Ah. You are very clearly much more skilled at trolling than I. Perhaps you practice more. That would seem likely, since I gave up the practice back in the days of Compuserve.
I am not particularly concerned about your opinions or who wins the contest you alone think you are having, but sometimes I do feel an obligation to point out to any audience where valid information is being abused by presenting it out of context.
Working link to Maue's graph on the COAPS site. The graph is of cyclonic energy accumulated over the Northern Hemisphere and Globally. Meaning that each data point represents the average for the month over very large areas. Since by definition an increase in extremes does not affect the estimation of centrality of curves, this graph does not support your point. It is meaningless. A car analogy: in a conversation about how fast various cars can go, you use the rated MPG to support your position.
Working link to NOAA's graph of strong tornados on the National Climatic Data Center web site. The first link provides no clue as to the context in which the graph is meant to be read. Eyeballing the graph itself, it does appear that while the mean number of nasty storms may be declining, there is more variablity from the mean in later years than in earlier ones. Which supports the premise that there is an increase in extremes.
I have other things to do and cannot take the time to walk through the third failed link, especially as I think it is highly likely that it, like these two, will provide only smoke but no new light on the discussion.
I have no idea why I and so many other persons can use links on Slashdot while you cannot, but I am confident it is not something that Slashdot is doing to you alone. It looks like PEBKAC.
As to user id numbers:
I was active on Slashdot from June, 2002 to about a month ago as MysticGoat, account #582871. I am continuing from this time forward with this account, under a nickname that is very close to my name in real life.
That was my first journal entry on this account, in 2009. So the Slashdot presence I am willing to admit to is not that much younger than your own. I honestly do not recall what my first account or user id was: all that got irretrievably lost in some personal chaos during the 2001 - 2002 era.
I have absolutely no clue what it is you were attempting to link to.
However there is nothing here to suggest that Slashdot has for some reason messed up on just your attempt to post some links. It seems far more likely that you simply do not understand how to work the technology. This stuff is not that hard to learn; hundreds of thousands of persons have joined Slashdot and learned how to use its capabilities; I am sure that you could do that, too. It would probably enrich your life.
Parent post assumes that the article in question-- and presumably the large number of similar articles that have been published over the years-- are part of a debate.
A debate is a way of throwing a couple of arguments at each other to determine their strengths and weaknesses and thus move more closely toward the truth. In this sense, there are never any losers in an honest debate since both parties and their audience leave with a better appreciation of the issues.
Propaganda, though, has nothing to do with the search for truth; its sole purpose is to get the audience to behave in a certain way. The behavior sought might be to raise a lot of confusion about public policies and laws that are based on scientific foundations.
When propaganda calls itself a debate, when it takes on the form of a debate, it does not become a debate. It remains propaganda.
The large body of existing data is unaffected and still strongly suggests that anthropogenic climate change is at work.
This new data suggests that one proposed mechanism to explain the changes may not be correct. That does not somehow magically reverse sea level rise, glacial retreats, decreases in permafrost, more extreme weather, and so on.
A car analogy: the mechanic has just reported that the carburetor (remember those?) is probably okay. But the car is not fixed; it still does not run right.
Somewhere between 1995 and 1999, I dropped my subscriptions to Scientific American, Nature, Smithsonian, etc as I realized that my problem with staying on top of stuff was no longer a matter of using effective pipes to get the information. I could rely on Slashdot and similar forums to stream all kinds of topical stuff past me. What I needed was an effective technique for determining out of all the little bitty pieces going by, which ones would be worth following up on.
I now scan each week probably around 1,000 discussion threads on Slashdot and several similar but more focused forums in my areas of interest (politics, CG, bicycling, kayaking, ecology, etc), looking for new buzz words, phrases, or concepts that jump out as interesting. Then doing some very aggressive googling on these to see where they go. This amounts to maybe 15 or 20 minutes of coffee break time each day scanning the forums, but I am not reading for content and usually not participating. Just scanning, like walking past the vairous booths at a crafts fair. When I come across something of interest, I might spend anywhere from another 5 minutes to an evening following up with Google and the avenues that Google opens up. Mostly those avenues either lead to territory I have already mapped well enough to suit me or to dead ends like World Of Warfare trivia.
