Well - that's reassuring! So, "only" 16,000 people potentially have their life savings at risk,
Uhhh, what? None of the data was encrypted, according to the actual article. Why the summary says most of it was is a mystery. So all of the millions have their credit/debit info exposed.
Why you are claiming they have their "life savings" at risk, I don't know that, either. A public statement of this kind pretty much puts the credit card companies on notice that their reports of fraud are going to go up, and you don't lose your life savings just because someone steals your credit card data.
Similarly, your debit account is also protected with appropriate notice -- you lose access to the money until the problem is resolved. If you keep your "life savings" in your debit account, you're asking for trouble.
Since the people who most vocally support evolution almost always conflate the concepts of "evolution" (small-e, adaptation of a species over time) with "Evolution" (capital-e, origin of life), I have begun to use the micro/macro terminology to differentiate. This should have been clear from the context, especially when I included the parenthetical "origin of life" next to the term macro-evolution. I'm sorry it wasn't clear.
So yes, I do think they are very different things, and I think the context explained sufficiently.
The point I was making is that Dawkins simply talking about "evolution" and how it doesn't get a pass from religious people implies he's using the "origin of life" term and not simple adaptation term. It is always hard to tell because the two concepts are repeatedly switched mid-discussion. A believer will talk about the origin of life and an evolutionist will talk about all the scientific evidence to prove evolution, as if the evidence of adaptation of a species was sufficient to prove how life began. The fact that Dawkins calls religous believers delusional might be another clue that his reference to religion and evolution involves creation.
Origin of life Evolution is, indeed, a religion. Dawkins should not be surprised when science steps into religion and religion responds with less than an open-armed invitation to join the congregation.
The difference between an atheist and a believer is only in how many gods they don't believe in.
No.
The difference between an athiest and a believer is that the athiest finds the concept of God delusional while the believer does not. The number of them is irrelevant to this.
Dawkins should not be surprised that "physics gets a pass" while evolution does not. Physics deals with things you can actually measure and the concept of falsifiability. While micro-evolution (adaptation) is arguably scientific (and not an argument that I am either making or interested in having), macro-evolution (the origin of life) is pure religion.
That doesn't mean there is *no* correlation with temperature, it means you have to carefully filter out data that is obviously bogus.
The issue here is how you define "bogus". Data that you know is wrong for some determined reason can honestly be called "bogus". E.g., if your weather station got painted black by accident and then got painted white again a month later, it is reasonable to discard all temperature data for that month as bogus. You know why it was wrong. If you are weighing experimental mice to determine the effects of some drug and when you check the calibration of the scale at the end of the weighing it doesn't read correctly, you discard the readings you just took as bogus and do them again.
Simply discarding data that doesn't fit your hypothesis and is thus "bogus" is beyond imagination for any true scientist. Data that doesn't fit the hypothesis is important, because it may mean your hypothesis is wrong. Since there is no ground truth available for tree rings in ancient times, there is no way to know why they don't agree with your theory.
As for Mann's hockey stick. I have long ago lost the email and am not going to spend a lot of time looking for it, but just a couple of years after I started working at a University in earth sciences there was an ecstatic email from an NCAR source bragging about how they had "fixed" the climate model they were using and the "hockey stick" turned upwards much more sharply... in the future. No support from real data to justify the change, but they got the situation to look worse so they were very pleased with their work. I remember it because it was my first real introduction to how modellers will change their models to "look better" even if there is no real justification for the changes. (Empirical constants are tweaked all the time, usually to fit existing measurements, but this was to help them "fit" a more dire set of predictions.)
This is why contract should stipulate the the music for a show, is part of the show. The musician cna use it for other things records, concerts, etc, but thye can't control the work the piece is attached to.
Of course, this is another example of how royalties are ruining the culture.
No, it's an example of how people who had no vision of the future are making your life less enjoyable, but it's hardly ruining the culture.
Of course contracts should say that the music is part of the show. Why they didn't is the true issue, not that the original work has a copyright. Mostly it's an issue of the producers of a movie not thinking ahead and foreseeing a huge market for DVDs or the streaming video market.
Really, who would have thought twenty years ago that you could sit in a park and watch videos on your phone?
So the reality is that, on top of being useless as an anti-spam mechanism, it now turns out to be even worse, and in fact vulnerable to malicious attacks. In other words, it's useless and uselesser.
