I choose the concesus. I never choose "one" expert unless I'm sure that expert is representing the concensus opinion of many scientists. If there's large segments with varying opinions, usually indicating a lack of data to explain which is more correct, then I remain agnostic. If there's one expert who disagrees with everyone else, I am leery of that expert's opinion, even if it's exactly what I want to hear.

If that expert turns out to be right, then that will eventually be reflected by the rest of the scientific community as the evidence becomes more and more convincing. As has happened over and over again.

Could this still mean I pick the wrong group of experts? Yeah.

Is that anything like a priesthood? No. That comparison is just stupid.

And for those of us who want to form our opinions based on science, but aren't climatologists, looking to the people who are and actually do study and understand climate science and asking them is wrong... how exactly?

For any other non-controversial field of science, this wouldn't be controversial either. Nobody says we're treating particle physicists like "priests" when we go with their best working picture of the microscopic universe with the understanding that this picture may change. How is that like a priest?

And for the record, while I do take what the climatologists say as a provisional truth, I would be delighted if they came out one day and said they were wrong all this time and it turns out there's nothing to worry about. So far, so bad.

Well, minus the one Youtube founder who was deliberately posting copyrighted material without permission to drive traffic early on.

Though the others did take pro-active steps by making him stop so on the whole, your statement is true.

Of course you stopped reading. Just like you stopped looking at reality as soon as it stopped conforming to your pre-conceived ideology. And of course you call trumping reality with ideology "intelligence". Even though this viewpoint has been tried and found woefully lacking. But that was only in reality!

I wish I was perceptive enough to see that reality is wrong when it contradicts what's in your head.

Of course they are part of the equation! Their behavior is extremely rational. Just not moral. Their goals are not what you think they should be. It's not to work for the betterment of their people. It's to maintain their hold on power over their people. This doesn't make them irrational. It does mean that as long as you equate rationality and morality and therefore assume that they are irrational that you will never understand them. And because you will never understand them (deliberately!) you will never deal with them effectively.

But failing before you even begin because of a conscious decision to replace reality with ideology is old hat for you, isn't it Mr. Iraq War Cheerleader? Is this you re-polishing your rhetoric in support of another war?

I am offended by your metaphoric comparison of pitbulls, wonderful creatures whose reputation was solely an artifact of those among whom they were popular, to something a beastly and vile as an Attorney General.

Fair enough, a cable was involved. They didn't lower it to the ground on a cable. They didn't lower it while in powered flight hovering above the ground. They did it to separate the rover housing from the descent stage so it would have room to deploy the airbags. Compare to the Curiosity EDL and the operation is quite different.

Alpha designers worked on Alpha at HP -- they produced several variants of the EV7 there. And the servers based on those chips performed better than HP's Itanium offerings, which was rather awkward for them.

Dirk Meyer went to AMD long before that. It was still DEC when he left. Dirk was the lead architect of the K7 (that success being a big part of how he ended up in a position to become CEO) which came out while Compaq was still making new Alphas.

But you're right that a great many jumped ship from Compaq.

No, just uninformed about the extent of the embedded use of these chips. By the time I heard of them (e.g. Playstation/N64, and much more recent uses of SPARC) their heydey was over. I had no idea there was a SPARC-based camera in the mid 90s. Obviously I was much more in tune with their traditional business side.

Some of these ISAs found new life, but MIPS and SPARC were for SGI boxes running Ultrix and Sun boxes running SunOS/Solaris respectively for many years. It's only once the original business models collapsed that they became otherwise.

NT on Alpha was contemporary with the ISA's hey-dey, though all it really did was demonstrate that you shouldn't count on Microsoft for the success of your non-x86 server platform. I did know someone who used such a box though. Four processors, baby!

Oh and yeah, the 68k is awesome. It was used in so much stuff besides machines running Unix, though, that "Unix processor" isn't an accurate historical metaphor.

Yeah, even some of the new parts weren't that new, though doing aerodynamic flight in Mars atmosphere counts as fairly new if not unprecedented.

The Viking's last stage of descent was done entirely with retrorockets on the lander itself. The MER rovers used a rocket powered descent stage that then dropped the rovers in their airbag-lined shells only the last 10s of meters. MSL was closer to the MER rovers in this sense, however the Sky Crane part was still completely new.

They had a rocket-powered descent stage, but it wasn't a "sky crane" because it didn't lower them on a cable, ala a crane, thus why it wasn't called one.

Easier on the rover by design/necessity, though more complicated for the EDL team. Not ridiculously so like everyone thought, but definitely a source of complication and stress.

I didn't realize it when I was watching the EDL stream live, but later learned that they had agreed that, largely due to the public watching, they had to be careful how they called out the steps of the landing. Specifically they said "TD nominal" when telemetry said the wheels were on the ground rather than "Touch Down" because they didn't want to get the public excited when the next thing telemetry told them could have been that Curiosity was being dragged across the surface of Mars by the descent stage after a failure to release the cables. They waited until they were sure Curiosity wasn't moving before declaring "Touch Down Confirmed."

Oh man, still gets me a little thinking about those words. Hehe.

Heh. What I like about the MSL pessimism is that most people didn't realize that literally the only new parts of the landing procedure were the sky crane at the end, and aerodynamic flight before parachute deploy.

It's like they think Spirit and Opportunity were just dropping onto Mars from orbit and some measely air bags absorbed all that energy.

But that's how Mission to Mars showed it, so I guess that's legit!

Patents with a fresh 17 year expiration date and not covered by licensing agreements with AMD et. al... Yes, I'm quite certain you are correct.

Heh. Given the intimate relationship between the proprietary Unix vendors and their proprietary RISC chips it's not completely bonkers to call em that. I mean did a PA-RISC chip have any purpose besides running HPUX? And did HPUX have any purpose besides being the Unix you got when you bought your PA-RISC systems?

That's an honest question; I've never seen a machine that had one without the other. I'm sure someone runs NetBSD or Linux on it but as far as market presence...