I can't speak for biology since I've only had superficial contact with that field, but the fields related to my profession are far from isolated ecosystems. Not to say there aren't problems with the system of scientific research and the way it's funded that should be addressed, but from my experience, bottom line is that it works.

And I presume you can back that description up somehow, or is it all conjecture? You see, I'm the kind of person who actually do check sources, thoroughly.

How you say it works doesn't match my experience. If you discover something that's actually relevant and useful, your results will be replicated, one way or another. There is no getting away from that. If for no other reason, it will happen as soon as someone tries to build upon or improve it. And until your results have been verified by someone else, your conclusions are just going to remain in a sort of "unconfirmed" state in the scientific community. Simply being published doesn't make something a scientific fact.

But you gain recognition and get published if you prove someone else wrong. And your academic progress is hampered if someone shows your results to be flawed. I think you are ignoring the competitive element.

That said, there is a problem with the current trend of grants being based strongly on the number of published papers, as it waters down the content of each paper and gets in the way of basic, long term research where there is no guarantee for "quarterly research results".

I'm sure that if they had not destroyed the docs, it would have been spun something like: "Even though the government informed them that these documents were sensitive to national security, they kept them. So they knew what they were doing was wrong." (See, you can get to the same conclusion either way, if you really want to.)

Clearly, you didn't read my footnote. Note that the median age is also very close to 10 years, so the distribution isn't as skewed as you presume. Classic cars are too few to be significant.

I find it doubtful that autonomous cars would be used much more -- the limiting factor for road trips today is hardly lack of drivers.

Again, it depends on how you want to define trust. I trust (within reasonable bounds) that they will behave according to a certain morality -- a morality to which I may not agree with, but one that I know and understand.

My impression is that you prefer to define their behaviour as lies, in order to invoke the immorality commonly associated with lies. In a sense: if what they do is similar to and just as bad as lies, we should value them equally. And in that regard, I think you are missing my point. I am not making an argument about the ethics of their behaviour. And actually, I would contend that that question is independent of what terminology we choose in order to label it -- their actions remain the same regardless.

What I am saying is that it is relevant, from a pragmatic standpoint, to differentiate between (technically) truthful but deceptive statements, and blatant lies, irrespectively of which of them is more or less immoral. If you want to use other words to describe that, then by all means feel free to do so. Mixing them up, on the other hand, is, well, a bit deceptive...

Well, if you want to get into a discussion about semantics, maybe. My point is that you can trust them, after a fashion. And, consequently, that the notion that they are all just liars, so there is no point in listening to them, is flawed. Hence, the distinction is relevant.

Then we could of course discuss whether any deception is equally immoral, regardless of whether it is a technically truthful statement or not, but that would be to head off on a tangent, so I'm going to leave it at your comments and my own insinuations.

I don't know, to me it's about as predictable and unnuanced as a so called fanboi comment. I read it as a satirically formulated straw man argument in support of a cynical standpoint that one should put absolutely zero trust in anything a government or corporation says. A standpoint which I find rather disingenuous.

Certainly they could lie to us, but most likely they are not. For whatever reason, many corporate leaders and politicians seem to adhere to a curious ethic where blatant lies are shunned, while deception or dishonest interpretations are perfectly okay. There is a difference between the two, because the latter can help you penetrate and understand what they are really saying. If you look at the carefully selected wordings of public statements, you can often get a clue as to what they are actually avoiding to say, instead of just dismissing everything as "lies".

Just to give you an example from recent public discourse: When a big cloud service provider says something along the lines of: "we have not given the NSA direct access to our servers", they are probably speaking the truth. Assuming that, it suddenly tells us something about how the NSA actually has been spying; namely by intercepting the traffic between the servers, possibly on site. Otherwise, the company would probably have said "we have not given the NSA direct access to our data centres", or something similar. The key is what they are not saying, and what words they are using.

In this particular case, some obvious question would be: How many surfaces were manufactured? Are we talking about all of them, or a first (perhaps small) batch? How should we quantify "close" (to selling out)? With the correct interpretations to these questions, they are probably not lying.

I used to run DD-WRT once, and liked the configurability and stability. However, a gigantic security hole found in 2009 pretty much destroyed all my confidence in the competence of the maintainers with regard to security. Basically, it would execute commands (as root!) directly from the url of a request to the management interface. All an attacker would need to do is get you to click an embedded link somewhere, and you are owned. (My link above is safe, by the way -- did you click on it?)

That's actually an interesting question. Out of curiosity, I had to check what Swedish law says regarding (fully) autonomous cars.