So if the reality is that it was already useless as an anti-spam mechanism, who cares if it is made "uselesser" as an anti-spam mechanism? Less that zero is still less than zero. If you already can't trust it to mean what it says, why is there such a tizzy that you still can't trust it to mean what it says?
Hell, even missing reverse records, which is popular with some anti-spam folks, lead to way too many false positives.
There is a current email by radio system that is intended for use in catastrophic events as a way of communicating outside the disaster area for things like requests for aid and other important traffic. The radio to internet mail transport checks for MX records for every destination server, and silently throws the email away if there isn't one. The sender gets no notice of failure. The recipient doesn't get anything. Just no communications.
And none of the inbound email servers for the internet to radio side have an MX record.
If it's easy to misuse, doesn't that make it broken?
No.
If I convince ignorant people that PGP signatures prove that they've actually won $47,325,443 in the Nigerian lottery, and all they need to do is send their account details so I can deposit their winnings, is PGP broken?
This wasn't even a true misuse of DKIM. It was use of a 512 bit key.
Something that many people seem to forget is that the strength of the security should be matched against the risk and costs of being broken. If I'm sending you a message that says "meet me at the corner of 5th and Smith St in five minutes", and it takes someone who intercepts the message an hour to break it, then the encryption has done its job just fine. By the time they break it, we will no longer be at 5h and Smith St, and they will have had no time to set up surveillance.
Given the intended use of DKIM, 512 bits is plenty.
Why rename "file" to... well, to nothing at all, just a multicolored button that doesn't even have a mouseover and it's in the same place that one expects the max/min/close at the top left of the screen.
It's worse than that.
I was using Word on my netbook via VNC over the net on my linux system, so I had a reasonable display and keyboard and mouse. And had some other windows open for reference materials I needed for the document I was writing. I started looking for the "save" command. I couldn't find it anywhere. I clicked on that large thing and nothing happened. I kept looking.
After about twenty minutes of looking for how to save my work, I happened to notice out of the corner of my eye the screen on my netbook after I clicked on that button. To my surprise, there was a popup menu on the netbook display -- but it didn't appear via VNC.
A button with no information about what it does, that opens a special window that won't display on a remote display, is just nonsense.
Why haven't we repurposed the obsolete AM Radio band for long-range wireless Internet access?
What obsolete AM band?
All it contains now is talk radio, and that kind of stuff can just as easily be done with webcasts or podcasts.
Spoken like a true city dweller where there are lots of FM stations ready to serve your every need, and a fast network connection to serve everything you can't get off the FM.
1. Band allocations are based on international treaty. Certainly any band that has the potential for international coverage is. One state cannot just decide to use a chunk of spectrum for whatever it wants.
2. The "obsolete" (but still actively used) AM radio band is only 1.2 MHz wide, about. 530kHz to 1.7MHz. You can't fit a lot of anything else there.
3. Anywhere near a US border, you'd be looking for whitespace between the AM broadcast stations in from Canada or Mexico that would make using a lot of the spectrum for data impossible.
4. The wavelength is very long, and you wouldn't like the size of the antennas you'd need to carry. The propogation would go to crap at night, or you'd have long distance interference making the band unusable for data.
5. When "the big one" hits, it is more likely that you'll be able to hear an AM radio station than log into your podcast server, and the information you get will be more current. It is more likely that one call to the AM station will propogate the information, where it would take a long time for the information to be formatted and put up for podcast. And you're more likely to get obsolete information from an archived podcast than from the AM station.
The arguments that go along the lines of "I don't think we need X anymore because I don't need X anymore" are usually a waste of time.
- before you go artificially tripping a fault, you're probably going to want to model stuff so that you DON'T trip the 'big one' when you're not ready.
Nobody is really ever ready for "the big one". Planners plan, architects design, emeregency responders practice, but in the end, the big one is always bigger than you wanted and never fully prepared for.
We've been expecting "the big one" in Oregon for many years. There's still stuff that the experts are coming up with to increase preparedness. Unfortunately, the people who have to be prepared the most are the ones who get tired of continually hearing about "be prepared" and they get a large case of apathy. That would be the public, who will be standing in the streets after the quake in a coastal city wondering which way to go and how to cross the bridges out of town after they've fallen down, as the tsunami rolls through town.
There was no sane reason why NASA needed that information. They were just collecting it because they could. Because someone said, "well, we've got just about everything on these boys...
