Comment Note to Google Users: (Score 1, Insightful) 131
If Google can "remotely configure" your device, then so can someone else if they're determined enough.
Duh.
Duh.
Could be. If several witnesses see an assailant bludgeon someone on the sidewalk with an obscured object, then run into a house, the police may not be able to ascertain exactly what the weapon is, but they'd certainly have enough evidence for a search, and they could keep a record of any potential weapons seen in the house in case forensics can later get them a better description of the weapon used.
I don't think the question is really whether the judge can order such a thing. I think it's more of a question of whether it is justified in this case.
GP made a very good point. Search warrants are required to be particular, and to specify the particular thing(s) being searched for. If they don't know what they're looking for, broadening the search to turn it into a "fishing expedition" is not allowable.
The general principle is that the search should be as narrowly focused on particular evidence as can practically be managed. Is that the case here? It doesn't seem to be, but I'm not the judge, I don't know the details.
I have no objection to paying for ad-free stuff.
Free and Open Source (for just one example) shows that advertisement-free is a workable model and the people can not only profit from it, but others can benefit from it. Without advertising.
That is why I stopped when I read:
Everyone gets that advertising is what powers the internet, and that our favorite sites wouldn't exist without it
NO. Not everyone "gets" that, because it isn't true. And if your "favorite" site is using that revenue model, then maybe you're visiting the wrong sites.
I have been around long enough to have been on the internet when the most active places were "Bulletin Boards", and the BEST of the net was indeed free. And it continued to be so for a long time.
If it weren't for THAT (and not ad-driven sites) the internet would not have survived. But take away the ads, it would still not only exist, it might be a hell of a lot better.
Since it released hope, please, please open the box*.
"Hope and Change" was released 6 years ago, and pretty much all we've seen since have been the evils.
But there's no room in the budget for that due to the black budget takeover...
What a terrible thing to say about King Obama! Why, now we know it's true: the opposition really is racist!
There's just an opportunity in Siberia - just opened up this week. Current theories are giant sandworms, graboids, pingo's, ufo's or an alien missile base:
The ideal finding, of course, would be all of the above.
"Visitors: to ensure optimum relations with the locals, no anal probes will be allowed beyond this point. You may check them in at Customs and reclaim them on your return home.
"Mind the sandworms."
Without more than a passing familiarity with economics, the point of this exercise seems to me to be to illustrate the way money works without centralization. Isn't this in fact how the international money trade works?
No.
Money, pretty much by definition, is a standard medium of exchange. It might fluctuate in value a bit here or there, but if it isn't relatively stable, then it isn't good money in the first place. An example of that is the hundred trillion dollar note in Zimbabwe currency.
This experiment would remove any standard: a "coin" would be worth vastly more to one person than another, based on completely arbitrary definitions of "value".
So it isn't a standard -- it's kind of the opposite -- therefore it isn't "money", in any conventional sense. But then neither were Zimbabwe dollars.
You are incorrect. The camera's were conceived as an FHWA program for specific intersections to reduce fatalities.
Um, I really hate to have to tell you this, but what they were "conceived" for is very different from what they are actually used for.
The camera's actually did reduce fatalities at some of those high fatality intersections.
But by now we also have LOTS of statistics saying that in many cities, they actually increased not just the number but also the average severity of accidents. I am aware this is counterintuitive, nevertheless it is true.
The study you linked to about overestimations basically makes the "only atmospheric warming" argument, which is what creates the illusion of "the pause."
The study I linked to makes no such argument. That is a straw-man. What the study shows is that surface temperature warming has been about half of what an average of all models projected. (Note that "surface temperature" is actually atmospheric temperature near the surface.) Regardless of whether there changes happening elsewhere, the models still got it wrong. That is the point. The models are flawed.
In case you weren't looking at the right one, it's this one specifically:
I admit that I had missed your second link. But this is hardly proof of anything. You brought us right back to the original issue: whether (and how) the datasets like GISS, HadCRUT etc. have been manipulated. It isn't valid to use that data as proof of itself. In order to demonstrate anything you have to compare it to something else. Like, for example... satellite data!
I can only assume your problem with the "97%" meta-study result was not considering those that didn't express a position on the issue in their abstract.
I don't know why you can only assume that. Criticism of that purported "study" are all over the place. Here are two examples from a climate scientist. And there are more. Many more. Which are very easy to find with any search engine. Probably the most relevant comment, which many of these criticisms state in various ways, is the following (yes, it's Monckton but pay attention to what he says, not who he is):
"The non-disclosure in Cook et al. of the number of abstracts supporting each specified level of endorsement had the effect of not making available the fact that only 41 papers -- 0.3% of all 11,944 abstracts or 1.0% of the 4014 expressing an opinion, and not 97.1% -- had been found to endorse the quantitative hypothesis, stated in the introduction to Cook et al. and akin to similar definitions in the literature, that 'human activity is very likely causing most of the current GW (anthropogenic global warming, or AGW)'."
