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  1. Re:Anthropometrics on 3 Recent Flights Make Unscheduled Landings, After Disputes Over Knee Room · · Score: 1

    Don't think we quite communicated. It is belligerent to cite a "right to recline". It is rude to recline. Two different actions, two different determinations. I'm guessing you are part of that minority that doesn't know that it is rude to recline and makes the person behind them miserable and uncomfortable. Being on the flying bus means doing your best to be polite.

    Don't recline. Just don't.

  2. Re:Anthropometrics on 3 Recent Flights Make Unscheduled Landings, After Disputes Over Knee Room · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Trouble is, it socially unacceptable to recline your seat on the airline unless the person behind you is reclining. And when you do recline, you should so slowly, preferably checking if there is a laptop in use before you do. The vast majority of people recognize this, respect it and don't recline except on night flights. The people who don't recognize it, tend to get very belligerent about their "right to recline" and airlines defuse this usually by siding with them.

    What's starting to happen is that the silent majority is realizing that if they don't resist, the airlines are going to keep siding with the more belligerent "reclining is my right" crowd.

    Kind of telling that you summarized this issue as a "knee jerk" incident. Tall passengers are people too.

  3. Re:Someone help me out here. on First Pictures of Chinese Stealth Fighter · · Score: 2

    Uh, no. First, lets touch upon the literal version of the claim: "did the USSR run out of money". Yes. The USSR traded with other countries in the world not under the soviet system. They had an imbalance of payments and little to no holdings of foreign currency.

    Second, lets consider the statement as euphemism for economic devastation in the USSR. This how this idea is usually meant, and its not usually not expressed simply as "they ran out of money".

    The USSR initially built a lot of "guns" and a lot of "food". There population was growing, and they needed to produce more "food". Meanwhile, the cold-war induced them to need to produce more "guns" too. What they didn't produce very much of was tools; they under-invested in capital goods. What this meant over time was that they could not make as many things per-capita as the US could. The total pie was smaller in Russia, it was growing more slowly, and much more of it was focused on "guns".

    By the end of the 80s, massive shortages of consumer goods were common. No bread. No shoes. No razors. Quality was very bad and declining. This forced the political reforms.

    By the time the USSR collapsed, its industrial base was in ruins and long starved for investment. The dissolution of the USSR couldn't fix this. So the people suffered greatly even afterward. The situation did start to improve--By being secure in their personal property, people had an incentive to invest. Eventually those investments have allowed the standard of living to go up in most post-socialist countries. This would not have been possible under the prior tyranny.

  4. Re:Good. on UK Banks Attempt To Censor Academic Publication · · Score: 1

    Every bank does that. Pin fraud is on a massive upswing based on compromised key-pads, and other compromised look-a-like hardware.

  5. Re:Good. on UK Banks Attempt To Censor Academic Publication · · Score: 1

    They are rolling them out because it was part of the legal quid-pro-quo to rollback the protections that come with traditional signature based authorizations: the merchant carries the burden of proof.

    What they sold the lawmakers on was that PINs were secure; if they weren't it was the customers fault, so the burden should shift to the consumer to prove that the charge was fraudulent.

    That's the problem. Its the system: PIN + legal rules.

    Those legal rules are never going to make sense because PINs are vulnerable. Once you knock out that support, Visa and Mastercard will have no interest in the chips either.

  6. Re:Good. on UK Banks Attempt To Censor Academic Publication · · Score: 1

    The difference is that the law recognizes that signatures are laughable but treats pins as strong proof. That's the problem.

  7. Re:Good. on UK Banks Attempt To Censor Academic Publication · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You as a consumer should never use a pin-based card--doing so completely vitiates your protections under the law.

    Consequently, PINs are almost never used in the US for credit card transactions. You have to go to Europe to encounter this oddity. What's crazy is that no one seems to realize that the best remedy is to just abandon the farce.

    Farce? Yes, the incident of fraud does not go down with pin systems. This is one in a long stream of vulnerabilities; there have always been attacks against these fixed-pin systems that make them pointless: pin observation either visually or through man-in-middle compromise of the hardware. Basically there is always a moment when the pin is in the clear. This interacts badly with legal regimes that regard 'pin as proof' of identify, and ultimately consumers can and should reject to participate in these systems. period.

    What does need to be more common--for online banking and e-commerce--are key fobs with rotating time-based pin displays. That would be a marked step forward.

