This doesn't make any sense at all. The Taliban etc. don't have any leverage at all toward driving us out other than trying to make it economically annoying to the American people so we'll leave. The only reason their kill numbers are anywhere near ours are because unlike in Vietnam, we're unwilling to scorch the Earth to defeat them. If the general population in their area was actively against them rather than cowed into hiding or defending them, the Taliban would cease to exist within a week. So the point stands in that small arms don't work against a full military with public support, and if a U.S. separatist group had the same level of support from the people living near them that the Taliban gets in Afghanistan, the U.S. military wouldn't be attacking them because they'd have a big enough voting bloc to make Congress stop.
You're overextending the statement. The statement indicates that this law isn't going to be as useful in preventing this sort of thing as parents taking better responsibility for their kids' online contacts and the kids themselves being more careful (presumably because their parents taught them to be). This isn't Grampa we're talking about, it's a random person in an online game, and keep in mind that most "kids" who play online games aren't first graders who don't have a clue, they're young teens who can reasonably be expected to understand the dangers if their parents put effort into it. So yeah, there's a responsibility that falls on the parents and kids themselves that would be far more effective than this law.
And you drive on thousands of publicly built and funded roads every year. Privately funded roads have never in history scaled to nation sizes, so why do you think that'll suddenly change now?
This still isn't a reasonable argument. Comparing Iran to the USSR makes no sense because you're trying to compare a small nation trying to build up a supply of fissionable material in secret while being opposed by forces far greater than themselves, to a superpower nation state that was willing and able to spend a huge portion of its resources on its military entirely unopposed. Sure, it takes a huge facility to produce fissionable material, but by the time the Soviets had learned how to build nukes (it wasn't a solved problem when they were doing it) they had built the facilities necessary to make them and there's no rational argument that they wouldn't have thought it worth committing the resources to building a vast array of nukes. On top of that, they had thirteen years between their first test and the Cuban Missile Crisis, and they have the largest stockpile of nukes on Earth (currently more than 4000 warheads and that's after decades of disarmament efforts and the dissolution of the Soviet Union), and I have difficulty buying that they built them all after 1962.
You're going to have to cite some kind of evidence that your statement is true before I'll believe that. If the USSR only had a handful of nukes as you state, it would be beyond crazy to load them on ships and sail them into a US Navy blockade, even if they thought we wouldn't shoot at them. I'd have believed it more if you'd said that the nukes on those ships were fakes than your statement, but I still find them both very difficult to believe. It's the research that costs so much time and money. Once you have a workable design it isn't all that costly to build a bunch of bombs.
This is Sweden, not USA. A guardian is not automatically responsible for the actions of the guarded. If he taught the child to do the act, he'd be guilty, and if he showed gross negligence, he'd be guilty of negligent child rearing, and might perhaps lose custody.
The idea that someone has to be blamed is pretty unique to conservative Abrahamic religion countries, and stems back to the "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" found in the scriptures. In other words, it's bunk.
And yet, here we are reading about it happening, so I'm guessing that it's not as much bunk as you claim.
The flip side is that it takes a year for a keyboard to get bad enough to warrant replacing, and it requires almost no cleaning at all in that time (slapdash cleaning once a week is more than most people bother with), where cleaning a touch screen is an almost daily affair. Add to that the fact that a grubby keyboard doesn't interfere with reading what's on the screen and the crud level just doesn't rise into awareness the same way.
Mostly because replacing a grubby keyboard is a ten dollar affair, and even the grubbiest fingers don't render a keyboard too grubby to use properly in a day or three.
You missed your target there. The NDA was presented by the CIAPC as part of a settlement offer to avoid them reporting the issue to the authorities in the first place. That doesn't make the NDA any better, but the authorities weren't insisting on any secrecy once the prosecution started.
The simplest solution is that this guy downloaded stuff and blames it on someone who's beyond the law.
This makes no sense at all, because (as the case itself demonstrated) blaming her would still cause charges to degenerate to him as her legal guardian, so it would be a pointless extra step, unless you're adding the extra and unlikely part that he planned to make it a PR nightmare in the event he got caught.
Is the loss of the occasional single innocent person really that big a deal when you consider we're talking about people who would probably take several lives if we don't stop them?
