You originally said that to be consistent, if I shout down someone who says X is true, I should also shout down someone who says X is false. I didn't need to bring up "authority" at all to point out what a dumb statement that was.

BTW, this was also wrong:

Consensus is part of the scientific method. You come up with a theory, test it with an experiment, publish your conclusion, and subject it to peer review where it may or may not gain consensus.

I assume you're talking about this.

That "petition" was a hoax.

"The simpleton's theory is usually correct."

Yes, be consistent... if you shout down people who are wrong, you should also shout down people who are right.

A few weeks ago I had my dog on a bike harness and we were cycling / galloping down a street in Salt Lake City (about 15 mph). Some guy was yakking on his phone and obliviously started wandering backwards off the curb into an intersection while facing 180 degrees away. I slammed on the brakes (along with someone driving a car) and my dog's leash broke off its safety hitch since he'd made a split second decision to pass the guy on his right side. The dude turned around and said, "what the hell [can't you see I'm on the phone here]?" This was in Salt Lake City; I didn't know he could have been fined $50. Although around here, they ticket cyclists for not having their bikes registered. The rules for driving in Utah are shocking to anyone from out-of-state; they were apparently written for demolition derby. I've seen safer driving in Mad Max movies. You have right of way if you think someone can slam on their brakes and leave streaks in the road without T-boning your ass. (I guess you have to, since you can never see around the guy next to you straddling the crosswalk with his Ford F300.) I'm always seeing drivers holding phones against their heads and gesticulating with their other hand to people who aren't physically present, instead of actually touching the steering wheel. (And I won't say much about the baby strollers around here, except that they're often going side-by-side in formation.)

Someone needs to sue these dicks- if I had to repair my computer for national security reasons because of someone's incompetent malfeasance, I would want to get paid for the time wasted. If you're a lawyer specializing in class action suits, this warning from the DHS is like a Superfish on a platter!

An electrical outlet is not at the boundary of a closed thermodynamic system. With an electric car, the waste heat is produced at the power plant before the energy is converted to electricity and sent on its way to you in the first place. In general heating is a wasteful use of electricity; if your utility burns fossil fuels to generate power, you'll have a lower carbon footprint from heating something with oil or gas than with electricity. That waste heat can go into your house or car instead of the air above a cooling tower miles away.

Don't buy their stock, and don't get in a car with one of their drivers.

What a pity this wasn't discovered sooner... Skyler White could have asked Saul Goodman to hire his Eastern European hacker again to launder Walt's meth money through that car wash using HTTP GET requests.

You're not supposed to do any heavy back-end work with node itself; it can handle simple database interactions and streaming etc. but anything that requires serious computation is supposed to be forked off to a separate process. Unfortunately it encourages misuse by providing a toehold for JavaScript programmers to start worming their way deeper into server processing.

This is why I love Slashdot- just make an offhand analogy to something like airplane patents in a story about patent trolls, and eventually half the comments on the page are about airplanes. Can we just add "flying machines" to the tag list?

Maybe because they were nomadic.

Because those are short term predictions made days ahead by weathermen. Weather is less predictable in the short term than climate in the long term. Over a longer term (meaning years, not days) temperatures haven't been "colder than predicted".

So?

14 of the 15 hottest years on record have been this century. (The exception was 1998, an El Nino year.) 15 years is a longer term than weathermen deal with.

People do seem to understand the difference between short term and long term phenomena if it's a stock price we're talking about. I don't hear people asking "if Apple stock is rising, then what about the high prices during 2012?" as if it was the medieval warming period. But if it's a planet's temperature- "la la la la, fingers in my ears, I can't hear you!"

I see these two arguments being made over and over in these threads.

This one: "Correlation is not causation. So if something correlates, it means it's being caused by something else."

And this: "They're saying we're going to get more hurricanes? I guess they were driving SUVs and burning fossil fuels in 1667 when a hurricane hit Jamestown, Virginia, right? Huh? Huh?"

It seems a lot of Americans don't even realise how rain gets into the sky in the first place.