I can only agree with you for the most part, science did what it was supposed to do but how many times and for how long has the old guard held up progress? Of course one can't generalize about all consensuses being wrong but it still happens often enough that erroneous consensuses are imposed by force. Regarding the whole debate about Neanderthal/Cro-Magnon interbreeding I actually saw Ian Tattersall claim interbreeding was impossible (I'm using the non scientific term Cro-Magnon because it's less clumsy than early-modern-human). Tattersall also wrote an entire paper in 1999 find where he dismissed the Lagar Velho child as a hybrid and then admitted on film in a documentary in 2002 that he hadn't even seen the actual skeleton. This issue is a good example of a consensus being imposed on a community by the old guard, progress in the field was held back for years and the word of Tattersall and his peers would probably still be law if they hadn't been caught off guard by scientists from another discipline with irrefutable evidence. Tattersall is now quite busy eating crow. Science did what it was supposed to but with an agonizingly long hiatus of limited progress. One can say what one wants about the way Trinkaus and Zilhao reacted to Tattersall's 1999 paper but they have been proven right about interbreeding. The only thing that remains for them to be completely vindicated is if somebody actually manages sequence DNA from the Lagar Velho child and proves conclusively that it was a hybrid.

It's not just that verifying somebody else's results in not sexy. There are other factors as well. There used to be a broad scientific consensus about phlogiston theory being the best explanation to explain processes like combustion and oxidation. Eventually it was discredited against fierce opposition from some of the big names in science at the time and there are many other examples of this from other scientific fields. Scientific consensus about some theory or other sometimes has a tendency to be imposed by big name scientists who have the clout to do that because they have built a career and a reputation that depends on their theory and their research remaining unchallenged long after it is starting to become clear that the theory and perhaps some of their research results are just plain wrong. There is politics in science like everything else and sometimes politics trumps science.

It is hard to believe that a near miss by a SAM would be given less attention by the captain than a malfunctioning coffee maker and even harder to believe that this incident was not reported. If a SAM exploded 20 seconds away from my DC-10 full of passengers whose lives I'm responsible for that would sure as shit get my attention if I was the captain and you can bet your bottom dollar I would report it to somebody. The original article simply says the captain refused to report the incident, it does not say he didn't try so it's entirely possible that he actually did try to report it and was told in no uncertain terms to shut the f*** up about it.

It does if you know anything about Finnish history. Pissing off the Soviets was may have been an American national sport during the cold war period but for the Finns it was not at the top of their agenda. Finland spent the cold war balancing on a razor's edge they were bound by post WWII treaties to have a military of a fixed (and rather small) size and of course to remain neutral. For this reason the Finns painstakingly split their military procurement exactly down the middle. Half the air force jets, half the army's tanks and half the navy's ships were bought in the Soviet bloc and the other half in the West and it was a very successful strategy (which is why its now being suggested as a solution to the Ukraine crisis). The Finns may have wiped the floor with the Soviet army during the Winter War but it was still not an experience the Finns cared to repeat in the nuclear era. Since the aircraft wasn't actually harmed no purpose would have been served by deliberately embarrassing the bad tempered 16 foot tall, 3000 pound grizzly bear sitting on their eastern border by advertising the ineptitude of the Soviet air defenses so the sensible strategy was just to play it down.

I've got a better match for you. Here are just some of the entities that the Islamic State has made enemies of:
- Iraq - 65% Shia so mostly against.
- Syria - 72% Sunni but currently at war with them and partly living the reality of ISIS rule, so against.
- Jordan - 92% Sunni, relatively secular country, no history of widespread ISIS support but possibly in doubt.
- Hezbollah - Shia militia currently fighting against ISIS in Syria so against.
- Free Syria Army - Relatively secular, moderate and currently at war with ISIS so against.
- United States - Definitely Against.
- Britain - Definitely against.
- Iran - Shia country efinitely against.
- Saudi Arabia - In doubt.
- Russia (maybe) - Scared shitless of this kind of movement spreading to Russias moslem regions so against.
- al-Qaeda - Threatened by ISIS so, against.

There are also some other entities involved in this the original list left out.
- The Kurds - Mostly Sunni but largely secular and at war with ISIS so against.
- The Kurdish Yazidis - Currently watching their women being sold as slaves to ISIS fighter so definitely against.
- The EU nations - Definitely against.
- The Non EU Nato nations - (chief among them Turkey) Definitely against.

I'd say his analysis is overwhelmingly correct.

The USA has been buying Soviet made equipment on the black market since the 1980s at least and in large quantities. So if anybody ever wondered where the Soviet weapons came from that the CIA gave to the Afghans to shoot at the Soviets with now you know...

