The problem isn't that someone can inject a fraudulent signal that does bad things. The problem is that THE OFFICIAL BROADCAST SIGNAL can include code that does bad things.

Just because code is part of a TV broadcast doesn't mean you should trust it. Just because code is part of a TV broadcast doesn't mean it should be able to hijack your stored internet credentials and automatically log into your account on any website, and take actions on those websites as if they were you, modify the content you see on those other sites, shouldn't be able to log into your web accounts as you, scan and phone-home a copy of all of your personal information accessible on that account. It shouldn't be able to spy on your activity and report it back. It shouldn't be able to scan and attack other devices on your home network.

Fucking asshats. They design a system with forty-two layers of DRM-enforcement security, but any signal that's part of the broadcast is given automatic authority to do anything it wants, given overriding authority against the TV owner's privacy and security.

What ever happened to products designed around the wants and needs and interests of the buyer, so that people will want to buy your product rather than your competitor's? These pieces of shit are obviously designed to serve and protect broadcasters, regardless of the owner's interests.

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There's a semi-famous SciFi story first published in a 1990 edition of OMNI magazine:

THEY'RE MADE OUT OF MEAT

Quite relevant, and quite funny.

Someone also made a seven and a half minute film of the story. It has a few cute video aspects, but overall it didn't come off so well and it's missing a few lines. I definitely recommend the original text link above rather the video version, but here's the video link anyway.

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Maybe you were infected by a stray creationist meme, chuckle.

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I can imagine a world without war, a world without hate, a world where everyone lives together in peace. I can imagine us attacking that world.

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It's a damn sight better than "all the experts think that, therefor I'm going to spin a wild conspiracy theory and believe the opposite!"

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The Slashdot population leans heavy on the tech and science geek side, people who are generally pretty good at finding reliable websites like the National Academy of Science, and secondary websites that reasonably reflect reliable mainstream science.

Usually.

Except when it comes to fucking climate change, when suddenly a substantial portion of our population buy into some wacky conspiracy theory that the entire mainstream science community is in on some conspiracy to publish lies, and they start actively rejecting the fucking United States National Academy of Science as presumptively unreliable, and instead start digging up random blatantly trash websites that gain "reliable" status when they see that the info supports the "right" side of the issue. And you start running into "climate" papers cited to support a point - papers filled with blatant errors - and when you google the author's name to try to figure out what sort of idiot wrote it, it turns out the author wasn't a climate scientists at all..... no... the author was a "combustion engineer".... and then you think "WTF is a combustion engineer" and you find the link to his professional page you see (drumroll please) he's a combustion engineer specializing in how to burn coal better. And you can't help but laugh at the absurdity of it all. Because the otherwise competent geek you were debating with fell into paranoid conspiracy nonsense throwing out everything he knows about reliable science, and rejecting sites like the National Academy of science as "unreliable".... and instead found himself a "reliable" junksite that said what he wanted to hear.

You can use reliable sites to figure out what to believe, or you can use what you believe to determine which websites are reliable. One of those two options doesn't work so well.

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I could point out that in 20 years of tracking the climate you'd EXPECT typically one result breaking the 95% confidence band on the high side and one result breaking the 95% confidence band on the low side.... and that I'm pretty sure we broke the 95% confidence band on the high side in 1998... but never mind that....

The whole warming thing is basic undeniable laws of physics. Sunlight shines down, hits the ground or ocean, and turns into heat. And basic laws of physics, CO2 blocks thermal infrared energy from leaving. Heat energy is trapped, Q.E.D. the basic principal and basic fact of global warming is an absolute undeniable result of basic laws of physics. The only complicated part is exactly what will happen with that trapped thermal energy. Where will it go and what will it do.

Surface temperatures have been rising slightly slower than predicted for the last few years, however the ocean temperatures have been rising faster than predicted for the last few years. That means the total warming balances out right just as expected. As I said, basic laws of physics, a pretty well predictable amount of heat energy was trapped, exactly as predicted.

The complicated part is how that heat energy will flow in the climate system and what abnormal effects it will produce in climate system. And just as we (in general) expected, it resulted in random anomalies in climate circulation - there was anomalously high rate of ocean mixing carrying more of the heat energy into the deep ocean.

The earth is warming exactly as expected, and weird random shit is starting to crop up in climate circulation patterns, just as anticipated. (I believe Donald Rumsfield would call these "Known Unknowns. We can predict that the climate is going to start doing weird shit we've never seen before, even if we can't predict exactly what that random shit is going to be. The overall heating of the Earth is a pretty well Known Known.)

Changes in ocean circulation is a core expected "unknown". The slight increase in vertical mixing we got is pretty insignificant, it gives a temporary slowing in the land-temperature rise. But another very possible change in ocean circulation patterns would be a shift or shutoff of one of the north-south circulation loops. If that happens.... well.... then they're going to start saying the "Alarmists" were overly optimistic. No one can even guess at the odds of that, so scientists focus on the known-knowns of the total amount of warming and sea level rise.

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The laws of physics aren't PROVEN! They're JUST THEORIES!
Checkmate, warmists.

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Indeed, there is a heavy overlap. Furthermore there's a well established correlation between conspiracy theories in general. Someone who believes in one conspiracy theory is more likely to believe in others. Anti-vaxxers and moon-landing deniers are more likely to be warming-deniers or creationists, creationists and warming-deniers are more likely to be anti-vaxxers or moon-landing deniers. Oh... and toss in 9/11 Truthers of course.

Once you start believing NASA/Doctors/Biologists/Climatologists/Geologists or whoever are in on some vast global conspiracy of deception, it's easy to expand and merge the conspiracies.

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Lead was eliminated from gasoline (and our air) by government mandate. The same goes for keeping mercury and other crap out of our water.

So either agree that it is reasonable and appropriate for the government to restrict/prohibit the usage of the atmosphere/waterways as an unlimited dumping ground for industrial waste, or go move to some communist country toxic hellhole city in China or Russia where society polluting HASN'T transformed by government mandate.

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No, he wasn't using Argumentum ad populum.
An example of Argumentum ad populum fallacy would be "Most of the general public believe global warming is scientifically controversial, therefore global warming is scientifically controversial".

He was using Argument from Authority, and as he was citing expert climatologists on an issue of climatology, he was using it in a non-fallacious manner.

The "bandwagon" says eating lead paint chips causes brain damage in children. And if you think effectively unanimous agreement of experts in a field and decades of research and thousands of peer reviewed papers and an entire planet of scientific evidence "bandwagon" is a SANE justification to reject something, then clearly your parents actively avoided the lead-paint-chip-bandwagon when you were a child.

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How's this for cherry picking: The Earth has been on a cooling trend every year since 1965.

Genuine global mean temperature data, continuous coverage from 1965 to 2013.5, no tricks or manipulation other than cherrypicking 5 dates to split it into 6 cooling trends. The graph was inspired by recent claims that warming has stopped, it's a perfect illustration of how utterly fictional that claim is.

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Does anyone have any info on what sort of tech this company is using? From the little info in the article I get the impression they are using satellite images? I'm rather skeptical that surface images can pick up elemental signals from the sea floor at substantial depth.

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Or flip the view:
A towering bank undercut by a small church.

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In the intersection between religion and the modern world
Religion razes grandeur to the ground for 20 pieces of silver.
In the intersection between religion and the modern world
Religion refuses to budge from barren historical ground.
In the intersection between religion and the modern world
A towering bank undercut by a small church nearly kills us.

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