Those people who view one side as better than the other, because they are "less evil" are simply delusional.

There are more than two sides. Rand Paul — currently from the "Libertarian wing" of the Republican Party — may as well become a bona-fide Libertarian. At least, that would assure a Presidential nomination for him.

Whatever he does, his attempts to block the extensions of this "most unpatriotic law" gained him support from both sides of the traditional isle (as his other actions did before).

Libertarianism has been rising over the last few decades — one can see it from Slashdot's own poll as well as feel it in the increasingly shrill reaction Libertarian ideas get from Slashdot's resident Statists. Maybe, we'll have three major parties once again soon.

Yes, technically there is a way to execute phone specific code with specially crafted text messages. This is not doing that. It's not executing a program.

Generally, if a carefully-crafted input can cause your application to crash, a similarly-crafted data may be able to exploit the same bug and cause an execution of malicious code. If — as is usually the case — the crash is due to buffer overflow and I can stomp over your app's memory, I may be able to place my code in the right place and it will be executed as part of the app...

There are ways to mitigate that — such as by declaring data-parts of memory non-executable — but the earlier successful exploits of buffer overflow in the image-parsing code suggest, Apple is not using this.

But this is not what I expect from Apple. This is just bad. Lack of sanity testing?

Security — as any good work in general — is hard. Disproportionally harder than the merely Ok work. The real measure is not the number of bugs, really, but the speed of the fixes, once the problems are discovered. Unfortunately, Apple seems to be slow at that too...

Ha! The submissions can all be dismissed as "biased" without trying too hard. All of the Climate-scientists paid by the government and international institutions, for example, are inherently biased — should they conclude, there is no danger in global warming, their grants will dry out and they'll lose their jobs and influence.

Worse! Even if the scientists themselves are sincere, the people who run their departments and the international institutions are politicians and thus (far) less trust-worthy. And it is in their interest to only seek-out and hire scientists, who favour their agenda — sincerely or otherwise. A good scientist may still be able to find employment, but if the International Panel on Climate Change is closed, a lot of the currently-influential people will become nobodies...

The conflict of interest is so stunning, I'm surprised we can still breath in the room with this giant elephant. Compared to that bias, a blogger's personal agenda is nothing to speak of...

Here's the latest one.

Like I said many times before: once the result is known, finding somebody having "predicted" is too easy to be convincing. If you put 720 stalled clocks into one room, each set to a different minute, one of them will always show correct time.

No, please, link to a prediction published — anywhere, be it "peer-reviewed" publication or a tabloid — online before it materialized... And not just one, but at least two or three.

it isn't a good example of a prediction.

Of course, it is not a good example of a prediction — it failed! I "cited" it as an illustration of a "binary" prediction only. Sorry, I don't know of any "good" predictions made by the Climate-scientists, so I cited a bad one. Do you?

Are you ready to try again? Of all people, you already know very well, what I'm seeking — and agree, that the format I ask for is not unreasonable...

It was about sea ice. The ice loss in evidence is land ice.

Distinction without difference. Both would evidence to the dangers of global warming — or lack thereof. That one was posted, while the other was not, hints at a bias...

It fails to distinguish between Arctic sea ice (which is retreating) and Antarctic (which is advancing).

The difference between the poles may affect local residents on each, but it does not affect the debate of whether or not the whole planet is warming to an alarming — or even perceptible — degree.

Once again, replying to a request for pairs of links with a single link does not count. Your submission is hereby rejected. FAIL.

If you'd like to play again, sift through your sources yourself to identify the predictions and post links to them separately from the confirmations of each one materializing. This was the challenge from the beginning of this sub-thread.

Note, that the other condition was that the links be at least 3 years apart — because, once the result is known, finding a prediction for it may be too easy (and even, some times, intellectually dishonest too).

anything that allows blackmail

This is why people with substantial power — such as, first of all, government officials — must not engage in adultery or anything similarly reprehensible even if it is not illegal for the rest of us. Not because of some wicked "puritanism", but because it opens them up to blackmail, that corrupts government thus affecting all of us.

Government officials — be they lawmakers, judges, or executives — must be squeaky fucking clean. (Same may apply to CEOs, but that's up to their shareholders.)

You are asking for a model, though.

Not at all. I don't care, not yet, how the prediction was arrived to. Only that it was made and turned out accurate. Once I see at least two or three such, we can dig deeper. But I'm yet to see any.

The fact this information is so easy to find

Yes, yes. The Prince of Darkness must be very busy the last 10 or so years preparing that special place in his Realm for people, who claim information to be "easy to find" without providing links to any...