I dunno. Incompetent, sure. The idea that Bush was stupid and uneducated is oversold so. He was neither. The fault wasn't in the Bush administration, but the American people. It was we the people as a whole who were stupid and uneducated. We didn't bother to educate ourselves about Iraq. We didn't bother to get reliable information on how 9/11 happened, and what to do about it. No. We left the thinking to our betters, and we got the just reward of lazy citizenship, which is bad government.
The people are not more competent at picking leaders than some secret elitist cabal would be. However, even though they don't know the cure to their problems, they can *usually* tell when the prescription is killing them. So democracy doesn't ensure wise government; it only gives people less drastic means for ridding themselves of governments that haven proven bad.
But there's another factor in play. We like to believe the universe is biased towards our welfare. We like to believe God has a purpose in giving Dick Cheney twice the span of years on the Earth than Mozart. So we rapturously voted Bush a second term, waiting for the amazing turn of fortune that always comes in the third reel of the movie.
After 9/11/2001, America saw in this man the leader it *wished* it had, not the man whose puny moral character was evident for anyone who was willing to see.
My first impression of Bush was listening to him early in the primary explain how he was a self-made man. That told me everything I needed to know about him, which is that he is a big phony. That's not just my liberal bias; I'd never say that Bob Dole was a phony. I can see that Dole's a great man I happen to disagree with. Bush was the first candidate I ever thought was to too *infantiile* to hold office.
There's nothing wrong with being born into privilege. I've had such people working for me and benefited from the superb education they received. People born to privilege are often the most admirable of men and women, and we benefit greatly when the best of them offer themselves for public service. But there is something deeply, fundamentally wrong about a man who can't say, "I was fortunate in life and I had parents who gave me advantages most people could only dream of." The Bush administration was marked by denial and wishful thinking, which sadly is not limited to the stupid and uneducated. Plenty of uneducated people manage to deal with reality quite well. Lacking the advantages of social prestige and wealth, they have to.
Now don't think I don't see the wishful thinking parallels with Obama. I happen to support him; I *think* he's going to prove a pretty good president. He's got the communication skills to get things done, and I happen to agree with the direction of his policies. So I certainly don't think he's the second coming of Hitler. But some of the hero worship on *my* side of the political spectrum is a bit scary.
Let's keep remembering, folks, these guys work for *us*.
I wonder if the problem isn't just bad design, period.
Good design is about containing assumptions. People who subvert system security seem to exploit implicit assumptions. A SQL injection attack is based on the assumption that inputs consists of lexically non-significant characters. We can fix this by using parameterized statements, but perhaps the design issue is more fundamental than that: maybe the processing of user input into database statements oughtn't be done on an ad hoc basis at all. After all, that also distributes assumptions about database conventions through the code.
This is not to denigrate the skills and motivations of the engineers who work for Microsoft either. I think of myself as a pretty good coder, but *I've* produced stuff I knew was crap. Good design means valuing the future of your code, and that means taking some productivity hits up front. You've got to be in an organization that values good design, otherwise you end up with a travesty, a kind of satire of good design with all the decorations and appendages of a proper design but little of the function.
Now, years later, we know that the primary achievement of the whole Iraq war effort has been to transform their country from a secular dictatorship to a theocratic dictatorship.
That's a bit of an overstatement -- and this is coming from somebody who protested that war from *before* the congressional authorization vote.
Our big problem going into Iraq were unexamined, and often *unspoken* assumptions that were believed because they were convenient for a certain ideology's supporters. Making the same kind of assumptions in support of a contrary ideology is not a cure for that madness.
It gets awfully tiring to be reminded of just how fucking bigotted the US is in this way. You should get over yourselves already.
Ha! Shows what you know. We're the most humble country in the world. We have way more humility than anyone else, the reason you don't see it is that it has to cover so much awesomeness.
Now, queue all the responses from people calling me a "liberal", "faggot", "commie", "pinko" etc, because I criticized the US (I am none of those things by the way).
I'd never call you any of those things, when I can call you "Canadian". Did I mention how tolerant and open minded we are? Well we are, so STFU.
