... how happy do you think our hypothetical programmer would be if someone used his code without asking permission, paying him or giving him credit?
A few years ago, Sun got into some trouble with the Open Source community for this reason. The problem wasn't that they included a bunch of open-source code in their packaged products. That was legal and didn't require any permissions. The problem was that they stripped out all the attributions from the code. This didn't just get the programmers upset; it was a violation of the GPL.
Sun did apologize for that one, though it was a bit late to save their image in the programming community. But the fact is that it's standard procedure in much of the corporate world. I've worked on a number of proprietary projects, and in every one of them, my name was removed from the comments in all the code during the release process. Of course, I have no legal right to complain about this, so I didn't. But it does tell you a lot about how much respect the management of those companies has for their own employees' professional reputations.
It's also somewhat foolish, because if further work is needed later on, it's difficult to find the real experts on the code who could probably do the work fairly quickly. I've also seen numerous cases where not just my name, but part or all of the explanatory comments were also deleted. And in some case, I've seen later changes to the code by people who obviously didn't understand the (uncommented) code and could have been helped by my explanations. But it's pointless to try to explain such things to managers who order them; it just gives you a rep as a potential troublemaker.
(In at least one case, I was later hired to add to a project that I'd worked on. When I found the comments missing, I restored them from a backup copy that I'd kept. I was suitably bemused by the fact that when the new code went into their database, most of the comments again disappeared.;-)
I'll disqualify slavery and killing from the category of "real, tangible products" due to the fact that they necessarily violate another human being's rights.
Ah, but 200 years ago, slavery was legal in the US and much of the rest of the world. It didn't violate the slaves' rights, because by the laws at the time, the slaves had no rights recognized by the legal system.
You've engaged in "ex post facto" legal reasoning, applying current law to a situation before the current laws were passed. This is explicitly disallowed by the US Constitution, and by the law in a good number of other countries.
Wikipedia has a good, readable summary, if you're interested. It also points out that the phrase used in English isn't grammatically correct Latin, and should be "ex postfacto", using "post" as a prefix rather than putting two prepositions before the noun (and the wrong case ending;-).
There were also the critical analyses from the NY Fire Dept people saying that the design of the World Trade Center buildings could lead to a small fire (e.g. a burning trash can or laptop battery next to a filing cabinet) that would sufficiently weaken the building's steel skeleton to cause a collapse similar to what actually happened. A number of engineer types have commented that the buildings could have easily withstood the impact of an airliner (as the Empire State Building did decades earlier); the problem was the softening of critical steel beams by the heat of the fire. There were even conjectures that this was the plan in that incident a decade earlier, with the burning van in the underground parking area, which was apparently done by part of the same gang that pulled off the 2001-9-11 caper.
When reading about such things, I found that it was hard to avoid the mental image of a bunch of engineers standing around talking about how helpful it was of al Qaeda to actually perform the experiment, and verify the accuracy of the engineering analyses. We all know how difficult it can be to get funding to actually perform such useful tests of new or marginal designs.
There's also the alternate theory, based on the fact that Mohammed Atta was an architecture student. This theory says that his leading the team that destroyed the WTC wasn't an act of terrorism; it was an act of architectural criticism. He successfully removed an out-of-place eyesore from the New York skyline. But note that this theory doesn't conflict with the above engineering explanation; it talks about motive, while the other deals with method.
(I also like the concept of "spin". But then, the "minor" part of my CS degree was in linguistics.;-)
As a pedant: No; "whoosh" is correct. The "woo*sh" spelling is a recent innovation, presumably originating in one of the English dialects that have merged the/wh/ consonant with/w/. If pairs like which/witch and where/wear are homophones for you, then you speak such a dialect. (I don't pronounce them the same.) English spelling tends to be conservative; it tends to preserve such distinctions even when the pronunciation in major dialects has lost them.
I'm afraid that any doubt about what kind of president he was kinda left the building when he called the constitution a just a Goddamned piece of paper
Yeah, because anyone who bothers to check the facts quickly learns that the US Constitution is on parchment, not paper.
I mean, when Bush couldn't even be bothered to get such a trivial detail right, it told us something about his general respect for the truth. That little error pretty much works as a symbol for the rest of his administration.
Fact checking isn't just for validating journalists...
Humans and Neanderthals diverged about 500,000 years ago, so some kind of humanoid existed at that time.
What kind, and how similar to us, today?
FWIW, the conventional "layman" explanation from the paleontologists is that if you could pick up a random Neandert[h]al fellow in your time machine, give him a shave and a haircut, dress him in modern clothes, and drop him down anywhere in Europe, nobody would give him a second glance. Granted, he wouldn't look exactly like the statistically average European, but his features would be within the normal range of variation. This would be especially true in the more northerly parts of Europe, since he would be adapted for a colder climate than what Europe currently has.
It turns out that much of the public image of the Neanderthals came from "artists' reconstructions" that more or less intentionally exaggerated their features to make them look more ape-like. Back in the 1800s, this was fairly common, and was also routinely done with non-white modern humans. This was basically propaganda to reassure their white viewers that the Europeans were the most advanced, civilized race, and all the rest were little better than animals. This pretty much continues with the Neanderthals, partly because they are no longer around to defend themselves. (Or are they? Perhaps all modern Europeans are.5% Neanderthal.;-)
This is all part of the reason for the ongoing discussion of whether H. neanderthalensis was a different species from us. It's true that there are statistical differences between them and us, but the differences are within the normal range of modern Europeans. This could be due to interbreeding, or it could be independent adaptation to European climate conditions. You can't decide from the skeletons. Maybe the traces of preserved DNA will tell us, if we can find enough of them before all of Europe's ice melts away. Or maybe we'll never know. We have found fossils of what look like neander/sapiens hybrids, but they could be "mules", i.e., sterile offspring. The fossil record doesn't preserve that information.
It sorta like the recent thread on another topic: The best scientific answer is "Well, that's interesting, but further research is clearly needed; can you find some more data that might help us decide?"
Oops; I accidentally out the word "don't" in the last sentence of the first paragraph. I'll leave it up to the reader to insert it in either of the two places where it'll make sense.;-)
Even if you can't use all the energy, there must be some way to bleed it off.
Sure; just turn it into a big geothermal energy farm. Run a bunch of pipes (tubes?;-) down to carry the heat to power generators. The current estimates are that the heat from Yellowstone could pretty much supply electricity equal to the world's current usage for several centuries. Of course, distribution to areas outside North America would be problematic. Also, we don't know how fast the heat sources might be replenished from below, so we really know how many centuries (or millennia) it might last.