I can think of one very good reason. To have a control sample to test against when they get back, to see what effects the low gravity/increased radiation had on them. Who knows, there might be gravity related issues with reproductive processes just like there are for bone and muscles.
Or for later use, in case there was a radiation accident that would render them incapable of having children.
Unfortunately the movement wasn't, so now we taxpayers get to pay for fixing it.
As a taxpayer, I would rather pay for a hundred microquakes caused by fracking than the one grand "big one" that destroys a lot of stuff and kills a lot of people.
I live on the west coast. We're expecting that "one grand big one" (the 500 year quake) any day now. It's supposed to take out most of the coast of Oregon, and have destructive effects well into the Willamette Valley. I'd rather be expecting one that I cannot even feel once a year. The dome on the state capitol cracked? Big whoop. Newport and Lincoln City and Astoria are underwater and 1000 people didn't make it high enough to avoid the tsunami that followed the quake? Well, good thing I don't live at the beach, huh?
Or perhaps a lot of little, benign microquakes that lead to a Fukushima..... or worse.
A lot of microquakes cannot lead to a Fukishima, because a microquake simply cannot generate the energy to cause the tsunami that followed. I get the NWS quake/tsunami warning messages, and there are a LOT of small quakes going on all the time that don't trigger anything close to Fukishima sized events, or "worse".
Nor will a microquake cause buildings to fall down and people to die. A thousand microquakes may cause incremental damage, but that can be fixed in between quakes and the final effect will be... yawn.
It's PR you're listening to, IMHO.
No, it's common sense and an understanding that the effects of many small events can be much less than the sum total all at once. Want to loan me an iPhone for a demonstration?
Then again, maybe the little slips put more pressure on different areas, and might make the 'big one' more likely.
More likely, if a small quake is going to put enough pressure on another area to make it fire off "the big one", then the large quake from an unrelieved fault is going to impact a lot of "another areas" and fire off a lot of "the big ones" in rapid succession.
I can tap my finger on the back of your fancy expensive iPhone a thousand times, or I can whack it with a ballpeen hammer once. Which would you prefer?
Similar time with T-Mobile. I haven't had a T-Mobile official phone for five or six years. No problem. And when I got my LG they added the old $10/month data plan without forcing me to leave my grandfathered $24/month plan.
I don't know what the plans are called, I don't care. I don't see anything being blocked or limited, and I've used the phone as a NAP to link both my Xoom and my laptop into the net.
T-Mobile has phases. They had a stupid phase a few years ago. As far as I can tell, they're in happy phase now. I hope this doesn't screw it up. But even at their worst, they were never as bad as Boost was the three days I tried to get service from them.
Yes it's only created in a lab - and it's extremely expensive to create.
That's because the alchemists who create it have to change half the original gold into chlorine so one hogshead of gold becomes one half hogshead of gold and one half hogshead of chlorine. Those then react to form AuCl. Or AuCl2. Whatever.
This is all nonsense. The bacteria are not "bacterial alchemy", or alchemy of any kind. It's a disgrace when scientists make such ludicrous statements.
Why? The respective research school selling point is that the teaching is better because the faculty is top notch.
Huh? Where did you get the idea that a good reseach faculty means a good teaching faculty? There's too much pressure on research faculty to do research to expect them to spend alot of their time concentrating on teaching. (Yeah, some research faculty are good teachers, but there is no causation.)
You go to a reseach school if you want to get involved in research, because that's where the student jobs in research are. You go to a teaching school if you want to learn, because as an undergraduate you aren't going to be concentrating on cutting edge information anyway. Chem 101 is still Chem 101, whether it is taught by a nobel laureate research prof or an instructor.
For example, say a $1 million proposal from a researcher at Stanford University is rejected. Stanford charges ~60% overhead, so the university loses up to $600,000. Then, on the basis of correspondence between the editors and reviewers (which constitute the peer review that BP wants to be public) showing the proposal to be equal to one that was not rejected, the university sues. Doesn't sound very far-fetched to me.
What "editors" are involved in this process? None. Editors publish journals, not decide who gets grants.
Every PI thinks his proposal is better than everyone else's. It's been like that forever. And every granting agency has less money than proposals. It's been like that forever, too. If what you fear was likely, it would already be happening.
No, what is true is that every proposal author knows that funding is not guaranteed, and that suing because one doesn't get funded is a losing waste of time.
