A strong Russian Orthodox church, incidentally run by a former KGB functionary . . .

Since the KGB ceased to exist years ago the existence of a time machine would certainly be a National Security issue. . .

Agreed, because perhaps the gods will make carbon dioxide and methane work differently in Earth's atmosphere than everywhere else in the observable universe so increasing their concentration won't cause anything to happen here.

It's the bedbug/spider ecosystem in his mom's basement.

Hidden heat? Wrong, it's well known where the heat is going. The oceans have been sucking up the excess heat instead of the atmosphere for reasons that currently are not well understood but which may have to do with the excess fresh water from melting glaciers forcing the warmer but denser salt water deeper (which is being observed in both the Arctic and Antarctic).

They're generally not actual conservatives, either. Most of the time they're extreme radicals. Grover Norquist's web site used to have a position paper where he proposed to run the US government debt so high that there would be no budget left for anything but the military and debt servicing. The effect would be to reduce the US government to the size where he "could drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the tub."

So thinking that doubling the carbon dioxide and tripling the methane in an atmosphere will cause more heat to be retained is "wild speculation"? It's not a hard experiment to do, honors science classes do this in high school. In every single case the result has always been that more heat is retained. Always. This has been known for a century and a half, what is "wild speculation" about it? Or is your position that there is something magical about Earth's atmosphere that will make carbon dioxide and methane violate the laws of physics? And why would that be, when those gasses function as would be expected on Venus and Mars?

Take the better models. Apply them with the variables appropriate for Venus. They work. Apply them with the variables appropriate for Mars. They work. Apply them with the variables appropriate for Earth ten million years BCE. They work. Are the models "proven" to be 100% accurate? No, of course not. Are they shown to be accurate with >90% reliability? Yep.

Now take those models and apply them with the variables appropriate to Earth in 100 years with current rates of anthropogenic emissions. The result is something catastrophic for our current model of civilization. Of course the only way to know for sure if the model is 100% accurate is to wait around a century and see if reality deviates noticeably from the model, so I guess we'd best twiddle our thumbs for a few generations.

When they take the current climate models and plug in the variables (solar insolation, atmospheric gas mix, albedo, etc.) appropriate to Venus, Mars and Titan they get results very close to the actual climates. In other words, the models have been tested and shown to be fairly accurate. Carl Sagan was able to do this with some of the first models back in the late 1970s, and the science and the modeling processes have only gotten better over the last four decades.

In reality, climate modeling has likely saved our civilization if not our entire species once already. It was while playing with those models that the 'Nuclear Winter', the result of a nuclear war, was discovered. Ronnie Raygun and his band of lunatics would likely have launched nukes against the Soviets in eastern Europe if it hadn't been conclusively demonstrated to them that there was no way for anyone to come out of it a winner.

College age, so 18-26 or so.

You can join the Nebraska woman who filed a lawsuit yesterday against all the homosexuals on the planet, claiming to represent god.

Used to know some guys that rented in a big rundown house full of stoners on Frat Row, all chopped up into about a dozen bedrooms, that everyone referred to as 'Entropy House'. It would have been about a block from these dingbats. One year in the late '70s during Rush Week they put up the Greek letters Lambda Sigma Delta on the house and handed out electric beer to all the prospective pledges that weren't bright enough to figure out what the letters spelled. It apparently was an interesting night.

Alexandria? Or Constantinople? Jerusalem was a tourist destination, Silk Road trade passed through Constantinople, spice trade through Alexandria. Of course that's only important if you consider Europe anything more than the backwards barely-civilized backwater that it was at the time. Europe was so unimportant that it didn't even hear about the opening of the Forbidden City for 21 years, while ambassadors were sent from kingdoms all over Africa and Asia bringing gold, jewels, elephants and giraffes as gifts.

I work in physical security (key cards, security cameras, alarm systems, etc.) had have seen plenty of stuff this bad. For six years one of the highest quality megapixel IP security cameras on the market had a single user, "root", with a password of "system" that you could not change. Two others had only root or admin as users and you could only configure a 4 character lower-case alpha password (raised to 6 characters in a later firmware release). The absolute worst I've ever seen was Cisco's abortion of a system.

I was in the training class at Cisco's headquarters, training to do our first (and fortunately only) deployment of this abysmal system. I had recently acquired a new port scanner and was playing with it on a break in the class, so pointed it at the encoder. Oh, Port 23 is open, let's see what I can do. Opened a telnet session, typed 'whoami', and it replied 'root'. I was so shocked I said "Holy crap!" loud enough to attract the instructor's attention. When I explained what I had found he didn't seem to think it was much of an issue, even though he was a Cisco lifer who had been around the company almost since the beginning. His exact quote was, "Well, since you're going to run the application on its own private network there won't be any issues." The entire class informed him what life in the real world was like.

The application server was a Windows Server 2003 box with **NO** updates because Service Pack 1 broke the application. You had to log into it as Administrator to do anything. End users had to be administrators on their PCs to run the client, even though it ran in a web browser. It would run under XP SP1, but one of the later Windows updates broke the client so you couldn't update them either. As bad as all that was, the whole application did not follow any of the standard paradigms for viewing security video, it looked like a bunch of programmers got together and said, "If I wanted to view security video how would I want it to look?"

Now I see that Cisco has it's own access control system as well, I can only imagine what a clusterfuck that thing will be.

You may have missed the The PCA pump stores wireless keys used to connect to the local (medical device) wireless network in plain text on the device. That means anyone with physical access to the Pump (which has an ethernet port) could gain access to the local medical device network and other devices on it.

Once you're on the medical wireless network you now have access to **ALL** the other equally insecure PCA devices connected to it. You see, you don't need to even change any settings on your pump to get access to everyone else's pump. For something like a morphine pump I can see a market opportunity for someone who can adjust one's settings at will. For an insulin pump, well there may be prospective heirs interested in making adjustments as well . . .