"the point of built-in battery is exactly so that "any putz with a screwdriver " would not open it and mess with the internals."
I don't know about you, but I must have at least twenty different things that take batteries, and perhaps I've owned a hundred or more of them in my lifetime. I've never messed up the internals while changing a battery. The builders were smart enough to divide the battery compartment from the rest of the delicate insides.
The point of the built-in battery is to make damn sure there's an end-of-life for the unit. By pricing the battery replacement out of the future predicted value of the unit, they've ensured you'll be shopping again.
"We are going to need to weed out the scum and the freeloaders and the riff raff currently serving as teachers - teachers like you would be. ONLY then can we increase their pay"
So what will you do when you find out that there are only genuinely devoted and talented teachers to teach maybe, what... one student in 500? When you discover that the rank and file are just average people, just like in most other professions, will you burn out your privileged elites?
Your utopia only works if there are enough terrific teachers to fill all teaching spots... and if the students don't break them down. Good luck with that.
"Just as we need police officers who are honorable and intelligent and of mild tempermant who can respond to the most intense situations and remain cool, we need teachers who can do the same."
Oh, that's even better. Let me know how you fare with that.
You went a long way in saying, "You'd be a terrible teacher", when I said it right in the part you quoted. Yes, I'd be a terrible teacher. Feel free to say it again in a few other words if it'll make you feel better.
When the respect a child has for their teacher (and undoubtedly for ANY authority figure for these kids) is as broken as this, how far do you suppose reasoning with them is likely to go?
Perhaps "slapped around a little" isn't the best choice of words, but I do think spanking has gotta make a comeback. I've had this discussion before, and interestingly enough all of the people I respect most around me were spanked as children. The uncontrollable brats my cousins are all raising have never been spanked.
On this topic I think the bleeding hearts can just keep on bleeding.
"If you and your friends can't cut it in the teaching profession, then the problem isn't that we don't allow you to get away with abusing and intimidating our children. No, the problem is YOU."
Spoken like somebody who has never had to do substantial time with somebody elses botched children.
The ex-teachers in my family didn't strike children, or yell at them... they just felt the stress involved was not worth the money. Every year the children got worse. Finally, they just gave up.
You couldn't pay me enough to be a teacher to primary/secondary student. Well, you could... but it'd have to be one heck of a lot more than a teacher makes now.
Several of my relatives (my generation) have teaching degrees. One now works in a body shop, one owns a flower shop, and the third is back in school learning a new trade.
Kids who deliberately provoke a teacher to film the results don't need to be yelled at so much as slapped around a little. And that's why I'd be a terrible teacher.
You obviously have no idea what you are talking about
That funny, considering the fact that your reply had nothing to do with my post. I commented on the EU's handling of the fine process and how they've treated the information they've already been given in the past.
Your post never really discussed my post, other than to make some incorrect assessments of my position on the validity of the EU's original claims, which I never once mentioned.
You even got the events wrong.
So your string of unrelated crap gets +5 informative, and I get -1 troll.
I think the EU is even less reasonable than Microsoft, which is clearly saying something. They'll say the documentation is unusable because a preschool student can't write an OS with it. They'll claim it's incomplete, but be unable to say why. And they'll demand something else, without saying what exactly they want, levy another fine, and the fun will continue.
Imagine, if you will, a fellow by the name of Larry.
Larry telecommutes. He converses with coworkers via teleconference, and he does his job well. His employers are completely happy with his productivity, and he is happy with his privacy. Larry gets paid by direct deposit. He pays his bills online, and never has a need of services that require him to visit a bank.
When it comes to food, Larry likes variety. He prepares a list from an online product catalog, and four hours later the food arrives, delivered by a local company that specializes in this type of transaction. They also deliver household consumables, such as bathroom supplies. Sometimes Larry wants something ready to eat, though, and of course companies have been delivering pizza, oriental food, indeed most kinds of meals, for decades. He orders clothes, gadgets, and computer equipment online, and the courier companies beat a path to his door.