But sometimes the approach pays off in a big way: following up on the buzzword "biochar" for instance has been very useful. The idea that significant carbon sequestration could be done on the cheap by home gardeners while also improving their gardens is very interesting. Who knew that a gram of charcoal had the effective surface area of two tennis courts, and could therefore act as a long term reservoir for N, P, and K, while simutaneoulsy removing that gram of carbon from the ecosystem for several thousand years?
Why does it matter whether it was incompetence or malice?
When the results are critical, there is a need for society to protect itself from the incompetent asshole as well as the malicious bastard. Burning all of those responsible, no matter what their intent might have been, can be an effective deterrent to both the assholes and the bastards. There is no need for us here on Earth to sort them out.
basically the publisher charges for organizing the peer review, editing and distribution.
That used to be the case, but increasingly in the USA over the last 20 years, companies like elsevier have been following a new paradigm: the publisher charges to make a profit.
For all the years that there have been language-nazi trolls on slashdot, I for reasons I cannot explain always assumed that they would not engage in the creation of neologisms or new portmanteau words. I stand corrected.
So even for the language-nazis among us, the English of our forefathers is just not quite good enough for today's communications.
Is this a typo or a neologism? This could be the most significant portmanteau word added to English this Summer.
Unfortunately its usage in the original post inappropriately weakens that post's point. "Anti-biofouling" is indeed hyphenated but by no means should it be considered hyperbole.
May of these antipsychotic medications require careful adjustment of the dosage regimen to avoid problems with mentation or emotional control. Different forms of pseudo-paranoia and irrational reality testing are common problems.
It is self evident that if a mind altering drug is being given for a reason that does not exist, then there can be no correct dosage regimen. Any use of the drug at all is going to distort behavior and belief systems.
This could explain a lot of contemporary American politics.
Would it be unreasonable to require American political candidates to publish the list of medications they are currently using? That might be a good first step in addressing a serious national health problem that has a direct impact on national politics.
However several of those Big Pharma anti-depressants are among the most addictive substances known, such that acute withdrawal can actually kill. Oh, yeah, they also have very high price tags.
None of the pure placebos can make those claims. So there.
It's snake oil, pure and simple. Snake oil meaning, it HAS been studied in this area, and it doesn't work. Time to move on.
Spoken like a true believer in Science.
Some of us would never go further than saying that so far the claimed benefits of the tea have not been reproducible under laboratory conditions. That is about as far as anyone who uses the scientific method can go. Persons who go beyond that are generally invoking Science as a God Substitute: some kind of Almighty Authority.
While I realize that as a geologist you may not have much more understanding of the climate and weather considerations involved than I do, but since I know basically nothing about climate, weather, or geology, you might have a better idea of what was going on during the K-T events than I do.
So this big old rock slams into the Earth and makes enough dust out of itself to create the world-wide iridium enriched sedimentary deposits that are the K-T boundary. And in so doing, creates a very long winter.
So how long does it take for all that dust to actually settle? How much other sediments brought about by the more rapid erosion of the early part of the Long Winter would bury the remains of the megafauna before most of the asteroid dust was deposited?
It would seem that some gap between the last dinosaur fossils and the iridium layer should be expected, but would this be only millimeters, or is 300 centimerters actually a reaonable expectation?
Reality is that businesses hire computer mechanics like you to keep things running smoothly, and users in those businesses need to know nothing more about their computers than how to get in and out of the apps they have to use on the job. Which in an ideal world would be nicely documented in their position's Procedure Manual.
Reality is that SOHOs and individual users who do not have a computer mechanic on hand, but do have a need or desire to do things with a computer, will find nothing of value in the comments of those like you who say that the OS does not matter so long as it runs the apps. At best, they find that approach terribly confusing; at worst they make bad and costly decisions based on what they think they understand you to have said.
