sstamps wrote:

So you admit that they stonewalled on the station list till 2008? And you admit that they didn't release their software until after they had been exposed by the climate gate email release? I may not have been clear, but I didn't mean to imply that they still haven't released stuff, but only that they were stonewalling at one time.

Strange. Why didn't he just give the URL for the files instead of refusing. But of course you've quoted a source admitting he didn't release the station list till 2008. So it doesn't look like it was "IN THE RESEARCH".

mrcaseyj wrote:

You cite BEST as replication by some other than buddies, but I was referring to replication of the hockey stick. BEST did not replicate the hockey stick. Furthermore, BEST was lead by an alarmist, so that is not clearly replication by other than buddies.

sstamps wrote:

Anthony Watts admitted after his own study that the average temperature trend of the urban stations was no higher than the good rural stations. Of course he then minimized it and tried to make a seemingly insignificant issue of the difference between the trends in the diurnal temperature range. I see tons of ignorance on the skeptic side. The alarmist side actually seems to be much more grounded in facts. But now we're seeing that the alarmist facts may not be as solid as was once thought. And you simply dismissed my criticism of the attempt to "hide the decline", but you gave no reasoned defense. That is understandable given it appears to be indefensible.

I know how it sometimes seems hard to believe that your opponents can be so unreasonable. It starts to look like they are not being honest. Some oil company shills probably aren't. But I fully believe that there are many skeptics, even ones that have looked deeply into the evidence, who truly do not believe there is cause for alarm. You probably know that people can have an amazing ability to convince themselves of something. Some people also find it very painful to admit they were wrong, even to themselves. Unless the evidence against them is massively undeniable, they will not change their mind. And often, even if the evidence IS massively undeniable, they will not admit it. This cuts both ways of course. Back when we didn't know how much hiding was going on, many people adopted a conclusion, and are very reluctant to admit a mistake. It's especially hard for them to back off their conclusion because the evidence against the alarmist case is nowhere near overwhelming.

I don't think it matters anyway, because if the alarmists turn out to be right, there are a variety of relatively inexpensive ways to shade the planet and reliably bring the temperature under control. The really bad worst case scenarios are of negligible likelihood. It is impossible with available funds, and not an optimum allocation of resources, to spend trillions of dollars to prevent every disaster for which there is a tiny possibility. Those funds would probably be better spent preventing wars, plagues, cancer, poverty, or other things.

sstamps wrote:
>First, he has never stonewalled requests for the raw data. It's been out there for ANYONE to obtain. The problem is that, for some of it, you have to PAY to get it, and UEA was forbidden by contract to give away said data for free...

No. Those who requested the data requested that if all the data couldn't be provided, then the freely available data should be provided. They were refused. When asked for a list of what data was used, but not the data itself, they refused. Even if the data is available for free on the net, how can the results be replicated if they will not say which data was used?

>Mann's work has been vindicated and replicated time and time again...

It has only been replicated by his buddies. It's like a study by an oil company being replicated by another oil company. There can be no vindication for trying to "hide the decline". It is a well established rule of science that you don't leave out data that casts doubt on your conclusion.

You've fallen for their story. Many of us used to think the alarmists were good willed, and we assumed they were honest. I still think they are good willed, but we now know they are not honest. They hide important information that casts doubt on their theories. And worse, when their colleagues are caught doing corrupt science, their community maintains a code of silence or defends the indefensible. This casts doubt on all the evidence brought by the entire climate science community.

I was mistaken above. Pe1chl explained below that it was the Dutch Government that acted as certificate authority and issued an intermediate certificate to DigiNotar, which used the intermediate certificate to issue certificates to various government agencies. The government needs to revoke the intermediate certificate it issued to DigiNotar and thus invalidate all the government certificates issued under it.

Relying on genuine certificates is not insecure. Revoking genuine certificates solves nothing. If someone's browser is relying on the genuine government certificates issued by Diginotar, then there is no security vulnerability with that particular communication, regardless of anything that happened at Diginotar. If somebody is fed a bogus certificate issued by Diginotar, and their browser relies on the bogus certificate, then revoking the genuine government certificates won't help.

Of course it is necessary for browsers to revoke trust in all Diginotar issued certificates. So all the government certificates issued by Diginotar are effectively revoked, regardless of any government action, for anyone using a browser that has stopped trusting Diginotar.

Terminator or Matrix would happen much faster than this educational AI loop. The educational AI loop would require decades for each round of feedback. And considering that the AI would have to be nearly as smart as humans to outperform human teachers significantly, the AI should be able to enhance itself much more rapidly than waiting for the next generation of kids to grow up and reprogram it.

