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Some of the items are scary spot on (like the amount of carbon dioxide we would see in the atmosphere).

A bunch of MIT types calculated that based on total assets in the earth (not just available to extract), we would hit several "limits to growth" between 2020 and 2100.

For example: We used as much chromium in 2014 as we did from 1900 to 2000 combined.

here's a summary of the 30 year update.
http://www.unice.fr/sg/resourc...

Many of their projections are following.
Food is a little higher- but so is population.

Here's the unavoidable situation they said we would hit.

Using so many resources that we overshoot the carrying capacity of the earth and then permanently lower it as a result. So if 6 billion were what it could carry for a very long time, by going to 12 billion, we might reduce the capacity to 3 billion.

And it projects a very rapid population reduction. 70 years to fall from 12 billion back to 1950s level populations.

The projection is we'll run low on multiple indusrial metals at the same time and prices of those metals will skyrocket.

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Now the fun bit. It's too late to do anything about it. We passed the point of no return back in the 1990s. It's a genuine "bend over and kiss your ass goodbye" situation.

And the good news... Many of us will be dead by 2040-2050 when it starts to get nasty tho we may see some signs as early as 2035 (I'll be 74 then-- my most likely lifespan is to 2038).

And while I'm at self promotion, the next time he went we recorded him with this software : http://stream.unice.fr/polytech/rms20080505/

Additional features of this software suite (slides capture and sync, PDF creation, re-encoding...) can be seen at http://tv.univ-nc.nc/conferences/

<unashamed_plug>
If you want video streaming with the end user being able to interact, I suggest you give a look at http://boxtream.unice.fr/ it is entirely Free Software and documented hardware.

We coupled it with a Free Software IRC applet at University of Nice to allow remote students to ask questions during courses, creating an end to end (the first one ?) Free Software based interactive courses and conferences streaming solution : all parts from the video encoders, streaming and chat servers, and client sides applets are Free Software.

Feedback is welcome.
<unashamed_plug>

For people who want to see what it is to live there, we've recorded a conference then visioconference with an international team of astronomers living several months a year at Concordia Base on Dome C (not Ridge A, but probably similar). It's at http://stream.unice.fr/concordia.html. Audio is in French but there are lots of pictures and video of the outside. Shameless plug : The recording was done with the help of the Boxtream project.

For people who want to see what it is to live there, we've recorded a conference then visioconference with an international team of astronomers living several months a year at Concordia Base on Dome C (not Ridge A, but probably similar). It's at http://stream.unice.fr/concordia.html. Audio is in French but there are lots of pictures and video of the outside. Shameless plug : The recording was done with the help of the Boxtream project.

"You cannot secure a platform against viruses where the end user can execute arbitrary code. It just ain't possible."

http://wims.unice.fr/wims/wims.cgi?module=adm/unice/challenge

I disagree totally anyway... you don't need to make it impossible - you need to make it unnecessary and, providing software is up to date, incredibly infeasible. That is easily possible, with such things as secured Linux distros (the above is merely a system call interceptor but it seems to do a pretty damn good job... enough to hinder 99.9% of the viruses out there, I'd say).

And I think that making even Windows secure enough that viruses are no longer viable and soon become distant memories of poor software is *perfectly* possible, it just isn't being done.

"Most viruses don't exploit 'gaping holes' in the OS, they exploit the end user."

Correct. But they run as admin becomes game X demands it. Thus, they have complete control over the machine. My later point (never let a user do anything as admin ever after initial installation, have proper rollback etc.) taken together with this information provides the answer.

"That option is not "I know what I'm doing", it's "defeat the purpose". Or, to the typically ignorant end user, the "make it work" option."

It's also the "I've taken conscious responsibility for if my machine starts spewing spam" option. That isn't currently available.

"The primary mode of infection is the user doing something "dumb", like installing CometCursor, or a smiley pack, or something else that malware can piggyback in on."

Why should ANYTHING installed on a machine affect that machine's operation for any other user? This is another of my points.

"Won't work. Some things genuinely do need to be installed system-wide, like hardware drivers, OS updates, and the like."

Yes. All of which should only ever come from a cryptographically verified reliable source. Hell, make it automatic. The user doesn't need to see this at all. Users that do can do it safely. This is not the problem - the problem is that Game X or Utility Y or even Theme Z compromises the machine when it shouldn't even be ALLOWED to do anything but write some files (only in a pre-defined space allocated by the OS itself and outside the domain of every other program), take input from peripherals (mouse, keyboard) and display something on ONE users screen. That screen could equally well be virtual so that there's not even the possibility of "faking" a desktop. Least privilege principles. If your software never needs to install a driver (that would be "it's not a driver itself"), NEVER allow it to do so. If your software never needs to be able to read C:\ and find out how much free space there is, NEVER let it do so. This can be done, in a way that doesn't break programs that "want" to do it by just faking reads and ignoring writes, or using COW for those obstinate, crappily written old programs. Your OS never has to allow a program to do ANYTHING. THis is how secure systems have worked for YEARS. Try and write to anywhere other than /home/username and /tmp on a properly configured unix system... does it affect what programs you can run, what games you can play? No. Hell, you can even emulate Windows as such an unprivileged user.