Slashdot Mirror
Well - that's reassuring! So, "only" 16,000 people potentially have their life savings at risk,
Uhhh, what? None of the data was encrypted, according to the actual article. Why the summary says most of it was is a mystery. So all of the millions have their credit/debit info exposed.
Why you are claiming they have their "life savings" at risk, I don't know that, either. A public statement of this kind pretty much puts the credit card companies on notice that their reports of fraud are going to go up, and you don't lose your life savings just because someone steals your credit card data.
Similarly, your debit account is also protected with appropriate notice -- you lose access to the money until the problem is resolved. If you keep your "life savings" in your debit account, you're asking for trouble.
So yes, I do think they are very different things, and I think the context explained sufficiently.
The point I was making is that Dawkins simply talking about "evolution" and how it doesn't get a pass from religious people implies he's using the "origin of life" term and not simple adaptation term. It is always hard to tell because the two concepts are repeatedly switched mid-discussion. A believer will talk about the origin of life and an evolutionist will talk about all the scientific evidence to prove evolution, as if the evidence of adaptation of a species was sufficient to prove how life began. The fact that Dawkins calls religous believers delusional might be another clue that his reference to religion and evolution involves creation.
Origin of life Evolution is, indeed, a religion. Dawkins should not be surprised when science steps into religion and religion responds with less than an open-armed invitation to join the congregation.
The difference between an atheist and a believer is only in how many gods they don't believe in.
No.
The difference between an athiest and a believer is that the athiest finds the concept of God delusional while the believer does not. The number of them is irrelevant to this.
Dawkins should not be surprised that "physics gets a pass" while evolution does not. Physics deals with things you can actually measure and the concept of falsifiability. While micro-evolution (adaptation) is arguably scientific (and not an argument that I am either making or interested in having), macro-evolution (the origin of life) is pure religion.
That doesn't mean there is *no* correlation with temperature, it means you have to carefully filter out data that is obviously bogus.
The issue here is how you define "bogus". Data that you know is wrong for some determined reason can honestly be called "bogus". E.g., if your weather station got painted black by accident and then got painted white again a month later, it is reasonable to discard all temperature data for that month as bogus. You know why it was wrong. If you are weighing experimental mice to determine the effects of some drug and when you check the calibration of the scale at the end of the weighing it doesn't read correctly, you discard the readings you just took as bogus and do them again.
Simply discarding data that doesn't fit your hypothesis and is thus "bogus" is beyond imagination for any true scientist. Data that doesn't fit the hypothesis is important, because it may mean your hypothesis is wrong. Since there is no ground truth available for tree rings in ancient times, there is no way to know why they don't agree with your theory.
As for Mann's hockey stick. I have long ago lost the email and am not going to spend a lot of time looking for it, but just a couple of years after I started working at a University in earth sciences there was an ecstatic email from an NCAR source bragging about how they had "fixed" the climate model they were using and the "hockey stick" turned upwards much more sharply... in the future. No support from real data to justify the change, but they got the situation to look worse so they were very pleased with their work. I remember it because it was my first real introduction to how modellers will change their models to "look better" even if there is no real justification for the changes. (Empirical constants are tweaked all the time, usually to fit existing measurements, but this was to help them "fit" a more dire set of predictions.)
This is why contract should stipulate the the music for a show, is part of the show. The musician cna use it for other things records, concerts, etc, but thye can't control the work the piece is attached to.
Of course, this is another example of how royalties are ruining the culture.
No, it's an example of how people who had no vision of the future are making your life less enjoyable, but it's hardly ruining the culture.
Of course contracts should say that the music is part of the show. Why they didn't is the true issue, not that the original work has a copyright. Mostly it's an issue of the producers of a movie not thinking ahead and foreseeing a huge market for DVDs or the streaming video market.
Really, who would have thought twenty years ago that you could sit in a park and watch videos on your phone?
So the reality is that, on top of being useless as an anti-spam mechanism, it now turns out to be even worse, and in fact vulnerable to malicious attacks. In other words, it's useless and uselesser.
So if the reality is that it was already useless as an anti-spam mechanism, who cares if it is made "uselesser" as an anti-spam mechanism? Less that zero is still less than zero. If you already can't trust it to mean what it says, why is there such a tizzy that you still can't trust it to mean what it says?
Hell, even missing reverse records, which is popular with some anti-spam folks, lead to way too many false positives.
