Please don't just attack the source - if you think the analysis is flawed, point out where.
The analysis isn't "flawed", actually: merely meaningless.
Here's what it says: "Without someone laying out a complete architecture drawing of the email systems, archive system, backup system, data retention policies and operational procedures, we can only guess at how the system was implemented, what options were available, and what options not."
So, basically they said they don't know anything, but they're willing to guess. Uh, yeah, so?
The one thing that it does state is "There’s reason to believe that it was not any of the researchers, because it is clear from many of the emails themselves that they had no idea that things like archives and backup tapes existed." So, pretty much the only conclusion from the link you suggested is that the statement written by anonymous coward, "A Climate Guy did it," is wrong. Which is precisely what I just said. So we agree.
Well, except it's pretty clear that, despite the accusations, the scientists involved did not "falsify data." Again quoting the BBC article: "Some of the e-mails released appeared to show scientists at CRU and their collaborators in other institutes deviating from accepted academic standards in an attempt to paint an alarmist picture of climate change. However, examination of the broader context by three separate investigations resulted in the scientists being cleared of malpractice."
Most notably, take a look at the graph in the article. The light blue is the Hadley Climate Research Unit data on temperature. The two other graphs show NASA data and NOAA data for the same period, independently generated from different data sets. The dark blue is the Berkeley data-- this was a project funded by some of the climate skeptics specifically to do an unbiased re-examination. They all show pretty much the same temperature trend
In science, ability to replicate results is important. The climate results has it.
So, when you are claiming that they "blatantly falsified data," here is the conspiracy theory that you're supporting: 1. The Hadley CRU is falsifying data to make a point which (if you're right) know will be shown to be false. 2. Three separate investigations in the UK independently conspired to hide the falsification. Yet another investigation, this one in the US, also conspires to hide the falsification. 3. Two US agencies-- on a different continent-- come up with pretty much the same temperature graphs, working on different data sets. 4. An independent analysis put together specifically to avoid the putative bias the other measurements also comes up with the same result, and 5. By an amazing coincidence, the result happens to pretty well fit the predictions of sixteen different climate models made by universities and research institutes on four different continents, many of which are open source (meaning that anybody can search through the code and look for the putative fudge factors), dating back to Manabe and Wetherald's 1967 model, which, as it turns out, agrees quite well with the results.
Or, alternatively: maybe the science is actually right, the scientist actually are not stupid, fraudulent, or deluded (or all of the above), and the climate is warming at pretty much the rate predicted, for the reasons that are well explained by well-known, not-at-all-controversial physics.
If you look at the BBC article, it specifically states: "Police say the theft was "sophisticated and orchestrated", and that no-one at the university is implicated."
Or, if you read the police report; "“However, as a result of our enquiries, we can say that the data breach was the result of a sophisticated and carefully orchestrated attack on the CRU’s data files, carried out remotely via the internet. The offenders used methods common in unlawful internet activity to obstruct enquiries. There is no evidence to suggest that anyone working at or associated with the University of East Anglia was involved in the crime.”
So, no, actually, it was not an "inside job." Quoting the BBC article further: "Prof Edward Acton, the university's vice-chancellor, said he was disappointed that the perpetrators had not been caught. 'The misinformation and conspiracy theories circulating following the publication of the stolen emails - including the theory that the hacker was a disgruntled UEA employee - did real harm...'"
But Americans have been hugely keen on giving more and more power to their federal government
Sigh. No. The ignorance of history by the average American is appalling. No, this is nothing new. It goes back to the 1798 Alien and Sedition acts, at least. There's nothing "more and more' about it-- you do remember the domestic spying of the 1960s and 1970s, right? Or the Kent State incident where National Guardsmen shot a bunch of students on the quad (who, as it turned out, didn't even have anything to do with the protests over which that the Guards had been called out?) Well, no, probably you don't. What is new is the large amount of push-back against giving power to the federal goverment.
There's been for the last two centuries a give and take between cries for security and the desire for non-interference; or, if you like, the battle between fear and freedom.
, so this is in inevitable byproduct. Of course there must be some government, but not one that grows without bound and attracts power hungry, corrupt authoritarians. But hey, keep on voting for those Republican and Democrats, because that's been working out so well thus far, amirite?
