They took the damn money, so they ought to build the network. If they don't, then they shouldn't only allow others to do their job, they should be forced to return the money.
And they haven't been doing the job that they took the money to do.
Perhaps so. I knew that they were planning *some* changes, but they were always planning some changes. I didn't find out what the changes were until they had already been implemented.
How do you know that it is having no impact? My suspicion is that you are trusting the honesty of Red Hat...but for many people this process has severely damaged their trust in Red Hat.
My trust in their actions (as opposed to their intentions) was damaged so severely several years ago that I switched away from them with considerable effort. OTOH, I'm not a $500 million company...or even a $1 million company. Perhaps they treat you a bit better.
But while I may still (usually) trust their intentions, I no longer trust their actions. Each action now needs to justify itself. This one doesn't. (I accept that it's probably a communications problem, but it's a doozy of a communications problem.
Were THAT the problem, then one would have expected for them to have told us so.
Note that it's not inherently necessary for details to be disclosed, merely for the communication to be honest, and not intentionally confusing. They have failed at this.
I presume that there is SOME legitimate, or at least quasi-legitimate, reason for their actions. Unfortunately it appears that the technicians talked to the PR guys who talked to the lawyers who talked to other PR guys and told them what to say. Almost no information made it's way through the chain of translation. And what did get through merely served to cast suspicion upon the rest. I'm not saying that everyone involved wasn't well intentioned. Merely that this is not a way to create trust. In the ideal world the technicians would have written the PR release, passed it to PR for vetting. It would have cycled back and forth a few times. Then the lawyers would have criticized it, and the techs would have rewritten it to their criteria. This clearly isn't what happened.
When PR writes to techs, the techs tend to rightfully distrust what is said, even when it's not clearly wrong. This is from lots of bitter experience. When the message has been stripped of useful information, then the distrust escalates, and a bit of bitterness is added.
I don't distrust Red Hat's intent here, but I certainly distrust their communication. And I'm made slightly dubious about even their intent, even though I'm fairly certain that it's just a lousy bureaucratic organization.
Debian maintainers are various in understanding and skill, though they're usually pretty good. Unfortunately, the hack on the SSH package caused it to install and run without noticeable problems. So nobody looked at it carefully for a fairly long time. Eventually the problem was noticed, and the reason was clear. UGH, but it was clear. And it was fixed.
For most packages, this kind of problem can't happen. If it doesn't work, it's pretty obvious, or easy to test for. (So there are regression tests.)
But Debian distributes lots of packages that they don't really understand. If you don't understand that, then you should use something else (just what depends on your precise needs). Debian has lists of "orphaned packages" where they are looking for a volunteer maintainer. The criteria are that you've got to be willing to do the job and keep the package running as the system changes underneath you. Most maintainers *DON'T* understand the package that they are maintaining in any depth. They try to keep the bug fixes current, and are usually behind the most current version of the package that's being distributed. (Debian *testing* went to Python 2.5 this year, while Python is trying to get to 2.6/3.0 this year. And Python is a major package with lots of support.)
If you don't want to accept how Debian does things, you should probably go to a major commercial Linux. They'll pretend that they understand all of the packages. Of course, they won't, and there won't be nearly as many packages, but they'll pretend for you, at a price.
All that said, yes, the SSH package problem was a major blunder on the part of Debian. But once they noticed it, they handled it well.
What we know is that their communication was bafflegab.
I agree that they might be constrained in what they could say, but they don't appear to have even said THAT. (I'd be more definite, but I don't intend to read their PR release again.)
I think you need to reread that post. The gp was in favor of Slashdot being less egalitarian.
I can see many reasons why that's a good thing, but I commonly don't pay attention to User ID numbers anyway. (I consider karma points more significant...and I don't think they should top out at 50. [Maybe they don't anymore? Who could tell.])
Sorry, but you have causal sequences in the wrong order. This short term perspective originated (well, was made acceptable by) the Harvard School of Business Administration.