The corporate computer guru is highly important in any business; it is a critical position. That role is however just a cog in a huge machine, and that cog has a very limited view of the wide world outside of its narrow domain.
Now, if you would claim to have 10+ years supporting mom and pop businesses as they computerize their operations, I will have to eat my words. But I am confident that you cannot honestly make that claim, because persons who have that kind of experiience are aware of the broader issues concerning OS / distro choices that you are saying do not exist.
This discussion could probably go on for years until either I shuffle off this mortal coil or age changes your perspective a bit. But I choose to end it with the reception of your next post, if you choose to have the last word.
The assumption that there is plenty of land and ample resources to grow enough to feed the world is bogus.
Modern agricultural practices destroy the native soil ecosystems and make the farms increasingly dependent on fertilizers and other additives to stay in production. At this point, in the USA, farmers who raise corn are only using the dirt to hold the stalks up. It takes 7 calories or more of petrochemicals to grow 1 calorie of corn. The need for additional chemical applications increases every year as the soil is degraded; much of what was once some of the most fertile land anywhere in the world could not now grow any marketable crop on its own.
There are sustainable farming practices that nurture the soil and can actually strengthen the ecosystem. However none of these methods could meet today's need for food, let alone the calories that all of today's squalling babies will need when they become teenagers ten years from now.
Our food factory is being run like a some Mississippi riverboat in a race to the New Orleans docks. Where rather than stopping to take on firewood and lose the race, the captain has ordered the crew to rip up the planks to stoke the boiler's furnace. Except one way or another, the riverboat race will come to an end and everyone involved will go back to a normal life. Many of you who read this will not have that luxury of looking ahead to a normal life. (The rest of us will be pushing up daisies long before 2050.)
Parent post says humans are clearly from this planet; could not be alien xenoforming gary goo.
But the easiest way to destroy an ecosystem is through genetic modification of a species that is already part of the ecosystem. From a distant point of view, the main differences between humans and other apes are that humans are multiplying unchecked, have expanded their territory from a piece of Africa to every place on the world, and are busy releasing huge amounts of bioactive carbon that have been sequestered underground for millions of years.
Yeah, there is an undeniable argument that humans are xenoforming Earth. Could this be natural? Possibly, but there are no known parallel examples of a single species altering ecosystems to this degree. Could this be genetically engineered interference from an alien Monsanto? On the face of it, that seems at least as likely and in several ways looks like the simpler hypothesis.
I am going to go away now. I need to find my tinfoil hat and monolith detector.
Junior? Hee-hee! Keep flattering me like that and I might get to like you.
My first personal computer was one of the first Apple ][+ machines to come onto the second hand market in the Pacific Northwest. My first programming was done a dozen years before that, in Fortran, on Hollerith cards. It has been a long time since anyone called me "Junior".
In responses sibling to yours, I see that the effort to frame these discussions as some kind of religious war between contingents of fanboys and therefore something to be dismissed out of hand continues unabated. That is unfortunate. The world will be a richer place when persons who know a thing or two about OSs, distros, and the like get beyond that kind of foolishness. But not to fret about it; that will happen for many of them in good time, when they learn a couple more things. So a few more years, another decade at most, and all that will be good.
Which operating system to use is not a religious matter. It never was; that was always a marketeer's gambit to sidestep discussions that would not lead to a quick sale.
Which operating system (distro, actually) to use is definitely a matter of lifestyle. Persons who want to own a Maserati or a Hummer will never be happy with a Linux distro. Persons who shop for a car that is reliable, safe, economical, and will not need to be replaced in a couple of years are likely to be happier with some Linux distro than with the stuff that is available in the Microsoft or Apple ecosystems.
Mechanics of course have an entirely different view of cars than drivers: Fords are nice because you can take them apart and put them together easily; European imports can be hard to get parts for, etc. Very little about actually using the vehicles the way the drivers do. You, Sir, with your credentials as an admin and web hosting guru, are a computer mechanic. Not a computer user. Please remember that when you are offering your advice to users.
