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Oil Slick Threatens African Penguins
An oil slick in South Africa is threatening the third-largest colony of Jackass penguins, which are about to enter their breeding season. This is the second major oil pollution disaster to hit Cape Town's penguins. Sanccob is leading the rescue effort. Donations can be sent here.
Will this delay the 2.4.0 kernel release?
I just found a new nickname for the clueless Linux Zealots at work...cool!
Must be a new Microsoft tactic... I suppose they chose the "linux" topic because there is no "penguins" topic. Or "enviro" topic -- which would be nice, btw.
The world is filled with good causes... thousands of them. There are hundreds of endangered species, people dying of diseases and starving in almost every part of the world, and we are destroying our environment in so many different ways. It would be impossible -- even in a community the size of Slashdot -- to even begin to address these problems. We can, however, do our small part to help with one of them. The penguin is our mascot, and that makes it as good a cause as any to get behind.
Even if you don't help save the penguins, you can give a dollar to a homeless guy, or buy an acre of land in the rainforest, or give to the American (or Canadian) Cancer Society. The point is, do something. As a collection of individuals with above average intelligence, we have a responsibility to this world to do something, anything, to make it just a little bit better.
Reality has a liberal bias
You know, this kind of stuff would have never had this kind of attention paid to it had it not been for the linux use of the penguin logo. Oil slicks suck, and yet we still demand cheap gas prices. Here in the Midwest, people are bitching about how they are getting screwed by the gas companies, so corners are cut and accidents such as this are more likely to occur.
<rant>
And of course there are already those posters complaining that this is not News for Nerds or that kind of ranting. Come on, this seems to be Sengan's second post, and this kind of news interested him. If you were also an author, you would have a right to complain.
</rant>
A site showing pictures of the penguins before the slick can be found here, and the google cached link of the slashdotted link is right here. CNN is also covering the story.
So the next time that you pump your gas or drive down the freeway to work, ask yourself whether you really need to do this. Public transportation is usually powered by much safer power sources, so maybe these kind of accidents won't happen anymore.
-zavyman
..I prefer my penguin baked rather than deep fried in oil. Whatever, as long as some Africans get food.
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+&x
"Hi, I'm Linus Torvalds and this is my friend, Tux."
[ Adorable little penguin waddles over and lays a flipper against Linus' leg, snuggling up against him. ]
"Oil slicks can be a messy, dangerous and often deadly disaster. Just a couple years ago, my friend Tux here was near death due to the after-effects of just such a slick, but thanks to caring contributions from people just like you, Tux is alive and well today [ Tux smiles, sweetly at the camera ]."
[ Shot widens to show Linus standing in front of a virtual sea of oily penguins. ]
"Right now, there are hundreds of penguins -- just like Tux -- who need your help. Won't you find it in your heart to share your good fortune with those less fortunate than yourself? Please contribute to the United Penguin Care Coalition. Little lives, like Tux's, depend on it."
* United Penguin Care Coalition substitued for the South African National Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds. Why? Duh, that would have sounded too fruity in the commercial.
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seumas.com
I would be much more likely to donate to the cause if they took credit cards online. Can't they appeal to some large, greedy oil company looking to do community service by donating a server, SSL, and a Merchant Account (say maybe someone who could symphathize... like maybe Exxon??)
I was thinking - yeah I might chip in some cash for this - I like penguins, hate oil slicks - what the hell?
Oh... but you got to fax your credit card number or send them a *snail mail* with your info... sorry but you lost me there. Make it easy to donate online and maybe more people would give.
Slashdot has always been Geek news, and it's always seemed to me fairly activist.
