According to the BBC, one of the world’s leading climate research units has been hacked. The BBC article doesn’t say (as of this writing) what the hacked information has revealed, but a file that allegedly contains the hacked data has appeared on the internet, and, if true, it seems to show a pattern of hiding and/or altering data to fit the theory of global warming.

I have no idea, honestly, whether these e-mails are legitimate or not. I believe they are, but, at this point, I am skeptical. Even assuming they are, this wouldn’t disprove the theory that the earth is warming, or even the theory that said warming is being caused by us. All it would prove is that some scientists deleted, edited, or otherwise falsified data in order to support the theory of global warming. It damages the theory’s credibility, but doesn’t utterly destroy it.

I suspect that these scientists are so confident that their theory is correct that they’re willing to throw out a single set of data that disproves it. Unfortunately for them, we’ve only got one planet, and, therefore, that single set of data is all they have. This isn’t a guy flipping a quarter ten times and having it come up heads all ten times (which would happen about once every 1,024) and then throwing out that particular set of data as an outlier. This is the opposite – a man trying to prove that quarters almost always come up heads and throwing out his first 1,023 experiments simply because they don’t prove his theory.

It probably will take the wind out of the sails of those individuals (See: Al Gore) who’ve made a career out of using the threat of global warming as a selling point for the idea of stripping various freedoms from pretty much anyone who isn’t Al Gore or one of his friends. Unfortunately, though, there are more of these people, who have various other crises (manufactured or otherwise) that they intend to use as an axe to chop away at our freedoms.

I’m anxiously waiting for further developments in this story.

At one point, having spent the an hour or so staring at the Modern Warfare 2 party screen, one of our party members said, sarcastically, “This is the best sixty bucks I’ve ever spent.”

The response? “Yeah, if we’d wanted to wait this long just to get into a game, we could’ve played Gears of War 2.”

The problem was, it wasn’t just the waiting. This was a problem we’ve had before (With Call of Duty 4, I believe): we’re in a party, we join a game, all of us are in the pre-game lobby, and just before the game starts, one or two of us are kicked back to the party lobby. At that point, whoever’s in the game can’t quit without getting penalized, which means that the “leftover” team has to either find something else to do for a while or wait.

The problem is made worse by the absolutely idiotic decision to disallow party chat during some game types (where “some game types” means “every game type you have access to when you start playing the game”). So, the process now goes like this: the party’s in party chat, and we join a lobby. Immediately, we’re removed from party chat and kicked to the in game chat, where we are “treated” to a dozen or so immature frat boys (and their sixth grade counterparts, who are often more mature, but somewhat chattier). We tolerate this for a minute or two, the game starts, and two members find themselves back in the party lobby. We’re now unable to tell our party members that we were kicked out (because God forbid we should be able to talk to our friends… thanks, Infinity Ward!), which makes the fact that we were separated from the game that much worse.

There’s no evidence that the booting is related to anyone’s connections being bad – the person “booted” is usually not the same person, and we can almost always find our way into another game with a very good connection speed beside our names. If that is the issue, IW and Microsoft need to make that clearer – if there’s something wrong with our connections (something that, I might add, doesn’t seem to interfere with any other games), we can fix it.

Like I said, though, that’s an issue we’ve hit before, and we dealt with it. The breaking of the party chat, though, is nearly unforgivable, and it’s only because I’ve already spent the money (and it’s not like I can return it now) that I’ll continue to play this game.

I can think of no good reason to break party chat this way. There’s no way it can be used to cheat, to my knowledge, since it’s only effective in-game if you’re on the same team, in which case you can talk to each other anyway. Contrast that with a game like, say, Chromehounds, which would have a perfectly good reason to break party chat – the idea that you can go out of contact with one another is a major factor of the game’s atmosphere.

One could say that it promotes team play, but my immediate reaction whenever I have to join a game with chattering twelve-year-olds or drunken idiotic frat boys (Oops, I repeat myself) is to mute everyone in the game except for the people I want to talk to (i.e., my party). Listening to the people on my team won’t promote team play – it will promote team killing.