The fact that you'd even ask this indicates that you've already jumped the rails. The answer is simply yes, that executing an innocent person should be considered far more abhorrent than not executing ten guilty people. Your argument is also entirely screwed up in that eliminating the death penalty does not in any way equate to setting people on death row free. They'd still be in prison so the worry that they'd kill more is certainly significantly reduced. Still, if being innocent of a crime isn't sufficient to prevent your being executed for it, then there's no "justice" in your justice system. And of course, for just about every crime that could result in the death penalty, executing an innocent person means that the guilty person, the one who committed the crime and the one whose future actions worry you so much, goes free. If you consider that reasonable, then maybe you shouldn't be commenting on anyone else's insanity.
Considering that you don't know the size of the paycheck, you can't really judge them on the size of the gift. Who knows, maybe the shipbuilders really wanted iPods. I know I'd rather have one than an iPad myself, and it's a thank you gift, not a gratuity.
Yes, every proponent of OSS will produce a nice list of some impressive OSS projects and certainly Android could be considered THE poster child of OSS. But for each successful OSS project there are 10,000 dead or semi dead ones. Imagine any other field with these odds. Imagine for instance bridge design. If only one out of 10,000 bridges designed and implemented would be actually used or usable, that would be terrible.
The analogy you've chosen doesn't make any sense. To extend it to match, you'd have to consider every pallet bridge, board-over-creek and fallen tree and see if they're serving their purpose reasonably well for the effort put into them. In that sense, your analogy fits, and using that analogy, most such "bridges" work very well in terms of utility for cost. To take it back to software, my company has produced a huge array of proprietary programs and products, and the majority of them don't sell for enough to make it worth maintaining them, but the few that do are enough to support the failures and the company to boot. That's just the business, and so by your model proprietary software development doesn't work very well either.
Innovation: Also, take that 10 most successful OSS project list and remove all the items that are OSS projects that are highly inspired by non OSS products predating them (e.g., Lunix/Unix, Gimp/Photoshop, OpenOffice/Office, Android/iOS,... ). I am not necessarily against these kinds of projects but it is really hard to consider them innovative. Now what are you left with? The answer is not much.
Every product you named sprung from OSS stuff. Linux came from UNIX, but UNIX developed from big iron OS software that got expanded to mini- and microcomputers for free. Photoshop commercialized software that the fashion industry built for their own use, and Office came from a number of products that themselves grew from basic tools available, you guessed it, free for mainframe users.
As an approach OSS has not worked well on average and nothing has really changed over the years. There is no real trend here. The fact that there are some, very few, truly successful, OSS projects now could simple be the result of the fact that there are just MORE OSS projects. In other words, the average chance of an OSS to have really impact has not improved at all. This is simply a number game with no qualitative shift of any kind. Also, lets not kid ourselves. Most end users really care about the FREE part of FOSS and not the fact that they could access or change the source. They want Foss not fOSS.
As an approach proprietary software has not worked well on average and nothing has really changed over the years. There is no real trend here. The fact that there are some, very few, truly successful, proprietary projects now could simple be the result of the fact that there are just MORE proprietary projects. In other words, the average chance of a proprietary program to have really impact has not improved at all. This is simply a number game with no qualitative shift of any kind.
Also, who cares why the end user wants FOSS? If the F drives people to want it and the OSS drives developers to contribute, you've got a working model.
Are the successful projects successful because of OSS or in spite of it? The answer to that is less clear that is should be. As a user, for instance, I may or may not like Linux for desktop. The fact that it is free is completely irrelevant to me because I value my time. If Windows or OSX works more efficiently for me just a little bit I will not hesitate one second to buy either one.
This argument makes no sense because it's entirely reversible. If Linux makes your computing experience better then you'd go with that instead, and so your argument boils down to Windows or OSX always being easier to use and therefore more efficient, when that's only the case because you've worked with it for yea
That's a nonsensical reply since (a) skydiving without a chute is already "banned" insofar as it's a crime to attempt suicide and the general public will already attempt to stop you from jumping out of an aircraft without a parachute, and (b) the number of people injured or killed in regular skydiving accidents already far outstrips the total number of chute-free skydivers so it's not even a good example of limiting risk. My point is that a soda serving size law is already an irrational attempt to legislate risk, and it's not even going to be very effective since there really aren't that many people who truly don't know that a liter of soda contains a lot of calories, and the ban will simply motivate people who overindulge to load up on calories elsewhere. What I find insane in all of this is thinking that legislating the serving size of a sugary drink is going to have any beneficial effect on general obesity.
