There is a difference between "doing Vista" and "doing Vista better than it does XP". After all, I can get XP Pro to install on a 128MB Celeron machine, but it will not perform as well there as Windows 98 would, for things that will run under Win98. A machine that meets Vista's "minimum performance level" specs is a pretty damn kick-ass machine under Windows XP or Linux.
How is this an improvement warranting a "must upgrade!" moniker?
If you want it, you must upgrade... everything. Unless, of course, you're currently running the latest blood-still-flowing-from-the-wounds-edge game machine, in which case you'll just need more memory and a better video card.
Why must I upgrade, though? What will I gain that I want in the first place? Better game performance? Not needed, since I don't do games. The ability to run the latest Microsoft Office at speeds approaching what you could do 5 years ago? Sorry, I already jumped ship to other options. Stronger DRM so that I'll be able to play Sony's next CD/DVD/WhateverD? I'll pass...
What I'd like is some tuning on the current operating system, so that it doesn't need more CPU cycles to do simple tasks, like display directories. And how about fewer holes for virii and worms, without introducing a whole new layer of software to protect the last new layer of software, which was to protect me from bugs in the previous new layer...
99% of the TVs in America has access to an NBC affiliate, and this web stream is designed not to be viewable outside the USA, so it's kinda questionable just who this stream is aimed at. West coasters who can't wait out a three hour tape delay and want to see the game at 5am PT? People who have an office job who are working at 8am ET on a Sunday morning?
NBC is hoping to double their ratings by reaching the other eight people interested in watching...
And it is a filtering nightmare. Most mail to our domains from BigFootInteractive bounce, because we can't keep them from sending to addresses that haven't existed in a decade. We selectively unblock ones we know are legitimate, but they keep changing the from address. They don't seem to take a 550 very seriously.
What is the use of using a service to send email when that service has a bad reputation and is on a lot of spam lists?
Do you believe there is anything that a company that is the target of a phishing attack can do?
The first thing they could do is to publish SPF records for their domains. And not the ones that end in "~all" ("and accept any other IP, in case we forgot one") like AOL, HOTMAIL, and many other sources whose domains are faked constantly use. The ability to tell your users "Hey, this didn't come from who it is claiming to have come from" is a start. But PayPal, eBay, and most banks I've seen scammed have no inkling of how a simple change to their DNS would protect them and their customers.
The second thing would be to tell their web servers to not serve images up that have the wrong referrer. Hey, referrer checking isn't 100%, but any time you have an image request from a victim of one of these scam mails, it would be a lot better if that picture had "THIS IS A FRAUD MESSAGE" overlayed on it. It would force the scammers to go back to hosting the pictures on the scam site, which is a harder to do than simply uploading a single script to a slightly-insecure website in Brazil or Ohio. And the emails are as legitimate looking as they are because they use the scammed bank's own graphics, from their own servers!
Well, actually, that's not true. How can you respond to mail you don't receive?
A week ago, I got a phishing scam that used the address http://paypal-com-us-ssl.info/ for its responses. At the time (it's dead now), that address resolved to a YAHOO server. So, I reported it, including the whole phishing message, with headers, to abuse@yahoo.com.
Their response? Don't know - their abuse@yahoo.com address has a spam filter on it, which rejected the message because it contained a phishing scheme:
abuse@yahoo.com: host mx1.mail.yahoo.com[4.79.181.14] said: 554 Message type
not allowed. UP Email not accepted for policy reasons. Please visit
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/mail/defer/defer-04. html [#4.16.3:120] (in
reply to end of DATA command)
The chances of losing two disks at once are slim. RAID 0+1 will provide great performance and good fault tolerance if you react to problems as they happen.
Say that after the airconditioning fails in the server room on a weekend, and you discover that the alarm company set the thermal alarm to 120F, instead of 80F.
Two drives in one server, another in a second, with two more drives failing over the next 5 weeks due to overtemp. Fortunately, they were running as RAID5 arrays with a hot spare, so the worst that should have happened was one array ran degraded. Unfortunately, the second drive failed before the spare could be fully-syncronized, leaving a non-recoverable array.
But, that's why there were 4 mirrored servers, including one off-site!
Also let's assume a crashed plane throws parts as far as 500 feet.
