* Posts by greg

38 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Dec 2007

Cocaine now cheaper than lager

greg

It's not only cheap, it's easier to find here

In my town known as the Olympic Capital (Lausanne, IOC general headquarters here, what a maffia, but that's an other subject...), I can find cocaine any hour of the day. And they won't check my age.

While in shops, you can't buy alcohol any hour of the day, and they will check your age.

And here, it's been down to 100 CHF a gram since a good 2 years, that's rightly approx 40 £...

As to the comment, here too they are seizing less, but there's more on the streets : the immediate conclusions are that :

-since Schengen, less controls at the borders

-police are less to be working on that subject (it costs but doesn't pay, politics prefer to ask policemen to go put parking tickets...)

-importers have made progress not to be caught

2 days ago newspapers title : a net of 35 small dealers arrested in Lausanne. All of them immediately replaced on the streets, no worry. And all of them arrested for 3-4 days then free again since they are all without passports from countries that don't recognize them and didn't do re-admission contracts with our government... (Nigerians for 95% of them)

And now, it's harder to find weeds in the streets, since they closed the shops you could buy it from a couple of years ago... So more black market, more fights, more troubles, etc...

Happy world we live in, but god do our politicians make all they can to annoy us...

Pirate Bay evades Italian blockade

greg

@AC who replied to morality argument

I agree with you, totally !

But read me again and think again for yourself...

Those bad right owners are shitting on me first : they don't publish some work (on account too few people are interested), they get money from dead artists, they put DRM to stop my legitim fair use rights... For them it's a business only, they don't give a crap about the artists or music.

I respect the work of the musicians and artist I download more than them, spreading around me some musical culture, from dead artists. I don't do it for free because it's easy to save money, I do it because it's almost the only way to get that music now. Torrent, or true piracy in the street from malaysia/china or who knows where from those CDs are done...

greg

Morally wrong, morally right ?

I find the morality argument becoming harder and harder to defend as each day pass...

Most people aren't as dumb as they appear (well, ok, sorry, on many points they are even dumber thab they appear, but that's not what I need for my argument, so let's forget it a minute...) :

Every day you read another scandal in the papers about government officials, about politicians, about CEOs, about ecclesiasts, about anyone supposed to belong to what we're supposed to call the elites...

So, most people working more and more to earn less and less, will be hard to be convinced about any morality argument. If the leaders seem to always show the attitude of "Me, myself and I first, what's may be left for others", how do you convince people ?

So, yeah, I do download things I morally shouldn't be getting. Well, according to most bad leaders's standard of what should be morally right or wrong for me, but of course doesn't apply to themselves.

I think for myself, it's called critical thinking, and I find quite some arguments I find morally right, by my own standards :

When I ruin my health to build a house as a bricklayer, I get paid the hours I work on building it, and I get no royalties on the loan the homeowner earn each month for years after.

When I download things mostly from dead artists, I don't see why I should pay lots of money in rights for some cocain sniffing lawyers and other posers in hollywood.

When those right owners don't even want to publish the work I'm looking for, it's even getting harder to resist the-way-of-the-torrent...

When they publish it in DRMs that don't let me put my legally bought CD in my car's CD player, I wonder about the morality argument...

Well, this morality argument is a biased argument : stealing a bit from the thieves who still have more than I get while doing less to merit it is a good philosophical problem, ain't it ?

Mac users urged to ditch Safari

greg

who cares about phishing anyway ?

Not me.

For a start, I got no credit card.

For a second, the day I get a credit card, it's never going to be used on the internet, no matter what site : not on my bank's site, not on EasyJet's site, not on any e-auction site, etc

This way, who want to empty my account need to steal my debit card, my pin code (it's not written anywhere in my world), then he can steal 1000$ a day, 3 days in a row if I don't notice it, then that's all he can ever get.

Or, he needs to steal my identity's card too, manage to look like me and sign like me. Won't work well.

Seriously, anyone in their right mind would never trust the internet for any payment : we lived pretty well without it for long enough to keep living better without, that's my philosophy.

Doctors: Third babies are the same as patio heaters

greg

Stupid to put Malthus and eugenism in this topic

Malthus was right.

Remove oil and see how much food the world will produce... Nowadays, USA use 10 cal of oil to produce 1 cal of human food... And Europe should be close to that ratio as well.