But you're not arguing for health warnings, you're arguing for banning servings that large. I'd like to see the logic that justifies that and not banning a vast array of other dangerous activities that adults voluntarily take part in every day. You could easily press the argument that because you think it's insane that it actually is to a large number of things. Are you calling for a ban on skydiving or extreme skiing? Do you think that it's rational to mandate governors on automobile and motorcycle engines? Most Americans don't subscribe to that level of governmental control because we've found that it doesn't work very well.
Then don't go to a smoke-filled pub. This argument fails requirement because there's no mandatory reason to visit a pub, so restricting smoking there doesn't make sense. If there's enough demand for smoke-free pubs, then smoke-free pubs will pop up, but this isn't like banning smoking in a government office where someone might be compelled to go there, or in a workplace where someone has no reasonable choice in the matter.
Your whole post doesn't even address my point about better enforcement, much less answer it. In fact, you present an example of bad enforcement not working as though that means that good enforcement wouldn't work. If those same police would worry less about ticketing for revenue and worried more about ticketing for safety, then safety would increase. To take your example, if those officers sat at stop signs instead of the bridge, fewer people would be running stop signs while more people would do 20 across the bridge, and that would be a net gain in safety.
Your argument isn't a rational flip to the request for better enforcement. If the police rarely if ever enforced traffic laws, then cars would regularly violate traffic laws and you'd see a lot more accidents. The concept of regulating behavior through legislation is rarely illustrated better than traffic laws, where the fear of getting a citation is most of the motive force behind compliance. A lot of the blame does fall to cyclists because a lack of enforcement in many areas does indeed lead to cyclists often failing to follow traffic laws, and that failure makes many cyclists more of a hazard on the road than if they complied just as areas with minimal traffic enforcement develop higher statistics for accidents caused by ignoring traffic controls. I agree that both sides of this need to be more aware but every time a study is done there are a lot more cyclists crossing red lights and ignoring stop signs than drivers.
And yet I never seem to hear of an Iranian or Saudi imam standing up and saying, "Dude, that's not us." There's so little internal correction in Islam that the Afghans and Pakistanis end up defining the whole thing, like the example of this very article where the Pakistani Prime Minister demands something that's patently ridiculous and nobody with any authority in Islam gets up to a microphone to say that it's not reasonable. If the non-Moslem world heard more of that sort of thing, I'd bet they would be a lot more willing to accept the overall message you're trying to put forth.
That's just an attempt to avoid the concept by applying a fairly arbitrary concept of "material". Riots incited by a film left 19 people dead. Are the rioters to blame, or the film maker, or neither of them or both? The whole article pivots on the answer to that question, so trying to dodge it by claiming "material harm" in such a peculiar way doesn't serve any logical ends.
I hav no idea how a post that contains "The earth is a closed system" gets rated insightful but it's not true, and it steals pretty much all of the thunder out of your statement. There are better ways to make the "Earth is overloaded" argument, and it would serve you well to find some of them.
They make more money selling pay-per-view for the baby punching than from the ads. I know I'd leave if I couldn't catch a good baby-punching video every now and again.
Productive jobs are limited by resources, and most of the world is well past the point where more workers would allow more resource extraction.
Where'd you pick up this gem? It's not true, so it blows you idea to pieces. There are lots of jobs that don't involve resource extraction. Accounting is a great example, where the job is to maximize efficiency in the use of resources, or teaching, which is only resource-driven if you're small-minded enough to think that any given person is interchangeable with another (which is also where the "produce more than they consume" canard springs from).
You should probably be made aware that stuff like this is why most people won't take your pronouncements seriously. You show a penchant for extreme overextension coupled with an obvious lack of perspective. Just to pull out the easiest piece because I lack time to address this level of crazy in full, it's pretty well understood why "The Dark Ages" happened (and it wasn't due to weather) and large chunks of the world like Persia, the Chinese and the Mayans were flourishing during that time so blaming global weather (or global anything) is simply foolish. If you think that global warming is likely to lead to living in mud huts and scrabbling for food within a generation then your opinions aren't worth discussing.
