"The report said the act helped secure six guilty pleas from an al Qaeda "sleeper cell" in Lackawanna, N.Y.; allowed the surveillance of a reputed terror cell in Portland, Ore., resulting in convictions of six persons in a scheme to travel to Afghanistan to fight U.S. forces; and the successful prosecution of a money launderer for Colombia's leftist rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC."
We are still counting al Qeada sleeper cells as terrorists, aren't we?
The directions on the iMic are the most counterintuitive things I've ever seen on any computer product. And the directions that come with the device are useless. You have to go to their website and dig around to find out how to use it.
I wanted to record something through my mic. So I plugged the microphone into the input with the microphone picture above it. Then I flipped the switch away from the speaker and towards the microphone, and nothing recorded.
After digging through the FAQ, I finally discovered that I have to flip the switch to the SPEAKER to get the MICROPHONE to work. Makes perfect sense, doesn't it?
I've tried to convert a tape to digital with it, also, and had horrible sound quality. Might be my tape deck, so I'll have to give it another shot sometime...
I used to work in the copy room of a law firm almost ten years ago. The bookkeepers made daily backups of all the records on tape. At the end of the day, one tape was locked up in a fireproof safe. The other went in the bookkeeper's purse and went home with her.
The bosses there must have REALLY trusted her.
They also didn't upgrade their systems until about two or three years ago, and their employees just got e-mail addresses two years ago. Progress marches on...
I switched from Windows to Linux last year. Now, I'm strongly considering switching from Linux to Mac. From what I've looked at so far, a Mac is like a Linux box that's fully integrated and will actually work out of the box.
But the point is this: I used OO.org for word processing, Audacity for audio recording, Firefox for web browsing, and Thunderbird for a mail client. That made switching from Windows to Linux a breeze, as there were version of those programs available for both platforms. And it looks like Thunderbird will be the only one I'd need to replace in Mac.
That's pretty cool, and makes switching very easy. I hope. I'll find out in the next few months.
The signaling button is no doubt an important part of the show. And last I heard, the J! producers put different people in charge of "turning on" the buzzers for every show. This way, you won't get one contestant in tune with one producer to lock into the timing. (Remember, you can't buzz in until AFTER Alex finishes reading the answer.)
People often forget (or don't realize) that there is a certain amount of strategy involved with Jeopardy! Being smart and a trivia hound is definitely the first thing, but then the buzzer comes into play, and answer selection. (If you're under a minute to go in Double Jeopardy and another contestant is at -$2000, try hard not to pick a $2000 answer right away...)
The idea I like the most to unseat KenJen is to bring back Chuck Forrest, Frank Spangenberg, etc. to compete against him. All out Super Jeopardy! brawl!
For comic books: Comic Book Artist Comics Buyer's Guide Wizard Sketch Draw Write
Computers: Linux Magazine Linux Format (UK) -- my favorite Linux Journal
Other: Wired Rolling Stone National Geographic
I get the comic ones (except CBG) at the comics shop each week, but the rest are subscriptions, just because I like getting mail once in a while that's not a bill.
I'd recommend POPFile for spam filtering, too. I had mine filtering spam just over 98% of my spam correctly, with only a very rare false positive. Plus, the web browser interface is easy to use and intuitive. It has plenty of options available to you, but it's not overwhelming. The stats tracker on it is invaluable for the curious.
Thunderbird's spam filter is rudimentary, by comparison. It only catched about half of my spam mail. Nice start, but not good enough in comparison to POPFile.
Just started setting my SUSE 9.1 up on Wednesday night. I'm upgrading from SUSE 9.0, and elected to do a completely fresh reinstallation, replacing the miniscule 40 Gig hard drive Linux was running on to a 160 Gig behemoth capable of storing all these SHN and FLAC concert audio files. ("Of A Revolution" comes highly recommended at http://www.archive.org )
The biggest disappointment so far is that the installer doesn't want to run in graphical mode. It would only do text. SUSE 9.0 did graphical right from the top without a problem. My Gateway FPD1910 LCD screen seems to be giving it fits. But after doing a quick and dirty installation through Text Mode, I ran SaX2 and had X-Windows running fairly easily. But it means the ease of installation was thrown right out the window. It's so much easier to pick which packages to install with a GUI than it is with plain text.
Had to use the ALSAMixer program to get Audacity to record from the microphone.
