Slashdot Mirror
Global Warming Mostly Confirmed - On Mars
dinotrac writes "A just-completed 23 month study, carried out over the course of a Martian year, found that the Martian polar ice caps are rapidly eroding, sending large amounts of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into the Martian atmosphere. If this pattern continues over time, Mars could go from a planet whose winters are cold enough for dry-ice snow to having a shirt sleeve atmosphere. Humans would still have to provide for oxygen, but plants could go naked.
I wonder if this means tougher emission controls on the next Martian rover?"
Sorry, but it does prove one thing. The climates of planets is many times beyond our pale ability to understand or have an effect on.
Are we so egotistical to believe we can readily affect the Earths climate? We would seriously have to try very hard to make a noticable effect. A single volcano outdid us in 3 days... reducing sunlight striking the earth!
Yes we have pollution issues, but the fact remains that that 23 months of Mars data is very similar in one way to the earth, both are attempting to extrapolate what the resulting climates will become with limited data.
We simply don't have enough data to prove one way or another for the Earth
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Maybe not as cheap as some greenpeace slut but damn close. If you fucking hippies hadn't derailed significant fission/fusion research by the fearmongering you did in the 60's, 70's and 80's (toked out of your gourds, I might add) we would never of had the sort of "perpetual" energy crisis whenever some fat cat wants to milk more money out of the populace. Congratfuckulations on giving the coal power plants the current lead in producing most of the electricity in the US, 40%
Also, stop destroying research that could actually feed the starving peoples of the world, because millenia of organic food certainly has not. The only fucks that can afford to stuff their faces with organic food are you and other people in industrilized nations. I feel a lot better giving a people a genitically engineered crop that does not need pesticides than some hippy tuber that will rot in the ground unless you dump tons of biotoxins on it.
Stay the fuck clear out of things you do not understand, hippy. Good day.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
I spoke with Uncle Isaac on several occasions regarding his favorite stock pick, MSFT. He explained that from day one, he knew that Microsoft was one of the most nimble companies that ever existed. Pointing out their rapid turnaround in the browser wars and in internet integration, he said that with billg at the helm, Microsoft would always prosper.
"What about .Net," I asked. "Do you really expect that thing to
succeed?"
".Net will put Microsoft in a position more powerful than any other company in the nation." When I pressed for details, he explained what Microsoft was planning to do:
Passport, in fact, is going to be marketed to web site owners. Sure, personal information is sometimes fun to have, but that isn't the main attraction. Microsoft plans to offer Passport up as a system to facilitate micropayments. They are targeting the owners of the many unprofitable information sites that are being propped up by venture capital (and pathetically meager ad revenues) today. This will force users to use Passport and pay for the information they receive off the web, with Microsoft taking a cut every time. Microsoft will become the largest middleman in the world, and multinational banks will look on in envy.
As a technical matter, this isn't a very difficult thing to do, but it needs a strong, reliable company with a good name, like Microsoft, to hold it up and to fund it during tough times. Microsoft has shown itself to be willing to subsidize many unprofitable ventures (such as IE and Bob) in order to attain a stronger position in the market, so it should come as no surprise that Passport will work the same way.
And, after Passport has taken over, there will be no more need for Linux/Apache on commercial sites. Microsoft can't compete with us directly, so they will destroy our market share by making the economics favor their product. We can give them Free software but Microsoft can sell them a big profit.
We, as the open source community, need to come together to stop this plan dead in its tracks. We can't rely on our government to do it for us, so we need to innovate and find ways to stop Microsoft. Maybe a bunch of open source hackers can get together and start producing macro virii and IIS worms nonstop, so that users are more aware of the poor security afforded by Microsoft products and services. Perhaps frequent DDoS attacks on Passport-compliant web sites are in order. Or maybe something completely different. Either way, we need to do something, so that Microsoft does not use Passport to take the internet away from us.
df