Anyway, this is hardly a radical suggestion. It has been proposed repeatedly over the years. It would have an impact on the local wildlife, of course, which is another resource worth preserving. So we might want to make sure that the impact on the surface ecosystem is minimized. We might just want to restrict it to supplying enough power for North America, and let the people on other continents tap their volcanic areas on their own.
It probably won't much happen, though, as long as our oil billionaires remain major contributors to political campaigns.;-)
If you want to know how to do it, contact the engineers over in Iceland. The Japanese also make and use a lot of geothermal power. Both countries also use their underground magma for direct heating, though that's less practical with Yellowstone due to its distance from population centers.
An interesting bit of economic trivia is that Iceland is a major supplier of bananas to Europe. They pipe underground steam up into huge greenhouses that are patches of the tropics with 23 hours of daylight in the summer, and the bananas love it.
Actually, it's not clear that this is a significant drain on the underground heat in Iceland or Japan. They're not using the heat to anything like maximum capacity. Perhaps we should be developing ways to increase the exploitation by orders of magnitude, if we want to seriously effect the danger of a future eruption.
It would seem the prudent thing to do, if you find yourself in a similar situation, would be to turn over the damn passwords.
Hmmm... Apparently you missed the earlier post's link to the article about the official policy of the county government. It included this summary excerpt:
"Password Policy" As such, all County employees (including contractors, vendors, and temporary staff with access to County systems) are responsible for taking the appropriate steps, as outlined below, to select and secure their passwords. All system-level passwords (e.g., root, enable, NT admin, application administration accounts, etc.) must be changed on at least a monthly basis" "Do not share County passwords with anyone, including administrative assistants or secretaries.
All passwords are to be treated as sensitive, confidential County information.
Here is a list of things to avoid -Telling your boss your password. -Talking about a password in front of others. -Telling your co-workers your password while on vacation."
So if he'd handed over the password to his bosses, he would have been charged with a violation of official published policy, and that charge would have probably stuck. By following the official policy, he may well have succeeded in winning the court case. Of course, it didn't stop the city from implementing what's almost certainly an illegal incarceration before trial. We'll have to keep checking to see how it turns out, and whether he can get restitution for the jail time.
In security-related situations, it's often a good idea to know the official published policy. When asked to violate it, it often can help to point out that what you're being asked to do is illegal, and ask if they really intended that. (If you're a contractor, you might try grinning and saying that you charge extra for illegal acts. Tell them that your consulting firm has a policy against performing illegal acts without first getting the explicit job description on paper with all the right signatures authorizing the higher rate, indemnification for possible charges, etc. It can be fun to watch their reaction.)
Let's put it into a slightly different scenario. The boss is visibly drunk, and demands the keys to the company van, which you are in charge of. You give them to him. He plows into someone else, killing them. YOU are liable.
Anyone know if this is really true? I'd agree that it should be how the law works. But I've never read of a court decision like that. I'd guess that many judges and juries would agree with the people here who say you should always follow your bosses' orders (although the Nuremberg Trials did say otherwise;-). A lot of people would just think that you shouldn't risk your job in such cases.
So do we have any legal precedent for this sort of situation? Did the courts consistently decide one way or the other, or were different cases decided differently?
Inquisitive (and self-interested) minds want to know...
Bail should be set as a deterrent to flee before a trial is finished, not to keep someone indefinitely in a cell.
And this is probably why they did it. His bosses probably knew (or were told by their lawyers) right off that they didn't have a chance of convicting him of anything. So they used one of the standard legal ruses to keep him in jail while they delayed the trial. It's not especially unusual for people to be jailed before a trial for longer than the longest legal sentence. It's even done when conviction couldn't get a jail sentence at all. The idea is to keep someone in jail as long as you can, by any means that will work. Then it doesn't much matter if the court exonerates them; you've shown that you can incarcerate them sufficiently long without a trial.
Parts of the US Bill of Rights were designed to prevent this sort of imprisonment. It hasn't worked very well in this case. And it's not the first time that such things have been done in the US. Anyone not aware of this problem is naive and ignorant of history.
The only real question is whether he can get restitution from the courts afterwards. History says he probably won't.
This sort of story is why I gave up on security/admin jobs early on. I read some stories similar to this, and figured out that the non-technical people above my immediate boss were highly likely to pull such stunts, perhaps with me as a chosen victim. The only way to win that game is not to play it, because the higher ups can see all the cards and do all the shuffling. Of course, when I and thousands of others started figuring this out, it inevitably led to our current sorry state of widespread computer insecurity.
One thing we might add to this story is a question about whether SF will be able to hire a competent person to replace him. I certainly wouldn't want to interview with them, except maybe to see if I could get some inside information about their current policies (after which I'd simply ignore any job offers).
One thing I'd suggest to anyone in his position: If your superiors demand that you give admin passwords to non-technical people, you should hand in your resignation along with the passwords. Tell them right out why you consider this a threat to your own legal safety as well as the computer systems. Chances are they won't be surprised, because they knew what was planned. After all, anyone with the root passwords can edit any file and fake lots of evidence, including the timestamps on files.
Of course, and in common speech, they usually do. But in scientific writing, words usually have fairly precise definitions. It's common for different scientific fields to use the same word with different meanings, of course, so you should always be aware of the definition used in the current field of discussion.
But the words "prove" and "proof" aren't used very often in many scientific fields, except when they're discussing math. As others have mentions, you more often see short phrases like "failed to disprove" or "the data supports", to express the idea that tests have been done, and the results support a hypothesis. Nobody much bothers to add "but doesn't prove it", because that's just a waste of words among people who understand scientific methods. The closest they usually come is the standard "further research is needed", the cliché that has been described as the most important part of the last paragraph of a scientific paper.
When you read "scientific proof", it's usually from non-scientific sources such as the media. We had an especially egregious example of this a few years back, when the Republicans started widely calling for "sound science". If you investigated this phrase, you found that their definitions required that the science be good enough to prove the results. Since scientific methods generally don't supply proofs, this turned out to be an approach that was mostly used to dismiss a list of scientific results that they didn't like. There was a strong suspicion that the people who invented this particular campaign tactic knew quite well what they were doing, and understood that the general public didn't have enough understanding of scientific methodology to see through it.
I haven't much seen the phrase "sound science" for the past year or so, so maybe they've put that approach aside temporarily. I have wondered how much flak they got from knowledgeable scientists over this particular misleading bit of anti-science propaganda. I know that it has come up in discussions around the concept of the "Republican war on science". It is a good example for people interested in propaganda techniques.
I don't have mod points right now, either. So I'll just add that the joke about Congress is just one of many example of "prior art" that might be used to disqualify this patent.