This study might also not mean a lot if they didn't take into account the size of the metropolitan area around the city. For example Los Angeles might not have ranked high if you only include attacks from within the proper city limits but exclude attacks from contiguous cities like Hollywood or poorer areas.

Back when clients started sending emails to lawyers, it was questioned whether lawyers had a responsibility to warn clients on their web sites that email was insecure. The courts decided that lawyers needn't publish public keys and tell clients to use them because it was considered almost always secure enough for almost all clients. Obviously some clients and lawyers need all the security they can get, but they apparently don't consider that the case in general. The situation was likened to telephones, snail mail, and faxes, which can be intercepted by a variety of adversaries, but apparently rarely are. The last time I sent an email to a lawyer a year or so ago, I checked the lawyer's web site and found no public key.

One argument against lawyers encouraging clients to encrypt email is that even encrypted email is so insecure that the false sense of security might do more harm than good for the clients if they put things in emails that are better left unwritten.

IPv6 will give almost everybody practically static addresses, the ultimate undeleteable cookie. So the EU regulation will be futile very soon.

You're concentrating on the benefits of lecturing but not fairly balancing the costs. If you're doing a good job for your students, then you're spending a huge number of hours designing and reciting lectures. One of the things that is highly beneficial for research is for researchers to expand their knowledge into quite different fields, e.g. a physicist studying sociology for a change. Such expansion of knowledge would likely be of greater benefit than reviewing and explaining what you already know to some students who can get it explained from somewhere else. There are also lots of journal articles and other writings in your own field that would be useful to read and would expand your mind, but nobody has time to read all the good ones. Researchers in every field could benefit greatly from increased mastery of the tools of their field such as a physicist studying more computer science, math, or electrical engineering. Questions from students and discussion with professors can be stimulating and educational, but I didn't suggest that communication stop, I just suggest that lectures are an inefficient way to facilitate such communication. Sure lecturing and teaching has considerable benefits, but those benefits are small compared to the alternatives.

I think the professor's knowledge would be strengthened more by studying deeper or more broadly or by research, rather than designing or delivering lectures. And professors could be made available to answer questions at any given time that students are watching the videos as well. Many questions should not distract and waste the time of many other students anyway. If the question is a good question, it should be included in the FAQ or incorporated into the video lecture. Why do you need a live lecturer to get through your education?

Some say that meeting people is a main benefit of college. That is surely a major benefit. But isn't there plenty of less expensive ways that don't waste the lives of talented professors and the money of poor students and parents? Clubs, internet forums, professional societies, etc.

I suspect one of the main purposes of regularly scheduled classes is just to get people to do the learning that they might otherwise never get around to. An externally imposed discipline. I haven't thought of any obvious alternative solution to that, but maybe with some kind of formal structure and time limits, it wouldn't be too big a problem.

So why do we have all these highly intelligent expensive professors wasting their time standing in front of hundreds of students in a lecture hall reciting their teaching script like a human video projector? Let the best lecturers in the country make videos and let the students send in questions and assemble a frequently asked questions list and then put those professors to work doing research for the benefit of humanity.

Sun just couldn't compete with Linux and Intel. Open sourcing wasn't the problem. It probably helped, just not enough.

I'm not suggesting the Russians would be stupid enough to assassinate when the US wouldn't, it's just that an un-redacted release of these secret US documents probably wouldn't reveal many, if any Russian confidential informants.

Russia killing wikileakers for releasing these sorts of things may be an effective deterrent to future wikileakers releasing Russian secrets because there is less need to stick your neck out to expose Russia since their tyranny is fairly open. On the other hand, leaking the bad deeds of the US could contribute significantly to convincing or enlightening those who support the US or its leaders.

The US better not kill Assange because then future leaks probably wouldn't be redacted and past leaks would probably be re-released unredacted. The names of confidential informants would be released directly into the open. Future leaks would still happen because this stuff wasn't leaked by Wikileaks, it was leaked by the army guy that stole them. He could have just emailed the documents to a thousand random email addresses and every newspaper in the world, including our enemies. He could have posted a torrent link on Slashdot and had it downloaded 10,000 times before the gov noticed it, by people here that have the expertise to distribute it reliably. Wikileaks is just publicizing and making convenient what would be out there anyway. The guy who actually leaked these things couldn't possibly have redacted them himself, and he couldn't have asked for help from the govt. So governments should encourage leaks to go through Wikileaks.

I don't know if Russia will kill him. He might be making himself hard to find.

I can't say that Muslims in general want to use force to take over the world. Some Muslims surely do, particularly terrorists, but most Muslims might only advocate for a voluntary conversion of the world.