Bullshit, you can't just reduce this to Weapons. Weapons are only as good as the people who operate them and they are only as good as those who lead them. Everything that has happened in Iraq since 2003 has been influenced by American meddling. Ibrahim al-Jaafari was replaced as Prime Minister of Iraq after the Bush White House became displeased with him due to his inability to curb the insurgency (which was not surprising in view of the fact that the army had been disbanded and some of the best troops had joined the insurgency). Iraq may have had democratic elections but the selection of parties and candidates available for election was carefully engineered by the USA and the same goes when it came to choosing which people occupied key government posts. Eye witness accounts of the search for a successor to al-Jaafari reminded me of the Praetorian's hunt for a new Roman emperor after the demise of Caligula. Having no idea who to replace Caligula with they finally found Claudius hiding behind a curtain and made him emperor and the US had given no more thought to who would replace al-Jaafari than the Pretorians had done when they disposed of Caligula. Finally the White House just chose Nouri al-Maliki, next best guy they could find without having any idea of how capable he was or whether he'd be an inclusive leader or a divisive one. The White House knew so little about al-Maliki that they mispronounced his name until he personally corrected them. Al-Maliki was so inexperienced he had to get weekly tutorial sessions from George W Bush Jr over video link (talk about dub leading dumber). It is this choice that is now coming back to bite the Obama administration along with it's own lack of interest in what is happening in Iraq. Yes the army was trained, yes the Sons of Iraq effort created a chance at reconciliation and yes It was al-Maliki, America's chosen man who de-Sunnified the government and civil service, it was he who fired all the US trained officers and replaced them with militarily inept cronies to coup-proof the army and it was his sectarian policies who sparked the campaign of repression that eventually led to the 'ISIS invasion' which in reality is a full blown Sunni revolt. Iraq today is very much America's mess and that is why the Europeans may be willing to join in the fight against ISIS by helping the Iraqi Kurds and possibly the YPG in Syria but they will remain unwilling to touch Iraq proper with a 16 foot pike. That's America's mess and it will have to be America who deals with it along with (irony abounds) Iran.

I had no idea who this Deadmou5 guy was until today. I searched on his name, saw that logo and concluded the instant I saw it that the Disney company is retarded if they think that their Mickey Mouse trademark looks anything like his logo (which is what this is about, right? trademarks, not copyright). Even a five year old would not confuse them. Disney seem to be suing anybody whose logo or trade mark looks even remotely like Mickey Mouse just on the off chance they find a judge who is brain dead enough to rule in their favour. The US must have a surplus of such judges if Disney did the math and concluded that this is a workable legal strategy. What's next? Sue anybody whose trade mark contains three circles whose centrers are arranged in an Isosceles triangle and who partially overlap? From a court transcript: Why no your honor, Having gone to Harward Law School I am actually quite literate and I know the big circle has "Billy Bob's Auto Parts" written in it and I also noticed that the two smaller ones have a picture of a pick-up truck and a buxom red-neck girl in them but we at the Disney corporation still feel that due to the arrangement of the three circles in an Isosceles triangle and their overlapping nature, that this logo could easily be confused with an image of Mickey Mouse thus confusing consumers.

Well they'd be right to be obnoxious and I hope they give these geniuses hell. I watched that video and all I saw was two stupid idiots climbing into a Volcano doing a whole bunch of things you could also have done with a drone and probably better too. I know science sometimes requires risk taking but this was just a dumb stunt.

Right, the best way to prevent sophisticated American weapons from ending up in the hands of ISIS would have been to not hand them over to an incompetent sectarian asshat like Nouri Al-Maliki, the proper way to prevent that from becoming the only option would have been to not start a stupid war in Iraq to boost Halliburton stock prices, this in turn brings us to the most workable way to prevent America from starting a stupid war in Iraq in the first place which would have been to not elect a cheerleader for president.

Putin can and will rattle his Nuclear saber but he won't use it until the utmost end of need so at the moment those are empty threats. The Ukraine situation could have been solved following the downing of MH17 by making it clear that any move of Russian regulars into the Ukraine and any support for insurgents would be regarded as an act of war. Failing that the thing to do would have been to match Russian support of the Insurgents with direct aid to the Ukrainian military. The most extreme reaction and the most likely one to be understood by Putin is marching 150.000 troops up to the Polish-Romanian and Baltic borders with the Ukraine and Russia, sending Nato naval task forces into the Black Sea and North Atlantic. Follow this up by dispatching somebody to knock on the Kremlin doors to ask if Putin would like to come out and play and I'm pretty sure the answer would be NO. The I and especially the C his beloved BRICS group would sit on their hands in the event of a war knowing as they do that they can only benefit from not getting sucked into a war in Europe and that that benefit would come to a large extent at Russia's expense. Russia would be alone, utterly and completely alone in such a war. Putin is a schoolyard bully and the only thing a bully respects and understands is a naked fist. Obama on the other hand has decided to rule out the employment of American military force which is a bit like entering a Poker game and pledging not to bluff. I'm beginning to wonder if he caught the stupid disease from sitting in the same leather office chair as GWB.

