Don't worry. The components in question are all made in China. You can't avoid buying something with a probable Chinese backdoor.

The letters are not damning. There isn't anything in them that I've read that GIVEN THE WHOLE CONTEXT OF THE DISCUSSION is damning, other than scientist are human and get pissed off at idiots and assholes like veryone else.

The DB comments, like the rest, are also out of context. That's like reading a bunch of source code and generating opinions of the coders by their comments in the code.

You also say yourself that you are no expert. Then how can you possibly comment on their comments? Climate data is noisy. Models can produce anything from daily averages to decadal averages. Some data series have know errors or unreliable segments so they are either smoothed over or ignored.

Let's put this in some perspective. Let's say you write an email with the title "Sex?" and had the content: "Man, I want to fuck a sheep right now!". If someone were to get ahold of that email and read it, what would they take away from it? Pretty damning right? Especially if the person didn't know you.

However, if that was just one email in a thread about a movie where drunk frat pledgers have to fuck a sheep to get in (a la Revenge of The Nerds), then that email is no longer quite so damning. In fact, it may even be funny.

You can't take singular emails, comments, etc. as gospel without the context surrounding them. Unless your the media of course.

~X~

Swiss Nazis have actually cameras installed on major freeways.

I thought that such a low threshold for being considered a Nazi was an American phenomenon. Before I can agree with you, I'll have to somehow come to terms with the equivalency between killing six million Jews and installing cameras.

I am pretty sure that the banks that rely on Linux on zSeries to manage billions of dollars of transactions per day would disagree with you. Is that not a valuable enough target for the "bad guys?"