Some programs hang in memory. I shut down Audacity a couple of times, but the system failed to realize it. It shut down from the screen, but when I went to restart it, I was told it was already running. I had to kill -9 it to restart it properly.
Then there are the little things, like my DVD Recorder being referred to as "CD Recorder (1)" which is annoying, but not a killjoy.
I've been fidgeting with settings as I go along, but I like the updated KDE. Lots of pretty icons and animations. The error sounds are annoying, but I'll get rid of those soon enough.
I still have to run WINE Rack against this system to see how QuickTime installs and see if I can get C
Have no idea if the 3-D graphics are working yet, but I'll install Unreal Tourney 2004 soon enough to find out.
I don't feel any big speed increases or noticeable functional differences so far, aside from the extremely annoying installation glitch. I use KDE, but I prefer the Nautilus manager to the Konqueror, so I'll need to install Nautilus and/or whatever GNOME stuff goes with it.
I dropped Windows completely at the end of December and haven't looked back. I've been using SUSE 9.0 since then, but am using SUSE 9.1 to give myself a fresh start. I've learned a lot in the past four or fives months. Some of the mistakes I've made can be erased now, and I'm looking forward to restarting this system, basically. 9.1 so far is a nice little tweak, but it's mostly cosmetic.
By the time I moved from Windows to Linux full time last December, I had created a system that used mostly all the same programs. The first ones to be installed right away, thus, would be:
1. Open Office 2. Firefox 3. Thunderbird
Everything after that is gravy.
On my Linux box today, I imagine the list would further include
4. Unreal Tournament 2004. 5. Audigy (audio editor I use to put together a radio newscast I do every week) 6. Crossover Office/Plugin, mostly for the QuickTime plug-in for the web browser, though. I need my Apple Quicktime movie trailer site.
When SUSE 9.1 comes out, I'll be upgrading and rearranging my entire system, installing a new larger hard drive, and formatting over the Windows hard drive completely. So this is what, in my mind, would constitute a dry run. Everything after it would just be gravy.
The answer to all of this is simple: An operating system programmed in Perl, with all applications programmed in Perl. Think of the expansion of the CPAN with something like that!
Every application would be easily ported to other OSes fairly easily. And Larry Wall could rule the universe. I couldn't think of a better way to go, although I'm sure a Python user will be along shortly with one.
Or, with Mozilla or Opera, you can use the current window as your base for tangents, and then open the links you wish to explore in new tabs (shift-click, or right click --> Open In New (Active or not) Tab) or even new windows. When you're done with those tangents, you can close the tabs and you still have the original page there.
Opening the same window with CTRL-N is something I've never understood about IE. It makes no sense, particularly when you're on a secure site and you ended up logged in twice or force some other odd cookie-based error.
I actually don't mind not having the commentary tracks on the disc. I've found that as my DVD collection grows larger and larger with each week, I just don't have the time or energy to listen to the commentary tracks. I have on a couple of TV shows (FAMILY GUY, BABYLON 5), but I don't often find the patience to watch a 2 hour movie the second time to see what the director can remember about it anymore.
That doesn't bother me so much.
I wish they had included a DTS soundtrack, but a brand new Dolby Digital 5.1 will no quite nicely thanks.
I know some people are complaining that these aren't the be-all and end-all of DVD releases, but I think some people have confused their anticipation of the discs for their contents.
A good clean transfer of the movies is all I want. Everything else is extra. For less than $50 (probably $35 at Best Buy), I can deal without all that.
"It's" and "its" isn't hard to keep differentiated at all. Just expand it out in your mind as you read it. "It's" is just "it is." Read the sentence without the contraction. You'll realize that saying "It's the price of fame" sounds OK, while "It made up it's own mind" is wrong.
When I first got on the internet in 1994, USENET was the place to be. I remember the early rumblings, tho, that segregated web-based message boards would one day overtake USENET and make it a vast wasteland. I didn't think it made any sense to purposely limit your conversations to such small focused sites, and figured it would never work.
I haven't used USENET in years now. It got too painful in the mid- to late-1990s to sort through all the spam and all the trolls and all the people posting pointless one-liners to hear themselves talk.
Granted, you still have many of the latter showing up on web-based message boards, but the spam is definitely much better controlled, and the volume of traffic is easier to handle as both a reader and a moderator.
But, man, Spafford was dead-on and years ahead of his time. I'd love to see a message board system with the kind of intelligence and grace that he used to see on USENET in the earlier days. The only way you're going to get it is on a web-based board or through a mailing list.