Eugenism is off topic : the one who said, who will decide who we have to kill got the problem wrong :

If we let population grow to the point it has to collapse, nobody will chose who to kill : there will be famines, which will lead to civil wars and state wars, which will lead to epidemics, etc...

If we start to lower population now by lowering breed, nobody will have to die early ; you can't kill a non-born individual. If we let thing go THEN people will have to die early, and a non-natural and most likely violent death.

And for those who forgot, remember New-Orleans after Katarina, please.

Now imagine London with food for 1/10th of people in shops abrubtly, and imagine the civil war.

greg

It's about time someone dare to talk about it!

It's a pity it takes Doctors to ring the bell on that subject, I agree.

Nevertheless, they raise an extremely important point, that no politic would dare to approach even if it is their job to talk about forseeable problems...

The western society's way of living is not sustainable for the population it concerns. Either we lower the population, either we lower our use of common goods.

And if we don't lower population, who knows, the rest of the world could abruptly force us to lower our use of common goods : what do we do if the things we manage to steal from the countries where the 2 billions of people live with less than 2$ a day stop being buyable at all, for whatever reason ? Start WW3 ?

World's biggest ISPs drag feet on critical DNS patch

greg

Swisscom's server vulnerable

Your name server, at 195.186.1.110, appears vulnerable to DNS Cache Poisoning.

All requests came from the following source port: 47043

Swisscom (Switzerland) primary DNS server for ADSL customers

Apple is Fisher-Price of sound quality, says Neil Young

greg

format, or earphones ?

In my humble opinion, a compression at 192 kb/s rate is enough for 90% of people to not hear the difference with a better definition...

The problem lies within the earphones most of the time, I would dare to say.

And of course, no matter the quality of earphones, there's a physical problem with any speakers... At 100 Hz, you get a wavelength of 3 meters, and since to hear sounds the best you should be at least at 1 wavelength from the source...

Big bad mean bass players that like to have their sound return your stomach and your haircut look like a l'Oreal commercial (your long hairs floating in the air in a so nice sinusoidal wave...) know it well !

SF's silent sysadmin pleads not guilty

greg

All these security experts, and no one to remember :

Bad input, bad output !

In other words, the press release don't give enough informations about the problem for you to propose a logical solution.

Let's wait the end of the story to start to comment on facts and not on suppositions ?

Google and the End of Science

greg

Philosophs should study mathematics

To better understand things like hypothesis, postulate, theorems...

There are interesting philosophic concepts in basic mathematics, that can easily be proven with the use of models and can't be demonstrated with empirical datas... Just one to start with :

What's infinity ? There are an infinite number of N numbers (1 2 3 ... infinity) which is quite a lot, since it's an infinite number...

Yet that infinite number is not enough to count how many numbers you can find in R numbers, like those between 1 and 2. Easily demonstrated in 2 minutes with a pen and paper to your favorite Paris Hilton type of scientist, thanks to Cantor.

So, in 2 minutes with a pen and paper and a model you can demonstrate a simple concept (that can't be proven by empirical means), that there are different "levels / meanings" of infinity...

I'd like to see how much time it takes to a philosoph to put this in practice : defining infinity... And we're not even talking about an expandable infinite model...

Well, the human language and what we could call empirical common sense is great up to a point, but if you want to make things work, you better leave philosophy for the boring long winter sunday evenings, and start to work on mathematics and models.

If I dared, I would say that philosophy is some sort of cerebral dysentery : a shitload of ideas, but they're all crap.

P.S. : Matemathics and models can demonstrate that there is no possible model for that old "squaring the circle" quest. Interesting paradox, one could say : a model to prove that you can't find a model for something apparently as easy as changing the shape of a very defined surface...

DOJ sinks another EliteTorrent admin

greg

Like the drug war, it's a lost war

Well, the big difference is the drug war implies a huge lot of real money that nobody really want to supress...

But else, as long as you have consumers, there will be providers.

As long as people have their reasons to not feel like thieves for downloading, they will download, and there will be uploaders.

Now, the day we could know for sure how much money is really lost for copyright owners (remove all the downloads that wouldn't have bring them any money anyway...), we might be surprized it's far less than the cost of the war against piracy, if you add up the lawyers, court and now jail costs...

And if the war is won by the copyright owners, the little more money they will make may be far less than the money lost by ISPs and hard drives makers, as well.

Bah, anyway it's just money going from pocket to pocket, you may change the pockets's address but the total money's flow pretty much stay the same...