Larry likes to keep fit, and to that end he has a treadmill, a set of weights and a stair climber, all within his home. He works out six days a week, and never strays from his routine. His health is excellent.
When it comes to socialization, Larry is an online kind of guy. He plays MMORPGs - Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games - and is active in video game player guilds, spending upwards of fifty hours per week interacting with other people in a virtual world. He uses a microphone to talk to players from all over the planet, and is well known in the circles of elite gamers. He even has virtual girlfriends. He is popular with people he has never met in his alternate reality, "real life".
Larry never goes out. He never really physically interacts with anybody. In fact, he hasn't left his home in months.
The question is: can Larry be happy?
For a long time I would have thought that no, Larry couldn't really be happy. After all, man is a social being by nature. From birth, we respond to touch, and to the presence of those around us. We have a need of sex, and possibly of love.
But what is really missing from Larry's life? He has food, shelter, clothing, work, entertainment, physical exercise, a social network, and sex by proxy (through "cybering" with his online girlfriends). He has a full life by his standards.
Many people would look down on his life, but Larry is part of a different scene. He grew up in a world that could be fully realized in isolation, and it is one that most people don't understand. But it is a life that has all of the trappings of a normal one, save for some small variances. Larry may be perfectly suited to his life, and consequently he may be very happy and well-adjusted.
Just because somebody makes lifestyle choices that we don't understand is no reason to conclude that their life is somehow lacking depth or value. The world is changing, and lives are changing with it.
"Dude, can you stop ending every teaser paragraph with some lameass variation of "read on for my awesome review." We all understand what the fucking "read more" link means."
I see you've been modded flamebait, but I'll go down the negative karma path with you. It's lazy. "It was a dark and stormy night."
"Ms Kroes said: "I am not impressed if someone says 90% of the information is already there when we need 100%. It's a jigsaw and some parts are missing... In my opinion, this information should have been here a couple of months ago."
So what's missing, and if it's "secret stuff", how do they know it exists? And how do you prove it doesn't, if it doesn't?
Seems to me that if your fines are based on something that isn't falsifiable, then you have no business levying such a fine.
Wow - you went all the way back to a different thread to check my consistency, but you didn't really make a point with it.
The guy in this thread does email, writes some microcontroller code, and designs some PCB's. Doesn't sound like he has a single reason to upgrade. In the older thread, somebody had to interoperate with others, and had to decide whether or not it was worth their client relationship to disconnect.
What exactly is bothering you about these two viewpoints? You know it's possible to decide something situation by situation.
" just picked up a "spare" thinkpad T21 (PIII 800MHz, 384MB RAM). I booted Puppy Linux [puppylinux.org], and after about 5 minutes figuring out where Puppy stores the WEP key, had that box on line. It's rocket fast and requires no tweaking. I was blown away with how well I could open word and excel documents from OWA. New OS' from Redmond always need more CPU and RAM. Interestingly, I was also recently shocked at how usable Tiger was on a G3 233 with 256MB RAM. DARN usable. Try that with a current MS OS and hardware built in 1999!:)"
Translation: "Windows is a hog. I heart linux. Mod me up!"
Sure you want to go out on a limb like that here on slashdot?
"I must be getting old because I don't see what upgrading will do for me. I chug along nicely on my ancient PIII-866, I repaired the motherboard twice now and I have no plans on changing. Besides, all I do is check emails and program a bit of microcontroller code and design some small PCBs, why do I need Vista and a new machine for this? I barely know how the win2k OS really works, now I'm supposed to change everything?"
You know, the simple fact that somebody is pointing a gun at the back of your head and demanding that you upgrade should be enough to get you to do so.
Wait... What do you mean, "Nobody's forcing me?" from the tone of your post I could swear your death was imminent, should you choose not to comply.
As an "IT" worker with experience in US, can't find a decent job in SF bay area. In interests of fairness, have to say that I declined jobs like this - hands on technical manager position that paid around 55 grand for managing 20 people. Sheesh.
I can't say I really have any sympathy for you. Turning your nose up at $55,000 (U.S. I'm assuming) and then complaining that you can't find a "decent job" seems a little silly to me.