They care because anybody can write a label saying "smallpox virus" and stick it on a vial. But if the vial actually *does* contain smallpox virus, then there were flawed procedures that let that virus be sent out to East Bumfuck with no records kept. And those flawed procedures might still be in place, in which case it is urgent that they get fixed.
That does make sense. But the interesting thing is, we already know there are flawed procedures in their improved procedures (reference the containment failures in recent years), so I would argue that they are actually increasing public risks by doing it this way.
I could be wrong. Maybe there are still really big, undiscovered holes in their procedures that need to be fixed. But there are already pretty big known holes.
Hey, kudos to whomever diverted them from Ft. Detrick to the NIH, back in the day. Anonymous, forgotten hero.
What I am wondering is: why do they even care whether the pathogens in the vials are actually what is on the labels?
They're trying to verify one endangerment of pubic health by further endangering public health.
I mean, they're not even saving money. Incinerate the lot, using the standard procedures for doing so, and have done with it.
If I have I wouldn't recognize it as you - I don't look at the usernames, just the comments.
I used to be the same way, until one user became abusive.
So did you not look at the graphs I link to, or do you take issue with them?
Of course I did. There are several issues with them. The ones I will mention are:
First, they're from SkepticalScience. Now, I don't normally indulge in arguments that someone might misconstrue as ad-hominem, but SkepticalScience's involvement in the recent, blatant debacles regarding "97% consensus" seriously puts their scientific integrity to question in my mind. I mean, that was a statistical thing that a high-schooler probably could not have unintentionally screwed up quite that badly. All evidence says it was pure statistical garbage being paraded as fact. To have perpetrated that -- I'm just going to call it "blunder" here -- while at the same time criticizing someone else's statistics seems pretty damned hypocritical on their part.
Second, in case you hadn't noticed, they aren't graphs of the same thing at all. Which makes your whole argument a straw-man.
Third, the article continues their habit of pushing the idea of "increasing catastrophic weather events" which most climate scientists today say is not very credible. (IPCC AR 5 report: "low confidence".) Further, not only has that NOT been observed, we have been in a long period of record-low cyclonic energy, world-wide, for decades. If anything, there has been the opposite trend from what the alarmist projections said we would see. The United States hasn't had a anything classed as a major hurricane for a near-record period of time, and Florida has recently set a new all-time record duration with no hurricanes at all.
Why do you think they've done nothing about it?
You tell me. You're the one spouting all this conspiracy stuff, not me.
If you would like some more information about the gross INaccuracy of climate models over the last 1-2 decades, I suggest you read this article: Overestimated global warming over the past 20 years, which was published in Nature Climate Change in 2013. According to that paper, the average amount that all 117 models that were studied overestimated warming was 100%. That's... well, not very accurate. A projection of no warming at all would not have been significantly less accurate than what the models actually projected. (Although in the other direction of course.)
This is what the lead author had to say about the paper and its publication:
1. Reviews
Our commentary was reviewed by 4 anonymous peers selected by the journal and underwent 2 major revisions and one minor revision over the course of 6 months. It was also internally reviewed by 3 colleagues in my Centre. It was not solicited by the journal.
2. Originality
To my mind there's a difference between what people think they know through popular discourse (which is perfectly fine), and what they actually know after weighing the evidence provided in original peer review literature (which is better). Some aspects of our commentary were known by some, and other aspects were known by few or none.
3. Uncertainty
Several sources of uncertainty in several contexts are considered in our commentary. These a laid out in detail in the Supplementary Information file that accompanies our commentary. Our specific estimate of the observed GMST trend and uncertainty for the period 1998-2012 is based on monthly-mean data and takes into account serial correlation (as described in my co-authors book titled "Statistical Analysis in Climate Research"). I can't vouch for the Skeptical Science Trend Calculator, but I do note that with it one obtains identical trends and uncertainties regardless of whether monthly-averaged or running-averaged data is used.
4. Cherry-picking
This is not issue with our commentary having considered all start years from 1980 to 1998, and having explicitly accounted for several known signals of natural climate variability (e.g. ENSO and volcanic eruptions).
5. Global warming
On second thought perhaps we should have titled our commentary "Overestimated global surface warming over the past 20 years", although perfection can only be an aspiration.
6. Spatial coverage
The models were sampled only where observations exist.
I will add myself that (6) is only reasonable, since unlike NCDC they recognized that it's not responsible to try to compare something against nothing.
Without life, Biology itself would be impossible.
