In what way is "energy payback time" a useful measure by itself? If you argued that it was somehow useful, maybe I could respect your argument, but instead you take it for granted as worth talking about without rebutting my earlier point that it ignores both financial and other very real costs.

Note to self: Assuming that thaylin means what s/he types is a bad idea.

Note to thaylin: Don't blame others when they make that assumption.

Such a focus on one small portion of the whole-lifecycle cost (in the general sense of "cost", including things like opportunity cost as well as chopped-up birds and kilo-backyards made ugly, rather than just "electricity in versus electricity out") is fundamentally dishonest -- it ignores the very real costs of everything else that goes into using a thing. If considering those other costs makes me a skeptic, I am glad to be one. I certainly would not want to promote a technology based on such a blinkered view of its cost/benefit tradeoffs.

Or maybe we just applied a sensible reading of "energy payback time" -- to wit, the time it takes for the energy output to pay off the total investment in the equipment -- rather than the stupidly narrow jargon that some people use, which pretends that human labor, raw materials, operational risks, and everything except electricity have negligible cost.

If the analysis was in terms of "environmental resources used", how many months does it take before the wind turbine produces enough steel, rare earths, and other raw materials to let us produce an identical turbine?

Why does the article think it gets to define its own meaning of "payback"? If I can basically pick and choose which cost factors to consider, and have a lot of leeway to fudge (some or most of) those numbers because they are not anything that people try to objectively measure, of course I can calculate a ridiculously short payback period. You have really only said that the article is not worth the electrons it is transmitted with, and that we should treat its authors as charlatans.

If this wind farm expects payback in five to eight months, we should be able to find some other wind farm (anywhere) that had payback in less than a year, right? Does anybody have a pointer to that kind of success story?

What specifically does the Data Use Policy say about this? The bit I saw quoted was that users agreed to Facebook's "internal operations", with research being an example of those. Peer-reviewed publication in a journal is clearly not an internal operation.

A statement like "I think thegarbs is killing kittens in blenders" implies the existence of undisclosed defamatory facts that form the basis of that conclusion, and this makes it usually actionable (in the US) as defamation. A statement like "I think Lumpy is an alcoholic because I see him drinking beers on his porch for hours at a time and he frequently leaves for work at 11 AM" discloses the facts that underlie the conclusion "Lumpy is an alcoholic", and is therefore not actionable (in the US) because it allows a listener to decide for themselves whether the conclusion is warranted.

Just because lawyers make them say a thing does not mean they believe it, or want us to believe it. In fact, Wikipedia would not really work (and maybe it already doesn't?) if its editors generally believed it is unreliable or inaccurate, and would not get traffic if the public believed that.

Let me share a video with you of Hitler's response to tobacco companies claiming "the logic just isn't there for your 'indisputable'" link between smoking and cancer...

The evidence is clearer and more abundant for the link that Jane Q. Public alleges than for a great many things that social science takes for granted. Yeah, that level of "proof" would never fly for physics or even biology, but it is considerably easier to perform experiments in those domains than in epidemiology and political science.

If I am confused, it is because you are spewing nothing but stuff and nonsense, and because you continue to lie about "presumptions" that only you have suggested. You admit that academic misconduct is not a crime like the things you compared it to, and you implicitly concede that it is not judged by the same standards. There are a lot of things that can ruin a career, and some of them are well deserved! At least in the US, we are very tired of people who feign outrage when they cannot otherwise defend their positions, so do not expect to get away with that here.

News flash for you from the real world: Society uses different standards of proof in criminal cases than for academic misconduct investigations. Still, I never suggested we should presume that Piketty was guilty of either, and I think you are arguing in bad faith to suggest I did.

We could argue all day about whether it is better to use the original Series C numbers (as I did) or the revised Series C numbers (as Reed did, perhaps because every revision for the top 10% of wealth was a downward one). We could also argue whether the differences between data sets are because of differences in how they estimate "wealth inequality" or whether they are instead estimating different kinds of wealth inequality (Atkinson et al. used estate numbers, which quantifies things at the end of life, which is about the least relevant quantity for Piketty's proposed policies).

At any rate, none of the discrepancies are pertinent to Piketty's claim that wealth inequality has been increasing since 1980. As the same data set is available and used for the 1976-2005 period, inter-data-set differences should not affect the shape of the curve during that period -- only its level. It is also tendentious to assume, as Reed and Piketty apparently want us to, that lower wealth-inequality estimates from during and after the recent global recession mean that the measurements need to be adjusted, rather than that they reflect an actual change in the wealth distribution.

You hopefully have some idea of the internal politics about the request -- whether this is something that a majority of the directors strongly wants to do, whether they are just curious, or whether they are leaning towards the idea but could be swayed. Take advantage of that in your response! Be respectful of their intentions, and don't go out of your way to antagonize either supporters or opponents of the idea, but you can either influence the decision or at least register your concerns.

If you are opposed to the idea (would you ask Slashdot otherwise?), point out the technical and legal considerations in carrying it out. Explain the extent of technical methods to prevent tech-savvy young students from using VPNs and other proxies to access the blocked sites. If this means you need to upgrade your network infrastructure with newer or beefier routers, put a dollar figure on that. Find polls of how consumers view this kind of network filtering, with bonus points if the polls focus on or break out your renters' demographic group, and point out the risk to revenue. If you don't know the regulatory risks and potential tort claims in detail, outline them at a high level and recommend that the company retain legal counsel to advise on those things.

Because you're the IT guy, they probably view you as a subject matter expert, and you can use that authority to guide their thinking. Just keep in mind the audience for your report, and respond in a way that shows respect for both their level(s) of technical background and their business objectives.

You are overthinking this problem, and you are (incorrectly) imaging search engines to have magical reputation-ruining powers.

If someone is arrested, and charges are later dropped, the simplest and best solution is to have publishers update their earlier stories to note the new developments. That is in the interest of the public (who see more up-to-date information), the publisher (who doesn't get a reputation for staleness), and the person who was arrested (who gets more visibility for being cleared), so everyone wins.

If you are worried about contemporaneous news coverage ruining reputations, regulations on Google and similar companies will not help at all.