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Comment Re:I found this article to be more informative (Score 1) 219

How's it different? Cameras aren't different than your friends and neighbors voluntarily going to the government to inform on you? Can you honestly see no difference there? Or are you just SO KEEN to say NSA=Gestapo that you will make any mental gyrations necessary to maintain your previously-established mental conclusions?

Submission + - Maldives Denies Russian Claims That Secret Service Kidnapped A Politician's Son

Rei writes: As was previously reported here, the Russian government has accused the US Secret Service of kidnapping the son of ultranationalist LDPR MP Valery Seleznev in the Maldives. The son, Roman Seleznev, stands accused of running one of the world's largest carding operations, with others charged in the affair having already been convicted; however, Roman had until recently been considered out of reach in Russia. Now the Maldives has struck back against these claims, insisting that they arrested him on an Interpol Red Notice and transferred him to the US, as they are legally required as an Interpol member state to do. “No outsider came here to conduct an operation,” president Abdulla Yameen stated. “No officials from another country can come here to arrest anyone. The government has the necessary documentation to prove it.”

Comment Re:Bitcoin isn't money but it's still a financial (Score 1) 135

<i> I want to be responsible for my money, and I want to be able to use it freely, without government snooping.</i>

Use cash - it's like bitcoin but it can't be tracked across the Internet.

Of course, if you take cash from some people and then give it to other people, well then you must be a criminal.

Comment Re:Is "tyrant" now the opposite of "activist"? (Score 1) 353

It is the elected bodies' responsibility to make the laws. It is the judiciary's job to judge them. A judge who writes laws from the bench is indeed an activist judge, and this is very bad indeed. How do you recall an unelected activist with lifetime tenure? You can't. Homework: describe six cases in which activist judges wrought catastrophe through well-intentioned activism.

Comment Re:Fetishising nature + this is after all a desert (Score 1) 265

Honest question: is it possible for people to have opinions that don't agree with yours? Or is everything that disagrees with you propaganda? Is calling it propaganda a way to relieve yourself of the burden of giving serious consideration to other viewpoints, and perhaps changing your mind once in a while?

Comment Re:Just to get through the misleading stuff: (Score 1) 94

It's to remove inefficiency of government. The EU are all smart people, they can make much better decisions when they are left alone. Just think of how good life will be when the stupid people are removed from the equation and government eliminates negative outcomes from the realm of possibility.

"Referenda are pure gambling. There is no guarantee of a positive outcome, unfortunately."
-- Danish EU advocate Charlotte Antonsen

Comment Re: (Score 2) 497

He said ice sheet. So we're supposed to ignore what he actually said and assume he meant something completely different? Um, no.

"I am not well read in this department" - wait a minute, you can give exact cites for research papers on sea ice, but don't even have a *general* conception of what percentage of the Antarctic ice sheet is gaining versus what is losing? Something tells me you're just grabbing cites you've never even read from denier websites.

Let me help you out with ice sheet. Pretty much all of the East Antarctic ice sheet is gaining, while pretty much the only area losing is the Antarctic peninsula and surrounding areas in West Antarctica. Now, they're losing *mass* a lot faster per unit area than the east is gaining mass, but in terms of area, the overwhelming majority of Antarctica is gaining ice. Because it almost never gets above freezing there, even in a warming world.

The 2010 paper was evaluating the failed CMIP5 predictions

If you'd actually read the paper, which you clearly haven't, you'd know that they themselves did the CMIP5 runs, it's not CMIP5 runs that had been done earlier. Do you even have a clue what CMIP5 stands for? Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5. As in, "there were four freaking phases that came before this one". CMIP5 is comprised of all of the latest models from all over the world. They didn't even start planning CMIP5 unitl September 2008. Your notion that this is some sort of review of old climate predictions just shows how terrible your understanding is of what you're talking about and how you don't actually read the papers that you cite, that you're just simply grabbing them from whatever denialist trash websites you read.

Comment Re: (Score 1) 497

First, that's a paper from 2010. How was a paper from 2010 supposed to be "predicting" anything about what scientists in the past thought?

Secondly, and more importantly, I had been responding to Archangel Michael, who was talking about the thickness of the Antarctic ice sheet, not Antarctic sea ice. So your link about pack ice is totally irrelevant.

But hey, let's switch topics totally and talk about sea ice, since you seem to want to. Here's how the IPCC sums up all papers on the modelling of antarctic sea ice, including this one:

Whereas sea ice extent in the Arctic has decreased, sea ice extent in the Antarctic has very likely increased. Sea ice extent across the Southern Hemisphere over the year as a whole increased by 1.3– 1.67% per decade from 1979–2012 with the largest increase in the Ross Sea during the autumn, while sea ice extent decreased in the Amundsen-Bellingshausen Sea. The observed upward trend in Antarctic sea ice extent is found to be inconsistent with internal variability based on the residuals from a linear trend fitted to the observations, though this approach could underestimate multi-decadal variability. The CMIP5 simulations on average simulate a decrease in Antarctic sea ice extent , though Turner et al. (2013) find that approximately 10% of CMIP5 simulations exhibit an increasing trend in Antarctic sea ice extent larger than observed over the 1979-2005 period. However, Antarctic sea ice extent variability appears on average to be too large in the CMIP5 models . Overall, the shortness of the observed record and differences in simulated and observed variability preclude an assessment of whether or not the observed increase in Antarctic sea ice extent is inconsistent with internal variability. Based on Figure 10.16b and (Meehl et al., 2007b), the trend of Antarctic sea ice loss in simulations due to changes in forcing is weak (relative to the Arctic) and the internal variability is high, and thus the time necessary for detection is longer than in the Arctic.

Weak trend, short observed record, and high internal variability in the simulations. Which shouldn't be surprising, sea ice is a lot harder to model than ice sheet thickness, which really only has three main parameters - snowfall, melt/sublimation, and outflow, and the short observed record is due to how few people historically have navigated antarctic waters vs. arctic.

But again, to reiterate the primary point: the conversation you jumped into was about ice sheet thickness, not sea ice.

Comment Absurd (Score 2) 285

The machine's designers must not be able to explain how their original code led to this new program

That is a flatly ludicrous requirement, far in excess of what we would ever even consider applying to determine if even a human being is intelligent or not. Hell, if you were to apply that standard to human beings, ironically, many extremely intelligent people would fail that metric, because in hindsight, you can very often identify precisely how a particular thought or idea came out of a person.

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