I’ve never friended anyone on Xbox Live except those people I knew outside of Xbox Live or people who joined our games because they knew people I knew outside of Xbox Live. I have no interest in trying to make new friends via Live – the signal-to-noise ratio there would make trying to find a halfway likable person nigh-impossible (especially since the likable people are either silent or in their own party chats) anyway.

I realize it’s probably too late to save anyone’s money (and even if it weren’t, 97% of the people who read this blog were in my party last night anyway), but if you value the party chat feature, save your money until Infinity Ward and Microsoft come to their senses and fix this issue.

I upgraded my desktop PC with Windows 7 on Saturday. I played with it some that evening, and continued a little bit on Sunday before we headed to Mountain Stage^[a]. All told, I probably got in 6 hours of Windows 7 time, not counting my brief interactions with a Release Candidate installed on a virtual machine.

Quick Review: I love it. So much so, in fact, that I already find myself missing certain features when I switch to using either my netbook (which I’m likely to upgrade soon, actually) or the PC at the office, both of which are running XP.

Slightly Longer Review:

• I absolutely love the fact that there’s a separate “recent documents” area for each of the applications that I have on the task bar. Even better, I can permanantly pin items that I want to keep right to the top of the list. I have a set of websites that I visit regularly on Chrome and a separate set for which I use Opera. I can right-click the task bar and jump straight to the one I want at any point. No more opening the browser then finding the link. Similarly, we can do the same thing with my wife’s favorite links in Safari.
• I keep hearing a lot of praise for Seven’s stability, but I never had any significant issues with Vista, much less with XP. Six hours isn’t long enough to have evaluated Seven’s stability, but so far so good.
• I know it was possible to do this with separate applications previously, but I really like being able to set the desktop background to a folder and then have the actual background image rotate every X minutes. I’m a desktop wallpaper addict^[b].

1. Completely off topic – we hit a deer on the way there. Fortunately there was very little damage done to the car (a single dent in a fender, about the size of my hand), and the deer himself walked away from the accident with no sign that he’d been seriously hurt. Having tried both now, I’d very wholeheartedly recommend hitting a deer on a back-road where you’re moving slowly enough to (almost) stop when a deer jumps in front of you rather than on an interstate. [↩]
2. One of the aforementioned sites I visit regularly in Chrome is InterfaceLift, and I have a link set up so that it jumps right to the resolution I need. Every file I like, I download and throw into my wallpapers folder, where they can now just jump right into the rotation. [↩]

I have to admit, as much as I love the Stargate universe, Stargate Universe has not really grabbed me that strongly. The first few episodes focused solely on the “shortage of the week”, it seemed, and I just am not that enthusiastic about seeing the ship pick a planet (with no real input from the crew) just so the crew can send a team through to pick up something they need.

Yesterday’s episode, Earth, was much better than the prior episodes. It answered one question that I’ve seen pop up in discussions since Light^[a], and gave us a little better feel for the dynamics between Colonels Young and Telford.

Some of the Earth scenes annoyed me^[b], especially the nightclub scenes, but I can sort of understand why they were there. Letting “non-essential” personnel like Chloe come home while scientists are sent to Destiny makes sense to me, and seeing what our characters do while on Earth is a reasonable part of telling the story.

I’m not real pleased with the constant hints that Rush is a traitor. If he is, it’s too hamhanded, and if he’s not, I think it’s just an annoying waste. My take on the episode is that he may have deliberately exaggerated the danger to drive Telford and the others home, but if there was a way to dial Earth, I can’t see him just pretending there wasn’t.

Anyway, I was already sticking around at least through the first season, but I’m glad to have some hope of actually enjoying it more than the first few episodes made me think I would.

1. Why not just dial Earth while the ship is recharging? [↩]
2. I’m still not pleased with how the communication stones are being portrayed; I’d let Louis Ferreira play the character on the ship regardless of whether it’s Young or Telford or someone else [↩]

Proverbs 6:1-2

1. My son, if you are surety for your friend, if you struck your palms with a stranger,
2. you are snared with the words of your mouth, you are taken with the words of your mouth.

I just keep hearing Dave Ramsey’s constant exhortation to never, ever co-sign for anyone when I read these verses…