Citations? What evidence is there that the Department of Commerce has a financial interest in a global warming hoax, or Penn State U? Eagerly awaiting your failure to reply.

Do you have a reference for that? The first link I looked at just said

So there could be various reasons for them to not want to share data (such as too much time & effort required) - but wanting to hide evidence against global warming, is not one of them. The GPs implied accusation that the science was fudged has been thoroughly and repeatedly disproved.

Frederick Seitz? The physicist who, in your own link, admits he took money from tobacco and oil companies? Any reason we should be listening to his opinions over the thousands of climatologists and other scientists?

That interview made very interesting reading, like where he dodges the questions of undue influence from vested interests, and instead tries to accuse the interviewer of being unduly influenced (by persons unknown), providing no evidence of his own but talking over the top of any mention of actual peer-reviewed studies. I see no reason to consider him a reputable source.

Go into the Settings/Apps list, tap any app you don't want, Uninstall any updates, and Disable it. That frees up all the writable space taken by that app, stops it from consuming CPU cycles, and hides it from your app drawer. Takes seconds, can be easily done by the average consumer, and provides all the results they're looking for.

Not enough for a power user? You don't even want it taking up bytes on your read-only /system partition? Google allows you to do that too, by making it easy to unlock your phone, root it, edit the system partition, flash new ROMs etc, and by providing the source to the latest version of Android so that third parties like CM can give you fully customised software on your hardware - and you don't even have to give up access to Google's closed Android apps to do it, if you don't want to.

I really don't see how any of this is "being evil", especially when you compare it to the offerings of the other major mobile systems.

What angers people is that multinational corporations like Apple (and Google and many others) collect a lot of revenue from many the countries they operate in - but somehow make such tiny profits in those countries that they pay tiny taxes.

Taxpayers in those countries pay for infrastructure and services that the multinationals' local offices depend on, consumers in those countries contribute greatly to their revenues, yet see very little return in corporate taxes thanks to the profits being funnelled away to tax havens via disproportionate expenses for intangibles like internal licencing fees (for example, there's a big Google R&D office in Australia, but the results of that work are given away to Ireland and licenced back, at a cost that eats up most of Google's local profits). It's a legal loophole that governments are increasingly unwilling to tolerate.

I know you'll go far to defend Apple from any perceived attack, but the "simp(sic) truth" is that these methods of minimising tax/revenue ratio to maximise their profits deprive their host countries of tax income that is badly needed to continue providing services that all depend on, including the multinational's offices and their own employees.

There's a lot of things there you're attributing to me which I really don't think I've ever claimed or even mentioned. I don't appear to be speaking your language, and you seem to be ignoring the points I'm trying to make, so yeah, another unproductive "discussion" on the internet. All the best.

If you want to put it that way, then all of science is educated guesses. Engineering too. Only maths is certain.

The scientific method recognises that absolute detachment is difficult, if not impossible, and endeavours to minimise that. Again, the "you have it or you don't" black & white viewpoint doesn't at all match what we see in the real world, where few if any scientists can claim to be absolutely detached from their work - but we've still been getting useful science done for centuries, despite that. Plenty of good science has been done regardless of attachment to the results - if you can be rigorous enough about your methodology. If your methods are beyond reproach, your results are too, despite any personal investment.

They are not "opinions" or "guesses". They are probabilities, backed by a great deal of evidence - like virtually everything in science. Higgs Boson existence? Probability. The Big Bang? Probability. Quantum mechanics? Yeah, a lot of that. To be scientific, a theory does not have to be a certainty at all; the probability just needs to be carefully quantified, and backed by observation and/or experiment.

Citation needed. The IPCC reports all state their conclusions in probabilities, which are carefully quantified, and are backed by citations of peer-reviewed studies at every stage. The vast majority of the evidence presented in the IPCC reports has proved under very close examination to be solid (NOT absolutely certain, but of sound scientific methodology). This is why they are accepted as, not the gospel truth, but the best information on the subject that we have, by every major scientific institution and government, as well as by the great majority of scientists (and nearly all climatologists).

I do agree that this is the source of the controversy. Solutions are indeed often political, but unfortunately all too often, peoples' political views about some of the solutions contaminate their views of the science, which usually leads to claims that the science itself is being politicised. I disagree with that.

If only we could do that. Unfortunately, there are still far too many strident voices still trying to undermine the science, which blocks any reasonable discussion of solutions. If those voices actually had any peer-reviewed evidence of a quality that could convince a reasonable number of experts, that would be fine, but sadly these dissenting voices tend to rely on volume instead.

