As an American, I am profoundly depressed by this thread. I respect the juror who is posting his perspective here, and greatly appreciate the fact he's taking the time to explain what happened from an insider's perspective. But his account reveals a terrible devolution of our system of justice: the ordinary citizens on a jury no longer protect us against an inappropriate or unfair application of the law.

It makes me furious every time I hear a juror come out of the jury room and say "I don't think he really did anything bad, but according to the judge's instructions, I had no choice but to convict." No, you had a choice. The brilliantly cynical and untrusting rebels who wrote the Constitution put you there to make the choice. Not an unfeeling robotic choice, not a judge-directed decision, but an independent decision that truly reflects the informed judgment of a "jury of peers."

The jury has become, not an independent check against the juggernaut of government prosecution, but a mere puppet of the system. In such a legal system, any one of us can be sent to jail for life on the government's whim, because there's not one of us who doesn't -- knowingly or unknowingly -- violate several laws daily; we count on juries to say, when appropriate, "ok, maybe he technically violated the law, but this prosecution is unreasonable, and we're not going along with it."

Our system was designed to make it really, really hard to convict. And really easy to acquit. If the prosecutor doesn't like the case, he can toss it out. If the judge doesn't like the case, he can toss it out. Heck, if the judge doesn't like the jury's "guilty" verdict, he can toss it out (but he can't set aside a "not guilty" verdict). Why has the jury come to believe they can't exercise at least the same power as the prosecutors and the judge routinely do: the power to toss out a case that just ain't right?

Looking at the pop-up labels that show up when you mouse-over the data, there seems to be a huge temporal discontinuity in your data set: right at the first vertical stripe, the displayed date/time labels jump from 2009-09-17 to 2009-09-27. Maybe I'm just misreading the display, but a 10-day discontinuity would seem to account for the anomaly you describe.

It couldn't be that easy, could it?

"not properly calibrated" means they did not match temperature, were pointing down while temperature up. And there was no way to "calibrate" them.

Yes. But if post 1960 results of proxy vs temperature do not match, PRE 1960 proxy temperatures ARE in question. In other words, how can we know that proxy shows correct temperature for MWP, if it cannot be "calibrated" to match instrumental record?

No dispute about that.

But a lot of question here. Was there MWP? Was there little ice age? Is this really happening on a scale not known before?

It can only indicate that there was warming 1975-2000. Nothing more. If you join random noise for 1000-1960 and then put 1975-2000 intrumental record next to it, you will get the curve too.

Nice anectodal story, but what that has to do with AGW?

When Iran cracked down on their citizens last time, during this summer's protests, Western companies such as Siemens and Nokia provided them the technology to do this.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124562668777335653.html

I also highly doubt they're building massive databases with worldwide surveillance on Iranian citizens -- for the purposes of going after their relatives within Iran -- with their own home-brew technologies.

This takes some scary stuff some Iranian University students could not simply hash together -- things like deep-packet inspection of all internet traffic and massive data-mining algorithms in the scope of millions upon millions of megabytes.

While personally I agree that in an ideal world journals should archive data used in publications, there are several real world issues:

• Journals have a small circulation. This means that they already charge an arm and a leg per issue.
• Journals have a small staff. In fact most reviews are sent out to unpaid 3rd parties because the journals don't have the in-house staff to do the reviews themselves.
• Journals have very limited resources even when supported by publication giants such as Elsevier. Adding the burden of holding the raw and processed data along with source code for every one of the 20x articles per issue would require an increase in staff to maintain the additional server space, an increase in cost to support the additional IT geeks and servers, and would ultimately result in the journals NOT getting distributed due to cost-related issues.

Bottom line is that the journals would only do this under duress because it would hurt their bottom line and probably make the publication process even more forbidding than it currently is.

Now that said, there is an attempt to create open-access journals which I am all for, but this is still a bit of an experiment. Many faculty are evaluated for tenure based on the reputations of the journals which have accepted their articles. If I publish all my research to an unknown journal which is experimental and hasn't established either readership or gravitas, I'm not likely to be taken seriously by the community nor my peers when I am up for tenure. It's sad, but true.

IANAL, but I'd never before heard of a law that explicitly required software to behave in a very specific way, and display very specific warnings. That alone tips this bill into the "big deal" category for me.

Add to this the tendency of prosecutors to misuse Federal statutes in ways that clearly exceed the legislative intent, and this law seems to open the door for prosecution of any government-targeted "bad guy" who also happens to have such 'illegal' network software.

And, of course, the original reason for this bill also stinks: it's almost certainly an RIAA-bought-and-paid-for law clearly designed to eliminate the "I didn't know" defense when suing file-sharers.

For months now, some RIAA-influenced Congressmen have been working on a crazily overbroad P2P regulation bill, H.R. 1319: The Informed P2P User Act. It just passed out of committee last month.

I would expect Congressmen to be falling all over each other to bring this to a vote now. After all, it's they're no longer just doing it for the RIAA/MPAA "campaign contributions." Now, it's personal.

The situation is already far worse than anyone in this thread has mentioned. Sure, you can strongly encrypt your laptop, and then, at the US Border checkpoint, adamantly refuse to provide your password. Fine. If you're a US citizen, they have to let you in anyway. And, of course, they'll confiscate your laptop for forensic analysis, which will yield nothing.

And, most importantly, the now royally pissed-off customs agent will document the fact that you were uncooperative (and carrying potential contraband) in the US Customs database. The database that is automatically checked every time you enter the country. Expect an anal probe *every* time you deal with US Customs from then on; and of course, losing your laptop at every subsequent entry into the US is a given.

US Customs' ability to mark you and make all subsequent travel *miserable* has greatly improved in recent years. "Land of the Free" my ass.

Chile is very clear and upfront about the reason for the $131 entry charge: it's because that's exactly what the US charges them for a visa. If the US quit charging, so would Chile.

In that respect, I found Chile *far* more civilized than the US.

In the USA, the "emergency personnel" that respond to a suicidal person call will probably be cops. The odds of that suicidal person getting himself shot go way up once the police are involved.

I would exhaust *all* other possibilities before calling the US police on someone I cared about.

When I received Red Cross first aid training, I was taught that applying a tourniquet is a decision to "sacrifice a limb to save a life." Having to pre-apply one of those things to each of your limbs before going into combat has got to be immensely sobering.

For an 18-year-old kid, the theoretical possibility of getting killed in combat probably doesn't hold as much dread as the very real possibilities of traumatic amputation symbolized by those tourniquets.

I hope that they built Hell large enough to contain all those national leaders who enter "wars of choice," as well as all military recruiters who play up the "money for college" aspects without mentioning the "wear four tourniquets to work" bit.

--
"A rational army would run away." -- Montesquieu

"280 million Trinitron displays equals how many billion tonnes of lead and other human-unfriendly substances?"

Doubtful that the Trinitron hazardous waste is anywhere near even an "billion" tons. Assuming two kilograms of lead per TV, that's 560,000 tons -- three orders of magnitude less than the smallest accepted value for "a billion tonnes".

Sadly, there's probably far more lead in use as pipes and solder in your municipal water system than will ever leach out of your city's dead Trinitrons.