That $2.87 rate is in today's money, in other words inflation adjusted. The correct rate decrease immediately after seregulatuon was about 50%.
Of course competition also brought us VOIP. With Vonage, for example, long distance is 0 cents per minute, a 100% reduction from government regulated rates.
Until 1984, national telecommunications was a regulated utility, with the government controlling prices. A long distance call was $2.87 per minute. In 1984, it was deregulated and natural competition quickly brought the rate to $0.10 per minute - a 97% reduction.
Tight government regulation of internet service as a utility is a great idea, if you want to pay $12 / GB. I can understand how this might have been debatable in 1812, but in 2012 we've already tried both ways over and over again. Competition beats government fiat every time. Maybe you haven't noticed the existing competive system has brought us from 14 kbps to 14Mbps, a THOUSAND times as fast as a few years ago?
I wouldn't sweat it. In my experience, there's rarely a problem. Since everything "just works" 99.5% of the time, I don't even spend time checking unless it's a $600 RAID card. (The top shelf stuff has always been compatible, but worth checking before spending $600 on a card.)
It's probably more costly to spend time worrying about it than the $0-$25 it would have cost to put in another NIC card. That was the real problem- the OP choose to spend 3 days instead of just grabbing a different NIC from his parts box or, if gigabit was required, running to Walmart and dropping $22.
The prpblem mentioned in the article is that often, a compromised desktop has root access to a server, which has access to another server, and so on. With proper key management, access to (a former employee's?) desktop shouldn't grant access throughout the network.
Too often, keys aren't properly managed, so an intruder can go from one machine to another, all over the network.
I wish I had my mid points beach that I used yesterday because this is far more useful than any other comment. Until you understand his reasoning, not just hear it but understand it, the PM is probably doing the right thing. In other words, the OP is most likely wrong.
Of two people disagree, there is a 50/50 chance each is wrong. Except here we have a programmer disagreeing with a project manager about project management. Most likely, the PM knows their job better than you do. (Just as the programmer knows their own job.) Until you truly understand what they are doing and why, and can then with full understanding disagree, you're just bring arrogant. Go talk to them. First understand them, then make your concerns clear.
You think they shouldn't arrest someone for having that LOOKS like a scary gun, right? My friend, that's basically the definition of "assault weapon" from the law - a gun that looks scary. An "assault weapon" is functionally equivalent to any other rifle. So if you yhink puerile shouldn't to prison based on something looking scary, you agree with the NRA. You just didn't know enough about guns to realize that.
Like the GP, I work in a Microsoft shop now. This agency even runs Windows for SERVERS. We have dozens of copies of Visual Studio. Yet, every desktop in my department has the $2,600 Adobe collection. The fact that we've never heard of Microsoft's alternative to Adobe is a giant fail by Microsoft.
It's a fail by Microsoft marketing that they've never gotten word out about the product's existence. It's also a fail of the software that it's not good enough to get even a passing mention in industry press, web sites, etc. If you haven't heard of a product I personally wrote, like Clonebox, that's because my company is tiny. If Microsoft spends milions making an entire suite of products and doesn't bother to tell their own customers about it, that's a fail.
Medical or other specialized jargon definitely CAN be translated into 6th grade English. Here's the simple proof. Medical textbooks explain the terms.
Every doctor/engineer etc. is taught those terms by having them translated into words they already know. For example, somewhere along the way someone tells the future doctor "tibia means shin bone". The fact that non-doctors can be taught the terms in medical school proves that for ALL such terms there must be a translation ala "tibia=shinbone". If there were any term that could not be translated into simpler language, it could not be taught.
I'll go one better and do the whole post. "languages are isomorphic" is itself redundant in that sentence, so the whole phrase could be deleted if you want to delete "fluff and filler".
The entire post without (arrogant) fluff and filler is:
"Some languages can express ideas that others can't."
That MAY be true. However, knowing that while modern computer languages LOOK different, they are in fact generally Turing equalivent, it's reasonable to suspect human languages may be also. Consider x86 assembly and Java. Totally different, right? They actually have EXACTLY the same expressive power, and here's proof. A Java virtual machine can be written in assembler. Therefore, assembler can express whatever Java does. (Consider that the bytecode is basically turned into assembler just before it hits the chip. THAT assembler expresses the exact same thing as the Java it was produced from.)
Also, Java can be used to write a (slow) x86 virtual machine (emulator) which translates x86 instructions into Java bytecode run by the emulator. Thus, Java can express what assembler can and vice versa.
