By the same shaky reasoning you could ask why we have a constitution to protect us. The constitution is the first level of regulation. Who needs the first amendment? Get the government out of the business of regulating speech. Let the market decide. Why have anti-monopoly legislation. Who needs OSHA anyway.

I have libertarian tendencies. I don't think the government does a great job at proactively running things. I believe that the market does best at most things except ensure fair competition in the market. Let the government be negative and merely prevent the things that restrict fair and open competition. I see net neutrality as an extension of free speech needing the same protections.

Read the article before posting nonsense. It clearly states how to use this to log into the iphone using ssh. If the ssh server can access the port it is in /dev somewhere. The only mystery is why this article gets posted to slashdot as a great revelation. People have been using the iPhone serial port for years. It was entertaining reading about someone debugging an rs232 connection after all these years, making the same mistakes I made 25 years ago, but I couldn't find anything new in the post.

This article unfortunately distorted the question by misquoting Natalie Angier. The question was not by Natalie as Hugh stated.but was instead a quote from Dr. Newman which he asked rhetorically only to answer it. Nothing in the article criticized alchemy. Doesn't anyone read sources. It is amazing how much hot air slashdot can generate over a simple misquote, taken out of context..

It is the scientists job to give us facts. It is the politicians job to give us solutions. It is your job to vote for politicians willing to honestly address the problem. If you are not happy stop whining on slashdot. That's useless. Instead consider writing to your congressman, after of course figuring out who he is.

>Science isn't an exact science, people are
>involved and people make mistakes.
>Scientist need to remember that they are human
>too and they will make mistakes.

I assure you that scientists don't need you to remind them of that. They get reminded every time they publish.

>But still the Scientists don't like saying
>to people Hey I could be wrong

WRONG! Scientists know that being wrong is more likely than being right, especially with leading edge data. The very stylistic wording of technical writing starts with different ways of saying "I could be wrong but..."

If you only knew... science publication has distinct resemblance to children bickering. Publishing a paper is a lot like saying "take that" and underneath the politeness a responding paper will likely say "Oh yeah!! Well take that." Contention, disagreement and occasionally being wrong are at the foundation of scientific methodology. The miracle of the scientific method is that it allows truth to win through over time even though scientists are human and thus narrow minded, egotistical people just like the rest of us. It isn't the non-existent godliness of scientists that makes us trust them. It is the gauntlet that they must run as they try to prove their conclusions. The claims of right wing fruitloops are nothing compared with the attacks from a scientists own peers. They are just worded more politely.

The "smart-arses" did publish, that's why you know about them. Posting on slashdot is a method of publication. They just didn't do so in a peer reviewed journal. Criticism is good for science. In fact criticism is at the foundations of scientific methodology.

Attacking the critics right to be critics is attacking both free speech and the foundations of scientific methodology. Science methodology is strong enough to weather it and come successively closer to truth over time in spite of right wing fruitloop denialists. Science grinds slowly but inevitably. The more important the issue, and there aren't many as important as climate change, the more important that the science be challenged and scientists be forced to justify their results with ever improved data and analysis. You'll never make money in the long run betting against scientists but short term they make lots of mistakes. It is part of the process.

You should never believe unquestionably any single scientific study. The first paper to draw a conclusion is merely throwing down a glove in the sand. Wait for the idea to be battle tested (in the journals) before you believe it. Unlike the popular image of science and scientists science is a world of viscous and continuous contention. That's why it can be trusted in the long run.

Of course you have the free speech right to attack the weather denialists just like they have the right to be fruitloops; so go ahead if it makes you happy. The fact that reasonable people will group you with them shouldn't slow you down.

This study was based on massive amounts of data, not "one piece of data" as you suggest. You are confused by the strange pluralization of the word data. A single piece of "data" is a datum. Data is the plural form of the word.

You show a lack of understanding of science methodology just like 90% of the public. Basically you are assuming that the issue is black and white, that the old methodology is totally wrong and therefor useless. Basically what we have is a lot of data analyzed the old way and a small amount the new way. So:

1) The value of consistency is that you can compare old results with new and see trends. Even though the detailed values reported may be inaccurate the trend may be. You move forward with the caveot that the flaw must be considered before accepting results. In this case they did not consider the possible impact of the flawed methodology before publishing. It was a mistake but mistakes happen a lot in science. That is the point of publishing. Every one else gets to check your methodology. Published papers in science are basically instruction manuals showing how to repeat the experiment and data analysis. This is the purpose of peer review. Science is an iterative process that hopefully converges on better predictions. Einstein did not just publish a single paper in isolation that revealed something that no one else had any hints about. What he actually did is conduct an extensive dialog with peers, some in the form of papers. This is typical science. Many people participated in the development of his ideas. He gets the credit because he presented the correct form first and it withstood the test of time.

2) All methodologies are faulty to some degree because they are approximations. It is the magnitude of errors that count. In this case the new methodology is more accurate but the old was still good enough to be useful. We mustn't throw out the baby with the bathwater.

In a case like this a plan must be in place to keep old (valuable) research moving forward but gradually shift to new methodology. In the ideal case it may be possible to convert old results to be equivalent to new at which point the conversion accelerates.

Bigjim is talking through his hat on this one. This issue was opened in 2002. Complaining after 6 years is not exactly being impatient. It is hard to imagine that this is so hard that it could not have been addressed in 6 years. It is obvious that there is NOT agreement and that in fact the core developers have never made this a priority. They may very well be be justified in this position. I have no idea what percentage of users need this. I need it but I suspect that I am in the minority. The advocates are certainly vocal but that doesn't prove anything number wise. However pretending that this is now and has ever been high priority for the core team is disingenuous. The key problem is that outlining is a structural function that really needed better support in the document structure itself. True outlining should be represented in the data structure. Outlining is not a markup attribute. Outlining means hierarchical (tree structured) data. It is being glued on top by using style tags that are not inherently hierarchical in nature. (Word does it that way but they obviously have tighter control over style tags in their code and even so their implementation is far from perfect.) Even when the document looks right it is easy for successive edits to break a structure when it is only implicit. This means that it really requires a change in the core functionality of the editor and the developers are justifiably unwilling to make changes there without careful thought. However 6 years should have given enough time to plan and implement this if the core team had cared enough. Instead various people have been assigned to make "patches" without having the authority to address the core problems blocking implementation. Outlining will not be solved until it gets promoted to a core team issue which means that it will probably never happen. Seeing no progress in 3.0 was certainly discouraging.