We don't know that human life and advanced civilization can thrive in a Cretaceous-like climate.

Of course we do. If it weren't for that climate, there wouldn't be any human life to begin with. The explosion of mammalian life, including one of our direct evolutionary ancestors, first appeared during the PETM. As for advanced civilization, it seems to thrive just fine in the tropics now, thus it will also thrive if there are more such areas.

The position of those who call themselves conservatives is "I want my Hummer, consequences be damned!"

No, this is just the pigeonhole the liberals want to put them in, to feel better about themselves while they envision themselves as environmental and social stewards. It's the same mentality that leads to them to call voter ID laws "racist", as if that word doesn't actually mean something already. The overall conservative position is economic and pragmatic. Spending money trying to avert something we cannot avert in the long run is pointless, and nothing the industrialized world can do WRT CO2 output is going to have any impact if the developing nations won't also play ball -- and they won't. You're not going to convince China or India to curb growth due to environmental concerns a century out.

I don't know how accurate the stats are, but w3techs puts FreeBSD at 1.1% of all web servers [w3techs.com]

Yes, but so what? It's not as though 99% of sites aren't also useless wordpress blogs and other "small fry" VPS solutions. % of websites means nothing. Why not look at % of traffic served, or % of money handled.

Not to mention Linus has by some small miracle managed to keep it together under one banner instead of forking into three branches with duplication of effort.

It's laughable to say Net/Free/Open are forks while Ubuntu/Debian/Redhat/CentOS/Gentoo/etc/etc/etc/etc are not. The BSDs all share a great deal of their code with one another.

BSD is popular with some companies and in colleges, but when you get into the real world it's either Linux or Solaris and Solaris is fading fast

I've been doing IT and development in the "real world" for ~20 years, and you are absolutely wrong. There is a lot of Windows infrastructure out there. Nothing competes with AD/Exchange/Sharepoint in corporate environments. Nothing. There's a ton of BSD as well. .Net is far more prevalent then you seem to have any clue about.

I'm not dissing BSD, but I'd never recommend it for anything in the enterprise.

The only reason for that can be that you don't know what you're doing / talking about.

I'm not a mac person. I recognize their strengths as desktops however, and don't fault those who prefer them over windows. You won't find me suggesting anyone run an OSX or Mini as a server. Your rock however must be small indeed because BSD is certainly "mainstream", as has been discussed on /. ad nauseam. You don't *see* it in your line of work perhaps, but it's there, in the background, making everything *work*. It's in every Juniper device. Hell, the os that runs the playstation3 is part FreeBSD, as is OSX itself.

your assertion that windows 7 or OS X is better than a Linux server shows how out of touch you are with enterprise computing.

RIF. I made no such assertion. I said they make a better desktop than Linux because, well, they do. The BSDs make better servers.

'motivated reasoning,' where 'high belief certainty influenced perceptions of personal experience,'

"I believe GW is happening and that it causes bad things. Today bad weather happened, must be due to GW."

or

"I do not believe GW is happening or that it causes bad things. Today bad weather happened, as it does from time to time."

'experiential learning,' where 'perceived personal experience of global warming led to increased belief certainty.'

"I did not believe GW was happening, but did believe it would cause worse hurricane. Today a bad hurricane happened, so now I have more faith in GW."

or

"I did not believe GW was happening, but did believe it would cause hotter summers.. We had snowfall in June so, therefore, no GW.

The far more interesting thing than the conclusion reached by the source is that none of these is a remotely scientific line of reasoning. Correlating personal experience (i.e., weather events) with climate is long acknowledged as foolish, just like jumping to the conclusion that you live in the most unsafe city in the world because you got mugged -- or that you live in the safest one because you've never been mugged.

Because as good as OS X is, it's not a particularly good server platform and requires Mac hardware, while Linux has been around for ages, runs on commodity hardware, has a very well supported number of open source packages and is considered mainstream by most Unix admins.

Exactly what OSX binaries do you desire to run on your "server"?

I don't mention BSD since it's not really mainstream any longer

How big is the rock you're living under?

All that being said, I prefer OS X systems for my workstation and CentOS or Scientific Linux for servers. Redhat's nice, but overpriced when you need to deploy a lot of systems

1. CentOS =~ s/Red Hat/CentOS/g.

2. (Win7 || OSX) > Linux desktop; *BSD > Linux server.

