Well, I don't think you and I are going to agree on this.
But I will point out that your bicycle example is crap. You're trying to make the bike do something it wasn't designed to do. If it breaks, fine, it's your fault.
That's exactly the point. You bought a bicycle or in this case a droid phone that was designed to do one thing- giving you access to run your own kernel or firmware wasn't one of them. You know it can't do more because there is a software fuse that renders it useless unless you somehow bypass it.
But if Schwinn somehow put a motor-detection circuit in the bicycle that sets off a shaped charge that cracks the frame when it detects a motor, that's something entirely different.
No, not really. What if, and this is probably actually true because of costs savings and not the conspiracy I'm going to give, but what if Schwinn deliberately leaves the metal the thin and weak in the areas that would be stressed the most be the two or three most obvious places to place a motor on the bike thereby intentionally awaiting it's destruction? Or better yet, suppose Schwinn sells a motorized bicycle that has extra support added (the development kit/version of the droid) for the placement of the motor at an extra fee, but the normal cheap versions are weaker by design and costs less(the droid consumer phone). The only difference here is that instead of the thickness or strength of metal, it's a software switch that fails. The moral is you still have what you purchased, if you modify it, you either have to modify the weakness too or accept that it will break.
If I try to make the phone do something it's not designed to do, like fly, I won't be mad if it breaks *purely due to my actions.*
If I try to make the phone do something it wasn't specifically designed to do, like run a different OS, I won't be mad if it breaks *purely because of my actions*
But if I try to make the phone do something it wasn't specifically designed to do, like run a different OS, and even though the phone could do it, it breaks because someone put a little self-destruct device in it to specifically prevent me from doing it, I'm gonna be mad.
Obviously, if it breaks by design, then obviously it couldn't run a different OS and it couldn't fly and it couldn't so something it wasn't specifically designed to do. You purchased a phone, not a computer or a set of microchips and resistors. It is designed to be a phone or more specifically, a certain type of phone and making it other then that results in it breaking in the same way as you found acceptable before. Just because it might run something else if this software kill switch (Efuse) wasn't there doesn't mean you purchased anything different then what you purchased.
I don't expect Motorola to honor the warranty if I futz with the kernel and break something. But I do expect them not to actively destroy my phone on purpose if I futz with the kernel.
Fist, they aren't destroying the phone. Only the people not paying attention will believe that. They are rendering it useless until another set of software and tool re-enables it. And all this means is that if you want to futz with the kernel, you also have to futz with the efuse device that disables the phone. To real hardware hackers, this is little more then an strong annoyance as they already figured out how to re-enable the phone and have spent a good bit of time futzing with crap like this in the past. What you are really saying is that your pissed that you have to jump through a couple extra hoops to make a phone for one price be able to work like something at another price.
If you can't see the difference there, then we really have nothing to talk about here.
I can see the difference, I just don't think you are realistically looking at it.
Agreed. However all these people should cooperate with the police and the victim in identifying both the illegal acts and the perpetrators.
Agreed, unless there is a law making the information private and the police or victims need to take steps like getting a warrant first. Then they should comply with the law and the warrant. I believe that's how it works currently.
Mostly people/companies cooperate because they're the victim, they are mostly the guy with the best possible information to catch the crook (e.g. the electricity company is the victim of electricity theft, and files a complaint after finding a cable inserted into their infrastructure and going into someone's home address).
But even when you have zero reason to help the police or a illegally disadvantaged party, you should still help them identify the crime and the criminal.
Even if you see someone openly violate a contract, strictly speaking, it's your duty to report it. Additionally, depending on the kind of offense (ie. if it's criminal, like sabotage or fraud) it's your duty to attempt to stop it from happening (mostly calling the police is sufficient, but you HAVE to do something).
So are the ISP's responsible for other people's crimes ? Of course not. They are, however, forced to do everything in their power (including packet inspection I would think) to at the very least report criminal activity on their networks. Even if they themselves have nothing to do with it.
I agree here too. Misprison of a crime is illegal in almost all legal jurisdictions built from English common law. However, you are not required under any situation to go out looking for violations of any laws. This is especially true when the ISPs are required to exert a certain amount of privacy on their networks by law. Wire tapping without a warrant is illegal and that's what packet inspection to determine the information being sent is. No matter how you look at it, if you are determining the content of the communications through packet inspection, you are illegally listening in on the communications unless you have a warrant or a law authorizing it.
If they notice criminal activity, sure, they have an obligation to report it. But even then, they have to know it's a criminal activity and for anything to be done about it, the authorities they report it to has to have some sort of jurisdiction or the ability to contact others with it. This complexity alone is one reason why most ISPs, even when they aren't considered common carriers, have special provisions in laws stating that they aren't liable for third party content if they had no part other then offering/providing the internet service and remove it after being notified by a legitimate owner of the content. This is the way it should be.
Number one, this isn't a "special screw head." This is intentional sabotage if I try to do something they don't like with my equipment. As someone else said elsewhere, it's like putting new wheels on my car, only to have it explode because the manufacturer wants me to only use factory wheels.
Not really. It's more like a car that won't engage into drive or start because of the after market wheels make the speedometer read wrong or something. Anyways, it's a an appliance device whether it's a computer or not, using it other then that should stop the appliance from functioning as intended. It's probably more likely that the device is capable of far more then it does and this locking mechanism allows Motorola to sell reduced versions of the hardware without actually having to make 10 different types. I find that totally acceptable because you aren't buying a general purpose computer or erector set, you are buying a specific device to do a specific task that the manufacturer claims it will do.
I bought that phone. I didn't rent it. I didn't license the hardware. I bought it. It's mine. I should be able to modify it how I please without having to deal with intentional sabotage. It doesn't matter if I want to install CP/M on it. If the device manufacturer intentionally puts a self-destruct into the phone that activates when I try to do it, then we have a problem. Hardware should not ever be sold with self-destruct devices.
Your right, you bought that appliance device, you didn't buy a computer, you didn't buy a development kit, you bought a phone that is designed to do certain things and break when it's outside of those things. In short, you did buy bicycle, don't be surprised when it doesn't have a motor or if the frame breaks when you attempt to put a motor on it.
If you want some development platform, then go buy one. And for the intentional self destruct mechanism, it's all in software and can be reset or over ridden by software so stop acting like it's junk afterwords.
And that's not even addressing the most glaringly obvious point in this particular case, which is that Google and Verizon and all the phone manufacturers have been jumping up and down yelling "It's ANDROID! It's based on LINUX! It's open source! Customize your phone how YOU want it! No more being chained to Steve Jobs' vision!"
Sure, I understand that. But the point still stands independent of any of this. The app development and all on it could easily fulfill that statement without needing to open access the hardware too.
Fine. If you want to advertise that, then I expect you to deliver it, and I certainly expect you not to intentionally sabotage those of us who might want to take you up on your claims.
Otherwise the ads should read "Customize your phone how YOU want it. . As long as what you want is exactly what we want."
Na.. It can easily be referring to your apps' your skins, your whatever. I don't know any adverts that claim you can modify the kernel and run it or anything like that. You are reading into it what you want then getting disappointed when it isn't there. I suffered from this once, I thought I really did win the 10,000 grand prize from publisher's clearing house and didn't pay attention to the "if your number is selected". You took a statement or series of statements and are making it to mean more then what it says. This may be because of deliberate similarities with the wording or it could be your imagination combining with your temper.
