Except that the latest UAH and RSS data sets (still in beta, so unofficial) show no warming for the last 18 years - something your link even acknowledges. (In 2009 he mentions "I have to say I find this all very puzzling.")

Good question. The main problem with all of these is proof. How do you determine intent of a dropped packet? Was it congestion, a hardware failure, or did the ISP have it in for that packet specifically? The guy screaming "I'm gonna kill you!" is the top suspect when someone turns up dead, but the cops still have to prove he did it.

When Comcast was using Sandvine Comcast denied, denied, denied that they were doing anything to degrade their users' internet experience. It took the EFF and a massive coordinated traffic logging effort to prove that Comcast was lying about intentionally disabling Lotus Notes (and BitTorrent) connections.

a costlier service

There is very little technical reason for a byte of amazon to cost more than a byte of wikipedia. Once those packets reach the backbone networks (a process that Amazon and Wikipedia both pay for through their ISPs) they're essentially identical, except in the fact that Amazon has more money and they have more to lose if something were to happen to that packet, and that would be a real shame.

The original plan was simply "neutrality". All bytes are equal. More bytes can cost more money, but those additional bytes are equal too.

And that's where it started falling apart. Bytes delivered by copper all cost the same, bytes delivered by fiber all cost the same, bytes delivered by avian carrier all cost the same. Bytes delivered wirelessly... well, they cost the same too but some major neutrality players were doing deals with telcos to provide some services free on phones. Which was more important to them, neutrality? Or getting wikipedia to the mobile masses with no data charges? Well, as long as the net was mostly neutral (except when it suited them) it's a good thing, right? But hypocrisy is the moral rot, and rot spreads quickly.

Personally, I have two horses in this race: in my personal life I'm an internet user, at work I develop web applications. I had my experience with value-subtracted ISPs years ago. Before Time Warner traded an agreement not to compete here with Comcast for an agreement from Comcast not to compete elsewhere, one of our customers had Time Warner Cable at their office. One day I get an angry call from them that we're down. I check the status of our servers and say "no, we're up" and they insist we're down and I ask them if we're down why are they the only customer calling me. They insist. I do a traceroute from the development server and everything looks fine to me. They continue to insist. I remote into their computer and sure enough, the application isn't loading. I open a ticket with our colocation facility to let them know that some routing is fucked up specifically between IPs A and B. It's closed: nothing wrong. I tell them to call their ISP. TWC insists its on our end. I roll my eyes and mirror their database on the development server and call it a day. Day 2: we're "down" again. Neither the main server nor the development server are reachable from that customer now. TWC insists its on our end. I set up a mirror on our mail server. Day 3: we're down again. We have a three-way call with TWC. TWC insists it's on our end. I tell them that every single one of our customers using DSL are having no problems at all and offer to pay the cancellation fee so our customer has internet that works. (By this time I had reviewed all of our server logs and discovered that they were literally our only user in the city coming from TWC, everyone else had DSL). Tier 2 support is on the phone in 15 seconds. Now, this is probably about a decade or so ago, so these are not the exact words used but I won't forget the general gist of it any time soon:

Tier2: We changed a setting in their router to allow them to access their "business application". Everything should be fine now
Qz: Thank you. For future reference if we have other customers on TWC what setting is this so we can make sure it's configured correctly and avoid this problem in the future?
Tier2: Oh, it's not a setting that the customer can change.

So, what is the intent of a setting that blocks access to an ISP user's commonly used websites?

Have they been good at predicting things, or are the things predicted being 'adjusted' to better match the predictions?

"Last month, we are told, the world enjoyed âoeits hottest March since records began in 1880â. This year, according to âoeUS government scientistsâ, already bids to outrank 2014 as âoethe hottest everâ. The figures from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) were based, like all the other three official surface temperature records on which the worldâ(TM)s scientists and politicians rely, on data compiled from a network of weather stations by NOAAâ(TM)s Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN).
But here there is a puzzle. These temperature records are not the only ones with official status. The other two, Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) and the University of Alabama (UAH), are based on a quite different method of measuring temperature data, by satellites. And these, as they have increasingly done in recent years, give a strikingly different picture. Neither shows last month as anything like the hottest March on record, any more than they showed 2014 as âoethe hottest year everâ.