You're ignoring large amounts of debate and back-and-forth in order to phrase things as simple freedom-versus-evil. Even in the two-party system, the parties are not monoliths; opinions are not uniform nor black-and-white. However, if you don't like the two-party system, you might try to see if you can advocate changing the ballotting system that we currently have, which drives the politics to two parties. Try advocating approval voting, for example, which is a system that is not biased toward two parties: http://www.electology.org/approval-votinghttp://bcn.boulder.co.us/government/approvalvote/center.html (or any of several other methods that don't fail badly with multiple candidates).
This article is just anti-government spin and alarmism. It is government policy to move as much computation as possible into the *public* cloud.
I've indeed heard that, but no one has ever explained to me why the federal government should want to use the (non-government) cloud.
The "cloud" makes sense for small and even medium sized businesses; they can make use of the economy of scale of the huge business computational power, which makes particular sense if you only intermittently need large computing capacity or requirements for storage, or, if you don't have good forecasts for how much computing you need, you can buy it as you go. But the government already has economy of scale, and should have good ideas for how much computing power they need. What advantage does using the cloud, and giving others physical possession of the computational equipment, have for them?
If you are going to make statements about the statistical significance of 67 years worth of data, please find out how many other 67 year periods of peace there have been.
I used the phrase "no large scale war," and you have modified this to "peace". There have been no large-scale wars, as I chose to define it, but certainly this has not meant "peace." There have been very few years with no wars at all, with Korea following on the heels of World War II so quickly that they almost appear phases of a single conflict.
Since there is a lot of flexibiliity in what is aggregated as "war," it's hard to say what the statistical significance is. It's dicey to make statistics when you can chose what to count in a way to adjust the result to anything you want. For example, I can claim 1815 to 1914 as a 99-year period of no large-scale wars. What? You say there were plenty of wars? Spanish American? Franco-Prussian War? Ah, but not large-scale wars.
I don't think it's at all certain that quick and devastating nuclear strikes would amount to more dead than the conventional wars which nuclear weapons have made impossible.
This is, of course, as-yet unknown, since there has never been a war that has started with both sides already in possession of nuclear weapons.
Approximately 60 million people were killed in World war II, or about 2.5% of the world population. "Only" approximately 150,000-246,000 of those dead were killed by atomic weapons.
Well, true, but the second world war was actually two separate wars, one in Europe and one in the Pacific. The war in Europe was over before nuclear weapons were introduced. Even counting them both together, since world war II lasted about 2170 days and three of those days were fought with one of the two combatants armed with nuclear weapons, you're saying that 0.13% of the duration of the war accounted for 0.4% of the deaths.
If WWII is any indication, if a war were to break out with a nuclear-armed state, it would end abruptly.
This is not clear. WWII was a war in which one of the two combatants had nuclear arms.
...Two little nagging problems with this are Hiroshima/Nagasaki, which weren't very peaceful as about 135,000 people died in two flashes of light.
I will remind you that the war in the Pacific was killing that many people per month, so if the bombings hastened the end of the war by as little as 5 weeks, they saved as many lives as they took. (Not even accounting for those who would die by starvation due to the fact that the Japanese had drafted all the farmers into the war effort.)
With or without nuclear weapons, the war was brutal.
Right. There is a plausible argument that nuclear weapons may have decreased the frequency of large-scale war. (That argument could be challenged [the data set is only 67 years, which may not be statistically significant] but it's a defensible proposition). However, nuclear weapons increase the destructiveness of large-scale war. So it is not at all obvious that decreasing the frequency but increasing the severity of war is a good result.
No need to bother the coders trying to fix the problem, with the exception of maybe pulling one or two aside for 15 minutes to write down exactly what the issue is, so the reps can explain it to irate customers.
Oh, that's just so easy! No problem, just "pull one or two of the programmers who are trying to solve the problem aside for fifteen minutes", yeah, that's all! Easy, just fifteen minutes! Twenty, tops! Well, maybe thirty, if they have to explain it in terms management can understand. No more than an hour, certainly, or, anyway, no more than two. Well, unless management has questions, then maybe a little more. Half a day, tops, dead certain.