Bad assumption. I've been involved in two private aircraft crash investigations, including securing the scenes for one of them. Debris from the first was isolated to the hole it dug. The other was spread over a mile, with the key components in explaining the crash being found half a mile from the spot where the majority of the aircraft impacted.
A previous incident at the same airport (AF tanker exploded overhead) rained debris over many square miles. Catastrophic failures, which can happen when pushing aircraft to their limits, do not make for compact crash sites or easy recovery of all debris.
Yes, the theoretical maximum is comfortably large... But, that limit is not what is compiled in by RH, Mandrake, and a few others I've tried. I haven't tried RedHat's "Enterprise" kernel, but most are compiled with a 4GB limit on file size.
I have personally had to deal with the results of forgetting to change from EXT3 to something else when setting up one of our servers. Took a year, but one of the database files reached that magical compiled-in limit of 4GB... Fortunately, I caught it shortly after it happened, and was able to rearrange things to keep the server from too far out of sync with the rest of the cluster.
EXT3 has a lot going for it, but the default compile options (at least the ones used by several of the popular packagers) make it incompatible with large files. "Large files" is, of course, a relative term, but more than a few people deal with 4+GB files nowadays, like DVD ISOs, so it's not just billion-record databases that blow up EXT2/3.
I long ago learned that "unsubscribe" means "put on the lists we sell to others", because they now have "proof" that it's a legitimate address. I've even set up special addresses to test the unsubscribe links... and some (not all) started receiving spam from "other sources" within a month of "unsubscribing".
By far, the most successful unsubscribe link I've found is the one that tells my servers to bounce anything that comes from the same/24 subnet. If one of my clients complains about missing messages because of this, I'll try to accommodate their needs... but a lot of outfits, such as ROVING.COM, can't seem to understand that sending messages to spam traps is not conducive to making me remove their company from our local block list....
So long as the CANSPAM act allows spammers to send messages to addresses that could not have "opted in" to anything, or could not have established a "business relationship", it's meaningless.
Why do that, when they won't even use their server software to rewrite requests for ebay.com graphics from unexpected referrers to ones that have "THIS IS A SCAM" overlaying them? When a phisher can build a near-perfect replica of a message from EBAY, PAYPAL, CHASE BANK, or wherever, just by linking to the official website graphics, cryptographic signing of messages is virtual fluff.
Other requests can be forwarded blind by my register to me
Ah, but there's the rub. Some registrars offer exactly what you want... except that they charge for it. They put forth the effort to make sure you get information regarding your domain, so they want compensated for it. Internet rules require that there be some way to contact a responsible party. They don't say who you have to be to be allowed to know who that party is...
My only experience with a "proxied" registration involved a compromised machine doing a flood attack against my email servers. Of course, calling the proxy service got me no where... Finally, I called their ISP. The only thing they could do was pull the plug on the offender, which they did. The attack stopped.
The ISP got an angry call from the customer. I got the next angry call from them. I explained that I was unable to contact them to stop the attack, because of their proxy registration. The only recourse was to deal with the next level responsible party. If that meant their website went down until they fixed the compromised workstation, that wasn't my fault; I was protecting my servers. And, by the way, who should I contact about compensation for the loss of business caused by their attack?
Last time I checked, they no longer hid their technical contact information behind a proxy.
Which brings up the question, why would anyone hide their technical contact information? Personal, I have no problem with... I rarely have to deal with the domain owner. But fake tech info?
(and I rarely, if ever, receive spam to my registrar email address through GoDaddy. the one that we used with Nitwit Solutions way back when still gets spammed regularly. and employees at our old ISP from the NS days are still getting postal mail addressed to our domain... Guess you just have to have the right registrar!)
I don't object to the people who legitimately need this information being able to access it -- I don't think it should be held 'in the clear' for just anyone to see.
Please define, in advance and universally, who the "people who legitimately need this information" are. If I get a phishing expedition message that uses a compromised website as a hiding place, how does a registrar differentiate between my wanting to contact that person to inform them of the compromise, and Bob The Spammer's desire to send that person spam? And, as a domain owner, which would weigh heaviest in your mind - preventing spam from Bob, or not finding out for days or weeks that your server has been used for criminal activities, and a prosecuter in Chicago now wants to speak with your attorney about negotiatiating your plea?
