (much of which has already occurred) by 2100 assuming we continue on to a full doubling of the pre-industrial base level of roughly 300 ppm. The feedbacks have been asserted to be strongly positive from the beginning, but it is precisely this assumption that the ongoing failure of the GCMs to predict the data that is being challenged. Total climate sensitivity is in full retreat at the moment as it should be in a Bayesian analysis of the prior assumptions of the GCMs relative to their failure. Basically, natural variability is likely to have been responsible for more than half of the observed late 20th century warming, and CO_2-driven forcing is thereby a much less important component determining the average surface temperature. A secondary point is that the feedbacks from e.g. water vapor are very likely wrong, and recently published papers are indicating possible reasons why -- the GCMs do not correctly capture the energy transport processes associated with e.g. thunderstorms.
This isn't terribly surprising -- it has long been known that our understanding of clouds and the water cycle is a weak point of the models, one that is amplified by the fact that most of the models run on an a
Or, I dunno, you could look at the data. Or for that matter, you could look at figure 9.8a of AR5, which has a typically nearly illegible spaghetti graph collapse of the data back to 1870 along with the MME mean, and you could estimate the p-value of the MME mean (meaningless as that is from the point of view of statistics) from the graph of the null hypothesis "the MME reflects the mean of climate models that accurately predict the real climate". It isn't just the divergence at the right (which is quite striking on this graph) but -- whaddya know, the MME mean diverges from the entire early 20th century warming as well, spends at best a tiny fraction of its time cooler than the actual climate and most of its time significantly warmer (as in the actual climate is on the envelope of the ensemble from which the mean is derived, which isn't a real ensemble as computational models are not iid samples from a distribution but it gives you some idea of how poorly the models themselves would fare individually on a hypothesis test). Note that I'll go easy here -- we can ignore all of the other dimensions where the predictions of climate models fail, or the fact that in a PPE run most of the climate models produces such a wide range of possible future climates (often including a few that hardly warm at all) that are all apparently accessible from the present that even tiny errors in the computation or the physics or the parameterization could easily shift the entire PPE around.
This is a tough question. In most of science, it is safest to assume that nature does the most probable thing, not the least probable thing. Maximum entropy/maximum likelihood. In most of science, if models diverge from nature, the models become suspect, not nature. Why, exactly, is it different in climate science? Could it be because there are trillions of dollars on the table, trillions that are only there if there is an emergency, trillions that the very energy companies that are reviled as being Evil and the secret source of funding any scientist identified as a "denier" are raking in by the billions? Who profits from higher gasoline prices, from higher prices for electricity produced by wind or solar power or for that matter, coal? What would prices in the energy market look like today if there had never been an IPCC asserting that human generated CO_2 was leading to a catastrophe, if Michael Mann had used (say) R instead of homebrew PCA software and wasn't part of a group trying to "erase the Medieval Warm period"?
Nahhh, humans never do anything for money. Only the noblest of motives. Unless we disagree with them, in which case they are obviously in the pay of Exxon because Exxon cares deeply about whether the gasoline they sell you is based on oil only, is E10, is E85, is E100 as long as they are selling it to you and they make a solid profit from it, ideally one artificially inflated by an artificially imposed perception of the scarcity of the resource.
As for the energy "encapsulated" in any given temperature increase -- you do know that the climate as reflected in global temperature varies, right? And that as far as we can tell from proxies other than Mann's tree rings and from historical evidence, it varies a rather lot, and often quite suddenly? And that it varied in this way long before humans had any possible proximate effect, to the point where the Little Ice Age was basically the coldest single episode of the entire Holocene interglacial post the Younger Dryas (and we do not know why it happened or why the Earth's climate started to recover from it after it happened)?
The Earth's climate system is apparently capable of the rapid uptake and release of huge amounts of energy -- as witness the whipsaw of ENSO forcing and identifiable volcanic cooling. But "huge amounts of energy" compared to what, exactly? The size and heat capacity of the system? I don't think so. If you plot that to scale, that is nearly flat from 1870 to the present, varying by l
What we haven't been doing since 1998 is warming, especially statistically significant warming. As I said, don't fight with me, fight with the authors of Chapter 9 in AR5. Obviously they acknowledge that there hasn't been any significant warming for roughly 16 years, as the title of Box 9.2 is "Climate Models and the Hiatus in Global Mean Surface Warming of the Past 15 Years" -- as of a year ago (they reference the lack of warming from 1998 to 2012 in HADCRUT4, which is now a lack of warming from 1998 to 2014 and counting, and similar things hold for the other major temperature indices). Obviously the authors of AR5 are all "deniers" because they feel the need to explain the fact that the general circulation models have significantly deviated from the actual climate for a period as long as the periods of actual warming visible in the 20th century.
If you bother to actually go out and grab AR5 to read what it actually says instead of what distortions of summaries of paraphrases might have said, you might stop by and read paragraphs 9.2.2.2 and 9.2.2.3. They are sublime. Basically they say "We have no defensible reason to think that the average of all of the climate models in CMIP5 has the slightest actual meaning, and we have excellent reasons not to just take the numerical average of their individual mean predictions with equal weight and to prune out the failing models, but we're going present the numerical average of all of the models, including the ones that are overtly failing, anyway".
Also, did you ever think that using a word like "denier" in an objective discussion of data labels you as somebody that views this as an us versus them issue, where anybody that doesn't agree with you cannot possibly have any sort of reason on their side? That sounds so... religious.
Here's a test. As a glance at the data I actually provide a link to above (data which is itself not exactly above reproach, but let's take HADCRUT4 as being at least a reasonably honest attempt to evaluate a global surface temperature anomaly even though they do not attempt to correct for e.g. UHI and hence almost certainly have a monotonic warming bias) clearly shows, the warming pre and post roughly 2000 (give or take a couple of years) is entirely different and the latter strongly deviates from the meaningless mean trajectory of the equally weighted CMIP5 models, which almost all run far too hot compared to measured reality. Two questions:
a) Obviously, if global temperatures had perfectly tracked the predictions of the models, we would have good reason to think that the models were working, or at least that any flaws in them were not yet revealed. Instead the models have deviated from the data almost from the minute they were released into the wild post the reference period where they were basically fit to a training set (a training set that just happened to embrace the only strong burst of warming seen in the second half of the 20th century, oops). In most areas of science a failure to predict the data is considered a good reason to decrease one's degree of belief that the model, or models, are correct. However sure you were that catastrophic anthropogenic warming was correct (say) ten years ago, any sort of Bayesian (or plain common sense) statistical analysis should make you less certain than you were then as the models that are really the sole basis for predictions of catastrophe fail to agree with the data.
Is this the case? Or are you even more certain of future catastrophe in spite of the lack of warming of e.g. the RSS dataset for 17 years, and all of the rest of the sets for intervals ranging from 14 to 16 years? If you are more certain, that's a sign of both religious belief and a certain amount of cognitive dissonance. You might want to consider whether your personal biases are coloring your judgment and your conclusions.
b) OK, so maybe you are less certain, maybe you aren't. However, certain or not, the data is flat to falling and lots of Real C
So Box 9.2 of AR5 in which they attempt to explain the 15 year (a year ago) "hiatus" is just describing just weather, not climate, because the general circulation models predicted 0.5 to 0.6 C warming over the same interval and they couldn't possibly be wrong, could they?
Also, if you are going to ignore the cooling/flattening associated with La Nina, perhaps we should ignore the one single solid burst of global warming in the latter 20th century in association with the 1997-1998 super El Nino as well. If you are going to assert that 15 years isn't statistically significant, perhaps we should ignore the single 15 year interval with significant warming in the latter half of the 20th century, especially since this 15 year stretch is surrounded by flat to descending stretches all the way back to 1944 on the left and flat to very weakly ascending stretches from 1998 to the present. All of which can easily be seen with your own eyes here:
... of the space aliens that are coming to take over the earth and set up a huge "meat" processing plant. First it is the phone lines and the copper cable. Next it will be the power lines -- all in the name of this fake "global warming" that is really caused by invisible heat rays beamed in from outer space. Then they will drop a neat pattern of small rocks from space down on the cell phone towers that might as well have "kick me" painted on them, electromagnetically speaking. Finally they will cut the optical fiber network and we'll all be isolated so they can come collect us one at a time to turn us into alien spam, and I don't mean of the internet sort.
Quick! They monitor all communications already and take action against any who dare oppose them! We must get the word out! I for one refuse to bow to our alien overlo
Well, not just THC or other cannibinoids. Antibiotics (that don't kill yeast, anyway). Other drugs. Gasoline. Biodiesel. Name your poison, find the gene sequence that can do it, splice it into yeast the way they are already doing it with so many other microorganisms (e.g. e. coli., chlorella, etc).