At the time it started to become acceptable, it was widely decried by prominent voices in the business community...but Harvard is a strong brand, and it was, indeed, buoyed by short-sighted investors and mobile executives (who didn't worry about what would happen to the company after they left). These acted to reinforce the short-termism, but they had always been present. But Harvard made they actions socially acceptable.
I usually like Red Hat, but every once in awhile they do a really abusive something. This is another.
I was a Red Hat customer for years. Then they dropped the professional edition without ANY warning. Fedora didn't show up for over a year (or so it seemed). Well, now I use Debian, and occasionally investigate one of the other distributions. (Ubuntu, Mandrake*, one of the small ones...NOT Novell's offering. I don't trust them.)
I still want to trust Red Hat. I feel that their corporate intentions are honorable...most of the time. OTOH, I'm not about the rely on them again. They aren't trustworthy, merely well intentioned. So I want to trust them, but I know it's a bad idea.
OTOH, CentOS *seems* to have come through this without scars. Their comments indicate that they got cooperation from Red Hat in containing the problem. Perhaps companies can trust Red Hat more than individuals can...perhaps. Or maybe they were just lucky this time.
*I know they're officially Mandriva, but that's for garbage legal reasons. To me they're still Mandrake. (This isn't totally good. They've pulled some boners too.)
Actually, most people don't know they've been gypped until after they've paid their money. Then it's too late.
They call the advertisements a lure on the analogy of a fishing lure. Expect hooks inside. Yes, I know it's appealing to look at. Lures are designed that way on purpose. It's not worth the cost of trying to get the hook out of your lips (presuming you didn't swallow it).
Which news are you talking about? It clearly isn't Science News, or Science, or Scientific American.
Your science appears to be "Weekly World News". I'll admit that it's one of my favorites...but not for anything to believe.
(That said, it does appear to be a monumentally silly idea. It might not be [I'd need more evaluation and evidence to be certain], but that's certainly how it appears.)
Not Jurassic, Carboniferous. Be prepared for total ice meltdown... which means the oceans are around 300 meters higher than they are now. (And how high are YOU above sea-level? What about where you work? And the roads in between?)
OTOH, humidity should increase enough that even deserts won't be *that* dry. And continents should get enough smaller that the deserts that exist will be a lot smaller, also.
If they start in on this, I may invest in a houseboat. With sails. And either solar or wave power for electricity. (An outrigger should make a dandy wave-power generator.) But I think I'll wait a bit, as I really don't see this getting off the ground, and I'd prefer that living on a houseboat be a bit less labor intensive that the last one I looked at.
I don't think that you understand the theory of evolution.
Evolution predicts that much junk will be generated during the process of evolution...and that it will be cleared away at a rate related to how expensive it is to continue it's existence. It also predicts that this will be a stochastic process.
At a more basic level the question becomes "What is the proper theoretical level to assign the role of replicator?" Traditionally this was considered to be either the individual animal or the population. Recently (20 years) strong arguments have been made that the proper level is the gene. This has been confirmed, though not proven, by the discovery of transposons and various other genetic elements that appear to act as parasitic genes. Also by virus genes embedded into the DNA that appear to have melded into the normal code to produce useful-to-the-organism genetic code, and others that do things like alter the sex ratios in a manner that facilitates their propagation of multiple copies.
It's hard to see what proof would be possible. Confirmation is offered by some predictions based on that theory being confirmed and on many other observations that are more simply explained by considering the genetic code itself as the level at which evolution is occurring.
One would think that genetic programming might offer some clues, and, indeed, it does. In genetic programming one of the big problems is clearing away junk genetic codes as the generation progress. I'm not current, but when I last checked this problem had not been solved satisfactorily.
It may be no more prone to mutation, but it's significantly less subject to selection pressure. There's always a tiny pressure, but in non-transcribed DNA it's usually below the noise-level, unless it does something like shape the folding (of the DNA) in a significant way. Even then it can usually be overruled by epi-genetic modifications, so the selection pressure on non-transcribed DNA is trivial.
OK. I'll bear that in mind for the future. These were metal platters.