I can't tell if your post was sarcasm or humor or both. Of course sarcasm and both make it even more humorous. Anyways, in case sarcasm was there, My comment was a stab at humor. Just so we are clear........you could skip the search engine and RTFA. Or you could do as you suggested and move along.
Yes, just like people who hold the rights to houses should be responsible themselves for keeping out burglars or murderers, right ? And if they fail, it's obviously their own fault right ?
It's certainly not your electric provider's fault, it's certainly not the corner convenient store's fault, so why pretend that it's the ISP's fault or obligation? They, like the others, are just members of your community that offer a service. Should the store be responsible for your house being robbed because the burglar looked through their window while buying something and saw you leaving the premises? Should the electric company be responsible because the crook flipped on a light to see what they were stealing? Then why would the ISP be responsible when they are not hosting the content, encouraging it's theft, or pointing to the location of it in any way? (if they are, then existing laws would cover that).
Here's how it works, the state has a monopoly on violence against persons. In trade for that monopoly (and taxes) the state has to defend all your legal rights using the appropriate violence (whether that means a police officer or a military campaign). All your legal rights (balanced, of course, against the rights of others). Your right to be left alone in your own home, your right to acquire whatever people who contracted with you promised they'd give you (say, your wages) and the right of copyright holders to be compensated for the distribution of their copyrighted works.
You can whine about it until the cows come home, but in actuality the failure of the state to prevent internet copying is a massive failure to uphold the law. It is, in essence, disrespecting the state's duty to uphold the law.
It is a massive failure of the (civil) justice system that these laws are not enforced.
I'm not saying I want draconian measures by the government, and I'm certainly not trying to justify such measures, I'm just trying to call a cow a cow. Internet copying is a direct breach of law. You don't like the law ? Great, the place to fight laws is parliament and demonstrations. If you can't do that, please stop whining.
I don't disagree with your point in general, I just don't think it's practical with the situation at hand. You see, this move isn't attacking anyone responsible for the breach of law. It's penalizing the provider of legal services because someone breaks the laws. If this logic would be followed through, then the state/city would be responsible for every crook that walks down a public sidewalk or drove down a road in order to commit their crime. If this logic would be followed through, then the store who sold the crook a pack of gum that was later used to imitate a gun while robbing someone would be responsible for the robbery.
Of course life and law doesn't work that way. You have to have knowledge that you are participating in or aiding the commission of a crime in order to be held responsible to that crime. What they want to do is ignore that rational and time tested line of thinking and make the ISP's responsible for the breach of law that might happen on their networks. And of course the ISP's will simply pass it down to the people using the service because it creates a cost that will need to be recouped so they are essentially creating a tax on you and me whether we pirate music or not.
But more to the point, if the ISP's are paying royalties for illegal file shares conducted by third parties, then technically, no breach of law is happening so I would never buy anything music related again, I would just down load it and not worry about it. I would also get it cheaper by doing it this way because the costs would be spread out to you and your parents who have internet but don't pirate anything too.
It's just a bad move, a bad idea all the way around to make casually related but not involved entities responsible for breaches of the law. Especially when those remedies make the breach non-existent in the intent of the law.
Well, it will be good for them until someone points out that it's tantamount to frying your computer when Norton Anti-virus detects a virus in the file you are attempting to open.
I can see legitimate uses for this. But most users will run from something that breaks by no fault of their own. Especially when the claimed break will be something that they generally ignore for 2 years on their windows PC until the ISP writes them a nastygramn about spreading viruses or sending spam or something.
How do you figure? Open software is pertaining to the software not the hardware. I'm not sure why you think you have some right to run whatever on anything but it's not there. An appliance device, or a droid phone/tivo whatever is designed to do a certain set of things and that is what you purchase when you buy one. If you want something that can run anything, then get a general purpose computer or the parts of the appliance device and assemble your own device designed to do what you want it to do. Open source or not, the hardware manufacturer has no obligation to allow you to turn your blender into a vacuum cleaner. If you have the skills and the necessary parts, you can do that on your own. But don't get pissy because they used a special screw head that you can't get a driver for.
Take what he says with special concern when the contract term is up and the out of warranty software update is designed to brick the out of warranty phones to get people to purchase another contract so they can get the discounted phone instead of paying full retail.
There is enough potential to fear abuse of this. The update will be closed source and probably can't be detected (at least for a while, then the class action lawsuit will end up getting everyone a $20 discount on their next phone they buy from that provider as the settlement or something stupid like that).
well- you see, there is this conspiracy to force users to read the article. That way the site in question can sell ads and all that magical interweb crap. It's not a perfect setup, but it will at least cause one person to read the article to answer your question. (hmm.. Unless that one person already knows the answers... then this conspiracy crap is crap?)
Me, I just type this gibberish to avoid reading the article. It's my rebellion against those attempting to rebel against the norm. This is slashdot for crying out loud, we don't need no stinking article.
So, you are arguing that saying they speak against the government is not a true statement because I can't know their motivations.
Sort of. What I'm trying to say is that simply speaking against the government on a few things might not mean they are not puppets of the government. You see, in the game of conning someone into trusting you or some entity, the easiest way to do so, or one of them, is to present a common enemy and side with the person you are attempting to gain trust in. I wouldn't base my assumptions of legitimacy or lack of control on that alone.
Take the some of the common con's on the elderly for instance. Most home renovation or home repair cons won't apply for and get permits because it leaves a legal trail. The con artists knows the elderly are generally on a fixed income (from retirement or whatever) and might say something like, if we get the permit's, all they will do is jack your taxes up afterwords and they don't need to take more money from someone who is on a fixed income. This presents the tax authority as a common ground and allows the scam to run until they disappear. In the case of the BBC, it may just be policy decisions they disagree with or it may be the long con where they appear all disgruntled over something meaningless or obviously wrong and influence public support in more subtle arenas pertaining to something that would be just as unpopular.
Or, just Occam's Razor. Some massive disinformation conspiracy overtly funded by the government and covertly managed is much more complex than the overt funding and obvious suggestions of use under threat of budget cuts without massive airtight conspiracies to defraud the population. If I were the government and wanted to do that, I'd do what's been proven to work in the past, I'd get the private media to break the story, as that would be more believable in the first place. Why work covertly with an organization you have proven ties with, when you can use a freelance one?
It's about trust. I'm not saying that the BBC is in on some conspiracy, I'm just saying look a little deeper then a disagreement or two. Anyways, if I can get the public to trust some news outlet that I can covertly control, then I can almost certainly control the opinion of the public. Now you do bring up a good point with Occam's razor, but that should be reserved for more natural environments where direct manipulation might not be intentional or by design. This is because knowing that you are more likely to believe that least complex explanation for a given set of events, then all I need to do is hide the complexity to convince you of something (assuming I can get the logic to follow too).
