1. We do nothing about global warning until it is undeniably in full force (maybe in 25 years, 50 years, 100 years or 200 years), if it ever happen. The consequential scenarios are: - Humanity faces an unprecedented crisis that leads to our extinction.

The realistic worst case projections are relatively minor. The possible extinction projections are pure hysteria.

- Humanity faces an unprecedented crisis and with its ingenuity it mitigate the crisis, while a set back in history (maybe thousands, millions or billions dies), humanity continue to strive.

The crisis would be if global cooling were to happen instead. Instead of some possibility so remote that it only exists in the hysterical, global cooling of any but the most minimal magnitude would indeed kill billions.

- Nothing happen and Humanity continue to do what it does now without suffering any consequences of our current behavior.

If nothing happens, but we hobble our economies with useless activity that accomplishes nothing, the consequences are enormous.

Is global warming real? I don't care. Act now!

Panic does noone any good.

If global warming turns out to be real and it turns out not to be beneficial, we have plenty of time to counter the worst effects. That is, plenty of time as in "at least a century".

The questions we should be asking, but aren't, go much further.

First, of course, is the question of whether or not it is actually happening. The answer is far from clear. And if we can't answer that, then it is ridiculously stupid to be paniced by a bunch of hysterical politicians spend billions or trillions of dollars to fix something that may not even be broken. And the term "politicians" includes those so-called climate scientists who have ceased being scientists in their quest to become advocates of their own global warming religion. Furthermore, if we can't even determine whether or not it is happening, than we have plenty of time to try to do something later if needed.

After that is the question of what, if anything, we can effectively do to slow it down or stop it. If we don't understand the problem, then anything we do is likely to be far from ineffective and may accomplish nothing at all. Why should we destroy our economy for little more than a hysterical nightmare?

Third is the question that hardly anyone is asking or even thinking about. The global warming advocates all take the answer for granted without even thinking about it. That is the question of whether or not we should do anything if global warming is happening and if there are some effective things we can do to combat it. Global warming is likely to be overwhelmingly beneficial for most life on Earth including mankind. Sure, if global warming occurs, there will be some people who come out behind. But global warming means longer growing seasons, especially toward the poles. Large expanses of land would become available for growing crops.

The real disaster would be global cooling. If that occurs, expect billions of people to starve to death. Remember that in the fossil record, periods of cooling, not warming, are the climatological causes of mass extinctions. If global warming helps postpone the next ice age or lessen its effects, the benefits to mankind and other animal life are clear.

There is no reason to panic. Far from it. There is plenty of reason to welcome global warming.

It's time for scientists to go back to doing science. Those who can't should go find some other work and get out of the way of the real scientists.

Except when cattle are commingled at the slaughterhouse - infection could be spread there.

By far the major problem is cross-contaimination at the slaugherhouse/packing plant.

I would bet that if you looked at the number of deaths in the United States over the last 50 years that resulted from eating contaminated beef. you would find that all, or nearly all, were from contamination that occurred after the animal was slaughtered.

The food industry doesn't need these regulations at all.

If you consider the actual diseases that make it to the consumers from meat, they are invariably the result of contamination or cross-contamination of meat at the packing plant. Where the animal came from prior to that makes no difference at all.

As for BSE, it has not been much of a problem here. When a cow with BSE was imported a couple of years or so ago, it took only about 24 hours to track it. It is doubtful that the cow would have been tracked any faster with NAIS.

If you want to look at the real threats to our meat supply, look at the animals being brought in from Mexico with relatively little oversight.

Considering the size of the food supply, there have been very few problems at the producer level. The problems that have occurred are after that.

After 20 years, my kid will have paid $2.3 million in sales taxes. Anything he spends after that means that the government will collect more tax revenue from the initial $10 million, than if he had spent 100% of it right away.

There is a concept known as "Present Value".

In your example, the government may collect more tax revenue, but the Present Value of that stream of tax revenue will be less.

Look, obviously there are more poor people supported by social safety nets than people living off inheritance, but it does cut both ways.

Obviously there are more poor drawing welfare, but the welfare for the rich is incredibly larger.

This year, the welfare for the rich is so big that the welfare for the poor is nearly nothing in comparison.

If you want to see what the Fair Tax would be like, you have to look no further than the disaster that was the Luxury Tax in the early 1990s. It was a tax on luxury jewelry, luxury cars, and luxury boats.

The first year's expected tax revenue was several billion dollars, but the actual revenue was on the order of a few million. What it didn't take into account was that by raising the cost, people's spending behavior would change drastically.