Guess that it's jeweler's rouge with fine sandpaper, and then into the trash, then. Possibly a ball-peen hammer...but if it's lots of glass slivers...well, I'm reluctant to expose myself to that. Possibly put between two cutting sheets (plastic) inside a plastic bag and bend. Guess I'll need more research if I ever get into that situation again. Perhaps pressure cooking would suffice. There'll be *some* simple physical answer.
If they're glass, they might not dissolve sufficiently in acid, but there'll be some easy answer. If nothing else, throw them into a cement mixer with some gravel, let it run for awhile, then add sand, cement, and water.
The kid calling was probably not the one who agreed to the contract, and I doubt that he knew he was even in danger of a monstrously excessive bill.
The guy who signed the contract probably signed it a year or so ago. I'm sure you remember all the terms of all the service agreements that you've signed in the last, say, three years. Not.
This is a clearly abusive practice. Just how it should be ameliorated is clearly a matter for argument, but the current practice is abusive. Personally I see nothing wrong with a warning being issued whenever engaging in an action that would double the current average bill. And again at triple, quadruple, etc. And I wonder about the employment of those who abuse such warnings as "Babysitting". Those signs by the side of the road that measure your current speed, and report it to you are useful...especially when they sit right beside the official speed limit signs.
My "Best Practices" calls for first using fdisk to make the drive a single partition, then filling that partition with/dev/random, then taking the drive apart and giving the platters to different kids playing in different sand-piles.
OTOH, I've only once had to deal with data that I considered worth that degree of effort.
IF the data were MORE important, then I'd have manually run sand-paper lubricated with jeweler's rouge over each platter before distributing them.
Theory is one thing, practice is another. I'd need to see it proven that this security was insufficient. If it were, then heating the platters on a burner should suffice.
The thing is, drives are cheap. If you REALLY want to ensure that data is non-recoverable, you destroy the drive. How thoroughly depends on how secure you want to be, but dissolving in acid is probably overkill no matter WHAT your data is. (Still, it would be effective. And my current "Best Practice" is overkill for the data that I was dealing with. But drives are cheap.)
It all depends on how you estimate probabilities before acting.
If someone is threatening you, and you estimate that there's only a 30% chance that they'll maim you for life and less than a 5% chance that they'll kill you, do you ignore the threat? It's quite improbable.
You estimate not only the probability of danger, but also the costs of acting or not acting. Or at least you ought to. (People are generally very bad at figuring these odds. Instead they tend to have stereotypical reactions preprogrammed to handle situations similar to those that they've previously encountered...which works faster in most common situations, and tends to fail disastrously in uncommon situations.)
Given the wild exaggeration for dramatic effect, that is, indeed, one plausible scenario. Of course, you generally get at lot of melting first, enough to raise the sea levels markedly, while the oceans continue to get warmer...but then one year something happens (possibly a large volcano in the early spring), and the snow doesn't melt that year, and now there's LOTS of water in the atmosphere to precipitate out...and it does. Some places as snow. And the oceans are still warm, but the air is now cold, so the cloud cover gets severe, which means that solar warming is diminished a lot, so it never really warms up that summer, and that winter it snows a lot more, and the next year it's still cloudy all summer...
Well, it's possible. It requires very warm oceans and a cool atmosphere, but if the oceans are very warm, a large volcano can supply the missing part.
OTOH, I'm sure you aren't mistaking a movie for how it would actually happen. It would probably take decades for the glaciers to cover even just Canada...but do notice that I said decades, not centuries. Last time the glaciers got as far south as central California (half way through the US) before they stopped advancing. We don't know why they started, or why they stopped, but that's one reasonable scenario.
Well, great warmings are often followed suddenly (less than a decade?) by great coolings. But that's not the way to bet.
And why do you believe that 1900 is too soon for anthropogenic effects? Some articles that I've seen trace such effects back to the beginning of rice cultivation. It's true that industrial effects have been more extensive, but they aren't the entire story. People have been altering the global climate since back before the goats ate the famous cedars of Lebanon. (The trees were lumbered off, and then goats were grazed on the hillsides and ate all the seedlings that tried to re-establish the forest.)