There is a current email by radio system that is intended for use in catastrophic events as a way of communicating outside the disaster area for things like requests for aid and other important traffic. The radio to internet mail transport checks for MX records for every destination server, and silently throws the email away if there isn't one. The sender gets no notice of failure. The recipient doesn't get anything. Just no communications.
And none of the inbound email servers for the internet to radio side have an MX record.
If it's easy to misuse, doesn't that make it broken?
No.
If I convince ignorant people that PGP signatures prove that they've actually won $47,325,443 in the Nigerian lottery, and all they need to do is send their account details so I can deposit their winnings, is PGP broken?
This wasn't even a true misuse of DKIM. It was use of a 512 bit key.
Something that many people seem to forget is that the strength of the security should be matched against the risk and costs of being broken. If I'm sending you a message that says "meet me at the corner of 5th and Smith St in five minutes", and it takes someone who intercepts the message an hour to break it, then the encryption has done its job just fine. By the time they break it, we will no longer be at 5h and Smith St, and they will have had no time to set up surveillance.
Given the intended use of DKIM, 512 bits is plenty.
Why rename "file" to... well, to nothing at all, just a multicolored button that doesn't even have a mouseover and it's in the same place that one expects the max/min/close at the top left of the screen.
It's worse than that.
I was using Word on my netbook via VNC over the net on my linux system, so I had a reasonable display and keyboard and mouse. And had some other windows open for reference materials I needed for the document I was writing. I started looking for the "save" command. I couldn't find it anywhere. I clicked on that large thing and nothing happened. I kept looking.
After about twenty minutes of looking for how to save my work, I happened to notice out of the corner of my eye the screen on my netbook after I clicked on that button. To my surprise, there was a popup menu on the netbook display -- but it didn't appear via VNC.
A button with no information about what it does, that opens a special window that won't display on a remote display, is just nonsense.
Really? Posting from my RPi.
Why haven't we repurposed the obsolete AM Radio band for long-range wireless Internet access?
What obsolete AM band?
All it contains now is talk radio, and that kind of stuff can just as easily be done with webcasts or podcasts.
Spoken like a true city dweller where there are lots of FM stations ready to serve your every need, and a fast network connection to serve everything you can't get off the FM.
1. Band allocations are based on international treaty. Certainly any band that has the potential for international coverage is. One state cannot just decide to use a chunk of spectrum for whatever it wants.
2. The "obsolete" (but still actively used) AM radio band is only 1.2 MHz wide, about. 530kHz to 1.7MHz. You can't fit a lot of anything else there.
3. Anywhere near a US border, you'd be looking for whitespace between the AM broadcast stations in from Canada or Mexico that would make using a lot of the spectrum for data impossible.
4. The wavelength is very long, and you wouldn't like the size of the antennas you'd need to carry. The propogation would go to crap at night, or you'd have long distance interference making the band unusable for data.
5. When "the big one" hits, it is more likely that you'll be able to hear an AM radio station than log into your podcast server, and the information you get will be more current. It is more likely that one call to the AM station will propogate the information, where it would take a long time for the information to be formatted and put up for podcast. And you're more likely to get obsolete information from an archived podcast than from the AM station.
The arguments that go along the lines of "I don't think we need X anymore because I don't need X anymore" are usually a waste of time.
But no, not if they are already gone, and only found in NY and LA.
- before you go artificially tripping a fault, you're probably going to want to model stuff so that you DON'T trip the 'big one' when you're not ready.
Nobody is really ever ready for "the big one". Planners plan, architects design, emeregency responders practice, but in the end, the big one is always bigger than you wanted and never fully prepared for.
We've been expecting "the big one" in Oregon for many years. There's still stuff that the experts are coming up with to increase preparedness. Unfortunately, the people who have to be prepared the most are the ones who get tired of continually hearing about "be prepared" and they get a large case of apathy. That would be the public, who will be standing in the streets after the quake in a coastal city wondering which way to go and how to cross the bridges out of town after they've fallen down, as the tsunami rolls through town.
This project is being used to get kids interested in science, technology, and mathematics.
So they will use Raspberry Pis to control the engine and autopilot it on city streets?
There was no sane reason why NASA needed that information. They were just collecting it because they could. Because someone said, "well, we've got just about everything on these boys...
I can think of one very good reason. To have a control sample to test against when they get back, to see what effects the low gravity/increased radiation had on them. Who knows, there might be gravity related issues with reproductive processes just like there are for bone and muscles.
