While this mostly seems like incoherent ranting -- pardon me if I am mistaken -- I was making a very simple point:

Let's say you, Sam, own a large farm. And somewhere on that farm, coincidentally, is a large deposit of naturally-occurring "Roundup". As long as it stays where it is, everything is fine. But if it got into your fields, your crops would mostly die.

You have several neighbors, many of whom are basically friendly to you. You also have one neighbor who also has fields, who directly competes with you. His name is Russel.

You and Russel both know that using Roundup on each other could kill each other's crops. So you have a mutual agreement to never use Roundup... but just in case the other guy does, you build up a pretty big reserve to use in retaliation. Just in case.

That pretty much describes the "cold war". And it wasn't irrational. It was stressful but it did work.

Now along comes some insane manager of your farm, who decides Russel isn't so bad after all. You, the owner (The People) know better, but that's the line your "manager" (President) is selling you.

Question: even though you are not actively in conflict, do you sell shares in your Roundup mine to Russel? Especially when you know he will in turn sell it to other neighbors who are even less friendly?

It would be IRRATIONAL to do so. It would be BETRAYING your farm and your family.

But that's just exactly what the Clinton Foundation helped do.

It's not fucking rocket science. Nor is it paranoia.

You're right, it was 24 years ago. I guess my mistake reflects just how much trouble I go to, to pay attention to your lengthy rantings.

But they DIDN'T predict growing sea ice in a world that is NOT warming, did they? (I did read the paper, by the way.)

Since these conditions are not the conditions presumed in the model, in fact they have not predicted anything. You are just a master at inappropriately shifting contexts, as I have pointed out many time. You don't get to say that they predicted a result given THESE conditions, then say the same result under OTHER conditions constitutes a "prediction". Especially given the uncertainties involved. That's bullshit.

You aren't using "all the available data". Once again, you are using the data that is convenient to you. I will ask you again: would the slope be the same if you chose 2000 for a starting point, or 1850?

No, it would not. I made a simple comment based on a simple fact: 1981 was at or near a local maximum, and using it for a starting point of your "average" is questionable at best. That is an accurate statement. If you chose 1930 instead, as another local maximum you would again have to justify that as a starting point. You don't get to weasel out of that.

Yes, indeed. If you should ever start actually using "all the available data", and were honest with yourself, I think you might start softening your tone.

That doesn't explain record sea ice extents at a time when it is claimed that ocean, not particularly land, temperature is increasing.

I'm not trying to claim it's irrelevant. But it certainly does not seem sufficient.

Manabe was 14 years ago. Conditions have changed rather significantly in that time, as has our understanding of the geology.

It may be that Manabe is still correct. On the other hand, it may not.

You seem to feel that what "you told people" is necessarily truth. That's an interesting point of view.

You are implying that my statement that 1981 was near a temporal local maximum is incorrect?

You would rather use 1930 as your starting point? As opposed to, say, 2000 or 1850?

No, like so many others you mischaracterize what Libertarians are all about.

Regardless, the Tragedy of the Commons stemmed from a socialist "commons" policy... nothing even remotely Libertarian. In a Libertarian society such commons would scarcely if ever exist, and if any did, no party would be allowed to exploit them at the expense of others.

The first thing to note is that you are confirming my own comment, to a rather laughable degree.

The second thing is: you prove your ignorance by speaking of "conservative libertarians". There is no such animal. There are libertarian-leaning conservatives, but it does not work the other way around.

And maybe you should learn something about people you are speaking to before assuming they are just repeating media talking points. In fact I was speaking strictly from personal experience, much of it gleaned from right here on Slashdot. From comments like yours.

Yep. Because people are sick and tired of "Progressive" liberals and their provably failed policies. I mean not just failing now, but that have historically failed, for many decades.

But on the other hand, the largest single voting bloc (>40%) are people who identify themselves as "independent" or "libertarian". In other words, not members or followers of either of the "Big 2" parties.

How do you know? Again you confirm my original comment by conflating libertarians with conservatives (a false notion), and then go further to suggest that YOU HAVE EVER SEEN A LIBERTARIAN POLICY. That's a hoot.

Personally, I think the odds are getting higher every year. Approval rates for all aspects of the Federal government are at all-time lows. Something has to give.

To me, the worst of the lot is the statistical "reasoning" which is all based on the presumption that these events are equally distributed. The thing is: we know that they are not uniformly distributed... and even worse, we don't know how they are distributed.

Sure, we do know of a few particular cycles of tendency, but those don't predict individual events.

So the very basis of TFA's statistical reasoning is nonsense. We don't have any way to actually calculate the probability of such an event. We don't have enough information.

Correction: arctic ice is below 1 standard deviation from 1981-2010 average, but within 2 std. deviations.

Still, remember that 1981 is a (dare I say deliberately chosen?) high point from which to start measurements, so going by the 1981-2010 average is probably a bit misleading.

And the total global ocean ice is still well above normal, because of the record high Antarctic ice right now.

Currently, global sea ice is well above normal. That is largely because antarctic sea ice is at or near a record high, while arctic sea ice is slightly lower than (but approximately within one standard deviation of) average.

Now, while I know that overall ocean temperature and surface ice may not be a direct correlation, it's a bit of a mystery to me how they can claim that ice is melting due to unusual ocean warming, when we know that ocean surface ice has been at record levels.

And while that may be true, the reason so many Democrats are rabid Libertarian-haters is that no matter how many other issues they may agree about, Libertarians simply do not support the big-government model Democrats insist upon. It's a fundamental philosophical difference.

Democrats, by and large, are unwilling to look past this difference, and see the things they DO agree on. Which is too bad, because it leads to the typical Leftist Libertarian-bashing that we see so much: conflating them with anarchists, etc.

Even though according to independent polls he won every debate in which the news media and other organizations allowed him to participate.

When a few events like this happened last year to Home Depot and a few others, I saw a couple of those letters with offers of free credit monitoring, etc.

IANAL, but I am pretty sure these are just attempts to stave off lawsuits. There is nothing binding about the "offers", and they don't preclude you from suing them for liability if you are an actual victim of identity theft.

I think what this will actually take, are some people willing to step up and kick off some big suits. It is those kinds of damages that will make them finally pay attention.

Having said that, "punitive" damages by government are supposed to be big enough to get corporations to end the sloppiness and take their their liability seriously. So yes, I think you can lay a lot of blame on government's cavalier attitude toward this sort of thing.

I hardly think that's really the point. Being a "strategic material" -- and it very definitely is -- there is a real issue with selling shares of US uranium production on the open market to the Russians.

While we aren't exactly in a "cold war" anymore, our relations in many ways are less than friendly, and the Russian deal with others who are even less friendly to the U.S. So doing that is just plain stupid.

It's like selling ammunition to a third party who you just know is going to then turn around and sell it to your enemies.

What OP doesn't say (and probably doesn't know) is how that IP address is assigned. As likely as not, it's assigned by the software he is using on his laptop, via DHCP by his host software; that would explain why they ALL have the same IP address. (Certainly that could be in the pump firmware, too, but we have zero evidence of that, so it could just as likely be the other.)

If the pumps actually get their address via DHCP, the software could be hacked to assign a different IP to each pump, and then using a simple ethernet hub or switch, run the firmware update in multiple threads, one thread per pump.

I don't know that's the case, but I have been given no reason to believe it is not.

OP should find out how the IP address is being assigned. He could probably do that simply by trying to telnet into the pump, or using one of the many bits of network analysis tools available.