In a weird sort of way you're right. If people didn't live in areas that were going to be flooded, or weren't depending on food being grown in areas that will be turned into deserts, then it wouldn't be a problem.
But when the waters rise, the people who live in the areas due to be flooded aren't going to take drowning lightly. They'll kill you to stay alive. And these days that can get pretty scary. It's easy to imagine someone in that kind of a situation saying "Well, I'm due to die if I don't do something, and this bug will kill off 90% of everybody, so if I live through it, there'll be room for me."
Not many people will react that way, but it doesn't take many. And any local government that would be supposed to stop them is going to be a bit busy...even if they wouldn't be sympathetic, which they might be.
Afterwards, things will eventually return to normal, say in a century or two. Nothing serious at all, from the perspective of someone who doesn't need to live through it.
N.B.: This is just one of many dire scenarios. And it's far from the worst.
P.S.: Try to guess how much the sea level will rise. It's likely to be somewhere between 2 meters and 300 meters, depending on exactly what goes. I'm not sure of the time scale though. The modelers always seem to refuse to believe the dire scenarios until the evidence is unavoidable. 30 meters within a century wouldn't surprise me, but it's far from the consensus...or was the last time I checked. (I'm not part of "the consensus". It's not my profession, and I'm not even a talented amateur. I just read popular science magazines.)
Yes, the water is warming. Most of the current rise in sea level is due to the water warming, and thus expanding rather than to ice melting. That won't be significant until Greenland goes. Floating ice melting doesn't change the sea level, but merely absorbs the heat required to melt it. This is significant for absorbing energy without raising the temperature. But after the floating ice melts, then the seas can raise their temperature without the hindrance of needing to melt ice. (Note that this is also a block the other way to water cooling.)
A given volume of water can hold considerable more thermal energy than the same volume of air at the same temperature. As a result the oceans act as a ballast on the thermal variations...but as they warm, the balance point of the scale shifts. It takes a long time to warm the oceans, and then it takes a long time to cool them. This is important in understanding climate change.
Note also that warmer air can hold more water. This is important as a thermal transport mechanism. (I'm not a climate modeler, so I can't understand why this would turn some places into deserts...but I've seen complex interaction of subroutines, so I'm not surprised that things like this happen.)
But it's not that either the air or the water is warming, they both are. Just at different rates, and with differing stability.
Huh? CO2 is opaque to infrared radiation in certain wavelengths. This isn't at all the same conceptually as "CO2 soaks up heat", which is just wrong, unless you mean dry ice absorbs heat and evaporates.
N.B.: It's entirely possible that the atmosphere be sufficiently saturated with CO2 that more would make no difference WRT heat retention. Then it becomes MUCH more important to worry about methane, nitrous oxides, etc. Anything that absorbs infrared in a wavelength that isn't blanketed by CO2. (And I'm no specialist. I can't tell you whether we are close to that point or not. Or what other gases are most important.)
Actually the Panama connection to temperatures isn't entirely implausible. Perhaps our models of archaic weather need adjustment. (They aren't very good.)
OTOH,... I'm not aware of any huge quantity of Carbon disappearing over the Sahara. Certainly nothing to compare with, say, the underground Indonesian coal fires. And apparently if a problem hasn't yet manifested (bird flu in a version contagious to between people) or has been successfully averted by proper action (SARS), then counting it an important danger was silly.
Sorry, but the gp doesn't generally impress me, even if he does have a idea or two of reasonable plausibility.
You know, I heard that precise same argument around 1970... only that time it was about Japan. "All they can do is copy.", "They can make anything out of used beer cans...but all they make is cheap shit".
How do you feel about Japan these days? Which country is doing the most in robotics?
(P.S.: I'm not certain that the answer to the second question is Japan, but they're definitely one of the top three.)
Slashdot Mirror
They took the damn money, so they ought to build the network. If they don't, then they shouldn't only allow others to do their job, they should be forced to return the money.