This is why the default is to publish the information. Using proxy registrations must have provisions for passing such notifications through to the responsible parties, or it violates the spirit and letter of the regulations that require responsible party contact information in the first place. I don't know many people who are going to provide such as service for free.
Perhaps a compromise would be that you could chose one public contact method... Some way that you can be reached for domain- or server-related notifications. And, of course, there is no requirement that what you publish be your "personal contact info", because it is simple to set up an email address for a specific purpose.
But, who could afford it, given today's laws and taxes? Under current law, it costs an employer a minimum of about $500/week (depending upon the state) to employ a person for 40 hours at minimum wage. That's not what the employee gets - that's what it costs the employer to have them around. Anyone that doesn't produce at least $500/week in value to the business isn't going to be around for very long, no matter how "compassionate" it is to keep them.
One of the local businesses used to hire students on summer vacation for clean-up of the property and shop. Few skills required, good hours, etc. But, once the minimum wage got over $3/hour, it was less expensive for the owners to do that work themselves. No more low-skill jobs there, and no chance to get your foot in the door for the high-skill, high-paying jobs in the rest of the plant.
There are jobs out there that do not require a lot of skill. Several million of them, according to statistics on illegal immigration. The trick is convincing students that they're not worth $30K per year when they first leave high school, because they haven't proven themselves in the work place. And that low-skill jobs aren't a career, but are a stepping stone toward better jobs. You're not going to stay a hamburger flipper, unless you have no ambition to move on... or your ambition is to own a hamburger joint!
It's easy enough for such a customer to run a whois on their domain name.
Domains are not exclusively sold to people who have a knowledge of how internet works. In fact, many large registrars are making well-publicised pushes to get people "with no IT guys" and "better with a hammer than a keyboard" to register a domain and have a "professional website in 20 minutes". Most of these people have no concept of WHOIS, or how to find a WHOIS server that will display arbitrary registrar information (some will only show domains managed by the particular registrar). Such people do not automatically deserve to be defrauded because of how the whole mess that is our domain registration "system" works.
After all, computers are supposed to help us solve problems, rather than being the source of them!
If they forgot who their registrar is, then they're just being irresponsible.
I don't know... I have several customers who have had their registrar change names several times! If you were, for example, a "Network Solutions" customer over the last decade, and you weren't paying close attention to Verisign's purchases, renaming, rebranding, etc., could anyone blaim you if you weren't 100% sure that the letter you received about the time you domain was up for renewal was from your registrar, or a different one with a "similar" name?
Personally, I'd rule out Exchange because it would encourage the use of Outlook. Outlook can be wonderful for calendars and such, but people have a tendency to also use that pesky "mail" module.
Not comprehensive. I can come up with about 50 of them from recent spams, things like "ukpromotionals.net", "contractawardingcommittee.net", "national-lottryresults.net", etc.
... because most of the ones we've received in the past few months are sent by MSN/HOTMAIL users. While many actually used MSN.COM or HOTMAIL.COM accounts, Microsoft has a few hundred "vanity domains", for which there is no accountability whatsoever - attempts to report the spam get bounced, because there is no "abuse@" for these domains, and abuse@hotmail.com will only accept reports of hotmail.com accounts, just as abuse@msn.com will only accept them for msn.com accounts.
It's a nifty little scheme - use one of the vanity domains, and you can send spam for months. The mail is delivered through HOTMAIL.COM servers, so blocking by IP doesn't work. Unless, of course, you are willing to take the colateral damage of blocking all HOTMAIL and MSN customers.
Which, it turns out, might not be much real damage at all...
By all means educate yourself on the subject, lots of data.
Yes, by all means. The data shows that we're coming off the bottom of the pendulum of earth temps, barely out of our last ice age. We have a long ways to go to reach the mean temp shown by the climatic record, and a long way to go from there to the previous upper end of the pendulum.
Now, humans weren't around for those previous swings, so those are all attributed to things like the orbital eccentricity of earth, sunspot cycles, wobble of the planet's axis, variations in the solar constant and earth's magnetic field. But this one is definitely our fault!
