But did you know that there are many places around the world where you can have access to 200,000 or more books, for free? Its called a library. And while not everyone can afford books, almost anyone can go into a public library and read all they want.
On the other hand, I've used a Toshiba laptop made in 2007 (after Vista became standard pre-installed) that had Vista (basic) pre-installed, The system specs were basic, but decent enough (Pentium Dual Core 1.6 Ghz CPU, 512 MB of RAM and ATI onboard graphics) even after removing all the crap along with disabling some high CPU/HD/Memory intensive processes (such as HD indexing) the system takes forever to get the most basic applications running. On the other hand, the same system has better performance running Ubuntu 8.10 off of a CD drive (same applications load faster, applications don't crash), than Vista off of a HD. Now, this being a family members computer that I had to use for a weekend and not mine I wasn't able to get full benchmarks, but the system was A) Virus free B) had minimal background applications C) Had Aero disabled and D) had no active anti-virus scanning, yet it ran just, completely slow. Now, I can excuse this behavior if it came with Windows XP, Linux, OS X, etc, but when it is pre-installed with Vista, the OEM should do their best to make sure that Vista runs decently on it.
I think the main thing that makes people hate Vista is the pathetic slowness of it. Compare that to Windows 7 where multiple reviewers have stated that it runs decently on even low-end netbooks. If MS could have gotten Vista to where it ran at a halfway decent speed, it wouldn't have gotten all the negative press, and don't use the piece of crap excuse that Vista was built for next-generation hardware, the OS is supposed to have a tiny, tiny, footprint on the actual programs. To put it one way, Ubuntu can run quickly and comfortably on an early Pentium 4 with 512 MB of RAM, on the other hand you will be waiting for ages for the thing to run Vista.
If Windows 7 can maintain its "light and fast" reputation and Apple doesn't make any moves to upset it such as releasing a *real* low-cost Mac (less than $350), netbook, or start embracing OS X on non-Apple hardware, I can see MS not losing any major marketshare like they have been with Vista.
That and possible large government projects. With Obama wanting to increase government projects and more transparency, along with save money, OSS is a great way to do it and I believe that Sun has already written to Obama about switching to all OSS. So Sun wanting to acquire more OSS vendors certainly makes sense.
Seriously, I don't get why the FCC even decided to mandate a transition to digital. Let the free market do it, if theres enough people who want pure analog TV let them, if theres some that want digital let them broadcast in that. The sane thing is for the FCC to not "sell" public airwaves only to keep a registration of who is using which ones so theres no interference.
That's exactly what I don't want. The government should improve telecom by investing in publicly owned infrastructure, not by handing money to private companies. That was bad enough when those companies were regulated monopolies. These days they're unregulated monopolies.
But then it similarly does the same thing, the government is going to lease the lines to whoever pays them the most which will only be the most established ISPs (Comcast, Time Warner) and smaller ISPs either have to start charging a lot more or merge in order to stay afloat.
...And then the sysadmin spends 99% of his time updating the file because of so many requests from teachers. For example, they try to go look at a website for a conference they are going to, blocked. The website they accessed fine at home to teach kids about something, blocked. Then there is the fun of a website being allowed but contains data from another website (such as a embedded flash movie) that ends up failing because its blocked. Plus then it is nearly impossible for kids to research about any topic because it may not be in the 4000 or so whitelisted sites.
The government would be completely out of the loop with respect to what content was flowing across the network. They wouldn't be your ISP, just your line provider
Unless they were fighting "terrorism". Similarly, governments are completely out of the loop for mobile phone transmissions, but as AT&T shows, if they are fighting "terrorism" the government can just rip apart the constitution.
This would be the same thing, but with a government-owned packet-switched digital fiber network serving a role analogous to the analog phone network.
You WANT something like that? Remember what happened whenever the government started giving grants to modernize America with phone lines? The AT&T monopoly was formed. Granted, all the AT&T monopoly could do is charge you money, but with the Internet the consequences are far, far, far greater than just a few more dollars per month.