Another well-known example of this process is the common practice in the food industry of having higher prices (and lower quality) in inner-city stores than in the same chain's suburban stores. The chain stores know that the poorer people can't afford to do price shopping like the more affluent people do, so they can get away with charging more in the poorer areas.
With a little effort, we can probably come up with a good list of prior art, and maybe we can even get it into the Patent Office's hands.
Perhaps it's time to once again point out that "scientific proof" is a red herring. As any number of science's theoreticians have carefully explained over the years, scientific methods rarely if ever actually "prove" anything. Rather, science works mostly with a double-negative approach: An accepted theory is one that we have failed to disprove. Scientific testing and data collection is mostly aimed at showing that a hypothesis is wrong. Results that agree with a hypothesis are generally called "support", not "proof", because usually the tests can't provide proof. But a single (correctly done;-) test or observation is often sufficient to disprove a theory.
This is why scientific theories are often called "tentative". Scientists are always trying to think of new ways to test a theory, and sometimes they succeed in finding situations where a theory fails. The poster child for this was the failure of Newton's mechanics to explain a number of anomalous observations about a century ago, which led to Einstein's theories explaining how the universe actually works. Of course, his theories have never been "proved", either. They have merely withstood hundreds of new experimental tests. Tomorrow some physicist (or high-school student) may produce a new test that demos an exception to Einstein's equations. But until then, they are accepted not because we've proved them, but rather because we have repeatedly failed to disprove them.
Of course, fundamental physics is "easier" that climate in an obvious way. Weather is much more complex than things like particle physics or orbital mechanics, which can be reduced to some fairly simple equations (though not quite as simple as we thought back in Newton's day). Anything dealing with weather has to be treated statistically, since the complexity is far beyond the capacity of our most powerful super-computers. (Our computers can't even model a butterfly's wings in detail, much less the effect the butterfly has on weather halfway around the world.;-) Since the public is generally totally ignorant of statistics, it's not surprising that people would fail to understand what the AGW theorists are telling us. It's fairly obvious that even most of the posters here in this "nerd" community don't understand the difference between weather and climate. You don't have much of a chance of understanding the issue without a good grounding in statistical methods, in addition to all the kinds of chemistry that you have to understand.
But the constant use of forms of the words "prove" and "proof" in regard to scientific theories should be treated with humor, since such words are an open statement that the author doesn't know much at all about scientific methods. Those are media and propaganda terms; they have very little use in scientific discussions. Proofs are what mathematicians do. Scientists do disproofs. (And it is interesting how well the radically different approaches of math and science complement each other. So far I haven't read much enlightening from either camp on this topic, just the observation that they play well together. But we all know that.)
Yeah; I've been getting 2 or even 3 15-point mod sessions per week for a while now. One thing it makes me think of is that I don't really understand all that much of how/.'s mod system really works. Is it actually documented somewhere that we can read? I haven't found anything that I'd call very informative about the mod system.
Part of the reason I'm interested is that some friends and other acquaintances have recently asked me about building some online news/blog sites for a couple of local organizations. Doing the basic programming seems rather straightforward, but I suspect that there are some subtleties for which it'd be best to learn from others. I'd want to include some sort of moderation system, so I'd like to read about some experiences with such things. Both successful and unsuccessful ideas would be useful. It'd probably be better than me making guesses about how to do it.
I did look into slashcode, but found that the documentation seems scarce, and apparently nobody is feeding and watering it any more. I also did a bit of googling, but didn't find much useful. Maybe I just didn't guess the right keywords...
Anyway, if the/. editors have produced any sort of history of what they've tried, what worked, and what didn't, it could be interesting reading to some of us.
Wait, what?! I'll check as soon as I get off work...
Nah; don't bother; they're not naked. They're covered with this stuff that's sorta like a RL version of a paywall; they call it "clothes" or something like that.
Funny thing is that a couple of years ago, a friend sent me a link to a couple of their political comic pages, and I've been following a few of them since then, checking them once or twice a week to see if there's anything new. But it never occurred to me to try salon's news pages, because I thought they would just block me. Guess I didn't get the message that this had changed. Actually, I'm not sure I'd bother even now, because I've mostly been following links via google news, and I don't recall ever noticing a salon.com link there. Maybe I'm just not paying attention, or maybe just have a low page rank in google's database so their articles don't get listed. Or maybe salon doesn't publish articles about things that attract my attention.
There are so many interesting news sources now that's it's hard to feel sorry (or at all) for a site that intentionally drives away their readers. (OTOH, if they're being blocked by ISPs or government filters, that tends to make them interesting and worth searching for. Sorta like how if you forbid a kid to look at something, it becomes fascinating.;-)
Just out of curiosity, I picked up my G1 Android (T-Mobile) phone, turned on its maps - and it showed my current position as about 7 blocks south of where I actually am (in my home office). This isn't at all unusual. GPS is notoriously flakey, and it'd be really unnerving to read of a court accepting GPS position data as evidence.
As an extreme case, a few months ago while sitting in the car with my wife driving, I checked the phone's position. At first, it showed the correct position, driving south a couple of miles from here on Boston's Route 128 circumference highway. Then suddenly it showed us jump to a point about 100 miles east-southeast, driving north about 15 miles off the coast of Cape Cod. According to the phone, we drove along out in the ocean for 10 minutes or so, and then just as quickly popped back to a highway parallel to the street we were on, but a couple blocks away. It would be fun to see a court deal with this "evidence" about our (or at least my phone's) position at that time.
We also have a couple Garmin GPS gadgets in our cars. Several years ago, while driving south on a local street in a nearby town (Concord), I noticed the GPS showed my position as about a block north of where I was - and moving north at around 100 mph. Traffic was light, so I glanced at it frequently, and watched my position pop to the correct one. So I quickly switched to the numerical display, and saw that I was travelling south on the street at over 200 mph (or 300 kph if you prefer). Again, I had thoughts of the gadget's record of my travels being presented as evidence in court. "Do you often get your car up to over 200 mph on local streets like this?" Actually, I sorta doubt that the car could take the stresses of that particular maneuver.
I've been on the lookout for stories of GPS data being used in court cases. But so far, I haven't read of any. Does anyone here know about this? Are any courts actually accepting GPS data as evidence? From my experience with a few brands of GPS receivers, I'd be sorta nervous at the thought that my freedom or life savings might depend on the accuracy of such data. Judges and others with legal training do seem to have something of a history of credulity when it comes to technological information that can be subpoenaed.
Now, if the organization then... ties them to beds and forgets to water them then there may be a problem.
Or, if they're part of the US government, ties them to beds and over-waters them.
Of course, so far there don't seem to have been any prosecutions of this practice. They're even bringing a fellow to trial after they water-boarded him more than a hundred times to get his confessions, and the judge hasn't laughed at them and ordered the guy freed.