If Java and assembler are in fact mechanically translateable (which they are), there's no reason to believe dialects of human languages can't be also.
If you think medical jargon can't be translated into understandable language, I feel for you. Hopefully you'll get a doctor who does so. I normally do. Example - "manifesting acute folliculitis" means "has a pimple on their head".
Some precision may be lost, certainly, but puerile who don't know medical jargon and want it in plain English probably don't need quite the level of precision the medical terminology allows. I'm a programmer, I can flumox someone with a bunch of jargon, or I can use technical vocabulary to communicate consisely and exactly with colleagues. However, I can also explain the same things to my non-techie bosses using simple, clear English.
"easily defeated as well" is the key phrase in that whole post. Doing some arbitrary computation on the key gains you nothing. Anyone who is going to find a key in a memory dump isn't going to be the list bit deterred by some trivial encoding of the key.
"Would an RFID-based system, in which you identify yourself to the gun using public key cryptography, be such a terrible thing? Assuming the mechanism can be made reliable (and with enough work, why can't it be made reliable enough?)"
If you can make it reliable enough, and prove that reliability, you can make millions. Remember that when it fails, people DIE. One failure EVER is too many.
The article and especially the summary is completely wrong about their central claim "gunmakers have no incentive...".
Of course that's typical - anti-gunners would never shoot, never handle a firearm, so they normally have no idea what they are talking about.
The supreme requirement in a firearm is RELIABILITY. If you are in a situation where you actually have to fire your sidearm, you die if it doesn't work right that time.
A defensive weapon has to work every single time. That's why the 1911 design is still the second most popular model over a hundred years later - because it's been proven reliable. That's why you keep firearms simple - complex things break. That's also why you definitely don't add a bunch of complexity designed to make the gun NOT WORK if something isn't perfect - it has to fire, or an innocent person dies.
It's only people who don't know about firearms, or about dealing with bad guys in general, who think something like "fingerprinting" one persons particular grip sounds like a good idea. It does sound good, until you think about the fact that the user is UNDER ATTACK. They may very well have to fire with their other hand, after the BG smashes their right arms with a baseball bat, car, stabs them with a knife....
These "smart guns" look cool in movies, but anyone with any tactical experience or training knows they are only movie props. In real life, these ideas would get good guys killed every day. If you've never even been trained in USING a firearm, please don't pontificate about how they be be designed.
From TFA, the changing cross srction reduces resistance as it stretches. At the same time, stretching increases resistance due to reduced diameter. The two effects tend to cancel one either, so they could be designed for no change when stretched, if it mattered to the application.
In 99% of cases, it doesn't matter. You simply want "low resistance" and don't care if it's 0.012 ohm or 0.015 ohm.
The law often causes information security problems in my state. The laws and regulations reflect what some politician thought sounded good twenty years ago, when the law was written. For example, mandating MD5, which is broken, whenever a hash is used. Since hashes can only be MD5, SHA256 is illegal. Sometimes we have to use no hash at all when MD5 won't work. We would make things much more secure if the law didn't get in the way.
I work for a state agency doing IT. Our state is just as bad because a) IT people aren't trained properly in security and b) "security" regulations prohibit actual security. It often happens that a secure design can't be used because it wouldn't be in compliance with laws and regulations, so an insecure system must be used.
For example, last week we needed a secure hash token to secure a transaction. SHA-128 or 256 was the right way to do it, but the law says all hashes must be MD5 (which has been broken for several years). MD5 wouldn't work, so we went with NO security token in order to comply with "security" regulations.
Accrediting security engineers the same way we do mechanical engineers and requiring that systems get signed off by a licensed security person would work FAR better. There is no way I'd sign off on most of our stuff without some significant, but simple and obvious fixes.
Another example - regulations say employee passwords must be changed every 90 days, and must include a number, so everyone has a simple incrementing password, typically myname1, myname2, myname3, etc. Those same policies limit passwords to only EIGHT characters. If I had to sign off the security, as opposed to following bureaucratic regulations, the first change would be that pass phrases should be 14 characters minimum.
> He single handedly does the work of 50 or more laborers who now do?
You get the cheap cotton goods with money you make from your web site or whatever. You're missing that fact that this has been going on for hundreds of years - you ARE the guy who is not picking. If you make more than $2 / day because you're not picking cotton, putting lids on jars, or weaving cloth, the automation of those repetitive jobs has been good to you.
