Once again, a /.er fails to notice the distiction between production costs and reproduction costs.

Hint: if there is virtually no cost/scarcity in the creation of new desirable books (as opposed to the reproduction of existing ones), then why isn't everybody a best-selling author?

From Galileo's recantation letter:

I must altogether abandon the false opinion that the sun is the center of the world and immovable, and that the earth is not the center of the world, and moves, and that I must not hold, defend, or teach in any way whatsoever, verbally or in writing, the said false doctrine, and after it had been notified to me that the said doctrine was contrary to Holy Scripture [...] I have been pronounced by the Holy Office to be vehemently suspected of heresy, that is to say, of having held and believed that the Sun is the center of the world and immovable, and that the earth is not the center and moves:

Also, for some reason you fail to discuss the prelude to the whole debacle, when the Church officially condemned the Copernician doctrine, and notified Galileo of the fact.

They explicitly threatened to burn him alive if he did not recant, specifically because his theories contradicted the official interpretation of scripture (that's the official justification as set out in the documents, including the letter above). Under what definition of "suppress" does this not count as "suppressing science"?

That describes you to a T.

Actually it doesn't. There is no plausible etymology from choir ("to fall", from latin cadere) to "chouart". Rather, the term "Rochechouart" comes from "Cavardus' rock", referring to the man who built a fort in the area.

It's difficult to be sure since you don't provide any references, but apparently you are referring to the publication of a bogus review paper by the Climate Research journal, and the resulting debacle.

Just to let you know, in the real world, no editor was "removed". Half the editors, including the hastily appointed editor-in-chief, resigned in disgust. The reason why people were upset is that an obviously flawed paper was published by exploiting a non-standard review process. If the Time Cube guy managed to publish an article in some journal, you bet people would become wary of being associated with it. Wait, no, actually you would regard this as an obvious conspiracy by the entire scientific community to suppress the very real cubicity of the universe.

See, that's one reason why people call you "denialists" instead of "skeptics". When faced with a difficult problem that they don't fully understand, real skeptics will look for more information, rather than just confabulate their conspiracy fantasies into an alternate reality.

The advantage of pulling stuff out of your ass is that you can post quickly.

The problem with pulling stuff out of your ass is that you often end up being wrong.

Sea level changes from 1970 to 2009, compared with IPCC predictions. (from the Copenhagen Diagnosis, via Tim Lambert on Scienceblogs).

Let us assume that what you say is true. You are basically telling us that we should dismiss climate change research, because (according to you) some of the early papers got it wrong. Can you see the problem with your "reasoning"?

I will, however, admit that the researchers should have noted the issues with the tree-ring data in question.

Good thing they did, then. Only ten years ago, mind you.

Seriously, this whole "climategate" debacle tends to run like this:

1- Deniers exhume some e-mail / piece of code which they don't understand, but assume is definite proof of evil scheming on the part of the great academic conspiracy ("Trick!" "Hide the decline!" OMGconspiracy send teh copz!!) .

2- Scientists post explanation, showing the deniers' allegations to be baseless (The "hidden" decline in tree ring growth was published a decade ago - see Nature link above; in this very publication, it was shown to diverge from the actual instrumental record after 1960; so for the post-1960 period we basically replace tree rings with the actual instrumental data, because we trust thermometers more than tree rings when the two fail to agree; we cited the relevant articles in the caption for the graph just to be sure).

3- Deniers completely ignore scientists' explanation, and keep fantasising about their glorious victory over evil scheming scientists. See GP for an illustration.

Rinse. Repeat.

To GP and all the folks who keep harping about this "VERY ARTIFICIAL" correction code: the code in question is a one-time code for temporarily re-calibrating the tree ring data. The reason, and the coefficients, are ultimately derived from the Nature article I linked to above. For an interesting hypothesis concerning the source of this code, see comment #147 and linked manuscript on this thread.

Except for discovering / inventing information theory, the transistor, the cosmic radiowave background, Unix and the C programming language. Among other trifling, Nobel-prize winning discoveries.
No private company has given more to the world than Bell. Bell Labs defined the Golden Age of American science and engineering. Reading that there was "no innovation" at Bell in a /. comment is pretty depressing.

Some encryption algorithms that were predicted to take forever to crack with today's technology, may in the long run end up taking the logarithm of forever.

Why was this modded funny? Taking the logarithm of something is enough to take it from "practically forever" to "actually quite feasible".

The log-10 of 100 is just 2. The log-10 of 1000 is 3. The log-10 of one billion is 9. Etc. Logarithms essentially negate the exponential explosions that are the source of practical impossibilities.

If someone found a way to logarithmically reduce the cracking time of a given algorithm, this algorithm would become essentially useless.

Man, I agree with all you said, but... TEN FSCKING DOLLARS.

No amount of government fiat is going to make even a screen+wifi+storage fit into $10.

Unless, of course, they massively subsidise each single unit. So the real cost would be in the high tens, or even a hundred, but Auntie Sonia and Manmohan Chachoo foot 80-90% of the bill, so it's $10 at the point of sale, not in production costs.

I suspect that's what they really mean.