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This doesn't make any sense at all. The Taliban etc. don't have any leverage at all toward driving us out other than trying to make it economically annoying to the American people so we'll leave. The only reason their kill numbers are anywhere near ours are because unlike in Vietnam, we're unwilling to scorch the Earth to defeat them. If the general population in their area was actively against them rather than cowed into hiding or defending them, the Taliban would cease to exist within a week. So the point stands in that small arms don't work against a full military with public support, and if a U.S. separatist group had the same level of support from the people living near them that the Taliban gets in Afghanistan, the U.S. military wouldn't be attacking them because they'd have a big enough voting bloc to make Congress stop.
Virg
This story is about China, so what you've seen in America isn't much help to the situation.
Virg
You're overextending the statement. The statement indicates that this law isn't going to be as useful in preventing this sort of thing as parents taking better responsibility for their kids' online contacts and the kids themselves being more careful (presumably because their parents taught them to be). This isn't Grampa we're talking about, it's a random person in an online game, and keep in mind that most "kids" who play online games aren't first graders who don't have a clue, they're young teens who can reasonably be expected to understand the dangers if their parents put effort into it. So yeah, there's a responsibility that falls on the parents and kids themselves that would be far more effective than this law.
Virg
And you drive on thousands of publicly built and funded roads every year. Privately funded roads have never in history scaled to nation sizes, so why do you think that'll suddenly change now?
Virg
This still isn't a reasonable argument. Comparing Iran to the USSR makes no sense because you're trying to compare a small nation trying to build up a supply of fissionable material in secret while being opposed by forces far greater than themselves, to a superpower nation state that was willing and able to spend a huge portion of its resources on its military entirely unopposed. Sure, it takes a huge facility to produce fissionable material, but by the time the Soviets had learned how to build nukes (it wasn't a solved problem when they were doing it) they had built the facilities necessary to make them and there's no rational argument that they wouldn't have thought it worth committing the resources to building a vast array of nukes. On top of that, they had thirteen years between their first test and the Cuban Missile Crisis, and they have the largest stockpile of nukes on Earth (currently more than 4000 warheads and that's after decades of disarmament efforts and the dissolution of the Soviet Union), and I have difficulty buying that they built them all after 1962.
Virg
You're going to have to cite some kind of evidence that your statement is true before I'll believe that. If the USSR only had a handful of nukes as you state, it would be beyond crazy to load them on ships and sail them into a US Navy blockade, even if they thought we wouldn't shoot at them. I'd have believed it more if you'd said that the nukes on those ships were fakes than your statement, but I still find them both very difficult to believe. It's the research that costs so much time and money. Once you have a workable design it isn't all that costly to build a bunch of bombs.
Virg
This is Sweden, not USA. A guardian is not automatically responsible for the actions of the guarded. If he taught the child to do the act, he'd be guilty, and if he showed gross negligence, he'd be guilty of negligent child rearing, and might perhaps lose custody. The idea that someone has to be blamed is pretty unique to conservative Abrahamic religion countries, and stems back to the "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" found in the scriptures. In other words, it's bunk.
And yet, here we are reading about it happening, so I'm guessing that it's not as much bunk as you claim.
Virg
The flip side is that it takes a year for a keyboard to get bad enough to warrant replacing, and it requires almost no cleaning at all in that time (slapdash cleaning once a week is more than most people bother with), where cleaning a touch screen is an almost daily affair. Add to that the fact that a grubby keyboard doesn't interfere with reading what's on the screen and the crud level just doesn't rise into awareness the same way.
Virg
Mostly because replacing a grubby keyboard is a ten dollar affair, and even the grubbiest fingers don't render a keyboard too grubby to use properly in a day or three.
Virg
You missed your target there. The NDA was presented by the CIAPC as part of a settlement offer to avoid them reporting the issue to the authorities in the first place. That doesn't make the NDA any better, but the authorities weren't insisting on any secrecy once the prosecution started.
Virg
The simplest solution is that this guy downloaded stuff and blames it on someone who's beyond the law.
This makes no sense at all, because (as the case itself demonstrated) blaming her would still cause charges to degenerate to him as her legal guardian, so it would be a pointless extra step, unless you're adding the extra and unlikely part that he planned to make it a PR nightmare in the event he got caught.
Virg
Is the loss of the occasional single innocent person really that big a deal when you consider we're talking about people who would probably take several lives if we don't stop them?