Such practices are normal for lots of big organizations, especially governments who have nobody to answer to. The only thing really unusual about this story is that it's a religious organization with no (obvious) ties to the government. Of course, we don't know what might have been going on behind the curtains, to prevent the California and US governments from breaking up the operation.
When every worker has a PC, but only the IT department has root access, then we end up with the same situation again.
You're right, of course, and I quoted you in case the moderators don't mod you up. This is one widespread result of the DP (or IT or whatever) department deciding that they couldn't win the battle against those newfangled small computers, so they'd better switch to subverting and controlling the new system. It's a running battle in lots of organizations, especially in corporations that have a strong top-down management philosophy.
In a local unix/linux mailing list, there's currently an ongoing discussion of the problem of developers not being allowed root access to their dev/test machines. This has gotta be one of the stupidest cases of the desire for power, since blocking developers from being able to get at the lowest levels of their test systems is a blatant case of "shooting yourself in the foot" out of a mere desire for control of things that the controllers rarely understand. But, contrary to the ideology often expressed here that corporations exist only to make a profit, the fact is that many people in any corporate hierarchy are primarily motivated by a personal quest for power over their underlings. So they'll seriously interfere with development projects to maintain control, to the point of blocking developers' access to needed equipment. The DP/IT/whatever department is often an extreme case of this. In most corporations, they know that they'll never make it to the top (unless the current rulers include a very close relative;-). So instead of being a functional "service" department, their actual approach is attempting to gain effective control of the other departments that they are supposedly serving.
We can expect the vendors of "cloud" services to behave similarly. They will function basically as a shared, distributed "IT Department" for their customers. Their public face will be saying "The customer is always right", as the old motto goes. Meanwhile, they'll be doing their best to get and maintain control over their customers' data. It's the way that human organizations of all sorts work in the Real World[TM].
Many of the future stories on the "cloud" will probably be about people learning, often the hard way, about the new power relationship they've entered into.
This sort of problem isn't at all new; it's much of why the "personal computer" approach took over computing back in the 1980s.
Before that, and still today in some large organizations, the "mainframe" was the only computer. When the little desktop computers started appearing, the "computer center" people in most companies and other organizations argued against them, mostly on the grounds that the work could be done much cheaper on the mainframe. Buying a lot of single-user machines was illogical from a purely cost-oriented viewpoint. But people kept finding ways to use their funds to buy the new little computers for a very simple reason: The mainframe was in the hands of a bureaucracy that had completely controlled what you could do on it. If you wanted to do something new (like run one of those newfangled "spreadsheet" programs), you had to go begging the DP people for permission. You couldn't install software on the mainframe yourself; the DP people had to install it for you. If they didn't think you needed it, you didn't get it. They usually had no idea what a "spreadsheet" was, so you couldn't get it. You couldn't have a terminal that did real-time interaction with software on the mainframe anyway, so a spreadsheet was sorta unusable on a mainframe.
So people bought the new little machines, not to save money, but so that they could do the things that the people in the computer department wouldn't allow them to do. Eventually the people at the top learned what was happening, and the sensible ones figured out that it was to their benefit to take the side of the workers and allow this to continue. The ones that forbid the use of desktop computers found that their company was slowly being made uncompetitive by the lack of ability to do the sorts of data processing (such as spreadsheets) that their competitors were doing.
The "cloud computing" idea has its merits. But it will always have the same problems that mainframe computers had. It will be under the control of the giant organizations (mostly secretive corporations) that run the cloud. Those organizations will have unfettered access to any data stored on their part of the cloud, and will use your data for their own purposes whenever they see a profit in doing so. If they don't like something you're doing, they will be able to block it. If you want control of your own data for any reason, you will have to keep it and the associated software on hardware that you own and control. If you don't, you'll find your pictures of your kids being used commercially. If your photo collection contains a picture of your kids in the bathtub or otherwise naked, they'll be labelled as "child porn" and deleted or sent to your local police. (Gotta bring in "Think of the children" here.;-)
It's the way things have always worked, and always will. There are reasons people want privacy, some frivolous and some serious. And there are things that are best done in public settings. For those things, the "cloud" will be a big win for everyone.
All along they've been telling us that is was the porn that was dragging the Net to a halt. And now they're saying that it's all because of dumb old ads? C'mon, now, were they lying to us all along about the porn? I mean; the advertisers are all honest, upstanding businessmen (and women), aren't they? They wouldn't drag it all down with their spam^Wattractive advertising, would they?
if you send a paper to the New England Journal of Medicine without supporting data and calculations they reject it outright regardless of conclusions, however provocative. Because there's such a thing as scientific fraud
And that's an important example. Consider the motives for fraud in astronomy and medicine. If you use your favorite image editor to product fake images of a nova or supernova, you can show them to people, but how do you make a profit from such fakery?
On the other hand, we've had quite a number of cases recently in which medical testing shows that some medical treatments don't work. These were for products supposedly developed by companies to treat certain medical conditions, and the companies often made a lot of money from them. If in fact they didn't work, the companies' claims were simply fraudulent. They didn't do proper testing; they just created a product and claimed that it had some effect without real scientific testing to verify that it had those effects. Such corporate medical fraud, when it is verified, is almost never prosecuted, and when there are individual lawsuits, court-ordered settlements rarely add up to more than the company's profits from the fraud. So medical fraud can be low-risk and highly profitable.
So there's a good financial motive for medical fraud; there isn't much motive for astronomical fraud.
There are other motives for fraud, of course. There's not much financial motivation behind the anti-evolution pseudo-science; it's almost purely a case of people feeling that their religion is threatened. But that's a small game compared to the huge profits involved in some kinds of scientific fraud. The climate "debate" fits into this, since it very clearly implicates some of our most profitable industries as the source of the slowly-growing problem.
That's not quite right. It's important that your results are reproducible. That requires a full description of how the data was gathered and how it was analysed. That way, someone can go and do their own experiments, collect their own data and conduct their own analysis.
Yes, that's the standard scientific approach - when it's feasible. But scientists in some fields do work with situations that are inherently not reproducible, at least not in a practical fashion. Astronomy is a prime example, where the scientists can't do many controlled experiments at all, much less reproduce them. Nobody considers astronomy to be less of a science because of this; they just hold each other to stricter data-handling rules than in other fields. They also implement parallel data collection by sending first telegrams and now email to colleagues to notify them of interesting events that should be watched by any observatories with the equipment available to do so.
Although conclusions can be less reliable in such situations, there are some practical ways of dealing with the problem. Fields of study that can't practically be reproduced tend to make a big deal of "open" data, with the raw data from the irreproducible observations being available to other scientists (and to pseudo-scientists, for that matter;-).
This is the main reason why this lost data is such a big deal. Climate study is another field in which experimentation is close to impossible, and many observations are irreproducible. Given a few hundred million years, perhaps we could set up experiments that reproduce the climates of the past few centuries, replay the industrial revolution, and get new data on how it all turns out. But from the viewpoint of a human lifetime, reproducing the past century just isn't feasible. So we get all upset when some scientific team discards its raw data.
Of course, a bigger problem is probably that much of the raw climate data is in the hands of private corporations, where it is probably mostly lost forever to actual scientific research. This is also true of much of our raw geological data, though in that case the geologists can in principle (if given funding) go out and do the drilling to get the data from the planet. In the case of climate data, nobody can go back to 1970 and collect the data over again, and by the time we can work up a replay of the scenario, even our civilization will probably be long dead and part of the archaeological record.
(Sorry about the longwinded theorizing, but it's clear that many readers here don't have a good understanding of how the scientific process really works. I hope that those who do understand skipped to the next message somewhere in my first paragraph.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
... how happy do you think our hypothetical programmer would be if someone used his code without asking permission, paying him or giving him credit?
A few years ago, Sun got into some trouble with the Open Source community for this reason. The problem wasn't that they included a bunch of open-source code in their packaged products. That was legal and didn't require any permissions. The problem was that they stripped out all the attributions from the code. This didn't just get the programmers upset; it was a violation of the GPL.
Sun did apologize for that one, though it was a bit late to save their image in the programming community. But the fact is that it's standard procedure in much of the corporate world. I've worked on a number of proprietary projects, and in every one of them, my name was removed from the comments in all the code during the release process. Of course, I have no legal right to complain about this, so I didn't. But it does tell you a lot about how much respect the management of those companies has for their own employees' professional reputations.
It's also somewhat foolish, because if further work is needed later on, it's difficult to find the real experts on the code who could probably do the work fairly quickly. I've also seen numerous cases where not just my name, but part or all of the explanatory comments were also deleted. And in some case, I've seen later changes to the code by people who obviously didn't understand the (uncommented) code and could have been helped by my explanations. But it's pointless to try to explain such things to managers who order them; it just gives you a rep as a potential troublemaker.
(In at least one case, I was later hired to add to a project that I'd worked on. When I found the comments missing, I restored them from a backup copy that I'd kept. I was suitably bemused by the fact that when the new code went into their database, most of the comments again disappeared. ;-)
I'll disqualify slavery and killing from the category of "real, tangible products" due to the fact that they necessarily violate another human being's rights.
Ah, but 200 years ago, slavery was legal in the US and much of the rest of the world. It didn't violate the slaves' rights, because by the laws at the time, the slaves had no rights recognized by the legal system.
You've engaged in "ex post facto" legal reasoning, applying current law to a situation before the current laws were passed. This is explicitly disallowed by the US Constitution, and by the law in a good number of other countries.
Wikipedia has a good, readable summary, if you're interested. It also points out that the phrase used in English isn't grammatically correct Latin, and should be "ex postfacto", using "post" as a prefix rather than putting two prepositions before the noun (and the wrong case ending ;-).
There were also the critical analyses from the NY Fire Dept people saying that the design of the World Trade Center buildings could lead to a small fire (e.g. a burning trash can or laptop battery next to a filing cabinet) that would sufficiently weaken the building's steel skeleton to cause a collapse similar to what actually happened. A number of engineer types have commented that the buildings could have easily withstood the impact of an airliner (as the Empire State Building did decades earlier); the problem was the softening of critical steel beams by the heat of the fire. There were even conjectures that this was the plan in that incident a decade earlier, with the burning van in the underground parking area, which was apparently done by part of the same gang that pulled off the 2001-9-11 caper.
When reading about such things, I found that it was hard to avoid the mental image of a bunch of engineers standing around talking about how helpful it was of al Qaeda to actually perform the experiment, and verify the accuracy of the engineering analyses. We all know how difficult it can be to get funding to actually perform such useful tests of new or marginal designs.
There's also the alternate theory, based on the fact that Mohammed Atta was an architecture student. This theory says that his leading the team that destroyed the WTC wasn't an act of terrorism; it was an act of architectural criticism. He successfully removed an out-of-place eyesore from the New York skyline. But note that this theory doesn't conflict with the above engineering explanation; it talks about motive, while the other deals with method.
(I also like the concept of "spin". But then, the "minor" part of my CS degree was in linguistics. ;-)
As a pedant: No; "whoosh" is correct. The "woo*sh" spelling is a recent innovation, presumably originating in one of the English dialects that have merged the /wh/ consonant with /w/. If pairs like which/witch and where/wear are homophones for you, then you speak such a dialect. (I don't pronounce them the same.) English spelling tends to be conservative; it tends to preserve such distinctions even when the pronunciation in major dialects has lost them.
I'm afraid that any doubt about what kind of president he was kinda left the building when he called the constitution a just a Goddamned piece of paper
Yeah, because anyone who bothers to check the facts quickly learns that the US Constitution is on parchment, not paper.
I mean, when Bush couldn't even be bothered to get such a trivial detail right, it told us something about his general respect for the truth. That little error pretty much works as a symbol for the rest of his administration.
Fact checking isn't just for validating journalists ...
Oops; I accidentally out the word "don't" in the last sentence of the first paragraph. I'll leave it up to the reader to insert it in either of the two places where it'll make sense. ;-)
Even if you can't use all the energy, there must be some way to bleed it off.
Sure; just turn it into a big geothermal energy farm. Run a bunch of pipes (tubes?;-) down to carry the heat to power generators. The current estimates are that the heat from Yellowstone could pretty much supply electricity equal to the world's current usage for several centuries. Of course, distribution to areas outside North America would be problematic. Also, we don't know how fast the heat sources might be replenished from below, so we really know how many centuries (or millennia) it might last.
Anyway, this is hardly a radical suggestion. It has been proposed repeatedly over the years. It would have an impact on the local wildlife, of course, which is another resource worth preserving. So we might want to make sure that the impact on the surface ecosystem is minimized. We might just want to restrict it to supplying enough power for North America, and let the people on other continents tap their volcanic areas on their own.
It probably won't much happen, though, as long as our oil billionaires remain major contributors to political campaigns. ;-)
If you want to know how to do it, contact the engineers over in Iceland. The Japanese also make and use a lot of geothermal power. Both countries also use their underground magma for direct heating, though that's less practical with Yellowstone due to its distance from population centers.
An interesting bit of economic trivia is that Iceland is a major supplier of bananas to Europe. They pipe underground steam up into huge greenhouses that are patches of the tropics with 23 hours of daylight in the summer, and the bananas love it.
