HINT: When faced with the facts, a couple of years ago, that his own arguments did not hold water, and that nobody had successfully refuted Latour, his reply to me was "they will". Which, if you understand English, is an admission of defeat.

It is 2 years or so later now, and they still haven't. Dr. Roy Spencer (himself a self-proclaimed climate skeptic) and Anthony Watts (also a climate skeptic) both tried to disprove him experimentally, and both failed. And nobody has pointed out any genuine errors in Latour's math or logic.

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I guess I just can't let it slide. Khayman80's argument that Latour doesn't understand that the subject under discussion is net heat transfer is almost certainly disingenuous and intended to mislead, because we had that argument a couple of years ago. Which he lost, by the way.

Latour has written papers about EXACTLY that topic, and I know that Khayman80 has seen at least one of them, because of the mentioned argument (which he lost), in which he admitted to having seen it. So he is either lying in order to try to convince others I am wrong (which is dishonest), of he has completely forgotten about Latour's actual work, in which case he's just making up the argument (which is intellectually dishonest), OR he is trying to make a straw-man argument by suggesting that Latour himself was arguing something he actually wasn't. Which is intellectually dishonest.

I'll let other readers decide the existence (if any) and extent (if any) of Khayman80's intellectual dishonesty. The evidence is right there above, if any of you would care to go read ALL OF those old arguments (which he lost).

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I will add:

Since this person is not making any scientific argument anyway, but simply attempting ad-hominem, and saying "so-and-so is wrong" without ANY evidence (which is all he can do, because he doesn't have any), this was a completely pointless exercise on his part. He was simply making another attempt at dragging my persona through the mud. I can only conclude that was his only purpose, since he didn't make any actual, substantive arguments.

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I have nothing to do with this person, or he with me. His pretense of knowing who I am and what I think, and his practice of taking years-old comments out of context and conflating them together does not make for sound argument.

Dr. Latour did heat-transfer work for NASA, and has made a career of building control systems for chemical processes involving heat. I daresay he is more of an expert on the subject than "Khayman80".

To the best of my knowledge, no-one to date has successfully refuted Latour's science. Many have tried, many have failed. Khayman80 himself admitted this a couple of years ago, right here on Slashdot, which makes me wonder why he's digging up even older arguments that he has since failed to refute. Perhaps he just forgot. Though I doubt it.

I have no reply to this person specifically. As far as I am concerned, he is a non-person.

Nonsense. LOTS of things are obvious to the uninformed:

Global warming, Young Earth, WMDs, chemtrails, anal probes... the list goes on and on. Granted, some of that is MISinformation, rather than lack of information, but I count misinformed as uninformed.

OP:

Well, I grant the "threats or competitors" part, to some degree. But the U.S. now has MORE forests and other wildlife habitat than it had 100 years ago. In my general area, wolves and peregrine falcons have been reintroduced, quite successfully (there is now a wolf hunting season). Not to mention the rebound of raptors like osprey and eagles. There are an abundance of other predators like badgers and mountain lions... which means a robust-enough prey population to support them.

I don't know where you live, but where I do, there's not much extinction going on. Quite the opposite, actually.

" But a sport involves the combo of physical exertion,"

Back in my day, lugging that goddamned 21" Trinitron CRT around with my almost as heavy loaded Antec P4 Server WAS the physical exertion aspect. Not easy for someone that's 6' and 145.

Off my lawn.

I'm nearsighted and have worn glasses on and off since I was about 10. I wore contacts through most of my 20s, but returned to glasses in my 30s.

Now that I'm in my 50s I'm in that stage where my near vision is starting to deteriorate and I'm slowly becoming far-sighted. The first real manifestation of this was when flying at night, when I was experiencing massive eyestrain reading charts in my lap, but could see outside the plane just fine. So I got progressives the last time I got new glasses, and I'm fine.

I don't wear glasses when I'm not driving or flying. I prefer a soft-focus world. :-)

Am I a candidate for laser eye surgery? According to the web sites, not really. I could get good distant correction, but would then need glasses for reading. Since I need glasses to drive and to fly anyway, I'm not sure this would buy me anything.

...laura

The anonymous poster pointed out a simpler mechanism, which is used in practice on file stores that want to be encrypted on the server. This technique also has a number of advantages. Using a symmetric cypher is generally faster than an asymmetric one and using a different key for each file is just good practice anyway as it limits the damage that certain kinds of trojan can do. If you're sharing with everyone, then you may as well just give the server the AES key and ask it to decrypt the file. If you're sharing with just a few people, then sending them a (fixed-size) key for each file is not too much overhead.

The thing that's really put me off the surgery is the improvement in contact lens technology over the last 10 years. My sight is sufficiently bad in one eye that I'd have to have an implanted contact lens, although the other could be fixed by burning the cornea. The contact lenses that I have now; however, are so thin that I don't notice that I'm wearing them most of the time and can be worn overnight. I put them in at the start of a month and then change them a month later. There's a slightly increased risk of eye infection, but they come with six monthly checkups to prevent this. I was wearing the previous generation of lenses (which were noticeably thicker) for about 10 years without serious issue, but with slight irritation around the eyelids caused by the thickness of the lens (and my eyes sometimes getting very dry, because it took a long time for the lens to dry out, so I'd forget to blink sometimes). With the newer ones, it's basically as if I had fully working eyes and if my prescription changes then I can put in different lenses next month.

I wouldn't even bother. No matter how valid a point you make the Kool-Aid Drinkers will never agree with you, and just continue quoting their gospel and insisting it's "fact", not politics. I know: I've been there many times.

No, that's not the point. Having a live virus for developing vaccines and antivirals are where the usefulness is.

It is very much like the anti-missile component of MAD, which neither side wanted the other to have.

There are techniques that allow searching within encrypted files, but they rely on the client creating the index. You can then search the index for an encrypted search term and, if you know the keys, interpret the answer. Getting this right is quite tricky (there are several research papers about it), so he's right, but it's not impossible.

The main reason that I suspect DropBox discourages encryption is that they rely a lot on deduplication to reduce their costs. If everyone encrypted their files, then even two identical files would have different representations server-side if owned by different users, so their costs would go up a lot.

I, for one, am in favour of removing bread from the human gene pool.

Yes, almost certainly. The market for compiler engineers is very much a sellers' market at the moment. Universities neglected it for so long that most people graduate from undergraduate degrees with basically no knowledge of how a compiler works (if they're lucky, the know how compilers worked in the '80s), so there are 10 jobs for every person.

In The Humane Interface, written in 2000, Jef Raskin made the same complaint. The time between turning a computer on and having written a program to add two numbers together on, say, a C64 or a BBC Model B, was about 30 seconds. On a modern computer of the time, you wouldn't even have finished booting - starting the IDE would take even longer. The problem is, this misses the point. There are lots of scripting languages with REPL environments, including a POSIX shell and PowerShell on Windows, that can do this as a single command once the computer is running (on OS X, you can add numbers in Spotlight, so it's even quicker - just hit command-space and type the sum). If you want to write a more complex application, it's vastly easier today. Extend that simple calculator to show an editable history and show equations, and you'll find it a bit easier today. Now extend it to be able to print - if you've ever written applications to print in the era before operating systems provided a printer abstraction then you'll know how painful that was.