I'm also of the opinion that many people misunderstand the solutions that have been proposed (for example, see all the claims that a phased transition to a carbon-neutral economy would be a disastrous burden on society, whereas many economists are seeing it as an opportunity for actually reducing the many existing external costs of carbon emissions).

It's not just creation cost, it's storage cost. If every tree is different, you need a complete dataset for every tree.

Notice how they didn't tell us how big any of those scenes were? The only number they mentioned for a laser-scanned scene was 3 terabytes (presumably after their compression), and I don't see anything close to that making it into a consumer release.

Still nicely done tech for professional fields; I just take issue with their whole "infinite detail! polygons are DEAD!" hyperbole.

So we agree on 1, 2 & 3. Is that "wrong"?

As for 4, I don't disagree, but my point was there is no easy way to determine absoutely if any given study is "scientifically correct" - particularly if you are not an expert in the field. That being the case, "probably" right is usually all we can determine (as most scientists themselves will tell you). And the science in question has well over 30 years of peer-reviewed observation to back it up, so climatologists do have some knowledge on the subject.

I'm not sure why people feel compelled to drag politics into this issue in the first place. I certainly have no interest in doing so. And I'm happy to be open-minded to new evidence - if it's solid enough to pass peer review, for a start (peer review: consensus in action).

I have little time for anecdotal arguments however, and less for people that dismiss peer-reviewed studies (and authors of same) for being "politicised", particularly if they can't offer any more reason than "this is the same thing as said by other, politically-leaning people".

Clearly you don't know how the Argument from Authority works, if you assume it is automatically a fallacy.

Nobody is claiming that the consensus view is 100% unassailably correct, just because it's a consensus. Like Occam's Razor, it's merely an aid to choosing between uncertain alternatives. Any rock-solid evidence could challenge the consensus view successfully - if you could be certain it was rock-solid.

And therein lies the rub. Science is uncertain. 100% certainty does not exist, outside pure math. We will never see a study that is self-evidently absolute truth to any person who views it, because a study can only roughly approximate reality, and our ability to judge these approximations varies according to our expertise with that aspect of reality and the techniques used to approximate it. Failing to realise this is the hallmark of Dunning-Kruger.

In the absence of certainty, the consensus view is more probably correct, and is therefore the best view to take, at least until better evidence comes along. And if you believe there is already better evidence, then why has it not changed the consensus view? I've yet to hear an answer for this that doesn't involve mass incompetence or mass conspiracy, either of which are far less probable than the remaining option of the "better" evidence not actually being better.

Also, you dodged the question: How do you (personally) know one specific scientist is right, and the others are wrong?

It's certainly possible, and has even happened.

What happens far more often is that studies that claim to overturn existing knowledge simply turn out to be wrong - usually bad methodology, where other factors have not been sufficiently controlled for.

Most of these get weeded out before publication by peer review. Most of the rest have their flaws pointed out by other scientists in the field. A few remain in limbo, where their evidence is unconvincing but not demonstrably wrong, and are not accepted until further studies add more convincing evidence.

The point is, how are you or I to know which is which? What looks correct to us may simply be our ignorance of the mistakes in the study, which aren't obvious until they are pointed out by more experienced people. And if 9 out of 10 experienced people say that such-and-such a flaw is fatal to the study's proposition, are you going to believe the one who claims it's still OK?

Answer me one simple question: How do you know one specific scientist is right, and the others are wrong?

Fact is, for any question outside our own fields of knowledge, only those suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect can answer that with any certainty, What may seem obvious to you or I could be completely wrong, if we aren't aware of other evidence, or of all the details and factors and nuances and caveats that underlay any moderately-complex scientific statement. This is why we rely on those who have specialised in that field to make those judgements for us.

Science isn't done by consensus - but correctness is certainly decided that way. In mathematics, your new proof may look bulletproof to you, but it's not accepted as fact until your peers have examined and judged it. A single study won't overturn a whole field of knowledge until it's accepted by the majority in that field. This is an essential aspect of the scientific process, and is crucial for weeding out plausible-sounding studies that turn out, on closer examination, to be wrong.

Not seeing any connection with consciousness there?

Speculation, and only relevant if we want to duplicate human consciousness. And even then, lower levels of virtual sensory input may well be sufficient for those purposes.

For much of the Singularity's predictions, non-human intelligences with varying levels of consciousness would be enough. We don't need to make a submarine swim like a fish for it to be useful.