For an expert who can configure a distro with one hand tied behind the back, and blindfolded, all operating systems are pretty much the same and which one is the better depends on the apps that will be run on it.
For the user who is simply interested in getting results from the damn app, the choice of distro / operating system will have a big impact on their experience. It can also have a big impact on the experiences of others, if their machine becomes a vector for viruses or a zombie in a botnet. There is a reason why the computers on those botnets with millions of zombies are all running some version of Windows.
Linux distros in general are much less prone to malware attacks than Windows, so unless there is some performance reason not to do so, it makes sense to have Linux on the outside and Windows in the more protected VM position. I have no serious experience with Windows after WinXP but my understanding is that for generally all applications other than games, there is no performance hit in running any version of Windows as a VM.
That said, a VM Windows may have trouble running some games well, when those games are bypassing normal OS protections to interface directly with graphics cards they recognize. So it comes down to whether the computer was purchased to be a tool, or merely a toy.
Spoken like someone whose experiences with different platforms goes all the way from WinXP to Win7.
Ubuntu is of course an entire distribution, not just an OS, but then the same can be said of every Windows release I have worked with, from Win3.0 in 1990 onward. So they are comparable. In addition to the basic operating system, Ubuntu provides a reasonably good security protocol, excellent update management services, several good options for backup managers, and easy access to an extensive on-line library of applications. Windows does not measure up in these areas.
OTOH, Windows is by far the better machine if you spend your days playing games. Linux distros are more in the nature of office equipment; they are not very good toys.
You've almost got the right idea. You just need to turn it around: Windows as a VM under Ubuntu.
For the mom, I would suggest Ubuntu 10.4, the latest Long Term Support version, on CD. She should of course try running it from the CD, but of course it will not perform very well that way. If she has room on her hard drive, she should consider the dual install option. It would not be hard to uninstall later, if she decides to do that.
She should definitely check out what is available under the Applications/Ubuntu Software Center. Much of the joy of running Ubuntu is the ease of accessing that huge library of applications.
She should also find someone to walk her through setting up the Update Manager for automatic daily checks for updates. It is not hard to do this, but there are a lot of different set ups available and someone who knows Ubuntu can fit her out with a plain vanilla set up much more quickly than bumbling around among all the choices.
Most of the long term joy of Ubuntu is in its automatic update facility. Which handles all the apps Ubuntu knows about, as well as Ubuntu itself. Sweet.
Around here, in Best Buy, Office Depot, Staples, etc, while more display area is given to tablets, the number of choices of netbooks is the same or more than the number of tablets. Which makes sense. At this point, people who are shopping for netbooks already know what they are looking for but to sell a tablet computer you have to wow the customer with all the bells, whistles, and sizzle.
Tablet computers are like riding lawn mowers: every hardware store has a big display of riding mowers. But they all sell lots more of the push mowers even though they do not need to display them (only need to set them where people can compare sizes and prices).
My dislike of Palin is entirely rational. The woman is catering to a demographic that has been playing la-la-la-I-am-not-listening with any news about the changes of the last 50 years. These are people who want to go back to the grand days of the 1960s have the very dangerous idea that they can somehow do that. Things have changed: there are now 6+ billion people instead of a couple billion; the Chinese way of life is in our face instead of a very, very long way away; the very climate is different and is probably going to become even more different. And so forth.
There are some good things coming out of this intense scrutiny of her emails:
A surprise: she is a lot more savvy than I had thought. For so far no one has found anything particularly stupid in her correspondence. Maybe she is intelligent enough to handle an executive position.
This kind of inspection for dirty linen is good at discouraging all sorts of riff-raff and gutter critters from running for public office. That is a good thing.
Anyone who seeks to publicly influence politics, whether through elected office, through sanctioned lobbying, or by seeking to become a political pundit should be open to this kind of public scrutiny. That is not only a fair exchange-- exchanging your right to privacy for the potential power of influencing voters-- it is a necessary condition for a working democracy. The good thing about this is that this discussion has given me an opportunity to point out what should be obvious to a bunch of slashdotters who presumably have the brains to recognize how this has to work (but for some reason are not bothering to use their brains).
