If you switch most of your billing paperless, then it's not that much work. Download your bank statements, bills, etc. as PDF and save them. Download a digital copy of all the owners manuals you can find online. Then just scan the few hard copies you're left with.

That cost is a bit much for the average home user. I've been scanning my papers as jpeg images and shredding everything for a few years. Of course, that's not searchable... So, I recently installed Tesseract-OCR.... very cool if you're okay putting in some elbow grease. All I need to do is scan to jpeg and the OCR happens overnight when I'm not using my mac mini. I also put together a small PHP app to do search the OCR'd text: https://sourceforge.net/projects/edocias/

I don't think any of the evidence suggests a "good chance" of catastrophe. Most of the research suggests the chance of catastrophe is very small. Indeed, some portion of research suggests beneficial effects of global warming. More people die from cold weather every year than heat for example.

Your assumption here is wrong. The other teams made use of CRUs data within their data. Of course, they used CRU's "adjusted" data rather than the raw data. And now that the original "raw" data is lost, we have now way to fix the data or even validate the data.

I think we can all agree that clean energy is a good thing. However, don't sign us all up for a hugely expensive TRILLION dollar cap-and-trade scheme based on THEORY... a theory that made predictions that haven't held over the past 5 years. And don't sign us up for programs to track our personal "carbon footprint" either. That's just creepy.

I don't believe you can assume a right to privacy when using your employer-funded email system while working on a government subsidized research program. To assume privacy under such circumstances is foolish.

Also of note.... while it may only be CRU's data that seems to be in the spotlight, the other datasets re-use the CRU data in theirs. See the following:

http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2009/11/30/a-myth-about-the-surface-temperature-record-analyses-perpetuated-on-dot-earth-by-andy-revkin/

You didn't state how the WSJ article lied. So, I can only assume you are trying to shoot the messenger because you don't like the message.

Have you not seen some of the source code found in the dump? Take a look at Eric Raymond's analysis of some of this:

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1447

I particularly like the source code comment that states "Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!"

You cannot dismiss this as just email bickering. You can see the SOURCE CODE where they artificially change the data to suit their agenda! Why are people not more ticked off about this??? This is an offense to both science in general and programming,

I had Randy Pausch for an undergrad CS class at UVA in either 88 or 89.... so that was either his first or second year teaching there. Without a doubt, he was the best teacher I had in all four years. I can only imagine that he got even better after almost 20 years of practice. He truly engaged the students. I've been in the software business for 17 years now, and I continue to enjoy it today. I have to think he's partly the reason I ended up there (since I was in the EE program).