Yes, we need the hoi polloi to discuss global warming; we need to teach the controversy in our schools. We can't let the experts spend all those years out of their lives doing all that sciencey stuff without the rest of us putting in our uninformed two cents and deciding the matter.

While weather is a chaotic system and can't be predicted with precision, the trend in climate change can be discerned. Sure, we don't know how bad things are but we do know that if things continue as they have been, we can expect unpleasantness at the very least.

And 10-11K years ago? That's when humans invented agriculture.

I may be wrong but my understanding is that IBM has done this; they have given every employee the option of running Windows or Linux. Most people are already familiar with Windows so they take the perceived path of least resistance. Me? I woulda stuck with OS/2.

I recall the Bush's adminstration endlessly repeated and inflamatory soundbite, "We can't let the smoking gun be a mushroom cloud" even after the Nigerian yellowcake "intelligence" was proven to be a sophomoric fabrication.

Just as we have a handle on N.Korea's and Iran's nuclear facilities we would have had the same on Iraq's, yet there were none. The only "proof" of Iraqi nuclear activity was the fake Nigerian document and some aluminum rocket tubes. Yet the Bush administration continued to prey on America's fear of nuclear war.

Deputy National Security Advisor Hadley stated that Bush had been directly and repeatly apprised of the deep rift in the intelligence community over the aluminum tubes, yet this was not communicated outside the White House.

Except that Canada's oil reserves are in the form of heavy crude which isn't as economically feasible to extract. But I agree with the rest of your comment.

I agree with Lord Bitman and disagree with the article. Looking at the timeline referenced in the article we can see amazing inventions like blue jeans and toasters. The author's grandmother saw culture-warping inventions like flashlights and toilet paper. Where are all the amazing inventions today?!

I'm not trying to belittle the accomplishments of the late 19th and early 20th centuries; afterall, we stand on their shoulders. But to discount our own accomplishments is disingenious.

The author has given short shrift to things like the LCD & LED, virtual memory, PET scans, CD & DVD, probes to the outer planets, GPS, Bose_Einstein condensates, smart phones, the discovery of dark matter, discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, carbon nanotubes, genetic manipulation, construction of a synthetic chromosomes, brane theory, multi-processing, cloning, quantum wells, discovering neutrinos have mass, quantum computing, and the Holocene extinction event.

I've ignored entire fields of study that didn't even exist in the author's grandmother's day. This list could go on for quite a while.

Oh yeah, the last item in the list was just to see if you were paying attention.

The State of Washington has multiple computing platforms. Why does everything think that these platforms are all supported by either Microsoft's or Amazon's clouds? I know the State of Washington also has IBM zSeries mainframe systems. Somehow I don't think these environments are supported by these particular clouds.

We had the largest data center in Seattle and believe me we did NOT have sprinklers in our data center. Saying that the city required them sounds like a cop-out to me. Our disaster recovery plan was pretty solid with off-site recovery several thousands of miles away within minutes. Unfortunately, we did not have a disaster recovery plan for being seized by the federal government and sold to a competitor.

And having sprinklers in the electrical room is such a good idea too. Let's make sure we don't just suffer from fire damage.... They're lucky no one was seriously injured.