Slashdot Mirror
Ah. You are very clearly much more skilled at trolling than I. Perhaps you practice more. That would seem likely, since I gave up the practice back in the days of Compuserve.
I am not particularly concerned about your opinions or who wins the contest you alone think you are having, but sometimes I do feel an obligation to point out to any audience where valid information is being abused by presenting it out of context.
Working link to Maue's graph on the COAPS site. The graph is of cyclonic energy accumulated over the Northern Hemisphere and Globally. Meaning that each data point represents the average for the month over very large areas. Since by definition an increase in extremes does not affect the estimation of centrality of curves, this graph does not support your point. It is meaningless. A car analogy: in a conversation about how fast various cars can go, you use the rated MPG to support your position.
Working link to NOAA's graph of strong tornados on the National Climatic Data Center web site. The first link provides no clue as to the context in which the graph is meant to be read. Eyeballing the graph itself, it does appear that while the mean number of nasty storms may be declining, there is more variablity from the mean in later years than in earlier ones. Which supports the premise that there is an increase in extremes.
I have other things to do and cannot take the time to walk through the third failed link, especially as I think it is highly likely that it, like these two, will provide only smoke but no new light on the discussion.
I have no idea why I and so many other persons can use links on Slashdot while you cannot, but I am confident it is not something that Slashdot is doing to you alone. It looks like PEBKAC.
As to user id numbers:
I was active on Slashdot from June, 2002 to about a month ago as MysticGoat, account #582871. I am continuing from this time forward with this account, under a nickname that is very close to my name in real life.
That was my first journal entry on this account, in 2009. So the Slashdot presence I am willing to admit to is not that much younger than your own. I honestly do not recall what my first account or user id was: all that got irretrievably lost in some personal chaos during the 2001 - 2002 era.
I have absolutely no clue what it is you were attempting to link to.
However there is nothing here to suggest that Slashdot has for some reason messed up on just your attempt to post some links. It seems far more likely that you simply do not understand how to work the technology. This stuff is not that hard to learn; hundreds of thousands of persons have joined Slashdot and learned how to use its capabilities; I am sure that you could do that, too. It would probably enrich your life.
Have a nice day.
Parent post assumes that the article in question-- and presumably the large number of similar articles that have been published over the years-- are part of a debate.
A debate is a way of throwing a couple of arguments at each other to determine their strengths and weaknesses and thus move more closely toward the truth. In this sense, there are never any losers in an honest debate since both parties and their audience leave with a better appreciation of the issues.
Propaganda, though, has nothing to do with the search for truth; its sole purpose is to get the audience to behave in a certain way. The behavior sought might be to raise a lot of confusion about public policies and laws that are based on scientific foundations.
When propaganda calls itself a debate, when it takes on the form of a debate, it does not become a debate. It remains propaganda.
The large body of existing data is unaffected and still strongly suggests that anthropogenic climate change is at work.
This new data suggests that one proposed mechanism to explain the changes may not be correct. That does not somehow magically reverse sea level rise, glacial retreats, decreases in permafrost, more extreme weather, and so on.
A car analogy: the mechanic has just reported that the carburetor (remember those?) is probably okay. But the car is not fixed; it still does not run right.
I want something like this magazine, as a website: http://www.spektrum.de/artikel/1116381 [spektrum.de] (German edition of the Scientific American
That approach seems so 1995 to me.
Somewhere between 1995 and 1999, I dropped my subscriptions to Scientific American, Nature, Smithsonian, etc as I realized that my problem with staying on top of stuff was no longer a matter of using effective pipes to get the information. I could rely on Slashdot and similar forums to stream all kinds of topical stuff past me. What I needed was an effective technique for determining out of all the little bitty pieces going by, which ones would be worth following up on.