Honestly, there isn't anything that the government hasn't screwed up in other than the basics of the government which is to protect the rights of the citizens, protect us for foreign attacks, print a stable currency and maintain order. And in the basics that they have screwed up in it is mostly because of something else they were trying to do.
The other thing is to ensure that a competent systems administrator is in place;)
That and competent IT teachers. For example in my high school, I learned absolutely nothing about computers other than MS Office and a bit of HTML. By the way, I took every single computer class my high school offered, and learned absolutely nothing. And note that these didn't even involve macros or VB, just how to format an Excel table or how to change margins in Word. About the most things that I learned was being able to Telnet into a *Nix server and getting to play with the command line a bit (not much of a learning experience since I had a Linux box back home....). So please, schools, do hire real IT teachers and not just business teachers who happen to know Word and can upgrade RAM.
No, no, no. Nationalization solves nothing other than allowing the government access to more information about you and higher taxes. Just look at the patriot act (mind you, passed by BOTH republicans and democrats) and you can see why the government shouldn't run any ISPs. What should be done if we are going to make a national project (which, I honestly think is a bad idea) is give it to small, local ISPs to extend lines along with granting money to start-up ISPs who operate in rural areas. Basically, a nationalized ISP would only lead to higher taxes, worse service (just look at the USPS for an example) and a massive eroding of freedom. We don't need that.
No. Theres some problems with the proxy-based filtering. First is that kids will always want to get on Facebook/MySpace so what do they do? They find some unblocked proxy server and use that. The problem is that might not exactly be a safe site in terms of malware, etc. Honestly, if the kid can get his assignment done in the first few minutes of class and use the rest of the time to get on Facebook, let them, obviously the teacher isn't very good or the kid knows his stuff, if the kid doesn't care about the class and wants to spend time on Facebook let them, they will fail the class.
Errr... Who exactly reads the manuals? I know that I never do unless I'm making an upgrade to my PC and want to check how much RAM the motherboard can hold....
Well, deleting files doesn't really do anything. Sure, if someone was going to write a quick script to make someone mad I'd make it delete a few files. If I was going to create a worm that is advanced (such as the storm worm) I'm going at least make a buck or two on it.
Tossing out the clunker fridges throughout the land and replacing with modern models will save vast amounts of energy. Same story for old air conditioners. Ditto for washing machines. Front-loading models with high speed spin are easier on your cloths, use less water (and less energy to heat that water) and come out drier so that your cloths dry faster and the drier uses less energy. Add to this the replacement of phantom draws like power bricks. (My newest Nokia phone charger produces no perceptible heat, unlike the previous models which were always warm.)
Sure, it will save money in the long run, but in the short run it is much, much, much easier to make small monthly payments than spend a huge amount of money on new appliances. In the current economy it is much easier for me to pay $10 more a month than to pay $400 on the spot, even if that will save me money. Because, honestly, unless you are self-employed or own a business you don't know that next month you will have a job.
I'm sorry, but our government has spent way more cash on much, much, much more trivial things than bandwidth. Secondly, bandwidth today is dirt cheap, and how many people are going to be viewing these videos at a time? I imagine not very many.
Botnet of PCs that download/stream videos from whitehouse.gov, effectively causing a DDoS.
...And a botnet could also DDoS the current whitehouse.gov website. And honestly, our government shouldn't have anything more than a few HTML files, images and videos on the whitehouse.gov servers.
I'm all for hosting them on YouTube AND the government's site, but there needs to be more than a single large corporation hosting the files and because government files are/should be in the public domain it will be mirrored to more than YouTube.
Why the heck does a TV need to download the time or background data or Boot up?
Some TVs have built in guides and channel lists that need to be updated. And I don't want to be watching TV and it to take 20 minutes to scan for channels and find the info on the shows.