Take an illegal search for instance. Suppose there was a gas leak and the cops went around evacuating residents in a neighborhood and one of the officers thought they heard the voices of small children in a house that they attempted to notify of the evacuation. Now suppose these cops entered the residence looking for the children to discover it was a radio playing in the back room but they also found a meth lab and drug making tools/supplies. Sounds innocent in intent given the known facts right now right? Now what if you learned that the cops receive lots of complaints about drug trafficking in the area, complaints about people coming and going at all hours of the night and they were certain a drug house was in the area. Now what if you learned it was an off duty cop from another area who discovered the gas leak and reported it. Is it still an innocent chain of events designed to protect the public that by chance discovered a drug lab and dealer's house or a concerted effort to get around a problem in getting a warrant? Occam's razor leads you to one suggestion when the complexity is hidden.
Have you ever thought about how the easiest way to get people to trust your word own word when connected to some organization that is unpopular might be? One of them is the enemy of my enemy in which someone can befriend someone if only because they showed hostility towards another that the new friend didn't like/trust.
for example, suppose I was in the military and I was ordered to raise support for a new offensive tactic that was already rejected by political regime. I can get public support by speaking against the military's current course of action that isn't working and suggest the new strategy as if it was the first time it had been heard off. The people wouldn't consider me to be a military plant doing their bidding because I spoke out against the military.
Suppose you have a company with a bad environmental record which also just had a pretty good enviromental accident that everyone is talking about. No, I get some PR firm to publically parrot some stooge as a far off subsidiary saying that he would have ran things differently, then eventually I hire him to run the show under me. Some people might think he sold out, but the majority of people would think he will be the watchdog keeping things right. Never mind that he might have been overseeing part of the operation in which the accident happened, it's all about perception.
So saying the "BBC is not a spokesnetwork for the government and does do some things the government doesn't necessarily like" could be the same as the government saying trust them, it's the best source we have to influence you. It doesn't mean they are, but speaking against the government doesn't mean they aren't.
The original owner doesn't have to reimberse squat. Here in the states possession of stolen property is a crime itself.
First of all, this will vary from state to state as these laws are governed by the states so a blanket statement will be pointless to make. Second, I think that if you look, you will find an element pertaining to a mental capacity with almost all state laws concerning the possession of property that might be stolen. Certainly you wouldn't expect to be arrested for possession of stolen property because the milk you purchased at the grocery store this morning was stolen from a farm the night before. That's why most states involve "knowingly" "recklessly" and "reasonable belief" in the legal requirements for it to be a crime. You will also find that in cases of innocent possession (where a reasonable person wouldn't have believed the property to of been stolen), that the sale becomes final and they can't take the property from you unless a separate court action concerning conversion is initiated and won. The cops can take the property as evidence, but you would be the lawful owner at that point in time. This is how it works in pawn shops and in the two situations I had something of value stolen and located later.
If you pay for a stolen laptop believing it to be a legitimate purchase and the police come to claim it because it was stolen, you are out the money you paid for it
Again. look above, you might be correct but not everywhere in the states. I know Ohio, California, and Missouri aren't the way you speak of. It may also change according to the specific items in question too. Things like titled vehicles might have different circumstances depending on how it was sold or if the title was legitimately transferred according to the state or not.
Best advice would be to sue the criminal to recover your money. (Good luck with that.) But in no way does the original owner owe you anything. I don't know of *any* state whose laws say otherwise. (Reference please.)
In many cases, if they want the property back, they will have to pay for it. You do not transfer the damages of a criminal act from one person to another in some vein attempt to make something morally right. The law doesn't legislate morals, it deals with damages. That's how it works in most states. The legitimate purchaser is the legitimate owner even when the goods are stolen if that fact wasn't present in the sale.
Generally what you say is what I understand the notion of the laws to routinely be except with one point.
egardless, even if you can prove that you were acting on good faith to buy the stolen merchandise, it can still be confiscated from you and your only recourse to get your money back (if you paid money for it) is to sue the person who sold it to you as a breech of contract. Presuming that you have ratted them out, a friend sitting in jail is not likely to have much money to give to you in that situation either.
While this may be true in most states, it's not in at least two that I know of. It you purchase something, say at a yard sale or at a place that normally sells things in the open like a street cart or flee market or similar, then the purchase is considered legit assuming nothing else indicated something wrong with it (like a too good to believe price). Anyways, if the purchase is legit or no bad faith, then the wronged party will have to compensate you for the returned merchandise to avoid shifting the wrong to another person. I had this happen to me twice where a crack head stole my garden tractor and sold it at a flee market his parents organized and another time with a transmission that was waiting to go into a car and another crack head sold it as scrap to a metals recycler. In both cases, in my state, if I wanted the stuff back, I had to give them the prices they paid for it. The transmission is the only thing I bought back as it was only 50 or 60 bucks and the tranny cost me around $2500 (which also made the theft a felony). The garden tractor was sold for market price at $800 and I could buy any other similar one for the same price so I let it go. But I did sue the guy to get my money from him. Unfortunately, he was in jail and I had to attach a lien to his home to get it back two years later when his wife attempted to sell it. The crack head was caught, the other guy who stole the transmission wasn't.
There is a concept of not making an innocent party damaged that is at play here. If something was stolen from you, you have already been damaged. If I purchase it unknowingly and didn't have any reason to suspect anything, then taking my property would cause damage to me unnecessarily. The law in most places doesn't spread or shift the damage unless there is a reason to believe they should have known it was stolen or somehow an illegitimate sale.
Here is two bones in the mix that might change anything from happening a bit.
Is the IP actually a home connection that can be traced to someone specific or some business that offers wifi access. There is no guarantee that the person on the internet account is in fact the thief as they could be on the internet on some free wifi hotspot somewhere, stealing wifi from someone else, or visiting a friend/relative who has no idea how or who has what laptop. Then there is the sale issue. What if the thief sold the laptop on Ebay or at a flee market the day after he stole it. The new owner would have presumed it was a legitimate sale as things get sold on Ebay and at Flee markets all the time (generally stopping a recieving stolen property charge and making it so the rightful owner will have to reimburse the new owner if they want it back, but this varies from state to state). So now he goes through all that trouble to find out it's someone who purchased it seemingly legitimately or some random smuck who can't secure a wifi router and you have to start all over with any information the about the thief that the guy can give if any.
Actually, no. The data and facts are readily available. But the denialists are only interested in cherry-picking what suits them. Just like creationists. The data is there. And yet both creationists and denialists keep denying it.
Cherry picking? You mean like what you are doing right now? The data and facts were not available hence the entire focus on the email in which the guy said "'We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?' or the lawsuits that eventually made the CRU data public information instead of some secrete squirrel stash like it was. If the data said what was being claimed, then giving them that data instead of hiding it would have left the "denialists" with no legit options.
And hey, I like the way you worked creationists in there like it's all a religion and related. But I guess when the facts don't back up your point, then anything is fair game right? Are you what you despise?
Again, this is wrong. The data is available, and the denialists keep misrepresenting it. To the denialist propaganda machinery it's more important to get a lie out there, because once it's out there, denialist sheep will parrot it for eternity.
Again with the Cherry Picking huh? I'm sorry to tell you but you are completely wrong in this too. That is because the Data was not available and it was actively being hidden. You can't apply after the fact circumstances to before the facts situations. If you can't follow a fucking time line and keep things into perspective, you probably shouldn't be discussing this topic at all. BTW, the topic is what happened and how people are being treated because of it happening. The point I made was that if the information was always available instead of someone wanting to hide it while discussing ways to keep conflicting data secrete or denying people access to it specifically because they would apply the scientific process to it and attempt to prove it wrong, then none of this would have happened and if anything contradicting wasn't scientifically correct, it would have been squashed soon after it was said.