I now scan each week probably around 1,000 discussion threads on Slashdot and several similar but more focused forums in my areas of interest (politics, CG, bicycling, kayaking, ecology, etc), looking for new buzz words, phrases, or concepts that jump out as interesting. Then doing some very aggressive googling on these to see where they go. This amounts to maybe 15 or 20 minutes of coffee break time each day scanning the forums, but I am not reading for content and usually not participating. Just scanning, like walking past the vairous booths at a crafts fair. When I come across something of interest, I might spend anywhere from another 5 minutes to an evening following up with Google and the avenues that Google opens up. Mostly those avenues either lead to territory I have already mapped well enough to suit me or to dead ends like World Of Warfare trivia.
But sometimes the approach pays off in a big way: following up on the buzzword "biochar" for instance has been very useful. The idea that significant carbon sequestration could be done on the cheap by home gardeners while also improving their gardens is very interesting. Who knew that a gram of charcoal had the effective surface area of two tennis courts, and could therefore act as a long term reservoir for N, P, and K, while simutaneoulsy removing that gram of carbon from the ecosystem for several thousand years?
Why does it matter whether it was incompetence or malice?
When the results are critical, there is a need for society to protect itself from the incompetent asshole as well as the malicious bastard. Burning all of those responsible, no matter what their intent might have been, can be an effective deterrent to both the assholes and the bastards. There is no need for us here on Earth to sort them out.
basically the publisher charges for organizing the peer review, editing and distribution.
That used to be the case, but increasingly in the USA over the last 20 years, companies like elsevier have been following a new paradigm: the publisher charges to make a profit.
Wow, I just learned something significant.
For all the years that there have been language-nazi trolls on slashdot, I for reasons I cannot explain always assumed that they would not engage in the creation of neologisms or new portmanteau words. I stand corrected.
So even for the language-nazis among us, the English of our forefathers is just not quite good enough for today's communications.
WRT "hypenated":
Is this a typo or a neologism? This could be the most significant portmanteau word added to English this Summer.
Unfortunately its usage in the original post inappropriately weakens that post's point. "Anti-biofouling" is indeed hyphenated but by no means should it be considered hyperbole.
May of these antipsychotic medications require careful adjustment of the dosage regimen to avoid problems with mentation or emotional control. Different forms of pseudo-paranoia and irrational reality testing are common problems.
It is self evident that if a mind altering drug is being given for a reason that does not exist, then there can be no correct dosage regimen. Any use of the drug at all is going to distort behavior and belief systems.
This could explain a lot of contemporary American politics.
Would it be unreasonable to require American political candidates to publish the list of medications they are currently using? That might be a good first step in addressing a serious national health problem that has a direct impact on national politics.
I sure hope that TSA chose Captain Clarence Oveur for their pilot. There is no one who is better suited to that role.
However several of those Big Pharma anti-depressants are among the most addictive substances known, such that acute withdrawal can actually kill. Oh, yeah, they also have very high price tags.
None of the pure placebos can make those claims. So there.
It's snake oil, pure and simple. Snake oil meaning, it HAS been studied in this area, and it doesn't work. Time to move on.
Spoken like a true believer in Science.
Some of us would never go further than saying that so far the claimed benefits of the tea have not been reproducible under laboratory conditions. That is about as far as anyone who uses the scientific method can go. Persons who go beyond that are generally invoking Science as a God Substitute: some kind of Almighty Authority.
While I realize that as a geologist you may not have much more understanding of the climate and weather considerations involved than I do, but since I know basically nothing about climate, weather, or geology, you might have a better idea of what was going on during the K-T events than I do.
So this big old rock slams into the Earth and makes enough dust out of itself to create the world-wide iridium enriched sedimentary deposits that are the K-T boundary. And in so doing, creates a very long winter.
So how long does it take for all that dust to actually settle? How much other sediments brought about by the more rapid erosion of the early part of the Long Winter would bury the remains of the megafauna before most of the asteroid dust was deposited?
It would seem that some gap between the last dinosaur fossils and the iridium layer should be expected, but would this be only millimeters, or is 300 centimerters actually a reaonable expectation?