You can do work, or you can answer questions from management, but you can't do both. If you think that it's possible to do both just because you have a lot of money-- well, sorry. It would be nice if money solved all problems.
Well, it seems to me that they did the correct thing, which is to put their resources into fixing the problem first, and discuss the problem with angry users later.
If Apple is so short on resources they can't afford to work on the problem and simultaniously dedicate 1 person to sending a message out to an email list saying "hey, we messed something up, give us a few to get it fixed," They've got some serious issues.
Dealing with the end users properly should include a statement of the form such as "this is what went wrong, this is how we're fixing it." If it doesn't include information similar to that, the users are going to be just as dissatisfied as they were before, and maybe more so. That means asking the people fixing the problem "what went wrong? How soon can we fix it?"
To which the correct answer is "shut up and stop bothering us, we're too busy to deal with you right now."
In general, you can do work or you can answer questions from management, but you can't do both.
I emailed App Review less than an hour after the update went live and yelled about it on Twitter. About two hours after the update went live, a correct, functional version of it started being distributed on reinstalls. As far as I know, the problem hasn't recurred since then.
I haven't yet received a response from App Review, so I don't know whether the fix was because I made noise, or simply because time passed, which may, for instance, expire a cache with the bad data.
He now just wants Apple to acknowledge that there was a problem.
Well, it seems to me that they did the correct thing, which is to put their resources into fixing the problem first, and discuss the problem with angry users later.
"A.D. 793. This year came dreadful fore-warnings over the land of the Northumbrians, terrifying the people most woefully: these were immense sheets of light rushing through the air, and whirlwinds, and fiery, dragons flying across the firmament. These tremendous tokens were soon followed by a great famine: and not long after, on the sixth day before the ides of January in the same year, the harrowing inroads of heathen men made lamentable havoc in the church of God in Holy-island, by rapine and slaughter."
This year also appeared in the heavens a red crucifix, after sunset;
I'm a little dubious that a supernova, even one visible only in the west after sunset, would be described as a red crucifix. In astronomical photos stars look like crosses, but that's an artifact of the telescope optics, which they didn't have in the dark ages. A supernova just wouldn't look like a cross.
On the other hand, I doubt it's aurora. Since England is pretty far north, and they didn't have artificial lights at night, they would see aurora far more often than we do now, and it just wouldn't rate such a mention. (Besides, an auroral manifestation in the shape of a cross? Dubious.)
A sun pillar plus a layer of clouds would make a crucifix, though. I'll go with that as my most-likely explanation.
Missile defense never worked. Not once. Obama has pushed the funding into weapons programs that may work.
To the contrary on both: there was just a successful test, and Obama has been funding missile defense, including funding deployment of missile defense.
Missile defense isn't any longer an issue on which there is significant difference between Republicans and Democrats.
Yes, I hate to say it, but from the facts given, the Apple employee was obeying the law.
"The iPad was to be a gift for her cousin who lives in Iran."
It was illegal for her to buy it in order to send it to Iran. You can argue about what he heard and what he knew about versus what he deduced from possibly incomplete evidence, but the end result, refusing to sell her an iPad she was intending to re-export to Iran, was following the law.
If you don't like it, don't blame Apple, go petition the US government who made the law.
In the US fuel taxes pay for 100% of roads AND subsidize mass transit.
Sorry, but no, they don't. They don't pay for the roads, much less subsidizing mass transit. That was the theory behind gasoline tax, that it would pay for roads, but it turns out to be so incredibly difficult politically to raise the gas tax that at the moment fuel taxes don't come anywhere near paying for roads. They should, but they don't.
Duplicating results has always been more an ideal than a practice. No one has time for it and it's sort of unnecessary because of two things everyone knows. First, scientific knowledge proceeds like a shotgun: most published articles, right or wrong, lead nowhere and are pretty much ignored with no need of replication. Second, validation can happen not by direct, targeted repeat of an experiment, but by having that experimental result work its way into other experiment designs as an assumption. People assume a result is true, proceed as if it were true, and fInd that things turn out as if it were true. Or false, in which case a targeted reexamination might be performed.
