If they found a weakness in Twofish, and wanted the world to migrate to a crypto algorithm that they have an attack against, then wouldn't it just have been easier to select Twofish instead of Rijndael for the AES specification in the first place? They were both finalists.

Look, it certainly seems like the NSA has tried to meddle with crypto standards in order to have an attack vector, and I can agree that a certain amount of paranoia is in order, but the theories you propose are so convoluted that, of all things the NSA might have cooked up, that has to go far down on the list. What is even to say people switch to Twofish if they switch, and not one of the other AES finalists? Or use both Twofish and Rijndael simultaneously for that matter?

Besides, the weakest part of most crypto systems (disregarding implementation and usage for a moment), is probably the key exchange/management algorithms. And from what I have understood, that is where the indications of standards manipulations have been.

I'm not suggesting that people should necessarily switch from AES to Twofish, or that Twofish is more secure. I don't even think Bruce is saying that. But I find the idea that the NSA would somehow be behind some kind of covert manipulation scheme to get people to switch to Twofish simply extremely unlikely. If nothing else, for the simple reason that I don't see it happening anyway. Could the NSA be sitting quietly on a weakness? Sure. But in that case I would be more worried about EC, and to an extent RSA. That is, if we limit ourselves to the theoretical component, and disregard the obvious target: implementations.

It would be an insanely unlikely coup. Think about what you are suggesting: First they get the entire world to use AES, to the point where leading CPU manufacturers have even included special instructions in the hardware specifically for encoding and decoding AES. They do this only so that an alternative algorithm (Twofish) would get less scrutiny by independent researchers for a number of years. They then orchestrate an elaborate leak indicating that they have attacks against some unnamed publicly used crypto algorithm. Meanwhile, or even before that, they have recruited an established and well known writer and cryptographist, and have him attack them openly in the public debate, only to give an apparent credibility to the algorithms he has designed. The intent of this is to get everyone in the industry to suddenly switch all cryptography to his somewhat less scrutinised algorithm (probably after reading about it on Slashdot), despite the fact that the author, who they had recruited to attack them, still claims that the math behind AES is solid, and despite the fact that replacing AES would now require replacing hardware and software that permeates our entire society at enormous costs.

If there is ever a time for the tinfoil hat metaphor...

The term "climate change" pre-dates "global warming". The former has been used at least since the 1950's. See for example The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change, Plass, Gilbert N., 1955 (link).

Also note that the UN panel (established in 1988) is named the "Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change", not Global Warming.

They never really "changed it".

If you argument is that an atrocious act somehow resulted in the smallest amount of total (civilian?) deaths, compared to whatever events could have occurred otherwise -- an argument which, like I said, I don't even agree to on principle -- then certainly the burden of proof is on you to show that. Why bomb two cities and not one? Why civilian targets and not military? Why not wait longer between the first bomb and the second? Why not bomb mount Fuji or some other symbolic object instead? Why not warn the inhabitants before bombing? There are hundreds of alternatives, if you bother to think about it.

Yes, for the umpteenth time, I know that! What does that have to do with anything? This is a discussion about nuclear weapons. What's with this pre-school level logic that keeps coming up; do you believe two wrongs make one right?

Furthermore, the difference is that if you gather a bunch of Germans and ask them about it, they will admit to that description, which is the entire point of my argument.

Since this discussion is going in circles, this will be my final post in this thread. Sorry about that, but I just don't have the time for it.

I think they should have not dropped the bombs. And if they did, I think they should have dropped only one, and not on a densely populated civilian target.

Underneath your question lies the assumption that the circumstances somehow forced them to commit these acts, and that they didn't have an option. I don't agree to that.

I also don't buy the utilitarian argument. Not only is it speculative to the extreme (and I could argue that the war would have ended anyway), but I find it fallacious on its very principle. If not, why not use nukes in more wars? And why not use biological and chemical weapons as well? Why not rape the wives and kill the children of enemy soldiers that refuse to give up, to break their morale?

It seems to me that you are rationalising, because the idea of the US having done inexcusable acts of barbarity doesn't fit with self-image of being a righteous nation under God (or whatever you want to call it).

People are not evil, deeds are. There is no point in passing judgement on individuals who are long gone, but it is important to recognise what they did in the name of a nation and a people that is still here today. This isn't limited to the US, just because we happen to be discussing that now, nor to the nuclear bombings for that matter, as far as historical events are concerned.

That's one part of the equation; a few big titles is more or less necessary for them to stand a chance at all. But they still need someone to produce the consoles cheaply (if they cost like a gaming PC it'll never compete with XBone or PS4), and that requires volume, which in turn requires a huge initial investment and commitment. I'm not saying it's impossible, and as a Linux user, once a gamer myself I really hope they succeed, but they only way I'd bet on it is if they've managed to attract some of the big players in the hardware industry (e.g. Samsung, LG, Asus, Acer) that might be interested in grabbing piece of the console gaming pie and are willing to chip in some serious resources to do it.