The first question is: Is it still a car if there is no driver, or is it something else? To which I think the answer is yes. It has an engine, is meant to be used on roads for the purpose of transporting people or goods, and is not a motorcycle or moped, hence sufficient conditions for "car" are met.

Then it gets slightly trickier -- technically, it might be a truck (which is a subset of car, together with bus and "personal car"). For it to be a "personal car" (i.e. a normal car), it has to have at most eight seats "apart from the driver's seat". So here, the existence of a potential driver is stipulated. If we interpret this as "apart from the driver's seat (if any)", then it is a personal car. If, on the other hand, that statement precludes a driverless car from the definition, it can neither be a bus (which has the same wording), which lands us in "truck", cleverly defined to encompass anything that is a car, but not a personal car or bus.

As for the laws regarding what you can do with an autonomous car, all of it pretty much assumes that there is a driver. However, the laws are using a word that I think is slightly weaker than the English verb "drive"; it might be translated as someone who "controls" or "leads" the car. I'm not sure how courts would interpret a situation where everyone in the car is a passenger, nor if there is precedence of some sort. If there is only one person in the car, or maybe a distinct person who entered the destination and pressed start, a wild guess is that they would define that person as the "driver", and apply normal laws if something goes wrong.

...with the risk of hanging on to cracked and exploitable copies. Are you sure that's the better alternative?

Actually, even 20 years seems overly optimistic. Some quick web searching indicates that the average age of a car in the US is 11 years. Assuming the total volume remains reasonably unchanged, that would mean that it would take around a decade* to reach 50% even if all cars sold from today were self-driving.

If we assume it takes another 10 years for fully autonomous cars to be commercially available (an legal), it is still unlikely that zero "ordinary" cars would be sold from then on. So I don't really see how any alternative lower than 30 years could be realistic. Remember, the question is when "most" driving is autonomous, not some driving.

Personally, I think we'll see a gradual transition, with an increasing degree of automation, over several decades. We are approaching the intermediate state where cars are more like horses; you still steer them, but they refuse to run off cliffs or into objects.

(* The time obviously depends on the shape of the distribution, which probably isn't uniform, but probably close enough for the sake of this argument.)

If they found a weakness in Twofish, and wanted the world to migrate to a crypto algorithm that they have an attack against, then wouldn't it just have been easier to select Twofish instead of Rijndael for the AES specification in the first place? They were both finalists.

Look, it certainly seems like the NSA has tried to meddle with crypto standards in order to have an attack vector, and I can agree that a certain amount of paranoia is in order, but the theories you propose are so convoluted that, of all things the NSA might have cooked up, that has to go far down on the list. What is even to say people switch to Twofish if they switch, and not one of the other AES finalists? Or use both Twofish and Rijndael simultaneously for that matter?

Besides, the weakest part of most crypto systems (disregarding implementation and usage for a moment), is probably the key exchange/management algorithms. And from what I have understood, that is where the indications of standards manipulations have been.

I'm not suggesting that people should necessarily switch from AES to Twofish, or that Twofish is more secure. I don't even think Bruce is saying that. But I find the idea that the NSA would somehow be behind some kind of covert manipulation scheme to get people to switch to Twofish simply extremely unlikely. If nothing else, for the simple reason that I don't see it happening anyway. Could the NSA be sitting quietly on a weakness? Sure. But in that case I would be more worried about EC, and to an extent RSA. That is, if we limit ourselves to the theoretical component, and disregard the obvious target: implementations.

It would be an insanely unlikely coup. Think about what you are suggesting: First they get the entire world to use AES, to the point where leading CPU manufacturers have even included special instructions in the hardware specifically for encoding and decoding AES. They do this only so that an alternative algorithm (Twofish) would get less scrutiny by independent researchers for a number of years. They then orchestrate an elaborate leak indicating that they have attacks against some unnamed publicly used crypto algorithm. Meanwhile, or even before that, they have recruited an established and well known writer and cryptographist, and have him attack them openly in the public debate, only to give an apparent credibility to the algorithms he has designed. The intent of this is to get everyone in the industry to suddenly switch all cryptography to his somewhat less scrutinised algorithm (probably after reading about it on Slashdot), despite the fact that the author, who they had recruited to attack them, still claims that the math behind AES is solid, and despite the fact that replacing AES would now require replacing hardware and software that permeates our entire society at enormous costs.

If there is ever a time for the tinfoil hat metaphor...

The term "climate change" pre-dates "global warming". The former has been used at least since the 1950's. See for example The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change, Plass, Gilbert N., 1955 (link).

Also note that the UN panel (established in 1988) is named the "Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change", not Global Warming.

They never really "changed it".