Public Service Announcement --------------- It is my policy to not respond to this person because he seems to have some kind of personal vendetta, plus a nasty habit of publicly lying about other people.

Please don't feed the troll.

(And let the dumbshits identify themselves.)

Now Naomi Oreskes is a "scientist"???

You might want to tell other people that, because nobody else seems to know.

This really is the problem.

The vast majority of private data leaks were due to HUMAN error... not vulnerability to hacks. That means that even if your site isn't hacked, some bozo working for the company you're supposed to TRUST is intentionally or accidentally giving out the information on your 12-year-old daughter.

People REALLY need to get it through their heads that the serious flaws aren't in the technology, they're in THE PEOPLE who implement it. A seriously hack-proof database is still going to get spilled, by idiotic corporate bureaucratic errors or even just employee theft.

You missed:

That means it's just an IDEA. Well, hell. I want an award for my idea of a thing just like a Star-Trek replicator, except it makes really cool sparkly FX when it operates.

This is really the whole thing.

ISP-imposed hotspots (all I've seen) require you to log in to the carrier before you can use them. So if you're a Comcast customer, you log in with your Comcast ID, and you're on the 'net. Whoopie.

The problem, of course, is that this is just a "foot in the door" to charging you for that usage.

That's why I, and EFF, say you should set up your own public WiFi hotspots, bypassing those imposed by your ISP.

I've had a NON-ISP open WiFi hotspot -- with pretty damned good range -- for about 5 years now, and only had one tiny problem with a neighborhood teenager abusing it. Nipped that right in the bud, and I didn't even have to ban her. (In fact I think she was pretty freaked out by getting the .mp3 file that called her by name and politely told her to knock it off. Ghost in the machine.)

It's not a "conspiracy bandwagon", it's a simple statement of truth. You've been listening to too much liberal propaganda, to think that anything you disagree with is "conspiracy".

If 6 people beat you up and take your wallet, is that "conspiracy", or just a crime?

Your audience.

Public Service Announcement
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It is my policy to not respond to this person because he seems to have some kind of personal vendetta, plus a nasty habit of publicly lying about other people. How ironic that he would pop up in a discussion of libel.

Please don't feed the troll.

Because he has a habit of making false public accusations and other misrepresentations, and I want others to see how wrong he is.

That, and to save his rantings "for posterity". And maybe for other purposes, as I see fit.

One thing I want to make clear is that I am NOT baiting him. He's the master baiter. I am just responding to his own comments. I have no reason to bait or troll him... I'd far rather he just went away.

I understand. But this whole topic is about a libel suit.

That's why I was trying to illustrate the difference. You are legally allowed to make criticism and commentary all you like anonymously. No problem there. As long as you're being honest. But doing so, anonymously or not, when you know or reasonably should know that it is not true is libel. In general.

I definitely agree that the ability to make commentary anonymously is, and should be protected. I do not agree that intentionally dishonest commentary should be protected, whether it is anonymous or not.

I have explained to you clearly at least several times that you MISUNDERSTOOD my meaning, and exactly where and how you misunderstood.

Therefore, I can only conclude that to continue presenting this to the public in the distorted way you have, and pretend that it was my actual meaning, is deliberate misrepresentation. Further, the circumstances surrounding it suggest that your purpose was malicious.

There is nothing more to be said.

Not via libel laws, you're not. And that's what this discussion is about. In the U.S., truth is often described as an "absolute defense" against libel.

Ooh... there are so many errors here I'd really love to take it all on. But I said I wouldn't.

However, I find this one just a little bit too juicy to resist. It's an excellent example of the tendency of Khayman80 (aka DumbScientist aka Bryan Killett) to just spout made-up bullshit when he gets angry.

This is such a gross misrepresentation of anything I actually said I'll count it as a lie in its entirety. First, I didn't at any time say I was talking about statistics actually involving "young earthers" per se. I was simply speaking of statistics, as a field, in a completely general sense. The science of statistics. Which has NOTHING to do specifically with young-earthers. They just happened to be topic under discussion, but my comment was about the nature of evidence, not about young-earthers.

It's a fact of life that if you hunt long and hard enough, you can find evidence for just about anything. It may not be very good evidence, and it may be shown to be false later, but evidence nevertheless. And simple statistics suggests this is also true of the young-earthers, as it is of just about anything else.

This guy has flatly disputed this nearly-invariate fact of life. They may not have any good evidence. But the notion that they have found some kind of evidence -- not proof mind you, but evidence, no matter how thin or tiny -- is strongly supported by a smidgen of statistical thinking. He flatly denies the idea that they could have any evidence at all, even though I've explained to him repeatedly that he appears to be conflating evidence with proof. Or even possibly just degrees of evidence.

As he states above, he has had some kind of personal issue with the young-earthers, so apparently -- this is as close as I can figure but it's only a guess -- if anybody says anything even in the same paragraph where they are mentioned, of which he disapproves, that must somehow equal "support" for their ideas. What utter garbage.

Interpreting my comment, after I explained it to him several times just as I have here, as any kind of support for young earthers or their ideas, is just lunacy. I have told him in so many words that I have never subscribed to the views of young-earthers, and I have denounced them here on Slashdot to him and others.

So for him to imply, as he does above, that I my comment in any way "treats creationism as a scientific hypothesis", is just crazy. Plain and simple. There is zero truth to it.

My comment to him was a simple statement about statistics and evidence. He insists on interpreting my comments somehow (very clearly incorrectly) as some kind of "defense" of the young Earth idea as a "scientific" idea, when I have repeatedly EXPLAINED to him that he's wrong. It's 100% nonsense. But that he does think it (or pretend to think it) is right there in his words above. But has so often happened in the past, I don't think most other people -- rational people -- will have any trouble understanding my explanation. I don't understand why he doesn't.

And THAT, in a nutshell, is how this guy argues. Solid evidence that he is some kind of nut. He conflates completely separate out-of-context comments and ideas into a third idea of his own custom design and imagination, divorced from any reality, and presents it to the public here as though it were the truth.

I don't have to address the rest of his statements above. It's all just more of the same.

Oh... except that I will point out that this is obviously an attempt at a personal "smear". There is no attempt to prove his actual, original accusations here... he's just blurting out many of the same negative things he's said about me in the past, true or (quite often) not.

This isn't a scientific or logical argument. And it has nothing to do with the original assertions he made a few days ago.

This is a blatant attempt to make me look bad. Nothing more.

About what I expected.

That looks like it must have been a lot of work.

As I have already stated: I will not be replying to it here, no matter how distorted and inaccurate it may be.