The only reason there is a "denialist propaganda machinery" because the data was hidden for so long while everyone attempted to politicize it for their own benefit.
Here is something you should realize, IS Does Not Equal WAS. And when IS (the data available) is built from was(the data that was hidden from whoever disagreed), then suspicion is warranted until IS can be thoroughly examined by everyone interested. I don't care how convinced you are of the data or how pissed you are at the "denialist", that's just a fact you have to accept and this isn't a religion where someone has to take the word of someone else because they are the elite or god chosen or something. Why, because anything less is no different then some random Joe off the street attempting to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge. They may own it and they may not, you need the time to check to see if the sale is legit and not everyone who was suspecting of the person selling the information is as confident in something you probably can't even validate yourself. And this is all because the data was not availible at a point in time which allowed the "denialist" to create the damn "denialist propaganda machinery" in the first place. IF the data was always available, it wouldn't be in existence today because the data would have backed up the claims from the start if the claims were truly representative of the data.
Although this article esquire.com - marc morano is admittedly pop-media, it demonstrates that most of the fault here lies with reporting, not the science or even the scientists. The researchers at UEA have been doing the best job of measuring and analyzing that anyone can, yet when they are harassed by payed pundits and gadflys the objectivity of the media is completely lost.
Do you not find it interesting that when the science actually says what the claims make it out to be, that the easiest way to silence paid pundits or gadflies is to publish the data and make the facts available in the most raw and uninterpreted ways with the research so it can be validates by anyone capable of checking it instead of hiding it, denying access to it, or even conspiring to keep it secrete from the people who don't share your views?
I mean all this could have been avoided is openness and transparency was a commitment from day one. If the science says what it's being reported to say, then no paid pundits or gadflies can change that. Reality is what's left when you close your eyes and it won't just disappear.
Even now that the researchers have been cleared of any professional wrongdoing, they are still being criticized (or apologized for) because they expressed frustration that their work was being misrepresented. If we should take away any message from this incident, it should be concern about how easily information can be corrupted in the public mind, even at times when clear public debate is critically important. Case in point: The Guardian is not the most balanced news outlet, and often has a sensationalist agenda of it's own.
Good point. However, if everyone and anyone had access to the data when the research was published, then when the Nay Sayers demanded that 2+2=5, it would be ten times or more difficult to convince others because they have the power to check too instead of running into a wall of some indication of a veiled secrete agenda that hides it's information but you are supposed to just trust.
You see, when someone wants to sell me something that I can't see or send someone I trust to evaluate it, when I can't look up the information and get the same answers to the letter that the salesman is claiming, I have all these alarm bells going off in my mind. Most others are the same but some of just gullible and will blindly accept anything told to them. An example of this might be all the swamp land sales in Florida or the sales of the Brooklyn bridge, or the Ocean front property in Arizona, or all the cars owned by a little old ladies who only drove it to the grocery store and church on Sundays. Yes, People Scam because it works on enough to be profitable. And when you know this, and someone is attempting to tell you something then makes it look like a scam, well, it's their fault for not making it appear as legit as possible if everyone else looks and thinks it's a scam.
So if anything is brought away from this, it should be that no matter who's saying what, hiding your information will always place doubt on the claims you make with it. It's only with this doubt that information can be corrupted in the public mind. How forthcoming you are with the information will determine how easily is can be corrupted. So the moral boils back to the person making the claim originally needing to be open to subvert the subversion or corruption in the public's perception.
It seems that you are operating under the inverse assumption that bloggers would not be scientists or members of the scientific community. Couldn't the reality be that there will be both scientists and non-scientists in the blogging community? Or more precisely and to the facts known at this time, the two people in the blogging community who have a deep background in statistics and mathematics who also were asking for the data and were denied because they were going to Analise it for errors. Certainly a mathematician or a statistician is more then capable of analyzing mathematical computations or statistical representations even if they weren't the newly coined "climatologists" practicing in the science community aren't they
I can boil more then half your time down to just a few days throughout your career. You see, you simply put up an FTP server and document in your work which data you used, how you manipulated it and why, then reference the files sitting on the FTP server as you do your work.
Now all they have to do is peer review your work, download the data to check it on their own, and if they find an error, well, the scientific process worked either way right?
It's not like you are hand copying data for each request and personally delivering them. It's not like you don't have access to internet servers through your department or something connected to your department if you are really doing scientific research to be released to the public that will influence public policy. Hell, some undergrad could simply follow you and place the files onto the server for you when you use different numbers. This entire "it takes too much time" excuse sounds facetious at best.
I don't know how that couldn't be seen as malice then. I mean if a large body of evidence suggests something like the earth is flat or big things sink and little things float, then the minority of evidence suggesting otherwise or a possibility of another explanation being hidden to retain those beliefs simple isn't scientific at all. And this is especially true when the topic of discussion is "one of the most complex things mathematically and otherwise" and "changes quickly" because "because people don't really have a grasp of what's behind it all".
Incompetence would be noting that we don't understand why this or that doesn't line up and then not following up on this or that to see why not. Malice would be hiding this or that in order to preserve the belief you wanted to keep true and is no different then the conflicts of the heliocentric universe or the flat earth. Unfortunately, it appears that they went the non-scientifically- prevailing path in global warming which resembled the failed path in history.
Hey, I've got a response for you: Fuck the blogosphere.
Translation, Yea, we aren't even confident enough in our claims to survive the scrutiny of the people we are pushing political views on.
Seriously, this wouldn't have been an issue at all in the blogosphere or anywhere if it wasn't picked up by politicians after being pushed by political activist scientists to demand changes that have effects reaching everyone in the world. But hey, I guess "Fuck you" is the appropriate response when someone tells someone else they have to do something or change something that is likely to costs them money and they reply with "Really? Let me see". I mean if it's a Do as I say and not as I do world and all.....that's how it works in politics and everyone trusts politicians right?
There is sufficient transparency in the scientific community, but you know what? People have opinions in the community as well. They don't claim its science, they argue, they piss each other off behind closed doors, and they deserve to have their personal e-mails kept private.
You are missing two entirely distinct points here. First, this isn't the scientific community nor was it conversations kept in the scientific community. Global warming currently is a political movement and was cooped or commandeered by politics when it was in an infancy. Being political, it's claims had far more reaching effects then someone's scientific hypothesis, it had to do with a transfer of wealth and hardship placed on the citizens of the world. Second, the emails didn't start the fire, they were just fuel added to the fire. When someone on a blog somewhere said Hey, this effects me, I want to verify it myself and the answer is Fuck you, the fire is already lit well before any emails became public. All the emails did was strengthen the doubt of people who were told to fuck off when they asked for data.
They aren't politicians -- they aren't accountable to the public, though they often do perform public services.
You are right and wrong. They aren't politicians, some of them pretend to be, and some of them had a strong political goal in mind. The entire IPCC ordeal was, is, and still is, a political movement as well as most all of the reported fixes or cures to global warming to date. When someone wants to enter the realm of politics, then the onus is on them to prove or convince others outside of their click that their claims are correct and their claimed course of action is supported. Telling blogger to fuck off does not do that in any way.
