Where are my Mod points when I need them? CTO should be out the door. +5

Power supply with half of components from junk. Plywood box, later upgraded to scavenged ALTAIR box.

TV for display. Wrote editor, assembler, debugger, and programmed into 2708 EPROMs

Not quite the same thing as software design.
Size, shape, pipelining, parallelism, clock rate...

Most asteroids large enough to cause an "extinction event" have been found and future orbits calculated for hundreds of years.
What might hit are smaller asteroids and long period comets. There is almost nothing we could do with a large long period comet. While we might get several years of warning, there is almost nothing that could be done.
Smaller asteroids we would get no warning on most of the time. There is a lot of sky, and only a tiny fraction of it is searched by something big enough to see a "city killer" a month away. A week's warning is more likely, even a day's warning is less than 50%. The most likely first warning would be a bright spot in the sky as the asteroid starts to hit the top of the atmosphere... Seconds before impact.
To get warning of city killers would require putting up some specialized sky survey satellites. Unlikely, in today's political environment.

So most of 'them' must be much older than a hundred plus years... Global warming has been around since 1895 or older.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius

They demand the power to do this, but they refuse to release their data.

This should do for a start:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/

They refuse to publish the code for their computer models

Really. Did you try SourceForge? And why not??

http://sourceforge.net/projects/climate-model/>

And this one has been public since 1983. 1983 was a long time ago...

http://www.ccsm.ucar.edu/models/ccsm3.0/

They refuse to rationally refute skepticism.

You mean like giving pointers to climate data and climate models that you claim are not public? Or pointing out that this isn't an new theory?

They refuse to address the question of whether warmer may be better than colder.

Ah yes. A little warmer might very well be better. You have a point. The problem is that we are unlikely to stop at a little warmer.

--

This is not a sig. If this was a sig, the "--" would be closer. If it was a sig, it would say something witty. If it was a sig, it would be meaningful. If it was a sig, it wouldn't be nearly this long.

We work from home, so about the most hazard we experience would be a cat jumping on the keyboard.

OTOH, in the realm of just annoying, is that a device emulator we use frequently takes about 90 seconds to load and can't just be left running -- you have to restart it for each recompile. It's like the testing cycle is make as many changes as possible, compile, go get a beverage or take a pee, come back, it should be just about ready to run.

Would you tune in to watch people play Doom in this day and age? Pac-Man still works too.

For a small object, yes.

For a object big enough to seriously worry about, no. Think of it this way. Take a rock the size of the one that killed the dinosaurs. It had roughly 300 million nuclear weapons worth of energy. Break it into a million equal size pieces, and there are a million rocks with 300 times the energy of a nuclear weapon, each of which would be more than large enough to punch through the atmosphere. The damage would be more focused on the surface of the Earth, and less would be "wasted" on deep layers of rock.

Small explosions are much more effective at destroying things than large explosions. That's why cluster bombs were invented.