But (as a beer maker) -- yeast that synthesizes THC directly into the wort as it works, no actual hemp plants needed, no expensive grow lights, no hidden greenhouse or plot in the middle of the woods, no need to smoke or vaporize, no actual taste (compared to the already sublime taste of barley and hops) -- slightly scary idea, actually. And it would make it so VERY difficult to maintain the prohibition on cannibinoids. I've long wondered how long it will take for some enterprising molecular biologist to splice THC production into tomatoes or corn (where it might have an actual evolutionary advantage as a pest repellant!) but I never dreamed of brewer's yeast. Bread yeast is almost the same thing (very close cousins)! Bread will never be the same!
... with all of that skeptical insistence on the consideration of confounding explanations that might also be compatible with the data.
Or is the term "skeptical" politically incorrect at this point, since everybody knows that no real scientist would disagree with the consensus view that he or she is told all of the other scientists have?
To be honest, the really cool thing isn't (yet) the origin of the gravitational waves observed, it is the observation of gravitational waves at all. So far, that has eluded researchers working equally hard on directly measuring them. Regardless of their cause, I'm sure we'll learn some useful stuff when issues like this are worked out, and kudos still go to the scientists involved. All of the rest of us (politically correct or not) tend to be at least marginally skeptical of transluminal neutrinos and direct evidence for the big bang until the assertions stand the test of time, even as we agree that (if correct) they are awesome achievements.
There are a few minor practical problems with jet packs, or more properly, rocket packs as these devices are rockets, not turbojets, and it matters. It matters because there are some pretty fundamental limits on how much fuel/reaction mass a soldier can carry, especially when they have to carry other stuff like body armor, weapons, helmets, ammunition, food, shelter. Let's imagine that a stripped down soldier carrying little but armor, ammo and a rifle has a mass of 100 kilograms, 90 kilograms of which are the actual soldier. The rocket pack described above had a mass (full) of 57 kilograms and required the pilot to wear heat-protective clothing -- let's call it 60 kilograms. So wearing it and suitable armor and carrying weapons would be a roughly 70 kilogram burden on a 90 kilogram soldier, sort of like wearing a liquid nitrogen and hydrogen-peroxide-filled teen-ager on your shoulders as you wade into battle.
Sadly, this model would not work at all for the current rocket pack designs -- they provide less than 1500 N of thrust, and our soldier now has a weight of 1600 N. He would burn half of his fuel (give or take) waiting for the fuel levels in the tank to drop to where he could take off at all. The troop of rocket-equipped soldiers would all have to be "feather merchants" -- mass 70 kg or less -- and be armed with plastic squirt guns to get off of the ground at all.
Even with modern improvements, nobody has been able to increase flight time beyond around 30 seconds. The practical range in 30 seconds is perhaps 200 to 300 meters, at a height of ten meters -- a height great enough that it is already dangerous to fatal if one falls from it wearing an explosive, superheated massive outfit on your back. One cannot expect to increase their range or flight time because rockets eject mass backwards at high speed in order to provide thrust forward. The backward speed of the reaction mass is determined and limited by thermodynamics and chemistry and the need not to cook the soldier to extra crispy in a 30 second flight. There isn't that much variation in what's available to use for thrust in this context -- one could probably improve on the 740 C exhaust temperature, but only at the expense of adding a lot more shielding (and weight) and much more protective clothing.
The more interesting possibility is to build an actual jet pack -- jets of course use air for thrust mass and use fuel just to heat and compress the air, so they potentially have a much greater range. Small jet engines are mostly hobbyist stuff at the moment, but can produce order of a kilonewton of force at a mass cost of maybe 20 kilograms for the engine itself. One would need two, still further efficiency improvements, serious hearing protection, better shielding in the clothing (jet exhaust is still hotter than the "rocket" exhaust of hydrogen peroxide catalysis to water and oxygen). There is even military technology associated with cruise missiles that could be adapted.
We could learn another lesson from cruise missiles as well. Wings help. Wingsuits, for example, increase the glide ratio of skydiver to six. Hang gliders can achieve 17 to 20. Equipping a small hang glider with a small jet engine (one engineered to run without overheating for indefinite periods of time, unlike many of the powered hang glider engines currently available that tend to be based on two stroke chainsaw motors) could conceivably result in a wearable harness with a comparatively small wingspan in which a fully equipped soldier would have a range of tens of kilometers in tens of minutes at heights ranging from 10s of meters to a thousand meters or so. After powering up and attaining height, the engines could be shut off and the gliders could passively and silently descend from a height of a kilometer to a target 10 kilometers away.
The wings would have to be designed to be "compressible" to a comparatively small pack and quickly and easily erected into a structurally stable functional form, and would probably ma
That sounds like it could even be a business plan right there. The most sought after limo service in the world, as long as the people doing the hiring are rich, fat old persons who plan to be accompanied by poor, thin, young persons and as long as this isn't a service that is going to be run predominantly in Finland in the winter.
My own solution to the problem would be a large, beefy individual wearing a tuxedo who rides in the bus. If anyone takes out a camera, he says to them very politely "Hey, sorry, no cameras on the bus." If they ignore him, he or she (we mustn't be sexist) gently reaches out and crushes the camera with one hand (tattoo of "HELL" across the knuckles optional) and repeats "I'm sorry, did you hear me say 'No cameras'?" If they persist and pull out a cell phone, the individual crushes in the screen with their teeth and spits out small fragments of glass into their laps and says "I'm so sorry, that goes for cell phone cameras too". If they start to whine about their broken hardware, then depending on whether they are rock star or groupie they can either say "The management would like to present this fine line of meth-and-heroin laced cocaine for your pleasure" and try to distract them as well as drug them to where they will forget that the incident ever occurred, or just throw them out of the bus. Optionally, stopping the bus first.
If that isn't going to work for you, you could experiment with flooding the cabin with IR and/or UV light bright enough to saturate the camera. I'm guessing that camera electronics are broader band than the human eye, so that the cabin could conceivably have light so bright that it at least washes out and ruins any pictures taken with unprotected electronics while still being invisible to the human eye, and MAYBE while not being physically dangerous or bright enough to give the cabin occupants a suntan while they ride. The built in cameras would simply be wrapped in a suitable filter. Of course this solution will only last as long as it takes for somebody to figure out out, and paparazzi disguised as groupies are probably not the idiots they are pretending to be -- at that point they'll tape a filter onto their own cameras and then you are back to camera-crunching "hosts" along for the ride.
The theory doesn't insist on life -- it simply further develops a principle that actually goes back IIRC to work by Prigogene on self-organization in open system (although I'm too lazy to look it up to be certain) and that is observed in phenomena like the transition from conduction to turbulent convection. The interesting thing is extending it to the microscale and chemistry.
Also, what's wrong with the "and" operator here, as well? Given a temperature range and physical environment conducive of complex chemistry between free energy sources and free energy sinks, self-organization of the chemistry to optimize the generation of entropy, via a natural selection favoring those processes that are most efficient at transferring the energy from a rate limited source AND that possess a certain "stability" in the physical environment. Self-replicating processes might not always be the most efficient, even, but they might possess the stability needed, or not. Once you have the self-replication, though, you have a pathway to life. Urey-Miller isn't even contradictory of this -- the nucleation of the self-replicating processes itself likely requires random noise to generate the soup in which the requisite self-organizing chemistry can take place.
Indeed, many specific religions go two steps further even than that. They begin with a self-referential statement affirming the perfect truth of the religious scripture, which is true because it is part of the religious scripture. Then, as you say, anything that is contained in that religious scripture is perfectly true, by definition, no matter how apparently internally inconsistent (contradictions within the scripture), externally inconsistent (contradictions with simple matters of fact derived from reason and observation), morally inconsistent (contradictions with accepted morality, e.g. is or isn't slavery good, is marriage by rape and a payment of 50 shekels morally acceptable, is it morally just to slaughter Midianite women and children except for the young female virgins and to subject them to rape and slavery, should we kill old women accused of being witches given that there is no such thing as an actual witch).
Since some of these things offend mere common sense to an enormous extent, religion has invented "hermeneutics" and "exegesis" as complex forms of interpretation of scriptural text whose sole purpose is to reduce the extreme cognitive dissonance induced by trying to believe that A and Not A are simultaneously true when they happen to be written in a religious text. Doublethink is alive and well and living in a religion near you.
The second step that they add is that in ordinary discourse and the usual scientific investigative process that we used to systematically refine a consistent set of beliefs in reasonable agreement with evidence, the only penalties associated with being wrong are natural ones that consistently fit in with the general framework of the scientific worldview -- if you fail to believe that the law of gravitation will apply to you and step off of the roof of a tall building, it is likely to be the last experiment you ever perform (likely in a specific and defensible sense, since of course it might always be the case that you have been sprinkled with fairy dust or have accomplished a sufficiently strong belief in The Force that the force of gravity does not cause you to splatter at the bottom of a long drop, it has just never been observed to be the case and is hence very unlikely from a Bayesian point of view at least). In the religious worldview, however, there is an entire hidden world where things happen that we cannot observe but that are precisely and correctly delineated in the aforementioned scripture. It is a second issue because religion makes many pronouncements on matters that cannot ever be contradicted by experience -- indeed, it revels in this and claims it as its "higher" ground.