Reality is that businesses hire computer mechanics like you to keep things running smoothly, and users in those businesses need to know nothing more about their computers than how to get in and out of the apps they have to use on the job. Which in an ideal world would be nicely documented in their position's Procedure Manual.
Reality is that SOHOs and individual users who do not have a computer mechanic on hand, but do have a need or desire to do things with a computer, will find nothing of value in the comments of those like you who say that the OS does not matter so long as it runs the apps. At best, they find that approach terribly confusing; at worst they make bad and costly decisions based on what they think they understand you to have said.
The corporate computer guru is highly important in any business; it is a critical position. That role is however just a cog in a huge machine, and that cog has a very limited view of the wide world outside of its narrow domain.
Now, if you would claim to have 10+ years supporting mom and pop businesses as they computerize their operations, I will have to eat my words. But I am confident that you cannot honestly make that claim, because persons who have that kind of experiience are aware of the broader issues concerning OS / distro choices that you are saying do not exist.
This discussion could probably go on for years until either I shuffle off this mortal coil or age changes your perspective a bit. But I choose to end it with the reception of your next post, if you choose to have the last word.
The assumption that there is plenty of land and ample resources to grow enough to feed the world is bogus.
Modern agricultural practices destroy the native soil ecosystems and make the farms increasingly dependent on fertilizers and other additives to stay in production. At this point, in the USA, farmers who raise corn are only using the dirt to hold the stalks up. It takes 7 calories or more of petrochemicals to grow 1 calorie of corn. The need for additional chemical applications increases every year as the soil is degraded; much of what was once some of the most fertile land anywhere in the world could not now grow any marketable crop on its own.
There are sustainable farming practices that nurture the soil and can actually strengthen the ecosystem. However none of these methods could meet today's need for food, let alone the calories that all of today's squalling babies will need when they become teenagers ten years from now.
Our food factory is being run like a some Mississippi riverboat in a race to the New Orleans docks. Where rather than stopping to take on firewood and lose the race, the captain has ordered the crew to rip up the planks to stoke the boiler's furnace. Except one way or another, the riverboat race will come to an end and everyone involved will go back to a normal life. Many of you who read this will not have that luxury of looking ahead to a normal life. (The rest of us will be pushing up daisies long before 2050.)
Parent post says humans are clearly from this planet; could not be alien xenoforming gary goo.
But the easiest way to destroy an ecosystem is through genetic modification of a species that is already part of the ecosystem. From a distant point of view, the main differences between humans and other apes are that humans are multiplying unchecked, have expanded their territory from a piece of Africa to every place on the world, and are busy releasing huge amounts of bioactive carbon that have been sequestered underground for millions of years.
Yeah, there is an undeniable argument that humans are xenoforming Earth. Could this be natural? Possibly, but there are no known parallel examples of a single species altering ecosystems to this degree. Could this be genetically engineered interference from an alien Monsanto? On the face of it, that seems at least as likely and in several ways looks like the simpler hypothesis.
I am going to go away now. I need to find my tinfoil hat and monolith detector.
Junior? Hee-hee! Keep flattering me like that and I might get to like you.
My first personal computer was one of the first Apple ][+ machines to come onto the second hand market in the Pacific Northwest. My first programming was done a dozen years before that, in Fortran, on Hollerith cards. It has been a long time since anyone called me "Junior".
In responses sibling to yours, I see that the effort to frame these discussions as some kind of religious war between contingents of fanboys and therefore something to be dismissed out of hand continues unabated. That is unfortunate. The world will be a richer place when persons who know a thing or two about OSs, distros, and the like get beyond that kind of foolishness. But not to fret about it; that will happen for many of them in good time, when they learn a couple more things. So a few more years, another decade at most, and all that will be good.
Which operating system to use is not a religious matter. It never was; that was always a marketeer's gambit to sidestep discussions that would not lead to a quick sale.