Back in January and February, two items in this column attracted more than 42,000 comments to the Telegraph website from all over the world. The provocative headings given to them were âoeClimategate the sequel: how we are still being tricked by flawed data on global warmingâ and âoeThe fiddling with temperature data is the biggest scientific scandalâ.
My cue for those pieces was the evidence multiplying from across the world that something very odd has been going on with those official surface temperature records, all of which ultimately rely on data compiled by NOAAâ(TM)s GHCN. Careful analysts have come up with hundreds of examples of how the original data recorded by 3,000-odd weather stations has been âoeadjustedâ, to exaggerate the degree to which the Earth has actually been warming. Figures from earlier decades have repeatedly been adjusted downwards and more recent data adjusted upwards, to show the Earth having warmed much more dramatically than the original data justified.
So strong is the evidence that all this calls for proper investigation that my articles have now brought a heavyweight response. The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) has enlisted an international team of five distinguished scientists to carry out a full inquiry into just how far these manipulations of the data may have distorted our picture of what is really happening to global temperatures."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/com...

Difference between raw and final data sets (this is an official graph from NOAA):
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/c...

by telling carriers that they can't charge more for premium levels of service

Close.

The original plan was to tell carriers that they can't make Vonage and Skype a premium level service (add the voip package for only $15/mo!) to prevent them from competing with their phone service (only $9.99!). Or make Netflix an unusable service to stop customers from cutting cable. Or make browsing Amazon difficult because Barnes & Noble paid them to. Or sell 90% of the bandwidth they sold to me to their "fast lane" partners, while the sites I actually want to see get the last 10% of the bandwidth I paid for.

Much like the Occupy Movement, nobody took control to keep the message on point and eventually the whole thing devolved into a flaming mess, helped along by the telcos themselves spouting bullshit about how network neutrality meant you couldn't pay more for faster internet.

is your definition of that due to your political positions or is it a moral absolute?

Actually, it's pretty easy to decide if something is a moral absolute or not: If it's OK for everyone to do it then you can, if it's not OK for everyone to do it, then you Kant.

Yep. There are plenty of banks to choose from that - whatever their other flaws - at least take security seriously. If your bank can't or won't lock down their website, then you already know that they're negligent in at least one area. What else are they neglecting?

I don't think it's extreme at all. I think we're past the point that's it's socially reasonable or responsible not to encrypt all traffic by default.

Even if you're 100% OK with visitors to your site being snooped on, consider that adding to the amount of crypto in use worldwide makes it hard for repressive governments to tell what their citizens are doing online. Maybe your site would be the straw that broke the Great Firewall's back and lets some kid read uncensored news.

A lot of people claim the soft sciences are not 'really science' due to the intangibility of their results - and this plays directly into that bias.

However, it's very much not just the softer sciences that have this issue. There's a growing realization that it's pervasive across many hard science disciplines:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB... : 64% of pharma trials couldn't be reproduced.

http://retractionwatch.com/201... - half of researchers couldn't reproduce published findings.

We're inundated with data that, due to the specificity of the field or detail of the results, has to come from 'experts' and doesn't lend itself to a sort of common-sense vetting that we can use to filter bullshit in the usual course of our lives. Whether it's from ignorance of statistical methods, poor experimental technique, motivated mendacity (for whatever reason), or simply experimental results that represent only an unusual end of a bell-curve, there are many, many reasons that scientific data has to be taken with a serious grain of salt. It can't be assumed to be conclusive until we've reproduced it in whatever context we're trying to apply it.

Tell me, what's on the horizon tomorrow that I can't do with my 100Mbps connection

Download two linux cd images in a second?

Get off my lawn, sonny.

(Thinks tattoos can be ugly or beautiful, just like the people wearing them.)

4-digit UID, just over 40, no tats but I've thought about it. I've never considered anything massive like a sleeve before because I don't think it'd look good on me, but I couldn't care less if other people have them.

Outside of Portland, what percentage of the population has full sleeve tattoos? 1 in 10,000, maybe? I'm not asking to be funny; except for in very certain cities, those are almost unseen. Even working in San Francisco I see very, very few. Oh, there are lots of smaller tattoos, but sleeves are unusual.

I'll bet more people are sensitive to the materials used to make the watch than are unable to use it because of their ink. That's not Apple's fault or a flaw in the watch, though: no one product can be useful to everyone.

Please direct your attention towards the front of the cabin as our flight attendants demonstrate the safety features of this craft.

In the event of pressure loss, an oxygen mask will drop from the overhead compartment. Please pull the mask to extend it completely and start the flow of oxygen, then place the mask over your nose and mouth and place the strap around your head to hold it in place. Put on your mask before helping children or others in need of assistance.

In the event of power loss, bicycle pedals will extend from the floor of the cabin. Please pedal as if our lives depended on it

in the real world everyone is expendable except for the CEO

And that's why when Steve Jobs died, he was entombed along with all of his employees to care for him in his next life.

Or maybe he, too, was replaced.

...hipster tragedy*:

"Oh no, my trendy tattoo is interfering with my Apple Smart watch! What ever will I do?"

*also called comedy by the rest of us.