But then they set it all aside, they publish their work to peer reviewed journals, and move towards some kind of consensus using common criterion. Demanding greater transparency (ie reduced privacy) because a small number of people from a much, much larger community made a poor judgement call (at best) is uncalled for.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. When you are making any claims that forces me into compliance by political measures, then transparency is a must. In fact, it is a must much more so then politics in general. Or are you somehow forgetting the corporate or other special interests that buy off politicians to subjugate the populous to some law that favors them extremely? And with the political hijacking of global warming reaching as far back as the early to mid 1990's- just a few years after the doom and gloom warnings started telling of a pending disaster, we see no difference between it and 3m attempting to make it legal to dump toxins in your drinking water supply because it's cheaper then the safe disposal of it.
You are right that a poor judgment call was made. It was telling people who simply wanted to review the data to fuck off because they had too much time invested just to have someone validate it. And yes, that's the layman's translation of "'We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?"
You list three things that do little to counter the op's point which was
"A web that gives you only pretty pictures won't help the world, and likewise won't hurt a government".
You also missed his point altogether.
I mean all the government's behind that are still in power without any serious hiccups. At best, China instills the fear of death in dissidents and actually benefits. Iran, well they aren't a democracy to begin with so it is little more then a well crafted illusion pretending to give the people power but in the end, all it did was worry the authorities that they would have to kill some peasants. The US military killing civilians changed nothing. Those already pissed at the US government remained pissed, those who know war is terrible just pointed out how terrible or horrific it can be. Those who supported the war simple made excuses to why it was a mistake and went on with life. Those who just don't care might have showed some outrage but quickly went back to not caring. If anything, the first two I mentioned exchanged a few people in the groups but the outcome is the same. And none of any of this resulted in governments being changed.
BTW, his point was that if you remove everything (which would include those videos and reports) and only present pretty little pictures, it does nothing to help the world or hurt the governments of the world. Of course help and hurt are subjective terms.
That would be a somewhat fit analogy if it wasn't for almost every operating system and wifi device warning you when you setup or connect to an open connection that all your communications can be listened to and it wasn't a secure setup.
You see, if someone or something warned me that my conversations with you could be listened to by anyone with a big microphone, or perhaps a web browser with the capabilities of viewing this post/response, then I would in no way expect that communications to be private. and if I wanted it to be confidential, then it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect me to take some appropriate action whether that would be sound proofing the area, setting up some sort of encryption, or using another form of communications.
Goodwill will only feed you for so long then you starve. That's a problem that people like you don't seem to understand. Sure, it would be nice if everything important not readily provided by nature was free, but the reality is that if it were, it would stop existing pretty quickly. This is because you have to have in order to give and if you give it all away, you have nothing.
We're talking about poor people in third world countries here. It's more like Windows and Microsoft Office will be pirated because people will think they need it that much more.
he only reason most of Hollywood's accountants and producers aren't rotting in jail for embezzlement is because the movie industry has been this walled garden for many decades, seen as to valuable to peel back the layers to discover the crooks running the show.
I'm not sure if the reason is some walled off garden. Remember McCarthy? There is a shinning example of what can go wrong if you start digging into Hollywood too deeply. They control the media more so then any politician or political group could ever hope for in their wildest wet dreams. And being Hollywood with years of experience in making statements without making statements to sway the public subliminally or subconsciously instead of directly, their power is almost unrivaled by any other threat that any politician would see in their lifetime.
If you don't believe me, just look at how the coverage of the BP oil spill has moved to Lindsey going to jail with a fingernail painted to say Fuck You.
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That's exactly the point. You bought a bicycle or in this case a droid phone that was designed to do one thing- giving you access to run your own kernel or firmware wasn't one of them. You know it can't do more because there is a software fuse that renders it useless unless you somehow bypass it.
No, not really. What if, and this is probably actually true because of costs savings and not the conspiracy I'm going to give, but what if Schwinn deliberately leaves the metal the thin and weak in the areas that would be stressed the most be the two or three most obvious places to place a motor on the bike thereby intentionally awaiting it's destruction? Or better yet, suppose Schwinn sells a motorized bicycle that has extra support added (the development kit/version of the droid) for the placement of the motor at an extra fee, but the normal cheap versions are weaker by design and costs less(the droid consumer phone). The only difference here is that instead of the thickness or strength of metal, it's a software switch that fails. The moral is you still have what you purchased, if you modify it, you either have to modify the weakness too or accept that it will break.
Obviously, if it breaks by design, then obviously it couldn't run a different OS and it couldn't fly and it couldn't so something it wasn't specifically designed to do. You purchased a phone, not a computer or a set of microchips and resistors. It is designed to be a phone or more specifically, a certain type of phone and making it other then that results in it breaking in the same way as you found acceptable before. Just because it might run something else if this software kill switch (Efuse) wasn't there doesn't mean you purchased anything different then what you purchased.
Fist, they aren't destroying the phone. Only the people not paying attention will believe that. They are rendering it useless until another set of software and tool re-enables it. And all this means is that if you want to futz with the kernel, you also have to futz with the efuse device that disables the phone. To real hardware hackers, this is little more then an strong annoyance as they already figured out how to re-enable the phone and have spent a good bit of time futzing with crap like this in the past. What you are really saying is that your pissed that you have to jump through a couple extra hoops to make a phone for one price be able to work like something at another price.
I can see the difference, I just don't think you are realistically looking at it.
Agreed, unless there is a law making the information private and the police or victims need to take steps like getting a warrant first. Then they should comply with the law and the warrant. I believe that's how it works currently.
I agree here too. Misprison of a crime is illegal in almost all legal jurisdictions built from English common law. However, you are not required under any situation to go out looking for violations of any laws. This is especially true when the ISPs are required to exert a certain amount of privacy on their networks by law. Wire tapping without a warrant is illegal and that's what packet inspection to determine the information being sent is. No matter how you look at it, if you are determining the content of the communications through packet inspection, you are illegally listening in on the communications unless you have a warrant or a law authorizing it.
If they notice criminal activity, sure, they have an obligation to report it. But even then, they have to know it's a criminal activity and for anything to be done about it, the authorities they report it to has to have some sort of jurisdiction or the ability to contact others with it. This complexity alone is one reason why most ISPs, even when they aren't considered common carriers, have special provisions in laws stating that they aren't liable for third party content if they had no part other then offering/providing the internet service and remove it after being notified by a legitimate owner of the content. This is the way it should be.
Not really. It's more like a car that won't engage into drive or start because of the after market wheels make the speedometer read wrong or something. Anyways, it's a an appliance device whether it's a computer or not, using it other then that should stop the appliance from functioning as intended. It's probably more likely that the device is capable of far more then it does and this locking mechanism allows Motorola to sell reduced versions of the hardware without actually having to make 10 different types. I find that totally acceptable because you aren't buying a general purpose computer or erector set, you are buying a specific device to do a specific task that the manufacturer claims it will do.
Your right, you bought that appliance device, you didn't buy a computer, you didn't buy a development kit, you bought a phone that is designed to do certain things and break when it's outside of those things. In short, you did buy bicycle, don't be surprised when it doesn't have a motor or if the frame breaks when you attempt to put a motor on it.
