Climate change is not a belief, there is no faith involved, it is not an opinion that claim that ejecting vast amounts of sequestered carbon into the atmosphere is going to have very bad effects on the lives of our descendants and that using renewable energy sources is preferable to that. Climate change and the benefits of using renewables in place of fossil fuels are observable, measurable and given the volume of data we now have it is an irrefutable fact that renewables are preferable to fossil fuels.

Yeah and, how can that judge claim that German Google customers do not have a way to communicate with Google? German Google customers send mail to support-de@google.com and a Google bot tells them to F*** Off! Not only does that constitute communication but the message is pretty clear. Of course, traditionally it has not proven to be a particularly intelligent strategy to tell the Germans to F*** Off! since they tend to react badly to that (read: Invasions, panzers, stukas, u-boats, V-1 cruise missiles, V-2 rockets... etc) but If Google wants to take a shot at it they I say let them try.

And how does that make them different from lala-landers of the politically incorrect christian conservative and occasionally coal rolling variety? There are two things that are almost always true about zealots no matter what their political or religious convictions, firstly they think they're always right and that that gives them the right to walk all over everybody else and secondly they are all stupid idiots.

You're obviously not a nerd since you don't seem to understand why it is hilariously funny that a Microsoft tablet is consistently being called an 'iPad' by its users. Even nerds who were only a glint in their father's eye during the Microsoft v. Apple wars know why this is funny. Which brings us to the next question: What are you doing here?

True, I'd rate this wreck much higher. It told us a wealth of things about ancient trade routes, the nature of cargo, how it was stowed, ship design in 3400BP, ... the list goes on, and they were all things that were mostly just make educated guesses at before. Then there is this a 1500 year old Roman transport just sitting there perfectly in tact. It makes you wonder what else is sitting there on the bottom of the Black Sea perfectly in tact: A Greek or Roman trireme, still sitting there with the oars in place and two Ballistas still standing on the deck? A Phoenician transport with it's cargo of perishables still in tact? A bronze, copper or even neolithic period merchant vessel? Something much, much older?

I can only agree with you for the most part, science did what it was supposed to do but how many times and for how long has the old guard held up progress? Of course one can't generalize about all consensuses being wrong but it still happens often enough that erroneous consensuses are imposed by force. Regarding the whole debate about Neanderthal/Cro-Magnon interbreeding I actually saw Ian Tattersall claim interbreeding was impossible (I'm using the non scientific term Cro-Magnon because it's less clumsy than early-modern-human). Tattersall also wrote an entire paper in 1999 find where he dismissed the Lagar Velho child as a hybrid and then admitted on film in a documentary in 2002 that he hadn't even seen the actual skeleton. This issue is a good example of a consensus being imposed on a community by the old guard, progress in the field was held back for years and the word of Tattersall and his peers would probably still be law if they hadn't been caught off guard by scientists from another discipline with irrefutable evidence. Tattersall is now quite busy eating crow. Science did what it was supposed to but with an agonizingly long hiatus of limited progress. One can say what one wants about the way Trinkaus and Zilhao reacted to Tattersall's 1999 paper but they have been proven right about interbreeding. The only thing that remains for them to be completely vindicated is if somebody actually manages sequence DNA from the Lagar Velho child and proves conclusively that it was a hybrid.

It's not just that verifying somebody else's results in not sexy. There are other factors as well. There used to be a broad scientific consensus about phlogiston theory being the best explanation to explain processes like combustion and oxidation. Eventually it was discredited against fierce opposition from some of the big names in science at the time and there are many other examples of this from other scientific fields. Scientific consensus about some theory or other sometimes has a tendency to be imposed by big name scientists who have the clout to do that because they have built a career and a reputation that depends on their theory and their research remaining unchallenged long after it is starting to become clear that the theory and perhaps some of their research results are just plain wrong. There is politics in science like everything else and sometimes politics trumps science.

It is hard to believe that a near miss by a SAM would be given less attention by the captain than a malfunctioning coffee maker and even harder to believe that this incident was not reported. If a SAM exploded 20 seconds away from my DC-10 full of passengers whose lives I'm responsible for that would sure as shit get my attention if I was the captain and you can bet your bottom dollar I would report it to somebody. The original article simply says the captain refused to report the incident, it does not say he didn't try so it's entirely possible that he actually did try to report it and was told in no uncertain terms to shut the f*** up about it.

It does if you know anything about Finnish history. Pissing off the Soviets was may have been an American national sport during the cold war period but for the Finns it was not at the top of their agenda. Finland spent the cold war balancing on a razor's edge they were bound by post WWII treaties to have a military of a fixed (and rather small) size and of course to remain neutral. For this reason the Finns painstakingly split their military procurement exactly down the middle. Half the air force jets, half the army's tanks and half the navy's ships were bought in the Soviet bloc and the other half in the West and it was a very successful strategy (which is why its now being suggested as a solution to the Ukraine crisis). The Finns may have wiped the floor with the Soviet army during the Winter War but it was still not an experience the Finns cared to repeat in the nuclear era. Since the aircraft wasn't actually harmed no purpose would have been served by deliberately embarrassing the bad tempered 16 foot tall, 3000 pound grizzly bear sitting on their eastern border by advertising the ineptitude of the Soviet air defenses so the sensible strategy was just to play it down.

