Humans are already pretty good at accidentally altering weather and changing habitat. How will doing it deliberately "mediate the effects of human activity"?
TFA and TFS fail to mention that SciPy, Numpy and Matplotlib have been added only to the Business, Enterprise, and OEM Editions of ActivePython. The Community Edition (the only one that's free) doesn't contain these libraries.
i'm sure a few species will die because of this, i'm sure some habitats will get destroyed because of this, but imagine removing the dependence and waste of fossil fuels, this would benefit everyone.
Everyone benefits except for the aforementioned species and habitats that will get destroyed, and any human or other animal that depends on those species and habitats for its survival.
I prefer solar over fossil fuel power and this program sounds like it could be a big improvement over, oh, I don't know, say offshore oil drilling as an example that comes to mind for some reason. But "everyone benefits" ignores the fact that there will be losers. On average, everyone benefits. In specific, some do and some don't.
I've long wondered about the short-sightedness of modern farming practices where farmers need to buy both seeds and fertilizer each year to produce a crop, when once upon a time in the not-to-distant past, both were free, and in the present, the abundance of animal waste has become an environmental problem.
Once plants and animals were raised together on the same farm -- which therefore neither produced unmanageable surpluses of manure, to be wasted and to pollute the water supply, nor depended on such quantities of commercial fertilizer. The genius of America farm experts is very well demonstrated here: they can take a solution and divide it neatly into two problems.
The Unsettling of America : Culture & Agriculture (1996), p. 62
The additional snag is that 2.1 hectares per person is only a viable number assuming industrial agriculture. Traditional agriculture, or "bio" products, or "sustainable farming" need between 10 times and 100 times that.
Citation needed, as the saying goes.
Furthermore, industrial agriculture also has negative side effects (like the one in the TFA) that reduce our ability to produce food elsewhere. Another example is
the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico (unrelated to the recent and ongoing oil spill) which is largely a result of nutrient runoff from industrial ag. Cheap midwestern corn has a price not reflected in the tag on the shelf.
Really, most people in the free software and open source software communities are staying away from Apple because of their hostility
On what grounds do you make that assertion? About half of the developers I counted at the 2009 Scipy (scientific Python) conference were toting Apple laptops.
Granted, mine was an unscientific observation, but if you've got better data that counters mine, I'd sincerely like to hear it.
what they have not done is bend one inch from the basic philosophy that Apple controls the user experience on its products.
On the iPad & iPhone, maybe. But under regular OS X, that's not at all true. Apple even supplies X for the Mac so I can run any X Windows app I want to (the GIMP, for example). The meta keys are all wrong, the widgets look ugly, and the focus doesn't behave as I expect.
That's exactly the kind of experience that Apple doesn't want people to associate with the its brand, but they're willing to enable it under the right circumstances. In this case, "the right circumstances" means someone who has purchased a computer (e.g. Mac Mini) as opposed to a entertainment appliance (iPad) and knows enough to download X from Apple's site and is therefore probably well aware of what s/he's getting into.
Apple sold 10 millions Macs in 2009; don't think the company is now defined solely by the iPod/Pad/Phone.
As an aside, honey is almost identical in composition to HFCF55, so if you meet any holistics bemoaning HFCF and championing honey, you can tell them to screw off.
As another aside, the glucose content of honey is a major factor in its tendency to crystallize. Higher fructose, lower glucose honeys resist crystallization. That's one of the reasons tupelo honey is well-regarded.
I don't mean to pick on you; yours is not the first comment I've seen in this thread mistaking "lamb" for "lam". The two words sound exactly alike, but the correct phrase for someone who is trying to escape pursuit is "on the lam".
...this is only going to be true where the water isn't properly sanitized. Most US systems are designed to have residual chlorine all the way to delivery...
The NY Times version of the same article says, "[Mycobacterium] avium tends to be a particular problem in municipal water supplies, Dr. Pace said. The reason is that cities treat their water with chlorine, a poison that kills most bacteria but gives avium a selective advantage."