I think it probably depends on what aspect of the Droid you are talking about. I think the most interesting thing about the Droid is its lack of non-proprietary video out connectors. The upshot is that you can't use the droid to drive your TV by putting it in a docking cradle, as you can with the iPhone. It's a significant, but interesting limitation,and if the Google phone is like that as well that tells us something.
My theory is that the big difference between Android and the iPhone is that ultimately for Android the device is secondary -- just a terminal into the cloud. You don't need a media connector in that vision, because your TV will be connected to the cloud as well. If the Google phone has some provision for HDMI output, that'd tell us that Google is hedging its bets.
At the current state of development, iPhone is more polished and useful. The user interface for the Safari and the iPhone email app are more convenient. At present my TV does not have software that work with non-proprietary Internet standards, so it's really quite helpful to be able to dock my iPod touch to my TV. But it'd be even *more* convenient not to have to connect my mobile device at all. If my TV were something like giant Archos box, or just a display peripheral to such a device, then I wouldn't miss the media connectors.
We all know about the limitations of the "cloud" concept, but let's not forget that the idea of every device being a storage device has its limitations too. We take it for granted that to use our *home* data, we have to become network and server admins. We accept that without question because that's the status quo, but even people who *can* be competent home network admins don't always *want* to be. I think Apple realizes this too, which is why they push the MobileMe service.
For my personal data, I'd much rather kiss dependency on any single device goodbye and let Google be the primary manager of my data, provided that (a) I had reliable network access, (b) my devices could work when the network fails by caching the data I'm most likely to want and (c) I had some kind of backup medium that I could recover *all* my data from if I had a dispute with Google.
Important point: Arrest is not tantamount to an accusation. It is an assertion that there is a legitimate public justification to keep you from going about your business for a limited time. For example if you are having a psychotic episode you can be detained for your own protection and to safeguard others.
At the border there's all kinds of legitimate reasons to detain people entering the country that don't imply criminal charges ought to be filed. That's not a license for abuse or indefinite detention of course but at present I'd be skeptical of both sides. Obviously at least one person was out of line, but that doesn't preclude both being out of line. The one thing you can be sure of is that both will claim to have been perfectly reasonable while the other was being a lunatic.
Of course. Raised from the dead by an evil magician's bad juju, then clad in armor -- evidently to evade the normal zombie killing methods. Arrington is apparently bravely jumping them and attempting to get through the armor's weak point with a metal rasp ("Arrington files suit").
Schmidt is right. Anonymity is not an unmitigated good. It can be used to protect legitimate expression from oppressive authority, true. It can also be used to cover things like character assassination and rumor mongering.
The problem is such statements can be self-serving. It's easy to choose between "Good" and "Evil". The hard situations are choosing between greater and lesser goods, or greater and lesser evils.
It's all to easy to cherry pick examples of how anonymity is good, or evil if that suits what you'd like to do. Morality is considering the full range of consequences of one's actions, both the intended and unintended consequences. Where you *want* to do something, that is the time to be most skeptical of the ethical arguments in its favor.
Hardly. It's *patents themselves* that makes screwing of the third world possible in things like biotech.
The obvious intent is to increase the number of green tech startups. One of the things on the goody list when somebody buys you out is do you have any licensable IP. It won't make much difference to Dow Chemical, but it will make a difference to some chemist who wants to start a compnay that might be *bought* by Dow. A lot of startups need more money to commercialize an idea than can be found by smashing piggy banks, so the race is to get bring in more money before you burn. There are lots of great ideas that disappear because they couldn't get backing before the cash ran out. Getting some patents earlier could make the difference in many cases.
Say rather: Einstein's critique was informed and thoughtful.
You get this in every field of human endeavor. A masters of a field may be dissatisfied with the canons of the field because their inadequacies. A neophyte is dissatisfied with them because of his own inadequacies.