If you want some development platform, then go buy one. And for the intentional self destruct mechanism, it's all in software and can be reset or over ridden by software so stop acting like it's junk afterwords.
Sure, I understand that. But the point still stands independent of any of this. The app development and all on it could easily fulfill that statement without needing to open access the hardware too.
Na.. It can easily be referring to your apps' your skins, your whatever. I don't know any adverts that claim you can modify the kernel and run it or anything like that. You are reading into it what you want then getting disappointed when it isn't there. I suffered from this once, I thought I really did win the 10,000 grand prize from publisher's clearing house and didn't pay attention to the "if your number is selected". You took a statement or series of statements and are making it to mean more then what it says. This may be because of deliberate similarities with the wording or it could be your imagination combining with your temper.
I can't tell if your post was sarcasm or humor or both. Of course sarcasm and both make it even more humorous. Anyways, in case sarcasm was there, My comment was a stab at humor. Just so we are clear........you could skip the search engine and RTFA. Or you could do as you suggested and move along.
It's certainly not your electric provider's fault, it's certainly not the corner convenient store's fault, so why pretend that it's the ISP's fault or obligation? They, like the others, are just members of your community that offer a service. Should the store be responsible for your house being robbed because the burglar looked through their window while buying something and saw you leaving the premises? Should the electric company be responsible because the crook flipped on a light to see what they were stealing? Then why would the ISP be responsible when they are not hosting the content, encouraging it's theft, or pointing to the location of it in any way? (if they are, then existing laws would cover that).
I don't disagree with your point in general, I just don't think it's practical with the situation at hand. You see, this move isn't attacking anyone responsible for the breach of law. It's penalizing the provider of legal services because someone breaks the laws. If this logic would be followed through, then the state/city would be responsible for every crook that walks down a public sidewalk or drove down a road in order to commit their crime. If this logic would be followed through, then the store who sold the crook a pack of gum that was later used to imitate a gun while robbing someone would be responsible for the robbery.
Of course life and law doesn't work that way. You have to have knowledge that you are participating in or aiding the commission of a crime in order to be held responsible to that crime. What they want to do is ignore that rational and time tested line of thinking and make the ISP's responsible for the breach of law that might happen on their networks. And of course the ISP's will simply pass it down to the people using the service because it creates a cost that will need to be recouped so they are essentially creating a tax on you and me whether we pirate music or not.
But more to the point, if the ISP's are paying royalties for illegal file shares conducted by third parties, then technically, no breach of law is happening so I would never buy anything music related again, I would just down load it and not worry about it. I would also get it cheaper by doing it this way because the costs would be spread out to you and your parents who have internet but don't pirate anything too.
It's just a bad move, a bad idea all the way around to make casually related but not involved entities responsible for breaches of the law. Especially when those remedies make the breach non-existent in the intent of the law.
Well, it will be good for them until someone points out that it's tantamount to frying your computer when Norton Anti-virus detects a virus in the file you are attempting to open.
I can see legitimate uses for this. But most users will run from something that breaks by no fault of their own. Especially when the claimed break will be something that they generally ignore for 2 years on their windows PC until the ISP writes them a nastygramn about spreading viruses or sending spam or something.
How do you figure? Open software is pertaining to the software not the hardware. I'm not sure why you think you have some right to run whatever on anything but it's not there. An appliance device, or a droid phone/tivo whatever is designed to do a certain set of things and that is what you purchase when you buy one. If you want something that can run anything, then get a general purpose computer or the parts of the appliance device and assemble your own device designed to do what you want it to do. Open source or not, the hardware manufacturer has no obligation to allow you to turn your blender into a vacuum cleaner. If you have the skills and the necessary parts, you can do that on your own. But don't get pissy because they used a special screw head that you can't get a driver for.
Take what he says with special concern when the contract term is up and the out of warranty software update is designed to brick the out of warranty phones to get people to purchase another contract so they can get the discounted phone instead of paying full retail.
There is enough potential to fear abuse of this. The update will be closed source and probably can't be detected (at least for a while, then the class action lawsuit will end up getting everyone a $20 discount on their next phone they buy from that provider as the settlement or something stupid like that).
well- you see, there is this conspiracy to force users to read the article. That way the site in question can sell ads and all that magical interweb crap. It's not a perfect setup, but it will at least cause one person to read the article to answer your question. (hmm.. Unless that one person already knows the answers... then this conspiracy crap is crap?)
Me, I just type this gibberish to avoid reading the article. It's my rebellion against those attempting to rebel against the norm. This is slashdot for crying out loud, we don't need no stinking article.
Sort of. What I'm trying to say is that simply speaking against the government on a few things might not mean they are not puppets of the government. You see, in the game of conning someone into trusting you or some entity, the easiest way to do so, or one of them, is to present a common enemy and side with the person you are attempting to gain trust in. I wouldn't base my assumptions of legitimacy or lack of control on that alone.
Take the some of the common con's on the elderly for instance. Most home renovation or home repair cons won't apply for and get permits because it leaves a legal trail. The con artists knows the elderly are generally on a fixed income (from retirement or whatever) and might say something like, if we get the permit's, all they will do is jack your taxes up afterwords and they don't need to take more money from someone who is on a fixed income. This presents the tax authority as a common ground and allows the scam to run until they disappear. In the case of the BBC, it may just be policy decisions they disagree with or it may be the long con where they appear all disgruntled over something meaningless or obviously wrong and influence public support in more subtle arenas pertaining to something that would be just as unpopular.
It's about trust. I'm not saying that the BBC is in on some conspiracy, I'm just saying look a little deeper then a disagreement or two. Anyways, if I can get the public to trust some news outlet that I can covertly control, then I can almost certainly control the opinion of the public. Now you do bring up a good point with Occam's razor, but that should be reserved for more natural environments where direct manipulation might not be intentional or by design. This is because knowing that you are more likely to believe that least complex explanation for a given set of events, then all I need to do is hide the complexity to convince you of something (assuming I can get the logic to follow too).
Take an illegal search for instance. Suppose there was a gas leak and the cops went around evacuating residents in a neighborhood and one of the officers thought they heard the voices of small children in a house that they attempted to notify of the evacuation. Now suppose these cops entered the residence looking for the children to discover it was a radio playing in the back room but they also found a meth lab and drug making tools/supplies. Sounds innocent in intent given the known facts right now right? Now what if you learned that the cops receive lots of complaints about drug trafficking in the area, complaints about people coming and going at all hours of the night and they were certain a drug house was in the area. Now what if you learned it was an off duty cop from another area who discovered the gas leak and reported it. Is it still an innocent chain of events designed to protect the public that by chance discovered a drug lab and dealer's house or a concerted effort to get around a problem in getting a warrant? Occam's razor leads you to one suggestion when the complexity is hidden.
Have you ever thought about how the easiest way to get people to trust your word own word when connected to some organization that is unpopular might be? One of them is the enemy of my enemy in which someone can befriend someone if only because they showed hostility towards another that the new friend didn't like/trust.
for example, suppose I was in the military and I was ordered to raise support for a new offensive tactic that was already rejected by political regime. I can get public support by speaking against the military's current course of action that isn't working and suggest the new strategy as if it was the first time it had been heard off. The people wouldn't consider me to be a military plant doing their bidding because I spoke out against the military.