This is the New York Times, not the friendlist of all outlets towards the conservatives. You have to take most of their stories with a huge grain of salt, because they'll always be tilted that way.
Why can't it be, perhaps, that the science is being corrected to suit the truth? Maybe the science was perverted in the first place to please the liberals in power at the time?
No, it's the Times. The first and only assumption is that conservatives are changing everything around to please them.
It's science. It changes and evolved as we learn more. Different interpretations of the data can lead to different conclusions. And it's not always right the first time, either. (Remember the whole "earth is flat" fiasco?;-) And, hey, is bran good or bad for you this week? I'm sure that the Times would find some Conservative Conspiracy to suggest that the cereal makers have Republican politicians in their pockets and link that to the different studies as to whether bran is supposed to be good or bad for you...)
I think the problem with the article is that it starts on the assumption that liberals are fair and true, and conservatives twist the truth to their own ends. But it's the New York Times. Of course they would think that. Keep that in mind.
The real worrisome part of the ruling, to me, are the counts against Image Comics, itself. Image Comics doesn't not function as DC or Marvel does. It's not a traditional publishing house. Image is a collective to bring together a series of creators to pool their resources and share space in PREVIEWS and administrative costs and whatnot. Each creator pays a flat fee to Image Central for the paperwork, basically, of getting a comic printed and shipped. Image doesn't own any characters, nor design any comics.
Image has no say as to the editorial content of any of the Founding Fathers' (McFarlane, Larsen, Valentino, Silvestri at this point) titles. So if the jury is ruling against Image Comics because they did or didn't put Neil Gaiman's bio on the back cover of an ANGELA trade, then that count should be overturned. It's factually incorrect. That's Todd McFarlane Productions' problem. Not Image's.
Other than those two counts, I'm happy with the ruling. I think now Todd should just exchange MarvelMan/MiracleMan to Neil for full rights to Angela (dead as of SPAWN #100), Medievil Spawn, and Cogliostro, and everyone call the deal done.
THEN those lawsuits over who owns what can begin. =)
I think you're thinking of Kevin Eastman, who married Julie Strain? I don't think Wanda was ever a Penthouse Pet. I never heard anything like that before. Last I heard, they were just college (or high school) sweethearts.
Yes, I believe so. Unless you send a surfing force of thousands out onto the net every day there's no way you can really keep your name safe. I do agree with you that it's great that Linus is taking the time to de-mystify the monster, but I really don't see a way to solve the problem (especially with the current growth of the web).
But isn't that what makes Open Source so great? We have a community of thousands already on the web programming on various products, helping to kill off FUD, evangelizing to the population at large about Linux. So we add one more task to that list -- Linux trademark protection. When you see a violator, you report it to LI.
All of us surf the web pretty heavily, I'm guessing. All of us have probably, out of curiosity, typed in some oddball combination of words to see if there's a site with that name. All of us have probably misspelled a URL and gone to the wrong site... I'm sure we could keep up with this. I'm an eternal optimist when it comes to this stuff, if little else.
I've seen more than enough reports portraying global warming for being a farce that I refuse to participate in any of the hype and meaningless "feel good" projects surrounding it. I will continue to drive my internal combustion engine-powered car, despite Al Gore's claim that it's the single most dangerous weapon in the world. I will continue to be awed when a volcano erupts, despite global warming wacko's claims that Mount Pinatubo's eruption caused a 5% shrinkage in the ozone layer "hole." (If that were true, we'd have zero ozone, given the age of the earth and the number of volcanic eruptions.) etc. etc.
Don't believe the hype.
-Augie
P.S. And thanks to modern firefighting techniques, we also have more trees in North American now than ever. Forest fires don't burn out of control anymore and don't eat up states' worth of trees. But that's a whole 'nother topic.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, a UC Berkeley study that's AGAINST a Republican? What's next? MicroSoft releasing a survey that shows Linux doesn't have any market share?
"We have to remember, the number of terrorists convicted as a direct result of these infractions on our Bill of Rights remains a big 0."
Actually, the number is a little bit higher than that:
"The report said the act helped secure six guilty pleas from an al Qaeda "sleeper cell" in Lackawanna, N.Y.; allowed the surveillance of a reputed terror cell in Portland, Ore., resulting in convictions of six persons in a scheme to travel to Afghanistan to fight U.S. forces; and the successful prosecution of a money launderer for Colombia's leftist rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC."
