If you have so many nits to pick, why don't you just pay someone to do it right for you? OSS projects aren't in a position to give you a usable system, they can only provide you with raw code. Someone has to take this code and turn it into something useful and usable. This can be you or somebody working for you.

Of course Al Gore isn't a trustworthy source. The United States presidential election of 2000 provided clear and unequivocal empirical evidence that George W. Bush was more trustworthy than Al Gore. Which was a pretty low threshold to miss.

Actually their animals did all but starve until they had eaten the last Viking. So in an odd way, the Vikings may have saved the polar bear.

Also, you never answered my question: In principle, what evidence would convince you that global warming is real, anthropogenic, and dangerous?

What evidence, by the way, could convice you that the world will be better off in 2100 or at any later time if we do not take any precautions today?

A strong scientific consensus is derived from...
1. Overwhelming evidence via multiple independent lines of enquiry.
2. A high degree of predictive and/or explanatory power.
3. A lack of conta-evidence and a lack of equally valid alternative explainations.
(...) The strong scientific consensus on GW is that mankinds emmisions are causing the bulk of the observed warming and it will servely retard our civilisation unless we act to reduce those emmissions by ~70-80% over the next four or five decades.

So the consensus you are talking about is in part a consensus about the state of our civilization a few decades into the future.Would you mind telling us ...

1. What exactly is the evidence that we have about the state of our civilization a few decades into the future?
2. Have there been any empirical experiments aiming to determine the predictive power of people who claim to be able to predict the future? If so, what were the results?
3. What would you consider valid contra-evidence that could convince you that a consensus about the state of our civilization a few decades from now might be wrong?

We can't all waste electricity.

We can't all have an Internet. It was a pleasure to meet you. Goodbye.

We literally owe more money in debt than actually exists.

How about ... recycling?

Maybe so, but here's a hypothetical situation to consider. A comet is crashing towards the area you live in. Scientists have a raging debate as to whether or not it will completely disintegrate before hitting your house. Do you stay in your house till they reach a "consensus" or get the hell out of there?

I have one more hypothetical situation to consider:

An evil empire of infidels is threatening the country you live in. Religious leaders have a raging debate as to whether or not going martyr will help to defeat them. There is a consensus among them, however, that you will end up in paradise if you do so and that ending up in paradise would involve a few classrooms full of virgins to your disposal. Do you shrug it off or do you blow up yourself and others in a crowded place?

Whether global warming is true or not really doesn't matter much. We still need to take precautions to prevent pollution and switch to cleaner energy sources. It will benefit our own health and safety as well as be a matter of prudence.

It ain't that simple. You are making an assumption: that every precaution we might be tempted to take would be without negative side effects, or that the positive effects would outweigh the negative ones. But this remains to be verified for every proposed solution. Considering your hypothetical situation, how would your assessment change if, after everything was over, you learned that the comet did indeed disintegrate and 315 people died from accidents while panicking and fleeing?

This doesn't imply that we shouldn't do anything. But we must remain rational in our risk analysis. And we have one element which is highly dangerous here on the political part of the debate. I'm sort of uneasy about the idea of justifying action today with a predicted result far into the future. This isn't wrong per se but it must not be used to override agreements that underlie our societies and political systems. Otherwise we will end up in a 72 virgins kind of a situation where people could be manipulated into anything by pointing to the great future success they are obliged to contribute to. There would be no easy way of disagreeing. If you don't like the paradise and virgins example, feel free to consider Marxism instead, which is built on the idea that human societies would develop according to principles that science has discovered (which may even be true) and that this science would predict that we are all going to end up in communist paradise (which has been profoundly discredited by history).

I'm sometimes bothered by the stress on studies being "verified" by something like a peer-review process.

This is a misunderstanding. The role of peer review is not to verify anything. To the contrary, there are many situations where a reviewer will not be able to verify results with resonable effort. Think LHC experiments, Mars probes, etc.

Peer review is really just a spam filter. Reviewers can check whether a publication has novel aspects to it, whether it is relevant to the journal or conference, whether it is presented in a comprehensible manner, whether releated work is properly cited, and so on. A paper that has passed the peer review process is not verified, it is only deemed useful.

There are people who claim otherwise and unfortunately some of them are scientists. Overstating the capabilities of peer review makes sense if one attempts to use science in politics (which isn't wrong per se) and attempts to close political debates on the sole ground of scientific considerations (which is usually wrong).

Recommended reading:

• Three myths about scientific peer review (where one commenter adds a link to this article quoting reviewer comments on famous computer science papers)
• How Are the Mighty Fallen

in Michael Nielsen's blog.

So, how'd I do? :)

Thanks a lot for the references.

My prime plan is that I think it should be possible to cut or short one or more lines on the TPM chip to effectively deactivate it or at least isolate it, boot into custom control software, flip the switch, and just feed the chip the same sequence of values it would load during the authentic Trusted boot sequence.

This attack is known as the TPM reset attack.

The TPM is specifically designed to secure the computer against the owner.

That's funny. They (the Trusted Computing community) keep telling me that the TPM and the technologies surrounding it were never designed to protect against physical attacks. It should be obvious that this is a bad choice when trying to secure a computer against the owner. Can you point me to a specific reference in the specification or other official matter regarding this design objective?

Except that real "trusted computing" using a TPM chip doesn't store the key in the CPU or in RAM, it is stored in the TPM.

This is a dangerous belief. It is true that some keys remain inside the TPM, at least as long as the chip is being accessed only through its wire interface. However, the TPM ist not suitable for bulk encryption. Applications therefore typically use the TPM only to store keys, which are extracted to memory when needed.

The attack essentially depends on being able to shutdown the computer but keep the memory cold enough that the randomization time is slowed down tremendously, giving enough time to perform a dump of the contents onto another system for further analysis.

The attack is really extracting the encryption key from memory after gaining physical access to the machine. Cold boot, cool as it may be, is just one particular implementation of it. To effectively protect your system you should defend against the attack, not particular implementations.

I thought Slashdot was against the TPM chip? Last I read, it was supposed to be used for anti-piracy.

Further down (or up?) the thread, Slashdot still is. But a TPM is not going to help you much here. The TPM is not supposed to do bulk encryption so it is typically used to restrict the release of a key to certain conditions. Which means that even with a TPM one will end up having the actual key somewhere in the RAM.