Answer is in the link. The short version is that there are references that lead scholars to believe that there was a spiritual leader named Jesus. We do not have corroboration for much of what happened in the bible, however.

If I recall correctly, you can recover the key simply by compareing the two encrypted messages. You don't even need the plaintext.

A bit off topic, but on the point of evidence showing that Jesus was a historical person... There is reason to believe he is a historical person, even if there is a lot of evidence to discount the stories about him.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Evidence_for_the_historical_existence_of_Jesus_Christ

You know what happened when we discovered the holes in Newtonian physics? We got relativistic physics.

Climate modeling is insanely complex, and no one working with the models would state that they are perfect, or that they can ever be perfect. However, the models are predictive. Ignoring them waiting for a perfect model, especially when it's well established that we can't have a perfect model, is just burying your head in the sand.

Right. Because there are only two choices - a black one, and a white one.

You sir, are a tool.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_climate_model#Accuracy_of_models_that_predict_global_warming

Another way to look at it: body-weight fluctuates day to day, based on water intake, restroom usage, time of day, etc. It's somewhat difficult to predict to the accuracy of a pound what your weight will be on any given day. It is however easy to predict that your weight will tend to increase on a 4000 calorie all-nacho diet.

If you look at the economic indicators, large business and investment firms are doing great in this economy. Small business on the other hand is suffering, not due to taxes or regulation, but due to a very weak middle class. That's a problem that can only be solved by growing the middle class; something I don't actually think Romney was capable of doing. Romney's approach seemed to be more of the same from the conservative party. Bust unions, relax hiring and pay regulations, undercut benefits, cut social programs. Policies that are great for business, but tend to undermine the lower and middle class.

BTW... You still kind of missed the point. It doesn't matter if there is fore-warning - you are still spending time learning a new OS, that you could be spending on other productive tasks.

I disagree with you completely. The more proficient your team is on a specific operating system, the more expensive it's going to be to move to a new one. My focus is on RedHat based distros, since that's what's used in the business world. If you asked me to admin a Debian site, or a Freebsd site, or a Solaris site, I'd be absolutely able to pull it off, but my productivity would suffer for a while.

For example, right now I could build a Cobbler host and Kickstart a hundred machines inside of a day or two. If you asked me to do the same with Jumpstart or FAI, the same simple task would probably take me a week. I could absolutely do it, but as a consultant the real cost to my company for moving from Centos to Debian based on that project alone, would be thousands of dollars.

I did switch from Fedora to Ubuntu on my desktop machines. There was definitely a learning curve, and I'm a little slower with system management tasks. It was justified, since Fedora was fairly broken on the equipment I was using. I'm happy I made the switch.

On the other hand, if I was fairly Junior, the cost of switching OS would be lower. Since I'd have a learning curve ahead of me either way, it wouldn't really matter which way we went.

None of this is a complaint about Debian, or Solaris, or BSD. They are all competent and powerful operating systems. It's just an illustration of the potential issues.

I'm very very surprised by the strong reaction I received to my original post.

We tried, but they swift-boated the other guy. I guess we got the president we deserved for that one...

You missed the point dude. It's not about whether or not someone is able to learn a new OS, It's about the cost of doing so. No matter how flexible you are, you are going to be slower work in an environment you're not used to. Lost productivity probably costs a lot more than you think.

Cost of training is in lost productivity, not necessarily on actual training courses. I'm an admin with 10 years of experience. My productivity would suffer significantly if you gave me a Mac or asked me to manage an unfamiliar distro. A week of lost productivity would easily cost my company thousands of dollars worth of my time.

Spread that out over a company of hundreds, or thousands and the numbers really add up.

Although Obama ran on a platform of supporting same sex marriage, he has come out in favor of it since, and he did end the DADT policy in the military. He's made demonstrable progress on that front. He also seems to have somewhat resisted picking a fight with the states over pot. That's movement in the right direction.

I agree that the government shouldn't be in the Marriage business, however I somewhat disagree with it not being in the civil union business - a civil union has impact on federal tax status, mandating some level of involvement.

Regarding the economy: Business is doing fine. I've made previous posts about economic indicators. The short version, is that additional business stimulus will do nothing to improve the economy. Business have more than enough funds to hire additional people, however they don't because there simply isn't demand to justify it. Demand for goods drives hiring, not the availability of resources. Hiring someone you don't need is simply Altruism, which isn't something many companies are big on. Again, you can't fix the problem by throwing more tax incentives or more money at business.

The issue right now is that real income for the middle and lower class has been falling over the past 30 years. The middle class doesn't have the funds to drive hiring.

We needed a president that would strengthen the middle class, not a president that would continue to push supply side economics and the trickle down theory. The recession ended in 09 for business - we're still waiting for it to end for the employees. The middle and lower classes have only been hurt by trickle down economics.

Regarding the comment about the FAA: I misspoke. I meant that the policy was set by the FAA, not the POTUS.