Yes, exactly. When a result is right, people build on it, and in the process of building on it, they repeat it and confirm it.
Scientists rarely say "here's a published result, let's make an exact copy of the apparatus and do the exact same experiment with the exact same conditions and see if we get the exact same result." It's much more "X published an interesting finding in p-doped GaAlSb crystals produced by LPE; we have a MBE system with an antimony source; let's give it to a grad student who needs a project and see if we can grow those crystals by MBE; if we can do that, then we can go on and do Y."
Actually, science is stll working; the real trouble comes with the publicity of the science.
You should never believe the results of any single study. Every scientist knows this; or should know this. Science comes when results are confirmed, not when somebody publishes the first paper. The real work of science just starts when somebody publishes a study saying "we show that x has the effect y." That initial paper really is no more than "here's a place to start looking." However, newspapers want to publish news, and they need to publish whatever's hot and interesting and being done today, not "well, scientist z had his team take a look at the xy phenomenon to see if there was anything interesting there, and they couldn't really find anything there, although maybe some other research lab might have different results."
And, I suppose that somebody should post a link to the obligatory xkcd: http://xkcd.com/882/
Heartland is making an argument against proposed policy responses to global warming by attacking the science.
But of course. That is how scientists debate such things.
No, actually it isn't.
Scientists do not attack the science because in response to the science some politicians have proposed a policy they don't like. If this happens, scientists would attack the policy, not say that the science must be wrong. The science is right, or wrong, regardless of the policy implications
Since our society is based on science, yes, I'd say that a campaign to instill the attitude that science is fraudulent and scientists are liars and should be put in jail is an attack on civilization as we know it.
And if that attack should be accurate in its accusations, then what does that say about our civilization?
Well, so far, the attacks have not accurate in their accusations. The science is not fraudulent, and scientists are not liars.
Slashdot Mirror
Please don't just attack the source - if you think the analysis is flawed, point out where.
The analysis isn't "flawed", actually: merely meaningless.
Here's what it says: "Without someone laying out a complete architecture drawing of the email systems, archive system, backup system, data retention policies and operational procedures, we can only guess at how the system was implemented, what options were available, and what options not."
So, basically they said they don't know anything, but they're willing to guess. Uh, yeah, so?
The one thing that it does state is "There’s reason to believe that it was not any of the researchers, because it is clear from many of the emails themselves that they had no idea that things like archives and backup tapes existed." So, pretty much the only conclusion from the link you suggested is that the statement written by anonymous coward, "A Climate Guy did it," is wrong. Which is precisely what I just said. So we agree.
Well, except it's pretty clear that, despite the accusations, the scientists involved did not "falsify data." Again quoting the BBC article:
"Some of the e-mails released appeared to show scientists at CRU and their collaborators in other institutes deviating from accepted academic standards in an attempt to paint an alarmist picture of climate change. However, examination of the broader context by three separate investigations resulted in the scientists being cleared of malpractice."
Most notably, take a look at the graph in the article. The light blue is the Hadley Climate Research Unit data on temperature. The two other graphs show NASA data and NOAA data for the same period, independently generated from different data sets. The dark blue is the Berkeley data-- this was a project funded by some of the climate skeptics specifically to do an unbiased re-examination. They all show pretty much the same temperature trend
In science, ability to replicate results is important. The climate results has it.
So, when you are claiming that they "blatantly falsified data," here is the conspiracy theory that you're supporting:
1. The Hadley CRU is falsifying data to make a point which (if you're right) know will be shown to be false.
2. Three separate investigations in the UK independently conspired to hide the falsification. Yet another investigation, this one in the US, also conspires to hide the falsification.
3. Two US agencies-- on a different continent-- come up with pretty much the same temperature graphs, working on different data sets.
4. An independent analysis put together specifically to avoid the putative bias the other measurements also comes up with the same result, and
5. By an amazing coincidence, the result happens to pretty well fit the predictions of sixteen different climate models made by universities and research institutes on four different continents, many of which are open source (meaning that anybody can search through the code and look for the putative fudge factors), dating back to Manabe and Wetherald's 1967 model, which, as it turns out, agrees quite well with the results.
