Actually, 'Change we can believe in' was Obama's campaign slogan and something they pushed very hard, not 'Republican propaganda'. Remember the 'first 100 days' feeding frenzy, where all the changes Obama was supposed to be making was discussed at great length? The only problem is the geniuses that believe him and voted him into office.

Petabytes? Are you serious? WTF where they storing? If you have 256 sites, each logging 100MB a day of climate data (a ridiculous amount of data), that's a bit more then 108 years of storage per petabyte.

I would also point out that its not as simple as getting the data from the original source.
1) First of all, there are a lot of original sources, which ones exactly did they get data from?
2) The data was on magnetic tape and paper form, who knows what is still readable or available
3) Data gets skipped, overlooked, entered in error, etc.
4) Often times there are several steps involved in post processing the data.

This is why you keep your raw data every step along the way. Do you really think a person now, 20+ years after the fact, can go through the process ( accumulating, organizing, ingesting, analyzing, and processing data from disparate data sets) and come up with the same data set? Really?

I would seriously doubt UEA would be able to reconstruct 90% of the original data set with a high degree of certainty

I agree, your methods and results should be reproducible. However in this case they destroyed the original temperature data for a bunch of stations for many years. This data is not reproducible (unless you have a time machine). You can’t rerun this simulation.

In their own words: "We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenized) data." Thus, all anybody has access too is their post processed data after it has been cleaned up and who knows what (if anything) removed. Even if you trust them to not massage the data in any way (suspect given their recent history) there is still no way to verify the assumptions, method, validity and correctness of the post processing.

This is at best catastrophic and unbelievably sloppy scientific work.

Thank you!

I have never understood why some IT people have to be dicks. Yes, sometimes you will have to deal with morons, the clueless, the malicious, and everywhere in-between. Welcome to the real world, put on your big boy pants and deal with it! The vast majority of people are just trying to do their job and made a honest mistake. I think it's time IT realizes that their job depends on 'DFUs'. Do you know what you call a IT guy without any user? Unemployed.

There is also the issue of paper thickness, ink layer, sharp edges and (god forbid) staples. These combine to make a material less then ideal for wipping ones' ass. As I always say, stick with TP for your ass, magazine for your brain in the loo.

Words to live by!

I second this comment, the Droid looks like a pretty sweet piece of engineering. Thinner, lighter, faster processor, camera with flash, etc. My only problem is how to get rid of my G1 (and T-Mobile) without getting screwed!

The Motorola Droid (not out yet I think) is supposed to have a 5 megapixel camera, auto focus and flash. I have not heard much about the picture quality. On the up side: the camera GUI, auto focus, and responsiveness have significantly improved on my G1 with every update. In good light on a mostly still subject the G1 takes acceptable pictures.

Wow! Students around the world must be flocking to Austria to study!

Global Destinations for International Students at the Post-Secondary (Tertiary) Level, 2008
United States 20%
United Kingdom 13%
France 8%
Germany 8%
Australia 7%
China 7%
Canada 5%
Japan 4%
...
Austria 1.3%


Source:
http://atlas.iienetwork.org/page/Country_Profiles/
Well, you get what you pay for I guess. I wonder if the ~600K foreign students came to the US for the excellent education or to get saddled with 'crippling debt'? I graduated with a BS and MS with $0 of student debt because I worked hard and didn't go to a absurdly expensive university.

You can keep your educational system, thanks!

Personally, I take Israel over Iran any day. I have heard a lot of mumbo jumbo about 'massacres Palestinians' and not a while lot about shooting rockets at Israel? Funny that. I think it's safe to say both sides don't like each other and have done some bad things to each other. However, only one country has refuses to acknowledge the other while threatening to destroy it. That country isn't Israel.

So true, those christian suicide bombers and all of those christians beheading 'infidels'... One of these things is not like the other, I will leave it up to you to figure that out. I am sure not all muslims are hateful, but they sure do have a vocal and cruel segment who are.