That is true, but I take issue with the 'basic skills' thing. You don't just learn basic skills when completing a CS degree you learn to analyze code and the way it works and that set of skills is often mostly missing with many of the self taught coders. For example when you hire a guy with a CS degree you get somebody who is more likely to write, say, an O(n log n) algorithm when a guy who just taught himself to code might come up with an O(n^2) or O(n^3) algorithm. In fact you'd probably struggle to find a self taught coder who even knows what Big Oh notation is. Coding is not just about writing clean code, it's about having been taught to understand mathematically what code does and more importantly what it will do even before you write it. You are also fairly certain to get a guy who recognizes the benefits of using a parser generator like Yacc when parsing complex files rather than writing a more naive parser that will quickly run into trouble as the complexity of the text increases. Most self taught coders that I have run into don't even have the knowledge to understand what tools like Yacc & Lex (and others like it) do to in order to be able to use them. Of course there are no guarantees that a CS guy didn't have a rich daddy who bought him a degree or that your applicant didn't just scratch his way through school just barely passing all of his exams between keg-parties and Chlamydia shots and retained little of the knowledge; just like some self taught coders are really smart and have skills way above the average self taught guy. However, as long as he came from a proper school and has proper grades, with a CS graduate you will at least get somebody who has had all of this stuff pounded into his brain so the odds of getting a guy who will write decent code are somewhat greater.

It would surprise me if they ruled against the government in this matter. This turd is going to get handed on all the way up to the supreme court. Major players and two presidents from both the Republican and Democratic party have stood behind this mass surveillance, one by setting up the operation and the other by doing nothing to dismantle it but rather making the same liberal use of the mass surveillance data as his predecessor. Ruling against the government in this matter is a career ending move for anybody involved in the decision unless they are have reached the peak of the promotion ladder and are unfireable like the supreme court judges are. What is interesting is will the supreme court choose to hear this case, or bail out the government by refusing to hear it? Apparently they hear no more than 100 cases a year. It all boils down to whether or not the judges (2nd Circuit or Supreme Court) have the balls to flip a bird at the White House and the entire Republican and Democratic establishments or not.

Just thought I'd express my opinion that Randall Munroe is a genius. The amount of work he puts into some of his comics really makes him unique.

Unrecognized command. Type "help" for assistance.
guest@xkcd:/$ help
That would be cheating!

Pure UNIX!

Leaving the Solutrean hypothesis aside for a minute some of these 'crazy' ideas that our ancestors were more mobile than we give them credit for have been stigmatized by the great egos in the scientific community in the past to the point where putting serious effort into investigating them was the equivalent of professional suicide. Even so sometimes, not always, but sometimes, they deserve better than to be ignored. In fact there is a written record that goes back at least a thousand years about contact between Europe and N-America:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saga_of_Erik_the_Red
These records have been well know for a long time but nevertheless until the discovery of L'Anse aux Meadows was rubbed in their faces some scientists thought accounts of Viking travel to the Americas were folk tales that should not be taken seriously. Since then Native American DNA has been found in Icelanders and that DNA is thought to be the result of pre-Columbian contact. Basically there is now genetic evidence that at least one Native American woman was brought to Iceland where she married a local man resulting in a group of living descendants:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/11/101123-native-american-indian-vikings-iceland-genetic-dna-science-europe/
This is not really so surprising if you think about it. If the Vikings, who count among the greatest navigators and seafarers in history, could find America. Why is it unthinkable that some Native Americans could not have gone back with them to Europe? There is no mention of this in the Sagas or contemporary annals but does that mean it didn't happen? The DNA seems to tell a different story. Another good example is that there is a growing body of evidence that Native Americans had pre Columbian contact with Polynesians which was considered laughable not so long ago. In retrospect it seems pretty ridiculous to think that scientists once considered it obvious a people who are arguably the greatest navigators on earth and who were capable of sailing for thousands of miles over open ocean between tiny islands with primitive technology would have missed what are by far the two biggest islands in the Pacific but that's sicentists for you. In the end they are only human and it takes a change of generations for the thinking to change.