Suppose you have a company with a bad environmental record which also just had a pretty good enviromental accident that everyone is talking about. No, I get some PR firm to publically parrot some stooge as a far off subsidiary saying that he would have ran things differently, then eventually I hire him to run the show under me. Some people might think he sold out, but the majority of people would think he will be the watchdog keeping things right. Never mind that he might have been overseeing part of the operation in which the accident happened, it's all about perception.
So saying the "BBC is not a spokesnetwork for the government and does do some things the government doesn't necessarily like" could be the same as the government saying trust them, it's the best source we have to influence you. It doesn't mean they are, but speaking against the government doesn't mean they aren't.
First of all, this will vary from state to state as these laws are governed by the states so a blanket statement will be pointless to make. Second, I think that if you look, you will find an element pertaining to a mental capacity with almost all state laws concerning the possession of property that might be stolen. Certainly you wouldn't expect to be arrested for possession of stolen property because the milk you purchased at the grocery store this morning was stolen from a farm the night before. That's why most states involve "knowingly" "recklessly" and "reasonable belief" in the legal requirements for it to be a crime. You will also find that in cases of innocent possession (where a reasonable person wouldn't have believed the property to of been stolen), that the sale becomes final and they can't take the property from you unless a separate court action concerning conversion is initiated and won. The cops can take the property as evidence, but you would be the lawful owner at that point in time. This is how it works in pawn shops and in the two situations I had something of value stolen and located later.
Again. look above, you might be correct but not everywhere in the states. I know Ohio, California, and Missouri aren't the way you speak of. It may also change according to the specific items in question too. Things like titled vehicles might have different circumstances depending on how it was sold or if the title was legitimately transferred according to the state or not.
In many cases, if they want the property back, they will have to pay for it. You do not transfer the damages of a criminal act from one person to another in some vein attempt to make something morally right. The law doesn't legislate morals, it deals with damages. That's how it works in most states. The legitimate purchaser is the legitimate owner even when the goods are stolen if that fact wasn't present in the sale.
These laws will vary from state to state.
Generally what you say is what I understand the notion of the laws to routinely be except with one point.
While this may be true in most states, it's not in at least two that I know of. It you purchase something, say at a yard sale or at a place that normally sells things in the open like a street cart or flee market or similar, then the purchase is considered legit assuming nothing else indicated something wrong with it (like a too good to believe price). Anyways, if the purchase is legit or no bad faith, then the wronged party will have to compensate you for the returned merchandise to avoid shifting the wrong to another person. I had this happen to me twice where a crack head stole my garden tractor and sold it at a flee market his parents organized and another time with a transmission that was waiting to go into a car and another crack head sold it as scrap to a metals recycler. In both cases, in my state, if I wanted the stuff back, I had to give them the prices they paid for it. The transmission is the only thing I bought back as it was only 50 or 60 bucks and the tranny cost me around $2500 (which also made the theft a felony). The garden tractor was sold for market price at $800 and I could buy any other similar one for the same price so I let it go. But I did sue the guy to get my money from him. Unfortunately, he was in jail and I had to attach a lien to his home to get it back two years later when his wife attempted to sell it. The crack head was caught, the other guy who stole the transmission wasn't.
There is a concept of not making an innocent party damaged that is at play here. If something was stolen from you, you have already been damaged. If I purchase it unknowingly and didn't have any reason to suspect anything, then taking my property would cause damage to me unnecessarily. The law in most places doesn't spread or shift the damage unless there is a reason to believe they should have known it was stolen or somehow an illegitimate sale.
Here is two bones in the mix that might change anything from happening a bit.
Is the IP actually a home connection that can be traced to someone specific or some business that offers wifi access. There is no guarantee that the person on the internet account is in fact the thief as they could be on the internet on some free wifi hotspot somewhere, stealing wifi from someone else, or visiting a friend/relative who has no idea how or who has what laptop. Then there is the sale issue. What if the thief sold the laptop on Ebay or at a flee market the day after he stole it. The new owner would have presumed it was a legitimate sale as things get sold on Ebay and at Flee markets all the time (generally stopping a recieving stolen property charge and making it so the rightful owner will have to reimburse the new owner if they want it back, but this varies from state to state). So now he goes through all that trouble to find out it's someone who purchased it seemingly legitimately or some random smuck who can't secure a wifi router and you have to start all over with any information the about the thief that the guy can give if any.
Cherry picking? You mean like what you are doing right now? The data and facts were not available hence the entire focus on the email in which the guy said "'We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?' or the lawsuits that eventually made the CRU data public information instead of some secrete squirrel stash like it was. If the data said what was being claimed, then giving them that data instead of hiding it would have left the "denialists" with no legit options.
And hey, I like the way you worked creationists in there like it's all a religion and related. But I guess when the facts don't back up your point, then anything is fair game right? Are you what you despise?
Again with the Cherry Picking huh? I'm sorry to tell you but you are completely wrong in this too. That is because the Data was not available and it was actively being hidden. You can't apply after the fact circumstances to before the facts situations. If you can't follow a fucking time line and keep things into perspective, you probably shouldn't be discussing this topic at all. BTW, the topic is what happened and how people are being treated because of it happening. The point I made was that if the information was always available instead of someone wanting to hide it while discussing ways to keep conflicting data secrete or denying people access to it specifically because they would apply the scientific process to it and attempt to prove it wrong, then none of this would have happened and if anything contradicting wasn't scientifically correct, it would have been squashed soon after it was said.
The only reason there is a "denialist propaganda machinery" because the data was hidden for so long while everyone attempted to politicize it for their own benefit.
Here is something you should realize, IS Does Not Equal WAS. And when IS (the data available) is built from was(the data that was hidden from whoever disagreed), then suspicion is warranted until IS can be thoroughly examined by everyone interested. I don't care how convinced you are of the data or how pissed you are at the "denialist", that's just a fact you have to accept and this isn't a religion where someone has to take the word of someone else because they are the elite or god chosen or something. Why, because anything less is no different then some random Joe off the street attempting to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge. They may own it and they may not, you need the time to check to see if the sale is legit and not everyone who was suspecting of the person selling the information is as confident in something you probably can't even validate yourself. And this is all because the data was not availible at a point in time which allowed the "denialist" to create the damn "denialist propaganda machinery" in the first place. IF the data was always available, it wouldn't be in existence today because the data would have backed up the claims from the start if the claims were truly representative of the data.
Do you not find it interesting that when the science actually says what the claims make it out to be, that the easiest way to silence paid pundits or gadflies is to publish the data and make the facts available in the most raw and uninterpreted ways with the research so it can be validates by anyone capable of checking it instead of hiding it, denying access to it, or even conspiring to keep it secrete from the people who don't share your views?
I mean all this could have been avoided is openness and transparency was a commitment from day one. If the science says what it's being reported to say, then no paid pundits or gadflies can change that. Reality is what's left when you close your eyes and it won't just disappear.
Good point. However, if everyone and anyone had access to the data when the research was published, then when the Nay Sayers demanded that 2+2=5, it would be ten times or more difficult to convince others because they have the power to check too instead of running into a wall of some indication of a veiled secrete agenda that hides it's information but you are supposed to just trust.