We are still counting al Qeada sleeper cells as terrorists, aren't we?
The directions on the iMic are the most counterintuitive things I've ever seen on any computer product. And the directions that come with the device are useless. You have to go to their website and dig around to find out how to use it.
I wanted to record something through my mic. So I plugged the microphone into the input with the microphone picture above it. Then I flipped the switch away from the speaker and towards the microphone, and nothing recorded.
After digging through the FAQ, I finally discovered that I have to flip the switch to the SPEAKER to get the MICROPHONE to work. Makes perfect sense, doesn't it?
I've tried to convert a tape to digital with it, also, and had horrible sound quality. Might be my tape deck, so I'll have to give it another shot sometime...
-Augie
I used to work in the copy room of a law firm almost ten years ago. The bookkeepers made daily backups of all the records on tape. At the end of the day, one tape was locked up in a fireproof safe. The other went in the bookkeeper's purse and went home with her.
The bosses there must have REALLY trusted her.
They also didn't upgrade their systems until about two or three years ago, and their employees just got e-mail addresses two years ago. Progress marches on...
Excellent. Thanks. I didn't catch that one last time I visited the site. It must be that funky new web page design they're using over there. ;)
I switched from Windows to Linux last year. Now, I'm strongly considering switching from Linux to Mac. From what I've looked at so far, a Mac is like a Linux box that's fully integrated and will actually work out of the box.
But the point is this: I used OO.org for word processing, Audacity for audio recording, Firefox for web browsing, and Thunderbird for a mail client. That made switching from Windows to Linux a breeze, as there were version of those programs available for both platforms. And it looks like Thunderbird will be the only one I'd need to replace in Mac.
That's pretty cool, and makes switching very easy. I hope. I'll find out in the next few months.
Horribly off-topic and I know I'll be modded down for this, but it has to be said:
Thanks for saying "couldn't care less" and not "could care less." It's good to see SOMEONE on the internet using the phrase right for a change.
The signaling button is no doubt an important part of the show. And last I heard, the J! producers put different people in charge of "turning on" the buzzers for every show. This way, you won't get one contestant in tune with one producer to lock into the timing. (Remember, you can't buzz in until AFTER Alex finishes reading the answer.)
People often forget (or don't realize) that there is a certain amount of strategy involved with Jeopardy! Being smart and a trivia hound is definitely the first thing, but then the buzzer comes into play, and answer selection. (If you're under a minute to go in Double Jeopardy and another contestant is at -$2000, try hard not to pick a $2000 answer right away...)
The idea I like the most to unseat KenJen is to bring back Chuck Forrest, Frank Spangenberg, etc. to compete against him. All out Super Jeopardy! brawl!
-Augie
For comic books:
Comic Book Artist
Comics Buyer's Guide
Wizard
Sketch
Draw
Write
Computers:
Linux Magazine
Linux Format (UK) -- my favorite
Linux Journal
Other:
Wired
Rolling Stone
National Geographic
I get the comic ones (except CBG) at the comics shop each week, but the rest are subscriptions, just because I like getting mail once in a while that's not a bill.
-Augie
I'd recommend POPFile for spam filtering, too. I had mine filtering spam just over 98% of my spam correctly, with only a very rare false positive. Plus, the web browser interface is easy to use and intuitive. It has plenty of options available to you, but it's not overwhelming. The stats tracker on it is invaluable for the curious.
Thunderbird's spam filter is rudimentary, by comparison. It only catched about half of my spam mail. Nice start, but not good enough in comparison to POPFile.
-Augie
Just started setting my SUSE 9.1 up on Wednesday night. I'm upgrading from SUSE 9.0, and elected to do a completely fresh reinstallation, replacing the miniscule 40 Gig hard drive Linux was running on to a 160 Gig behemoth capable of storing all these SHN and FLAC concert audio files. ("Of A Revolution" comes highly recommended at http://www.archive.org )
The biggest disappointment so far is that the installer doesn't want to run in graphical mode. It would only do text. SUSE 9.0 did graphical right from the top without a problem. My Gateway FPD1910 LCD screen seems to be giving it fits. But after doing a quick and dirty installation through Text Mode, I ran SaX2 and had X-Windows running fairly easily. But it means the ease of installation was thrown right out the window. It's so much easier to pick which packages to install with a GUI than it is with plain text.
Had to use the ALSAMixer program to get Audacity to record from the microphone.