Your post shows a poor undestanding of what science is.For one thing, you get the notion of "theory" completely wrong. The National Academy of Sciences says it better than I could:
Science Evolution and Creationism Is Evolution a Theory or a Fact? It is both. But that answer requires looking more deeply at the meanings of the words “theory” and “fact.” In everyday usage, “theory” often refers to a hunch or a speculation. When people say, “I have a theory about why that happened,” they are often drawing a conclusion based on fragmentary or inconclusive evidence. The formal scientific definition of theory is quite different from the everyday meaning of the word. It refers to a comprehensive explanation of some aspect of nature that is supported by a vast body of evidence. Many scientific theories are so well established that no new evidence is likely to alter them substantially. [emphasis mine] For example, no new evidence will demonstrate that the Earth does not orbit around the Sun (heliocentric theory), or that living things are not made of cells (cell theory), that matter is not composed of atoms, or that the surface of the Earth is not divided into solid plates that have moved over geological timescales (the theory of plate tectonics).
[from National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine (2008) Science, Evolution, and Creationism (National Academy Press, Washington, DC).]
You apparently don't understand skepticism either. It is not at all like contrarianism.
Skepticism is actually built on belief (albeit provisional) set in the bedrock of scientific *theory*. If you want me to underwrite your perpetual motion invention, you are going to encounter skepticism on the grounds that I find the laws of thermodynamics more credible than you. Go find a *contrarian* investor.
That's the rub. Contrarianism is just a mirror image of credulity. The credulous person is prepared to believe anything that suits his purpose. The contrarian is prepared to *disbelieve* anything that suits his purpose. The effect is not at all different. You can find underwriters for your perpetual motion machine in both camps, on the grounds that anything in is possible on hand, or on the grounds that anything can be wrong on the other.
Skepticism is the happy medium between credulity and contrarianism. It entails belief that is not as easily earned as that of credulity, nor as easily abandoned as that of contrariansm.
The issue isn't whether it's cost effective (it probably is) or whether game publishers don't like it (they probably don't care).
The issue is one of principle, and violating that principle has costs that are significant although hard to measure in dollars: you can't control what you can't observe.
I've seen articles about recovering information from overwritten tracks. It was possible some years ago when the magnetic domains were larger. It probably is still possible.
A write on a magnetic disk only has to change enough polarity near the head position to make the head read (in this case) zero. The actual track of the head is not *perfectly* reproduible, therefore with something like an atomic force microscope, you can see how a track of writes doesn't exactly wipe out the prior track of writes because it is not *exactly* on center.
You wouldn't want to rely on that for file recovery, but if you were looking for telltale bit patterns and had the money to do it, you'd have a better than zero chance.
I suppose it would depend on how motivated they were to nail you.
In a case like this (as described in the article -- won't can't always take that at face value) the FBI agent was looking for a cheap win, so he ran his software only tool. If the FBI were motivated enough to spend serious money to get you, they could do some kind of physical forensics of the drive, in which case you'd probably want to make sure the drive was destroyed. I wouldn't count on all physical traces of the prior bits being erased.
I'd guess that if you weren't going to destroy the drive, then it'd probably be worth a few passes with random data after wiping the drive with zeros. I'd think they'd have more luck trying to recover the old state of the drive if they were looking a random garbage instead of what was supposed to be a nice uniform field of zeros.
Which makes him easy pickings for a DA who gets judged by the number of people he convicts (which is why ten of a drug kingpin's stooges are worth more than the kingpin himself).
Now I see why the deniers are so hot and bothered. Apparently they see it as having to admit some kind of collective guilt, then having to go back to living in trees.
I don't see anthropogenic global warming as a condemnation of civilization. How could civilization have known?
There is *no* trial going on over "killing Gaia". Where is the corpus delecti? The very idea is silly (*especially* if you believe in the Gaia hypothesis).
No, the trial is whether we can scrape up some kind of rational and just response to a complex problem we could not possibly have anticipated. Throwing and evading blame is a pointless, irrational sideshow.
For better or worse, we are dependent on technology to survive. We *couldn't* go back to living in the trees, not without killing most of our species. The answer to AGW will be a combination of adapting ourselves to inevitable changes (which was going to happen sooner or later anyway) and developing *new* technology that will help us do this while reducing our impact on the planet.
Nobody in his right mind wants to see forests and wild animal populations disappear, to see the planet paved over and it air choked with pollution. The planet will survive, it just won't be as nice a place as the one were born in. I believe that means finding more environmentally efficient technologies that will raise our standard of living without depriving us of a the natural wealth we inherited.
