You've just fallen victim to one of the classic blunders of political discussion: you have attributed the views of a few to the more general group to which they belong!

The GOP does not association "raw capitalism" with Christ-like behavior. Certain people who are Republicans do. I am a registered Republican (fiscal conservatism is my overriding political view) and a Christian and I do not make such an association. In fact, I am torn as to which party to support as the Democrats say the words that make them sound more Christ-like (that is, share your blessings with others so that all may benefit) and the social programs they seek to implement (universal healthcare, welfare, etc.) are noble goals indeed.

Where I disagree with the Democrats is in that I do not believe such programs can be administered by the behemoth that is the federal government. (Side note: the Christian church should be performing that function; unfortunately, as a whole, the Christian church is equally inept at doing so). History shows me that this will likely always be the case because, by and large, 1) politicians want power more than anything else; and 2) will do almost anything to keep power once they have won it, including paying off interest groups and slyly but purposefully "keeping the people down" by structuring said social programs so that the individual is not encouraged to achieve highly. And the Democrats are clearly not the only group at fault for doing this; the GOP is just as bad.

Greed is the root cause of this problem. Politicians are greedy and want more power. If you figure out how to eliminate greed from the human consciousness, you will likely have solved most of the ills of this world. Of course, my view as a Christian is that such a thing is not possible on this earth...

So everyone who makes over $250k is responsible for this mess? Or every husband and wife team who makes over $250k is responsible? Really? Some people would argue that the government itself is responsible for this mess. Not one President and not one party. The government.

Prove it. There are a lot of people who busted their ass to climb the corporate ladder and are now making $250k+. There are also a lot of people who got it handed to them on a silver platter. If one could accurately separate the two, I would at least be willing to listen to the 'morally appropriate' argument. But that's not possible, is it? Not without the government knowing every single thing about your life--where you were born, who your parents were, who you screwed (fig. & lit.) to get to the top, etc.--but that would violate a person's privacy.

Taxing those people making $250k+ is neither morally appropriate nor fair. What is fair in the minds of those making $20k/year (as an example: taxing the wealthy and not taxing themselves at all) is different that what is fair to those making $250k/year (as an example: taxing everybody at the exact same rate of 20%).

I personally fall into neither the very rich nor very poor category, and I'm more inclined to follow the flat percentage tax approach. In such a situation the rich pay far more than the poor, as they should. But not unfairly so.

If a programmer is going to depend on this behavior, then his/her application *must* check that the filesystem it is writing to is ext3 and even more importantly that it is a version of ext3 that was tested against when the program was released.

Not checking at least the above two items while assuming that the behavior is constant across all versions of ext3 and/or all filesystems is a BUG() in the program.

Am I incorrect in my description of the issue?

I never said that I believe 1900 is too early for man-made global warming. Indeed, great warmings are often followed suddenly by great coolings, though I am discussing those that occur on the order of millenia.

However, if we are discussing these much smaller cycles that occur on the order of decades, please note that in the early 1970s there was a "Global Cooling" scare. Search the Newsweek archives and you'll find these articles--heck, one articles was a cover story. But that scare was not real.

Now I will agree that, over the course of the 1900s (and even before that into the 1800s and late 1700s) the data indicates that the Earth has been trending warmer, more so than we have seen at any other time period, at least on a macro timescale.

Everyone is citing data for the last half-century and trying to draw conclusions about what is happening. In doing so they are making comparisons between a small timescale (50-100 years) and a macro timescale (a millenia or more), and doing so where the micro scale has several orders of magnitude more data points than the macro scale.

All I'm saying is that at least two global temperature scares have panned out to be patently false: the Global Cooling scare of the 1970s and the more recent CO2 scare of early this decade. (Yes I'm talking about part of Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth. Take a seriously look at the data. A rise in CO2 levels follows a rise in temperature, not the other way around. Temperature is the cause, not the effect.) I, for one, am sick of getting lied to by someone with an agenda.

In short, I do not believe that the data supports the conclusion. In fact, in the words of Admiral James Greer in Tom Clancy's The Hunt for the Red October, "The data support no conclusions."