Actually, it's George W. Bush's fault, personally. Him and Cheney, and his oil company cronies. They even sent agents back using the mothership's time machine to make it look like it has been happening for centuries, just to throw off the people.
Depends upon the state, really. In Illinois, our illustrious governor is trying to use mail-order drug fullfillment from Canada to reduce the state expenditure on Medicaid. Just one little problem... Illinois law requires that any prescription drug be handed to the patient by a registered pharmacist which kind of excludes the average postal or parcel delivery person...
So, yes, the pharmacies shipping stuff to Illinois are legally allowed to do that, but anyone who delivers the package without the right paperwork hanging on their wall is violating drug laws...
Funny you should accuse me of putting words in your mouth, after this opening salvo:
So your position is to continue to rape the planet, full speed ahead? Sounds sensible. Let's do it.
The beat of a humming bird's wings in central China affects the global climate to some extent, as does its breathing, its effects upon the flowers it feeds upon, and its droppings. Wild fires in Australia and Africa raise CO2 and particulate levels, affecting the climate. Forests in the US absorb more CO2 than the U.S. produces, according to satellite data, but that's conveniently left out of the discussion. Also left out is the fact that forested land in the United States exceeds what the continent had at the time of the country's founding, because we've been fighting the natural fires that deforested entire mountains in the past. Of course, this has had an effect on the climate, too... as well as the ecosystems that depend upon periodic fires to reinvigorate them.
I, for one, would gladly pay $200 per month for electricity instead of $80 if I knew we would greatly increase our chance of creating a more sustainable lifestyle.
And we probably will, too, but it will not go towards "sustainable lifestyles", it will go towards meeting some collection of government regulations designed to appease people like you, rather than really address the issues at hand.
Are you aware of just how much land would be plastered with solar panels or mirrors to provide a mere 10% of today's electical usage? We're talking hundreds of thousands of acres. And have you looked into the climate change caused by massive wind power farms? Some areas have seen localized mean temperature increases of 1 to 2C over 5 years, traceable to reduced wind velocities, brought about by harvesting the wind's energy.
There are big problems with just about every "renewable" source of energy we've found so far. Hydrogen is a net loss energy transport. Centralized generation of electricity loses 40-50% of its input in heat losses during delivery, no matter what the base source. The most effective way to store solar energy is through crops... but they're not in a ready-to-use form. And many complain about the green house gasses generated by burning plants, while neglecting the fact that the plants collected those gasses before-hand.
I know... Let's build a huge, stainless steel methane collector over Siberia, to prevent the methane from escaping. The stainless steel will reflect the sun's heat back into space, lowering the mean temperature, eventually allowing the bogs to re-freeze. In the mean time, we use that methane as a source of hydrogen, to run our fuel-cell cars on, until it runs out, and we have to start melting the peat again....
1. The climate is warming MUCH FASTER than we have any record of it doing in the past.
May I have a link to your reference to this? The NASA.GOV link I posted earlier graphs the rate of change observed in the fossil records and other sources for nearly as long as life has existed as multiple cells on this planet, and the current upswing is more gradual than others in the past. We're noticing it because we're directly observing it this time around, but climate shifts in the past have been both (geologically) gradual and sudden.
2. Regardless of why the climate is changing, the change will inconvenience us considerably, and expensively over the next 50 years or so.
Quite likely. And, it will quite likely be doubly expensive if we discount the fact that we can only attempt to moderate what may be a "done deal". There are any number of potential "cascade events" in nature that would flood the atmosphere with levels of green house gasses that make our contribution seem small. The collapse of a small number Methane hydrate deposits on the ocean floor is suspected in numerous to 5-7C short-term jumps in global temperatures. A GOOGLE search for "Methane hydrate" comes up with many wonderfully gloomy articles on this.
Slashdot Mirror
How is this an improvement warranting a "must upgrade!" moniker?
Why must I upgrade, though? What will I gain that I want in the first place? Better game performance? Not needed, since I don't do games. The ability to run the latest Microsoft Office at speeds approaching what you could do 5 years ago? Sorry, I already jumped ship to other options. Stronger DRM so that I'll be able to play Sony's next CD/DVD/WhateverD? I'll pass...