  8. Re:Wait what? on New York Judge Rules 6-Year-Old Can Be Sued · · Score: 1

    No, you haven't. Not in the sense that you would do something 'on purpose'. They don't have the part of the brain that you would use to make such a decision. That's why we don't hold them accountable for those decisions in criminal courts.

    Well, the legal system disagrees with you. In particular the case law says that its impossible for a child under the age of 4 to be negligent; however, a child can be held negligent after that age. That was the entire point of this ruling and this article.

    In the opinion of court precedent, children of the age four do usually possess adequate facilities to judge that running into someone, especially someone old with a bicycle could cause serious harm.

    Anyways, what the science says is that children as basically psychopaths. What they lack is not an awareness that they are choosing or a lack of awareness of the consequences of their choices. Its a lack of regard for others.

    Our forbearance in these matters stems from knowing that children don't need to go to a correctional facility to be fixed. They'll grow out of it, but keep in mind that this is a civil suit. Civil cases, unlike criminal prosecution, are not about correcting errant behavior, they are about remuneration to the victim.

    That children can be negligent is a very important element in civil case law. For instance if a child runs into the street and you hit him, are you liable for civil damages? The answer depends upon whether the child acted negligently. The contributory negligence of the victim counterbalances the negligence of the perpetrator.

  9. Re:Photos from the same spot but not the same seas on New Photos Show 'Devastating' Ice Loss On Everest · · Score: 1

    Yes glaciers are not seasonal. The author invites us to conclude that everything in the old picture is glacier. That's just not necessarily so, and that's why its important to understand what the normal variability in snow cover is for the particular slopes in view.

  10. Photos from the same spot but not the same season on New Photos Show 'Devastating' Ice Loss On Everest · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So we have a few photographs and the conclusion that the ice loss is devastating--despite no investigation as to whether the photographs were taken during the same day of the year nor as to what the internal variability is. But still, the editors immediately jump to the ice loss is devastating and that the mid-century prediction of the AR4 is right after all.

    Nonsense, the glaciers are monitored very closely and the loss-rates are calculated to be very slow. The AR4 prediction was, of course, the center of a big scandal because it was basically a fabrication, whereas the actual science is deep and gives several hundred years.

  11. Re:That's not even what this debate is about on Climategate's Final Days · · Score: 1

    Nonsense. Based the temperature records twenty years ago, it was not obvious that the 20th century had a warming trend. You think moving on and accepting new data is being opportunistic? Sorry, that's wrong. Its being scientific. Keep in mind that the period from 1980 to 2000 accounts for most of the 20th century warming.

    Meanwhile, the prime highlight of the IPCCs AR3 was to "forget" the existence of climate change prior to the 19th century. Natural variation over the past thousand years was reduced to quiet gradual downtrend with an abrupt surge upward in the 1800s. In so doing they discarded thousands of studies and work of thousands who previously carefully documented periods of great warming and cooling throughout the history of man. That work is precisely the work implicated by these inquiries, and which the climategate archives now shows that the literature was manipulated to fit a desired narrative.

    I suggest comparing comparing the IPCC-1990 report, which concisely shows the consensus of an old guard (now largely dead) with AR3. A very warm, much warmer period during the middle ages (shown in red) is visible. The IPCC AR3 and AR4 replaced this with the blue curve. Shown a flat-changeless temperature history with a slight downtrend, suddenly accelerating upward.

    But their claim was bespectacled from the start by way of special pleading they had explained away each interruption in warming that occurred during the 20th century, but then after the report was published, yet another unexpected cooling period emerged.

    Suddenly the meme switched from being about "Global Warming" to being "Climate Change". The focus shifted from temperatures to sea-levels and hurricanes. Yet this turned out to be an even more tenuous footing. Its already no longer considered reputable among intellectual circles to discuss such extravagances. Eventually the talking point was settled upon: weather is not climate. The recent cooling is just weather.

    Indeed, weather is not climate. Climate is the expectation of weather--and so yes, it surely does matter when year after year goes by somewhat cooler than had been predicted by the IPCCs latest report.

    Meanwhile, the very people who had steadfastly refused to deny climate-change are now labeled the climate change deniers. This stemmed from an Orwellian campaign to redefine terminology. Suddenly believing in climate-change meant believing in anthropogenic climate change. The language literally twisted to be an embodiment of the "one true belief"--no need for that pesky modifier anthropogenic, and all the better to co-opt what everyone knows: climate changes.

    Several very cogent critiques of the AR3 temperature series have been published which eviscerated that graph (Mann's work) as a product of flawed statistical methods and bad data. Yet a loud cadre continues to deny any problem exists, and banks on the lack of specialized knowledge among the public and other scientists to trade on their word alone.

