This is the problem with vigilantism. It starts out with a target many agree with, and then just starts looking for targets.

Anonymous, you're now just another garden-variety thug. Proud of yourselves? Time for a new group to shut you down.

Actually, I've always thought there should be one more common operator - "===". In floating-point context, it would be "approximately equal to", returning true if the arguments are within 10 times the smallest representable value. That would reduce problems with floating-point comparison.

Thus exposing your ignorance of how to use floating point numbers. Thank you for handing me a new question for my interview list to highlight weaknesses of potential candidates. The "problems" with floating point are well-known, and if you use them correctly they do a fine job. If you're so ignorant that you blindly do a simple comparison test like this, it means you probably shouldn't be writing software that uses floating point.

Hardcoding an operator to perform this specific test (which is one particular way to compare for equivalency) is idiotic, and would encourage even more "programming by guessing" than we already have.

Yah, I had the same WTF moment when they started using mSv all the time. Apparently they're also using it to weight different types of radiation (alpha, beta, gamma). First time I've seen it used like that.

Imagine how well you'd model this using monte-carlo techniques / ray tracing.

Sadly, that's not the only part of the equation. Will regulation make it better and/or safer?

Because in my experience (10+ years of software medical device work) FDA regulation of medical devices has reached a point where the cure is now worse than the disease. Innovation is swamped under paperwork that prevents many solutions from coming out that would make medical devices safer or better, but which would cost too much for a company to implement because of FDA rules.

Too often, medical device errors (radiation burns, etc.) are because of human error which could be corrected with a strict checklist, rather than more FDA regulation.

The most likely result of regulating wireless networking in a hospital will be the removal of the wireless network. People will likely schlep data around on USB drives, which are unmarked and untracked, etc. (I've seen that happen before when devices don't have networking capability). In such a scenario are patients protected or endangered?

You do know that your sig is wildly deceptive right? The statement in context is here, and is quite different from (say) Congressman Phil Hare saying he didn't care about the constitution.

Immelt is also on Obama's economic recovery committee, GE has been given $25 million in stimulus money and MSNBC hosts are openly shills for the administration (at least as much as people like Hannity were for the last one).

So GE gets millions of free money from the government, then turns around and spends millions on cars from the government. All at taxpayer expense.

Remember, the only way to look at the government is down. Following the money still works, even if the politicians are on "your side."

Wait, you trust MMA as a partisan organization which responds to partisans of the other side. And they commit just as much fraud in selective quoting and editing as they claim to point out on the other side.

Why do you trust this partisan organization over other partisan organizations? Just because they're on your side?

...After years of receiving money through Soros organizations. This is the first time Soros name is on the check without the cash flow being laundered first.

Yes, I've read that paper, but Menne appears to not be an honest broker. Not only did he use the data that Watts stopped updating publicly (to avoid ad hoc analysis) but he apparently deliberately excluded Watts from the article process.

The fact that I saw a false premise in the first paragraph of the paper (reviewing it again just now) didn't improve my opinion of Menne et al.

I believe the "adjustment" process is fatally flawed (hence my "make stuff up" link in my prior post). Smearing the data around doesn't make it better (side note: my background includes physics simulations of rigorously tested data, so I have at least some experience with data quality like this), and when there simply isn't any data, fiddling with the gaussian isn't going to make the data appear.

On top of all this, NOAA and NCDC appear to have colluded to hammer out talking points regarding Watts' "Is the U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable?"

Climate scientists simply cannot be trusted until all data and methodology are public and can be replicated by statisticians outside of the field.

No, they haven't moved them. Fully 90% of surface sensors are badly sited. That's the point of http://www.surfacestations.org/, to document the quality of the sensors.

Satellites take temperature measurements as well, but they have other issues. Well-sited surface sensors would be the best data we can get, and yet we don't even make the effort to site them properly.

Which makes me suspect a lot of the AGW scare. Another being what happens when they have no data and just make stuff up.

Actually, from what I understand, this range of X-rays has caused behavioral changes in mice. It's unlikely to cause cancer, but it would be irresponsible to simply dismiss all health concerns.

What's it got to do with BP? [dailymail.co.uk] The rig was owned and operated by a company called Transocean. BP (and others) just leased it off them to do the drilling (and no BP employee was involved in the actual work).

That was what I thought at first, but later I heard there was a BP rep on the rig telling the workers to ignore safety concerns. That wouldn't make BP entirely responsible, but it certainly would include them in the blame reasonably.

Last March, Tim Kretschmer, 17, used his father’s 9mm Beretta pistol in a school shooting rampage that left nine pupils and three teachers dead, mostly with execution-style shots to the head

"Execution-style" typically refers to point-blank shots, not "whipping around" and hitting multiple targets in a short amount of time.

No, the founding documents of the USA state that all rights come from the creator. "Copyright" is a law (well, set of laws) created by our society to temporarily (hah!) grant exclusive permission to one entity to copy something. However, that permission is not universal -- fair use and archives are examples of where copyright does not apply.