Or, alternatively: maybe the science is actually right, the scientist actually are not stupid, fraudulent, or deluded (or all of the above), and the climate is warming at pretty much the rate predicted, for the reasons that are well explained by well-known, not-at-all-controversial physics.
If you look at the BBC article, it specifically states:
"Police say the theft was "sophisticated and orchestrated", and that no-one at the university is implicated."
Or, if you read the police report;
"“However, as a result of our enquiries, we can say that the data breach was the result of a sophisticated and carefully orchestrated attack on the CRU’s data files, carried out remotely via the internet. The offenders used methods common in unlawful internet activity to obstruct enquiries. There is no evidence to suggest that anyone working at or associated with the University of East Anglia was involved in the crime.”
So, no, actually, it was not an "inside job." Quoting the BBC article further: "Prof Edward Acton, the university's vice-chancellor, said he was disappointed that the perpetrators had not been caught. 'The misinformation and conspiracy theories circulating following the publication of the stolen emails - including the theory that the hacker was a disgruntled UEA employee - did real harm...'"
But Americans have been hugely keen on giving more and more power to their federal government
Sigh. No. The ignorance of history by the average American is appalling. No, this is nothing new. It goes back to the 1798 Alien and Sedition acts, at least. There's nothing "more and more' about it-- you do remember the domestic spying of the 1960s and 1970s, right? Or the Kent State incident where National Guardsmen shot a bunch of students on the quad (who, as it turned out, didn't even have anything to do with the protests over which that the Guards had been called out?) Well, no, probably you don't. What is new is the large amount of push-back against giving power to the federal goverment.
There's been for the last two centuries a give and take between cries for security and the desire for non-interference; or, if you like, the battle between fear and freedom.
, so this is in inevitable byproduct. Of course there must be some government, but not one that grows without bound and attracts power hungry, corrupt authoritarians. But hey, keep on voting for those Republican and Democrats, because that's been working out so well thus far, amirite?
You're ignoring large amounts of debate and back-and-forth in order to phrase things as simple freedom-versus-evil. Even in the two-party system, the parties are not monoliths; opinions are not uniform nor black-and-white. However, if you don't like the two-party system, you might try to see if you can advocate changing the ballotting system that we currently have, which drives the politics to two parties. Try advocating approval voting, for example, which is a system that is not biased toward two parties: http://www.electology.org/approval-voting http://bcn.boulder.co.us/government/approvalvote/center.html (or any of several other methods that don't fail badly with multiple candidates).
This article is just anti-government spin and alarmism. It is government policy to move as much computation as possible into the *public* cloud.
I've indeed heard that, but no one has ever explained to me why the federal government should want to use the (non-government) cloud.
The "cloud" makes sense for small and even medium sized businesses; they can make use of the economy of scale of the huge business computational power, which makes particular sense if you only intermittently need large computing capacity or requirements for storage, or, if you don't have good forecasts for how much computing you need, you can buy it as you go. But the government already has economy of scale, and should have good ideas for how much computing power they need. What advantage does using the cloud, and giving others physical possession of the computational equipment, have for them?
If you are going to make statements about the statistical significance of 67 years worth of data, please find out how many other 67 year periods of peace there have been.
I used the phrase "no large scale war," and you have modified this to "peace". There have been no large-scale wars, as I chose to define it, but certainly this has not meant "peace." There have been very few years with no wars at all, with Korea following on the heels of World War II so quickly that they almost appear phases of a single conflict.
Since there is a lot of flexibiliity in what is aggregated as "war," it's hard to say what the statistical significance is. It's dicey to make statistics when you can chose what to count in a way to adjust the result to anything you want. For example, I can claim 1815 to 1914 as a 99-year period of no large-scale wars. What? You say there were plenty of wars? Spanish American? Franco-Prussian War? Ah, but not large-scale wars.
I don't think it's at all certain that quick and devastating nuclear strikes would amount to more dead than the conventional wars which nuclear weapons have made impossible.
This is, of course, as-yet unknown, since there has never been a war that has started with both sides already in possession of nuclear weapons.
