It's funny that the slashdot teaser - and your response - both latch onto the "private" part of the picture, as though there was inherent reason to dread private enterprise when providing some important service, to presume government would do better.

bravo

We reject [this] false choice.

Sorry, that was certainly not the intent. Of course "the" (this particular topic: AGW) was implied, and everyone else understood it that way.

"utilizing the scientific process honestly, let alone correctly"

Well ok, mistakes happen ... but these don't meet the suggested criterion of "ignoring science entirely".

"skeptics would like [to own the term skeptic]"

And the people's front of judea would like the splitters to call themselves the front of judean people.

"other than that, the story was accurate"

"the denier ignores [science] entirely"

Do such people actually exist? (e.g., "scientist X, Y, Z don't have credibility with me" is not "ignoring science entirely".)

I'd really like to hear what Bennett Haselton has to say about that.

Read some of Michael Totten's series on Cuba.
It's not much better than North Korea, if you get beyond the goo served up by the michigan documentator.

I don't know anything about the physics of this paper.

But I love figure 3 (also highlighted at the aps.org URL),
because it highlights outliers from the theory, and points
to the supplementary information for theories about why
those points didn't fit the otherwise nice curve.

Bringing attention to errors as well as successes - that's
good honest work.

Well sure, but the point is that it's not up to the whims of the license or licensor what those legal terms mean. They exist outside.

The authors of a license, even the GPL, cannot simply redefine the pre-established legal concept of "derivation" (absence of which implies irrelevance of license, no matter what the licensor prefers).

... well, considering the supposedly the purpose of the medallion was to keep meanie drivers out of cabs, then they should reflect the deemed safety of the -driver-, not the car.

The trick is that the light source varies with different samples. What this apparatus appears to be computing is a dot product (overall image intensity) with a series of 2D wavelets. Then inverse-transform the coefficients to a 2D image.