What I'd like is some tuning on the current operating system, so that it doesn't need more CPU cycles to do simple tasks, like display directories. And how about fewer holes for virii and worms, without introducing a whole new layer of software to protect the last new layer of software, which was to protect me from bugs in the previous new layer...
Oh, wait... that's Linux.
NBC is hoping to double their ratings by reaching the other eight people interested in watching...
What is the use of using a service to send email when that service has a bad reputation and is on a lot of spam lists?
The first thing they could do is to publish SPF records for their domains. And not the ones that end in "~all" ("and accept any other IP, in case we forgot one") like AOL, HOTMAIL, and many other sources whose domains are faked constantly use. The ability to tell your users "Hey, this didn't come from who it is claiming to have come from" is a start. But PayPal, eBay, and most banks I've seen scammed have no inkling of how a simple change to their DNS would protect them and their customers.
The second thing would be to tell their web servers to not serve images up that have the wrong referrer. Hey, referrer checking isn't 100%, but any time you have an image request from a victim of one of these scam mails, it would be a lot better if that picture had "THIS IS A FRAUD MESSAGE" overlayed on it. It would force the scammers to go back to hosting the pictures on the scam site, which is a harder to do than simply uploading a single script to a slightly-insecure website in Brazil or Ohio. And the emails are as legitimate looking as they are because they use the scammed bank's own graphics, from their own servers!
A week ago, I got a phishing scam that used the address http://paypal-com-us-ssl.info/ for its responses. At the time (it's dead now), that address resolved to a YAHOO server. So, I reported it, including the whole phishing message, with headers, to abuse@yahoo.com.
Their response? Don't know - their abuse@yahoo.com address has a spam filter on it, which rejected the message because it contained a phishing scheme:
Say that after the airconditioning fails in the server room on a weekend, and you discover that the alarm company set the thermal alarm to 120F, instead of 80F.
Two drives in one server, another in a second, with two more drives failing over the next 5 weeks due to overtemp. Fortunately, they were running as RAID5 arrays with a hot spare, so the worst that should have happened was one array ran degraded. Unfortunately, the second drive failed before the spare could be fully-syncronized, leaving a non-recoverable array.
But, that's why there were 4 mirrored servers, including one off-site!
Bad assumption. I've been involved in two private aircraft crash investigations, including securing the scenes for one of them. Debris from the first was isolated to the hole it dug. The other was spread over a mile, with the key components in explaining the crash being found half a mile from the spot where the majority of the aircraft impacted.
A previous incident at the same airport (AF tanker exploded overhead) rained debris over many square miles. Catastrophic failures, which can happen when pushing aircraft to their limits, do not make for compact crash sites or easy recovery of all debris.
Yes, the theoretical maximum is comfortably large... But, that limit is not what is compiled in by RH, Mandrake, and a few others I've tried. I haven't tried RedHat's "Enterprise" kernel, but most are compiled with a 4GB limit on file size.
EXT3 has a lot going for it, but the default compile options (at least the ones used by several of the popular packagers) make it incompatible with large files. "Large files" is, of course, a relative term, but more than a few people deal with 4+GB files nowadays, like DVD ISOs, so it's not just billion-record databases that blow up EXT2/3.
If I wanted small files, I'd have used FAT32! :)
By far, the most successful unsubscribe link I've found is the one that tells my servers to bounce anything that comes from the same /24 subnet. If one of my clients complains about missing messages because of this, I'll try to accommodate their needs... but a lot of outfits, such as ROVING.COM, can't seem to understand that sending messages to spam traps is not conducive to making me remove their company from our local block list....
So long as the CANSPAM act allows spammers to send messages to addresses that could not have "opted in" to anything, or could not have established a "business relationship", it's meaningless.
Yes, but, without CANSPAM, your spam cound would double every 5 months and 25 days! That's a 1% cut in Washington-speak!
Why do that, when they won't even use their server software to rewrite requests for ebay.com graphics from unexpected referrers to ones that have "THIS IS A SCAM" overlaying them? When a phisher can build a near-perfect replica of a message from EBAY, PAYPAL, CHASE BANK, or wherever, just by linking to the official website graphics, cryptographic signing of messages is virtual fluff.