The point is that the journal as an institution has a lot invested in the scientific method. Unlike some recently concocted "scholarly" journals, it does not have to take papers sponsored by its corporate underwriters. The incentive is to maintain its reputation, rather than to sell it.
It doesn't mean that it's perfect. No science is perfect. If you've ever seen it being done up close. The process of peer review can be nasty and ugly when you see it in operation. It is certainly not infallible, but it works better than anything anybody else has ever come up with, and it *does* correct its past mistakes, which *politically* motivated processes never do.
What *no* prestigious journal wants to do is become the organ of the status quo view. If some upstart journal published a landmark paper that turns the scientific consensus on AGW upside down, *that* is what would break the journal's rice bowl. On the other hand they don't want to be publishing papers on perpetual motion machines or "creation science" either. It turns out that the sweet spot is open minded skepticism about turning over decades of scientific work.
What that means is that the standard of scrutiny for overturning the consensus is higher than for extending that consensus. Naturally, this gets climate change skeptics pissed, but that's the it is. You just can't write a paper saying the consensus arrived at after four decades of climate research is wrong and expect the reviewers to treat that paper kindly. The default stance of the reviewers is going to be that the scientific consensus is right, and they'll hold you to a higher stnadard if you claim it isn't. That means you have to make narrower claims, have them rebutted, then rebut the rebuttal, and so ad nauseum until you begin to sow the seeds of doubt.
And the truth is that scientists, while skeptical, *want* their skepticism broken down. That's major scientific progress. Scientists *want* their understanding of the world twisted and turned inside out. That's the fun. But it's no fun having your world view turned inside out and finding out that the paper that did it wasn't as wonderful as it looked. So they put their thumb on the scales of evidence, and insist that extraordinary claims undergo extraordinary scrutiny. *Any* paper if looked at closely enough will have flaws, but if you want your paper to become a *seminal* one, you'd better do a lot better job than a less controversial one.
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I dunno. Incompetent, sure. The idea that Bush was stupid and uneducated is oversold so. He was neither. The fault wasn't in the Bush administration, but the American people. It was we the people as a whole who were stupid and uneducated. We didn't bother to educate ourselves about Iraq. We didn't bother to get reliable information on how 9/11 happened, and what to do about it. No. We left the thinking to our betters, and we got the just reward of lazy citizenship, which is bad government.
The people are not more competent at picking leaders than some secret elitist cabal would be. However, even though they don't know the cure to their problems, they can *usually* tell when the prescription is killing them. So democracy doesn't ensure wise government; it only gives people less drastic means for ridding themselves of governments that haven proven bad.
But there's another factor in play. We like to believe the universe is biased towards our welfare. We like to believe God has a purpose in giving Dick Cheney twice the span of years on the Earth than Mozart. So we rapturously voted Bush a second term, waiting for the amazing turn of fortune that always comes in the third reel of the movie.
After 9/11/2001, America saw in this man the leader it *wished* it had, not the man whose puny moral character was evident for anyone who was willing to see.
My first impression of Bush was listening to him early in the primary explain how he was a self-made man. That told me everything I needed to know about him, which is that he is a big phony. That's not just my liberal bias; I'd never say that Bob Dole was a phony. I can see that Dole's a great man I happen to disagree with. Bush was the first candidate I ever thought was to too *infantiile* to hold office.
There's nothing wrong with being born into privilege. I've had such people working for me and benefited from the superb education they received. People born to privilege are often the most admirable of men and women, and we benefit greatly when the best of them offer themselves for public service. But there is something deeply, fundamentally wrong about a man who can't say, "I was fortunate in life and I had parents who gave me advantages most people could only dream of." The Bush administration was marked by denial and wishful thinking, which sadly is not limited to the stupid and uneducated. Plenty of uneducated people manage to deal with reality quite well. Lacking the advantages of social prestige and wealth, they have to.
Now don't think I don't see the wishful thinking parallels with Obama. I happen to support him; I *think* he's going to prove a pretty good president. He's got the communication skills to get things done, and I happen to agree with the direction of his policies. So I certainly don't think he's the second coming of Hitler. But some of the hero worship on *my* side of the political spectrum is a bit scary.
