These newly available airwaves are a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to revolutionize Internet access -- beaming high-speed signals to every park bench, coffee shop, workplace, and home in America at more affordable prices than current Internet service."

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Within the lifetime of most of our users, half the species on this planet could be extinct, amongst countless other unthinkable consequences, if things do not change within the next 10 years.

Recently, the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change released information from their 4th report (founded in 1988, their last report was in 2001). IPCC is a collaboration of 1,200 authors and 2,500 scientific expert reviewers from more than 130 countries (including any interested businesses and governments). In this report, the certainty level has increased to 90% that human activities have caused “most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century,” and that this warming is now “unequivocal”. The report also confirms that the current atmospheric concentration of CO2 and methane “exceeds by far the natural range over the last 650,000 years.”

Because of the dramatically increased certainty of this report, amongst other things, the U.S. political world seems to finally be making a shift from arguing if climate change is real to arguing what can be done. I listen to a lot of environmental podcasts that contain lots of reports on the many ways climate change is hurting humans and the natural world, and a lot of times the problem seems so enormous I lose hope and feel depressed.

But today I was listening to a speaker who gave a great history of the problem and a realistic outline of what can be done about it. The gist of it is that to avoid catastrophy, we need to reduce CO2 emissions by 2% each year till 2050. Difficult, but far from impossible. So, this is my action for today. Listen, do what you can, and have hope.

12-16-06 update: I changed the default font everywhere to Verdana and cleaned up the look of some additional pages, including the main menu. A lot of the admin pages have been cleaned up and some functionality added. The link checker was fixed so most links don't say "site appears to be down" anymore. A lot of links still need to be rated, if you're so inclined. Emailed replies to posts now use CSS to color the body text white, which I assume will work in more email clients (like mine).

Historically large amounts of money from everyday people has been going to help progressive candidates, providing funding for the first time that nearly equals what big business spends to push their own agenda via our elected officials. Thanks in part to $27 million dollars donated by individuals and over 7 million calls made by MoveOn.org volunteers, on Nov 7th, Democrats were elected into the majority in the house, senate, and state governors offices. World reaction: Democratic win welcomed. After six long years, I hope a new day is finally dawning.