Ah, but there's the rub. Some registrars offer exactly what you want... except that they charge for it. They put forth the effort to make sure you get information regarding your domain, so they want compensated for it. Internet rules require that there be some way to contact a responsible party. They don't say who you have to be to be allowed to know who that party is...
My only experience with a "proxied" registration involved a compromised machine doing a flood attack against my email servers. Of course, calling the proxy service got me no where... Finally, I called their ISP. The only thing they could do was pull the plug on the offender, which they did. The attack stopped.
The ISP got an angry call from the customer. I got the next angry call from them. I explained that I was unable to contact them to stop the attack, because of their proxy registration. The only recourse was to deal with the next level responsible party. If that meant their website went down until they fixed the compromised workstation, that wasn't my fault; I was protecting my servers. And, by the way, who should I contact about compensation for the loss of business caused by their attack?
Last time I checked, they no longer hid their technical contact information behind a proxy.
Which brings up the question, why would anyone hide their technical contact information? Personal, I have no problem with... I rarely have to deal with the domain owner. But fake tech info?
(and I rarely, if ever, receive spam to my registrar email address through GoDaddy. the one that we used with Nitwit Solutions way back when still gets spammed regularly. and employees at our old ISP from the NS days are still getting postal mail addressed to our domain... Guess you just have to have the right registrar!)
Please define, in advance and universally, who the "people who legitimately need this information" are. If I get a phishing expedition message that uses a compromised website as a hiding place, how does a registrar differentiate between my wanting to contact that person to inform them of the compromise, and Bob The Spammer's desire to send that person spam? And, as a domain owner, which would weigh heaviest in your mind - preventing spam from Bob, or not finding out for days or weeks that your server has been used for criminal activities, and a prosecuter in Chicago now wants to speak with your attorney about negotiatiating your plea?
This is why the default is to publish the information. Using proxy registrations must have provisions for passing such notifications through to the responsible parties, or it violates the spirit and letter of the regulations that require responsible party contact information in the first place. I don't know many people who are going to provide such as service for free.
Perhaps a compromise would be that you could chose one public contact method... Some way that you can be reached for domain- or server-related notifications. And, of course, there is no requirement that what you publish be your "personal contact info", because it is simple to set up an email address for a specific purpose.
One of the local businesses used to hire students on summer vacation for clean-up of the property and shop. Few skills required, good hours, etc. But, once the minimum wage got over $3/hour, it was less expensive for the owners to do that work themselves. No more low-skill jobs there, and no chance to get your foot in the door for the high-skill, high-paying jobs in the rest of the plant.
There are jobs out there that do not require a lot of skill. Several million of them, according to statistics on illegal immigration. The trick is convincing students that they're not worth $30K per year when they first leave high school, because they haven't proven themselves in the work place. And that low-skill jobs aren't a career, but are a stepping stone toward better jobs. You're not going to stay a hamburger flipper, unless you have no ambition to move on... or your ambition is to own a hamburger joint!
Domains are not exclusively sold to people who have a knowledge of how internet works. In fact, many large registrars are making well-publicised pushes to get people "with no IT guys" and "better with a hammer than a keyboard" to register a domain and have a "professional website in 20 minutes". Most of these people have no concept of WHOIS, or how to find a WHOIS server that will display arbitrary registrar information (some will only show domains managed by the particular registrar). Such people do not automatically deserve to be defrauded because of how the whole mess that is our domain registration "system" works.
After all, computers are supposed to help us solve problems, rather than being the source of them!
I don't know... I have several customers who have had their registrar change names several times! If you were, for example, a "Network Solutions" customer over the last decade, and you weren't paying close attention to Verisign's purchases, renaming, rebranding, etc., could anyone blaim you if you weren't 100% sure that the letter you received about the time you domain was up for renewal was from your registrar, or a different one with a "similar" name?
Personally, I'd rule out Exchange because it would encourage the use of Outlook. Outlook can be wonderful for calendars and such, but people have a tendency to also use that pesky "mail" module.
Not comprehensive. I can come up with about 50 of them from recent spams, things like "ukpromotionals.net", "contractawardingcommittee.net", "national-lottryresults.net", etc.
It's a nifty little scheme - use one of the vanity domains, and you can send spam for months. The mail is delivered through HOTMAIL.COM servers, so blocking by IP doesn't work. Unless, of course, you are willing to take the colateral damage of blocking all HOTMAIL and MSN customers.