Actually, it's not clear that this is a significant drain on the underground heat in Iceland or Japan. They're not using the heat to anything like maximum capacity. Perhaps we should be developing ways to increase the exploitation by orders of magnitude, if we want to seriously effect the danger of a future eruption.
It would seem the prudent thing to do, if you find yourself in a similar situation, would be to turn over the damn passwords.
Hmmm ... Apparently you missed the earlier post's link to the article about the official policy of the county government. It included this summary excerpt:
So if he'd handed over the password to his bosses, he would have been charged with a violation of official published policy, and that charge would have probably stuck. By following the official policy, he may well have succeeded in winning the court case. Of course, it didn't stop the city from implementing what's almost certainly an illegal incarceration before trial. We'll have to keep checking to see how it turns out, and whether he can get restitution for the jail time.
In security-related situations, it's often a good idea to know the official published policy. When asked to violate it, it often can help to point out that what you're being asked to do is illegal, and ask if they really intended that. (If you're a contractor, you might try grinning and saying that you charge extra for illegal acts. Tell them that your consulting firm has a policy against performing illegal acts without first getting the explicit job description on paper with all the right signatures authorizing the higher rate, indemnification for possible charges, etc. It can be fun to watch their reaction.)
Let's put it into a slightly different scenario. The boss is visibly drunk, and demands the keys to the company van, which you are in charge of. You give them to him. He plows into someone else, killing them. YOU are liable.
Anyone know if this is really true? I'd agree that it should be how the law works. But I've never read of a court decision like that. I'd guess that many judges and juries would agree with the people here who say you should always follow your bosses' orders (although the Nuremberg Trials did say otherwise ;-). A lot of people would just think that you shouldn't risk your job in such cases.
So do we have any legal precedent for this sort of situation? Did the courts consistently decide one way or the other, or were different cases decided differently?
Inquisitive (and self-interested) minds want to know ...
Bail should be set as a deterrent to flee before a trial is finished, not to keep someone indefinitely in a cell.
And this is probably why they did it. His bosses probably knew (or were told by their lawyers) right off that they didn't have a chance of convicting him of anything. So they used one of the standard legal ruses to keep him in jail while they delayed the trial. It's not especially unusual for people to be jailed before a trial for longer than the longest legal sentence. It's even done when conviction couldn't get a jail sentence at all. The idea is to keep someone in jail as long as you can, by any means that will work. Then it doesn't much matter if the court exonerates them; you've shown that you can incarcerate them sufficiently long without a trial.
Parts of the US Bill of Rights were designed to prevent this sort of imprisonment. It hasn't worked very well in this case. And it's not the first time that such things have been done in the US. Anyone not aware of this problem is naive and ignorant of history.
The only real question is whether he can get restitution from the courts afterwards. History says he probably won't.
This sort of story is why I gave up on security/admin jobs early on. I read some stories similar to this, and figured out that the non-technical people above my immediate boss were highly likely to pull such stunts, perhaps with me as a chosen victim. The only way to win that game is not to play it, because the higher ups can see all the cards and do all the shuffling. Of course, when I and thousands of others started figuring this out, it inevitably led to our current sorry state of widespread computer insecurity.
One thing we might add to this story is a question about whether SF will be able to hire a competent person to replace him. I certainly wouldn't want to interview with them, except maybe to see if I could get some inside information about their current policies (after which I'd simply ignore any job offers).
One thing I'd suggest to anyone in his position: If your superiors demand that you give admin passwords to non-technical people, you should hand in your resignation along with the passwords. Tell them right out why you consider this a threat to your own legal safety as well as the computer systems. Chances are they won't be surprised, because they knew what was planned. After all, anyone with the root passwords can edit any file and fake lots of evidence, including the timestamps on files.
A word can have different shades of meaning.
Of course, and in common speech, they usually do. But in scientific writing, words usually have fairly precise definitions. It's common for different scientific fields to use the same word with different meanings, of course, so you should always be aware of the definition used in the current field of discussion.
But the words "prove" and "proof" aren't used very often in many scientific fields, except when they're discussing math. As others have mentions, you more often see short phrases like "failed to disprove" or "the data supports", to express the idea that tests have been done, and the results support a hypothesis. Nobody much bothers to add "but doesn't prove it", because that's just a waste of words among people who understand scientific methods. The closest they usually come is the standard "further research is needed", the cliché that has been described as the most important part of the last paragraph of a scientific paper.
When you read "scientific proof", it's usually from non-scientific sources such as the media. We had an especially egregious example of this a few years back, when the Republicans started widely calling for "sound science". If you investigated this phrase, you found that their definitions required that the science be good enough to prove the results. Since scientific methods generally don't supply proofs, this turned out to be an approach that was mostly used to dismiss a list of scientific results that they didn't like. There was a strong suspicion that the people who invented this particular campaign tactic knew quite well what they were doing, and understood that the general public didn't have enough understanding of scientific methodology to see through it.
I haven't much seen the phrase "sound science" for the past year or so, so maybe they've put that approach aside temporarily. I have wondered how much flak they got from knowledgeable scientists over this particular misleading bit of anti-science propaganda. I know that it has come up in discussions around the concept of the "Republican war on science". It is a good example for people interested in propaganda techniques.
I don't have mod points right now, either. So I'll just add that the joke about Congress is just one of many example of "prior art" that might be used to disqualify this patent.
Another well-known example of this process is the common practice in the food industry of having higher prices (and lower quality) in inner-city stores than in the same chain's suburban stores. The chain stores know that the poorer people can't afford to do price shopping like the more affluent people do, so they can get away with charging more in the poorer areas.
With a little effort, we can probably come up with a good list of prior art, and maybe we can even get it into the Patent Office's hands.
Perhaps it's time to once again point out that "scientific proof" is a red herring. As any number of science's theoreticians have carefully explained over the years, scientific methods rarely if ever actually "prove" anything. Rather, science works mostly with a double-negative approach: An accepted theory is one that we have failed to disprove. Scientific testing and data collection is mostly aimed at showing that a hypothesis is wrong. Results that agree with a hypothesis are generally called "support", not "proof", because usually the tests can't provide proof. But a single (correctly done;-) test or observation is often sufficient to disprove a theory.
This is why scientific theories are often called "tentative". Scientists are always trying to think of new ways to test a theory, and sometimes they succeed in finding situations where a theory fails. The poster child for this was the failure of Newton's mechanics to explain a number of anomalous observations about a century ago, which led to Einstein's theories explaining how the universe actually works. Of course, his theories have never been "proved", either. They have merely withstood hundreds of new experimental tests. Tomorrow some physicist (or high-school student) may produce a new test that demos an exception to Einstein's equations. But until then, they are accepted not because we've proved them, but rather because we have repeatedly failed to disprove them.
