Well it seems clear that there was nothing "random" about his detention. And it's bad enough that customs can seize anything going through the borders without warrant or cause. But it's even worse when border crossings get used as an excuse for warrantless interrogations.

I don't think they really make them anymore. Works OK as a monitor, let's me browse from my reclining couch. I do enough sitting in a chair at work so I don't want to come home and spend another five hours sitting in an office chair at home.

Hopefully LED LCDs will catch up in size/affordability soon. The text is a bit blurry on the DLP and it doesn't align quite right on Windows or Linux without tweaking from the proprietary ATI drivers, which I'd rather not have to use (on Linux anyway).

But it's big.

If people really wanted those types of optimizations, they'd be wiling to pay for them. But they cost too much in time and money.

Generics seem pretty straightforward to me, even the "? extends Whatever" syntax. Maybe you could give some concrete examples as to the problems with generics. The only problem right now is that type erasure makes arrays of generics impossible. Hopefully they'll fix that with the next revision.

3 machines with 16GB RAM is much cheaper than 1 machine with 300GB RAM. There's nothing wrong with using swap if you do so wisely.

I get the impression that there is plenty of research on data structures and tiered memory. If no one had done it before, it'd be an easy thesis. What grad student wouldn't jump at that opportunity. Anyway, a cursory search gives examples like this:

http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~jignesh/quickstep/publ/cci.pdf

As for pedagogy, you're probably right that more focus needs to be put on the effects of tiered memory on various data structures.

Well the main complaint is that your work isn't anything new really. You seem to assume that CS has not progressed in 40 years, that no modern researchers are aware of tiered memory.

I'm not an expert, but that doesn't mean I or other laypersons will feel obliged to believe whatever a so called expert says. There is too much data out there for anyone to be an expert on everything, yet we must still evaluate what experts say. And that doesn't mean always deferring to experts, even when someone knows much more than you about a subject matter there are ways to evaluate his results without becoming an expert yourself.

When you start making absolute statements, my bullshit detector goes off. Science does not deal with absolutes. Now you couch it with caveats like, "accepted quantities" but that could mean many things, allowing you a no true Scotsman retreat. If there's a model that would contradict your universal statement, then it must not be using "accepted quantities".

In fact, I'm much more skeptical of these models if none exist that can show a cooling effect. Perhaps none show a cooling effect "all things being equal". But as we know from paleoclimatology, there is much more affecting the climate than just us. We can never assume "all things will be equal". It could very well be that AGW is merely delaying an ice age that would have occurred sooner rather than later without us. To say this is not even a possibility with the limited data climate data we have measured, relative to the known age of the Earth, sounds like nothing but hubris.

Now, I'm a skeptic but I'm inclined to believe that AGW is more or less true. I don't believe it will be cataclysmic, however. All that CO2 we're barfing into the atmosphere was once in the atmosphere before it was sequestered by organisms and geological processes.

Climatologists, if they want to be taken seriously, need to stop at the science. Tell us what the temperature levels and sea levels will look like in a X decades. Sure, but don't speculate on the social or economic implications. The worst predictions I've heard so far aren't particularly dramatic, and don't seem like they'll affect me during my entire life. This is a far cry from the alarmist Ranger Rick articles I read as a kid in the 80's. I was convinced that by now none of the populous coastal cities would be above water anymore.

When the alarm keeps getting sounded without an ensuing alarm-worthy event, people get inured. They stop believing. Against such a background it's difficult to believe the hockey stick type alarmism that's current. Rather, for the layperson, it seems reasonable to expect a moderated temperature increase over many decades. This expectation drives no immediate call to action. It motivates a measured rather than dramatic response. Sure, we should cut back on CO2 emissions where reasonable. But the tradeoff isn't worth it to make any dramatic, socially disruptive changes at this moment. The amount of environmental harm we prevent is not balanced against the social and economic chaos that would ensure.

