Yes yes, but what about the latency?

Unfortunately, even if they have your data, they won't hand it out to you, since it is classified.

I can totally relate to that sentiment. I am mentioned as "inventor" on two patents; things that are actually rehashes of existing things, just in a new context. The things where so novel to my colleagues that my boss though I should file an invention. And after a session with the company's patent lawyer and some waiting I got a nice letter form the patent office. I did it primarily for career advancement and I honestly think they will fail miserably if challenged.

I would think about it as an investment. You may get a return, you may not. If nobody backs that game, it will never come to market and in some cases there is no alternative that you could buy. Backing "me too" project of course is stupid... You just have to evaluate the project and team and see if they are likely to deliver.

As the saying goes: Don't feed the trolls.

They did not publish the pictures on the internet, they stored them in their iCloud account, big difference. If you post something on Facbook or upload it to YouTube and that later comes to bite you, that really is your fault. You willingly published something about you. But here we have something else. The iCloud is semantically part of their device, that it resides on server connected to a network is a mute point. If you decide not to trust networked services, you basically have to stop to trust any modern IT system. Say you decide to only store such things locally, how can you be sure that the software / firmware is not leaking your data clandestinely? You can't.

I personally only trust the current breed of web services (storage & apps) only as far as I can throw them. The reason being that I know how some of them are implemented and the inherent risks. But that does not preclude hat the systems could be designed in a safe way.

In addition to this being a manual process. Brute forcing with automated systems is easy, but recording the endings and trying may actually take a while.

Yes is maps very closely to the inverse of the average temperature, lagging around a good decade. Who would have though? But If you take the current decade average the trend is flat. If you take the 1979 - 2014 time range you get a clear temperatures up, ice down trend; but that does not tell you much about the future. If we had good data on the last couple of decades before that...

GTK is not the Gnome Toolkit, it is the Gimp Toolkit. That it sort of was absorbed into the Gnome project is rather a sad reality. While the Gnome 2 days it seemed like an OK trade of. But as they purposefully broke Windows support in GTK 3 for Gnome 3, the writing was on the wall. Although they brought Windows and Mac OS support back in line, GTK stopped being the reliable UI library it once was.

Yes good points, but that means that you have very few data points, as this does not occur that often. Although an interesting subject, it is clear that is becomes really hard to get good data.

You are correct, the effect, without feedback mechanisms that is, is well understood. When going from 300ppm to 600ppm the average temperatures should rise around 1C. So how did the climate scientists come to the 4C figure or the current IPCC figure of 2C? Assuming that these figures are correct, the exact feedback mechanisms that lead to these figures are not understood.

Take for example this Plot from the NISDC: http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_i...

As I mentioned, it is low against the 30 year average, but far from a downward trend in the last 10 years.

So far we can conclude that it is not in the upper atmosphere, it is not in the lower atmosphere, it is not on land surfaces and not on the ocean surface. Now we have an additional data point, it is not in the lower oceans and the ice caps are low but a slow positive trend. These last two decades have seen runaway CO2 emissions but no noticeable warming. Few people claim that high CO2 levels are a good thing, but as GP stated, we are far from understanding climate.

I think the 500km / 4h figures are with stops included. So an average of 125km/h is not bad; even though it may be better. In most areas the problem is not the train, not even the track, but restrictions because of noise. (One of the primary reasons the German railway sucks.) On the other hand high speed train service in the US, especially in almost empty mid west should work quite well.

Good that you mention Karl Benz. The restrictions imposed on him, led to the first long distance driver being a woman. As the story goes, Karl Benz was only allowed to drive the car with prior police permission and only on closed off roads. He never drove the car himself, because of fear it would explode on him. So on 5 August 1888, when Karl was out, his wife Berta decided to visit her sister in Pfortsheim. As there where no other means of transportation she and her two sons took the car on the 106 km trip. This was without the permission of her husband and the police. They had to refuel on the way and bought the ethanol in a pharmacy. This story was a PR wonder that got many restrictions lifted.