Approximately 60 million people were killed in World war II, or about 2.5% of the world population. "Only" approximately 150,000-246,000 of those dead were killed by atomic weapons.
Well, true, but the second world war was actually two separate wars, one in Europe and one in the Pacific. The war in Europe was over before nuclear weapons were introduced. Even counting them both together, since world war II lasted about 2170 days and three of those days were fought with one of the two combatants armed with nuclear weapons, you're saying that 0.13% of the duration of the war accounted for 0.4% of the deaths.
If WWII is any indication, if a war were to break out with a nuclear-armed state, it would end abruptly.
This is not clear. WWII was a war in which one of the two combatants had nuclear arms.
...
...Two little nagging problems with this are Hiroshima/Nagasaki, which weren't very peaceful as about 135,000 people died in two flashes of light.
I will remind you that the war in the Pacific was killing that many people per month, so if the bombings hastened the end of the war by as little as 5 weeks, they saved as many lives as they took. (Not even accounting for those who would die by starvation due to the fact that the Japanese had drafted all the farmers into the war effort.)
With or without nuclear weapons, the war was brutal.
Right. There is a plausible argument that nuclear weapons may have decreased the frequency of large-scale war. (That argument could be challenged [the data set is only 67 years, which may not be statistically significant] but it's a defensible proposition). However, nuclear weapons increase the destructiveness of large-scale war. So it is not at all obvious that decreasing the frequency but increasing the severity of war is a good result.
No need to bother the coders trying to fix the problem, with the exception of maybe pulling one or two aside for 15 minutes to write down exactly what the issue is, so the reps can explain it to irate customers.
Oh, that's just so easy! No problem, just "pull one or two of the programmers who are trying to solve the problem aside for fifteen minutes", yeah, that's all! Easy, just fifteen minutes! Twenty, tops! Well, maybe thirty, if they have to explain it in terms management can understand. No more than an hour, certainly, or, anyway, no more than two. Well, unless management has questions, then maybe a little more. Half a day, tops, dead certain.
Idiot. I just hope you're not in management.
Money has nothing to do with it.
You can do work, or you can answer questions from management, but you can't do both. If you think that it's possible to do both just because you have a lot of money-- well, sorry. It would be nice if money solved all problems.
Well, it seems to me that they did the correct thing, which is to put their resources into fixing the problem first, and discuss the problem with angry users later.
If Apple is so short on resources they can't afford to work on the problem and simultaniously dedicate 1 person to sending a message out to an email list saying "hey, we messed something up, give us a few to get it fixed," They've got some serious issues.
Dealing with the end users properly should include a statement of the form such as "this is what went wrong, this is how we're fixing it." If it doesn't include information similar to that, the users are going to be just as dissatisfied as they were before, and maybe more so. That means asking the people fixing the problem "what went wrong? How soon can we fix it?"
To which the correct answer is "shut up and stop bothering us, we're too busy to deal with you right now."
In general, you can do work or you can answer questions from management, but you can't do both.
From the linked blog by app author Marco Arment:
He now just wants Apple to acknowledge that there was a problem.
Well, it seems to me that they did the correct thing, which is to put their resources into fixing the problem first, and discuss the problem with angry users later.
Dragons!!!
That would explain the "wonderful serpents" ...
If you just read down a few years:
"A.D. 793. This year came dreadful fore-warnings over the land of the Northumbrians, terrifying the people most woefully: these were immense sheets of light rushing through the air, and whirlwinds, and fiery, dragons flying across the firmament. These tremendous tokens were soon followed by a great famine: and not long after, on the sixth day before the ides of January in the same year, the harrowing inroads of heathen men made lamentable havoc in the church of God in Holy-island, by rapine and slaughter."
(from The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle : Eighth Century)
This year also appeared in the heavens a red crucifix, after sunset;
I'm a little dubious that a supernova, even one visible only in the west after sunset, would be described as a red crucifix. In astronomical photos stars look like crosses, but that's an artifact of the telescope optics, which they didn't have in the dark ages. A supernova just wouldn't look like a cross.