Of course, fundamental physics is "easier" that climate in an obvious way. Weather is much more complex than things like particle physics or orbital mechanics, which can be reduced to some fairly simple equations (though not quite as simple as we thought back in Newton's day). Anything dealing with weather has to be treated statistically, since the complexity is far beyond the capacity of our most powerful super-computers. (Our computers can't even model a butterfly's wings in detail, much less the effect the butterfly has on weather halfway around the world.;-) Since the public is generally totally ignorant of statistics, it's not surprising that people would fail to understand what the AGW theorists are telling us. It's fairly obvious that even most of the posters here in this "nerd" community don't understand the difference between weather and climate. You don't have much of a chance of understanding the issue without a good grounding in statistical methods, in addition to all the kinds of chemistry that you have to understand.
But the constant use of forms of the words "prove" and "proof" in regard to scientific theories should be treated with humor, since such words are an open statement that the author doesn't know much at all about scientific methods. Those are media and propaganda terms; they have very little use in scientific discussions. Proofs are what mathematicians do. Scientists do disproofs. (And it is interesting how well the radically different approaches of math and science complement each other. So far I haven't read much enlightening from either camp on this topic, just the observation that they play well together. But we all know that.)
Yeah; I've been getting 2 or even 3 15-point mod sessions per week for a while now. One thing it makes me think of is that I don't really understand all that much of how /.'s mod system really works. Is it actually documented somewhere that we can read? I haven't found anything that I'd call very informative about the mod system.
Part of the reason I'm interested is that some friends and other acquaintances have recently asked me about building some online news/blog sites for a couple of local organizations. Doing the basic programming seems rather straightforward, but I suspect that there are some subtleties for which it'd be best to learn from others. I'd want to include some sort of moderation system, so I'd like to read about some experiences with such things. Both successful and unsuccessful ideas would be useful. It'd probably be better than me making guesses about how to do it.
I did look into slashcode, but found that the documentation seems scarce, and apparently nobody is feeding and watering it any more. I also did a bit of googling, but didn't find much useful. Maybe I just didn't guess the right keywords ...
Anyway, if the /. editors have produced any sort of history of what they've tried, what worked, and what didn't, it could be interesting reading to some of us.
Nah; don't bother; they're not naked. They're covered with this stuff that's sorta like a RL version of a paywall; they call it "clothes" or something like that.
Funny thing is that a couple of years ago, a friend sent me a link to a couple of their political comic pages, and I've been following a few of them since then, checking them once or twice a week to see if there's anything new. But it never occurred to me to try salon's news pages, because I thought they would just block me. Guess I didn't get the message that this had changed. Actually, I'm not sure I'd bother even now, because I've mostly been following links via google news, and I don't recall ever noticing a salon.com link there. Maybe I'm just not paying attention, or maybe just have a low page rank in google's database so their articles don't get listed. Or maybe salon doesn't publish articles about things that attract my attention.
There are so many interesting news sources now that's it's hard to feel sorry (or at all) for a site that intentionally drives away their readers. (OTOH, if they're being blocked by ISPs or government filters, that tends to make them interesting and worth searching for. Sorta like how if you forbid a kid to look at something, it becomes fascinating. ;-)
Just out of curiosity, I picked up my G1 Android (T-Mobile) phone, turned on its maps - and it showed my current position as about 7 blocks south of where I actually am (in my home office). This isn't at all unusual. GPS is notoriously flakey, and it'd be really unnerving to read of a court accepting GPS position data as evidence.
As an extreme case, a few months ago while sitting in the car with my wife driving, I checked the phone's position. At first, it showed the correct position, driving south a couple of miles from here on Boston's Route 128 circumference highway. Then suddenly it showed us jump to a point about 100 miles east-southeast, driving north about 15 miles off the coast of Cape Cod. According to the phone, we drove along out in the ocean for 10 minutes or so, and then just as quickly popped back to a highway parallel to the street we were on, but a couple blocks away. It would be fun to see a court deal with this "evidence" about our (or at least my phone's) position at that time.
We also have a couple Garmin GPS gadgets in our cars. Several years ago, while driving south on a local street in a nearby town (Concord), I noticed the GPS showed my position as about a block north of where I was - and moving north at around 100 mph. Traffic was light, so I glanced at it frequently, and watched my position pop to the correct one. So I quickly switched to the numerical display, and saw that I was travelling south on the street at over 200 mph (or 300 kph if you prefer). Again, I had thoughts of the gadget's record of my travels being presented as evidence in court. "Do you often get your car up to over 200 mph on local streets like this?" Actually, I sorta doubt that the car could take the stresses of that particular maneuver.
I've been on the lookout for stories of GPS data being used in court cases. But so far, I haven't read of any. Does anyone here know about this? Are any courts actually accepting GPS data as evidence? From my experience with a few brands of GPS receivers, I'd be sorta nervous at the thought that my freedom or life savings might depend on the accuracy of such data. Judges and others with legal training do seem to have something of a history of credulity when it comes to technological information that can be subpoenaed.
Now, if the organization then ... ties them to beds and forgets to water them then there may be a problem.
Or, if they're part of the US government, ties them to beds and over-waters them.
Of course, so far there don't seem to have been any prosecutions of this practice. They're even bringing a fellow to trial after they water-boarded him more than a hundred times to get his confessions, and the judge hasn't laughed at them and ordered the guy freed.
Such practices are normal for lots of big organizations, especially governments who have nobody to answer to. The only thing really unusual about this story is that it's a religious organization with no (obvious) ties to the government. Of course, we don't know what might have been going on behind the curtains, to prevent the California and US governments from breaking up the operation.
When every worker has a PC, but only the IT department has root access, then we end up with the same situation again.
You're right, of course, and I quoted you in case the moderators don't mod you up. This is one widespread result of the DP (or IT or whatever) department deciding that they couldn't win the battle against those newfangled small computers, so they'd better switch to subverting and controlling the new system. It's a running battle in lots of organizations, especially in corporations that have a strong top-down management philosophy.
In a local unix/linux mailing list, there's currently an ongoing discussion of the problem of developers not being allowed root access to their dev/test machines. This has gotta be one of the stupidest cases of the desire for power, since blocking developers from being able to get at the lowest levels of their test systems is a blatant case of "shooting yourself in the foot" out of a mere desire for control of things that the controllers rarely understand. But, contrary to the ideology often expressed here that corporations exist only to make a profit, the fact is that many people in any corporate hierarchy are primarily motivated by a personal quest for power over their underlings. So they'll seriously interfere with development projects to maintain control, to the point of blocking developers' access to needed equipment. The DP/IT/whatever department is often an extreme case of this. In most corporations, they know that they'll never make it to the top (unless the current rulers include a very close relative ;-). So instead of being a functional "service" department, their actual approach is attempting to gain effective control of the other departments that they are supposedly serving.