Which, it turns out, might not be much real damage at all...
Yes, by all means. The data shows that we're coming off the bottom of the pendulum of earth temps, barely out of our last ice age. We have a long ways to go to reach the mean temp shown by the climatic record, and a long way to go from there to the previous upper end of the pendulum.
Now, humans weren't around for those previous swings, so those are all attributed to things like the orbital eccentricity of earth, sunspot cycles, wobble of the planet's axis, variations in the solar constant and earth's magnetic field. But this one is definitely our fault!
Actually, it's George W. Bush's fault, personally. Him and Cheney, and his oil company cronies. They even sent agents back using the mothership's time machine to make it look like it has been happening for centuries, just to throw off the people.
Depends upon the state, really. In Illinois, our illustrious governor is trying to use mail-order drug fullfillment from Canada to reduce the state expenditure on Medicaid. Just one little problem... Illinois law requires that any prescription drug be handed to the patient by a registered pharmacist which kind of excludes the average postal or parcel delivery person...
So, yes, the pharmacies shipping stuff to Illinois are legally allowed to do that, but anyone who delivers the package without the right paperwork hanging on their wall is violating drug laws...
So your position is to continue to rape the planet, full speed ahead? Sounds sensible. Let's do it.
The beat of a humming bird's wings in central China affects the global climate to some extent, as does its breathing, its effects upon the flowers it feeds upon, and its droppings. Wild fires in Australia and Africa raise CO2 and particulate levels, affecting the climate. Forests in the US absorb more CO2 than the U.S. produces, according to satellite data, but that's conveniently left out of the discussion. Also left out is the fact that forested land in the United States exceeds what the continent had at the time of the country's founding, because we've been fighting the natural fires that deforested entire mountains in the past. Of course, this has had an effect on the climate, too... as well as the ecosystems that depend upon periodic fires to reinvigorate them.
I, for one, would gladly pay $200 per month for electricity instead of $80 if I knew we would greatly increase our chance of creating a more sustainable lifestyle.
And we probably will, too, but it will not go towards "sustainable lifestyles", it will go towards meeting some collection of government regulations designed to appease people like you, rather than really address the issues at hand.
Are you aware of just how much land would be plastered with solar panels or mirrors to provide a mere 10% of today's electical usage? We're talking hundreds of thousands of acres. And have you looked into the climate change caused by massive wind power farms? Some areas have seen localized mean temperature increases of 1 to 2C over 5 years, traceable to reduced wind velocities, brought about by harvesting the wind's energy.
There are big problems with just about every "renewable" source of energy we've found so far. Hydrogen is a net loss energy transport. Centralized generation of electricity loses 40-50% of its input in heat losses during delivery, no matter what the base source. The most effective way to store solar energy is through crops... but they're not in a ready-to-use form. And many complain about the green house gasses generated by burning plants, while neglecting the fact that the plants collected those gasses before-hand.
I know... Let's build a huge, stainless steel methane collector over Siberia, to prevent the methane from escaping. The stainless steel will reflect the sun's heat back into space, lowering the mean temperature, eventually allowing the bogs to re-freeze. In the mean time, we use that methane as a source of hydrogen, to run our fuel-cell cars on, until it runs out, and we have to start melting the peat again....
May I have a link to your reference to this? The NASA.GOV link I posted earlier graphs the rate of change observed in the fossil records and other sources for nearly as long as life has existed as multiple cells on this planet, and the current upswing is more gradual than others in the past. We're noticing it because we're directly observing it this time around, but climate shifts in the past have been both (geologically) gradual and sudden.
2. Regardless of why the climate is changing, the change will inconvenience us considerably, and expensively over the next 50 years or so.
Quite likely. And, it will quite likely be doubly expensive if we discount the fact that we can only attempt to moderate what may be a "done deal". There are any number of potential "cascade events" in nature that would flood the atmosphere with levels of green house gasses that make our contribution seem small. The collapse of a small number Methane hydrate deposits on the ocean floor is suspected in numerous to 5-7C short-term jumps in global temperatures. A GOOGLE search for "Methane hydrate" comes up with many wonderfully gloomy articles on this.