So when a divinely inspired, perfectly true (if only after massive "interpretation") religious scripture tells you that if you fail to believe that every word in that scripture that the scripture itself assures you is perfectly true is, in fact, true, you will be cast into a fiery pit so that your skin can be burned off of your living body and then instantly regrown to be burned off again, repeated to infinity and beyond, it is self-consistently guaranteed to be true. The Quran tells us so. The New Testament tells us so perhaps a bit less graphically. The general texts of Hinduism assure us that unbelievers who fail to obey its precepts will be reincarnated as intestinal parasites living in a dog or the like.
The core of most scripture-based religious belief is, in fact, supernatural posthumous extortion in the form of events that cannot ever be objectively verified but that are so extreme that they tempt even the rational to make Pascal's Wager, coupled with a system of equally unverifiable posthumous rewards for those who meekly acquiesce in the entire ball of scriptural wax and the consequent transfer of political power, social status, and wealth to the priesthood tasked with "interpreting" the very scriptures that, after all, are perfectly true. They say so, and if you don't believe (perhaps because yo
I completely agree. I tend to trust high end encryption because I know something about how difficult the problem of cracking a serious cipher with a large key is -- even brute force attacks simply aren't tenable for the good ones. 4096 bits is 2^4096 approx 10^400 permutations and 100 billion years with every atom in the visible Universe a computer still aren't enough. Of course this time can be substantially reduced if one discovers mathematical weaknesses in the encryption or if people do stupid things, but I think e.g. GPG and SSH are pretty reliable when implemented with large keys provided that you can trust your source for the software. SSL is also probably fine if you can trust your key servers and software. However, what NSA does have in abundance is talented crackers and lots of resources and access to federal warrants and even the freedom to proceed without warrants. The easy way to crack my ssh encrypted channel isn't to do a brute force attack on the data stream, it is to crack any of the systems on which I store public and private keypairs. The easy way to decrypt my gpg encrypted documents no matter how large a key I specify is to crack my system and do any of a dozen things -- monitor my keystrokes and steal my keys, issue a warrant forcing me to give up my keys (so I go to jail on contempt of court to rot forever without a trial if I fail to comply). The latter is what the FBI actually told me that they do in cases where there is probable cause, e.g. kiddy porn cases where somebody has a large encrypted file suspected of containing snuff films involving small children or the like (I've attended security conferences and chatted extensively with FBI'ers attending the same sessions in the past, although I don't mess with security at this level much any more).
But the only solution to the issue of privacy is to move BACK to this state of affairs. People have to have a real right to presume that their affairs and activities are private with the narrow exception of a search warrant granted on the basis of actual evidence and probable cause, sort of like it says in the constitution and its amendments.
Of course, we have to be willing to pay the price for this. That means that yeah, criminals and terrorists will succeed in concealing their affairs a lot more often. More of the innocent will die or be hurt in other ways. We cannot insist on having our privacy preserved and then bitch when the outcome of it is that a terrorist succeeds in nuking a city in a case where ignoring the privacy laws might have prevented it.
An alternative that might almost be more palatable would be to alter the laws to completely eliminate victimless crime and almost all moral crime, and indeed provide citizens with broad rights to completely freely choose their lifestyle and activities without their ability to seek employment or education being threatened. People conceal things that might be damaging, and one of the dangers of a police state is that so many things are illegal that "everybody" commits certain crimes, such as driving over the speed limit, driving with a blood alcohol that is just over the limit, bending things a bit on tax returns, engaging in sexual acts between consenting adults that are still technically against the laws of the state in which they live, smokes pot. This makes everybody vulnerable, and hence controllable. If we could actually trust the police not to abuse their power by eliminating most of the ways they COULD abuse their power, it would be a lot simpler to think about exceptions for exceptional risks.
Best of all, do both. Strong privacy laws, eliminate moral/victimless non-crimes and indeed establish legal protections for acting as one wishes to act outside of things that directly impact their employment or damage others, and sure, a tight system of well-regulated courts to handle the edge cases expeditiously and with the ability to seal the record of all discovery outside of a narrow window. Sort of like one imagines the framers of the constitution possibly intended. But then, they were all terrorists themselves.
Duke doesn't require you to authenticate your wireless device every time you connect, and I doubt most other Universities do either. It does require you to register your device MAC address (in an authenticated session). In fact, at this point Duke might require you to register wired addresses as well. Unregistered devices get kicked onto an anonymous network outside of a firewall, so visitors can get internet access without getting a "Duke" IP number. Duke controls its own outgoing PoP, of course, so it effectively logs all connections into and out of the Duke domain. As was pointed out above, this was more than likely the method used to identify the student at Harvard -- simply look for a Harvard IP that connected to a TOR server (and obviously, the toplevel TOR servers HAVE to be publicly known or nobody could connect to them) at the right time. That time AFAICT could not be delayed as some have suggested by TOR itself because TOR doesn't know what you are connecting to and has to treat all connections as though they might be real-time keystrokes. You'd need an anonymous, non-logging mail server with a delay on it on the far side to put any sort of substantial desynchronization between the connection and the mail message -- TOR itself cannot do it unless I'm still in error after reading about its architecture for a while.
Regardless, anyone even slightly 1337 would have at the very least gone to starbucks or an internet cafe and THEN used Tor, or bought a disposable USB wireless interface and used the anonymous network or (best) both. No possible way the FBI could have backtracked a cash purchased USB stick from a store with no video surveillance used from an alley next to (but not inside) a Panera Bread while wearing a wig and makeup one dons in the restroom of a giant mall connected to TOR, even if the NSA actually "volunteers" most of the toplevel TOR servers and half of the nodes and/or maintains a running map of all of the nodes (which I'm pretty sure they do regardless of how many they actually provide). I mean what's ten or twenty million dollars in hardware to the NSA, if it gives them a chance to monitor most of the traffic through a supposedly secure onion network? In the end, the Internet does not allow one anything like non-subvertable security of connections, only the data content sent over those connections. I doubt that even the NSA is likely to be able to decrypt e.g. 4096-bit key-secured traffic EXCEPT by obtaining the keys.
OK, so the warrant idea was dumb and I should have taken more time to learn how TOR worked. But now that I've taken the time, consider the possibility that the TOR server one connects to belongs in fact to the NSA or FBI in the first place, or that they simply implement their monitoring and control on the upstream ISP feeding those servers. Note that the content of the message is irrelevant -- all that mattered was that a Harvard IP connected to a TOR server in the right general timeframe. It's actually interesting to see how one can attack TOR (beyond the scope of TFA) -- own enough of the toplevel servers and you quickly get an idea of who is connecting from where (and start to build a pretty good map of the intermediate nodes). Own enough of the intermediate nodes, and you begin to have enough keys to be able to decrypt intermediate traffic (the French claim that the critical number is around 1/3) and can probably identify nearly all of the exit nodes. So the really big question is -- when you hook into TOR, are you really hooking into a network of nodes contributed by freedom-loving selfless volunteers who are willing to donate substantial network bandwidth and processing time, or are you hooking into a network of nodes thoughtfully provided by the NSA through numerous plausible looking fronts, saving everybody the trouble of implementing a man in the middle attack by BEING the man in the middle?
From what I could glean, it looks like there is a very good chance that TOR has been spanned by the NSA for quite a while now. And how could one even tell if this is the case? Because there is no central authority, AFAICT anybody can contribute resources and there is no way to check on whether the resources are being contributed by people who support the concept or are seeking to subvert it. The entire model relies on the intermediate nodes being MOSTLY trustworthy, and it is almost certainly not valid if any significant fraction of those nodes are subverted. It also relies to some extent on there being "many" connections to the servers at any given time and not "few", partly because again AFAICT there are only three node hops in between, and because the nodes do not know if the traffic is a block message or keystrokes in a real-time interface they cannot institute any sort of systematic delay. Few to few connections can easily be sorted out if owns enough of the servers and/or nodes to be able to create a reasonably accurate table of all of the nodes AND are presumed to have access to the intermediate routers or the routers feeding particular services. I couldn't do it, but the NSA and by extension the FBI? Deep pockets, very smart people.
Say what? Why not just buy a cheap USB wireless stick (paying cash, of course) and send the message from a car parked outside of Panera Bread (or any other unsecured wireless network) and then throw the stick into the nearest storm drain? The only thing you have to do is use a MAC address not already registered in Harvard's DHCP tables to the student. While a proper geek would then edit the internal logs of the laptop -- a REAL geek on their LINUX (or possibly Mac) laptop where the logs are in straight ASCII and bone simple to edit -- to remove all trace of the DHCP connection and the MAC address of the stick. But even if they didn't do this, the trail ends at Panera, assuming that the student didn't go inside and get his face captured on the store video or the like. They would have to examine the logs of every laptop on campus to find the perp otherwise, and of course they'd never get a judge to agree to that.