Which operating system (distro, actually) to use is definitely a matter of lifestyle. Persons who want to own a Maserati or a Hummer will never be happy with a Linux distro. Persons who shop for a car that is reliable, safe, economical, and will not need to be replaced in a couple of years are likely to be happier with some Linux distro than with the stuff that is available in the Microsoft or Apple ecosystems.
Mechanics of course have an entirely different view of cars than drivers: Fords are nice because you can take them apart and put them together easily; European imports can be hard to get parts for, etc. Very little about actually using the vehicles the way the drivers do. You, Sir, with your credentials as an admin and web hosting guru, are a computer mechanic. Not a computer user. Please remember that when you are offering your advice to users.
For an expert who can configure a distro with one hand tied behind the back, and blindfolded, all operating systems are pretty much the same and which one is the better depends on the apps that will be run on it.
For the user who is simply interested in getting results from the damn app, the choice of distro / operating system will have a big impact on their experience. It can also have a big impact on the experiences of others, if their machine becomes a vector for viruses or a zombie in a botnet. There is a reason why the computers on those botnets with millions of zombies are all running some version of Windows.
Linux distros in general are much less prone to malware attacks than Windows, so unless there is some performance reason not to do so, it makes sense to have Linux on the outside and Windows in the more protected VM position. I have no serious experience with Windows after WinXP but my understanding is that for generally all applications other than games, there is no performance hit in running any version of Windows as a VM.
That said, a VM Windows may have trouble running some games well, when those games are bypassing normal OS protections to interface directly with graphics cards they recognize. So it comes down to whether the computer was purchased to be a tool, or merely a toy.
The OS is merely a platform.
Spoken like someone whose experiences with different platforms goes all the way from WinXP to Win7.
Ubuntu is of course an entire distribution, not just an OS, but then the same can be said of every Windows release I have worked with, from Win3.0 in 1990 onward. So they are comparable. In addition to the basic operating system, Ubuntu provides a reasonably good security protocol, excellent update management services, several good options for backup managers, and easy access to an extensive on-line library of applications. Windows does not measure up in these areas.
OTOH, Windows is by far the better machine if you spend your days playing games. Linux distros are more in the nature of office equipment; they are not very good toys.
You've almost got the right idea. You just need to turn it around: Windows as a VM under Ubuntu.
For the mom, I would suggest Ubuntu 10.4, the latest Long Term Support version, on CD. She should of course try running it from the CD, but of course it will not perform very well that way. If she has room on her hard drive, she should consider the dual install option. It would not be hard to uninstall later, if she decides to do that.
She should definitely check out what is available under the Applications/Ubuntu Software Center. Much of the joy of running Ubuntu is the ease of accessing that huge library of applications.
She should also find someone to walk her through setting up the Update Manager for automatic daily checks for updates. It is not hard to do this, but there are a lot of different set ups available and someone who knows Ubuntu can fit her out with a plain vanilla set up much more quickly than bumbling around among all the choices.
Most of the long term joy of Ubuntu is in its automatic update facility. Which handles all the apps Ubuntu knows about, as well as Ubuntu itself. Sweet.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Unless of course you mean that you are into worshipping your gizmos.
Floor space does not always count for much.
Around here, in Best Buy, Office Depot, Staples, etc, while more display area is given to tablets, the number of choices of netbooks is the same or more than the number of tablets. Which makes sense. At this point, people who are shopping for netbooks already know what they are looking for but to sell a tablet computer you have to wow the customer with all the bells, whistles, and sizzle.
Tablet computers are like riding lawn mowers: every hardware store has a big display of riding mowers. But they all sell lots more of the push mowers even though they do not need to display them (only need to set them where people can compare sizes and prices).
My dislike of Palin is entirely rational. The woman is catering to a demographic that has been playing la-la-la-I-am-not-listening with any news about the changes of the last 50 years. These are people who want to go back to the grand days of the 1960s have the very dangerous idea that they can somehow do that. Things have changed: there are now 6+ billion people instead of a couple billion; the Chinese way of life is in our face instead of a very, very long way away; the very climate is different and is probably going to become even more different. And so forth.
There are some good things coming out of this intense scrutiny of her emails: