I know someone who works in the fraud prevention business and they allege that iTunes purchases and credit card fraud are strongly correlated.

I also know someone who works in the fraud prevention business, and they say that this correlation is non-existent. Note, that I too can make up anonymous and unsourced 3rd party quotes to support any thing I choose to say, and the credibility of said quotes is identical to yours.

Also, since this is Slashdot, it's incumbent on me to remark that correlation is not causation.

There are a couple of lefties at work who keep insisting that any and all climate change currently happening is due to our actions.

Ah, I see. Probably fictional coworkers who don't understand anything are a significant issue here, it's true.

the Global Warming money train arriving on time at the university station

Out of curiosity, how well does global warming research pay? I mean, it must be a real cash cow, if the university is willing to unjustly exonerate investigators just to keep that money coming in. So, how much money are we talking here? Billions a year?

Similarly, can we completely discount the results of denialists, since they work for institutions that get funding from industries with vested interests in ensuring that the status quo continues?

Hardly an independent panel.

Why? Because they're academics? Unless you have a specific reason to find them other than independent, you're committing the logical fallacy of poisoning the well.

they did say he was incorrect to not have real statisticians working on the results - which invalidates much of the published work.

That's incorrect. The conclusions are in no way automatically invalidated because a statistician was not working on the results. Non-statisticians do statistical analysis of data all the time, and produce valid results. This is not to say that statisticians should not review the analysis for problems, but to say the results are automatically invalid is stupid.

And isn't that what really matters here, that the scientific method is carefully applied instead of fitting data to a pre-concieved conclusion?

No, what matters here is if the conclusions from the analysis of the data are validly drawn. Science works to find support for theories, which are pre-conceived. Let me repeat that - having something you'd like to show by experiment and analysis is key to science.

It's funny that you seem so willing to accuse Mann of doing sloppy work, given the clear biases in your own thinking about the matter.

Won't pollution and deforestation will kill and harm us a whole lot more than a few simple degree changes in our atmosphere?

Deforestation and pollution help cause climate change. And increases in global temperatures accelerate desertification, increasing deforestation. Increasing global temperatures also are predicted to cause significant droughts throughout the world. Significant droughts reduce the available amount of food. Reductions in the available amount of food mean starvation and/or wars to procure resources. And then there's the probable destruction of most coastal cities due to rising ocean levels.

The risk from starvation and violence related to the effects of climate change are far greater than the risk of getting cancer. The Pentagon (that bastion of squishy liberalism) has included climate change in their strategic planning documents as a key driver of security issues in the future.

So, to summarize, we shouldn't be dumping shit into the environment, but you should be more worried about changing the climate than possibly getting cancer from drinking from a plastic bottle, cause the consequences of that are liable to kill you the old fashioned way - through starvation and violence.

No, no. This isn't the end. Not even close.

You can without a doubt easily prove that the world is older than 4,000 years, yet there are many Christians that will tell you otherwise.

This is not true. Proving anything without doubt is an epistemological impossibility, and runs counter to the very nature of science. Science never proves anything, it merely posits theories and seeks to find supporting or undermining evidence.

that is something the states can handle by themselves just fine.

This is hilariously wrong. There's plenty of states that can't do an even halfway adequate job of handling education, and it's absurd to disadvantage children in those states because of the incompetence, parsimony, or moral bankruptcy of their parents and legislators.

Could be handy. It is a bit limiting that it requires you pair the target language with one where you're relatively sure that the morphology and word roots are fairly similar, and that the writing systems are similar (structurally and statistically).
I guess there might be some way to handle some possible differences in script type (comparing a language written with alphabetic system to one written using a syllabary or abjad) by producing a fake alternate writing system for the known language that would be plausibly similar to the target. You're probably screwed if you're going from a phonetic-type writing system to a (possibly partially) logographic one, though.
For cases where there were a variety of competing theories about the nature of the script and language it represents, it might speed up the process of checking alternatives. Maybe it's better to think of this as a tool for testing proposed solutions, rather than automatically discovering them.

If you have a GSM phone, you can switch between handsets without much trouble - just put the SIM into the one you want to use, and have at it. You may have to mess with syncing contacts, etc., but you'd have the problem with multiple handsets with the same number anyway.

Don't survey a subset of the users and then generalize that to all users. It's inherently unfair.

Surveying a subset and generalizing the population from which it's drawn is what we call inferential statistics; it's a cornerstone of modern science and social research.
There may be some significant problems with the survey design, however. There's no information about how the survey was conducted (internet? email? something else?), or how the respondents for it were chosen (self-selection? something else?). The information's a bit to sketchy to tell how reliable the survey is.

Nobody in congress really cares about China's policies towards their own people. It's just something they like to trot out occasionally to show they believe in liberty.

They won't ever actually do anything but pass a non-binding resolution condemning the situation, after which they'll get back to making it easier for us to buy cheap shit from China.

Have you even actually used an HTC Android phone? Android + Sense pretty much blows iOS4 out of the water.

Dont' know about the AC, but I have, and it most certainly does not blow iOS4 out of the water.
Android's ok, I guess, but the iPhone software is just much more polished and usable.