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Comment Signal vs Noise (Score 1) 693

There have been FIVE warming/cooling cycles, and all of them pre-date mankind. All you have to do to convince me of AGW is to answer these two, simple questions:
  1. How does your explanation/what-if model account for prior cycles?
  2. How are you able to separate human activity from whatever it is you say caused the earlier cycles?

Comment Re: The FOIA is not broken (Score 2) 116

From the excellent new book, What Government Gets Wrong: The Unelected Officials Who Actually Run Government: "Simply comparing the total volume of congressional output with the gross bureaucratic product provides a rough indication of where lawmaking now occurs in the federal government. The 106th Congress (1999â"2000) was among the most active in recent years. It passed 580 pieces of legislation, 200 more than the 105th Congress and nearly twice as many as the 104th. Some, like campaign finance reform, seemed quite significant, but many pieces of legislation were minor. During the same two years, executive agencies produced 157,173 pages of new rules and regulations in the official Federal Register, roughly the average number for recent years." We still elect politicians, but they no longer run the country.

Comment Paper ballots are HORRIBLE (Score 1) 127

I am an officer of election. We use DRE machines. We black-box test them before each election, the exact same technique that is the gold standard for software testing by any reputable QA team. A properly-tested machine is far better than any paper-based system. It provides immediate feedback to the voter. It can display in large fonts. It can be used by the disabled. It has almost no moving parts. It cannot get jammed. It does not have to guess what a vote is, it is unequivocal. Paper is a miserable medium. It gets lost. It gets wrinkled. It can be marked haphazardly or incompletely. NO ONE counts paper ballots by hand. Humans are TERRIBLE at repetitive tasks, that's why we invented machines to do this kind of work for us. Even optical ballots are counted by machine, so it is no different than a direct-recording machine -- except it has many more moving parts, and has to GUESS at the voters intent.

Comment Re: Why at a place of learning? (Score 1) 1007

Unless you are willing to personally recreate every scientific experiment ever made whose assumptions you are incorporating into your hypotheses, you MUST accept a certain level of "belief" in order to Science. But go ahead, pretend like you are being completely objective and the other guy is a mindless twit.

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