It's not going to be easy. Bootstrapping a console ecosystem is immensely expensive. You need to become big very quickly, or you get a negative feedback cycle where you have few users, leading to few games being developed for it, leading to fewer users, and so on. To an extent, they can leverage their PC gaming presence, but it's still going to be an extra cost for developers to support an additional platform, which they aren't going to take unless there is a significant market there. And if the consoles are much more expensive than the competition, it'll be a tough sell to console gamers. If they don't have the economy of scales, they'll have to subsidise the hardware, and that costs serious bucks. Microsoft took an enormous investment when they entered the console market with the original XBox.

I'm thinking their best bet is to make it an open specification for which they develop a standard software stack, kind of like Android did for smart phones. That way, they can get hardware vendors (Samsung et al.) to make the heavy lifting.

Yes, I know that the US firebombed Tokyo and several other cities, and that those bombings caused hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties. Why do you presume that I think they were any better?

I also don't get what Germany and Russia have got to do with anything. We are discussing the nuclear bombings of Japan. If I were discussing Russian history with Russians, you bet I would be pointing fingers! There is nothing precluding me from recognising more than one barbarity. As far as Germany is concerned, I wouldn't need to have this discussion with a German when it comes to the holocaust.

Honestly, both of those arguments have got to be among the lousiest you could find. The first basically amounts to something like "Yeah well, we also did much worse things. So there!", and the second is what I would expect form a child, trying to excuse a mischief by the fact that other children did something similar.

You can call it whatever you want, but putting a label on a situation doesn't somehow suspend moral. There are choices in a war just like there are at any other time, and people are responsible for them. If the Japanese had possessed nuclear weapons, and used them to obliterate New York and Washington before the war ended, do you think that would have been found acceptable?

I get that people sometimes do horrible things when they are under pressure. I can even accept it, if those who are responsible have the conscience and dignity enough to fully recognise their actions and their consequences, and deal with their history honestly without rationalising or looking for excuses.

I'm not really sure what your point is regarding the firebombing of Tokyo, the scale of which I am already fully aware. Did you think I was okay with it, and by extension should be okay with the atomic attacks?

One can of course argue about hypotheticals, but the fact remains that the US chose to two densely populated civilian targets, with the intent to massacre as many civilians as possible, as efficiently as possible, most of them women, children and elderly. They did this without warning, and they chose to drop two bombs with such a short interval that the Japanese hardly had a chance to fathom what had happened before the second one dropped. The original plan even was to drop four, but they apparently had the decency to change their minds before manufacture of the other two had finished.

No matter what rational one can come up with, there is no other word for those actions that atrocities. That a lot of Americans will not recognize this, I personally find despicable. As former US Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara said, quoting General LeMay: ""If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals." And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?".

Ironically, your comment and the comment you respond to shows exactly how easily one can get caught up in the details of the complexity, and forget about the underlying logic.

Save for the effect of fluid intake/loss (causing temporary changes in weight), the GGP was pretty much spot on. Your weight change is the difference between energy consumption and energy expenditure. The only reason you are able to gain muscle mass when exercising (and I then assume you mean weight lifting, since endurance exercise doesn't really cause muscle hypertrophy), is because you are eating enough. Try exercising while fasting, and I will guarantee you that there is no weight gain whatsoever.

The difference when exercising is that you increase energy expenditure (the "calories spent" part of the equation), and that you gain weight in the form of muscle mass instead of or as well as adipose tissue (i.e. "fat"), provided that you eat enough.

For a DIY hobby project maybe. Somehow, I don't find it very comforting that this is the mindset of people who are entrusted with everyone's private information (things like banking data, medical records, private correspondence, news interests, political leanings, whereabouts etc.). It kind of gives the impression that it's just a game to them.

The ice story was particularly idiotic. The ice cover of 2012 was at an extreme low; this years it's pretty much spot on the (downward) trend line, which happens to lie 60% above the 2012 record. Drawing any long-term conclusion from that difference is like saying there will be no winter this year, because it was warmer today than yesterday.

Peter Hadfield summarised it quite nicely in a video.

So, you bring up two different questions; I will try to respond to both, one at a time.

First, there is Hans von Storch's interview with Der Spiegel.

Hans von Storch is a German climate scientist. As far as being "the lead author" of "the IPCC report" is concerned, I'm not really sure which report you are referring to. Each of the 11 chapters of IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (the most recent one) has around ten or more lead authors, and as far as I can tell Storch isn't among them. He isn't even among the even larger group of contributing authors. Nevertheless, as a climate scientist who has been in the field for a long time, he raises some valid points.

