Well, is the data that sensitive? Here is one they released: http://pdfcast.org/pdf/nato-1 Old and dull. And Sabu yesterday claimed they were about to release a bunch of Sun emails. Now they say they won't. There's a bit more smoke than fire.

Nice thread title. Racist much?

In reports of this size, there will always be small errors. The problem is that right wing bloggers trumpet these up to raise doubts about the basic science, and then fox news et. al. broadcast this even further. The result is a complete disaster: people will not make the sacrifices needed to stop climate change if they have doubts about whether it is happening. A great example is leakegate, where the Sunday Telegraph used a tiny citation error to suggest a conspiracy of scientists to falsify evidence of global warming (the UN report cited another report which contained the peer reviewed work, rather than directly citing the peer reviewed work). Eventually, the Telegraph retracted their article, but not before the damage was done. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/06/leakegate-a-retraction/ As Mark Twain said, lie can get halfway around the world while the truth is still putting its boots on...

We need more than just the ones on the list. All minutes of all government meetings (including cabinet meetings) should be published except parts which have security implications. Just like opensource code allows for scrutiny, opening up government will make representatives think twice before screwing us over...

Propublica is pretty awesome, and their recent piece about Magnetar, and the market crash is a great example of that. http://www.propublica.org/feature/the-magnetar-trade-how-one-hedge-fund-helped-keep-the-housing-bubble-going And with the recent videos released by wikileaks of the US military mowing down civilians, it seems more and more, it is alternative media which is doing real journalism. Newspapers claim they are loosing money because of internet news and thus can't afford to do investigative reporting. Propublica and wikileaks are the other side of that coin.

Yeah, I think it better to read the original sources rather than the shit journalism on this. There's a non-technical section of the report and to my mind, it is saying the opposite of the headline: "Stop emitting CO2 or geoengineering could be our only hope The future of the Earth could rest on potentially dangerous and unproven geoengineering technologies unless emissions of carbon dioxide can be greatly reduced, the latest Royal Society report has found.

I also love the variation of headlines for this story. Slashdot and the BBC report it as "UK Royal Society Claims Geo-engineering Feasible," while the Financial Times reports it as "Hopes dashed for geo-engineering solutions". The Nature blog has an interesting entry about the variation in headlines.

I love how the Pentagon are hailing this as a success even though the part that they were supposedly trying to test, (i.e. whether the system can be fooled by a balloon), completely failed to deploy.

By all accounts, these tests are completely rigged, and the system can be fooled by the simplest of tactics. The only way to really test it, is to set up a game, where you allow a completely independent team to try to fool the system and another team to try to shoot it down. It is really dangerous to kick off another cold war in order to deploy a system which is a complete fraud. This is yet another way to funnel money to defense contractors...