I would like to suggest we keep in mind the original promise of the computer...paperless. Indeed Enviromentalism is an *excelent* geek thing to engage in. Biology rocks in a completely egg-based geek way, and it's really really interesting. Us boffins are the future, and if we don't use our ,often, priveleged positions to fight for stuff that really matters than were all doomed
Case in point in Australia is SIMCOA's use of Old Growth Jarrah woodchips in the silicone smeltering process. Jarrah is one of the largest trees in the world, and it also produces fan-bloody-tastic furniture. It's endangered too. Currently SOTICO, the logging company is selling this priceless wood as woodchips at $14 a tonne. There are many enviro-friendly alternatives for it. As end users we should be complaining bitterly that our comps are trashing forrests unneccesarrily. Put preasure if you want to on intel/amd/motorolla etc to use enviro friendly processing methods.
Either way. It's verry geek. Let's do something for those penguins. It's important. Tux'd agree too methinx.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
So the next time that you pump your gas or drive down the freeway to work, ask yourself whether you really need to do this. Public transportation is usually powered by much safer power sources, so maybe these kind of accidents won't happen anymore.
I agree that humans and their feigned needs for fossil fuels at low costs led to this sort of tragedy. I don't agree that public transportation uses safer power sources. They use either (1) electricity created at central fossil-fuel burning facilities, or (2) fossil-fuels in other forms.
Not to mention the mode of transportation itself. Cars crashing on the highway are the number one dangerous mode. But think of the number of San Francisco Muni bus accidents, New York subway derailments, airline disasters, AMTRACK derailments, freight trains with toxic chemicals spilling, train derailments in Turkey and Germany and everywhere else.
Diesel smoke from public buses also cause more pollution per person, in areas where ridership is too low to amortize the damage. Sure, if the route runs half-full, then say thirty people use twenty times the fuel of cars. During off-peak and mis-arranged routes, then four people use fifteen times the fuel.
Diesel truck lobbying groups and the engine producers don't let you into the dirty secrets: tests are rigged to measure idle-power emissions instead of typical loads. Diesel engine improvements far outweigh the efficiencies demanded by the solo car driver; a car in 1998 emitted 4% of the toxins that a car in 1978 did, while diesel has hardly budged.
Yep, people's priorities are skewed pretty badly.
Rainforests burn daily for farming acreage, eradicating dozens of species of primates, countless other animal and vegetation species, and we devote to the cause of some penguins caught in a one-time disaster.
More money was spent on the making of Jurassic Park than had ever been spent in the history of dinosaur paleontological research. The USPTO has a few hundred million dollars siphoned off in appropriations committees, since they don't really need those patent fee proceeds; announced the same day that NASDAQ:MSFT nears its 52week low, representing a drop of over a hundred billion equity because of uncertainty in a single massive litigation.
And while I'm off-topic,
When is O'Reilly going to create a wildlife fund for all the cute animals featured on the covers of *nix utility references?
[
Coming from South Africa, I have a tendency to actually read some of the stuff that pops up about it. I read this and I realized that is serious. Most of you played this off as something which should not be posted on Slashdot, even kindof flaming them for daring to put it on the site. Like it or not, our mascot is a penguin and any pengiuns should be close to our hearts.
Lets be hypothetical a little... would you say that a Swedish hacker is less of hacker than an American hacker? They are both hackers and from what I have seen on the newsgroups some of them make the news with more pizaz than many others ;-)
Back to being a bit more serious. EVERY nut in the world knows that the conservation of a species is VERY important, since the loss of a species has several impacts on the environment that are only fully realized years after it has happened. These pengiuns off the South African coast are part of a penguin species that do not exist anywhere else in the world. Apart from the fact that the oil spill arrived during their breeding season, the impact of the oil spill will only be seen next year when hundreds, if not thousands of penguins are lost.
So, be serious for a moment and realize that if oil spills happen a few more places in the world, and not just in SA, the pengiun mascot we have may be the only living pengiun in the world by 2020.
It disturbs me to see "brainy" geeks be so unbelievably STUPID as to play off the importance of a species being in trouble. Drop that arrogant shithead approace to life and be better people. Perhaps you might even be a real software engineer then, and not just a hopeless script kiddie.
That is my two cents worth ...
Life's like that