    And, no, the claim is no not that there is no contribution from Man. CO2 is a greenhouse gas, but its effect on temperature depends on poorly understood feedback effects. These effects are in part also responsible for the long history of natural temperature variation that the IPCC otherwise ignores. Ultimately, what it comes down to is this: The IPCC claims a temperature rise of 2C/century. To arrive at this number they assume almost all strong feedbacks are amplifying rather moderating the C02 driven warming. Why does this matter? Much of the impetus for "ACTION NOW!" stems from the notion of a climate tipping point, but if the feedback effects are more moderating than the IPCC claims, this is highly unlikely.

  12. Re:The damage has already been done on Climategate's Final Days · · Score: 1

    A few too many people have their fingers in their ears.

  13. Re:The damage has already been done on Climategate's Final Days · · Score: 1
    Yes, the damage has been done by the audacious framing and whitewash undertaken by this panel and its kin. If you read the panels report you can find this nugget from Lindzen, one of the panel's expert witnesses:

    On May 5 20 I 0, the RA-I 0 Investigatory Committee (Assmann, Irwin, Jablonski, Vondracek; Dr. Castleman was not available) and Candice Yekel interviewed Dr. Richard Lindzen, Professor, Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Investigatory Committee had four prepared questions, but Investigatory Committee members were free to ask additional questions as well as follow-up questions as they saw fit.

    Before the Investigatory Committee's questioning began, Dr. Lindzen was given some general background information regarding the process of inquiry and investigation into allegations concerning Dr. Mann, with a focus on the particular allegation that is the subject of the current review by the Investigatory Committee. Dr. Lindzen then requested, and was provided with, a brief summary of the three allegations previously reviewed. When told that the first three allegations against Dr. Mann were dismissed at the inquiry stage of the RA-lO process, Dr. Lindzen's response was: "It's thoroughly amazing. I mean these are issues that he explicitly stated in the emails. I'm wondering what's going on?"

    The Investigatory Committee members did not respond to Dr. Lindzen's statement. Instead, Dr. Lindzen's attention was directed to the fourth allegation, and it was explained to him that this is the allegation which the Investigatory Committee is charged to address.

    Unfortunately, and contrary to the summary of this article on slashdot, nothing of substance has been resolved.

  14. Re:Hardware Vendors Giddy on IEEE Releases 802.3ba Standard · · Score: 1

    These people? At the moment interest in 40G/100G is related to aggregating 10G server connections, not in running 10G to the server.

  15. Re:This isn't so strange. on Guess My Speed and Give Me a Ticket, In Ohio · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This whole story is strange. Courts have always recognized that Cops can ticket you based on "passing markers"--yes they need only count off the seconds between those little reflectors on the side of the road.

    This is considered indisputable if the officer has passed a certification test.

    Officers will routinely write, "passing markers" because its subjects them to the least review by the courts.

    Other backwards ideas: if Cops use 'stationary radar' they need to do a bunch of work to ascertain whether it is working correctly--it takes two patrol units: the stationary one and the reference vehicle. But, none of this is necessary if they use moving radar!

    But moving radar is next to meaningless (cosin error) without careful regulation of the setting which is only required... for stationary radar.

  16. Re:1970s and 32MPG...? on When the US Government Built Ultra-Safe Cars · · Score: 1

    Peak horsepower is mostly irrelevant to engine efficiency. What matters is how much power the driver requests--flooring a 70hp 4c only burns so much gas, flooring a 500p V8 burns a lot more. The pedals of both cars have about the same travel, so within the precision of human control, the bigger engine uses a good deal more fuel.

    Turn-on the cruise-control: there is just a tad more frictional loss in the large engine. The idea that chasing horsepower is the story is very misleading.

  17. Re:Sadly... on Second Inquiry Exonerates Climatic Research Unit · · Score: 1
    Consider Judith Curry's recent remarks:

    Criticisms of the Oxburgh report that have been made include: bias of some of the members including the Chair, not examining the papers that are at the heart of the controversies, lack of consideration of the actual criticisms made by Steve McIntyre and others, and a short report with few specifics that implies a superficial investigation. When I first read the report, I thought I was reading the executive summary and proceeded to look for the details; well, there weren't any. And I was concerned that the report explicitly did not address the key issues that had been raised by the skeptics.

    My thoughts indeed, and here we have a post that trumpets CRU as exonerated. The post gives two links one leading to a CRU press release and the second to a scant five page report.