Perhaps you overvalue your skills in the "new market". Lots of managers make under that figure.
If you expect "truthfulness" from either camp, I suspect you're being unreasonably optimistic. At best I think you should hope that the post-election honeymoon period lasts a while. That's assuming the Democrats take the house... and the citizens of the U.S. surprised everybody two years ago. It could happen again.
> Today at the polls I tapped the square for "Jim Davis" and the square for "Charlie Crist" was checked off.
Maybe the power of Crist was compelling you?
"If the best you can do is tell critics that, "you can poke holes in anything," then what you're doing no better than astrology."
Not every critic deserves real consideration. There are others in this thread who have addressed the problems in this critique. My comments were appropriate for their target, and are valid. "Debunking" conclusions in a field as complex as climatology should require providing proof that the conclusions are wrong. Otherwise you aren't really "debunking" it, are you?
"If you cannot defeat your enemy outright, then infiltrate the enemy and divide them. This is going to end up worse than anything SCO has done because Microsoft has done it before. They already drew the dividing line - if you use any non-Suse Linux, you're open to the "consequences". This isn't a pro-Suse remark - Microsoft never does anything except to profit Microsoft. They'll use this to tie up Redhat and other distros in court, bring down the ones with a small budget altogether and destroy the larger ones with brute legal force then when they're done, they'll dump Suse like the whore they think she is. The future looks bleak - only Novell's waking up and terminating the relationship will kill this snake-in-the-grass."
I don't think the future is quite as terrifying as you do. While I can't put a halo on their heads, the fact is that despite the "slap-on-the-wrist" punishments that they have endured to date, they can't really pursue a strategy like that, or they risk becoming Standard Oil.
Good thing you caught my typo! Somebody might have gone on to repeat it. Then it might have gained mass acceptance, and gone on to undermine theoretical physics, setting us back a century.
I can just picture a physicist staring at a chalkboard of equations, shaking his head and saying, "Damn it, this just isn't working out like it ought to. I got the underlying basic equations from the internet, so they couldn't possibly be wrong!"
"I'll say. It seems to me that, if you'd like people to accept a theory that is complex and hard to test, it doesn't put extra responsibility on people believe you more readily. It wouldn't make sense, right? Like, I say to you, "I have this theory, but it's too complicated for you to understand, and I can't test it," it seems to me that I should have to work harder to prove it. I should have to be *more* vigilant about sealing the holes people poke in my theory, not less so."
I guess what I didn't make clear was that there is NO way to seal all the holes in climatology. There will always holes in the methodology and the conclusions drawn. No matter how sure you are of something, something can always be found to undermine your viewpoint. That doesn't make you wrong, of course...
You cannot hold climatology to the same demanding specification of proof that you would something like newtonian physics. You'd never, ever get there. And then you'd risk what I described in another post: being in an unprovable deadlock with no actionable conclusions because all of them are suspect for one reason or another.
You have to accept fuzzy proof for something like that, or you will never do anything about it.
Poking valid holes in good science shouldn't be very easy. If your theories can have holes poked in them with little things like "facts" and "statistics", then maybe you should go back to the drawing board.
Poking holes is perfectly fine. It's part of the scientific process.
The basics of Newtonian physics are far less complex and much more testable than are the basics of climatology. Therein is the problem. I said I can poke tons of holes in the methodologies involved in making conclusions about complex systems. That doesn't mean I'll prove it wrong. I'll just seem to make the results seem untrustworthy, even if they are completely correct.
When somebody claims to be debunking global warming, it bothers me a bit just because there has been such a vast amount of work done in the field. The author will generally do what I said - cherry-pick some items to call into question, and ignore lots of other research examples that reached similar conclusions. They can have a point with respect to the cases they mention, and still be completely wrong overall.
"Don't know" is a perfectly valid, if not especially satisfying, answer.
The problem with "Don't Know" is that's it's completely inactionable, and utterly useless, even if it is correct. With climatology we're pretty much assured that we will never "know".