Imagone the power went out at your workplace. How much could you produce with no automation? Remember no automatic word processor - if you mess up you have to rewrite it. Your productovity minus overhead and marketing is your maximum salary. I thank God I'm not picking cotton or weaving cloth because machines have replaced me in those roles.
It's not a fantasy or even a theory, it's historical fact for the last four hundred years. A guy who can run a combine harvesting tons of cotton per day makes more, and works fewer hours, than someone picking by hand. An accountant running a computer is more productive and higher paid than one with a quill pen.
Assume a company was NOT willing to pay you more for programming robots than it did for assembling toasters. (Or equalivently, give you more time off.) You'd simply get a job at another company which will pay programmers operators of robots more than the assembly low workers the robots replace. The fact is, 98% of Slashdot readers earn more and get more time off than our grandparents precisely because we use the technology that replaced pur grandparents' jobs.
"The current crop of GOP senators", are trying to get rid of the very loopholes Google uses. Remember flat tax, fair tax, 9-9-9? The GOP position is that the tax code should be simple, so people can't finagle as much.
It's Obama who insists on keeping the special exemptions and loopholes so he can pick the winners and losers, while raising rates on the people who actually report the money they earn. Pick up any newspaper, their positions are clear - GOP says "close loopholes and special interest deductions", Obama "no, taise tax rates".
By that reasoning, a 70 MPH speed limit would be the wedge which inevitably lead to making driving illegal. That hasn't happened.
It's not a wedge, it is what it is - it will show what it thinks you're looking for. If it thinks you're not looking for porn, it won't show porn. If it thinks you want porn, it'll give you porn.
In a banjs new industry, it's all about marketing, getting market share. Profits come later, after the market stabilizes and you are the market leader. So plan to spend a lot more on marketing than machines at first.
Also, three months later, better machines will come out. Buy smart and plan to replace often. Better processes will also be developed, so budget big for research and development so that your process is better than the other guy's.
You've got that exactly backwards. Tea Party people hate government interference and enjoy usenet shootong on weekends. His comments are those of a liberal weenie.
Creative Commons has a non-commercial license. While it sounds good at first, non-commercial licenses tend to be troublesome in the real world. There are a lot of scenarios, details, where it just doesn't work out too well. However...
You asked if the general consensus is that free software shouldn't be sold for profit. Some think so, many don't. In practice, the fact that any buyer can give it away for free, or sell it cheaper, means that free software is rarely if ever sold with a profit on the software itself. The profit is normally on support and such. Why would you buy Red Hat when you can get the exact same software from CentOS free, for example. You would only pay Red Hat if you want their support services, update servers, and other value add services. Red Hat can't profit on the actual software itself because the software is available free from CentOS .
Is it okay to profit from OSS related services?
Most of Red Hat's revenue goes into supporting free software, such as paying their staff of developers who constantly contribute to OSS. For that reason, most businesses "around" free software have been of enormous benefit to the community.
Even there, Red Hat is the exception - most people CAN'T get customers to pay for free software, so the question of whether or not you SHOULD sell it is moot. It doesn't matter if you should charge money or not, when no-one is willing to pay anyway.
Therefore, in practical application, GPL is normally non-commercial anyway, but without the problems of the explicitly non-commercial licenses.
> convince so many people that scientists are lying them.
The very same scientists who were on TV in 1988 warning of dire consequences from global warming have ADMITTED that they were lying. We greatly exaggerated in order to motivate people politically, some of the best known GW alarmists have said.
Perhaps you've forgotten what these "scientists" were saying in 80s "by the year 2000... "(California will be underwater, famine will sweep the US, etc.) It's 2012 and California is still there, so quite obviously they are liars, or fools. The only reason anyone would trust them now would be extreme cognitive bias. Remember these clamotogists were screaming about a man-made ice age in 1970s. Wrong again.
Add in the facts they like to ignore, like the fact that other planets are warming too. Mars didn't have cars, so it probably has a lot more to do with sun cycles than sedans. Once you tune out the crazies and those who are clearly more interested in politics than science, here's what you're left with:
In the least few decades, the earth has been in a slight warming cycle.
The earth has warmed a little more than other planets.
The earth's natural systems have done remarkably well at counteracting change. (For example, warmer temps evaporate water, which form clouds. Clouds shield us from the sun, making it cooler. Thus, warmer temps cause cooling back to normal.)
Once again, California is still there. Alarmists and deniers both have been proven wrong. The truth is, it's a tiny bit warmer and it hasn't caused famine like they said it would.