I don't know where you have your TV, but I know mine is easily in a place where I could press the power button on my own and then do everything else by remote to save on power consumption.
So, unplug and replug your TV every time you want to watch it. I honestly don't care if my TV uses 20 Watts when it isn't turned on or not, that is a rather insignificant part of my electric bill for a major part of my (and most people's) life.
I don't own a TV that downloads its own clock setting. Though I haven't bought a TV in a while...
And what background data does a TV need anyways?
Some TVs have a guide that you can use to see what is on. And yes, there are actually TVs with built-in guides not using the cable box. It might be important to have that load in a timely matter rather than 15-20 minutes later.
I've never really considered the boot up time to be that terrible for TVs that I have turned on manually in the past. I don't consider TV that important that the difference between 2-3 seconds (LCD) and maybe 20-30 (old CRT) is at all important.
Then unplug and replug in your TV, the rest of the world wants TVs to boot up instantly.
The fact that you don't watch TV much and prefer to manually turn on TVs rather than using the remote is simply a preference. For most of the people that that TV manufacturers cater to, they don't want to wait. They want the TV to turn on quickly and using the remote, no matter if it costs a few extra watts of electricity. For people like you, well theres always the option of unplugging and replugging in the TV.
What happens when bugs in the software mess this up? In most fields, the computer is always right. And honestly, I don't want the data to be messed up that could cost someone their life.
You're absolutely wrong. This isn't "just a little bit of re-training". This is a big deal. The thing is, everyone uses MS Office. If someone can't do some little task, chances are they can ask one of their co-workers. You can't ever really under-estimate this kind of knowledge, and what it's worth. The cost of an entire corporation which is switching over all at once to a new piece of productivity software is quite high, in terms of productivity.
It is called progress. The problem is, employees who spent months training for migration from Lotus to Office suddenly think that going from Office to OOo will 100% painless. If they would spend 25% of the time they spent training on Office before it was deployed as they would on OOo before it was deployed there would be an increase in productivity. The problem is, mot employees seem to cringe at the thought of any progress being made with technology.
Because of language. Lets say I don't speak Chinese. The Chinese version of a game costs $5 and the English version costs $40. I can either struggle with learning the Chinese version or just buy the easy $40 version. I think that many people would pay extra to get a game that they can understand if they were released with the same content and the same time.
...Or bundle it in with pre-bought systems. A lot of people keep the same OS until they go to get it repaired by some large company and then they might have to wipe it (because of a BSoD or similar) in which case they can simply but the spyware on there by the repairmen. About the only people that I know of who regularly upgrade or change their OS are Mac and Linux people the rest don't bother. Or hey, bundle it on flash drives and other removable storage. All this and no hacking required.
Not really. All we know is that the general trend of the earth's temperatures have been rising. But also fluctuate and ways different than CO2 emissions. We don't have a clue what caused it, if it will continue, or anything. Plus, it isn't even global warming, its local warming some places have higher highs and others don't. Just take a look in an Almanac and you will see that the highest temperatures for a given day don't correspond with the CO2 emissions for the year. Same thing with the lows.
We'll survive, but that doesn't mean that there won't be economic, social, or geopolitical impacts that we'd prefer to have avoided.
Ok, so some of the costland is gone and cities must be moved further inland. That is also assuming that technology will not advance to where that is no longer a problem which my guess is based on technology throughout history is that if there is a problem humans will solve it.
No, it's assuming that we don't KNOW that miracle solutions will appear. If people in the future have amazing tech and don't care about sea level rise or whatever, great, but it's not really ethical to hand them such a problem assuming that they'll be able to and want to deal with it.