With something as important as global warming, it makes more sense to listen to "we think", and make some decisions on our best guess, than it is to wait for certainty that is unlikely to appear.
I liken it to the first rumblings of "smoking might cause cancer". Many relatives of mine dismissed the idea because nobody knew for sure. Two died of lung cancer. Now if they had said, "Cigarettes might cause cancer? Gee - I should cut down on smoking!" then they might have had longer lives. But nobody could say for certain.
I know its a flawed analogy because there are serious economic costs associated with addressing global warming, while quitting smoking is essentially free. I don't expect people to bankrupt their nations. But it makes more sense to make the effort "in case it's us" than it does to deny,deny, deny until it's too late.
All of the topics you mention seem to be areas where the unnecessary complexity was eventually discarded, to reveal a simple core truth. E=MC*2 is wonderfully, beautifully simple - that's its elegance.
Climatology is fundamentally different. It's a field, affected by huge numbers of variables. It's unlikely that you will be able to condense the problem down to a fundamental conclusion like "global warming IS manmade". Even if it becomes a devastating fact of life, and it wipes most of the life off of the planet, we still won't be able to definitively state that we caused it.
Of your original list, the 'Evolutionary Process" conclusion on "Origin and Differentiation of Biological Life" seems the most appropriate. Despite what we know of the process, we cannot definitively state the "Origin" of biological life.
Give me any conclusion on a topic involving a really complex process, and I'll find a way to poke a bunch of holes in it. I'll examine the process of investigation and nit-pick it to death, because no process is complete or fault-free. If necessary, I'll just go to the core assumptions and attack their validity. Easy enough.
Since none of the conclusions can be "proven", all we can do is go with our "best guess". In this case, the general concensus among scientists in the field is our best guess.
Slashdot Mirror
"the point of built-in battery is exactly so that "any putz with a screwdriver " would not open it and mess with the internals."
I don't know about you, but I must have at least twenty different things that take batteries, and perhaps I've owned a hundred or more of them in my lifetime. I've never messed up the internals while changing a battery. The builders were smart enough to divide the battery compartment from the rest of the delicate insides.
The point of the built-in battery is to make damn sure there's an end-of-life for the unit. By pricing the battery replacement out of the future predicted value of the unit, they've ensured you'll be shopping again.
"We are going to need to weed out the scum and the freeloaders and the riff raff currently serving as teachers - teachers like you would be. ONLY then can we increase their pay"
So what will you do when you find out that there are only genuinely devoted and talented teachers to teach maybe, what... one student in 500? When you discover that the rank and file are just average people, just like in most other professions, will you burn out your privileged elites?
Your utopia only works if there are enough terrific teachers to fill all teaching spots... and if the students don't break them down. Good luck with that.
"Just as we need police officers who are honorable and intelligent and of mild tempermant who can respond to the most intense situations and remain cool, we need teachers who can do the same."
Oh, that's even better. Let me know how you fare with that.
You went a long way in saying, "You'd be a terrible teacher", when I said it right in the part you quoted. Yes, I'd be a terrible teacher. Feel free to say it again in a few other words if it'll make you feel better.
When the respect a child has for their teacher (and undoubtedly for ANY authority figure for these kids) is as broken as this, how far do you suppose reasoning with them is likely to go?
Perhaps "slapped around a little" isn't the best choice of words, but I do think spanking has gotta make a comeback. I've had this discussion before, and interestingly enough all of the people I respect most around me were spanked as children. The uncontrollable brats my cousins are all raising have never been spanked.
On this topic I think the bleeding hearts can just keep on bleeding.
"If you and your friends can't cut it in the teaching profession, then the problem isn't that we don't allow you to get away with abusing and intimidating our children. No, the problem is YOU."
Spoken like somebody who has never had to do substantial time with somebody elses botched children.
The ex-teachers in my family didn't strike children, or yell at them... they just felt the stress involved was not worth the money. Every year the children got worse. Finally, they just gave up.
You couldn't pay me enough to be a teacher to primary/secondary student. Well, you could... but it'd have to be one heck of a lot more than a teacher makes now.
