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As stated by scientists in this article

http://opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?i d=95000606

They don't know what the effects of global warming are and they don't know what causes it. In the 1300's politicians were going around preaching doom because the Earth was getting cooler. They predicted how eventually everything on Earth would freeze to death. We can all see what a right bunch of fruitcakes they were now can't we.

The modern study of climate encompasses maybe 50 years. Oldest reliable weather obs date back about 400 years (and at a precious few locations), and older data are deduced from ice cores and such making assumptions which could be wrong and which yield less-than-finely-grained data. With an enormous and enormously complex system involved, and with the physics and chemistry incompletely understood, not to mention extremely challenging to model, and assuming infinite computational power (which is not as bad as you might think, since climate and nuke modelling are #s 1 and 2 on CPU use over most supercomputing facilities), we can't possibly venture more than barely educated guesses.

Scientists are pretty evenly split on whether global warming even exists, though neither the press nor the politicians are clever enough to convey this to the public, who are probably not interested or educated enough to understand even that. Read this by a scientist involved in evalutaing claims used to support Kyoto. There is ample evidence to support claims on both sides, and only the most zealous and those with agendas will claim irrefutable proof.

Do people affect the environment they live in? Sure. Do greenhouse gases warm the atmosphere? Of course, that's why they're called that. Can these effects really overwhelm the huge natural processes and cycles of the planet to modify it enough for us to notice? We don't know.

Maybe we're staving off the now-overdue ice age. Perhaps we're experiencing a regular or otherwise cycle of climatic oscillation. Maybe we're screwing ourselves. Who knows? It is relatively certain that curtailing our emissions would have smaller impact on the environment, but that impact might already be much smaller than we think.

Certainly it couldn't hurt, but Kyoto could, and a decision to support it or not should be based on solid environmental, economic and political considerations. Kyoto not only radically reduced limits on pollution in the US and other 1st world nations, but guaranteed the right of 3rd world nations to continue to pollute indefinitely. There were many other difficulties as well, many of which reflect the USA's decreasing involvement in international affairs (W can't even spell UN, so we shouldn't be surprised), and the diplomatic Napoleon complex being expressed by the EU, trying to throw it's new, generally left-leaning politcal weight around.

The world is likely to be severely impacted by an asteroid large enough to cause catastrophic climate change, and will without doubt suffer even worse damage as our sun ages in a billion years or so. Politicians pay no atention to these issues, which would be easy to mitigate given the time until their effects will be felt. Any time they spend on Global Warming is to garner public accolades for their "green" side. Maybe this cancels out drilling in ANWAR.

Or maybe DotGNU

No reason to assume Microsoft will be the ONLY company to figure out the usefulness of Authentication services, or that some creative software libertarians won't be able to implement a decent system that gets people some of the benefits of Authentication/billing management without necessarily sacrificing the options of end users or locking everyone into a monopolizing service provider.

It's still to early to tell how the Market will react to these technologies, but I don't recall Microsoft ever getting as much flack in the mainstream press over it's business practices and proposed technologies as it has been lately. The battle lines are becoming more clear, and a lot of people apparently want to hurt Microsoft, so I bet these projects will attract a lot of developer mindshare.

The big question for me is how RMS and other hardline Free Software leaders will react to the idea of integrating content-billing into a Free Software project. Clearly, such capability (combined with Free Software's reputation for reliability and security) would entice content providers into using it as an alternative to .NET (which assuredly will provide similar abilities), but it seems to fly in the face of the FSF's stated goals. I'm very curious what the long-term destiny of these projects will be.

From the Wall Street Journal's Zero Tolerance Archive.

In Jonesboro, Ark., eight-year-old Christopher Kissinger has been suspended from South Elementary School for three days. Christopher's crime: pointing a breaded chicken finger at a teacher and saying "Pow, pow, pow." The Associated Press reports that "the incident apparently violated the Jonesboro School District's zero-tolerance policy against weapons."

Nearby Westside Middle School was the site of a 1998 shooting in which four students and a teacher were killed. No poultry was involved in that crime.

Brian Kalt, an assistant professor of law at Michigan State University, has closely followed Miami-Dade's recount. He notes that by beginning in numerical order, it proceeded first through heavily Democratic precincts, many of which had gone for Gore by as much as 9 to 1. The 135 recounted precincts as a whole gave Mr. Gore 74% of the vote, compared with only 53% countywide. That means that the remaining precincts as a whole went for Mr. Bush, and would have delivered far fewer additional votes for Mr. Gore.

"The count was just about to move into heavily Republican and Cuban areas," says Mr. Kalt. "Given how the rest of the precincts would have voted, I don't see how Gore would have picked up votes. If the trend had continued, an admitted if, Bush would actually have gained 400 votes countywide."

In short, Gore's problem is an ontological one: you cannot initiate what has already started, and you cannot create what already exists. Yet this is precisely what Gore claimed, a claim that is so obviously undefendable. Unfortunately, he seemingly cannot stop pulling stuff out of the thin air, even when unpressured. Even at the first debate, he was claiming a nonexistent trip FEMA trip or lack of funding for a well-funded school.

The fact is, one will be hard pressed to defend a lifetime of lies, especially when that entails numerous documented fibs in his own words. The evidence is overwhelming, despite the feeble efforts of his defenders. Gore and Clinton are in a league of their own. What makes Gore worse is that while Clinton lies for self-preservation, Gore unnecessarily lies for self-aggrandization.