Let's keep remembering, folks, these guys work for *us*.
Sad, isn't it?
I'm not sure about this theory.
I wonder if the problem isn't just bad design, period.
Good design is about containing assumptions. People who subvert system security seem to exploit implicit assumptions. A SQL injection attack is based on the assumption that inputs consists of lexically non-significant characters. We can fix this by using parameterized statements, but perhaps the design issue is more fundamental than that: maybe the processing of user input into database statements oughtn't be done on an ad hoc basis at all. After all, that also distributes assumptions about database conventions through the code.
This is not to denigrate the skills and motivations of the engineers who work for Microsoft either. I think of myself as a pretty good coder, but *I've* produced stuff I knew was crap. Good design means valuing the future of your code, and that means taking some productivity hits up front. You've got to be in an organization that values good design, otherwise you end up with a travesty, a kind of satire of good design with all the decorations and appendages of a proper design but little of the function.
Now, years later, we know that the primary achievement of the whole Iraq war effort has been to transform their country from a secular dictatorship to a theocratic dictatorship.
That's a bit of an overstatement -- and this is coming from somebody who protested that war from *before* the congressional authorization vote.
Our big problem going into Iraq were unexamined, and often *unspoken* assumptions that were believed because they were convenient for a certain ideology's supporters. Making the same kind of assumptions in support of a contrary ideology is not a cure for that madness.
It gets awfully tiring to be reminded of just how fucking bigotted the US is in this way. You should get over yourselves already.
Ha! Shows what you know. We're the most humble country in the world. We have way more humility than anyone else, the reason you don't see it is that it has to cover so much awesomeness.
Now, queue all the responses from people calling me a "liberal", "faggot", "commie", "pinko" etc, because I criticized the US (I am none of those things by the way).
I'd never call you any of those things, when I can call you "Canadian". Did I mention how tolerant and open minded we are? Well we are, so STFU.
I think it probably depends on what aspect of the Droid you are talking about. I think the most interesting thing about the Droid is its lack of non-proprietary video out connectors. The upshot is that you can't use the droid to drive your TV by putting it in a docking cradle, as you can with the iPhone. It's a significant, but interesting limitation,and if the Google phone is like that as well that tells us something.
My theory is that the big difference between Android and the iPhone is that ultimately for Android the device is secondary -- just a terminal into the cloud. You don't need a media connector in that vision, because your TV will be connected to the cloud as well. If the Google phone has some provision for HDMI output, that'd tell us that Google is hedging its bets.
At the current state of development, iPhone is more polished and useful. The user interface for the Safari and the iPhone email app are more convenient. At present my TV does not have software that work with non-proprietary Internet standards, so it's really quite helpful to be able to dock my iPod touch to my TV. But it'd be even *more* convenient not to have to connect my mobile device at all. If my TV were something like giant Archos box, or just a display peripheral to such a device, then I wouldn't miss the media connectors.
We all know about the limitations of the "cloud" concept, but let's not forget that the idea of every device being a storage device has its limitations too. We take it for granted that to use our *home* data, we have to become network and server admins. We accept that without question because that's the status quo, but even people who *can* be competent home network admins don't always *want* to be. I think Apple realizes this too, which is why they push the MobileMe service.
For my personal data, I'd much rather kiss dependency on any single device goodbye and let Google be the primary manager of my data, provided that (a) I had reliable network access, (b) my devices could work when the network fails by caching the data I'm most likely to want and (c) I had some kind of backup medium that I could recover *all* my data from if I had a dispute with Google.
Important point: Arrest is not tantamount to an accusation. It is an assertion that there is a legitimate public justification to keep you from going about your business for a limited time. For example if you are having a psychotic episode you can be detained for your own protection and to safeguard others.
At the border there's all kinds of legitimate reasons to detain people entering the country that don't imply criminal charges ought to be filed. That's not a license for abuse or indefinite detention of course but at present I'd be skeptical of both sides. Obviously at least one person was out of line, but that doesn't preclude both being out of line. The one thing you can be sure of is that both will claim to have been perfectly reasonable while the other was being a lunatic.