I'm tempted to joke around about how multiply stupid this Harvard kid was compared to Duke kids -- not only failing a course but too stupid to even send in an anonymized bomb threat by email in an untraceable way -- but sadly to my direct experience there are Duke students who are (or have been in the past) just as criminally dumb and this is a real tragedy and not really something to joke over. The poor kid is probably sitting around in a daze trying to figure out how what happened, how he went from being a struggling (but probably really pretty bright) student at one of the best universities in the world to being a plea-bargained felon working off a hundred-thousand dollar fine selling coffee and cleaning toilets at Starbucks with no hope of ever attending anything better than a community college for the rest of his or her life.
As I pointed out above, the OUTGOING timestamp had little to do with it.
a) FBI notes that Tor was used as the agent that sent the email. b) FBI has federal judge issue a warrant to Tor compelling them to provide the backtrace through Tor to the originating IP address. c) Tor complies. They literally have no choice. They are not attorneys or physicians -- there is nothing legally privileged in their business activity and this is a felony we're talking about. They might have helped without even being legally compelled as it never pays to get on the wrong side of the FBI and why in the world would they want to protect a felon? d) The student's laptop is almost certainly registered in Harvard's campus DHCP server for their trusted network (at Duke it certainly would be, I can't imagine Harvard being any different assuming their networking people are competent). This means that the University possesses a map between MAC address and individual students and their laptops. e-1) If the student used the trusted network, the timestamp on the original Tor connection request -- not the time they sent the message which is irrelevant -- would be used only to determine the connection between the trusted IP number used and the MAC address and hence the student. e-2) If the student used Harvard's anonymous/visitors wireless network (not likely, because the student was obviously neither a computer genius nor a rocket scientist intelligence-wise) they still use the log to connect IP number and MAC address and hence the student (they have to look in a different table for the latter, that's all). f) Student is confronted, told that if they don't confess they will spend several years making "friends" with a tattooed biker in for manufacturing meth, but that if they do they'll likely get suspended sentence and a fine large enough to pay for everybody's wasted time. Parents of student (paying Harvard's astronomical tuition already) balk at the thought of another 5 or 6 figure expense with no guarantee of victory and besides their idiot of a child is guilty as hell and everybody knows it. Confession. Expulsion. Probation. Counseling. Everybody is happy except for idiot child, who wonders how it could all have gone so bad, so quickly.
In all probability, Harvard's trusted wireless network requires registration of all connected hosts. It may have an anonymous network as well (Duke does), but in either case it is almost certain that they are logging every DHCP event AND have a registered match between the student's hardware and his MAC address. So once the FBI subpeona'd Tor to get the IP number that sent the threat, it was a done deal.
Of course, that doesn't mean that they'll get a conviction. Even though the evidence sounds like a smoking gun, it is really still circumstantial unless they get a confession. The DA has to prove that the student was in direct possession of the laptop at the time the message was sent. The DA has to prove that the student was in direct CONTROL of the laptop in question at the time the message was sent, since a REAL hacker could well have taken control of the laptop any one of a dozen ways to use it as a breakout for sending the message, and could even have deleted the tools they used to leave no traces. I'm guessing that they'll have to show that the student had a motive for sending the bomb threat to get out of the exam to partly counter this sort of defense, but then we're back to circumstantial -- perhaps the hacker was another student failing in the class who selected this laptop to hack just because it would keep anyone from following the trail further. All the defense attorney has to do is create reasonable doubt and communicate it effectively -- even with the match the FBI has more forensic work to do on the laptop to be able to address/counter these possibilities IF the student chooses to fight it.
More likely the student has already confessed, or will confess as part of a plea bargain (if they are in fact guilty). Nobody, especially the parents of the kid who would have to pay for it, will want to bring this to trial. He or they will likely get socked with a pretty hefty fine (to pay for the cost of the forensic work and bomb squad), three years probation with mandatory counseling/therapy, and (of course) will get kicked out of Harvard so hard that he bounces on the pavement all the way home, where his parents will very likely add their own line of punishment (such as working flipping burgers until he or she pays off the fine before resuming an education at the local community college). If the student was in academic difficulty because of bad habits or cognitive problems -- video gaming, drugs, partying constantly with too much alcohol, ADD with impulse control issues (all of which he might have to confess to just to get out of going to jail) there will be additional therapy there as well.
Obviously the kid wasn't a rocket scientist, Harvard or not. A proper geek would have paid cash for a throwaway USB wireless stick, used the anonymous wireless network at Panera Bread or Barnes and Noble from a car (to avoid time-logged in-store video surveillance) and then simply thrown the stick into a storm drain. A geek who wears pants with belt and suspenders would have booted their linux box into single user mode and edited the log files to remove all trace of both the IP number and MAC address of the USB stick. A serious geek would never have been caught. But then, a serious geek wouldn't have needed to delay the exam...
A manager went to the master programmer and showed him the requirements document for a new application. The manager asked the master: ``How long will it take to design this system if I assign five programmers to it?''
``It will take one year,'' said the master promptly.
``But we need this system immediately or even sooner! How long will it take if I assign ten programmers to it?''
The master programmer frowned. ``In that case, it will take two years.''
``And what if I assign a hundred programmers to it?''
The master programmer shrugged. ``Then the design will never be completed,'' he said.
Looking at the number of programmers in the room, that seems about right.
Slashdot Mirror
So as I have repeatedly suggested above in other sub-threads, visit AR5, chapter 9, and look at figure 9.8a. It directly compares CMIP5 to temperature back to 1870. The graph speaks for itself. Even the MME, which doesn't mean much of anything, spends roughly 90% of the time well above the actual temperature everywhere outside of the reference period, with a strong and increasing divergence starting around 15 years ago but with an equally impressive divergence that "erases" (sits well above) the temperature decrease and subsequent increase of the first half of the 20th century.
As for WWII influencing the climate -- measured CO_2 shows that the increase prior to the 1950s so small that it had at most a negligible impact on the climate. Again don't believe me -- look at the flatness of CMIP5 across the first half across the regions where it has strongly deviated from the actual temperature. That is "negligible impact".
rgb
First of all, I have endeavored to avoid snide remarks, and your reply is itself an avoidance of the issues. For one thing, so far I'm the only one that has actually proposed that anyone look at actual data, and have referenced AR5, figure 9.8 as a decent place to start (although I've also provided links to graphs in woodfortrees that anybody can generate and play with for themselves). You are not addressing the data, you are asserting that the science shows something, that the data shows something, without referencing either the data or what specifically you are referring to as "the science".
I am. The surface temperature data as presented in AR5 are not impressive evidence that the science, as represented by the general circulation models in CMIP5 that are really the sole basis for quantitative predictions of warming, is correct. I don't ask you to believe this because "scientists say so" or because there are Nobel prizes one way or the other at stake or because an entire field of science has to be overturned and this has never, ever happened before, but because if you look at the data and compare it to the predictions, the predictions suck. And figure 9.8a does not adequately represent how much they suck, because it is a single dimension of a multivariate model that predicts many dimensions of climate and deviation in additional dimensions simply adds to the suckiness. The spaghetti graph also hides the fact that some models in CMIP5 don't suck as much as others, but the models in CMIP5 that are on the way to major fail are still included in the MME mean. Or course if AR5 honestly presented each model in CMIP5, one at a time, against the actual climate data in many dimensions, a reader might be tempted to reject well over half of them in a rather pre-emptory fashion as failing a basic hypothesis test and what would that do to the mean prediction of climate sensitivity and the sense of disaster needed to motivate a claim against the entire disposable wealth of the planet for generations?
Drop it, of course. A lot. Drop it to make the science better agree with the data.
The question I'm raising is not whether or not anthropogenic warming exists. It is not about whether or not CO_2 is a greenhouse gas. As I noted elsewhere in this thread, I spend a lot of time trying to teach skeptics of the noisy but ignorant sort that the greenhouse effect is real and understandable. I can derive at least a few of the simple single layer models for it offhand on a piece of paper on demand (can you? or are you relying on what you are told, not what you know for yourself?) and I would bet that I'm one of the few people participating in the debate on /. that can. For what it is worth, I actually understand and have worked through a lot of atmospheric dynamics, both radiation coupled and convective. I could probably build a climate model myself from scratch, or could modify e.g. CAM to move it off of a silly lat/long tessellation and onto a rescalable icosahedral tessellation (for example), although that's the point where a hobby becomes serious work.