Oh right, I forgot about all those times in history when innovation completely ceased and everything stayed where it was for ~200 years. Sure, we can't assume that there will be some miracle, but you can assume that in 200 years we will have enough technology to deal with the problem, much as we can assume that in 8 years computers will have more than 4 gigs of RAM standard. Same type of thing, because each year the minimum amount of memory always rises for computers you can make assumptions on trends, same thing with inventions, if such a major problem comes up that is man-made it isn't too hard for man to come up with a solution in 200 years. Just look at what humans have accomplished, there are very, very, very, few problems that we don't have a solution for that have been around (and known about) for ~200 years, sure, the solutions aren't perfect because they might be too expensive or may not work all the time, but for just about every known problem for ~200 years humans have a solution or if not a solution than a temporary fix.
The Sun is very unlikely to counteract the greenhouse effect over the long term any time soon. We do have geological records of what the Sun has done in the past. It's conceivable that it could do something really weird in the near future, but again, it's not something you bet on. In tens of thousands of years we might have to worry about the next ice age, in which case we'd probably prefer to save our greenhouse gases for later, when we actually need them.
Unlikely, but remember in 1809 you would have been laughed at if you said that people would make plane trips across the ocean regularly or that people would ever land on the moon. Computers would have also been totally foreign to them. What we think we know about astronomy, geology and climate will have been superseded by much, much, much, much, more accurate information. Much as how in 1809 the cure for almost everything was bleeding.
Yes, you have a point that we can't assume everything, but if there is one thing we are certain of, it is that technology will vastly improve before climate change (if it does indeed exist) becomes any sort of problem.
We can re-adapt to a new climate, but it's going to be expensive if the change happens within a century or two, and there are very long-term consequences (e.g. sea level rise) that we may or may not prefer to commit future generations to.
But that is assuming that everything stays the same, carbon emissions, the sun, and technology. back in 1809 we didn't have cell phones, computers, the internet, we didn't even have airplanes. In 2209 who knows what the technology level will be, it might be that rising sea levels will be no problem because we can quickly build artificial islands, or perhaps we won't be even living on the earth we might be living on a different planet or in the air. Not to mention that a nuclear winter, changes in the sun, or a meteor strike could change the climate much, much, much, faster than CO2 will in a thousand years.
Slashdot Mirror
But did you know that there are many places around the world where you can have access to 200,000 or more books, for free? Its called a library. And while not everyone can afford books, almost anyone can go into a public library and read all they want.
On the other hand, I've used a Toshiba laptop made in 2007 (after Vista became standard pre-installed) that had Vista (basic) pre-installed, The system specs were basic, but decent enough (Pentium Dual Core 1.6 Ghz CPU, 512 MB of RAM and ATI onboard graphics) even after removing all the crap along with disabling some high CPU/HD/Memory intensive processes (such as HD indexing) the system takes forever to get the most basic applications running. On the other hand, the same system has better performance running Ubuntu 8.10 off of a CD drive (same applications load faster, applications don't crash), than Vista off of a HD. Now, this being a family members computer that I had to use for a weekend and not mine I wasn't able to get full benchmarks, but the system was A) Virus free B) had minimal background applications C) Had Aero disabled and D) had no active anti-virus scanning, yet it ran just, completely slow. Now, I can excuse this behavior if it came with Windows XP, Linux, OS X, etc, but when it is pre-installed with Vista, the OEM should do their best to make sure that Vista runs decently on it.
Umm... How many spammers actually click through image links to get e-mail addresses? Most go through sites with a spider or similar to get them.
I think the main thing that makes people hate Vista is the pathetic slowness of it. Compare that to Windows 7 where multiple reviewers have stated that it runs decently on even low-end netbooks. If MS could have gotten Vista to where it ran at a halfway decent speed, it wouldn't have gotten all the negative press, and don't use the piece of crap excuse that Vista was built for next-generation hardware, the OS is supposed to have a tiny, tiny, footprint on the actual programs. To put it one way, Ubuntu can run quickly and comfortably on an early Pentium 4 with 512 MB of RAM, on the other hand you will be waiting for ages for the thing to run Vista.
