Consensus (even if 100%!) does NOT determine truth! History is literally filled with examples of consensus being dead wrong, quite often in the name of "science".

As you look into this (I have) you discover that what we *know* about climate (and especially the causes for its widely varying changes over both history and prehistory) begins to become very thin, very quickly. Large-scale, highly multi-variate, inherently chaotic systems are *hard* to model and understand, and even if you DO manage to build an accurate model of one (and IMO, that is currently WELL beyond our technological abilities), that is NO indication that the model is accurate or valid. And even if the model is valid for a subset of the problem domain, there is a very good chance that the fundamental presuppositions that underlie it are wrong to at least some degree. This is clearly seen even in areas that are far better understood than global climate change and GHG forcing - despite the fact that we can produce useful models of many phenomena (as did Newtonian physics), we frequently(!) discover new knowledge that causes reevaluations of our previous "knowledge" and assumptions.

REAL truth is hard to come by, and even the scientific pursuit of truth and knowledge should start with the recognition of what we don't know, and what we can't know (or at least, what we cannot prove scientifically, which is a great deal - not all questions can be answered in a scientific, observational way...)

For those who are historically unaware, the doctrine of anticipatory self-defense was NOT originated by the U.S. In fact, the U.S. was on the receiving end of the attack by the British known as "The Caroline incident" that established anticipatory self defense as a part of international law. U.S. Secretary of State Daniel Webster eventually agreed that nations must have a right to take pre-emptive strikes in the event that "necessity of that self-defence is instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation".

This is "the Caroline test" used to establish the validity of such strikes under international law, and it's not a trivial standard, as you suppose - simply claiming a need for self-defense is a far cry from satisfying the Caroline test. While this arguably supports actions such as an Israeli bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities, it clearly would not support actions such as those Obama took in his recent attacks on Libya. Without a credible threat, it's pretty hard to reach the bar set by the Caroline test...

The gears of the Antikythera mechanism do not have involute teeth - they are simple, hand-filed triangular profiles. This device has been a hobby of mine for years, and my source for this is Price's original scholarly work on the mechanism, "Gears from the Greeks". (Getting a copy of this out-of-print book was quite difficult in the mid-90's - it took me nearly two years to find a copy for sale, and I had to pay nearly $200 for it. I expect it's out on the net somewhere these days...)

That said, it's not the craftsmanship that's remarkable - we have plenty of ancient jewelry to prove that precision metalworking techniques were common long before the Greeks - it's the design of the device.

The amazing thing about the Antikythera mechanism is that it's far harder to figure out how to make one, that it is to actually make it. With a only a few exceptions, most anything that could be built right before the industrial revolution could have been built by the ancient Greeks, Romans, etc. Don't get so proud of being modern - people are no smarter or capable now than they were then, we just have the advantages and motivations of a capitalist society to propagate technology...

The measurements are pretty easy, especially for people who were fluent in geometry, as most ancient empires were. (In fact there's some substantial reason to suspect that the scientists of Rhodes had a still-unknown method of determining longitude at sea, a problem that flummoxed the west's best scientific minds (including Newton and his contemporaries) until the 18th century. (Read Dava Sobel's excellent book "Longitude" for the full story. I highly recommend the illustrated edition, which has hundreds of high-quality photos of old navigational and timekeeping devices.)

Your historical ignorance is truly staggering, but apparently, your blind hatred of Christians and religion blinds you to much else, too... Christians had nothing to do with burning the Library at Alexandria, a fact easily provable by the fact there weren't any Christians in 48 B.C.! I expect even you can handle that math!

Science could not (and actually, cannot) exist without or outside a Christian worldview. Science and Christianity are anything but opposed, since science itself depends on the foundational presuppositions of a Christian worldview (see van Til and Bahnsen). The medieval period was anything but dark - in fact, it was during this time that Christian scholars created modern scientific inquiry, and nurtured it to fullness.

I prefer one of the latest versions of Puppy Linux, which have the advantage of being much smaller and faster than Ubuntu, but still giving you access to all the Ubuntu packages. This is an awesome combination.

Puppy isn't as pretty (in terms of UI polish) as some of the others, but it's technically excellent, and is probably the most innovative distro out there overall - and that innovation has been a continual process for several years now.

With Unetbootin, you can create a bootable Puppy CD in minutes (including download), and install from that to your hard disk if you decide you like it. (Yes, it can coexist with a previously-existing FAT filesystem if you want, and despite what some ignorant Linux purists are saying here, that can be a good option under many circumstances, especially when someone wants to try Linux, but be able to back out everything if they decide they don't like it.)