But it isn't about that. It is about whether or not the predictions of the GCMs that we will experience between 2 and 5C of total warming by 2100 are correct. It is about the possibility that humans could be causing some warming, but that the total warming produced by doubling CO_2 to 600 ppm could be no more than 1 to 1.5 C (and could be even less, or more). Note well that it is a simple fact that we are over 1/8 of the way to 2100 already and there has been no statistically significant warming in the 21st century so far. Every year that this persists increases the rate warming has to occur later to make up the difference. It is about whether James Hansen's public assertions that the oceans will rise between 1 and 5 meters -- yes, I've watched him assert a 5 meter rise as his personal opinion on TED talks, and folks, this is the ex-head of NASA GISS, the "father of
Not at all. First of all, I spend a considerable amount of time explaining the greenhouse effect to people that don't want to believe that it exists at all. I, on the other hand, can derive it at least in at the single layer model level such as the one laid out in Petty (a book that is sitting a few inches from my left elbow as I type this). If the climate had continued on the curves predicted by the GCMs, if the ocean was rising an inch a year, if the climate/temperature were completely flat before CO_2 started to increase and increased monotonically and consistently lagging CO_2 concentration, I'd very likely have a different stance than I do know, which is not, by the way, complete rejection of the catastrophic possibility but a simple downgrading of its probable truth pending some evidence that the planet is on a catastrophic climate trajectory. Now and ever, data talks, bullshit walks, because no, I do not take the GCM results terribly seriously a priori, perhaps because I have some idea of how complicated, nonlinear, and chaotic the problem is that they're trying to solve, how inadequate (and IMO insane) their spherical tessellation is, and because the GCMs were initialized/validated on monotonic data with an implicit hypothesis which is a serious mistake in any sort of predictive modeling computation. I actually think it is rather probable that the bulk of the GCMs contain a substantial warming bias and represent the wrong balance between CO_2 linked forcing, feedbacks, and natural variation. I actually think that a hell of a lot of the climate scientists who work on this are coming to the same conclusion, and you should note that AR5 backpedals relative to AR4 as a consequence. It doesn't backpedal enough, and everybody knows that as well, but at this point the words vested interest don't suffice to describe the situation. If the global average temperature doesn't start rising aggressively soon, there will be an even bigger global backlash than the one that has already begun, career enders for many, many of the participants. That's because this has never just been about the science -- it has been about the money and about a philosophy every bit as much. A premise of environmental science that those of us who grew up in the 60's, 70's, and 80's can appreciate is that humans are wrecking the environment with technology and overpopulation. Carbon dioxide makes it easy to avoid dealing with complexity and demonize civilization itself starting with its motive power: pure, inexpensive energy.
At the moment, based on the data, I am dubious that human generated CO_2 or CO_2 in general has more than a marginal impact on the global temperature. This is in accord with the physics, actually -- direct forcing is expected to be responsible for 1 to 1.5 C of warming (much of which has already occurred) by 2100 assuming we continue on to a full doubling of the pre-industrial base level of roughly 300 ppm. The feedbacks have been asserted to be strongly positive from the beginning, but it is precisely this assumption that the ongoing failure of the GCMs to predict the data that is being challenged. Total climate sensitivity is in full retreat at the moment as it should be in a Bayesian analysis of the prior assumptions of the GCMs relative to their failure. Basically, natural variability is likely to have been responsible for more than half of the observed late 20th century warming, and CO_2-driven forcing is thereby a much less important component determining the average surface temperature. A secondary point is that the feedbacks from e.g. water vapor are very likely wrong, and recently published papers are indicating possible reasons why -- the GCMs do not correctly capture the energy transport processes associated with e.g. thunderstorms.
This isn't terribly surprising -- it has long been known that our understanding of clouds and the water cycle is a weak point of the models, one that is amplified by the fact that most of the models run on an a
Or, I dunno, you could look at the data. Or for that matter, you could look at figure 9.8a of AR5, which has a typically nearly illegible spaghetti graph collapse of the data back to 1870 along with the MME mean, and you could estimate the p-value of the MME mean (meaningless as that is from the point of view of statistics) from the graph of the null hypothesis "the MME reflects the mean of climate models that accurately predict the real climate". It isn't just the divergence at the right (which is quite striking on this graph) but -- whaddya know, the MME mean diverges from the entire early 20th century warming as well, spends at best a tiny fraction of its time cooler than the actual climate and most of its time significantly warmer (as in the actual climate is on the envelope of the ensemble from which the mean is derived, which isn't a real ensemble as computational models are not iid samples from a distribution but it gives you some idea of how poorly the models themselves would fare individually on a hypothesis test). Note that I'll go easy here -- we can ignore all of the other dimensions where the predictions of climate models fail, or the fact that in a PPE run most of the climate models produces such a wide range of possible future climates (often including a few that hardly warm at all) that are all apparently accessible from the present that even tiny errors in the computation or the physics or the parameterization could easily shift the entire PPE around.
This is a tough question. In most of science, it is safest to assume that nature does the most probable thing, not the least probable thing. Maximum entropy/maximum likelihood. In most of science, if models diverge from nature, the models become suspect, not nature. Why, exactly, is it different in climate science? Could it be because there are trillions of dollars on the table, trillions that are only there if there is an emergency, trillions that the very energy companies that are reviled as being Evil and the secret source of funding any scientist identified as a "denier" are raking in by the billions? Who profits from higher gasoline prices, from higher prices for electricity produced by wind or solar power or for that matter, coal? What would prices in the energy market look like today if there had never been an IPCC asserting that human generated CO_2 was leading to a catastrophe, if Michael Mann had used (say) R instead of homebrew PCA software and wasn't part of a group trying to "erase the Medieval Warm period"?
Nahhh, humans never do anything for money. Only the noblest of motives. Unless we disagree with them, in which case they are obviously in the pay of Exxon because Exxon cares deeply about whether the gasoline they sell you is based on oil only, is E10, is E85, is E100 as long as they are selling it to you and they make a solid profit from it, ideally one artificially inflated by an artificially imposed perception of the scarcity of the resource.
As for the energy "encapsulated" in any given temperature increase -- you do know that the climate as reflected in global temperature varies, right? And that as far as we can tell from proxies other than Mann's tree rings and from historical evidence, it varies a rather lot, and often quite suddenly? And that it varied in this way long before humans had any possible proximate effect, to the point where the Little Ice Age was basically the coldest single episode of the entire Holocene interglacial post the Younger Dryas (and we do not know why it happened or why the Earth's climate started to recover from it after it happened)?
The Earth's climate system is apparently capable of the rapid uptake and release of huge amounts of energy -- as witness the whipsaw of ENSO forcing and identifiable volcanic cooling. But "huge amounts of energy" compared to what, exactly? The size and heat capacity of the system? I don't think so. If you plot that to scale, that is nearly flat from 1870 to the present, varying by l
What we haven't been doing since 1998 is warming, especially statistically significant warming. As I said, don't fight with me, fight with the authors of Chapter 9 in AR5. Obviously they acknowledge that there hasn't been any significant warming for roughly 16 years, as the title of Box 9.2 is "Climate Models and the Hiatus in Global Mean Surface Warming of the Past 15 Years" -- as of a year ago (they reference the lack of warming from 1998 to 2012 in HADCRUT4, which is now a lack of warming from 1998 to 2014 and counting, and similar things hold for the other major temperature indices). Obviously the authors of AR5 are all "deniers" because they feel the need to explain the fact that the general circulation models have significantly deviated from the actual climate for a period as long as the periods of actual warming visible in the 20th century.
If you bother to actually go out and grab AR5 to read what it actually says instead of what distortions of summaries of paraphrases might have said, you might stop by and read paragraphs 9.2.2.2 and 9.2.2.3. They are sublime. Basically they say "We have no defensible reason to think that the average of all of the climate models in CMIP5 has the slightest actual meaning, and we have excellent reasons not to just take the numerical average of their individual mean predictions with equal weight and to prune out the failing models, but we're going present the numerical average of all of the models, including the ones that are overtly failing, anyway".
Also, did you ever think that using a word like "denier" in an objective discussion of data labels you as somebody that views this as an us versus them issue, where anybody that doesn't agree with you cannot possibly have any sort of reason on their side? That sounds so ... religious.
Here's a test. As a glance at the data I actually provide a link to above (data which is itself not exactly above reproach, but let's take HADCRUT4 as being at least a reasonably honest attempt to evaluate a global surface temperature anomaly even though they do not attempt to correct for e.g. UHI and hence almost certainly have a monotonic warming bias) clearly shows, the warming pre and post roughly 2000 (give or take a couple of years) is entirely different and the latter strongly deviates from the meaningless mean trajectory of the equally weighted CMIP5 models, which almost all run far too hot compared to measured reality. Two questions:
a) Obviously, if global temperatures had perfectly tracked the predictions of the models, we would have good reason to think that the models were working, or at least that any flaws in them were not yet revealed. Instead the models have deviated from the data almost from the minute they were released into the wild post the reference period where they were basically fit to a training set (a training set that just happened to embrace the only strong burst of warming seen in the second half of the 20th century, oops). In most areas of science a failure to predict the data is considered a good reason to decrease one's degree of belief that the model, or models, are correct. However sure you were that catastrophic anthropogenic warming was correct (say) ten years ago, any sort of Bayesian (or plain common sense) statistical analysis should make you less certain than you were then as the models that are really the sole basis for predictions of catastrophe fail to agree with the data.