Or for later use, in case there was a radiation accident that would render them incapable of having children.
Unfortunately the movement wasn't, so now we taxpayers get to pay for fixing it.
As a taxpayer, I would rather pay for a hundred microquakes caused by fracking than the one grand "big one" that destroys a lot of stuff and kills a lot of people.
I live on the west coast. We're expecting that "one grand big one" (the 500 year quake) any day now. It's supposed to take out most of the coast of Oregon, and have destructive effects well into the Willamette Valley. I'd rather be expecting one that I cannot even feel once a year. The dome on the state capitol cracked? Big whoop. Newport and Lincoln City and Astoria are underwater and 1000 people didn't make it high enough to avoid the tsunami that followed the quake? Well, good thing I don't live at the beach, huh?
Or perhaps a lot of little, benign microquakes that lead to a Fukushima..... or worse.
A lot of microquakes cannot lead to a Fukishima, because a microquake simply cannot generate the energy to cause the tsunami that followed. I get the NWS quake/tsunami warning messages, and there are a LOT of small quakes going on all the time that don't trigger anything close to Fukishima sized events, or "worse".
Nor will a microquake cause buildings to fall down and people to die. A thousand microquakes may cause incremental damage, but that can be fixed in between quakes and the final effect will be ... yawn.
It's PR you're listening to, IMHO.
No, it's common sense and an understanding that the effects of many small events can be much less than the sum total all at once. Want to loan me an iPhone for a demonstration?
Then again, maybe the little slips put more pressure on different areas, and might make the 'big one' more likely.
More likely, if a small quake is going to put enough pressure on another area to make it fire off "the big one", then the large quake from an unrelieved fault is going to impact a lot of "another areas" and fire off a lot of "the big ones" in rapid succession.
I can tap my finger on the back of your fancy expensive iPhone a thousand times, or I can whack it with a ballpeen hammer once. Which would you prefer?
Tell me you can vet any information relating to data suggesting that these iddy-biddy earthquakes are just, well, fine!
Let's ask the people in Japan if they prefer a hundred small quakes or one Fukishima. "Just, well, fine" compared to the alternative.
I don't know what the plans are called, I don't care. I don't see anything being blocked or limited, and I've used the phone as a NAP to link both my Xoom and my laptop into the net.
T-Mobile has phases. They had a stupid phase a few years ago. As far as I can tell, they're in happy phase now. I hope this doesn't screw it up. But even at their worst, they were never as bad as Boost was the three days I tried to get service from them.
And the goose in my backyard. Until I cut him open to get all the gold out.
Yes it's only created in a lab - and it's extremely expensive to create.
That's because the alchemists who create it have to change half the original gold into chlorine so one hogshead of gold becomes one half hogshead of gold and one half hogshead of chlorine. Those then react to form AuCl. Or AuCl2. Whatever.
This is all nonsense. The bacteria are not "bacterial alchemy", or alchemy of any kind. It's a disgrace when scientists make such ludicrous statements.
Why? The respective research school selling point is that the teaching is better because the faculty is top notch.
Huh? Where did you get the idea that a good reseach faculty means a good teaching faculty? There's too much pressure on research faculty to do research to expect them to spend alot of their time concentrating on teaching. (Yeah, some research faculty are good teachers, but there is no causation.)
You go to a reseach school if you want to get involved in research, because that's where the student jobs in research are. You go to a teaching school if you want to learn, because as an undergraduate you aren't going to be concentrating on cutting edge information anyway. Chem 101 is still Chem 101, whether it is taught by a nobel laureate research prof or an instructor.
I don't remember the joke, but the end goes something like: "and the nun said: 'it was huge and glowing!'"
No. "I gargled with that water..."
For example, say a $1 million proposal from a researcher at Stanford University is rejected. Stanford charges ~60% overhead, so the university loses up to $600,000. Then, on the basis of correspondence between the editors and reviewers (which constitute the peer review that BP wants to be public) showing the proposal to be equal to one that was not rejected, the university sues. Doesn't sound very far-fetched to me.
What "editors" are involved in this process? None. Editors publish journals, not decide who gets grants.
Every PI thinks his proposal is better than everyone else's. It's been like that forever. And every granting agency has less money than proposals. It's been like that forever, too. If what you fear was likely, it would already be happening.
No, what is true is that every proposal author knows that funding is not guaranteed, and that suing because one doesn't get funded is a losing waste of time.