Rare Mac Trojan exploits Apple vuln

greg

Correct me if I'm wrong please

But if you download and install something, on any OS, can't it be giving control anyway, no matter what OS ?

On the other side, if you're not totally stupid and have an Mac 10.5 and bought an external harddrive and use time machine correctly, you can go back to your prior-to-the-trojan-stupid-install in 30 mins, maybe less ?

I mean, very easily, without being a computer genius, which is important since it's computer illiterate likely to be hit by such an install...

Disgruntled admin gets 63 months for massive data deletion

greg

Also sue the incompetent

Sue those responsible for letting it happen, as well.

And then maybe, maybe, people paid to secure sytems will do what their pay is for ?

And in case those paid to secure the system left a note to higher hierarchy to say they aren't given the right needs to secure it, sue the higher hierarchy, etc...

God makes you stupid, researchers claim

greg

God is an onion

And since none can prove God isn't an onion, nor can prove it's an orange, then it has to be an onion.

Well, now less seriously : if a believer dies and there's nothing after, he won't even notice he was wrong; while if a non-believer dies and then start his other life, he'll (or she'll, let's not be sexist!) notice he was wrong.

So, believers are people who refuse to take the risk to notice they were wrong, even if they may well be !

French court fines eBay for sale of counterfeit handbags

greg

luxury business model

Well, me didn't go to any business school, but let's think a bit...

If China can make a luxury item copy for 10$ that looks so well as the original luxury item sold 1'000$, then the original is not worth much than 10$...

If people want to pay 1'000$ for an 10$ item, it means that besides being dumb, they DO want to be recognized as RICH dumb people...

If people buy fake luxury item, it means it's important for them to fake being recognized as rich dumb people, thus not faking being dumb (else they'd just get a no-brand item) but only faking being rich. So they're actually poor, nonetheless dumb people.

If you have too many poor, nonetheless dumb people carrying around the fake luxury items, then the true rich and dumb people ready to pay the luxury price will move to an other luxury item wich is more likely to show other how rich (and dumb) they are.

So now we know why luxury items makers need to defend their items.

We still don't know why so many people, rich or poor, are dumb and want to be recognized as such. But please, don't change the system too much, it's such a nice system to detect dumb people...

For truth about Europe, read The Reg

greg

Quite frankly, who's here too lazy to change the settings about title needed ?

"There are things Europe has to offer that are harbingers for the general human future,"

Yep. Lethal skunk !

"There is a definite gap opening between America and Europe in terms of coverage because Americans can't afford to live there."

Yep. No coverage here for a loan when you got 0 income. No exception (yet?) for US citizen.

I Was A Teenage Bot Master

greg

Victim's responsability

What about insurances ?

Why do you have to prove effraction to call your burglar's insurance ?

So many instances in everyday life where you first have to prove you took the common sense precautions before pretending being a victim...

Your personal data just got permanently cached at the US border

greg

Reverse them the favor

Didn't I remember a story about Brazil now fingerprinting only US citizen that want to enter their borders ?

If, let's dream, some countries would mandate any US citizen entering their borders to have all their digital devices be copied, what would happen ?

Ok, I shouldn't dream...

'We could wake up smarter' - Ballmer hints at Win XP reprieve

greg

In this virtual money's world...

I'd like to know how much Microsoft really has in fortune...

The real money that is. The one that can't disappear in 2 days.

Boffins develop '500TB iPod' storage tech

greg

DNA still unbeat then

I clearly remember that astounding number in a book that stated that the human DNA has

10^600'000'000 (yes, 10^600 millions !) possibilities.

I also remember scientists going with an approximate number of particles in the universe in the range of 10^80 only...

That leaves more than 10^50 million numbers to code each of those particles...

So when someone male brags about his new toy's storage capacity, remind him of how much he wasted last time he ejaculated...

Local council uses snooping laws to spy on three-year-old

greg

Definition of criminal

Well, in my eyes spying citizens for a possible fraudulent school application is a worst crime that said fraudulent application !

If I got it right, they spy before the fraud occurs, to avoid it. That's not good. If you want a civilised way, you remember the good old "innocent unless proven guilty", let people who want to fraud try it, THEN you punish fraudsters.

Well I guess people who make donations to the school they'd like their children into don't get that spying first, accept application after treatment...

Global-warming scientist: It's worse than I thought

greg

Disaster, really ?

Well, it would only be a disaster if you postulate that we achieved the best possible living conditions, and that those conditions would suffer...

