I have no intention -- or reason, for that matter -- to reply to you about something someone may have written on Twitter.

However, regarding what you asked above, I have a question of my own: are you unaware of the issues that have been raised about GRACE? That seems unlikely.

I have already admitted I made an error.

But as for dishonesty, yes, you have given me ample and frequent reason to think you have been less than honest. So I won't apologize for suspecting you may be doing so at times when you may not actually be. "Fool me once..." as the saying goes. Here is an example:

Nowhere did I write such a thing. So when you continually -- rather routinely, in my experience, as I have demonstrated on many occasions in the past -- suggest I have stated things that in fact I have not, I have to wonder what the reason is. Given the context and past experience, Occam's Razor would seem to indicate dishonesty. I know of no other reason that is anywhere even remotely as likely.

No, without looking into it further, I do not agree. I'm not claiming that it is false, either... I would have to look some things up, which I am not free to do at the moment.

One thing I would have to check, just for example, is what those confidence intervals are given the multidecadal variability, which is not -- at least not uncontroversially -- known to any precise degree yet. What has been claimed to be a newly discovered variability in the Atlantic has turned up, for example. Not to mention that we know during La Niña periods of ENSO there tends to be storage, while during El Niño, more of a release. All these factors would need to be considered. Until I do, I neither agree or disagree.

Engaging in your usual context-shifting, I see. But even more: how could I be "reflexively dismissing it" if my own statement, which you quoted, was "THOSE temperatures are no surprise and have already been accounted for"??? , That makes absolutely no sense. No great surprise there, I suppose.

Assuming the rather huge problems with GRACE's accuracy have been fixed. It is claimed they were. Perhaps they have been.

Except I did not do that. You have had a very nasty habit of twisting what other people say. That's dishonest. I've pointed that out to you many times, over a period of years. You really need to start reading what people actually say rather than interpreting so heavily.

Now, THAT is a fair point. I did in fact get surface temperatures mixed up with upper ocean temperatures. Mea culpa.

But I am just curious. Just a straightforward question: are you now claiming, as you seem to be, that the "missing heat" cause of the pause in surface warming is actually hiding in the UPPER ocean, rather than the lower?

Thanks, Obama.

You have a point but it is grossly over-stated. First, it is very clear why the U.S. telephone and internet infrastructure currently suck: incompetent (or in some cases corrupt) regulation. When ISPs and phone service providers are allowed to act as oligopolies, they just pocket their money and run, rather than properly investing in better infrastructure. Because they can.

However, there is another issue that is mostly unrelated: the U.S. is less densely populated than most "Western" countries, and the cost of infrastructure for providing comparable service is provably higher. That doesn't excuse the monopolists and incompetent bureaucrats, still it is true. And the U.S. government's attempt to fix the rural infrastructure problem was a comedy of errors, literally ridiculous cost overruns, and incompetence.

So you can lay the blame for a lot of this -- perhaps most of it -- directly at the feet of the U.S. government.

Back when we had a telephone system that was a properly regulated utility, it was demonstrably better than in the vast majority of Europe. Many European countries still had competing land-line services that were wholly incompatible with one another.

Also: in the beginning, the Japanese were not making cars that were "far superior" to those built in the U.S.. What they were making were cars that got better mileage and were inexpensive. The quality left a hell of a lot to be desired. So that statement is just plain wrong.

Over time, the quality got better and the U.S. manufacturers (also effectively an oligopoly, or so they thought) did not keep up. So much is undeniable.

Originally, the meaning of "drone" in relation to vehicles meant it was autonomous, with no pilot at all. It had nothing at all to do with line of sight. But Now it is often used to mean remotely-operated craft, regardless of whether they have any autonomous capability, but that's very different indeed from the original.

The word "drone" essentially meant "no human pilot", even a remote one. And it's still that way in a lot of dictionaries.

We don't know what will be possible in the next 1000 years, but it's entirely possible that out inability to travel faster than light is not a technological problem. That is, as our knowledge of physics becomes deeper, we might only confirm that FTL travel is simply impossible, no matter what technology we bring to bear. It's impossible for us to say with certainty, at least at this point in our development, but there is no reason to think that we can actually develop technology for FTL travel, time travel, teleportation, or a lot of other scifi technologies.