Slashdot Mirror
That $2.87 rate is in today's money, in other words inflation adjusted. The correct rate decrease immediately after seregulatuon was about 50%. Of course competition also brought us VOIP. With Vonage, for example, long distance is 0 cents per minute, a 100% reduction from government regulated rates.
Until 1984, national telecommunications was a regulated utility, with the government controlling prices. A long distance call was $2.87 per minute. In 1984, it was deregulated and natural competition quickly brought the rate to $0.10 per minute - a 97% reduction. Tight government regulation of internet service as a utility is a great idea, if you want to pay $12 / GB. I can understand how this might have been debatable in 1812, but in 2012 we've already tried both ways over and over again. Competition beats government fiat every time. Maybe you haven't noticed the existing competive system has brought us from 14 kbps to 14Mbps, a THOUSAND times as fast as a few years ago?
I wouldn't sweat it. In my experience, there's rarely a problem. Since everything "just works" 99.5% of the time, I don't even spend time checking unless it's a $600 RAID card. (The top shelf stuff has always been compatible, but worth checking before spending $600 on a card.) It's probably more costly to spend time worrying about it than the $0-$25 it would have cost to put in another NIC card. That was the real problem- the OP choose to spend 3 days instead of just grabbing a different NIC from his parts box or, if gigabit was required, running to Walmart and dropping $22.
The prpblem mentioned in the article is that often, a compromised desktop has root access to a server, which has access to another server, and so on. With proper key management, access to (a former employee's?) desktop shouldn't grant access throughout the network. Too often, keys aren't properly managed, so an intruder can go from one machine to another, all over the network.
Same here. Also many of my IM messages end with ":wq"
I wish I had my mid points beach that I used yesterday because this is far more useful than any other comment. Until you understand his reasoning, not just hear it but understand it, the PM is probably doing the right thing. In other words, the OP is most likely wrong. Of two people disagree, there is a 50/50 chance each is wrong. Except here we have a programmer disagreeing with a project manager about project management. Most likely, the PM knows their job better than you do. (Just as the programmer knows their own job.) Until you truly understand what they are doing and why, and can then with full understanding disagree, you're just bring arrogant. Go talk to them. First understand them, then make your concerns clear.
You think they shouldn't arrest someone for having that LOOKS like a scary gun, right? My friend, that's basically the definition of "assault weapon" from the law - a gun that looks scary. An "assault weapon" is functionally equivalent to any other rifle. So if you yhink puerile shouldn't to prison based on something looking scary, you agree with the NRA. You just didn't know enough about guns to realize that.
Like the GP, I work in a Microsoft shop now. This agency even runs Windows for SERVERS. We have dozens of copies of Visual Studio. Yet, every desktop in my department has the $2,600 Adobe collection. The fact that we've never heard of Microsoft's alternative to Adobe is a giant fail by Microsoft. It's a fail by Microsoft marketing that they've never gotten word out about the product's existence. It's also a fail of the software that it's not good enough to get even a passing mention in industry press, web sites, etc. If you haven't heard of a product I personally wrote, like Clonebox, that's because my company is tiny. If Microsoft spends milions making an entire suite of products and doesn't bother to tell their own customers about it, that's a fail.
Medical or other specialized jargon definitely CAN be translated into 6th grade English. Here's the simple proof. Medical textbooks explain the terms. Every doctor/engineer etc. is taught those terms by having them translated into words they already know. For example, somewhere along the way someone tells the future doctor "tibia means shin bone". The fact that non-doctors can be taught the terms in medical school proves that for ALL such terms there must be a translation ala "tibia=shinbone". If there were any term that could not be translated into simpler language, it could not be taught.
I'll go one better and do the whole post. "languages are isomorphic" is itself redundant in that sentence, so the whole phrase could be deleted if you want to delete "fluff and filler". The entire post without (arrogant) fluff and filler is: "Some languages can express ideas that others can't." That MAY be true. However, knowing that while modern computer languages LOOK different, they are in fact generally Turing equalivent, it's reasonable to suspect human languages may be also. Consider x86 assembly and Java. Totally different, right? They actually have EXACTLY the same expressive power, and here's proof. A Java virtual machine can be written in assembler. Therefore, assembler can express whatever Java does. (Consider that the bytecode is basically turned into assembler just before it hits the chip. THAT assembler expresses the exact same thing as the Java it was produced from.) Also, Java can be used to write a (slow) x86 virtual machine (emulator) which translates x86 instructions into Java bytecode run by the emulator. Thus, Java can express what assembler can and vice versa. If Java and assembler are in fact mechanically translateable (which they are), there's no reason to believe dialects of human languages can't be also.