    Elsewhere Professor Curry continues:

    The primary frustration with these investigations is that they are dancing around the principal issue that people care about: the IPCC and its implications for policy. Focusing only on CRU activities (which was the charge of the Oxbourgh panel) is of interest mainly to UEA and possibly the politics of UK research funding (it will be interesting to see if the U.S. DOE sends any more $$ to CRU). Given their selection of CRU research publications to investigate (see Bishop Hill), the Oxbourgh investigation has little credibility in my opinion. ... The corruptions of the IPCC process, and the question of corruption (or at least inappropriate torquing) of the actual science by the IPCC process, is the key issue.

  18. Re:Absence of Evidence on Debunking a Climate-Change Skeptic · · Score: 1

    You're wrong in saying "no, just no". Yes, CO2 does act that way; however, a doubling of CO2 would produce only 1 degree C of warming solely on the basis you described. The IPCC claims several degrees of warming. The difference between the simple CO2 only calculation and the IPCC claim stems from the latters incorporation of feedback effects.

    That is, they argue CO2 causes changes in the hydrological cycle. This means a change in humidity and cloud cover. Ipso facto, the climate sensitivity from a doubling of CO2 is more than would be suggested by a simple black-body radiation calculation.

    This is not just a small part of their argument. Its a significant factor, and yet while black-body radiation is a universally accepted idea; the magnitude (and sign!) of the feedback effects is poorly understood.

    Thus my remark was dead-on accurate. You might want to review this from Dr Roy Spencer, one the scientists who does satellite based temperature monitoring.

  19. Re:Absence of Evidence on Debunking a Climate-Change Skeptic · · Score: 1

    Uh, no. You're wrong to say that I'm wrong. Expectation is a statistical term which you'd do well to understand before criticizing my remark.

    What is wrong is to say "weather is not climate" therefore the recent temperature means nothing. This is false, and its false because climate is related to weather: climate is the expectation of weather. Therefore a few months of data mean a little something--although not very much. That is, with only a few months data we cannot statistically falsify the IPCC claim that the trend-rate of warming is 2C/century. Nonetheless, with the past 10, 15, 20, etc years of data, we can falsify the IPCC claim, but just barely.

    Such analysis is easy to do yourself. You can also find people who have posted their own number-crunching. See for instance this from Lucia Liljegren

  20. Re:Absence of Evidence on Debunking a Climate-Change Skeptic · · Score: 5, Informative

    There you go again. Conflating "climate change" with whether man is the most likely cause. Its really rather rich. The prime highlight of the IPCCs AR3 was to "forget" the existence of climate change prior to the 19th century. Natural variation over the past thousand years was reduced to quiet gradual downtrend with an abrupt surge upward in the 1800s. In so doing they discarded thousands of studies and work of thousands who previously carefully documented periods of great warming and cooling throughout the history of man.

    This can be seen clearly by comparing the IPCC-1990 report, which concisely shows the consensus of an old guard (now largely dead). A very warm, much warmer period during the middle ages (shown in read). The IPCC AR3 and AR4 replaced this with the blue curve. Shown a flat-changeless temperature history with a slight downtrend, suddenly accelerating upward.

    But their claim was bespectacled from the start by way of special pleading they had explained away each interruption in warming that occurred during the 20th century, but then after the report was published, yet another unexpected cooling period emerged.

    Suddenly the meme switched from being about "Global Warming" to being "Climate Change". The focus shifted from temperatures to sea-levels and hurricanes. Yet this turned out to be an even more tenuous footing. Its already no longer considered reputable among intellectual circles to discuss such extravagances. Eventually the talking point was settled upon: weather is not climate. The recent cooling is just weather.

    Indeed, weather is not climate. Climate is the expectation of weather--and so yes, it surely does matter when year after year goes by somewhat cooler than had been predicted by the IPCCs latest report.

    Meanwhile, the very people who had steadfastly refused to deny climate-change are now labeled the climate change deniers. This stemmed from an Orwellian campaign to redefine terminology. Suddenly believing in climate-change meant believing in anthropogenic climate change. The language literally twisted to be an embodiment of the "one true belief"--no need for that pesky modifier anthropogenic, and all the better to co-opt what everyone knows: climate changes.

    Several very cogent critiques of the AR3 temperature series have been published which eviscerated that graph as a product of flawed statistical methods and bad data. Yet a loud cadre continues to deny any problem exists, and banks on the lack of specialized knowledge among the public and other scientists to trade on their word alone.