Several of my relatives (my generation) have teaching degrees. One now works in a body shop, one owns a flower shop, and the third is back in school learning a new trade.
Kids who deliberately provoke a teacher to film the results don't need to be yelled at so much as slapped around a little. And that's why I'd be a terrible teacher.
"I am the one who owns the English language. I get the final word on how it is used. Why do you ask?"
If ur the guy, u suk. LOL ROFL
The actual name of the language is Mapudungun.
Clearly they got it wrong to avoid being dragged into court. You, on the other hand, have opened yourself to a lawsuit!
You obviously have no idea what you are talking about
That funny, considering the fact that your reply had nothing to do with my post. I commented on the EU's handling of the fine process and how they've treated the information they've already been given in the past.
Your post never really discussed my post, other than to make some incorrect assessments of my position on the validity of the EU's original claims, which I never once mentioned.
You even got the events wrong.
So your string of unrelated crap gets +5 informative, and I get -1 troll.
I think the EU is even less reasonable than Microsoft, which is clearly saying something. They'll say the documentation is unusable because a preschool student can't write an OS with it. They'll claim it's incomplete, but be unable to say why. And they'll demand something else, without saying what exactly they want, levy another fine, and the fun will continue.
Imagine, if you will, a fellow by the name of Larry.
Larry telecommutes. He converses with coworkers via teleconference, and he does his job well. His employers are completely happy with his productivity, and he is happy with his privacy. Larry gets paid by direct deposit. He pays his bills online, and never has a need of services that require him to visit a bank.
When it comes to food, Larry likes variety. He prepares a list from an online product catalog, and four hours later the food arrives, delivered by a local company that specializes in this type of transaction. They also deliver household consumables, such as bathroom supplies. Sometimes Larry wants something ready to eat, though, and of course companies have been delivering pizza, oriental food, indeed most kinds of meals, for decades. He orders clothes, gadgets, and computer equipment online, and the courier companies beat a path to his door.
Larry likes to keep fit, and to that end he has a treadmill, a set of weights and a stair climber, all within his home. He works out six days a week, and never strays from his routine. His health is excellent.
When it comes to socialization, Larry is an online kind of guy. He plays MMORPGs - Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games - and is active in video game player guilds, spending upwards of fifty hours per week interacting with other people in a virtual world. He uses a microphone to talk to players from all over the planet, and is well known in the circles of elite gamers. He even has virtual girlfriends. He is popular with people he has never met in his alternate reality, "real life".
Larry never goes out. He never really physically interacts with anybody. In fact, he hasn't left his home in months.
The question is: can Larry be happy?
For a long time I would have thought that no, Larry couldn't really be happy. After all, man is a social being by nature. From birth, we respond to touch, and to the presence of those around us. We have a need of sex, and possibly of love.
But what is really missing from Larry's life? He has food, shelter, clothing, work, entertainment, physical exercise, a social network, and sex by proxy (through "cybering" with his online girlfriends). He has a full life by his standards.
Many people would look down on his life, but Larry is part of a different scene. He grew up in a world that could be fully realized in isolation, and it is one that most people don't understand. But it is a life that has all of the trappings of a normal one, save for some small variances. Larry may be perfectly suited to his life, and consequently he may be very happy and well-adjusted.
Just because somebody makes lifestyle choices that we don't understand is no reason to conclude that their life is somehow lacking depth or value. The world is changing, and lives are changing with it.
Larry may be normal in the future.
(Taken from my blog, July 18, 2006)
"Dude, can you stop ending every teaser paragraph with some lameass variation of "read on for my awesome review." We all understand what the fucking "read more" link means."
I see you've been modded flamebait, but I'll go down the negative karma path with you. It's lazy. "It was a dark and stormy night."
From the English article:
... In my opinion, this information should have been here a couple of months ago."
"Ms Kroes said: "I am not impressed if someone says 90% of the information is already there when we need 100%. It's a jigsaw and some parts are missing
So what's missing, and if it's "secret stuff", how do they know it exists? And how do you prove it doesn't, if it doesn't?