On the other side of the logic, there are going to be change in living conditions, but who can pretend that has to be a disaster ? It might well end up with even better conditions if humanity has to rethink about itself...

Brown ignores scientists and pushes pot reclassification

greg

Switzerland case

Interesting that in Switzerland we had a majority of politicians, police chiefs, doctors asking for cannabis to be decriminalized, the change of law almost happened but is now delayed...

When 500'000 adults over 6 millions admit to smoke couple of times a year, it's annoying to want to put them all 5 years in jail for possession.

Those wanting to put pot smokers in jail are usually the same wanted to put parents in jail too if the state can't force their children on Ritalin, interesting too.

Politic's is easy, follow the money...

Comcast admits it can do the impossible

greg

Not sure with have 2 diferrent issues, Andrew

I don't agree that there are really 2 different issues...

Nobody forces the PR people or sale people to advertize an "All you can eat" business, and they shouldn't if they can't provide the food they promise.

It's one single issue at the end, there is a limited by physic capacity to a network, you can't sell it like you have more. Or, you can maybe sell a little more than what you really have and people won't notice. But once you really oversold your capacity, starting to use management technics won't change the simple fact you simply oversold it, period. Lying about it only add to the shame of the bad business principles applied.

See, you can overbook your flights a little, most of the time statistics will be with you and you'll end with full planes and none left behind, but when someone IS left behind, what do air companies do ? Apologize, and offer a small compensation ?

Or lie, telling you it's your fault because you should have guess that that particuliar flight is always overbooked ?

Anyway, it's a shame and a bad business. Tell people the truth, or something pretty close to the truth. Sell what you have at the price it is worth. Or else, you should morally be called a crook because that's how you act.

Hey, at least here in Switzerland you can legally attack a false misleading advertisement, which means even if it's more expensive at least ISP give you what they sell you.

My apologizes for my bad english, it's not my mother language.

greg

A small flaw in your view, Andrew Orlowski

Quoting you :

"But before we are in a position to make a moral judgement on Comcast, we have to permit them the possibility that they may have been acting rationally."

If they had been explicitly explaining what they were doing, why, who would benefit and who would not, then everything would be fine. Honest, rational way of taking care of problems.

Now, lying as they did, allows me to make a moral judgement about them, and call them lyers.

For the whole subject of bandwith and net neutrality, why wouldn't it be possible to have ISPs make clean, honest contracts ?

In the mobile phone business, here in Switzerland I got 3 operatots, each offering different contracts, I end with like 15 different possible choices. Harder to find best suitable one, but things are honest.

In the ISP business, there are 6 choices total, and none is really honest since none can assure you a minimal speed, they are all about possible max speed. Where is the honesty ?

US state outlaws RFID data theft

greg

We should obviously pass laws to make

Adultery a crime. Without adultery, how many lifes would we save from passionate revenge crimes ?

Cheaters are terrorrists ! Think about the children !

So really, what are YOU waiting to bug your representatives to pass this new law, asap !

French Googleslayer gets the green light

greg

@Tom Willis

Hello there,

you probably missed the point I was trying to have.

And I probably did try to make it in a very bad way.

I was a bit amused that most first comments had not much to do with the content of the article, but only focused on the name of the project.

I also didn't know there could be any thing like "Brits-don't-know-languages" reputation or a-priori, mind you, I learnt this from your answer.

Had I knew there was anything like this, I would have chose an other way to comment.

So, here I present you all Brits my sincere apologizes if you felt insulted by my comment. It was not in any way my purpose.

My only purpose was and still is, why make so much fun of the name of the project and not comment purely on the project itself ?

By the way, the choice of a Latin name is a good choice at least for one political reason : it won't be related to one particuliar member of the project's team.

Thus probably the latin name for the european GPS clone...

Now, we could maybe comment on why it may be a good point to not put all your eggs in the same basket, and why such a project may well be needed...

I have nothing for or against Google, but the day they are the only player left I will have something against them, for sure.

greg

Etymology

So now you Brits may have a vague idea of the root of words like

quest, request, querry, and al...

English do contain many latin derivated words, after all :)

'Freetard ? more like advert programmed PAYTARDS!'

greg

So many different arguments

What about people who "steal" music for free because :

1 It's possible

2 If it wasn't, they wouldn't buy it anyway.

Can you even count those as a sale loss ? Barely...