If Windows 7 can maintain its "light and fast" reputation and Apple doesn't make any moves to upset it such as releasing a *real* low-cost Mac (less than $350), netbook, or start embracing OS X on non-Apple hardware, I can see MS not losing any major marketshare like they have been with Vista.
That and possible large government projects. With Obama wanting to increase government projects and more transparency, along with save money, OSS is a great way to do it and I believe that Sun has already written to Obama about switching to all OSS. So Sun wanting to acquire more OSS vendors certainly makes sense.
Seriously, I don't get why the FCC even decided to mandate a transition to digital. Let the free market do it, if theres enough people who want pure analog TV let them, if theres some that want digital let them broadcast in that. The sane thing is for the FCC to not "sell" public airwaves only to keep a registration of who is using which ones so theres no interference.
That's exactly what I don't want. The government should improve telecom by investing in publicly owned infrastructure, not by handing money to private companies. That was bad enough when those companies were regulated monopolies. These days they're unregulated monopolies.
But then it similarly does the same thing, the government is going to lease the lines to whoever pays them the most which will only be the most established ISPs (Comcast, Time Warner) and smaller ISPs either have to start charging a lot more or merge in order to stay afloat.
...And then the sysadmin spends 99% of his time updating the file because of so many requests from teachers. For example, they try to go look at a website for a conference they are going to, blocked. The website they accessed fine at home to teach kids about something, blocked. Then there is the fun of a website being allowed but contains data from another website (such as a embedded flash movie) that ends up failing because its blocked. Plus then it is nearly impossible for kids to research about any topic because it may not be in the 4000 or so whitelisted sites.
Unless they were fighting "terrorism". Similarly, governments are completely out of the loop for mobile phone transmissions, but as AT&T shows, if they are fighting "terrorism" the government can just rip apart the constitution.
This would be the same thing, but with a government-owned packet-switched digital fiber network serving a role analogous to the analog phone network.
You WANT something like that? Remember what happened whenever the government started giving grants to modernize America with phone lines? The AT&T monopoly was formed. Granted, all the AT&T monopoly could do is charge you money, but with the Internet the consequences are far, far, far greater than just a few more dollars per month.
Honestly, there isn't anything that the government hasn't screwed up in other than the basics of the government which is to protect the rights of the citizens, protect us for foreign attacks, print a stable currency and maintain order. And in the basics that they have screwed up in it is mostly because of something else they were trying to do.
The other thing is to ensure that a competent systems administrator is in place ;)
That and competent IT teachers. For example in my high school, I learned absolutely nothing about computers other than MS Office and a bit of HTML. By the way, I took every single computer class my high school offered, and learned absolutely nothing. And note that these didn't even involve macros or VB, just how to format an Excel table or how to change margins in Word. About the most things that I learned was being able to Telnet into a *Nix server and getting to play with the command line a bit (not much of a learning experience since I had a Linux box back home....). So please, schools, do hire real IT teachers and not just business teachers who happen to know Word and can upgrade RAM.
No, no, no. Nationalization solves nothing other than allowing the government access to more information about you and higher taxes. Just look at the patriot act (mind you, passed by BOTH republicans and democrats) and you can see why the government shouldn't run any ISPs. What should be done if we are going to make a national project (which, I honestly think is a bad idea) is give it to small, local ISPs to extend lines along with granting money to start-up ISPs who operate in rural areas. Basically, a nationalized ISP would only lead to higher taxes, worse service (just look at the USPS for an example) and a massive eroding of freedom. We don't need that.
No. Theres some problems with the proxy-based filtering. First is that kids will always want to get on Facebook/MySpace so what do they do? They find some unblocked proxy server and use that. The problem is that might not exactly be a safe site in terms of malware, etc. Honestly, if the kid can get his assignment done in the first few minutes of class and use the rest of the time to get on Facebook, let them, obviously the teacher isn't very good or the kid knows his stuff, if the kid doesn't care about the class and wants to spend time on Facebook let them, they will fail the class.