You see, when someone wants to sell me something that I can't see or send someone I trust to evaluate it, when I can't look up the information and get the same answers to the letter that the salesman is claiming, I have all these alarm bells going off in my mind. Most others are the same but some of just gullible and will blindly accept anything told to them. An example of this might be all the swamp land sales in Florida or the sales of the Brooklyn bridge, or the Ocean front property in Arizona, or all the cars owned by a little old ladies who only drove it to the grocery store and church on Sundays. Yes, People Scam because it works on enough to be profitable. And when you know this, and someone is attempting to tell you something then makes it look like a scam, well, it's their fault for not making it appear as legit as possible if everyone else looks and thinks it's a scam.
So if anything is brought away from this, it should be that no matter who's saying what, hiding your information will always place doubt on the claims you make with it. It's only with this doubt that information can be corrupted in the public mind. How forthcoming you are with the information will determine how easily is can be corrupted. So the moral boils back to the person making the claim originally needing to be open to subvert the subversion or corruption in the public's perception.
It seems that you are operating under the inverse assumption that bloggers would not be scientists or members of the scientific community. Couldn't the reality be that there will be both scientists and non-scientists in the blogging community? Or more precisely and to the facts known at this time, the two people in the blogging community who have a deep background in statistics and mathematics who also were asking for the data and were denied because they were going to Analise it for errors. Certainly a mathematician or a statistician is more then capable of analyzing mathematical computations or statistical representations even if they weren't the newly coined "climatologists" practicing in the science community aren't they
I can boil more then half your time down to just a few days throughout your career. You see, you simply put up an FTP server and document in your work which data you used, how you manipulated it and why, then reference the files sitting on the FTP server as you do your work.
Now all they have to do is peer review your work, download the data to check it on their own, and if they find an error, well, the scientific process worked either way right?
It's not like you are hand copying data for each request and personally delivering them. It's not like you don't have access to internet servers through your department or something connected to your department if you are really doing scientific research to be released to the public that will influence public policy. Hell, some undergrad could simply follow you and place the files onto the server for you when you use different numbers. This entire "it takes too much time" excuse sounds facetious at best.
I don't know how that couldn't be seen as malice then. I mean if a large body of evidence suggests something like the earth is flat or big things sink and little things float, then the minority of evidence suggesting otherwise or a possibility of another explanation being hidden to retain those beliefs simple isn't scientific at all. And this is especially true when the topic of discussion is "one of the most complex things mathematically and otherwise" and "changes quickly" because "because people don't really have a grasp of what's behind it all".
Incompetence would be noting that we don't understand why this or that doesn't line up and then not following up on this or that to see why not. Malice would be hiding this or that in order to preserve the belief you wanted to keep true and is no different then the conflicts of the heliocentric universe or the flat earth. Unfortunately, it appears that they went the non-scientifically- prevailing path in global warming which resembled the failed path in history.
Translation, Yea, we aren't even confident enough in our claims to survive the scrutiny of the people we are pushing political views on.
Seriously, this wouldn't have been an issue at all in the blogosphere or anywhere if it wasn't picked up by politicians after being pushed by political activist scientists to demand changes that have effects reaching everyone in the world. But hey, I guess "Fuck you" is the appropriate response when someone tells someone else they have to do something or change something that is likely to costs them money and they reply with "Really? Let me see". I mean if it's a Do as I say and not as I do world and all.....that's how it works in politics and everyone trusts politicians right?
You are missing two entirely distinct points here. First, this isn't the scientific community nor was it conversations kept in the scientific community. Global warming currently is a political movement and was cooped or commandeered by politics when it was in an infancy. Being political, it's claims had far more reaching effects then someone's scientific hypothesis, it had to do with a transfer of wealth and hardship placed on the citizens of the world. Second, the emails didn't start the fire, they were just fuel added to the fire. When someone on a blog somewhere said Hey, this effects me, I want to verify it myself and the answer is Fuck you, the fire is already lit well before any emails became public. All the emails did was strengthen the doubt of people who were told to fuck off when they asked for data.
You are right and wrong. They aren't politicians, some of them pretend to be, and some of them had a strong political goal in mind. The entire IPCC ordeal was, is, and still is, a political movement as well as most all of the reported fixes or cures to global warming to date. When someone wants to enter the realm of politics, then the onus is on them to prove or convince others outside of their click that their claims are correct and their claimed course of action is supported. Telling blogger to fuck off does not do that in any way.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. When you are making any claims that forces me into compliance by political measures, then transparency is a must. In fact, it is a must much more so then politics in general. Or are you somehow forgetting the corporate or other special interests that buy off politicians to subjugate the populous to some law that favors them extremely? And with the political hijacking of global warming reaching as far back as the early to mid 1990's- just a few years after the doom and gloom warnings started telling of a pending disaster, we see no difference between it and 3m attempting to make it legal to dump toxins in your drinking water supply because it's cheaper then the safe disposal of it.
You are right that a poor judgment call was made. It was telling people who simply wanted to review the data to fuck off because they had too much time invested just to have someone validate it. And yes, that's the layman's translation of "'We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?"
You list three things that do little to counter the op's point which was
You also missed his point altogether.
I mean all the government's behind that are still in power without any serious hiccups. At best, China instills the fear of death in dissidents and actually benefits. Iran, well they aren't a democracy to begin with so it is little more then a well crafted illusion pretending to give the people power but in the end, all it did was worry the authorities that they would have to kill some peasants. The US military killing civilians changed nothing. Those already pissed at the US government remained pissed, those who know war is terrible just pointed out how terrible or horrific it can be. Those who supported the war simple made excuses to why it was a mistake and went on with life. Those who just don't care might have showed some outrage but quickly went back to not caring. If anything, the first two I mentioned exchanged a few people in the groups but the outcome is the same. And none of any of this resulted in governments being changed.
BTW, his point was that if you remove everything (which would include those videos and reports) and only present pretty little pictures, it does nothing to help the world or hurt the governments of the world. Of course help and hurt are subjective terms.
That would be a somewhat fit analogy if it wasn't for almost every operating system and wifi device warning you when you setup or connect to an open connection that all your communications can be listened to and it wasn't a secure setup.
You see, if someone or something warned me that my conversations with you could be listened to by anyone with a big microphone, or perhaps a web browser with the capabilities of viewing this post/response, then I would in no way expect that communications to be private. and if I wanted it to be confidential, then it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect me to take some appropriate action whether that would be sound proofing the area, setting up some sort of encryption, or using another form of communications.
Goodwill will only feed you for so long then you starve. That's a problem that people like you don't seem to understand. Sure, it would be nice if everything important not readily provided by nature was free, but the reality is that if it were, it would stop existing pretty quickly. This is because you have to have in order to give and if you give it all away, you have nothing.
We're talking about poor people in third world countries here. It's more like Windows and Microsoft Office will be pirated because people will think they need it that much more.
I'm not sure if the reason is some walled off garden. Remember McCarthy? There is a shinning example of what can go wrong if you start digging into Hollywood too deeply. They control the media more so then any politician or political group could ever hope for in their wildest wet dreams. And being Hollywood with years of experience in making statements without making statements to sway the public subliminally or subconsciously instead of directly, their power is almost unrivaled by any other threat that any politician would see in their lifetime.
If you don't believe me, just look at how the coverage of the BP oil spill has moved to Lindsey going to jail with a fingernail painted to say Fuck You.