Of course. Raised from the dead by an evil magician's bad juju, then clad in armor -- evidently to evade the normal zombie killing methods. Arrington is apparently bravely jumping them and attempting to get through the armor's weak point with a metal rasp ("Arrington files suit").
I thought the title ought to be extended: How to Build a Quantum Propulsion Machine for Fun and Profit .
Schmidt is right. Anonymity is not an unmitigated good. It can be used to protect legitimate expression from oppressive authority, true. It can also be used to cover things like character assassination and rumor mongering.
The problem is such statements can be self-serving. It's easy to choose between "Good" and "Evil". The hard situations are choosing between greater and lesser goods, or greater and lesser evils.
It's all to easy to cherry pick examples of how anonymity is good, or evil if that suits what you'd like to do. Morality is considering the full range of consequences of one's actions, both the intended and unintended consequences. Where you *want* to do something, that is the time to be most skeptical of the ethical arguments in its favor.
My version of the puzzle can generate infinite numbers of pictures. All the pieces are white and it comes with a box of paints.
It's part of my line of "can't lose" Christmas toys, along with the ever popular "No-Miss Target Shooting (Barn not Included)."
...now is an amazing "Still not decided in advance to complete" that is the emergence of a mysterious puzzle Nantomo!
Mysterious puzzle, indeed.
Hardly. It's *patents themselves* that makes screwing of the third world possible in things like biotech.
The obvious intent is to increase the number of green tech startups. One of the things on the goody list when somebody buys you out is do you have any licensable IP. It won't make much difference to Dow Chemical, but it will make a difference to some chemist who wants to start a compnay that might be *bought* by Dow. A lot of startups need more money to commercialize an idea than can be found by smashing piggy banks, so the race is to get bring in more money before you burn. There are lots of great ideas that disappear because they couldn't get backing before the cash ran out. Getting some patents earlier could make the difference in many cases.
Einstein was qualified.
Say rather: Einstein's critique was informed and thoughtful.
You get this in every field of human endeavor. A masters of a field may be dissatisfied with the canons of the field because their inadequacies. A neophyte is dissatisfied with them because of his own inadequacies.
Your post shows a poor undestanding of what science is.For one thing, you get the notion of "theory" completely wrong. The National Academy of Sciences says it better than I could:
[from National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine (2008) Science, Evolution, and Creationism (National Academy Press, Washington, DC).]
You apparently don't understand skepticism either. It is not at all like contrarianism.
Skepticism is actually built on belief (albeit provisional) set in the bedrock of scientific *theory*. If you want me to underwrite your perpetual motion invention, you are going to encounter skepticism on the grounds that I find the laws of thermodynamics more credible than you. Go find a *contrarian* investor.
That's the rub. Contrarianism is just a mirror image of credulity. The credulous person is prepared to believe anything that suits his purpose. The contrarian is prepared to *disbelieve* anything that suits his purpose. The effect is not at all different. You can find underwriters for your perpetual motion machine in both camps, on the grounds that anything in is possible on hand, or on the grounds that anything can be wrong on the other.
Skepticism is the happy medium between credulity and contrarianism. It entails belief that is not as easily earned as that of credulity, nor as easily abandoned as that of contrariansm.
The issue isn't whether it's cost effective (it probably is) or whether game publishers don't like it (they probably don't care).
The issue is one of principle, and violating that principle has costs that are significant although hard to measure in dollars: you can't control what you can't observe.
Why, introduce harshness and flicker!
Simple. Because they hate their customers.
"It's a different kind of world. We need a different kind of software ..."
I've got it! LCARS running on a Galaxy Class starship computer core.
I've seen articles about recovering information from overwritten tracks. It was possible some years ago when the magnetic domains were larger. It probably is still possible.
A write on a magnetic disk only has to change enough polarity near the head position to make the head read (in this case) zero. The actual track of the head is not *perfectly* reproduible, therefore with something like an atomic force microscope, you can see how a track of writes doesn't exactly wipe out the prior track of writes because it is not *exactly* on center.
