The temperature change over the last 30-50 years is of comparable magnitude to the shift from the medieval warm period to the little ice age (the two greatest temperature extremes of the last 2000 years), a change that took more than 10 times as long to occur. Perhaps if you look further back you can find natural cycles that match the volatility of the current one, but the examples given above certainly don't cut it.

There hasn't been an increase in the last 10 years primarily because of a particularly strong la nina. Short term cyclical events generally have a greater magnitude than the overall warming trend. If you take ~11 year moving averages to hide the known cyclical variations, the warming trend is very much still there.

"Hide the decline" refers to the fact that temperatures inferred from tree ring sizes in the last couple decades haven't matched actual temperature readings (possibly because of other human influence on tree growth). When presenting tree ring data, they replace very recent data with actual temps, usually using a different color or something to indicate that it has been swapped out.

There are legitimate criticisms of the AGW argument, but you haven't put forth any of them. <ad hominem> This clearly indicates that you don't seek the truth, just the promotion of a personal agenda. That or you're not very smart, and it's usually wrong to attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence. </ad hominem>

RTFA, you can use a computer to come up with a better move than you would have on your own.

Yep, all science done with computers should be tossed out. OH WAIT THAT'S ALL OF IT

Most Americans know that the common stereotypes about hillbillies, trailer trash, and Christians are inaccurate. The same can't be said for Americans knowing about foreign religions and cultures.

The sensors wouldn't be picking up anything interesting if they weren't automatically being pointed at interesting things. There aren't enough astronomers to do the pointing manually.

It's a perfect analogy. "Just because a lot of people are breaking a law, doesn't necessarily mean the law must be changed." He's not saying it doesn't need to be changed, just that you can't use that fact that people break the law a lot as evidence that it's flawed. The reasons they're breaking the laws, the way the laws are enforced, and the severity of the punishments can all be looked at, as I'm sure they were with traffic laws, but the analogy definitely holds.

I have never had a problem caused by the presence of DRM when I buy or play games on steam. If it's that unobtrusive, I don't see how it compares to being run over by a car.

This, and there's a very good reason. Universities should be spending money on educating students, and for a select few, doing research. It's just a waste of money to hire or train a new IT guy to provide tech support for 5% of the the student population.

Defense in depth. By your line of reasoning, there's no problem storing passwords in cleartext. Although a particular line of defense shouldn't be necessary, doesn't mean you shouldn't worry if it's quickly losing potency. There will always be security vulnerabilities, so for someone, somewhere, it matters, e.g. PSN.

A person capable of being a full university professor could be making literally millions in the private sector. The less you pay, the lower the overall quality of our universities as more students chose industry over academia.