The fact that you'd even ask this indicates that you've already jumped the rails. The answer is simply yes, that executing an innocent person should be considered far more abhorrent than not executing ten guilty people. Your argument is also entirely screwed up in that eliminating the death penalty does not in any way equate to setting people on death row free. They'd still be in prison so the worry that they'd kill more is certainly significantly reduced. Still, if being innocent of a crime isn't sufficient to prevent your being executed for it, then there's no "justice" in your justice system. And of course, for just about every crime that could result in the death penalty, executing an innocent person means that the guilty person, the one who committed the crime and the one whose future actions worry you so much, goes free. If you consider that reasonable, then maybe you shouldn't be commenting on anyone else's insanity.
Virg
Considering that you don't know the size of the paycheck, you can't really judge them on the size of the gift. Who knows, maybe the shipbuilders really wanted iPods. I know I'd rather have one than an iPad myself, and it's a thank you gift, not a gratuity.
Virg
Yes, every proponent of OSS will produce a nice list of some impressive OSS projects and certainly Android could be considered THE poster child of OSS. But for each successful OSS project there are 10,000 dead or semi dead ones. Imagine any other field with these odds. Imagine for instance bridge design. If only one out of 10,000 bridges designed and implemented would be actually used or usable, that would be terrible.
The analogy you've chosen doesn't make any sense. To extend it to match, you'd have to consider every pallet bridge, board-over-creek and fallen tree and see if they're serving their purpose reasonably well for the effort put into them. In that sense, your analogy fits, and using that analogy, most such "bridges" work very well in terms of utility for cost. To take it back to software, my company has produced a huge array of proprietary programs and products, and the majority of them don't sell for enough to make it worth maintaining them, but the few that do are enough to support the failures and the company to boot. That's just the business, and so by your model proprietary software development doesn't work very well either.
Innovation: Also, take that 10 most successful OSS project list and remove all the items that are OSS projects that are highly inspired by non OSS products predating them (e.g., Lunix/Unix, Gimp/Photoshop, OpenOffice/Office, Android/iOS, ... ). I am not necessarily against these kinds of projects but it is really hard to consider them innovative. Now what are you left with? The answer is not much.
Every product you named sprung from OSS stuff. Linux came from UNIX, but UNIX developed from big iron OS software that got expanded to mini- and microcomputers for free. Photoshop commercialized software that the fashion industry built for their own use, and Office came from a number of products that themselves grew from basic tools available, you guessed it, free for mainframe users.
As an approach OSS has not worked well on average and nothing has really changed over the years. There is no real trend here. The fact that there are some, very few, truly successful, OSS projects now could simple be the result of the fact that there are just MORE OSS projects. In other words, the average chance of an OSS to have really impact has not improved at all. This is simply a number game with no qualitative shift of any kind. Also, lets not kid ourselves. Most end users really care about the FREE part of FOSS and not the fact that they could access or change the source. They want Foss not fOSS.
As an approach proprietary software has not worked well on average and nothing has really changed over the years. There is no real trend here. The fact that there are some, very few, truly successful, proprietary projects now could simple be the result of the fact that there are just MORE proprietary projects. In other words, the average chance of a proprietary program to have really impact has not improved at all. This is simply a number game with no qualitative shift of any kind.
Also, who cares why the end user wants FOSS? If the F drives people to want it and the OSS drives developers to contribute, you've got a working model.
Are the successful projects successful because of OSS or in spite of it? The answer to that is less clear that is should be. As a user, for instance, I may or may not like Linux for desktop. The fact that it is free is completely irrelevant to me because I value my time. If Windows or OSX works more efficiently for me just a little bit I will not hesitate one second to buy either one.
This argument makes no sense because it's entirely reversible. If Linux makes your computing experience better then you'd go with that instead, and so your argument boils down to Windows or OSX always being easier to use and therefore more efficient, when that's only the case because you've worked with it for yea
That's a nonsensical reply since (a) skydiving without a chute is already "banned" insofar as it's a crime to attempt suicide and the general public will already attempt to stop you from jumping out of an aircraft without a parachute, and (b) the number of people injured or killed in regular skydiving accidents already far outstrips the total number of chute-free skydivers so it's not even a good example of limiting risk. My point is that a soda serving size law is already an irrational attempt to legislate risk, and it's not even going to be very effective since there really aren't that many people who truly don't know that a liter of soda contains a lot of calories, and the ban will simply motivate people who overindulge to load up on calories elsewhere. What I find insane in all of this is thinking that legislating the serving size of a sugary drink is going to have any beneficial effect on general obesity.