And they haven't been doing the job that they took the money to do.
Perhaps so. I knew that they were planning *some* changes, but they were always planning some changes. I didn't find out what the changes were until they had already been implemented.
How do you know that it is having no impact? My suspicion is that you are trusting the honesty of Red Hat...but for many people this process has severely damaged their trust in Red Hat.
My trust in their actions (as opposed to their intentions) was damaged so severely several years ago that I switched away from them with considerable effort. OTOH, I'm not a $500 million company...or even a $1 million company. Perhaps they treat you a bit better.
But while I may still (usually) trust their intentions, I no longer trust their actions. Each action now needs to justify itself. This one doesn't. (I accept that it's probably a communications problem, but it's a doozy of a communications problem.
Were THAT the problem, then one would have expected for them to have told us so.
Note that it's not inherently necessary for details to be disclosed, merely for the communication to be honest, and not intentionally confusing. They have failed at this.
I presume that there is SOME legitimate, or at least quasi-legitimate, reason for their actions. Unfortunately it appears that the technicians talked to the PR guys who talked to the lawyers who talked to other PR guys and told them what to say. Almost no information made it's way through the chain of translation. And what did get through merely served to cast suspicion upon the rest. I'm not saying that everyone involved wasn't well intentioned. Merely that this is not a way to create trust. In the ideal world the technicians would have written the PR release, passed it to PR for vetting. It would have cycled back and forth a few times. Then the lawyers would have criticized it, and the techs would have rewritten it to their criteria. This clearly isn't what happened.
When PR writes to techs, the techs tend to rightfully distrust what is said, even when it's not clearly wrong. This is from lots of bitter experience. When the message has been stripped of useful information, then the distrust escalates, and a bit of bitterness is added.
I don't distrust Red Hat's intent here, but I certainly distrust their communication. And I'm made slightly dubious about even their intent, even though I'm fairly certain that it's just a lousy bureaucratic organization.
There's good points here and bad points.
Debian maintainers are various in understanding and skill, though they're usually pretty good. Unfortunately, the hack on the SSH package caused it to install and run without noticeable problems. So nobody looked at it carefully for a fairly long time. Eventually the problem was noticed, and the reason was clear. UGH, but it was clear. And it was fixed.
For most packages, this kind of problem can't happen. If it doesn't work, it's pretty obvious, or easy to test for. (So there are regression tests.)
But Debian distributes lots of packages that they don't really understand. If you don't understand that, then you should use something else (just what depends on your precise needs). Debian has lists of "orphaned packages" where they are looking for a volunteer maintainer. The criteria are that you've got to be willing to do the job and keep the package running as the system changes underneath you. Most maintainers *DON'T* understand the package that they are maintaining in any depth. They try to keep the bug fixes current, and are usually behind the most current version of the package that's being distributed. (Debian *testing* went to Python 2.5 this year, while Python is trying to get to 2.6/3.0 this year. And Python is a major package with lots of support.)
If you don't want to accept how Debian does things, you should probably go to a major commercial Linux. They'll pretend that they understand all of the packages. Of course, they won't, and there won't be nearly as many packages, but they'll pretend for you, at a price.
All that said, yes, the SSH package problem was a major blunder on the part of Debian. But once they noticed it, they handled it well.
What we know is that their communication was bafflegab.
I agree that they might be constrained in what they could say, but they don't appear to have even said THAT. (I'd be more definite, but I don't intend to read their PR release again.)
I think you need to reread that post. The gp was in favor of Slashdot being less egalitarian.
I can see many reasons why that's a good thing, but I commonly don't pay attention to User ID numbers anyway. (I consider karma points more significant...and I don't think they should top out at 50. [Maybe they don't anymore? Who could tell.])
Sorry, but you have causal sequences in the wrong order. This short term perspective originated (well, was made acceptable by) the Harvard School of Business Administration.