On the other hand, I doubt it's aurora. Since England is pretty far north, and they didn't have artificial lights at night, they would see aurora far more often than we do now, and it just wouldn't rate such a mention. (Besides, an auroral manifestation in the shape of a cross? Dubious.)
A sun pillar plus a layer of clouds would make a crucifix, though. I'll go with that as my most-likely explanation.
Missile defense never worked. Not once. Obama has pushed the funding into weapons programs that may work.
To the contrary on both: there was just a successful test, and Obama has been funding missile defense, including funding deployment of missile defense.
Missile defense isn't any longer an issue on which there is significant difference between Republicans and Democrats.
Indeed. My respect for Apple just went up.
Yes, I hate to say it, but from the facts given, the Apple employee was obeying the law.
"The iPad was to be a gift for her cousin who lives in Iran."
It was illegal for her to buy it in order to send it to Iran. You can argue about what he heard and what he knew about versus what he deduced from possibly incomplete evidence, but the end result, refusing to sell her an iPad she was intending to re-export to Iran, was following the law.
If you don't like it, don't blame Apple, go petition the US government who made the law.
No, actually, it's the "no true scotsman" fallacy:
Assertion: No capitalist would fear change.
Counterexample: But these [examples listed] capitalists fear change.
Rebuttal: those are no true capitalists!
Obviously, they're in the process of developing Gibson's black ICE!
We should be afraid.
Every even number greater than 1 is the sum of no more than six primes, one of which is three.
Bullshit.
In the US fuel taxes pay for 100% of roads AND subsidize mass transit.
Sorry, but no, they don't. They don't pay for the roads, much less subsidizing mass transit. That was the theory behind gasoline tax, that it would pay for roads, but it turns out to be so incredibly difficult politically to raise the gas tax that at the moment fuel taxes don't come anywhere near paying for roads. They should, but they don't.
It's been known for a long time that Google has been secretly working with NSA.
Citation needed.
Duplicating results has always been more an ideal than a practice. No one has time for it and it's sort of unnecessary because of two things everyone knows. First, scientific knowledge proceeds like a shotgun: most published articles, right or wrong, lead nowhere and are pretty much ignored with no need of replication. Second, validation can happen not by direct, targeted repeat of an experiment, but by having that experimental result work its way into other experiment designs as an assumption. People assume a result is true, proceed as if it were true, and fInd that things turn out as if it were true. Or false, in which case a targeted reexamination might be performed.
Yes, exactly. When a result is right, people build on it, and in the process of building on it, they repeat it and confirm it.
Scientists rarely say "here's a published result, let's make an exact copy of the apparatus and do the exact same experiment with the exact same conditions and see if we get the exact same result." It's much more "X published an interesting finding in p-doped GaAlSb crystals produced by LPE; we have a MBE system with an antimony source; let's give it to a grad student who needs a project and see if we can grow those crystals by MBE; if we can do that, then we can go on and do Y."
Actually, science is stll working; the real trouble comes with the publicity of the science.
You should never believe the results of any single study. Every scientist knows this; or should know this. Science comes when results are confirmed, not when somebody publishes the first paper. The real work of science just starts when somebody publishes a study saying "we show that x has the effect y." That initial paper really is no more than "here's a place to start looking." However, newspapers want to publish news, and they need to publish whatever's hot and interesting and being done today, not "well, scientist z had his team take a look at the xy phenomenon to see if there was anything interesting there, and they couldn't really find anything there, although maybe some other research lab might have different results."
And, I suppose that somebody should post a link to the obligatory xkcd: http://xkcd.com/882/
Heartland is making an argument against proposed policy responses to global warming by attacking the science.
But of course. That is how scientists debate such things.
No, actually it isn't.
Scientists do not attack the science because in response to the science some politicians have proposed a policy they don't like. If this happens, scientists would attack the policy, not say that the science must be wrong. The science is right, or wrong, regardless of the policy implications
Since our society is based on science, yes, I'd say that a campaign to instill the attitude that science is fraudulent and scientists are liars and should be put in jail is an attack on civilization as we know it.
And if that attack should be accurate in its accusations, then what does that say about our civilization?
Well, so far, the attacks have not accurate in their accusations. The science is not fraudulent, and scientists are not liars.