If you think medical jargon can't be translated into understandable language, I feel for you. Hopefully you'll get a doctor who does so. I normally do. Example - "manifesting acute folliculitis" means "has a pimple on their head". Some precision may be lost, certainly, but puerile who don't know medical jargon and want it in plain English probably don't need quite the level of precision the medical terminology allows. I'm a programmer, I can flumox someone with a bunch of jargon, or I can use technical vocabulary to communicate consisely and exactly with colleagues. However, I can also explain the same things to my non-techie bosses using simple, clear English.
"easily defeated as well" is the key phrase in that whole post. Doing some arbitrary computation on the key gains you nothing. Anyone who is going to find a key in a memory dump isn't going to be the list bit deterred by some trivial encoding of the key.
"Would an RFID-based system, in which you identify yourself to the gun using public key cryptography, be such a terrible thing? Assuming the mechanism can be made reliable (and with enough work, why can't it be made reliable enough?)" If you can make it reliable enough, and prove that reliability, you can make millions. Remember that when it fails, people DIE. One failure EVER is too many.
The article and especially the summary is completely wrong about their central claim "gunmakers have no incentive...". Of course that's typical - anti-gunners would never shoot, never handle a firearm, so they normally have no idea what they are talking about. The supreme requirement in a firearm is RELIABILITY. If you are in a situation where you actually have to fire your sidearm, you die if it doesn't work right that time. A defensive weapon has to work every single time. That's why the 1911 design is still the second most popular model over a hundred years later - because it's been proven reliable. That's why you keep firearms simple - complex things break. That's also why you definitely don't add a bunch of complexity designed to make the gun NOT WORK if something isn't perfect - it has to fire, or an innocent person dies. It's only people who don't know about firearms, or about dealing with bad guys in general, who think something like "fingerprinting" one persons particular grip sounds like a good idea. It does sound good, until you think about the fact that the user is UNDER ATTACK. They may very well have to fire with their other hand, after the BG smashes their right arms with a baseball bat, car, stabs them with a knife ....
These "smart guns" look cool in movies, but anyone with any tactical experience or training knows they are only movie props. In real life, these ideas would get good guys killed every day. If you've never even been trained in USING a firearm, please don't pontificate about how they be be designed.
From TFA, the changing cross srction reduces resistance as it stretches. At the same time, stretching increases resistance due to reduced diameter. The two effects tend to cancel one either, so they could be designed for no change when stretched, if it mattered to the application. In 99% of cases, it doesn't matter. You simply want "low resistance" and don't care if it's 0.012 ohm or 0.015 ohm.
The law often causes information security problems in my state. The laws and regulations reflect what some politician thought sounded good twenty years ago, when the law was written. For example, mandating MD5, which is broken, whenever a hash is used. Since hashes can only be MD5, SHA256 is illegal. Sometimes we have to use no hash at all when MD5 won't work. We would make things much more secure if the law didn't get in the way.
I work for a state agency doing IT. Our state is just as bad because a) IT people aren't trained properly in security and b) "security" regulations prohibit actual security. It often happens that a secure design can't be used because it wouldn't be in compliance with laws and regulations, so an insecure system must be used. For example, last week we needed a secure hash token to secure a transaction. SHA-128 or 256 was the right way to do it, but the law says all hashes must be MD5 (which has been broken for several years). MD5 wouldn't work, so we went with NO security token in order to comply with "security" regulations. Accrediting security engineers the same way we do mechanical engineers and requiring that systems get signed off by a licensed security person would work FAR better. There is no way I'd sign off on most of our stuff without some significant, but simple and obvious fixes. Another example - regulations say employee passwords must be changed every 90 days, and must include a number, so everyone has a simple incrementing password, typically myname1, myname2, myname3, etc. Those same policies limit passwords to only EIGHT characters. If I had to sign off the security, as opposed to following bureaucratic regulations, the first change would be that pass phrases should be 14 characters minimum.
> He single handedly does the work of 50 or more laborers who now do? You get the cheap cotton goods with money you make from your web site or whatever. You're missing that fact that this has been going on for hundreds of years - you ARE the guy who is not picking. If you make more than $2 / day because you're not picking cotton, putting lids on jars, or weaving cloth, the automation of those repetitive jobs has been good to you. Imagone the power went out at your workplace. How much could you produce with no automation? Remember no automatic word processor - if you mess up you have to rewrite it. Your productovity minus overhead and marketing is your maximum salary. I thank God I'm not picking cotton or weaving cloth because machines have replaced me in those roles.