At the time it started to become acceptable, it was widely decried by prominent voices in the business community...but Harvard is a strong brand, and it was, indeed, buoyed by short-sighted investors and mobile executives (who didn't worry about what would happen to the company after they left). These acted to reinforce the short-termism, but they had always been present. But Harvard made they actions socially acceptable.
I usually like Red Hat, but every once in awhile they do a really abusive something. This is another.
I was a Red Hat customer for years. Then they dropped the professional edition without ANY warning. Fedora didn't show up for over a year (or so it seemed). Well, now I use Debian, and occasionally investigate one of the other distributions. (Ubuntu, Mandrake*, one of the small ones...NOT Novell's offering. I don't trust them.)
I still want to trust Red Hat. I feel that their corporate intentions are honorable...most of the time. OTOH, I'm not about the rely on them again. They aren't trustworthy, merely well intentioned. So I want to trust them, but I know it's a bad idea.
OTOH, CentOS *seems* to have come through this without scars. Their comments indicate that they got cooperation from Red Hat in containing the problem. Perhaps companies can trust Red Hat more than individuals can...perhaps. Or maybe they were just lucky this time.
*I know they're officially Mandriva, but that's for garbage legal reasons. To me they're still Mandrake. (This isn't totally good. They've pulled some boners too.)
Actually, most people don't know they've been gypped until after they've paid their money. Then it's too late.
They call the advertisements a lure on the analogy of a fishing lure. Expect hooks inside. Yes, I know it's appealing to look at. Lures are designed that way on purpose. It's not worth the cost of trying to get the hook out of your lips (presuming you didn't swallow it).
There are lies, damn lies, and advertisements.
Which news are you talking about? It clearly isn't Science News, or Science, or Scientific American.
Your science appears to be "Weekly World News". I'll admit that it's one of my favorites...but not for anything to believe.
(That said, it does appear to be a monumentally silly idea. It might not be [I'd need more evaluation and evidence to be certain], but that's certainly how it appears.)
Not Jurassic, Carboniferous. Be prepared for total ice meltdown... which means the oceans are around 300 meters higher than they are now. (And how high are YOU above sea-level? What about where you work? And the roads in between?)
OTOH, humidity should increase enough that even deserts won't be *that* dry. And continents should get enough smaller that the deserts that exist will be a lot smaller, also.
If they start in on this, I may invest in a houseboat. With sails. And either solar or wave power for electricity. (An outrigger should make a dandy wave-power generator.) But I think I'll wait a bit, as I really don't see this getting off the ground, and I'd prefer that living on a houseboat be a bit less labor intensive that the last one I looked at.
I don't think that you understand the theory of evolution.
Evolution predicts that much junk will be generated during the process of evolution...and that it will be cleared away at a rate related to how expensive it is to continue it's existence. It also predicts that this will be a stochastic process.
At a more basic level the question becomes "What is the proper theoretical level to assign the role of replicator?" Traditionally this was considered to be either the individual animal or the population. Recently (20 years) strong arguments have been made that the proper level is the gene. This has been confirmed, though not proven, by the discovery of transposons and various other genetic elements that appear to act as parasitic genes. Also by virus genes embedded into the DNA that appear to have melded into the normal code to produce useful-to-the-organism genetic code, and others that do things like alter the sex ratios in a manner that facilitates their propagation of multiple copies.
It's hard to see what proof would be possible. Confirmation is offered by some predictions based on that theory being confirmed and on many other observations that are more simply explained by considering the genetic code itself as the level at which evolution is occurring.
One would think that genetic programming might offer some clues, and, indeed, it does. In genetic programming one of the big problems is clearing away junk genetic codes as the generation progress. I'm not current, but when I last checked this problem had not been solved satisfactorily.
It may be no more prone to mutation, but it's significantly less subject to selection pressure. There's always a tiny pressure, but in non-transcribed DNA it's usually below the noise-level, unless it does something like shape the folding (of the DNA) in a significant way. Even then it can usually be overruled by epi-genetic modifications, so the selection pressure on non-transcribed DNA is trivial.
OK. I'll bear that in mind for the future. These were metal platters.