Some programs hang in memory. I shut down Audacity a couple of times, but the system failed to realize it. It shut down from the screen, but when I went to restart it, I was told it was already running. I had to kill -9 it to restart it properly.
Then there are the little things, like my DVD Recorder being referred to as "CD Recorder (1)" which is annoying, but not a killjoy.
I've been fidgeting with settings as I go along, but I like the updated KDE. Lots of pretty icons and animations. The error sounds are annoying, but I'll get rid of those soon enough.
I still have to run WINE Rack against this system to see how QuickTime installs and see if I can get C
Have no idea if the 3-D graphics are working yet, but I'll install Unreal Tourney 2004 soon enough to find out.
I don't feel any big speed increases or noticeable functional differences so far, aside from the extremely annoying installation glitch. I use KDE, but I prefer the Nautilus manager to the Konqueror, so I'll need to install Nautilus and/or whatever GNOME stuff goes with it.
I dropped Windows completely at the end of December and haven't looked back. I've been using SUSE 9.0 since then, but am using SUSE 9.1 to give myself a fresh start. I've learned a lot in the past four or fives months. Some of the mistakes I've made can be erased now, and I'm looking forward to restarting this system, basically. 9.1 so far is a nice little tweak, but it's mostly cosmetic.
-Augie
The people behind UNREAL 2004 track on-line players to see what platform players are using. It was mentioned in a Slashdot thread here at the time.
Assuming that the id people do the same in such a case, then the best thing you can do is buy the client and play it on-line. A lot.
By the time I moved from Windows to Linux full time last December, I had created a system that used mostly all the same programs. The first ones to be installed right away, thus, would be:
1. Open Office
2. Firefox
3. Thunderbird
Everything after that is gravy.
On my Linux box today, I imagine the list would further include
4. Unreal Tournament 2004.
5. Audigy (audio editor I use to put together a radio newscast I do every week)
6. Crossover Office/Plugin, mostly for the QuickTime plug-in for the web browser, though. I need my Apple Quicktime movie trailer site.
When SUSE 9.1 comes out, I'll be upgrading and rearranging my entire system, installing a new larger hard drive, and formatting over the Windows hard drive completely. So this is what, in my mind, would constitute a dry run. Everything after it would just be gravy.
-Augie
((Your friend(is a (mad man)).)
But good (for) him!)
The answer to all of this is simple: An operating system programmed in Perl, with all applications programmed in Perl. Think of the expansion of the CPAN with something like that!
Every application would be easily ported to other OSes fairly easily. And Larry Wall could rule the universe. I couldn't think of a better way to go, although I'm sure a Python user will be along shortly with one.
-Augie
Or, with Mozilla or Opera, you can use the current window as your base for tangents, and then open the links you wish to explore in new tabs (shift-click, or right click --> Open In New (Active or not) Tab) or even new windows. When you're done with those tangents, you can close the tabs and you still have the original page there.
Opening the same window with CTRL-N is something I've never understood about IE. It makes no sense, particularly when you're on a secure site and you ended up logged in twice or force some other odd cookie-based error.
-Augie
Thanks for the links! Both look interesting. I'm going to be experimenting with them this weekend to see if they do what I need them for.
-Augie
I actually don't mind not having the commentary tracks on the disc. I've found that as my DVD collection grows larger and larger with each week, I just don't have the time or energy to listen to the commentary tracks. I have on a couple of TV shows (FAMILY GUY, BABYLON 5), but I don't often find the patience to watch a 2 hour movie the second time to see what the director can remember about it anymore.
That doesn't bother me so much.
I wish they had included a DTS soundtrack, but a brand new Dolby Digital 5.1 will no quite nicely thanks.
I know some people are complaining that these aren't the be-all and end-all of DVD releases, but I think some people have confused their anticipation of the discs for their contents.
A good clean transfer of the movies is all I want. Everything else is extra. For less than $50 (probably $35 at Best Buy), I can deal without all that.
-Augie
"It's" and "its" isn't hard to keep differentiated at all. Just expand it out in your mind as you read it. "It's" is just "it is." Read the sentence without the contraction. You'll realize that saying "It's the price of fame" sounds OK, while "It made up it's own mind" is wrong.
-Augie
When I first got on the internet in 1994, USENET was the place to be. I remember the early rumblings, tho, that segregated web-based message boards would one day overtake USENET and make it a vast wasteland. I didn't think it made any sense to purposely limit your conversations to such small focused sites, and figured it would never work.