Seems to me that if your fines are based on something that isn't falsifiable, then you have no business levying such a fine.
Wow - you went all the way back to a different thread to check my consistency, but you didn't really make a point with it.
The guy in this thread does email, writes some microcontroller code, and designs some PCB's. Doesn't sound like he has a single reason to upgrade. In the older thread, somebody had to interoperate with others, and had to decide whether or not it was worth their client relationship to disconnect.
What exactly is bothering you about these two viewpoints? You know it's possible to decide something situation by situation.
" just picked up a "spare" thinkpad T21 (PIII 800MHz, 384MB RAM). I booted Puppy Linux [puppylinux.org], and after about 5 minutes figuring out where Puppy stores the WEP key, had that box on line. It's rocket fast and requires no tweaking. I was blown away with how well I could open word and excel documents from OWA. New OS' from Redmond always need more CPU and RAM. Interestingly, I was also recently shocked at how usable Tiger was on a G3 233 with 256MB RAM. DARN usable. Try that with a current MS OS and hardware built in 1999! :)"
Translation: "Windows is a hog. I heart linux. Mod me up!"
Sure you want to go out on a limb like that here on slashdot?
"I must be getting old because I don't see what upgrading will do for me. I chug along nicely on my ancient PIII-866, I repaired the motherboard twice now and I have no plans on changing. Besides, all I do is check emails and program a bit of microcontroller code and design some small PCBs, why do I need Vista and a new machine for this? I barely know how the win2k OS really works, now I'm supposed to change everything?"
You know, the simple fact that somebody is pointing a gun at the back of your head and demanding that you upgrade should be enough to get you to do so.
Wait... What do you mean, "Nobody's forcing me?" from the tone of your post I could swear your death was imminent, should you choose not to comply.
As an "IT" worker with experience in US, can't find a decent job in SF bay area. In interests of fairness, have to say that I declined jobs like this - hands on technical manager position that paid around 55 grand for managing 20 people. Sheesh.
I can't say I really have any sympathy for you. Turning your nose up at $55,000 (U.S. I'm assuming) and then complaining that you can't find a "decent job" seems a little silly to me.
Perhaps you overvalue your skills in the "new market". Lots of managers make under that figure.
...Hello truthfulness...
Wow... are you ever in for a shock.
If you expect "truthfulness" from either camp, I suspect you're being unreasonably optimistic. At best I think you should hope that the post-election honeymoon period lasts a while. That's assuming the Democrats take the house... and the citizens of the U.S. surprised everybody two years ago. It could happen again.
> Today at the polls I tapped the square for "Jim Davis" and the square for "Charlie Crist" was checked off.
Maybe the power of Crist was compelling you?
Now I have to wipe pop off my monitor.
"If the best you can do is tell critics that, "you can poke holes in anything," then what you're doing no better than astrology."
Not every critic deserves real consideration. There are others in this thread who have addressed the problems in this critique. My comments were appropriate for their target, and are valid. "Debunking" conclusions in a field as complex as climatology should require providing proof that the conclusions are wrong. Otherwise you aren't really "debunking" it, are you?
"If you cannot defeat your enemy outright, then infiltrate the enemy and divide them. This is going to end up worse than anything SCO has done because Microsoft has done it before. They already drew the dividing line - if you use any non-Suse Linux, you're open to the "consequences". This isn't a pro-Suse remark - Microsoft never does anything except to profit Microsoft. They'll use this to tie up Redhat and other distros in court, bring down the ones with a small budget altogether and destroy the larger ones with brute legal force then when they're done, they'll dump Suse like the whore they think she is. The future looks bleak - only Novell's waking up and terminating the relationship will kill this snake-in-the-grass."
I don't think the future is quite as terrifying as you do. While I can't put a halo on their heads, the fact is that despite the "slap-on-the-wrist" punishments that they have endured to date, they can't really pursue a strategy like that, or they risk becoming Standard Oil.
