Heard that all before. It's related to geological time scales, most often, and usually not particularly relevant to the current debate. While I DO feel that many of the proponents of Climate Change have been guilty of some serious scientific misconduct in their handling of the issue and their treatment of opposing views (which have been shameful and contrary to all principles of scientific discourse at times), their evidence and projections (even though based on mathematical models that admittedly contain more than a few assumptions and must be updated all the time) seem quite solid.
But my training is in statistics, not climate science and I've not yet found it worthwhile to delve more than superficially into climate modeling (although I AM slightly familiar with weather forecast models from chaos theory studies ... VERY different animal!).
So I watch the models and predictions change with interest. And hope that there are no more incidents of outright suppression of dialogue on either side, either in the press or in the scientific community. I was glad to hear about that "Rapid Response Force" mentioned. I hope it is used to present EVIDENCE, not to belittle their opposition.

You just don't want to admit it. It's another inevitable byproduct of anthropogenic global warming caused by greenhouses gasses. That should be obvious to anyone. Expect the IPCC papers on the subject to be exposed by a whistle-blower any day now. Insiders are predicting that the studies will show that the pole is repelled by the stronger SOURCES of the gasses, but there is a lag effect, so it is only now moving away from US, and toward Siberia. In an exchange of email messages also to be released at the same time by this anonymous whistle-blower, two of the secondary authors are reported to have said "aren't these econometric models WONDERFULLY flexible?"

When the Democrats took control of Congress, it should be noted, unemployment stood at 4.6%. When they got booted out it was well over 9%. If it isn't somewhat lower than that two years from now, I would expect that the Republicans will get the same heave-ho. Especially if people see more bucks going to prop up Wall Street and the Banks while those same banks toss them out of their homes and the companies traded on Wall Street toss them out of their jobs. Anger drove this election, and if things don't get better it will drive the next one too.

One correction. The DHS LOCAL affiliates, the county Emergency management agencies, usually do a pretty good job of mobilizing local resources (like the Red Cross, etc.) to respond to local situations like tornados and minor flooding. These are the LOCAL groups that are affiliated with FEMA, which is under DHS. They get overloaded when there is a major emergency and the federal people have to take over, but in a local situation these people do a tremendous job.

Read a book. A REAL one.

What you have to realize is that almost all school districts keep two sets of books. When they give costs per pupil, or talk about deficits forcing them to cut back programs, they are talking about money in their OPERATING budgets. These tell only part of the story. What usually goes unreported are the costs of things like this: the BUILDING funds, which are, in most districts, accounted for under a completely different budget and are NOT included in the "cost per pupil" figures that anyone ever sees. Thus this half a billion dollars will probably NOT raise Los Angeles' cost of educating pupils (on paper, at least) in the slightest. It's a totally hidden cost.

When Chicago started its recycling program, residents soon noticed that the recycle bags were being thrown into the same trash-compacting trucks as the regular garbage. The city's excuse? We're picking the bags out later. Right. After it's all been compacted together. SURE you are.

Remind me NOT to move to Australia when the USA becomes untenable because of repressive policies. Any suggestions about good places to go?

Actually, rail is NOT a good solution in most dense areas in many cases. Work places today are so distributed, no longer centralized, that it would require an entire rail GRID similar to the road grid to serve the needs of commuters who often are required to work longer and unpredictable hours. In suburban areas the nearest train station to a major work center may be ten or twelve miles away, and a person living in a suburb served by a totally different commuter line is faced with a commute all the way down to the city center, then back out on the other line, and then with the problem of HOW to get from the train station to his or her work place.

Seems to me there's a really old one that got left out. Maybe I'm wrong, or this one shouldn't count, but IIRC the MUSIC system interface to the S/3x0 mainframes came with a text game called "Hunt the Wumpus." At least I never saw an implementation of MUSIC WITHOUT Wumpus on it, so I assumed that it came with it. Maybe someone who was a sysadmin (rather than just a user, as I was) in that environment can shed some light on that question.

Well, my router is so old that it wasn't covered in the Forbes article referenced, and the firmware for it hasn't been updated since 2007. So that means that either (a.) I'm totally safe because nobody would think of bothering with equipment THAT old; or (b.) I'm totally hosed because there IS no way to protect hardware that old.

I've done all the obvious stuff (like changing the router admin ID and password to something generated by my nifty random-password generator program), but face it ... there IS no security in this world short of unplugging the internet connection. (And even THAT'S iffy!)

Being from their cross-town rival I almost hate to say this, but DePaul has been at the forefront of this sort of program for some time. Back in the late '80's or early '90's they introduced a master's degree in applied mathematics that contained an in-depth study of all of the material customarily found in a quantitatively-oriented MBA degree, with some additional courses that were somewhat more oriented toward the theory behind that basic core.

And this provides the professors WHAT incentive to write the textbooks in the first place?

Writing ANY kind of a book is a non-trivial exercise. Although part of the compensation an academic receives is the prestige of having his or her name on a major (or even "standard") text in their field, the income generated from the sale of these books is, indeed, a major motivator. Absent this, it seems likely that the top-tier people in the field would avoid this work in favor of things like research, which are more likely to result in accolades (if that's what's really all that's at stake in academic publishing).

People with technical skills these days are NOT looking to the sciences, but to business. Ph.D.'s in areas like Finance and Economics, with some ability to work with practical applications in a real world environment can earn several times the median salary of a Ph.D. in most of the "hard" sciences. With my degrees in math and compsci, I had no trouble at all following my cousin's doctoral dissertation in Finance, done in the relatively early days of the Black-Scholes investigations, even though I'd only had one course in Finance.

is that the platform is NOT a Windows machine. That has been happening in workplaces and schools across the country for many years now ... "sorry, our standard platform is Windows, and you'll just have to conform."

Now that it's NOT, well, that's kind of like a "man bites dog" story, it seems.