The relevant question for any sane person is: Would it have happened anyway?

What's interesting from a societal standpoint isn't whether an average engineer, at that particular time in history, would have thought of the same idea. What's interesting is whether the same "invention" will arise and gain society without the help of a state-granted monopoly. If Google's business model was crafted only a short while later, without them knowing about that particular patent (I don't know if that's the case), then that would strongly suggest that the patent doesn't benefit society, and should in principle be invalid, in my opinion.

The law may not agree, of course.

Yes, it may be appropriate to take a call in such situations, and it would then be accompanied with "I apologise, this is an important call, and I really need to take it" followed by the person leaving the room while taking it as to not disturb the others. People will understand and accept that if it's really the case, and you didn't plan for it to happen during the meeting. This is of course the same as with any situation -- there can always be exceptional circumstances that override what would normally be seen as appropriate social behaviour. I don't think that's what TFA is about, though.

But that's what they are already doing! It's all about quantifying -- the primary mechanism has been known for some 150 years, the rest of it has been a long history of quantifying things, with increasing precision.

I challenge you to name a single credible objection relating to "natural changes" that hasn't been, or isn't being studied.

Yes! They are so intimately part of climate change models that it would be impossible to not study cyclical properties. That is why the statement doesn't make sense to me -- it would be like saying "we want you to study climate and focus on molecules", or some other completely generic and inseparable property abundant in every aspect it. And then they call it "cyclical climate change", as if there existed some kind of separate theory of the climate that is purely cyclical. As opposed to what? Linear climate change? Like you said yourself: "You simply can't even begin to have a valid theory if you do not take them into account".

The only plausible reason I can see why they would give that kind of directive to the researchers, is that they have read a claim from someone that "it could all be cyclical" (insinuating somehow not caused by the huge increase in greenhouse gases), and instead of actually trying to understand some of the science, or even the scientific process in general, they buy into those kind of vague, unspecified myths, and now want the scientists on "their" payroll to "investigate" them, nonsensical as they may be.

Either that or pure malice, but since I firmly subscribe to Hanlon's razor, I'm going for scientific illiteracy over malice.

You can't, which is of course why that is pretty much all climate research consists of -- separating and modelling different forcings and interactions, some of them caused by human activity, most of them natural. Really, how did you figure climate researchers arrived to the conclusions there are today? Have you even looked at any research?

I don't even know what they mean by "cyclical climate change". There are multiple factors affecting the average energy in the climate system, greenhouse gases (primarily carbon dioxide) and solar irradiation being the most important ones. You need both to explain temperature trends, not only the current ones but historical. It has been studied by many researchers to great detail, and it is being studied still more.

By telling the researchers to "look at 'cyclical' climate change", you are telling them to lock in to a conclusion, that climate changes cyclically, instead of studying and understanding the mechanisms that causes change. It is probably one of the most blatant and ignorant attempt and controlling science for political motives I have seen.

What is your point, actually? Are you suggesting that having stability and thereby attracting service providers justifies using those service providers to spy on people? And if you don't live in a country with an economy comparable to the US, you deserve to be spied upon, because it's your own fault for not "solving it"? It's "easy to solve", after all.

I'm not really a fan of those FTFY kind of comments, but for the sake of your own education:

I can assure you, that is not what is the controversy elsewhere.

If you want daylight-like colour, there are other alternatives than LEDs. Ceramic metal halide lamps, for example, have excellent colour rendering and about the same efficiency and life expectancy as LEDs, at a significantly lower cost. The main drawback is that they take a while to fire up, but that isn't really a problem with street lights.

I can't speak for biology since I've only had superficial contact with that field, but the fields related to my profession are far from isolated ecosystems. Not to say there aren't problems with the system of scientific research and the way it's funded that should be addressed, but from my experience, bottom line is that it works.

And I presume you can back that description up somehow, or is it all conjecture? You see, I'm the kind of person who actually do check sources, thoroughly.

How you say it works doesn't match my experience. If you discover something that's actually relevant and useful, your results will be replicated, one way or another. There is no getting away from that. If for no other reason, it will happen as soon as someone tries to build upon or improve it. And until your results have been verified by someone else, your conclusions are just going to remain in a sort of "unconfirmed" state in the scientific community. Simply being published doesn't make something a scientific fact.

But you gain recognition and get published if you prove someone else wrong. And your academic progress is hampered if someone shows your results to be flawed. I think you are ignoring the competitive element.

That said, there is a problem with the current trend of grants being based strongly on the number of published papers, as it waters down the content of each paper and gets in the way of basic, long term research where there is no guarantee for "quarterly research results".

I'm sure that if they had not destroyed the docs, it would have been spun something like: "Even though the government informed them that these documents were sensitive to national security, they kept them. So they knew what they were doing was wrong." (See, you can get to the same conclusion either way, if you really want to.)

Clearly, you didn't read my footnote. Note that the median age is also very close to 10 years, so the distribution isn't as skewed as you presume. Classic cars are too few to be significant.

I find it doubtful that autonomous cars would be used much more -- the limiting factor for road trips today is hardly lack of drivers.

Again, it depends on how you want to define trust. I trust (within reasonable bounds) that they will behave according to a certain morality -- a morality to which I may not agree with, but one that I know and understand.

My impression is that you prefer to define their behaviour as lies, in order to invoke the immorality commonly associated with lies. In a sense: if what they do is similar to and just as bad as lies, we should value them equally. And in that regard, I think you are missing my point. I am not making an argument about the ethics of their behaviour. And actually, I would contend that that question is independent of what terminology we choose in order to label it -- their actions remain the same regardless.

What I am saying is that it is relevant, from a pragmatic standpoint, to differentiate between (technically) truthful but deceptive statements, and blatant lies, irrespectively of which of them is more or less immoral. If you want to use other words to describe that, then by all means feel free to do so. Mixing them up, on the other hand, is, well, a bit deceptive...

Well, if you want to get into a discussion about semantics, maybe. My point is that you can trust them, after a fashion. And, consequently, that the notion that they are all just liars, so there is no point in listening to them, is flawed. Hence, the distinction is relevant.

Then we could of course discuss whether any deception is equally immoral, regardless of whether it is a technically truthful statement or not, but that would be to head off on a tangent, so I'm going to leave it at your comments and my own insinuations.

I don't know, to me it's about as predictable and unnuanced as a so called fanboi comment. I read it as a satirically formulated straw man argument in support of a cynical standpoint that one should put absolutely zero trust in anything a government or corporation says. A standpoint which I find rather disingenuous.

Certainly they could lie to us, but most likely they are not. For whatever reason, many corporate leaders and politicians seem to adhere to a curious ethic where blatant lies are shunned, while deception or dishonest interpretations are perfectly okay. There is a difference between the two, because the latter can help you penetrate and understand what they are really saying. If you look at the carefully selected wordings of public statements, you can often get a clue as to what they are actually avoiding to say, instead of just dismissing everything as "lies".

Just to give you an example from recent public discourse: When a big cloud service provider says something along the lines of: "we have not given the NSA direct access to our servers", they are probably speaking the truth. Assuming that, it suddenly tells us something about how the NSA actually has been spying; namely by intercepting the traffic between the servers, possibly on site. Otherwise, the company would probably have said "we have not given the NSA direct access to our data centres", or something similar. The key is what they are not saying, and what words they are using.

In this particular case, some obvious question would be: How many surfaces were manufactured? Are we talking about all of them, or a first (perhaps small) batch? How should we quantify "close" (to selling out)? With the correct interpretations to these questions, they are probably not lying.