"Admin privileges are highly overrated in this context. The list of things a piece of malware might want to do, that it cannot do from a regular user account, is vanishingly small."

Then the users have FAR TOO MUCH power. An unidentified program should never be allowed to write to anywhere but a carefully set aside portion of the disk assigned to just that program. It shouldn't be able to query DMI information, or read from the registry, install startup programs (without confirmation I might add!), install itself into the systray. Not just "unless the user is admin", but it shouldn't be doing these things ANYWAY. The systray sh

I can't speak about what these people feel, or why.

But, what I can speak about from experience, is that all the pictures on their website ARE NOT made by medical personnel or equipment, or else this personnel has to be fired. I know since I view medical pictures every day in the course of my job.

They are all blurred and noisy and there's no way to know the exact size of samples. This, more than the stories themselves, makes the whole difficult to be trusted.

BTW I've myself got a strange condition : I've got greenish, slimy, self reproducing insects which live in my nose, and which make me want to scratch it all the time. As of today, noone has been able to explain this very rare infection to me.

Put a whatever password in the usual /etc/shadow. Usually a weak but easy to remember one.

When this password is accepted, put the user to a strong quarantine jail with a sh environment that can only be used to enter a second layer passphrase or any other custom authentication method.

The second layer authentication can be a long but easy to remember phrase, enforced using a simple custom shell script. I myself am using interactive methods which is even stronger: even if my ssh line is cracked, the password is not leaked.

The Live Linux CDs run under Windows, too, like 'winknoppix' does. All enhancing choices !

Sweet! Do you know about WIMS?

Freeduc-cd, Web Interactive Math Server, and 'knosciences' again from OFSET will do you fine. All run from CD; relatively little danger of being rooted; you can throw away the hard disks if you want.

Starts here http://gcompris.free.fr/ and works up, you may get here http://wims.unice.fr/wims/wims.cgi before you know it.

It doesn't require money. It does require a desire to help. You help your brother, you help others, others help you.

Many features are not directly offered by the individual software packages, OS or not. In particular the capability of generating sophisticated random exercises that can be used for open-question examinations.

More is to come but our experience shows that the existing tools are quite sufficient for freshmen needs in math computation.

WIMS can be accessed eith as a website, or as a local installation.

Yes, we've done it !

The solution we used, in French (but there are pictures for you illiterates) :
PDF document explaining our installation

NB : Most of what is at the end (previsions about future) was finally implemented and works fine. The document is a bit old and I have to update it.

If only the common lisp world had something to accessible and free.

I realized I was pretty nerdy when I caught myself taking my iBook to the bathroom to read some STk documentation whilst pooping. heh.

It's hard to explain in a paragraph or two why functional programming is so great. Suffice it to say that it allows for much more reuse than object-oriented programming, opens up whole new ways of abstracting out functionality, and prevents one of the most common sources of bugs--aliasing.

Not all functional programming languages are purely functional. In fact, many programmers program in such functional programming languages like they do in Perl or Python. That can be both bad and good. On the one hand, because functional programming languages are powerful even for procedural programming, they may never be encouraged to learn how to take advantage of functional features. On the other hand, it may be a good way of getting work done.

My recommendation for people wanting to use a statically typed, efficient functional programming language would be OCAML. It has a full object system, yet also offers a full set of functional programming primitives. SML/NJ is another excellent implementation supporting both procedural and functional programming, and very lightweight threads (as an alternative to objects; cf. the GUI system).

Scheme and CommonLisp are also great languages. As a procedural or OO programmer, you can think of them as Python with a different syntax and a much better compiler. MzScheme is an excellent Scheme system for learning, and Bigloo is a powerful Scheme compiler. You can find more information at schemers.org.

For heavy-duty programming, CommonLisp is still better than Scheme, IMO, but it's significantly more complex. You can find a bunch of implementations at cons.org. I recommend CMU CommonLisp highly. For experimentation, CLISP by Haible is a good small interpreter. There are also a few "scripting" implementations of CommonLisp around.

Haskell is absolutely amazing for distilling programs down to 1/10 or 1/100 their size. However, it really requires a very different way of approaching programming. I'm not sure whether to recommend starting programming with it or not, in particular if you come from other languages.

There are also some special-purpose functional programming languages for high-performance computing. Those languages give performance similar to Fortran or C on numerical problems and can actually be parallelized more easily.

Of course, whether any of these links help you depends on whether you can get started using a new language with a reference manual, user manual, short tutorial, and implementation. If not, there are lots of textbooks around. The Haskell site in particular also has lost of link for FP-related resources. Also search Fatbrain.

So, in summary: functional programming languages are definitely ready for many applications. If you want to get started, there are lots of resources available. Try to find a book that you like and experiment. MzScheme or OCAML are fairly traditional ways of getting started (you still get a lot of the features you are used to from procedural languages). I suspect that functional programming is going to be the "next big thing" in programming after OOP, and I also think it's a lot more useful than OOP and a lot more well-founded.

wims is (Www Interactive Mathematics Server) is an internet server system designed for mathematical educational purposes.
Among the things it allows you to do, it lets you put LaTeX code in your html page and translates them to html. This is a big and clever cgi..

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http://www.esinsa.unice.fr/xxl.html