Errr... Who exactly reads the manuals? I know that I never do unless I'm making an upgrade to my PC and want to check how much RAM the motherboard can hold....
Well, deleting files doesn't really do anything. Sure, if someone was going to write a quick script to make someone mad I'd make it delete a few files. If I was going to create a worm that is advanced (such as the storm worm) I'm going at least make a buck or two on it.
Tossing out the clunker fridges throughout the land and replacing with modern models will save vast amounts of energy. Same story for old air conditioners. Ditto for washing machines. Front-loading models with high speed spin are easier on your cloths, use less water (and less energy to heat that water) and come out drier so that your cloths dry faster and the drier uses less energy. Add to this the replacement of phantom draws like power bricks. (My newest Nokia phone charger produces no perceptible heat, unlike the previous models which were always warm.)
Sure, it will save money in the long run, but in the short run it is much, much, much easier to make small monthly payments than spend a huge amount of money on new appliances. In the current economy it is much easier for me to pay $10 more a month than to pay $400 on the spot, even if that will save me money. Because, honestly, unless you are self-employed or own a business you don't know that next month you will have a job.
More taxpayers money spent on bandwidth.
I'm sorry, but our government has spent way more cash on much, much, much more trivial things than bandwidth. Secondly, bandwidth today is dirt cheap, and how many people are going to be viewing these videos at a time? I imagine not very many.
Botnet of PCs that download/stream videos from whitehouse.gov, effectively causing a DDoS.
I'm all for hosting them on YouTube AND the government's site, but there needs to be more than a single large corporation hosting the files and because government files are/should be in the public domain it will be mirrored to more than YouTube.
Why the heck does a TV need to download the time or background data or Boot up?
Some TVs have built in guides and channel lists that need to be updated. And I don't want to be watching TV and it to take 20 minutes to scan for channels and find the info on the shows.
I don't know where you have your TV, but I know mine is easily in a place where I could press the power button on my own and then do everything else by remote to save on power consumption.
So, unplug and replug your TV every time you want to watch it. I honestly don't care if my TV uses 20 Watts when it isn't turned on or not, that is a rather insignificant part of my electric bill for a major part of my (and most people's) life.
I don't own a TV that downloads its own clock setting. Though I haven't bought a TV in a while... And what background data does a TV need anyways?
Some TVs have a guide that you can use to see what is on. And yes, there are actually TVs with built-in guides not using the cable box. It might be important to have that load in a timely matter rather than 15-20 minutes later.
I've never really considered the boot up time to be that terrible for TVs that I have turned on manually in the past. I don't consider TV that important that the difference between 2-3 seconds (LCD) and maybe 20-30 (old CRT) is at all important.
Then unplug and replug in your TV, the rest of the world wants TVs to boot up instantly.
The fact that you don't watch TV much and prefer to manually turn on TVs rather than using the remote is simply a preference. For most of the people that that TV manufacturers cater to, they don't want to wait. They want the TV to turn on quickly and using the remote, no matter if it costs a few extra watts of electricity. For people like you, well theres always the option of unplugging and replugging in the TV.
What happens when bugs in the software mess this up? In most fields, the computer is always right. And honestly, I don't want the data to be messed up that could cost someone their life.
You're absolutely wrong. This isn't "just a little bit of re-training". This is a big deal. The thing is, everyone uses MS Office. If someone can't do some little task, chances are they can ask one of their co-workers. You can't ever really under-estimate this kind of knowledge, and what it's worth. The cost of an entire corporation which is switching over all at once to a new piece of productivity software is quite high, in terms of productivity.
It is called progress. The problem is, employees who spent months training for migration from Lotus to Office suddenly think that going from Office to OOo will 100% painless. If they would spend 25% of the time they spent training on Office before it was deployed as they would on OOo before it was deployed there would be an increase in productivity. The problem is, mot employees seem to cringe at the thought of any progress being made with technology.