We can expect the vendors of "cloud" services to behave similarly. They will function basically as a shared, distributed "IT Department" for their customers. Their public face will be saying "The customer is always right", as the old motto goes. Meanwhile, they'll be doing their best to get and maintain control over their customers' data. It's the way that human organizations of all sorts work in the Real World[TM].
Many of the future stories on the "cloud" will probably be about people learning, often the hard way, about the new power relationship they've entered into.
We also don't need jerks like you trying to justify despotism because of the despotism that already exists.
However, we do need people with a sense of humor, and the ability to recognize humor in others' words.
This sort of problem isn't at all new; it's much of why the "personal computer" approach took over computing back in the 1980s.
Before that, and still today in some large organizations, the "mainframe" was the only computer. When the little desktop computers started appearing, the "computer center" people in most companies and other organizations argued against them, mostly on the grounds that the work could be done much cheaper on the mainframe. Buying a lot of single-user machines was illogical from a purely cost-oriented viewpoint. But people kept finding ways to use their funds to buy the new little computers for a very simple reason: The mainframe was in the hands of a bureaucracy that had completely controlled what you could do on it. If you wanted to do something new (like run one of those newfangled "spreadsheet" programs), you had to go begging the DP people for permission. You couldn't install software on the mainframe yourself; the DP people had to install it for you. If they didn't think you needed it, you didn't get it. They usually had no idea what a "spreadsheet" was, so you couldn't get it. You couldn't have a terminal that did real-time interaction with software on the mainframe anyway, so a spreadsheet was sorta unusable on a mainframe.
So people bought the new little machines, not to save money, but so that they could do the things that the people in the computer department wouldn't allow them to do. Eventually the people at the top learned what was happening, and the sensible ones figured out that it was to their benefit to take the side of the workers and allow this to continue. The ones that forbid the use of desktop computers found that their company was slowly being made uncompetitive by the lack of ability to do the sorts of data processing (such as spreadsheets) that their competitors were doing.
The "cloud computing" idea has its merits. But it will always have the same problems that mainframe computers had. It will be under the control of the giant organizations (mostly secretive corporations) that run the cloud. Those organizations will have unfettered access to any data stored on their part of the cloud, and will use your data for their own purposes whenever they see a profit in doing so. If they don't like something you're doing, they will be able to block it. If you want control of your own data for any reason, you will have to keep it and the associated software on hardware that you own and control. If you don't, you'll find your pictures of your kids being used commercially. If your photo collection contains a picture of your kids in the bathtub or otherwise naked, they'll be labelled as "child porn" and deleted or sent to your local police. (Gotta bring in "Think of the children" here. ;-)
It's the way things have always worked, and always will. There are reasons people want privacy, some frivolous and some serious. And there are things that are best done in public settings. For those things, the "cloud" will be a big win for everyone.
All along they've been telling us that is was the porn that was dragging the Net to a halt. And now they're saying that it's all because of dumb old ads? C'mon, now, were they lying to us all along about the porn? I mean; the advertisers are all honest, upstanding businessmen (and women), aren't they? They wouldn't drag it all down with their spam^Wattractive advertising, would they?
if you send a paper to the New England Journal of Medicine without supporting data and calculations they reject it outright regardless of conclusions, however provocative. Because there's such a thing as scientific fraud
And that's an important example. Consider the motives for fraud in astronomy and medicine. If you use your favorite image editor to product fake images of a nova or supernova, you can show them to people, but how do you make a profit from such fakery?
On the other hand, we've had quite a number of cases recently in which medical testing shows that some medical treatments don't work. These were for products supposedly developed by companies to treat certain medical conditions, and the companies often made a lot of money from them. If in fact they didn't work, the companies' claims were simply fraudulent. They didn't do proper testing; they just created a product and claimed that it had some effect without real scientific testing to verify that it had those effects. Such corporate medical fraud, when it is verified, is almost never prosecuted, and when there are individual lawsuits, court-ordered settlements rarely add up to more than the company's profits from the fraud. So medical fraud can be low-risk and highly profitable.
So there's a good financial motive for medical fraud; there isn't much motive for astronomical fraud.
There are other motives for fraud, of course. There's not much financial motivation behind the anti-evolution pseudo-science; it's almost purely a case of people feeling that their religion is threatened. But that's a small game compared to the huge profits involved in some kinds of scientific fraud. The climate "debate" fits into this, since it very clearly implicates some of our most profitable industries as the source of the slowly-growing problem.
That's not quite right. It's important that your results are reproducible. That requires a full description of how the data was gathered and how it was analysed. That way, someone can go and do their own experiments, collect their own data and conduct their own analysis.
Yes, that's the standard scientific approach - when it's feasible. But scientists in some fields do work with situations that are inherently not reproducible, at least not in a practical fashion. Astronomy is a prime example, where the scientists can't do many controlled experiments at all, much less reproduce them. Nobody considers astronomy to be less of a science because of this; they just hold each other to stricter data-handling rules than in other fields. They also implement parallel data collection by sending first telegrams and now email to colleagues to notify them of interesting events that should be watched by any observatories with the equipment available to do so.
Although conclusions can be less reliable in such situations, there are some practical ways of dealing with the problem. Fields of study that can't practically be reproduced tend to make a big deal of "open" data, with the raw data from the irreproducible observations being available to other scientists (and to pseudo-scientists, for that matter ;-).
This is the main reason why this lost data is such a big deal. Climate study is another field in which experimentation is close to impossible, and many observations are irreproducible. Given a few hundred million years, perhaps we could set up experiments that reproduce the climates of the past few centuries, replay the industrial revolution, and get new data on how it all turns out. But from the viewpoint of a human lifetime, reproducing the past century just isn't feasible. So we get all upset when some scientific team discards its raw data.
Of course, a bigger problem is probably that much of the raw climate data is in the hands of private corporations, where it is probably mostly lost forever to actual scientific research. This is also true of much of our raw geological data, though in that case the geologists can in principle (if given funding) go out and do the drilling to get the data from the planet. In the case of climate data, nobody can go back to 1970 and collect the data over again, and by the time we can work up a replay of the scenario, even our civilization will probably be long dead and part of the archaeological record.
(Sorry about the longwinded theorizing, but it's clear that many readers here don't have a good understanding of how the scientific process really works. I hope that those who do understand skipped to the next message somewhere in my first paragraph. ;-)