Guess that it's jeweler's rouge with fine sandpaper, and then into the trash, then. Possibly a ball-peen hammer...but if it's lots of glass slivers...well, I'm reluctant to expose myself to that. Possibly put between two cutting sheets (plastic) inside a plastic bag and bend. Guess I'll need more research if I ever get into that situation again. Perhaps pressure cooking would suffice. There'll be *some* simple physical answer.
If they're glass, they might not dissolve sufficiently in acid, but there'll be some easy answer. If nothing else, throw them into a cement mixer with some gravel, let it run for awhile, then add sand, cement, and water.
Make WHO aware??
The kid calling was probably not the one who agreed to the contract, and I doubt that he knew he was even in danger of a monstrously excessive bill.
The guy who signed the contract probably signed it a year or so ago. I'm sure you remember all the terms of all the service agreements that you've signed in the last, say, three years. Not.
This is a clearly abusive practice. Just how it should be ameliorated is clearly a matter for argument, but the current practice is abusive. Personally I see nothing wrong with a warning being issued whenever engaging in an action that would double the current average bill. And again at triple, quadruple, etc. And I wonder about the employment of those who abuse such warnings as "Babysitting". Those signs by the side of the road that measure your current speed, and report it to you are useful...especially when they sit right beside the official speed limit signs.
Drives are cheap.
My "Best Practices" calls for first using fdisk to make the drive a single partition, then filling that partition with /dev/random, then taking the drive apart and giving the platters to different kids playing in different sand-piles.
OTOH, I've only once had to deal with data that I considered worth that degree of effort.
IF the data were MORE important, then I'd have manually run sand-paper lubricated with jeweler's rouge over each platter before distributing them.
Theory is one thing, practice is another. I'd need to see it proven that this security was insufficient. If it were, then heating the platters on a burner should suffice.
The thing is, drives are cheap. If you REALLY want to ensure that data is non-recoverable, you destroy the drive. How thoroughly depends on how secure you want to be, but dissolving in acid is probably overkill no matter WHAT your data is. (Still, it would be effective. And my current "Best Practice" is overkill for the data that I was dealing with. But drives are cheap.)
It all depends on how you estimate probabilities before acting.
If someone is threatening you, and you estimate that there's only a 30% chance that they'll maim you for life and less than a 5% chance that they'll kill you, do you ignore the threat? It's quite improbable.
You estimate not only the probability of danger, but also the costs of acting or not acting. Or at least you ought to. (People are generally very bad at figuring these odds. Instead they tend to have stereotypical reactions preprogrammed to handle situations similar to those that they've previously encountered...which works faster in most common situations, and tends to fail disastrously in uncommon situations.)
Given the wild exaggeration for dramatic effect, that is, indeed, one plausible scenario. Of course, you generally get at lot of melting first, enough to raise the sea levels markedly, while the oceans continue to get warmer...but then one year something happens (possibly a large volcano in the early spring), and the snow doesn't melt that year, and now there's LOTS of water in the atmosphere to precipitate out...and it does. Some places as snow. And the oceans are still warm, but the air is now cold, so the cloud cover gets severe, which means that solar warming is diminished a lot, so it never really warms up that summer, and that winter it snows a lot more, and the next year it's still cloudy all summer...
Well, it's possible. It requires very warm oceans and a cool atmosphere, but if the oceans are very warm, a large volcano can supply the missing part.
OTOH, I'm sure you aren't mistaking a movie for how it would actually happen. It would probably take decades for the glaciers to cover even just Canada...but do notice that I said decades, not centuries. Last time the glaciers got as far south as central California (half way through the US) before they stopped advancing. We don't know why they started, or why they stopped, but that's one reasonable scenario.
Well, great warmings are often followed suddenly (less than a decade?) by great coolings. But that's not the way to bet.
And why do you believe that 1900 is too soon for anthropogenic effects? Some articles that I've seen trace such effects back to the beginning of rice cultivation. It's true that industrial effects have been more extensive, but they aren't the entire story. People have been altering the global climate since back before the goats ate the famous cedars of Lebanon. (The trees were lumbered off, and then goats were grazed on the hillsides and ate all the seedlings that tried to re-establish the forest.)