Because of language. Lets say I don't speak Chinese. The Chinese version of a game costs $5 and the English version costs $40. I can either struggle with learning the Chinese version or just buy the easy $40 version. I think that many people would pay extra to get a game that they can understand if they were released with the same content and the same time.
...Or bundle it in with pre-bought systems. A lot of people keep the same OS until they go to get it repaired by some large company and then they might have to wipe it (because of a BSoD or similar) in which case they can simply but the spyware on there by the repairmen. About the only people that I know of who regularly upgrade or change their OS are Mac and Linux people the rest don't bother. Or hey, bundle it on flash drives and other removable storage. All this and no hacking required.
It's rather well established by now.
Not really. All we know is that the general trend of the earth's temperatures have been rising. But also fluctuate and ways different than CO2 emissions. We don't have a clue what caused it, if it will continue, or anything. Plus, it isn't even global warming, its local warming some places have higher highs and others don't. Just take a look in an Almanac and you will see that the highest temperatures for a given day don't correspond with the CO2 emissions for the year. Same thing with the lows.
We'll survive, but that doesn't mean that there won't be economic, social, or geopolitical impacts that we'd prefer to have avoided.
Ok, so some of the costland is gone and cities must be moved further inland. That is also assuming that technology will not advance to where that is no longer a problem which my guess is based on technology throughout history is that if there is a problem humans will solve it.
No, it's assuming that we don't KNOW that miracle solutions will appear. If people in the future have amazing tech and don't care about sea level rise or whatever, great, but it's not really ethical to hand them such a problem assuming that they'll be able to and want to deal with it.
Oh right, I forgot about all those times in history when innovation completely ceased and everything stayed where it was for ~200 years. Sure, we can't assume that there will be some miracle, but you can assume that in 200 years we will have enough technology to deal with the problem, much as we can assume that in 8 years computers will have more than 4 gigs of RAM standard. Same type of thing, because each year the minimum amount of memory always rises for computers you can make assumptions on trends, same thing with inventions, if such a major problem comes up that is man-made it isn't too hard for man to come up with a solution in 200 years. Just look at what humans have accomplished, there are very, very, very, few problems that we don't have a solution for that have been around (and known about) for ~200 years, sure, the solutions aren't perfect because they might be too expensive or may not work all the time, but for just about every known problem for ~200 years humans have a solution or if not a solution than a temporary fix.
The Sun is very unlikely to counteract the greenhouse effect over the long term any time soon. We do have geological records of what the Sun has done in the past. It's conceivable that it could do something really weird in the near future, but again, it's not something you bet on. In tens of thousands of years we might have to worry about the next ice age, in which case we'd probably prefer to save our greenhouse gases for later, when we actually need them.
Unlikely, but remember in 1809 you would have been laughed at if you said that people would make plane trips across the ocean regularly or that people would ever land on the moon. Computers would have also been totally foreign to them. What we think we know about astronomy, geology and climate will have been superseded by much, much, much, much, more accurate information. Much as how in 1809 the cure for almost everything was bleeding.
Yes, you have a point that we can't assume everything, but if there is one thing we are certain of, it is that technology will vastly improve before climate change (if it does indeed exist) becomes any sort of problem.
We can re-adapt to a new climate, but it's going to be expensive if the change happens within a century or two, and there are very long-term consequences (e.g. sea level rise) that we may or may not prefer to commit future generations to.
But that is assuming that everything stays the same, carbon emissions, the sun, and technology. back in 1809 we didn't have cell phones, computers, the internet, we didn't even have airplanes. In 2209 who knows what the technology level will be, it might be that rising sea levels will be no problem because we can quickly build artificial islands, or perhaps we won't be even living on the earth we might be living on a different planet or in the air. Not to mention that a nuclear winter, changes in the sun, or a meteor strike could change the climate much, much, much, faster than CO2 will in a thousand years.