Puppy has gotten a bit ahead of its documentaition, (as I said it is innovating at quite a pace), but overall, I find that in the vast majority of cases (even on old hardware), Puppy "just works"...

IMO, Puppy is vastly superior to Knoppix, and even many of the bigger-name distros. It's lean, fast, and Barry Kauler's built what may be one of the most technically excellent foundations of any distro out there. The newer versions of Puppy have the ability to use packages from other distros - the default at the moment is to use Ubuntu Lucid packages, but there are several other options available, and support for others is an ongoing thing.

Actually, for the question the OP posed, I would recommend Puppy over probably *any* other Linux distro...

Power over Ethernet is DEFINITELY the way this should go. For one thing, PoE and the PoE standard just works, and has now been tested, standardized, extended to higher power ranges (802.3af up to 12W, 802.3at to 25W (50W w/all wires), and is extremely interoperable across devices and manufacturers.

PoE is smart - The PSE (power supplying equipment) and PD (powered device) have to sync (mostly passively, it's clever) to determine power required and the presence of a PD before any power is delivered.

PoE also has the advantage of being the first non-trivial worldwide power interface (yep, I'm considering USB as trivial, for lots of reasons...), and its standardization on 48VDC means there are already zillions of telco and industrial devices (including all modern VoIP phones) that can easily interoperate with it, or be easily modified to use it.

If only the automotive guys hadn't had their heads up an locked before standardizing on 42VDC next-gen automotive electrical systems... (I can't wait for $500 batteries!)

Most of the recommendations here are for the hardcore do-it-yourselfers. I'm perfectly capable of writing good HTML/CSS/JavaScript code (Notepad++ or vi) - BUT, because I don't do it day in and day out, I'm slow and never wind up doing it nearly as well as I wish I had. It's really hard to stay up with this stuff if you dont' live and breathe it. (I run a kick-ass web app development team, but I'm not a programmer - even that's still not enough to really stay on top of this technology from a DIY perspective...)

I think that's why the OP is asking about power tools. I've just been looking at some myself, and Squarespace.com definitely stands out from the crowd. It's a very solid CMS/editor/web site builder/manager app with some very large and successful customers. Since they're a for-pay service (you can try it for free), and have many serious customers, they're unlikely to go away soon, like many free hosted solutions.

BTW, I have no relation with Squarespace other than as a very likely potential customer: I've just been looking for a tool that lets me easily host, build, and manage killer sites without having to keep up with all kinds of arcane technical crap, and Squarespace seems to be the best thing I've found to do exactly that. I'm planning on using them to build my next couple of sites, and may even do a couple more just because of the leverage I expect it'll give me...

Tcl is indeed an excellent choice for many embedded applications. It's not as trendy as many of the newer languages, but it is an awesome tool for getting a lot done with a very small amount of code (some joke that it stands for "Try Coding Less"), and with very minimal overhead.

Lua's certainly intriguing, and I might look at it for future projects, but the vast majority of what I've had my teams build in the past few years is Tcl (if small size is important), or Python (if it's less important).

Like Python, Tcl approaches executable pseudocode - it's almost always trivial to read a Tcl program and be able to follow it, unlike many other languages. The value of this for things that you (or others) have to maintain and/or extend over time is incalculable...

Tcl's biggest ding right now is that it doesn't have a "popular and modern" snazzy web app platform right now, although AOLserver has great integrated-from-the-ground-up Tcl support, and is definitely one of the apps that shows that Tcl can scale up as well as it scales down....

I need another laptop, but I'm not buying another one until I can avoid having to do all my work on a screen with the aspect ratio of a mail slot. I broke out my old ThinkPad 570E the other day, and its 13" screen seemed *huge* compared to the 13.3" HP dm3 I usually carry. Interestingly, both are only 768 px tall (not nearly enough - I'd really lve a portrait display laptop!), but the old IBM really felt like it had much more room, mostly because the screen is physically much taller, even if there aren't any more pixels there.

It's also gloriously non-reflective matte. If it were possible to stuff more RAM in it and get a modern network adapter for it, I'd seriously think about going back. (It's a sleeker package than many current laptops, and it has the best 2-stage media slice + desk base (handy if anyone ever needed 4(!) PCMCIA slots) docking station I've ever seen. (Unfortunately, only Windows is smart enough to be able to handle 2-stage docking correctly...)

Crappy widescreen aspect ratios are one big reason I'm thinking of a tablet - I'm just dying for vertical pixel count. I don't necessarily want a tablet, but there's simply no other ultraportable solution that can give me 1000+ pixels of vertical resolution at a sub-$700 price point...