Is this the case? Or are you even more certain of future catastrophe in spite of the lack of warming of e.g. the RSS dataset for 17 years, and all of the rest of the sets for intervals ranging from 14 to 16 years? If you are more certain, that's a sign of both religious belief and a certain amount of cognitive dissonance. You might want to consider whether your personal biases are coloring your judgment and your conclusions.
b) OK, so maybe you are less certain, maybe you aren't. However, certain or not, the data is flat to falling and lots of Real C
So Box 9.2 of AR5 in which they attempt to explain the 15 year (a year ago) "hiatus" is just describing just weather, not climate, because the general circulation models predicted 0.5 to 0.6 C warming over the same interval and they couldn't possibly be wrong, could they?
Also, if you are going to ignore the cooling/flattening associated with La Nina, perhaps we should ignore the one single solid burst of global warming in the latter 20th century in association with the 1997-1998 super El Nino as well. If you are going to assert that 15 years isn't statistically significant, perhaps we should ignore the single 15 year interval with significant warming in the latter half of the 20th century, especially since this 15 year stretch is surrounded by flat to descending stretches all the way back to 1944 on the left and flat to very weakly ascending stretches from 1998 to the present. All of which can easily be seen with your own eyes here:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/pl...
That's what, 0.5 C of total warming over 75 years, almost all occurring in one single burst? Sort of like the 0.7 C of warming visible here:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/pl...
except that warming occurred without the benefit of significant CO_2 forcing and was much more uniform.
rgb
... of the space aliens that are coming to take over the earth and set up a huge "meat" processing plant. First it is the phone lines and the copper cable. Next it will be the power lines -- all in the name of this fake "global warming" that is really caused by invisible heat rays beamed in from outer space. Then they will drop a neat pattern of small rocks from space down on the cell phone towers that might as well have "kick me" painted on them, electromagnetically speaking. Finally they will cut the optical fiber network and we'll all be isolated so they can come collect us one at a time to turn us into alien spam, and I don't mean of the internet sort.
Quick! They monitor all communications already and take action against any who dare oppose them! We must get the word out! I for one refuse to bow to our alien overlo
Well, not just THC or other cannibinoids. Antibiotics (that don't kill yeast, anyway). Other drugs. Gasoline. Biodiesel. Name your poison, find the gene sequence that can do it, splice it into yeast the way they are already doing it with so many other microorganisms (e.g. e. coli., chlorella, etc).
But (as a beer maker) -- yeast that synthesizes THC directly into the wort as it works, no actual hemp plants needed, no expensive grow lights, no hidden greenhouse or plot in the middle of the woods, no need to smoke or vaporize, no actual taste (compared to the already sublime taste of barley and hops) -- slightly scary idea, actually. And it would make it so VERY difficult to maintain the prohibition on cannibinoids. I've long wondered how long it will take for some enterprising molecular biologist to splice THC production into tomatoes or corn (where it might have an actual evolutionary advantage as a pest repellant!) but I never dreamed of brewer's yeast. Bread yeast is almost the same thing (very close cousins)! Bread will never be the same!
rgb
... with all of that skeptical insistence on the consideration of confounding explanations that might also be compatible with the data.
Or is the term "skeptical" politically incorrect at this point, since everybody knows that no real scientist would disagree with the consensus view that he or she is told all of the other scientists have?
To be honest, the really cool thing isn't (yet) the origin of the gravitational waves observed, it is the observation of gravitational waves at all. So far, that has eluded researchers working equally hard on directly measuring them. Regardless of their cause, I'm sure we'll learn some useful stuff when issues like this are worked out, and kudos still go to the scientists involved. All of the rest of us (politically correct or not) tend to be at least marginally skeptical of transluminal neutrinos and direct evidence for the big bang until the assertions stand the test of time, even as we agree that (if correct) they are awesome achievements.
rgb
You mean several years after the average temperature flattened out completely?
rgb
There are a few minor practical problems with jet packs, or more properly, rocket packs as these devices are rockets, not turbojets, and it matters. It matters because there are some pretty fundamental limits on how much fuel/reaction mass a soldier can carry, especially when they have to carry other stuff like body armor, weapons, helmets, ammunition, food, shelter. Let's imagine that a stripped down soldier carrying little but armor, ammo and a rifle has a mass of 100 kilograms, 90 kilograms of which are the actual soldier. The rocket pack described above had a mass (full) of 57 kilograms and required the pilot to wear heat-protective clothing -- let's call it 60 kilograms. So wearing it and suitable armor and carrying weapons would be a roughly 70 kilogram burden on a 90 kilogram soldier, sort of like wearing a liquid nitrogen and hydrogen-peroxide-filled teen-ager on your shoulders as you wade into battle.
Sadly, this model would not work at all for the current rocket pack designs -- they provide less than 1500 N of thrust, and our soldier now has a weight of 1600 N. He would burn half of his fuel (give or take) waiting for the fuel levels in the tank to drop to where he could take off at all. The troop of rocket-equipped soldiers would all have to be "feather merchants" -- mass 70 kg or less -- and be armed with plastic squirt guns to get off of the ground at all.
Even with modern improvements, nobody has been able to increase flight time beyond around 30 seconds. The practical range in 30 seconds is perhaps 200 to 300 meters, at a height of ten meters -- a height great enough that it is already dangerous to fatal if one falls from it wearing an explosive, superheated massive outfit on your back. One cannot expect to increase their range or flight time because rockets eject mass backwards at high speed in order to provide thrust forward. The backward speed of the reaction mass is determined and limited by thermodynamics and chemistry and the need not to cook the soldier to extra crispy in a 30 second flight. There isn't that much variation in what's available to use for thrust in this context -- one could probably improve on the 740 C exhaust temperature, but only at the expense of adding a lot more shielding (and weight) and much more protective clothing.
The more interesting possibility is to build an actual jet pack -- jets of course use air for thrust mass and use fuel just to heat and compress the air, so they potentially have a much greater range. Small jet engines are mostly hobbyist stuff at the moment, but can produce order of a kilonewton of force at a mass cost of maybe 20 kilograms for the engine itself. One would need two, still further efficiency improvements, serious hearing protection, better shielding in the clothing (jet exhaust is still hotter than the "rocket" exhaust of hydrogen peroxide catalysis to water and oxygen). There is even military technology associated with cruise missiles that could be adapted.
We could learn another lesson from cruise missiles as well. Wings help. Wingsuits, for example, increase the glide ratio of skydiver to six. Hang gliders can achieve 17 to 20. Equipping a small hang glider with a small jet engine (one engineered to run without overheating for indefinite periods of time, unlike many of the powered hang glider engines currently available that tend to be based on two stroke chainsaw motors) could conceivably result in a wearable harness with a comparatively small wingspan in which a fully equipped soldier would have a range of tens of kilometers in tens of minutes at heights ranging from 10s of meters to a thousand meters or so. After powering up and attaining height, the engines could be shut off and the gliders could passively and silently descend from a height of a kilometer to a target 10 kilometers away.
The wings would have to be designed to be "compressible" to a comparatively small pack and quickly and easily erected into a structurally stable functional form, and would probably ma
or let them into the limo only if they are naked.
That sounds like it could even be a business plan right there. The most sought after limo service in the world, as long as the people doing the hiring are rich, fat old persons who plan to be accompanied by poor, thin, young persons and as long as this isn't a service that is going to be run predominantly in Finland in the winter.
rgb
My own solution to the problem would be a large, beefy individual wearing a tuxedo who rides in the bus. If anyone takes out a camera, he says to them very politely "Hey, sorry, no cameras on the bus." If they ignore him, he or she (we mustn't be sexist) gently reaches out and crushes the camera with one hand (tattoo of "HELL" across the knuckles optional) and repeats "I'm sorry, did you hear me say 'No cameras'?" If they persist and pull out a cell phone, the individual crushes in the screen with their teeth and spits out small fragments of glass into their laps and says "I'm so sorry, that goes for cell phone cameras too". If they start to whine about their broken hardware, then depending on whether they are rock star or groupie they can either say "The management would like to present this fine line of meth-and-heroin laced cocaine for your pleasure" and try to distract them as well as drug them to where they will forget that the incident ever occurred, or just throw them out of the bus. Optionally, stopping the bus first.
