Because it's a betrayal of the principles she claimed to stand for, in more ways than one. One of Ayn Rand's positions was that the government shouldn't be looking after anyone because people who can't care for themselves and who don't have friends who are both rich enough and care enough to support them are useless parasites who don't actually deserve to live. Yet when she found herself in the exact same position where she dismissed others as not worthy of life, she chose to sacrifice her principles and live a bit longer.

It's not only the betrayal of her own principles that is at issue here, it's also her failure, with access to opportunities that many Americans never had, to plan for her own future to the extent where she wouldn't have needed government assistance. If Ayn Rand, who had the motive, the means and the opportunity to care for herself on her own dime was not able to do so, then why should we expect everyone else (including those who lack the means the opportunities) to do what she could not do? Why should we accept the Rand libertarian’s view that those who find themselves in the exact same situation as Ayn Rand should be dismissed as "takers" or "parasites"?

The point is popular, because it is a textbook example of an ironic fate, though people may not recognize that that is why this fact about Ayn Rand final years provides so much amusement.

Isn't Austrlia's current government essentially owned by Rupert Murdoch? I sure we can all understand that he has to make sure someone will buy the coal from his mines.

I'm going to beat the rush and bring my Roomba to the passport office tomorrow morning.

The rebuttal is reasonably long (27 pages, not including the details), and I admit I only read some of it. However, I did read that part, and also some commentary on the rebuttal. The commentary seems to affirm that Mann's criticism on that issue was valid and the rebuttal's characterisation was inaccurate.

Regardless of whether it was reasonable for Mann et al 2008 (M08) to exclude those data sets, they did. Any attempt to criticize the statistical method used in M08 would benefit from separating the concerns of what data to include and how the data should be analysed, so the analysis should use the original input data and focus on the difference in the results produced by the methods. Unfortunately for McShane and Wyner, it seems that if you only change the methods or only change the input data, the results are less significant.

I did read the discussion, it seems McShane and Wyner have contributed some useful analysis and some not very useful analysis. Unfortunately, some of their conclusions are tainted by failure to follow the same procedures as Mann et al 2008 when claiming that they (effectively) did. For example, they chose to use tree ring proxies that were excluded by M08 and claimed that their exclusion was ad hoc and thus unsupportable. However, the major exclusive criteria seems to be fairly simple: proxies that contain fewer than 8 individual trees are too unreliable for inclusion (individual trees exert too much influence over the proxy average and can produce significant anomalous results). Re-running their analysis with that one change seems to flip their results on their head. Instead of reducing the confidence in anomalous warming in the late 20th century to 80% certainty, it increases the confidence to 99% certainty.

I think that shows a basic problem with the methodology of the McShane and Wyner analysis. They changed the input data at the same time as they changed the analysis method, thus conflating the two different changes together. We all know that in an experiment you want to change only one variable at time, right? Similarly, I think that they should have used the exact same data when they challenged the analysis method and challenged the data selection methods in a separate paper if they felt that issue was important enough to warrant a challenge.

Those claims would be more interesting if some references were provided. For example, I seem to remember some people who are often referred to as statisticians (actually a minerals prospector and an economist) doing something similar, but it turns out instead of "proving" that the hockey stick wasn't real, they proved that they couldn't follow the documented procedures.

No, it's why do local government's loathe their citizens? After all, they're the ones who are, almost always, signing exclusive contracts with these companies to provide a local monopoly of services while forcing unnecessary additional costs (local government access via cable TV) and franchise fees to fund them.

Yeah, and also meant my public key.
Derp.

Anyone who encrypts mail to me does it from their own machines. This is for Facebook mail to you. If a user grabs your keys they can also send you mail directly without going through Facebook.

Facebook lets you control your public keys as if it were any other information: public, friends only, etc.

Them having my private key is not a problem. This encrypts email one would normally get. I don't work for Facebook.

What is the problem you are eluding to?

If they have only your public keys, what is the harm in them running a keyserver?

I don't use the gmail web client. I have the a GPG plugin (GPGMail) on my laptop's email and a GPG client (oPenGP) on my iPhone.

There are GPG plugins for the web client but I have not used them.

a) for some things, yes.

b) It's worth encrypting everything. This protects your data not only from the spooks, but from gmail/live/your ISP/whatever free client you may use.

Just added my keys. Not that I care about the notifications that "Billy scored X on Y Game", but anything that obfuscates and encrypts data on the wire is a good thing. It's not just the NSA, how many of you use gmail? This will keep them from scanning your mail.

>In fact I may enable a bunch more useless notifications and set up a rule to delete them at my end as they arrive.