Now, those people wouldn't steal a car if it was possible without getting caught :

They would steal a copy of the car. But remember, they are people that wouldn't buy the real car if stealing the copy wasn't possible anyway...

The day we know exactly how much the industry lose is far, but we today know what they earn...

Me myself don't even download anything, nor for pay, nor for free, so I'm out of both categories...

Apple's Time Capsule: is its HDD really 'server grade'?

greg

The way Time machine works

Try to not forget that if you leave it running on the dafaults, Time Machine will backup every hour of last 24 hours, then every day of last month, then a weekly one, until backup disk is full.

Since a full backup is done on first time then only changes are recorded,

if they are no changes since last backup, there's not much to copy either.

Then, there's few chances the backup drive will ever work 24/7, it will mostly idle.

Time Machine is for home users that will more likely use it because they accidentally earased some files than for pros who have real sensitive datas to be safely stored in 3 different physical places with UPS in each etc...

And since that one is working on wifi, you can even have it in an OTHER room of your flat than your computer after all !

Home Office opens sex offender files in pilot scheme

greg

@Mr Chris

So, those of you in favour of hitting kids to discipline them - will you mind if someone else does it to your kids as well?

I am not in favour of hitting kids, but I do agree that there are times it's the best way, if not the only way.

I'm talking of a slap that's not purposed to cause physical harm, but to remind the child of his childish position versus the adult. In most cases, like in school, that used to work wonderfully at my young years.

It was not the harm to be slapped, but the shame that did the lesson.

Mind you, when I was a child, we were explained that they were limits, that crossing the limits would have consequences, and we understood the limits.

I was slapped 2 times by a teacher in my school years, but I didn't complain, I knew I had cross the limits, and I knew that if the father was to learn about it (and both times the 2 teachers themselves explained it to my father), well the father would explain me that the teacher did right because if he had been there he (the father) would have slap me himself !

And if I was a father myself, I'd gladly go explain my child's teachers behind what limits they have my benediction to slap them.

All these moderns pedaguogic theories have lost connection with reality I'm afraid.

Armed police swoop on MP3-packing mechanic

greg

What if he had a gun, legally ?

I bet if he was any kind of man with a legal reason to have a gun, things would have been easier for him !

FBI issues prosthetic pregnant belly bomb alert

greg

72 virgins

72 virgins for you and for ever might be a nice reason to give up your life as a young man (even though I'd take 2 experienced ones over 72 virgins every day as a much better deal...), I fail to see how this may help to recruit women suicide bombers...

US may shoot down spy sat to safeguard tech secrets

greg

Everyone has his own nightmares

Lockheed for a failing kit...

US Army for secrets failures, but also for possible more failure trying to destroy it...

NASA for even more space debris if the sat is detroyed too high and some parts are sent back higher by the explosion...

CIA for all the coca-cola they will have to import in USA to re-subsidize those black accounts to pay for an other sat...

Ben Laden for taking no credit in this exploit...

And poor little me for laughing out about all of this, while the NSA's computers try to decide if this piece of internet's rant need some human time wasted on it...

Failing civilization maybe too ?

Will Microsoft parachute Windows 7 in early?

greg

RE : Apple Playbook

Different customers, different needs, different views...

I am NOT a computer guru, and don't plan to become one. I'm your typical John Doe using a computer to access the web, use emails, transfer my legally bought music onto some sort of MP3 player...

Important to note is I have a family computer. I don't have much clue, but I got a lot compared to wife and children.

So 5 years ago I decided to get a computer at home, and I went for a Mac.

I spent a lot of time reading manuals (I know that's very old-school, wife and children just never would have the idea to open a manual when a problem occur...).

5 years after, I can't remember of rebooting my Mac once except for the Mac securities updates, I never spent a penny on any anti-virus, I learnt how to find interesting free things to solve my problems...

And best part is I never got wife or children able to screw anything I couldn't solve in 10 secs with the *force application to quit* solution !

They're happy on Youtube, recieve mails, put music and photos on comp and then on Ipod, and I have had nothing that can remotely remember me of what the word problem means...

Customers like me LOVE Macs and OS X, and we even know why.

CIA claims crackers took out power grids

greg

If you want to attack critical facilities...

Why not attack weakest point of the chain ?

And, logically, an unguarded one ? One that takes long to repair ?

Then, there are far easier possibillities.

Take a long distance high-tension electricity line, for example. Some run across hundreds of kilometers, with unguarded weak points every 100 meters or less.