Virg
But you're not arguing for health warnings, you're arguing for banning servings that large. I'd like to see the logic that justifies that and not banning a vast array of other dangerous activities that adults voluntarily take part in every day. You could easily press the argument that because you think it's insane that it actually is to a large number of things. Are you calling for a ban on skydiving or extreme skiing? Do you think that it's rational to mandate governors on automobile and motorcycle engines? Most Americans don't subscribe to that level of governmental control because we've found that it doesn't work very well.
Virg
Then don't go to a smoke-filled pub. This argument fails requirement because there's no mandatory reason to visit a pub, so restricting smoking there doesn't make sense. If there's enough demand for smoke-free pubs, then smoke-free pubs will pop up, but this isn't like banning smoking in a government office where someone might be compelled to go there, or in a workplace where someone has no reasonable choice in the matter.
Virg
Your whole post doesn't even address my point about better enforcement, much less answer it. In fact, you present an example of bad enforcement not working as though that means that good enforcement wouldn't work. If those same police would worry less about ticketing for revenue and worried more about ticketing for safety, then safety would increase. To take your example, if those officers sat at stop signs instead of the bridge, fewer people would be running stop signs while more people would do 20 across the bridge, and that would be a net gain in safety.
Virg
Your argument isn't a rational flip to the request for better enforcement. If the police rarely if ever enforced traffic laws, then cars would regularly violate traffic laws and you'd see a lot more accidents. The concept of regulating behavior through legislation is rarely illustrated better than traffic laws, where the fear of getting a citation is most of the motive force behind compliance. A lot of the blame does fall to cyclists because a lack of enforcement in many areas does indeed lead to cyclists often failing to follow traffic laws, and that failure makes many cyclists more of a hazard on the road than if they complied just as areas with minimal traffic enforcement develop higher statistics for accidents caused by ignoring traffic controls. I agree that both sides of this need to be more aware but every time a study is done there are a lot more cyclists crossing red lights and ignoring stop signs than drivers.
Virg
And yet I never seem to hear of an Iranian or Saudi imam standing up and saying, "Dude, that's not us." There's so little internal correction in Islam that the Afghans and Pakistanis end up defining the whole thing, like the example of this very article where the Pakistani Prime Minister demands something that's patently ridiculous and nobody with any authority in Islam gets up to a microphone to say that it's not reasonable. If the non-Moslem world heard more of that sort of thing, I'd bet they would be a lot more willing to accept the overall message you're trying to put forth.
Virg
That's just an attempt to avoid the concept by applying a fairly arbitrary concept of "material". Riots incited by a film left 19 people dead. Are the rioters to blame, or the film maker, or neither of them or both? The whole article pivots on the answer to that question, so trying to dodge it by claiming "material harm" in such a peculiar way doesn't serve any logical ends.
Virg
I hav no idea how a post that contains "The earth is a closed system" gets rated insightful but it's not true, and it steals pretty much all of the thunder out of your statement. There are better ways to make the "Earth is overloaded" argument, and it would serve you well to find some of them.
Virg
They make more money selling pay-per-view for the baby punching than from the ads. I know I'd leave if I couldn't catch a good baby-punching video every now and again.
Virg
Productive jobs are limited by resources, and most of the world is well past the point where more workers would allow more resource extraction.
Where'd you pick up this gem? It's not true, so it blows you idea to pieces. There are lots of jobs that don't involve resource extraction. Accounting is a great example, where the job is to maximize efficiency in the use of resources, or teaching, which is only resource-driven if you're small-minded enough to think that any given person is interchangeable with another (which is also where the "produce more than they consume" canard springs from).
Virg
You should probably be made aware that stuff like this is why most people won't take your pronouncements seriously. You show a penchant for extreme overextension coupled with an obvious lack of perspective. Just to pull out the easiest piece because I lack time to address this level of crazy in full, it's pretty well understood why "The Dark Ages" happened (and it wasn't due to weather) and large chunks of the world like Persia, the Chinese and the Mayans were flourishing during that time so blaming global weather (or global anything) is simply foolish. If you think that global warming is likely to lead to living in mud huts and scrabbling for food within a generation then your opinions aren't worth discussing.
Virg