that Kurzweil Singularity bullshit should be left out of the discussion until we fully understand it.

Indeed! We should never discuss things we do not "fully understand!" Just imagine the chaos that could result!

Anyone with a WAP connected directly to a LAN deserves *exactly* what they will eventually get. External firewall, internal firewall, and the area between them (the DMZ) is where the WAP belongs, if it belongs on your network at all. Chances are, it does not.

As someone who's worked for a defense contractor, wireless devices were not restricted when I worked there, because there was no on-site wireless access. Anything that had a camera or could act as external storage *was* restricted though. Check it in when you get to work, pick it up when you leave. This is not a bad policy for non-governmental entities either. Only the me me me generation thinks they have any legitimate need (or "right", *snort*) to have any personal devices of any sort with them when the are *at work*.

We don't know that human life and advanced civilization can thrive in a Cretaceous-like climate.

Of course we do. If it weren't for that climate, there wouldn't be any human life to begin with. The explosion of mammalian life, including one of our direct evolutionary ancestors, first appeared during the PETM. As for advanced civilization, it seems to thrive just fine in the tropics now, thus it will also thrive if there are more such areas.

The position of those who call themselves conservatives is "I want my Hummer, consequences be damned!"

No, this is just the pigeonhole the liberals want to put them in, to feel better about themselves while they envision themselves as environmental and social stewards. It's the same mentality that leads to them to call voter ID laws "racist", as if that word doesn't actually mean something already. The overall conservative position is economic and pragmatic. Spending money trying to avert something we cannot avert in the long run is pointless, and nothing the industrialized world can do WRT CO2 output is going to have any impact if the developing nations won't also play ball -- and they won't. You're not going to convince China or India to curb growth due to environmental concerns a century out.

I don't know how accurate the stats are, but w3techs puts FreeBSD at 1.1% of all web servers [w3techs.com]

Yes, but so what? It's not as though 99% of sites aren't also useless wordpress blogs and other "small fry" VPS solutions. % of websites means nothing. Why not look at % of traffic served, or % of money handled.

Not to mention Linus has by some small miracle managed to keep it together under one banner instead of forking into three branches with duplication of effort.

It's laughable to say Net/Free/Open are forks while Ubuntu/Debian/Redhat/CentOS/Gentoo/etc/etc/etc/etc are not. The BSDs all share a great deal of their code with one another.

BSD is popular with some companies and in colleges, but when you get into the real world it's either Linux or Solaris and Solaris is fading fast

I've been doing IT and development in the "real world" for ~20 years, and you are absolutely wrong. There is a lot of Windows infrastructure out there. Nothing competes with AD/Exchange/Sharepoint in corporate environments. Nothing. There's a ton of BSD as well. .Net is far more prevalent then you seem to have any clue about.

I'm not dissing BSD, but I'd never recommend it for anything in the enterprise.

The only reason for that can be that you don't know what you're doing / talking about.

I'm not a mac person. I recognize their strengths as desktops however, and don't fault those who prefer them over windows. You won't find me suggesting anyone run an OSX or Mini as a server. Your rock however must be small indeed because BSD is certainly "mainstream", as has been discussed on /. ad nauseam. You don't *see* it in your line of work perhaps, but it's there, in the background, making everything *work*. It's in every Juniper device. Hell, the os that runs the playstation3 is part FreeBSD, as is OSX itself.

your assertion that windows 7 or OS X is better than a Linux server shows how out of touch you are with enterprise computing.

RIF. I made no such assertion. I said they make a better desktop than Linux because, well, they do. The BSDs make better servers.

'motivated reasoning,' where 'high belief certainty influenced perceptions of personal experience,'

"I believe GW is happening and that it causes bad things. Today bad weather happened, must be due to GW."

or

"I do not believe GW is happening or that it causes bad things. Today bad weather happened, as it does from time to time."

'experiential learning,' where 'perceived personal experience of global warming led to increased belief certainty.'

"I did not believe GW was happening, but did believe it would cause worse hurricane. Today a bad hurricane happened, so now I have more faith in GW."

or

"I did not believe GW was happening, but did believe it would cause hotter summers.. We had snowfall in June so, therefore, no GW.

The far more interesting thing than the conclusion reached by the source is that none of these is a remotely scientific line of reasoning. Correlating personal experience (i.e., weather events) with climate is long acknowledged as foolish, just like jumping to the conclusion that you live in the most unsafe city in the world because you got mugged -- or that you live in the safest one because you've never been mugged.

Because as good as OS X is, it's not a particularly good server platform and requires Mac hardware, while Linux has been around for ages, runs on commodity hardware, has a very well supported number of open source packages and is considered mainstream by most Unix admins.

Exactly what OSX binaries do you desire to run on your "server"?

I don't mention BSD since it's not really mainstream any longer

How big is the rock you're living under?

All that being said, I prefer OS X systems for my workstation and CentOS or Scientific Linux for servers. Redhat's nice, but overpriced when you need to deploy a lot of systems

1. CentOS =~ s/Red Hat/CentOS/g.

2. (Win7 || OSX) > Linux desktop; *BSD > Linux server.

When it comes to a mandated piece of equipment in company and personal vehicles, the situation gets a little more complicated. The operator is responsible for the safe operation of the vehicle. So the question is, what benefit is there in this?

The benefit is in the judicial system. No more people lying that their car suddenly accelerated with the brakes fully depressed. No more lying about how fast you were going when you plow into a school bus full of nuns. No more lying about how long you were parked. No more kids lying to their parents about how fast they were driving, how far they drove, etc. That is, of course, if it retains data for any length of time. The bill only requires it record data for a "reasonable" amount of time before a crash or airbag deployment, so it's likely that no more than 1-5 minutes of data will be recorded.

Absolutely everything the box records is in the public domain already, collecting it is just expensive or manpower intensive.

There is no request by any government agency, and no plan put out by any auto manufacturer, to have the data available remotely. Most new vehicles already *have* these data recorders in them, and have for some time, there is just no standard on what must be recorded or what protocol the interface must speak.

If you're concerned about what data it is going to record, and who has the (legal) rights to access that data, you could always -- you know -- read the bill. It's already been passed by the Senate, S. 1813, sec 31406. Reading the entire bill would reveal far more heinous things that are worth fighting, like empowering the IRS to revoke the passport of anyone owing more than $50k in back taxes.