In a weird sort of way you're right. If people didn't live in areas that were going to be flooded, or weren't depending on food being grown in areas that will be turned into deserts, then it wouldn't be a problem.
But when the waters rise, the people who live in the areas due to be flooded aren't going to take drowning lightly. They'll kill you to stay alive. And these days that can get pretty scary. It's easy to imagine someone in that kind of a situation saying "Well, I'm due to die if I don't do something, and this bug will kill off 90% of everybody, so if I live through it, there'll be room for me."
Not many people will react that way, but it doesn't take many. And any local government that would be supposed to stop them is going to be a bit busy...even if they wouldn't be sympathetic, which they might be.
Afterwards, things will eventually return to normal, say in a century or two. Nothing serious at all, from the perspective of someone who doesn't need to live through it.
N.B.: This is just one of many dire scenarios. And it's far from the worst.
P.S.: Try to guess how much the sea level will rise. It's likely to be somewhere between 2 meters and 300 meters, depending on exactly what goes. I'm not sure of the time scale though. The modelers always seem to refuse to believe the dire scenarios until the evidence is unavoidable. 30 meters within a century wouldn't surprise me, but it's far from the consensus...or was the last time I checked. (I'm not part of "the consensus". It's not my profession, and I'm not even a talented amateur. I just read popular science magazines.)
Yes, the water is warming. Most of the current rise in sea level is due to the water warming, and thus expanding rather than to ice melting. That won't be significant until Greenland goes. Floating ice melting doesn't change the sea level, but merely absorbs the heat required to melt it. This is significant for absorbing energy without raising the temperature. But after the floating ice melts, then the seas can raise their temperature without the hindrance of needing to melt ice. (Note that this is also a block the other way to water cooling.)
A given volume of water can hold considerable more thermal energy than the same volume of air at the same temperature. As a result the oceans act as a ballast on the thermal variations...but as they warm, the balance point of the scale shifts. It takes a long time to warm the oceans, and then it takes a long time to cool them. This is important in understanding climate change.
Note also that warmer air can hold more water. This is important as a thermal transport mechanism. (I'm not a climate modeler, so I can't understand why this would turn some places into deserts...but I've seen complex interaction of subroutines, so I'm not surprised that things like this happen.)
But it's not that either the air or the water is warming, they both are. Just at different rates, and with differing stability.
...We know CO2 soaks up heat and ...
Huh? CO2 is opaque to infrared radiation in certain wavelengths. This isn't at all the same conceptually as "CO2 soaks up heat", which is just wrong, unless you mean dry ice absorbs heat and evaporates.
N.B.: It's entirely possible that the atmosphere be sufficiently saturated with CO2 that more would make no difference WRT heat retention. Then it becomes MUCH more important to worry about methane, nitrous oxides, etc. Anything that absorbs infrared in a wavelength that isn't blanketed by CO2. (And I'm no specialist. I can't tell you whether we are close to that point or not. Or what other gases are most important.)
But "soaks up" is entirely the wrong model.
Actually the Panama connection to temperatures isn't entirely implausible. Perhaps our models of archaic weather need adjustment. (They aren't very good.)
OTOH, ... I'm not aware of any huge quantity of Carbon disappearing over the Sahara. Certainly nothing to compare with, say, the underground Indonesian coal fires. And apparently if a problem hasn't yet manifested (bird flu in a version contagious to between people) or has been successfully averted by proper action (SARS), then counting it an important danger was silly.
Sorry, but the gp doesn't generally impress me, even if he does have a idea or two of reasonable plausibility.
You know, I heard that precise same argument around 1970 ... only that time it was about Japan. "All they can do is copy.", "They can make anything out of used beer cans...but all they make is cheap shit".
How do you feel about Japan these days?
Which country is doing the most in robotics?
(P.S.: I'm not certain that the answer to the second question is Japan, but they're definitely one of the top three.)