"Actually it is E=MC^2"
Good thing you caught my typo! Somebody might have gone on to repeat it. Then it might have gained mass acceptance, and gone on to undermine theoretical physics, setting us back a century.
I can just picture a physicist staring at a chalkboard of equations, shaking his head and saying, "Damn it, this just isn't working out like it ought to. I got the underlying basic equations from the internet, so they couldn't possibly be wrong!"
"I'll say. It seems to me that, if you'd like people to accept a theory that is complex and hard to test, it doesn't put extra responsibility on people believe you more readily. It wouldn't make sense, right? Like, I say to you, "I have this theory, but it's too complicated for you to understand, and I can't test it," it seems to me that I should have to work harder to prove it. I should have to be *more* vigilant about sealing the holes people poke in my theory, not less so."
I guess what I didn't make clear was that there is NO way to seal all the holes in climatology. There will always holes in the methodology and the conclusions drawn. No matter how sure you are of something, something can always be found to undermine your viewpoint. That doesn't make you wrong, of course...
You cannot hold climatology to the same demanding specification of proof that you would something like newtonian physics. You'd never, ever get there. And then you'd risk what I described in another post: being in an unprovable deadlock with no actionable conclusions because all of them are suspect for one reason or another.
You have to accept fuzzy proof for something like that, or you will never do anything about it.
Poking valid holes in good science shouldn't be very easy. If your theories can have holes poked in them with little things like "facts" and "statistics", then maybe you should go back to the drawing board.
Poking holes is perfectly fine. It's part of the scientific process.
The basics of Newtonian physics are far less complex and much more testable than are the basics of climatology. Therein is the problem. I said I can poke tons of holes in the methodologies involved in making conclusions about complex systems. That doesn't mean I'll prove it wrong. I'll just seem to make the results seem untrustworthy, even if they are completely correct.
When somebody claims to be debunking global warming, it bothers me a bit just because there has been such a vast amount of work done in the field. The author will generally do what I said - cherry-pick some items to call into question, and ignore lots of other research examples that reached similar conclusions. They can have a point with respect to the cases they mention, and still be completely wrong overall.
"Don't know" is a perfectly valid, if not especially satisfying, answer.
The problem with "Don't Know" is that's it's completely inactionable, and utterly useless, even if it is correct. With climatology we're pretty much assured that we will never "know".
With something as important as global warming, it makes more sense to listen to "we think", and make some decisions on our best guess, than it is to wait for certainty that is unlikely to appear.
I liken it to the first rumblings of "smoking might cause cancer". Many relatives of mine dismissed the idea because nobody knew for sure. Two died of lung cancer. Now if they had said, "Cigarettes might cause cancer? Gee - I should cut down on smoking!" then they might have had longer lives. But nobody could say for certain.
I know its a flawed analogy because there are serious economic costs associated with addressing global warming, while quitting smoking is essentially free. I don't expect people to bankrupt their nations. But it makes more sense to make the effort "in case it's us" than it does to deny,deny, deny until it's too late.
All of the topics you mention seem to be areas where the unnecessary complexity was eventually discarded, to reveal a simple core truth. E=MC*2 is wonderfully, beautifully simple - that's its elegance.
Climatology is fundamentally different. It's a field, affected by huge numbers of variables. It's unlikely that you will be able to condense the problem down to a fundamental conclusion like "global warming IS manmade". Even if it becomes a devastating fact of life, and it wipes most of the life off of the planet, we still won't be able to definitively state that we caused it.
Of your original list, the 'Evolutionary Process" conclusion on "Origin and Differentiation of Biological Life" seems the most appropriate. Despite what we know of the process, we cannot definitively state the "Origin" of biological life.
Give me any conclusion on a topic involving a really complex process, and I'll find a way to poke a bunch of holes in it. I'll examine the process of investigation and nit-pick it to death, because no process is complete or fault-free. If necessary, I'll just go to the core assumptions and attack their validity. Easy enough.
Since none of the conclusions can be "proven", all we can do is go with our "best guess". In this case, the general concensus among scientists in the field is our best guess.