It's not a fantasy or even a theory, it's historical fact for the last four hundred years. A guy who can run a combine harvesting tons of cotton per day makes more, and works fewer hours, than someone picking by hand. An accountant running a computer is more productive and higher paid than one with a quill pen. Assume a company was NOT willing to pay you more for programming robots than it did for assembling toasters. (Or equalivently, give you more time off.) You'd simply get a job at another company which will pay programmers operators of robots more than the assembly low workers the robots replace. The fact is, 98% of Slashdot readers earn more and get more time off than our grandparents precisely because we use the technology that replaced pur grandparents' jobs.
"The current crop of GOP senators", are trying to get rid of the very loopholes Google uses. Remember flat tax, fair tax, 9-9-9? The GOP position is that the tax code should be simple, so people can't finagle as much. It's Obama who insists on keeping the special exemptions and loopholes so he can pick the winners and losers, while raising rates on the people who actually report the money they earn. Pick up any newspaper, their positions are clear - GOP says "close loopholes and special interest deductions", Obama "no, taise tax rates".
By that reasoning, a 70 MPH speed limit would be the wedge which inevitably lead to making driving illegal. That hasn't happened. It's not a wedge, it is what it is - it will show what it thinks you're looking for. If it thinks you're not looking for porn, it won't show porn. If it thinks you want porn, it'll give you porn.
In a banjs new industry, it's all about marketing, getting market share. Profits come later, after the market stabilizes and you are the market leader. So plan to spend a lot more on marketing than machines at first. Also, three months later, better machines will come out. Buy smart and plan to replace often. Better processes will also be developed, so budget big for research and development so that your process is better than the other guy's.
You've got that exactly backwards. Tea Party people hate government interference and enjoy usenet shootong on weekends. His comments are those of a liberal weenie.
Creative Commons has a non-commercial license. While it sounds good at first, non-commercial licenses tend to be troublesome in the real world. There are a lot of scenarios, details, where it just doesn't work out too well. However ...
You asked if the general consensus is that free software shouldn't be sold for profit. Some think so, many don't. In practice, the fact that any buyer can give it away for free, or sell it cheaper, means that free software is rarely if ever sold with a profit on the software itself. The profit is normally on support and such. Why would you buy Red Hat when you can get the exact same software from CentOS free, for example. You would only pay Red Hat if you want their support services, update servers, and other value add services. Red Hat can't profit on the actual software itself because the software is available free from CentOS .
Is it okay to profit from OSS related services?
Most of Red Hat's revenue goes into supporting free software, such as paying their staff of developers who constantly contribute to OSS. For that reason, most businesses "around" free software have been of enormous benefit to the community.
Even there, Red Hat is the exception - most people CAN'T get customers to pay for free software, so the question of whether or not you SHOULD sell it is moot. It doesn't matter if you should charge money or not, when no-one is willing to pay anyway.
Therefore, in practical application, GPL is normally non-commercial anyway, but without the problems of the explicitly non-commercial licenses.
> convince so many people that scientists are lying them. The very same scientists who were on TV in 1988 warning of dire consequences from global warming have ADMITTED that they were lying. We greatly exaggerated in order to motivate people politically, some of the best known GW alarmists have said. Perhaps you've forgotten what these "scientists" were saying in 80s "by the year 2000 ... "(California will be underwater, famine will sweep the US, etc.) It's 2012 and California is still there, so quite obviously they are liars, or fools. The only reason anyone would trust them now would be extreme cognitive bias. Remember these clamotogists were screaming about a man-made ice age in 1970s. Wrong again.
Add in the facts they like to ignore, like the fact that other planets are warming too. Mars didn't have cars, so it probably has a lot more to do with sun cycles than sedans. Once you tune out the crazies and those who are clearly more interested in politics than science, here's what you're left with:
In the least few decades, the earth has been in a slight warming cycle.
The earth has warmed a little more than other planets.
The earth's natural systems have done remarkably well at counteracting change. (For example, warmer temps evaporate water, which form clouds. Clouds shield us from the sun, making it cooler. Thus, warmer temps cause cooling back to normal.)
Once again, California is still there. Alarmists and deniers both have been proven wrong. The truth is, it's a tiny bit warmer and it hasn't caused famine like they said it would.