Absolute certainty is only available in the realm of pure maths and logic. Well-programmed computers come quite close to that, but most systems cannot be perfectly understood even in principle - see The Matrix and Descarte's evil demon. The level of certainty of AGW is much better than the level of certainty we accept to send people to prison (which is supposed to be "beyond reasonable doubt").

We have determined that to a very high level of consensus in the scientific community. The result is politically and economically unwelcome, which is why some people and organisation deny the consensus. You don't need to get the politics out of science, you need to get the science into politics.

That said, the vote very much reminds me of Indiana in 1897 and some thing with square circles ;-).

"They" (both NOAA and Berkley Earth independently) have done that. Berkley Earth found no significant difference when using only the best locations (but then their automated method is designed to compensate spurious jumps in temperature) (here) and NOAA found a slight low bias for badly sited stations (here). IIRC, there also is a similar NASA study coming to the same results, but I don't remember the authors or title.

Anecdotes are not data. You cannot expect perfection - if you have a sufficiently large organisation, someone will fuck up sometimes.The question is if the organisation is doing an ok job overall, and if it there are ways to address errors of judgement.

Also, there is the perennial problem of adequate funding. A decent service of any kind is not free, nor usually cheap. Either we need to pay sufficient taxes, or we must do without certain services provided by the state (and/or live with crappy services). If a CPS worker has to handle 8 cases per day, they can spend a grand total of one hour per case (assuming no overhead -ha!) - and if a team of to spends half a day on one visit, that means the other 15 cases get only about half an hour.

We can whine one way or the other, but whining both ways (less taxes and more/better services) is not a sign of much maturity.

Here is a question: Does it matter if I know the strategy of the opposing player? Looking at the researchers website, the algorithm seems to be deterministic. So I could use the meta-knowledge about how Cepheus would play with any possible hand (that is compatible with my hand and the public cards), and could bet accordingly. From what I've read so far, I don't know if that effect is modelled in the paper.

Have you finally stopped beating your wife?

A classical case of both abductive reasoning and confirmation bias. Some climate scientists are geologists, but not all geologists are climate scientists. Some climate scientists are mathematicians, but not all mathematicians are climate scientists. And so on. Yes, if you water down the definition to include more and more people, you will get a few more dissenting voices. But its still minuscule compared to your base. Nearly all professional scientific organisations accept man's influence on the climate. None is known to maintain the dissenting opinion. And while some of the dissenters have written "papers", most of these "papers" have not been published by the scientific press, but by so-called think-tanks or web blogs. Even so, finding "plenty" is a far stretch - it's a small group of deniers with maybe three or four people with some credibility left.

Sure they can do something about it, and they are welcome to it. But any approval is morally void by the most basic natural laws, at least according to my morality compass. There is no process that justifies subjecting anybody to this treatment. And whoever is affected has an absolute right to self-defence against such treatment - and I'm hard-pressed not to argue that there even is a right, if not a duty, for others to intervene. If we go there, all claims of moral superiority of the west evaporate, and most "terrorists" suddenly have a valid moral claim. It seems to work fine the other way round - see classics like Rambo 2 or Red Dawn.

How do you know it's necessary? In all those ticking bomb scenarios, how do you ever know 100% that there is a ticking bomb, and that you have the one person that can tell you where it is, but miss any other useful information?

Apart from the immorality of torture, and the ineffectiveness of it, it also leads to the deterioration of proper police and intelligence work. Why infiltrate organisations, keep your ear on the ground, talk to people, maintain contacts, observe, when you can just grab some schmuck of the street and torture him (or her)? You'll get a lot of information you can sell as a success, wether true or false...

It's not something within the remit of voters to approve or disprove. Inalienable rights and all that....

• There must be a way to travel faster than then the speed of light!
• There must be 3 integers a,b,c, such that a^3+b^3=c^3 and there certainly must be a way to get superscript in Slashdot!
• There must be a way to determine if an arbitrary computer program halts for a given input!

...and so on. Maybe there is a way of telling smart people from dumb people (Forrest Gump comes to mind), but there is no guarantee that we can always reasonably measure a vaguely defined property like "intelligence".

You miss the point. It's not the "general purpose processor" that is harmful per se. What is harmful is the labelling of a certain class of processors as "general purpose", when, in the view of the author, they are not really general purpose, but specialised for executing C code with, at most, mid-sized working sets and little inter-processor communication. By assuming this workload as the default and calling processors good for it "general purpose", we may miss other approaches that might be more suitable for certain classes of problems.

Not true. There are many things of which I know how they don't work without knowing how they work. Before the detection of nuclear fusion, we didn't know how the sun was heated. But we did know that it was not a chemical reaction (not enough fuel for the time it had been burning). I don't know how Google indexes keywords. But I do know they are not looking them up via sequential search (too fast for that). I don't know what the annoying traffic light on my way to work is triggered by, but I know its not telepathy - or I wouldn't be standing there forever each day. And so on. Indeed, that's how science works - you formulate hypotheses and then refute them one-by-one. If you can't refute a reasonable one, that's your tentative model of reality.

Ok, my experience is mostly with computer science, math and physics. Typically, you write your paper in LaTeX with a style provided by the publisher. LaTeX does the actual typesetting, of course. Some journals also have Word templates, but that's much rarer.