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Were the numbers hand picked?

Or are they simply hand-copied from another piece of code that produced them from a statistical treatment?

Until you can answer this question, your expressed opinion is entirely inadmissable of any accusation of wrongdoing.

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Its the standard refrain: “the next version will be better”; “you are using the wrong version”, “you should have used version X”. I don’t care if your base line is 1970, 1990, or 2009. Where is the version that “just works”. Meaning, does what it is reported to do, does it in a way that you need it to do it, does it without having to jump through hoops, does it without having to spend ages reconfiguring it, ie Just Works. It does not exist. Some are better than others. None are the silver bullet that can solve all problems, without a problem, forever, amen.

That being said, I have used Windows deeply since 3.0. I jumped on Windows NT as a beta tester in 1992. I have made 32 bit Windows do things that others think impossible. It is hands down the most powerful most flexible most adaptable workstation operating system out there. Unix in ANY of its incarnations is an amateur hack job by comparison and has been from its inception.

I am done with this conversation.

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It will all be put under a microscope. Some will be honest about it and others will not. In the meantime this is a high stakes game with vested interests in making money, including the high priest of the Church of CO2 is Evil, Al Gore. Climate change is really a political disease, not a science problem. We have to beat down any agreement in Copenhagen. A united effort to get it out that the data was phony and there was no evidence that CO2 is doing anything is what we need right now.

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There are useful comments on Eric Raymond blog and on Watts Up. (Copied a few here).

Eric Raymond, a guru blogger of programmers and of the open source movement exposed this code on Nov 24. .

I’m told he had not commented on climate change in his years of blogging before this point. But it’s clear now, he had been watching and knew exactly what to look for.

Anthony, I’m sure Eric has been reading Watts Up and CA! (look at how well he knows the terms of engagement…)

Eric (ESR) responds to questions on his site.
———-
“>The “blatant data cooking” is to use the actual thermometer data where it’s available, which, of course, shows no decline over those decades …

esr: Oh? “Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!”

That’s a misspelling of “artificial”, for those of you slow on the uptake. As in, “unconnected to any f…. data at all”. As in “pulled out of someone’s ass”. You’re arguing against the programmer’s own description, fool!

In fact, I’m quite familiar with the “divergence problem”. If AGW were science rather than a chiliastic religion, it would be treated as evidence that the theory is broken.”

——
“>The program you are puzzling over was used to produce a nice smooth curve for a nice clean piece of COVER ART.

esr: Supposing we accept your premise, it is not even remotely clear how that makes it OK to cook the data. They lied to everyone who saw that graphic.”

——
“>I’m sure we’ll see a correction or retraction here any minute.

esr: As other have repeatedly pointed out, that code was written to be used for some kind of presentation that was false. The fact that the deceptive parts are commented out now does not change that at all.

It might get them off the hook if we knew — for certain — that it had never been shown to anyone who didn’t know beforehand how the data was cooked and why. But since these peiple have conveniently lost or destroyed primary datasets and evaded FOIA requests, they don’t deserve the benefit of that doubt. We already know there’s a pattern of evasion and probable cause for criminal conspiracy charges from their own words.”

—————————————————-

JohnSpace wrote:Watts UP:

For those saying that this isn’t a “smoking gun” because we don’t know how it has been used, you are right as far as that goes, however you are wrong for a more serious reason. No one knows how this model was used. That is the whole point. These scientists would not turn over how the made the model and what their assumptions were based upon. They lost their data, their models were spaghetti, and they increasingly lost control over the process. I don’t care whether this was fraud or incompetency, it sure as heck isn’t science, and it most assuredly should not have been used to justify billions of expenses.
This is a “smoking gun” because even the scientists who MADE this code can explain it and whether or not it was used. As such all their work is now suspect.

JJ wrote on Watts UP:

Incidently, for those of you who think ‘It was commented out!’ is some sort of definitive resolution to this issue – It Aint. When we programmers ‘comment out’ code like that, we do it so that we can comment it right back in if we want. If we have no intention of ever running that code again, we dont comment it out. We delete it. That the code was commented out is no proof whatsoever that it was never used.

We need to know what this code does, what the data in it represent, to which data it was applied, what the results were, and how the results were used. Absent that, this is just an interesting lead that needs to be followed. Pretending otherwise is hypocritical, and can backfire in ways that could be used to smokescreen the objects of legitimate criticism that we are seeing in the whistleblowers data.

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Lionell: I’ve developed SW for captive use, commercial use, and have done all kinds of licensing arraignments. Just because you put some things into a public license doesn’t necessarily mean that you put everything into it. If the last time you looked at Unix was 1995. you’re missing a lot of context. Out of the box, open UNIX’s like Solaris and Linux are so incredibly fully functional and trivially upgradeable. They offer the features of the highest level of functionality offered by M$ with all the trimmings, and then some, and it even includes client and server level M$ compatibility. They transparently interoperate with each other and other unix’s and even M$ clients and servers. I also use OpenOffice and I really consider it a superset of M$ office. It was a little rough at first, primarily because the M$ proprietary file formats had to be reverse engineered, but it’s come a long way. One of the reasons I like open software is that it evolves far more quickly than closed software.

George

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I have no problem with “tying down windows” for a “decent level of security”. I have done it since Windows 3.0. I am doing it right now with Windows 7. Like I said, the overwhelming cause of security problem is the component between the keyboard and the chair seat.

Secondly, there is documentation and then there is documentation. Unix quality MAN pages are an absolute joke. I know because I have used at least four dialects of Unix since 1983 to 1995 inclusive. Having to study the Linux source code to find out how things work is worse than a joke. The rest of the Linux documentation follows the Unix standard.

Agreed, software V&V is done all the time. All that does is test that it meets the written specifications. If there is a bug in your specification, you are hosed. Often that is where the most serious bugs breed.

You cannot test quality into software. It has to be designed in. Also, you cannot possibly test every permutation and combination of input and environmental condition of anything but a trivial program. ALL you can do is test classes and known error limits. You cannot catch them all. Especially the unknown error limits. Further, you don’t find all the wondrous and magical ways real live uses will find to break your code. Users don’t pay attention to your specifications or your documentation. They pay attention to what they need to do and try to figure out how to get it done.

I have written code for life critical medical devices. The VP of product development told me 5 years after I left the place that he didn’t know how he could have delivered the stream of products he did without the work I left behind. It was a general purpose graphical user interface on top of VX-Works. Linux would not have had a chance in hell of being applied because it does not understand the needs of a high reliability, highly responsive real time application. Its idea of real time, is time of day to within a few 100 milliseconds more or less.

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If you say that by copying my work you are not taking it from me, that is bullshit. You would be using the results of a significant portion of my life without my permission and without paying for it. THAT is theft AND making me your slave.

If you care to take a bit of trouble reading what I actually said, you might note that the proprietary software world thieves a whole lot more from the GPL world than happens the other way around. Although I know nothing about your particular work, statistically over the whole industry no one has found one single place where a GPL code has stolen from a proprietary code. Not one.

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