If that isn't going to work for you, you could experiment with flooding the cabin with IR and/or UV light bright enough to saturate the camera. I'm guessing that camera electronics are broader band than the human eye, so that the cabin could conceivably have light so bright that it at least washes out and ruins any pictures taken with unprotected electronics while still being invisible to the human eye, and MAYBE while not being physically dangerous or bright enough to give the cabin occupants a suntan while they ride. The built in cameras would simply be wrapped in a suitable filter. Of course this solution will only last as long as it takes for somebody to figure out out, and paparazzi disguised as groupies are probably not the idiots they are pretending to be -- at that point they'll tape a filter onto their own cameras and then you are back to camera-crunching "hosts" along for the ride.
rgb
The theory doesn't insist on life -- it simply further develops a principle that actually goes back IIRC to work by Prigogene on self-organization in open system (although I'm too lazy to look it up to be certain) and that is observed in phenomena like the transition from conduction to turbulent convection. The interesting thing is extending it to the microscale and chemistry.
Also, what's wrong with the "and" operator here, as well? Given a temperature range and physical environment conducive of complex chemistry between free energy sources and free energy sinks, self-organization of the chemistry to optimize the generation of entropy, via a natural selection favoring those processes that are most efficient at transferring the energy from a rate limited source AND that possess a certain "stability" in the physical environment. Self-replicating processes might not always be the most efficient, even, but they might possess the stability needed, or not. Once you have the self-replication, though, you have a pathway to life. Urey-Miller isn't even contradictory of this -- the nucleation of the self-replicating processes itself likely requires random noise to generate the soup in which the requisite self-organizing chemistry can take place.
rgb
Indeed, many specific religions go two steps further even than that. They begin with a self-referential statement affirming the perfect truth of the religious scripture, which is true because it is part of the religious scripture. Then, as you say, anything that is contained in that religious scripture is perfectly true, by definition, no matter how apparently internally inconsistent (contradictions within the scripture), externally inconsistent (contradictions with simple matters of fact derived from reason and observation), morally inconsistent (contradictions with accepted morality, e.g. is or isn't slavery good, is marriage by rape and a payment of 50 shekels morally acceptable, is it morally just to slaughter Midianite women and children except for the young female virgins and to subject them to rape and slavery, should we kill old women accused of being witches given that there is no such thing as an actual witch).
Since some of these things offend mere common sense to an enormous extent, religion has invented "hermeneutics" and "exegesis" as complex forms of interpretation of scriptural text whose sole purpose is to reduce the extreme cognitive dissonance induced by trying to believe that A and Not A are simultaneously true when they happen to be written in a religious text. Doublethink is alive and well and living in a religion near you.
The second step that they add is that in ordinary discourse and the usual scientific investigative process that we used to systematically refine a consistent set of beliefs in reasonable agreement with evidence, the only penalties associated with being wrong are natural ones that consistently fit in with the general framework of the scientific worldview -- if you fail to believe that the law of gravitation will apply to you and step off of the roof of a tall building, it is likely to be the last experiment you ever perform (likely in a specific and defensible sense, since of course it might always be the case that you have been sprinkled with fairy dust or have accomplished a sufficiently strong belief in The Force that the force of gravity does not cause you to splatter at the bottom of a long drop, it has just never been observed to be the case and is hence very unlikely from a Bayesian point of view at least). In the religious worldview, however, there is an entire hidden world where things happen that we cannot observe but that are precisely and correctly delineated in the aforementioned scripture. It is a second issue because religion makes many pronouncements on matters that cannot ever be contradicted by experience -- indeed, it revels in this and claims it as its "higher" ground.
So when a divinely inspired, perfectly true (if only after massive "interpretation") religious scripture tells you that if you fail to believe that every word in that scripture that the scripture itself assures you is perfectly true is, in fact, true, you will be cast into a fiery pit so that your skin can be burned off of your living body and then instantly regrown to be burned off again, repeated to infinity and beyond, it is self-consistently guaranteed to be true. The Quran tells us so. The New Testament tells us so perhaps a bit less graphically. The general texts of Hinduism assure us that unbelievers who fail to obey its precepts will be reincarnated as intestinal parasites living in a dog or the like.
The core of most scripture-based religious belief is, in fact, supernatural posthumous extortion in the form of events that cannot ever be objectively verified but that are so extreme that they tempt even the rational to make Pascal's Wager, coupled with a system of equally unverifiable posthumous rewards for those who meekly acquiesce in the entire ball of scriptural wax and the consequent transfer of political power, social status, and wealth to the priesthood tasked with "interpreting" the very scriptures that, after all, are perfectly true. They say so, and if you don't believe (perhaps because yo
I thought it was "Never get into a contest of wits with a Sicilian".
Damn, I've been teaching it wrong all these years.
I completely agree. I tend to trust high end encryption because I know something about how difficult the problem of cracking a serious cipher with a large key is -- even brute force attacks simply aren't tenable for the good ones. 4096 bits is 2^4096 approx 10^400 permutations and 100 billion years with every atom in the visible Universe a computer still aren't enough. Of course this time can be substantially reduced if one discovers mathematical weaknesses in the encryption or if people do stupid things, but I think e.g. GPG and SSH are pretty reliable when implemented with large keys provided that you can trust your source for the software. SSL is also probably fine if you can trust your key servers and software. However, what NSA does have in abundance is talented crackers and lots of resources and access to federal warrants and even the freedom to proceed without warrants. The easy way to crack my ssh encrypted channel isn't to do a brute force attack on the data stream, it is to crack any of the systems on which I store public and private keypairs. The easy way to decrypt my gpg encrypted documents no matter how large a key I specify is to crack my system and do any of a dozen things -- monitor my keystrokes and steal my keys, issue a warrant forcing me to give up my keys (so I go to jail on contempt of court to rot forever without a trial if I fail to comply). The latter is what the FBI actually told me that they do in cases where there is probable cause, e.g. kiddy porn cases where somebody has a large encrypted file suspected of containing snuff films involving small children or the like (I've attended security conferences and chatted extensively with FBI'ers attending the same sessions in the past, although I don't mess with security at this level much any more).
But the only solution to the issue of privacy is to move BACK to this state of affairs. People have to have a real right to presume that their affairs and activities are private with the narrow exception of a search warrant granted on the basis of actual evidence and probable cause, sort of like it says in the constitution and its amendments.
Of course, we have to be willing to pay the price for this. That means that yeah, criminals and terrorists will succeed in concealing their affairs a lot more often. More of the innocent will die or be hurt in other ways. We cannot insist on having our privacy preserved and then bitch when the outcome of it is that a terrorist succeeds in nuking a city in a case where ignoring the privacy laws might have prevented it.
An alternative that might almost be more palatable would be to alter the laws to completely eliminate victimless crime and almost all moral crime, and indeed provide citizens with broad rights to completely freely choose their lifestyle and activities without their ability to seek employment or education being threatened. People conceal things that might be damaging, and one of the dangers of a police state is that so many things are illegal that "everybody" commits certain crimes, such as driving over the speed limit, driving with a blood alcohol that is just over the limit, bending things a bit on tax returns, engaging in sexual acts between consenting adults that are still technically against the laws of the state in which they live, smokes pot. This makes everybody vulnerable, and hence controllable. If we could actually trust the police not to abuse their power by eliminating most of the ways they COULD abuse their power, it would be a lot simpler to think about exceptions for exceptional risks.
Best of all, do both. Strong privacy laws, eliminate moral/victimless non-crimes and indeed establish legal protections for acting as one wishes to act outside of things that directly impact their employment or damage others, and sure, a tight system of well-regulated courts to handle the edge cases expeditiously and with the ability to seal the record of all discovery outside of a narrow window. Sort of like one imagines the framers of the constitution possibly intended. But then, they were all terrorists themselves.
rgb
Duke doesn't require you to authenticate your wireless device every time you connect, and I doubt most other Universities do either. It does require you to register your device MAC address (in an authenticated session). In fact, at this point Duke might require you to register wired addresses as well. Unregistered devices get kicked onto an anonymous network outside of a firewall, so visitors can get internet access without getting a "Duke" IP number. Duke controls its own outgoing PoP, of course, so it effectively logs all connections into and out of the Duke domain. As was pointed out above, this was more than likely the method used to identify the student at Harvard -- simply look for a Harvard IP that connected to a TOR server (and obviously, the toplevel TOR servers HAVE to be publicly known or nobody could connect to them) at the right time. That time AFAICT could not be delayed as some have suggested by TOR itself because TOR doesn't know what you are connecting to and has to treat all connections as though they might be real-time keystrokes. You'd need an anonymous, non-logging mail server with a delay on it on the far side to put any sort of substantial desynchronization between the connection and the mail message -- TOR itself cannot do it unless I'm still in error after reading about its architecture for a while.