    And, no, we're saying that there is no contribution from Man. CO2 is a greenhouse gas, but its effect on temperature depends on poorly understood feedback effects. These effects are in part also responsible for the long history of natural temperature variation that the IPCC otherwise ignores. Ultimately, what it comes down to is this: The IPCC claims a temperature rise of 2C/century. To arrive at this number they assume almost all strong feedbacks are amplifying rather moderating the C02 driven warming. Why does this matter? Much of the impetus for "ACTION NOW!" stems from the notion of a climate tipping point, but if the feedback effects are more moderating than the IPCC claims, this is highly unlikely.

  21. Re:Don't say "NAT" on At Current Rates, Only a Few More Years' Worth of IPv4 Addresses · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Less scare oriented analysis have shown less than 50% of the IPv4 space in actual use. IPv6 is considered a to be a broken ill-designed protocol that screws up more than it fixes. Its basically unusable with mobile networks (WiMax, WiFi, etc). It significantly increases the cost of routers, switches, etc--the exceptions being those hardware that treat IPv6 in the slow-path. i.e., by trapping to the control CPU.

    The IP network was designed to be a gateway network, not to connect every dippy host to every other one. Which is a broken, insecure, nonsensical practice. If you believe in it, you should review the Geek Social Fallacies.

    The truth will be in the pudding. Once address space begins to be clawed back, abusive users (like IBM; IBM does NOT have millions of protocol compliant IPs: they ought to be NATed), will face a cost of reconfiguring their broken network topologies using IPv4 or switching to IPv6. Then we'll know.

  22. Re:Shoot the messenger on New Research Forecasts Global 6C Increase By End of Century · · Score: 1

    Next time try reading whole sentences. Then you might actually understand what you're being told.

    I see that you ask: Might I suggest to you that when you find something someone quotes from them to be demonstrably wrong, you demonstrate that it is in fact wrong. Here is one vein:

    Back in December 2004 John Finn asked about the divergence in "Myth vs. Fact Regarding the Hockey Stick"--a thread on realclimate.

    Whatever the reason for the divergence, it would seem to suggest that the practice of grafting the thermometer record onto a proxy temperature record - as I believe was done in the case of the 'hockey stick' - is dubious to say the least.

    This drove a response from realclimate team (M. Mann):

    No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, "grafted the thermometer record onto" any reconstrution. It is somewhat disappointing to find this specious claim (which we usually find originating from industry-funded climate disinformation websites) appearing in this forum.

    With some effort, the methodologies were reproduced and it became clear that MM was not be entirely truthful.

    But RC has stuck its party line--even now after some of the leaked emails from CRU show us that this particular fudging technique was quite common and applied to manipulate data more than once.

  23. Re:Shoot the messenger on New Research Forecasts Global 6C Increase By End of Century · · Score: 1

    Take a breath. Think about what I said. I didn't say they weren't scientists working for important climate research institutions. They are, but somehow you think your assertion of those facts cuts against what I said. It does not.

    The problem with realclimate is not they don't have some good, accurate, etc information. The problem is that when someone from their 'tribe' is caught doing bad science they don't play the honest broker. They man the fences, truth be damned--no matter now glaringly in the wrong they are.

    So I stand by my claim. realclimate is too partisan and too dogmatic to be used as a reliable source of information.

  24. Re:How can they tell... on New Research Forecasts Global 6C Increase By End of Century · · Score: 1

    Again, you don't get the logic. The core science is right; yet, the conclusion being drawn does not follow. The people blogging at realclimate are the same ones monopolizing the lead author positions at the IPCC. So there is no independence here and no meaning to the repetition.

  25. Re:How can they tell... on New Research Forecasts Global 6C Increase By End of Century · · Score: 1

    The question here is: "how can they tell that the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere is due to CO2".

    Yes they can measure carbon ratios; no, the data does not necessarily mean what they claim it means. Yes, the changes are consistent with burning fossil fuels, but that does nothing on its own to explain why the equilibrium level of CO2 in the atmosphere is higher today than before.

    Let me illustrate this:

    Bin(t) - Biological intake of CO2
    Bout(t) - Biological emission of CO2
    Oin(t) - Inorganic absorption of CO2
    Fout(t) - Burning fuel emissions of CO2

    CO2 = \int (Bout(t) - Bin(t) + Fout(t) - Oin(t)) dt

    All four terms are time varying. Isotope ratios only indicate that Bout/Fout are higher than before. They cannot explain why the CO2 in the atmosphere is rising which necessarily requires understanding the other terms as well.

    Don't link to realclimate.org; its heavily partisan and apologetic for even bad science and outlandish claims.