I don't know specifically how it affected the jewerly and automobile business, but it certainly just about put ever American sailboat business out of business. They laid off nearly every builder and salesman around. If it hadn't have been repealed reasonably quickly, those business would likely have been gone for good.

One frequent argument is that the Fair Tax won't increase costs at all because the base charges of items will decrease by about as much as the Fair Tax. But the only possible way that can happen is if all the employees also take a pay cut so that their take-home pay after the Fair Tax is the same as before. You should know as well as I know that that is not going to happen. In reality, pre-taxes prices will stay pretty much the same and the Fair Tax would make everything far more expensive.

The Fair Tax also presupposes that it is revenue neutral. That is, the total tax revenue with the Fair Tax will not change from the total tax revenue of the current Income Tax. Since the Fair Tax will be collected only on the sales of new merchandise, the very wealthy who pay the vast majority of the income taxes will only be taxed on what they buy. If a person makes $10,000,000 a year, but only spends $500,000 a year and invests the rest, their total taxes would be approximately $167,000 for an effective tax rate of 1.67%.

Guess who will be making up that difference? Not the poor. It will be the middle class and lower upper class that will pay the vast amount of taxes. If you make $75,000 to $500,000 a year, expect your tax load to increase dramatically as the tax rate is increased to make up for the massive reductions in tax revenue as people change their spending habits.

The Fair Tax also supposed that the Income Tax will be abolished. That's not going to happen at all. In all likelihood, we would end up with both the Fair Tax and the Income Tax -- that's the only way they could bring up the same tax revenue as now -- the Fair Tax can't do it.

In that respect, the Fair Tax is kind of like a VAT. (Note that I didn't claim it is a VAT, but that it is kind of like a VAT.) What happened to all those countries that created a VAT? Did they get rid of their Income Taxes? Not hardly. Their combined taxes have climbed higher and higher as a result of having both.

Remember that any law that is passed including the Fair Tax, the law can easily be amended. It may require the abolishment of the Income Tax, but how long do you think it would be before it was quietly amended to keep both?

If we must have taxes, we need to go to a Flat Tax with very few deductions. My suggestion is two deductions -- a $15,000 deduction per family member and a $15,000 deduction per household. Thus, a single person with no kids would pay the tax on all income over $30,000 while a family of four would pay the tax on all income over $75,000.

Obviously ssh should be off by default.

I don't think that is obvious at all. Quite the contrary -- ssh is probably the most secure method one has of connecting. Better to leave it on and turn off things like telnet.

I would like to see the password login shut off by default. If soneone wants to use plain passwords on ssh, let them edit the /etc/ssh/sshd_config file themselves to enable them.

Just get a big botnet and try all 2^1048 RSA key possibilities and there you go.

My RSA keys are 8192 bits.

Why not just disable cleartext passwords?

On our systems, we permit only skey and RSA/DSA keys for logins.

1980s 2400/9600 bps Serial connections displayed the data that the people wanted fast enough for them to get their work done.

We used to run a small company off of a single 2400 baud link with an 8 port statmux (statistical multiplexor) to a remote VAX minicomputer.

It worked fine.

heck it was a few thousand bucks for a VT terminal.

If I remember correctly, a VT100 was something like $1,200 or $1,600. After a while, there were third party VT100 compatibles that were much cheaper.

I bought a brand new out of the box ten year old VT100 compatible monitor on eBay a couple of years ago for about $60.

I love it. I actually get more work done on it than from my usual Linux and OpenBSD workstations.

You overgeneralize.

If an ISP promises a certain level of traffic, then it would be fraud. If not, it isn't fraud.

We never guarantee any customer a particular bandwidth. We had one that was interested in a guaranteed bandwidth, but that would have come at a much higher price and they didn't like our price quote.

We also tell our customers outright that we prioritize the packets by type of service. Most of our customers really do appreciate that.

What we do is to prioritize packets.

The top priority goes to certain essential network traffic. Things like DNS, for example.

The next level of priority is for very interactive traffic such as ssh.

After that comes e-mail and web browsing.

At the very bottom is anything else.

The idea is that the type of things that are most critical in terms of being very aggravating to users as they wait are at the top. The more batch-like traffic is at the bottom.

That is as it should be.

I went through a ten year period where I averaged about 2 hours a night.

I started doing this when working a full time job in Texas and teaching at a college in Oklahoma. I'd routinely go to bed at about 4 to 5 am and get up at 6:30 to take a shower and drive to the college for an 8 am class.

The only exceptions were when allergies were really bothering me and I took a strong antihistamine.

I went from a Sunday morning to a Friday night without sleep once.