It would be difficult to get a paper published in a women's studies journal with the thesis that men aren't such bad people after all. Women's studies is clearly part of academia. And while much good comes of academia, various factors can result in programs that are based on pushing an ideology rather than honestly seeking the truth in some area of study.

I'm not saying those in women's studies are wrong. What I'm saying is that certain academic programs which are highly insular against contrarian research. Is "climate research" one of those academic programs? To answer the skeptics, they should show how they are not. It seems unlikely one would take the effort to become proficient in climate studies unless one was enthusiastic about the environment, and protecting it from corporate interests. It's possible, but unlikely. Not quite as unlikely as becoming an expert in women's studies just to argue against its main tenets, but still unlikely.

A bigger problem I think is demonstrating that climate research is a "hard" science. What I see is a program subject to many of the same difficulties facing sociology. There are many variables, and plenty of models, but few good predictions. And there is no way to run a controlled experiment with all the relevant variables. We, and the Earth, are the experiment.

You are correct about the complications in making climate predictions. Regardless, I think AGW will be accepted if there is dramatic average warming in the next few hundred years, and similarly it will be rejected if there is no significant warming over the next few hundred years. I don't think the remaining decades I have to live will be enough for widespread acceptance or rejection of AGW.

Yes, I was simplifying a bit. Evolution does have predictive results. Yet there are still accepted truths that we cannot test. We cannot (yet anyway) evolve humans from primates, yet we still accept that humans evolved from primates. Not by running an experiment and reproducing the results. We base it on the limited experiments we can do and the historical evidence we have available. Biomedical research certainly tests the theory of evolution in many different ways, but these tests are quite limited when compared to mammalian evolution over millions of years. I would still say that mammalian evolution is a scientific "fact", though there is no good way to "predict" it.

Academia can be very insular. It's publish or perish and it's difficult to get published if the editors think you're part of the "tin-foil-hat gang" or being paid by Exxon. There is also a great bias against publishing negative results. Climate science is full of models that are plugged into a computer and out comes a result. These models depend on many variables, some of which are measured, some of which are estimated, and some of which are guessed. In addition the whole algorithmic process by which the "model" works is at best an approximation. Certain methods of modeling future climate result in lots of warming, some less. Right now there are large margins of error and much disagreement about exactly how "much" climate change we will experience.

Now, it certainly seems plausible that there are models out there with variables and assumptions that result in no warming, or a cooling. What is the likelihood these would get published based purely on their results? Not good. Well then what is it about a model that makes it better than others? It's ability to "predict future changes" when plugged in with past data. However, as we go back in time we quickly start losing variables in quantity and precision. 100 years of good solid data (if it's even that much) is not much when it comes to modeling how the Earth's climate changes over it's vast history.

We are at least aware of many radical changes in climate that had nothing to do with humans over the Earth's history. If we can't account for those, then we are woefully unprepared to predict future changes.

The issues are very complicated, but it's not quite correct to say that scientists are solely interested in "truth". Academia has a culture, and this culture can create biases. These biases can affect entire research programs in ways that are more nuanced than simple conspiracies.

When predicting the future, there is more of value at stake than when explaining the past. The more there is at stake, the more likely people are to be swayed by various desires than by the truth. This goes on both sides. There's no real money at stake whether evolution is correct or not. But if AGW is correct, then Exxon and others stand to lose billions. It wouldn't be fair to say that deniers of AGW are all biased and those believing it are all justified. But the whole debate is necessarily political from the start.

In any case, predicting the future rather than explaining the past gives AGW the potential to be much stronger than evolution or cosmological theories. Since it has not yet happened, it can be tested. We'll have to see if it passes the "test". I have a feeling that no one will be satisfied with the results of AGW's predictions within my lifetime.

Erasing his hard drive would have been perfectly fine if he did it before he realized he was the subject of an investigation.

No, that's not it. As long as the person is not working as an "agent of the state", anything they do is admissible. This came up when a hacker kept hacking into pedophiles' computers and turning them into the police. The courts ruled he was not working as an agent of the state, since the police had no control over him.