I haven't used USENET in years now. It got too painful in the mid- to late-1990s to sort through all the spam and all the trolls and all the people posting pointless one-liners to hear themselves talk.
Granted, you still have many of the latter showing up on web-based message boards, but the spam is definitely much better controlled, and the volume of traffic is easier to handle as both a reader and a moderator.
But, man, Spafford was dead-on and years ahead of his time. I'd love to see a message board system with the kind of intelligence and grace that he used to see on USENET in the earlier days. The only way you're going to get it is on a web-based board or through a mailing list.
Too bad.
Too many cooks, perhaps.
-Augie
This is the New York Times, not the friendlist of all outlets towards the conservatives. You have to take most of their stories with a huge grain of salt, because they'll always be tilted that way.
;-) And, hey, is bran good or bad for you this week? I'm sure that the Times would find some Conservative Conspiracy to suggest that the cereal makers have Republican politicians in their pockets and link that to the different studies as to whether bran is supposed to be good or bad for you...)
Why can't it be, perhaps, that the science is being corrected to suit the truth? Maybe the science was perverted in the first place to please the liberals in power at the time?
No, it's the Times. The first and only assumption is that conservatives are changing everything around to please them.
It's science. It changes and evolved as we learn more. Different interpretations of the data can lead to different conclusions. And it's not always right the first time, either. (Remember the whole "earth is flat" fiasco?
I think the problem with the article is that it starts on the assumption that liberals are fair and true, and conservatives twist the truth to their own ends. But it's the New York Times. Of course they would think that. Keep that in mind.
-Augie
The real worrisome part of the ruling, to me, are the counts against Image Comics, itself. Image Comics doesn't not function as DC or Marvel does. It's not a traditional publishing house. Image is a collective to bring together a series of creators to pool their resources and share space in PREVIEWS and administrative costs and whatnot. Each creator pays a flat fee to Image Central for the paperwork, basically, of getting a comic printed and shipped. Image doesn't own any characters, nor design any comics.
Image has no say as to the editorial content of any of the Founding Fathers' (McFarlane, Larsen, Valentino, Silvestri at this point) titles. So if the jury is ruling against Image Comics because they did or didn't put Neil Gaiman's bio on the back cover of an ANGELA trade, then that count should be overturned. It's factually incorrect. That's Todd McFarlane Productions' problem. Not Image's.
Other than those two counts, I'm happy with the ruling. I think now Todd should just exchange MarvelMan/MiracleMan to Neil for full rights to Angela (dead as of SPAWN #100), Medievil Spawn, and Cogliostro, and everyone call the deal done.
THEN those lawsuits over who owns what can begin. =)
-Augie
I think you're thinking of Kevin Eastman, who married Julie Strain? I don't think Wanda was ever a Penthouse Pet. I never heard anything like that before. Last I heard, they were just college (or high school) sweethearts.
-Augie
Yes, I believe so. Unless you send a surfing force of thousands out onto the net every day there's no way you can really keep your name safe. I do agree with you that it's great that Linus is taking the time to de-mystify the monster, but I really don't see a way to solve the problem (especially with the current growth of the web).
But isn't that what makes Open Source so great? We have a community of thousands already on the web programming on various products, helping to kill off FUD, evangelizing to the population at large about Linux. So we add one more task to that list -- Linux trademark protection. When you see a violator, you report it to LI.
All of us surf the web pretty heavily, I'm guessing. All of us have probably, out of curiosity, typed in some oddball combination of words to see if there's a site with that name. All of us have probably misspelled a URL and gone to the wrong site... I'm sure we could keep up with this. I'm an eternal optimist when it comes to this stuff, if little else.
-Augie
I don't jump on conventional wisdom bandwagons.
I've seen more than enough reports portraying global warming for being a farce that I refuse to participate in any of the hype and meaningless "feel good" projects surrounding it. I will continue to drive my internal combustion engine-powered car, despite Al Gore's claim that it's the single most dangerous weapon in the world. I will continue to be awed when a volcano erupts, despite global warming wacko's claims that Mount Pinatubo's eruption caused a 5% shrinkage in the ozone layer "hole." (If that were true, we'd have zero ozone, given the age of the earth and the number of volcanic eruptions.) etc. etc.
Don't believe the hype.
-Augie
P.S. And thanks to modern firefighting techniques, we also have more trees in North American now than ever. Forest fires don't burn out of control anymore and don't eat up states' worth of trees. But that's a whole 'nother topic.