Now you might bring up flight, as many people do. "200 years ago, you would have said that there's no reason to think that we would develop the technology for manned flight, but we have!" True, but at least there was a precedent. We knew that flight was possible, because we'd seen birds do it. Even in traveling through space, there has been a precedent in that we've known for a while that meteors fell from "the heavens" for quite a while, and people may have suspected that it was the case even before that, so we knew that material could traverse the sky. And anyway, there didn't seem to be physical laws that prevented it, other than that we're heavy, and there didn't seem to be any way to get up there. There was the potential to build a staircase as high as your architecture skills would allow.

But FTL travel? All indications at this point are that it's simply impossible. If we were to posit that mankind will someday achieve inter-galactic travel, I would guess that it would be by developing suspended-animation and AI capable of piloting a ship over that kind of time frame. The logistics of planning that kind of trip are pretty unimaginable, but I still suspect it's more realistic than FTL travel.

I think if you're an IT worker-- one who's actually interested in his job-- then this information is probably of some interest. It sounds like a lot of it would be things I already know, but "How to setup SSL/TLS properly so that it uses the bare minimum of resources," seems like a helpful bit of information to have.

Well yes, you should use SSL. It may have problems, but what's your other option?

I'm not sure how it relates to the conversation, but the US still does have a lot of engineers. Unfortunately, a lot of them are scrambling in competition to build a half-assed mobile app that they can sell to Google for a billion dollars. That's the American dream these days: make a half-assed company that I can sell for a lot of money before people realize it's useless and the whole thing implodes.

For the jobs you're talking about, it's not clear to me that they intend to attract the "best and brightest". They're willing to settle for, "Will work long hours picking fruit for almost no money, and will be too afraid to report me if I break labor laws."

Microsoft Surface?

I'm not too familiar with what you're specifically referring to, but I would wonder if they've really simulated insects. It seems more likely that there have been projects that created and tweaked some kind of machine learning that resulted in behaviors similar to insects. The distinction may not be obvious, but it's one thing to say, "I've completely simulated the intelligence of a bee," and another to say "I've been able to create an AI project with artificial 'bees' that are able to exhibit some of the same swarm behaviors that real bees do."

I think it's worth pointing out, though, that your listed "features" are all computing features. I know you also say "many more features", but the fact that you list computing features seems to already assume that intelligence is a function of computing. It's not clear to me that we can make that assumption.

I agree that it's a rough/vague term, which is why I think it would be important to be clear what we're talking about before we can say how close we are to achieving it. I've heard some people suggest that Watson is a good example of AI because it has shown that a machine can perform some intellectual function better than people can. Fair enough, but then we could have said that about computers quite a long time ago-- computers have long been able to memorize numbers and perform arithmetic faster and more reliably than people.

On the other hand, a person might suggest that to have real "intelligence" in the way that people do, it would be necessary for an artificial intelligence to be able to empathize with others. Even if that's something that could be simulated with computing power, the activity itself is not a direct "feature" of computing that belongs in the same list as "processing speed" and "response time".

Now you might be reading this post and thinking, "Empathy?! This guy is stupid. Obviously you can have intelligence without empathy!" Well, perhaps you can, but I think it depends on what you mean by 'intelligence', which is not something that has ever been made clear.

Not necessarily. Here's where things get difficult: the question of how you tell who is a "serious" philosopher, and whether there's such a thing as an "objective metric", is a question for philosophers.

I would not agree. What we call "science" is an offshoot of "natural philosophy". The scientific method was created by natural philosophers as a refinement of practices they were already using: observation, hypothesis, experimentation, and falsification. Philosophers realized that if you limited a line of inquiry to only things that could be tested and falsified by physical experimentation, that they could make much more effective progress in those particular topics. Hence, science.

And I know, there are people who think that philosophy is just a bunch of silly idiots arguing about nonsense that can't be proved or disproved. Ironically, those people are generally subscribing to a specific philosophic viewpoint, and not a very well thought out one.

I also think it's important to understand the context of the "stop and frisk" stuff going on in NYC. There's a practice of randomly searching people without any real grounds for a search, and statistically, minorities are being frisked much more often than white people. A while back, there was even a recording leaked where police officers were being specifically instructed to search young black men.

If police are going to target young black men, it seems only reasonable that young black men should be educated on how to respond so as to protect their rights and to avoid getting hurt.