You wouldn't want to rely on that for file recovery, but if you were looking for telltale bit patterns and had the money to do it, you'd have a better than zero chance.
Somebody has been watching too many reruns of "Kung Fu"...
I suppose it would depend on how motivated they were to nail you.
In a case like this (as described in the article -- won't can't always take that at face value) the FBI agent was looking for a cheap win, so he ran his software only tool. If the FBI were motivated enough to spend serious money to get you, they could do some kind of physical forensics of the drive, in which case you'd probably want to make sure the drive was destroyed. I wouldn't count on all physical traces of the prior bits being erased.
I'd guess that if you weren't going to destroy the drive, then it'd probably be worth a few passes with random data after wiping the drive with zeros. I'd think they'd have more luck trying to recover the old state of the drive if they were looking a random garbage instead of what was supposed to be a nice uniform field of zeros.
From your story, I'd say you got lucky. You were not only up against amateurs, they were *stupid* amateurs.
Getting framed by the FBI is a different kettle of fish.
Which makes him easy pickings for a DA who gets judged by the number of people he convicts (which is why ten of a drug kingpin's stooges are worth more than the kingpin himself).
Wow --
Now I see why the deniers are so hot and bothered. Apparently they see it as having to admit some kind of collective guilt, then having to go back to living in trees.
I don't see anthropogenic global warming as a condemnation of civilization. How could civilization have known?
There is *no* trial going on over "killing Gaia". Where is the corpus delecti? The very idea is silly (*especially* if you believe in the Gaia hypothesis).
No, the trial is whether we can scrape up some kind of rational and just response to a complex problem we could not possibly have anticipated. Throwing and evading blame is a pointless, irrational sideshow.
For better or worse, we are dependent on technology to survive. We *couldn't* go back to living in the trees, not without killing most of our species. The answer to AGW will be a combination of adapting ourselves to inevitable changes (which was going to happen sooner or later anyway) and developing *new* technology that will help us do this while reducing our impact on the planet.
Nobody in his right mind wants to see forests and wild animal populations disappear, to see the planet paved over and it air choked with pollution. The planet will survive, it just won't be as nice a place as the one were born in. I believe that means finding more environmentally efficient technologies that will raise our standard of living without depriving us of a the natural wealth we inherited.
The point is that the journal as an institution has a lot invested in the scientific method. Unlike some recently concocted "scholarly" journals, it does not have to take papers sponsored by its corporate underwriters. The incentive is to maintain its reputation, rather than to sell it.
It doesn't mean that it's perfect. No science is perfect. If you've ever seen it being done up close. The process of peer review can be nasty and ugly when you see it in operation. It is certainly not infallible, but it works better than anything anybody else has ever come up with, and it *does* correct its past mistakes, which *politically* motivated processes never do.
What *no* prestigious journal wants to do is become the organ of the status quo view. If some upstart journal published a landmark paper that turns the scientific consensus on AGW upside down, *that* is what would break the journal's rice bowl. On the other hand they don't want to be publishing papers on perpetual motion machines or "creation science" either. It turns out that the sweet spot is open minded skepticism about turning over decades of scientific work.
What that means is that the standard of scrutiny for overturning the consensus is higher than for extending that consensus. Naturally, this gets climate change skeptics pissed, but that's the it is. You just can't write a paper saying the consensus arrived at after four decades of climate research is wrong and expect the reviewers to treat that paper kindly. The default stance of the reviewers is going to be that the scientific consensus is right, and they'll hold you to a higher stnadard if you claim it isn't. That means you have to make narrower claims, have them rebutted, then rebut the rebuttal, and so ad nauseum until you begin to sow the seeds of doubt.
And the truth is that scientists, while skeptical, *want* their skepticism broken down. That's major scientific progress. Scientists *want* their understanding of the world twisted and turned inside out. That's the fun. But it's no fun having your world view turned inside out and finding out that the paper that did it wasn't as wonderful as it looked. So they put their thumb on the scales of evidence, and insist that extraordinary claims undergo extraordinary scrutiny. *Any* paper if looked at closely enough will have flaws, but if you want your paper to become a *seminal* one, you'd better do a lot better job than a less controversial one.