When it comes to a mandated piece of equipment in company and personal vehicles, the situation gets a little more complicated. The operator is responsible for the safe operation of the vehicle. So the question is, what benefit is there in this?

The benefit is in the judicial system. No more people lying that their car suddenly accelerated with the brakes fully depressed. No more lying about how fast you were going when you plow into a school bus full of nuns. No more lying about how long you were parked. No more kids lying to their parents about how fast they were driving, how far they drove, etc. That is, of course, if it retains data for any length of time. The bill only requires it record data for a "reasonable" amount of time before a crash or airbag deployment, so it's likely that no more than 1-5 minutes of data will be recorded.

Absolutely everything the box records is in the public domain already, collecting it is just expensive or manpower intensive.

There is no request by any government agency, and no plan put out by any auto manufacturer, to have the data available remotely. Most new vehicles already *have* these data recorders in them, and have for some time, there is just no standard on what must be recorded or what protocol the interface must speak.

If you're concerned about what data it is going to record, and who has the (legal) rights to access that data, you could always -- you know -- read the bill. It's already been passed by the Senate, S. 1813, sec 31406. Reading the entire bill would reveal far more heinous things that are worth fighting, like empowering the IRS to revoke the passport of anyone owing more than $50k in back taxes.

What there is is a statement against being tracked

You have no such right. The police can still "tail" you without the little black box in your car. So can crooks. Anyone can sit and track your day to day movements with as much precision as they're willing to put the effort into obtaining.

Love your TBBA - zero risk of abuse? Really? So you won't mind that you're broadcasting to everyone exactly where you are every moment you're in your car?

I already am, via a technological marvel called a license plate. Combined with another technological marvel called the database, at any time anyone, friend or foe, can find the address belonging to this license plate. If you think this information is lawfully restricted only to police or other government agencies, you are mistaken. If you think the private companies that have access to it never abuse it, you're doubly mistaken.

In any event, it was a simple example of extrapolation. There is no call by anyone for the little black boxes to transmit anything. The interface will be hardwired (well until the geeks whip up a device to let you send the information to your iphone) and the data on it only available to people with physical access -- you know, like police or insurance adjusters doing an accident investigation. Or crooks with a slimjim.

Totally wrong. How about "all that arable farm land in the middle of the US will be parched desert

How open with "Totally Wrong." and follow it up with a totally wrong statement? How... expected of you. How do I know your statement is totally wrong? Easy. During those periods of history when the NA climate was the most hospitable to life year round, it was warmer than even the worst AGW predictions expect it to get. Much warmer.

The worst case prediction from the IPCC report is an average temperature rise of 4.5C. The average temperature increase during the PTEM was 6C -- not above temperatures today, but above temperatures during the rest of the Paleozoic and Eocene period. Compared with today, global temperatures were about 11C warmer.

The fossil record [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Thermal_Maximum#Life]indicates that during this time[/url], deep sea creatures faired rather poorly, with nearly 50% extinction. However, plankton, plants, and land animals -- especially mammals -- had a huge population explosion, spreading and diversifying wildly. North America was a tropical to subtropical environment at this time, not the arid wasteland you seem to suggest.

I don't think anyone thinks we can control *whether* coastal cities go underwater. We can just make it happen much more slowly by slowing the rate of warming. Many skeptics think that accepting AGW means thinking that we have complete and total control of the climate, which clearly isn't the case.

In my experience of layperson debates on the subject, like this one, that particular observation cuts both ways. Both sides *do* think we can, ultimately, decide if the coastlines (as they are now) are put under water or not. The skeptics think it's hubris to assume man has any impact besides a negligible one, while the alarmists claim the reverse -- that it's the natural course that has the negligible impact.

Likewise, you're going to die some day, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't be concerned about your health because you're going to die no matter what you do.

This is a very poor analogy. In the climate change argument, you can (with enough resources and determination) reduce the negative impact of the inescapable outcome to near zero. You cannot mitigate the effects of death. If you want to equate it to some healthcare scenario, it's more like the abstinance vs. protection argument. The alarmists are preaching abstinence, while I'm advocating for invention of the condom since abstinence is never going to work in the long run.

How much would it cost to protect (or move) NYC? An unimaginable amount of money. How much will it cost when it finally does go underwater, if unprotected? Even more.

At the very least, the two costs should be plotted vs. time so a sensible course of action can be taken, whereby we spend only as much to try and prevent the situation as is needed to ensure the preparations are completed before it happens with some amount of certainty.