Ah well the parent post was hidden and there was somebody talking about kooks. My error, sorry.

Without measurements, I can say with certainty anything I want.

With measurements, I can only say with certainty what the measurements prove.

An Inconvenient Truth pointed out that warming can lead to cooling in some areas, as ocean currents change. Skeptics point out that urban density leads to localized warming. So whatever you've felt or noticed in your tiny area of the globe doesn't prove anything at all.

Also, that poster didn't refer to kooks or frauds at all. It was a statement of scientific skepticism. Skepticism is required for good science. What's bad for science is emotional people who are scared because they've used their ninth-grade notion of "science" to convince themselves of a conclusion that becomes "obvious" to them... even though they actually know jack shit.

As for me, I *know* I know jack shit and so I will wait for more data points.

I think the technologies have advanced enough that the modern hard drive should not be called a "winchester drive". The name actually referenced a specific model of IBM hard drive manufactured in 1973... with a capacity of 35 MB.

I often wonder about that. In the real world, we have a set of laws to protect us, but what protects people from abuse online? There's no internet constitution - certainly we have some laws, but those laws always stop before the point of telling moderators how they can treat users.

Certainly, it's possible to say "well, it's not your server, if you don't like it go somewhere else - it's only the internet", but surely any place where you can meet people and form relationships is a real place, not some figment of the imagination that you can dispel on a whim. I'd feel uncomfortable being forced to leave an internet community just as I would a real-world one.

On the other hand, though, losing my real-world identity would be much more devastating to me than losing my internet equivalent, but why is that so? Just because it's more closely tied to my physical form, or because I'm more used to it? I wonder if my answer would be the same if most of my friends were in WoW.

It's something to think about, anyway. I stumbled across a couple of excellent pieces of writing about this a while back as part of a Guardian article called "Ten unmissable examples of New Games Journalism". The latter, in particular, made me think for a long time.

A Rape in Cyberspace
Posessing Barbie