Storch is discussing temperature data from the last 15 years (not 20 as you first said -- when he mentions 20 years, he is talking about the hypothetical scenario that the current trend would continue for another 5 years, and what that could mean).

Essentially, his point is that we are currently observing a slower increase in surface temperature than many of the models had predicted. While we are certainly talking about a rather short time period on a geological time scale, the models used by Storch's team indicate that these observations are unlikely to have occurred through random fluctuations. Hence, he concludes there is probably something going on that hasn't been modelled properly.

At the same time as we are seeing this reduced increase in surface temperatures, other climatological changes, such as rising sea levels and ocean water temperatures, have carried on.

Based on measurements of incoming and outgoing radiation, it has also been observed that the Earth absorbed more net energy between 2004 and 2008 than surface temperatures would suggest. This has led researchers to wonder where this energy has gone.

One suggested explanation is that heat is being transferred to deep ocean water, to a greater extent than previously anticipated. (Since water has a very high heat capacity, the oceans can buffer a significant portion of the thermal energy.) A recent study by Balmaseda, Trenberth and Källén concludes that this is in fact happening, and that it is the result of certain weather phenomena in recent years, such as El Niño.

In fact, Storch brings the heating ocean water explanation up himself, further down in the same interview.

The thing is though, if increased heat transfer to deep ocean water is happening, it doesn't actually change our long-term fate. Deep ocean water is expected to heat as we reach a new thermal equilibrium, just not this early. In other words, assuming this theory proves to hold water (no pun intended), the end result is the probably more ro less the same; things just heat up in a slightly different order.

Throwing CO2 out of the equation, on the other hand, isn't really anywhere on the map. It would immediately make historical data inexplicable and put into question a lot of fundamental physics. And nor is Storch suggesting any such thing. What we can hope for is that the Earth's sensitivity to CO2 forcing has been overestimated somewhat -- that could make the soon hopelessly out of reach maximum 2 degrees warming target perhaps more attainable.

All in all, I think it would be fair to say that the jury is still out on exactly how the recent apparent stagnation in surface temperature increases should be interpreted. We should not get carried away. No doubt, the coming few years will shed light on the issue. Additionally, it's not exactly like the current pace of climate negotiations will get around to doing anything drastic in the meantime anyway, so let's not slow them down further still just because there are open questions. There always will be, from time to time, and they aren't (yet) big enough to challenge the primary conclusions.

Since we were talking about consensus, I'd also like to make it clear, by quoting from the same interview as you did, that Storch is not dissenting on the view that there is significant AGW. So as far as consensus is concerned, he is part of it:

Now to your second source, a quote from Nicola Scafetta. As far as I can tell, Scafetta's statement traces back to a paper he published in 2009 regarding the ACRIM gap (the roughly two-year long gap between the ACRIM-1 and ACRIM-2 satellites, where high-quality solar irradiance data is missing).

One thing to keep in mind is that Scafetta is a statistician, and has published papers in a wide array of scientific fields (ranging between sociology, economics, medicine and astronomy). While I don't wish to diminish any of his published and peer-reviewed results, I think it's relevant to be aware from what context he then draws conclusions from those results. Nevertheless, let's look at what he is actually saying.

From what I can understand, in his 2009 paper Scafetta investigates the ACRIM gap using a model called SATIRE, specifically the variant called SATIRE-T. Using this model to bridge the gap between the two disjoint data series, he proposes that total solar irradiance (TSI) has increased between the solar cycle minima of 1986 and 1996. From this, he draws the conclusion that TSI has had a positive trend, and therefore explains much of the recent warming. (Disclaimer: The actual article is behind a paywall, so this is based on the abstract and secondary sources.)

You asked if I could provide any sources refuting Scafetta's claims. To that, I refer you to a paper published by the authors of the SATIRE model shortly after Scafetta's paper. In short summary, they respond to Scafetta et al. by saying that the SATIRE-T model isn't suitable for the kind of calculations Scafetta et al. are doing, and that the SATIRE-S model should have been used instead. They then go on and do the same calculations using the SATIRE-S model, from which they get a data series that shows no increase in TSI between 1986 and 1996.

Finally, let me note that the fact that these kinds of serious discussions are going on among climate researchers -- openly in peer-reviewed journals -- is, to me at least, strong evidence against the kind of conspiracy theory that is constantly brought up by dissenters (albeit perhaps not by you), and is an indication that the scientific process is working as it should. When contradictory data are found, models and theories are scrutinised.

And so far, the overall conclusion has remained intact.