IIUC, his lawyers requested that certain materials not be produced, and in doing so quoted a section of the state law which exhempted a particular category of material from being required to be produced. If you don't like the phrasing, talk to the people who wrote the law. His lawyers were just doing their job, and making it easy for the judge.

I don't think they count as science...until the make predictions that match the later observed results. Then they do.

Unfortunately, as you pointed out actually recreating the simulation can be absurdly difficult. And if it's not reproducable, then it's not science.

That said, when I worked at a transportation study commission, we used models all the time. We never deceived ourselves that they were correct, but they were a lot better than just guessing. Policies were built based around their 20-year projections. Often we'd have several very different 20-year projections based on different assumptions about what would be done in between. (Would this transit project be successful? Would that bridge be built? What effect would building the other highway have on journey-to-work times?) The results were never accurate. They were subject to political manipulation...but so was what projects would be built. It was a lot better than just guessing, but it sure was a lot short of science.

I think of this frequently when I read about the models, and the problems that people have with accepting their projections. Usually the problems aren't based in plausibility, but rather in what beliefs make them comfortable. And in those cases I tend to believe the models. But I sure don't think of them as "sound science".

OTOH: Do you trust the "Four Color Theorum"? It's a mathematical proof that any map can be colored with four colors, with no two adjacent patches having the same color except at a single point. The proof is so complex that no human can follow it. Do you trust it? Would you trust it if a lot of money was riding on the result?

Even math is less than certain. Complex proofs are only as trustworthy as every step in them multiplied, and both people and computers make mistakes. There are lots of illusions that prove that people will frequently dependably make the same mistake. So you can't really trust math. But just try to find something more trustworthy. You need to learn to live with less than certainty, because certainty is always an illusion.

Who's going to tell the judge no? Who's going to enforce it?

Sometimes a judge will be so egregiously corrupt that the higher courts will discipline them, but it's quite infrequent, and I've never heard of it happening when he was acting to support the local politicos. (And even then the "discipline" is generally trivial in comparison to the offense.)

Are you certain about the "state secrets act"? It seems to me that National Security Letters cover the same ground...and then some.

The Republicans who were responsible for emancipation (as an act of war against the rebellious South) is only vaguely related to the current Republican party. The Democrats have a closer link, and again, the civil rights movement was a political attack against the Dixiecrats, who pretended to be Democrats, but actually had an independent agenda.

P.S.: Given what the Federal Govt. has become, are you so sure states' rights was a bad idea? You can trace the current Federal Govt. back to the centralization imposed (by both sides!) during the Civil War.

P.P.S.: Under privitization, prisons have become defacto sources of slave labor. So don't claim that slavery has been eliminated. It's nature has been changed, but it isn't gone.

Just because you are convinced a particular technology is going to succeed doesn't mean that you want it to do so. Betting can, thus, be better than investing.

Taxes go TO the government. Payroll comes FROM the Taxpayers.

Besides, the NSA already read all the emails anyone.

Because delays in the case have delayed the start of Discovery. Interestingly, Mann has asked the court to exempt him from discovery. He thinks that only he should be able to ask questions and not anyone else.

I think there is a qualitative difference between notifying large end users like Facebook in advance, and notifying people in the distribution system for a general release. It's the former that inherently means the people who aren't large end users with privileged access get left exposed for longer than necessary, and that's what I'm objecting to.

You're latching onto this specific case, perhaps because you have some connection to it, but I'm talking about the general principle here. In general, it is not unreasonable to assume that if a vulnerability has been found by two parties in rapid succession, there may be a common factor involved, which may mean that other parties will also find it in the same time frame, and that an extra day may therefore be very significant.

Obviously most serious security bugs don't sit there for years, then have two groups discover them at almost the same time, as seems to have happened in this case, and need half the known Internet to update their systems as a precaution because no-one really knows whether they've been damaged by the vulnerability at any time over the past couple of years.

If it's that funny to you, why are you defending giving them a day of advanced warning? Some of us did have a patch rolled out within a couple of hours of the public announcement, but presumably we could have had the patch rolled out a day earlier in the alternative situation. Once again, in this case, one day in two years obviously isn't that significant as we're all going to have to assume keys were compromised and set up new ones anyway. But if this was something that only got committed three days ago, it's a different story.

You're still assuming that the dev teams, or to be more precise the parts of the dev teams who will actively review new code, are the same size. That isn't necessarily true at all, so the "provided everything else is equal" part of your last sentence is the problem here.

It's still highly uncertain whether a court would find a contract to exist at all under these conditions.

Even if it does, you can always go to court and argue for your right to be there because the other guy's term about arbitration is unenforceable for whatever reason. The court might disagree and send you back to arbitration, but they won't stop you coming in the door in the first place.

Which statement do you think implied that? I don't see anything about it in this thread.

Why? I see little evidence that this is happening in general.

Most established OSS projects seem to require no more than one or two reviewers to approve a patch before it goes in, and then there is no guarantee that anyone will ever look at that code again later.

How does that guarantee that more experts will review a given piece of security code than in a proprietary, closed-source, locked-up development organisation that also has mandatory code reviews?

But you didn't review it and find the vulnerability, did you?

And apparently, despite the significance and widespread use of this particular piece of OSS, for a long time no-one else did either, or at least no-one who's on our side did.

Your argument is based on theory. The AC's point is based on pragmatism. It's potentially an advantage that OSS can be reviewed by anyone, but a lot of the time that gives a false sense of security. What matters isn't what could happen, it's what actually does happen.