Regardless, anyone even slightly 1337 would have at the very least gone to starbucks or an internet cafe and THEN used Tor, or bought a disposable USB wireless interface and used the anonymous network or (best) both. No possible way the FBI could have backtracked a cash purchased USB stick from a store with no video surveillance used from an alley next to (but not inside) a Panera Bread while wearing a wig and makeup one dons in the restroom of a giant mall connected to TOR, even if the NSA actually "volunteers" most of the toplevel TOR servers and half of the nodes and/or maintains a running map of all of the nodes (which I'm pretty sure they do regardless of how many they actually provide). I mean what's ten or twenty million dollars in hardware to the NSA, if it gives them a chance to monitor most of the traffic through a supposedly secure onion network? In the end, the Internet does not allow one anything like non-subvertable security of connections, only the data content sent over those connections. I doubt that even the NSA is likely to be able to decrypt e.g. 4096-bit key-secured traffic EXCEPT by obtaining the keys.
rgb
OK, so the warrant idea was dumb and I should have taken more time to learn how TOR worked. But now that I've taken the time, consider the possibility that the TOR server one connects to belongs in fact to the NSA or FBI in the first place, or that they simply implement their monitoring and control on the upstream ISP feeding those servers. Note that the content of the message is irrelevant -- all that mattered was that a Harvard IP connected to a TOR server in the right general timeframe. It's actually interesting to see how one can attack TOR (beyond the scope of TFA) -- own enough of the toplevel servers and you quickly get an idea of who is connecting from where (and start to build a pretty good map of the intermediate nodes). Own enough of the intermediate nodes, and you begin to have enough keys to be able to decrypt intermediate traffic (the French claim that the critical number is around 1/3) and can probably identify nearly all of the exit nodes. So the really big question is -- when you hook into TOR, are you really hooking into a network of nodes contributed by freedom-loving selfless volunteers who are willing to donate substantial network bandwidth and processing time, or are you hooking into a network of nodes thoughtfully provided by the NSA through numerous plausible looking fronts, saving everybody the trouble of implementing a man in the middle attack by BEING the man in the middle?
From what I could glean, it looks like there is a very good chance that TOR has been spanned by the NSA for quite a while now. And how could one even tell if this is the case? Because there is no central authority, AFAICT anybody can contribute resources and there is no way to check on whether the resources are being contributed by people who support the concept or are seeking to subvert it. The entire model relies on the intermediate nodes being MOSTLY trustworthy, and it is almost certainly not valid if any significant fraction of those nodes are subverted. It also relies to some extent on there being "many" connections to the servers at any given time and not "few", partly because again AFAICT there are only three node hops in between, and because the nodes do not know if the traffic is a block message or keystrokes in a real-time interface they cannot institute any sort of systematic delay. Few to few connections can easily be sorted out if owns enough of the servers and/or nodes to be able to create a reasonably accurate table of all of the nodes AND are presumed to have access to the intermediate routers or the routers feeding particular services. I couldn't do it, but the NSA and by extension the FBI? Deep pockets, very smart people.
rgb
I stand corrected.
Read TFA? Where's the fun in that?
Yeah, I realized that right after posting. Sorry.
rgb
Say what? Why not just buy a cheap USB wireless stick (paying cash, of course) and send the message from a car parked outside of Panera Bread (or any other unsecured wireless network) and then throw the stick into the nearest storm drain? The only thing you have to do is use a MAC address not already registered in Harvard's DHCP tables to the student. While a proper geek would then edit the internal logs of the laptop -- a REAL geek on their LINUX (or possibly Mac) laptop where the logs are in straight ASCII and bone simple to edit -- to remove all trace of the DHCP connection and the MAC address of the stick. But even if they didn't do this, the trail ends at Panera, assuming that the student didn't go inside and get his face captured on the store video or the like. They would have to examine the logs of every laptop on campus to find the perp otherwise, and of course they'd never get a judge to agree to that.
I'm tempted to joke around about how multiply stupid this Harvard kid was compared to Duke kids -- not only failing a course but too stupid to even send in an anonymized bomb threat by email in an untraceable way -- but sadly to my direct experience there are Duke students who are (or have been in the past) just as criminally dumb and this is a real tragedy and not really something to joke over. The poor kid is probably sitting around in a daze trying to figure out how what happened, how he went from being a struggling (but probably really pretty bright) student at one of the best universities in the world to being a plea-bargained felon working off a hundred-thousand dollar fine selling coffee and cleaning toilets at Starbucks with no hope of ever attending anything better than a community college for the rest of his or her life.
As I pointed out above, the OUTGOING timestamp had little to do with it.
a) FBI notes that Tor was used as the agent that sent the email.
b) FBI has federal judge issue a warrant to Tor compelling them to provide the backtrace through Tor to the originating IP address.
c) Tor complies. They literally have no choice. They are not attorneys or physicians -- there is nothing legally privileged in their business activity and this is a felony we're talking about. They might have helped without even being legally compelled as it never pays to get on the wrong side of the FBI and why in the world would they want to protect a felon?
d) The student's laptop is almost certainly registered in Harvard's campus DHCP server for their trusted network (at Duke it certainly would be, I can't imagine Harvard being any different assuming their networking people are competent). This means that the University possesses a map between MAC address and individual students and their laptops.
e-1) If the student used the trusted network, the timestamp on the original Tor connection request -- not the time they sent the message which is irrelevant -- would be used only to determine the connection between the trusted IP number used and the MAC address and hence the student.
e-2) If the student used Harvard's anonymous/visitors wireless network (not likely, because the student was obviously neither a computer genius nor a rocket scientist intelligence-wise) they still use the log to connect IP number and MAC address and hence the student (they have to look in a different table for the latter, that's all).
f) Student is confronted, told that if they don't confess they will spend several years making "friends" with a tattooed biker in for manufacturing meth, but that if they do they'll likely get suspended sentence and a fine large enough to pay for everybody's wasted time. Parents of student (paying Harvard's astronomical tuition already) balk at the thought of another 5 or 6 figure expense with no guarantee of victory and besides their idiot of a child is guilty as hell and everybody knows it. Confession. Expulsion. Probation. Counseling. Everybody is happy except for idiot child, who wonders how it could all have gone so bad, so quickly.
rgb
In all probability, Harvard's trusted wireless network requires registration of all connected hosts. It may have an anonymous network as well (Duke does), but in either case it is almost certain that they are logging every DHCP event AND have a registered match between the student's hardware and his MAC address. So once the FBI subpeona'd Tor to get the IP number that sent the threat, it was a done deal.
Of course, that doesn't mean that they'll get a conviction. Even though the evidence sounds like a smoking gun, it is really still circumstantial unless they get a confession. The DA has to prove that the student was in direct possession of the laptop at the time the message was sent. The DA has to prove that the student was in direct CONTROL of the laptop in question at the time the message was sent, since a REAL hacker could well have taken control of the laptop any one of a dozen ways to use it as a breakout for sending the message, and could even have deleted the tools they used to leave no traces. I'm guessing that they'll have to show that the student had a motive for sending the bomb threat to get out of the exam to partly counter this sort of defense, but then we're back to circumstantial -- perhaps the hacker was another student failing in the class who selected this laptop to hack just because it would keep anyone from following the trail further. All the defense attorney has to do is create reasonable doubt and communicate it effectively -- even with the match the FBI has more forensic work to do on the laptop to be able to address/counter these possibilities IF the student chooses to fight it.
More likely the student has already confessed, or will confess as part of a plea bargain (if they are in fact guilty). Nobody, especially the parents of the kid who would have to pay for it, will want to bring this to trial. He or they will likely get socked with a pretty hefty fine (to pay for the cost of the forensic work and bomb squad), three years probation with mandatory counseling/therapy, and (of course) will get kicked out of Harvard so hard that he bounces on the pavement all the way home, where his parents will very likely add their own line of punishment (such as working flipping burgers until he or she pays off the fine before resuming an education at the local community college). If the student was in academic difficulty because of bad habits or cognitive problems -- video gaming, drugs, partying constantly with too much alcohol, ADD with impulse control issues (all of which he might have to confess to just to get out of going to jail) there will be additional therapy there as well.
Obviously the kid wasn't a rocket scientist, Harvard or not. A proper geek would have paid cash for a throwaway USB wireless stick, used the anonymous wireless network at Panera Bread or Barnes and Noble from a car (to avoid time-logged in-store video surveillance) and then simply thrown the stick into a storm drain. A geek who wears pants with belt and suspenders would have booted their linux box into single user mode and edited the log files to remove all trace of both the IP number and MAC address of the USB stick. A serious geek would never have been caught. But then, a serious geek wouldn't have needed to delay the exam...
rgb
The picture in this article reminds me of one of my favorite lines from http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/General/tao/tao.html (The Tao of Programming):
3.4
A manager went to the master programmer and showed him the requirements document for a new application. The manager asked the master: ``How long will it take to design this system if I assign five programmers to it?''
``It will take one year,'' said the master promptly.
``But we need this system immediately or even sooner! How long will it take if I assign ten programmers to it?''
The master programmer frowned. ``In that case, it will take two years.''
``And what if I assign a hundred programmers to it?''
The master programmer shrugged. ``Then the design will never be completed,'' he said.
Looking at the number of programmers in the room, that seems about right.