It would be easy as hell and cost nothing in money or knowledge to bring such a line down. With the load on the electrical web already close to maximal capacity, taking such a line down will have real annoying consequences, for a minimum of 3-5 days.

A terrorist ready to study a week could find public plans to find weak points of fiber lines around Wall Street or the City, then go cut one with an axe.

Easy, cheap, safe for your health ways to bring hell are all around.

Fortunately, terrorists are busy studying how to hijack planes with explosives hidden in shoes or in coke bottles, or so are we to believe !

Lord Triesman on P2P, pop-ups and the Klaxons

greg

Government enabled racket ?

If I hear about some music I may like, from friends or whatever source, what do can I do nowadays ?

Go to the local official dealer, ask to hear the artist (no way I'll buy it without a little test), pay the CD. Since I paid for it, I have the right to hear it whenever and whereever I'd like, logically.

So I happily put it in the car CD player... Doesn't work !?! I say, f**k DRM !

I put it in my old portable CD player... Doesn't work !?! F**k DRM !

I want to encode it and play it on my portable MP3 player ? Soon enough it won't work (without using an illegal software that is) !?! F**k DRM !

So, today, whenever I buy a CD, I already feel that I am stolen from MY rights !

I turn on the radio in the car. I am forced by law to pay a license fee here in Switzerland. 9 out of 10 songs I hear, on any station, are things I'll never buy, I wouldn't accept even if given for free, and I'm not ever going to get by any way.

But because some businessmen in this world managed to make Justin Timberlake a "star" and have deals with MTV and have it played even in the shopping malls, it's number one in the charts, it's on the radio and I'm forced by law to pay for him. If I wouldn't want to pay for him, I'd have to remove the car radio, go to our government agencies to say I refuse to pay the fee, prove I removed the radio, and that would cost me even more.

So, I pay for people I don't want to pay, because of this stupid business model and the laws that apply to it.

2nd time I feel I am stolen from my rights.

So, as far as I am concerned, I for once would LOVE this whole music industry being forced to find a true competitive market model, where only the artists that play something nice enough for an audience that really is willing to pay for would survive.

Take one more example, valid here in Switzerland. Part of the tax I am forced to pay is to sponsor some artistic work. I see one huge problem at least :

hundreds of thousands $ are given each year to make it possible to play Operas.

Every citizen is forced to sponsor it, but at the end only the rich citizen are able to pay the remaining entrance fee, which is still way above what 90% of workers who paid tax for it can afford. So, poor people are sponsoring Operas for the rich people. I'd likely remove that sponsoring and make the rich people who like to go show other rich people that they like Operas pay the full participation due to it !

So when I pay more than half and hour of work's money for a CD for a 20 years ago dead artist that I can't play in my car, to pay businessmen that do their jobs so well that they force me to hear Justin or Britney in shops and sponsor against my will...

At minimum I feel I am stolen of MY rights 3 times.

Add the blanket license fee we have on blank digital container of any sort I am forced to pay even if I never copied any copyrighted work on them...

Add that crap implying I am a thief I am forced to see whenever I legally pay to rent a DVD...

And then call me a fool, because I feel there's a RACKET against me ?

Sicilians may have produce the maffia, but Hollywood is trying to enforce a worlwide government enabled racket.

Cloudy outlook for climate models

greg

Did I miss something BIG ? Yellow big ?

There's something annoying about all the climate problematic, from a stupidly basic fact... Where's the sun's changes influences taken in account ?

If all these models and studies about atmosphere's changes related to climate changes are trivially based on the sole asumption or postulate that change in atmosphere has to imply change in climate, scientifics may have simplify a bit too much to try to find possible models.

After all, changes have happened both in atmosphere and climate way before human started to mess with them, and the sun's activity does not seem to be a flat constant. If the lack of any data about the sun's activity variations is a reason to forget about it in the models, I think we may have a scientific consensus about the existence of God before these models approach any truth.

What I find most annoying is the political obsession with greenhouse effects which seem just a bit too convenient to hide a couple of problems where human's activity can't be denied : water pollution and soil depletion for example.

Malthus wasn't wrong. He didn't know we could artificially improve culture's returns with oil based chemicals. We bought a delay on the deadline, but think about it again taking in account it seems in average the USA are wasting 10 cal of oil to produce 1 cal of food, and check why the grains prices are going high in the markets ?