"Democracy is based on the assumption that a million men are wiser than one man. How’s that again? I missed something.
Autocracy is based on the assumption that one man is wiser than a million men. Let’s play that over again, too. Who decides?" - Robert Heinlein

What in defense spending isn't really defense: paying troops, operations, maintenance, basic research, system development, or building new stuff? Or do you just object to having it called defense as a whole?

None of those came from NSF though, modern medicine is NIH, Internet was DARPA, Lasers were Bell Labs. None possible without the US Government spending money (or providing a Sherman Act exemption), but not through NSF. In my experience NSF is there to give money to Bill Nye the Science Guy and keep my professors doing research in crazy things that have big promise, but little chance of success.

While the diplomats are (if they are doing their job) working to benefit the US, if they are doing their jobs competently, the information disclosed in working communications should represent their perception of reality more so than publicly disclosed information, which would obviously be said in a way to make the US look good. Hopefully the diplomats have a fairly accurate perception of reality.

MATLAB does most everything with doubles, int and float formats are really only there when dealing with input/output to files. If i put A = 1 into a command line, its put in memory as a double. I use MATLAB most of my working day for signal processing algorithim design, and I don't think I've ever needed the precision of a 64 bit integer. Numbers bigger than a 32 bit integer can handle pop up from time to time, but never with more precision than a double provides.

$1 million is probably enough to handle 6 or so people working in an office. If they are there to facilitate the cross-pollination of ideas, writing and maintaining a couple hundred page piece of FAA regulations, and another document to explain how to manage the airspace involved, that's probably the right amount of money to get started.

Actually, the federal government has supreme authority over interstate commerce, not sole authority, the states are welcome to institute additional regulations on either end, provided they don't contradict each other, and they don't conflict with Federal law.

In Maryland, where I live, the law is the same as Florida's. I've seen the light turn red on me just as I pass under and the red light camera never took a picture. I think there's a law requiring some sort of review before they send you a ticket, so if there was a good reason, you don't get ticketed.

right on, two recent projects I've done, one my senior design project, and my first professional job had me using RS-232 to connect a laptop to an embedded system. If the host machine only needs to see a single floating point number a couple times a second, RS-232 is plenty fast enough, and is much less time consuming from a design standpoint than say a TCP/IP connection.

Of course, the climate model from the 5 years ago wouldn't predict the past 5 years, climate models can't resolve that small amount of time. The fundamental issue of the predictive properties is that by the time we know if the model is right it will be too late to fix the problem, and the models constantly get better as more powerful computers become available and climate science becomes more sophisticated. There's no good way to test the validity of the models, since theres not alot of good data, similar to the problems of doing macroeconomic modelling. The real issue is how much money and time to invest as a result of the conclusions of the models.

There's a big ole difference between denying a past event with eyewitnesses and believing the future will turn out a certain way because most climate scientists believe it will turn out that way. Its also entirely possible to be skeptical about AGW if you are not comfortable with temperature proxies being grafted onto measurements because the proxies didn't match actual temperatures after 1960 or if you insist that a prediction model is able to predict a future it was not trained on. For alot of people, providing the most accurate reading available at any given time and training the model on history and looking at the predictions are good enough. And even if you're not skeptical on the predictions, you can be skeptical that proposed solutions are worth it.

To set cement used on my teeth, its cheaper than alternatives like wood or metal, depends on the brake pad but its ultimately something with a high friction coefficient. You don't have to be a specialist to have a reasonable level of understanding about the magic in things, just be reasonably smart and be able to learn and reason.

I don't know if you understood what I meant. In plainer english: Anyone can preform a simple experiment or use a simple (E=hv) equation and figure out that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. No one can preform an experiment to prove AGW, and so we've got to rely on models.

well there's a big difference between not surviving several hundred years of history and being purposely deleted after a FOIA request. AGW is not a fundamental explanation of the workings of the universe, its the conjecture of the result of adding CO2 to the atmosphere and trying to anticipate the results. The question isn't whether CO2 is a greenhouse gas, that's scientific fact that has underpinings that can be readily tested experimentally. We know that CO2 absorbs IR light, it can be tested. AGW is an outgrowth of the effect that has to be modelled and inferred from past data, which isn't just a graph of past temperature and CO2 levels. One point of contention in the e-mails is that prior to ~1900 temperature is inferred from tree ring growth, until 1960 the tree rings and the temperature record matched, after 1960 the tree rings and temperature record began to diverge, in the graphs, the pre-1960 tree ring inferred record was grafted onto the post-1960 temperature record, and there are differing views on why there is a divergence. (pollution, non-linear temperature/growth relation are cited as possibilities). But at the end of the day, there's no way to do a controlled experiment, and they the models they have had in the past that suggest AGW have not predicted the present conditions, so though the best we can ever hope for is a model that cannot be tested fast enough in order to give us time to act on its conclusions. Its not as cut and dry as gravity, its how an extremely complicated, non-linear feedback system(the models do not cover this, scientists say its a secondary effect) whose operation varies with time (aka a 1ppm increase in CO2 has a different impact depending on not just the current state, but past states). That's why Ph.D's work on these things, you're trying to draw a conclusion from a situation where normal experiment cannot apply.

I find it somewhat arrogant that to say that just because someone does not have the particular scientific knowledge to do the work themselves means that they are beneath contempt and should be ignored. As an engineer who does a lot of initial research on technologies, convincing the person who will eventually put money behind your work is ultimately as important as the results you get. The person you are trying to convince are never as well versed in the subject as you, but your job is to convince them that your results are valid and deserve the level of trust that you have for them. In my mind anyone who can't or won't explain what they are doing to a layman usually doesn't know what they are doing in the first place.