I've got a better match for you. Here are just some of the entities that the Islamic State has made enemies of:
- Iraq - 65% Shia so mostly against.
- Syria - 72% Sunni but currently at war with them and partly living the reality of ISIS rule, so against.
- Jordan - 92% Sunni, relatively secular country, no history of widespread ISIS support but possibly in doubt.
- Hezbollah - Shia militia currently fighting against ISIS in Syria so against.
- Free Syria Army - Relatively secular, moderate and currently at war with ISIS so against.
- United States - Definitely Against.
- Britain - Definitely against.
- Iran - Shia country efinitely against.
- Saudi Arabia - In doubt.
- Russia (maybe) - Scared shitless of this kind of movement spreading to Russias moslem regions so against.
- al-Qaeda - Threatened by ISIS so, against.

There are also some other entities involved in this the original list left out.
- The Kurds - Mostly Sunni but largely secular and at war with ISIS so against.
- The Kurdish Yazidis - Currently watching their women being sold as slaves to ISIS fighter so definitely against.
- The EU nations - Definitely against.
- The Non EU Nato nations - (chief among them Turkey) Definitely against.

I'd say his analysis is overwhelmingly correct.

The USA has been buying Soviet made equipment on the black market since the 1980s at least and in large quantities. So if anybody ever wondered where the Soviet weapons came from that the CIA gave to the Afghans to shoot at the Soviets with now you know...

Bullshit, you can't just reduce this to Weapons. Weapons are only as good as the people who operate them and they are only as good as those who lead them. Everything that has happened in Iraq since 2003 has been influenced by American meddling. Ibrahim al-Jaafari was replaced as Prime Minister of Iraq after the Bush White House became displeased with him due to his inability to curb the insurgency (which was not surprising in view of the fact that the army had been disbanded and some of the best troops had joined the insurgency). Iraq may have had democratic elections but the selection of parties and candidates available for election was carefully engineered by the USA and the same goes when it came to choosing which people occupied key government posts. Eye witness accounts of the search for a successor to al-Jaafari reminded me of the Praetorian's hunt for a new Roman emperor after the demise of Caligula. Having no idea who to replace Caligula with they finally found Claudius hiding behind a curtain and made him emperor and the US had given no more thought to who would replace al-Jaafari than the Pretorians had done when they disposed of Caligula. Finally the White House just chose Nouri al-Maliki, next best guy they could find without having any idea of how capable he was or whether he'd be an inclusive leader or a divisive one. The White House knew so little about al-Maliki that they mispronounced his name until he personally corrected them. Al-Maliki was so inexperienced he had to get weekly tutorial sessions from George W Bush Jr over video link (talk about dub leading dumber). It is this choice that is now coming back to bite the Obama administration along with it's own lack of interest in what is happening in Iraq. Yes the army was trained, yes the Sons of Iraq effort created a chance at reconciliation and yes It was al-Maliki, America's chosen man who de-Sunnified the government and civil service, it was he who fired all the US trained officers and replaced them with militarily inept cronies to coup-proof the army and it was his sectarian policies who sparked the campaign of repression that eventually led to the 'ISIS invasion' which in reality is a full blown Sunni revolt. Iraq today is very much America's mess and that is why the Europeans may be willing to join in the fight against ISIS by helping the Iraqi Kurds and possibly the YPG in Syria but they will remain unwilling to touch Iraq proper with a 16 foot pike. That's America's mess and it will have to be America who deals with it along with (irony abounds) Iran.

I had no idea who this Deadmou5 guy was until today. I searched on his name, saw that logo and concluded the instant I saw it that the Disney company is retarded if they think that their Mickey Mouse trademark looks anything like his logo (which is what this is about, right? trademarks, not copyright). Even a five year old would not confuse them. Disney seem to be suing anybody whose logo or trade mark looks even remotely like Mickey Mouse just on the off chance they find a judge who is brain dead enough to rule in their favour. The US must have a surplus of such judges if Disney did the math and concluded that this is a workable legal strategy. What's next? Sue anybody whose trade mark contains three circles whose centrers are arranged in an Isosceles triangle and who partially overlap? From a court transcript: Why no your honor, Having gone to Harward Law School I am actually quite literate and I know the big circle has "Billy Bob's Auto Parts" written in it and I also noticed that the two smaller ones have a picture of a pick-up truck and a buxom red-neck girl in them but we at the Disney corporation still feel that due to the arrangement of the three circles in an Isosceles triangle and their overlapping nature, that this logo could easily be confused with an image of Mickey Mouse thus confusing consumers.

Well they'd be right to be obnoxious and I hope they give these geniuses hell. I watched that video and all I saw was two stupid idiots climbing into a Volcano doing a whole bunch of things you could also have done with a drone and probably better too. I know science sometimes requires risk taking but this was just a dumb stunt.

Right, the best way to prevent sophisticated American weapons from ending up in the hands of ISIS would have been to not hand them over to an incompetent sectarian asshat like Nouri Al-Maliki, the proper way to prevent that from becoming the only option would have been to not start a stupid war in Iraq to boost Halliburton stock prices, this in turn brings us to the most workable way to prevent America from starting a stupid war in Iraq in the first place which would have been to not elect a cheerleader for president.