If you are a serious UI designer, and you first priority is not *C*H*O*I*C*E*, then you are a failure at your job and have so stop working *right now*.
Just to play Devil's Advocate, I'll point out that having too many options can be just as bad a having too few. It's easy to overwhelm people with too many choices. Some Linux distros could be accused of having too many options (although the newer ones like Ubuntu do a pretty good job of making things simpler) whereas Apple's OS X leans toward the other end of the spectrum.
OS X has a good reputation for ease of use, and in part it is because one doesn't have futz with a lot of configuration. That said, if OS X makes a non-configurable choice and you don't like it, there's not much you can do about it. As I said above, it's a balance.
If you want to build a solid foundation with this wonderful person, one way to do it would be by acknowledging that she's a woman, not a "girl". (Unless she's 12, that is.)
Using "girl" instead of "woman" is extremely common but there's a world of difference between the two. Why not use the right word?
I also worry about the amount of rainfall that would be lost if Bill Gates plan actually works. Believe it or not there are some useful aspects to a hurricane and more importantly tropical storms.
Hugely useful. Here in central North Carolina (NC), the ends of our summers (August - October) are hot and often very dry. We get thunderstorms now and again but for a nice steady, soaking rain we rely on a tropical storm or hurricane running up the coast or moving north through the Gulf of Mexico, breaking up over land and then sweeping east over us as the remnants get caught up in normal weather patterns.
Have a look at the paths of the storms in 2007. Notice how few approach NC? That was also the year of the worst drought in over 100 years. We didn't get those late summer storms to mitigate an abnormally dry year.
whatcouldpossiblygowrong indeed. Read John McPhee's Control of Nature for some examples. The story of the defense of the harbor on Iceland's Heimaey is inspiring. The story of redirecting mudslides near LA is a cautionary tale. Similarly, the story of how the US Army Corps of Engineers tool control ("permanent" control from humanity's point of view, "temporary" control from Nature's) of the flow between the Mississippi and Atchafalaya. Before that, the river rose and fell and people accepted it because they had no choice. Afterwards, people complained that the water was too high, or too low, and probably too wet as well.
Control a hurricane? Even if I had a magic wand with which to do it, I'd say no thanks. I would not want to catch that tiger by the tail.
FOSS doesn't converge to one winner any more than living creatures converge (evolve) to one "perfect" form. There are many ecological niches to exploit and there are many software niches as well.
Try to build a new browser or new *nix kernel and see how many people you project gets.
You'll get some if the software fills a need that's not addressed well by existing tools.
I don't care what anybody else says, we need a new protocol for messaging.
Given that you don't care what anybody else says, you can invent and use your own spam-preventing protocol. No one else will be able to communicate with you, but hey, who needs other people! =)
Sorry for the cheap shot, but your comment struck me as funny even if you didn't mean it that way. The raison d'être of a messaging protocol is caring about what other people say, both at the protocol level and the message level.
On a more serious note: if solving the problem was as simple as drafting a new RFC, don't you think Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc. who spend millions (billions?) battling spam would have come up with a new protocol by now? They've certainly got the money, talent and influence to make it happen.
They suck. I do NOT want to have sounds in my environment if it is not neccesairy.
Suit yourself! In a typical cube farm, keyboard racket is perfect for drowning out the doofus in the next cubicle who is on the phone yakking about his recent prostate exam.
Me, I love my Unicomp replacement for my old IBM Dreadnought a.k.a. Model M. I only got the Unicomp because it has the three meta keys I need for OS X, whereas the Model M has only two. The Model M still works fine and will be 18 years old in July. I'm not sure I could buy a piece of computer equipment today that I'd expect would still work in 2017.
Slashdot Mirror
Humans are already pretty good at accidentally altering weather and changing habitat. How will doing it deliberately "mediate the effects of human activity"?
TFA and TFS fail to mention that SciPy, Numpy and Matplotlib have been added only to the Business, Enterprise, and OEM Editions of ActivePython. The Community Edition (the only one that's free) doesn't contain these libraries.
http://www.activestate.com/activepython
i'm sure a few species will die because of this, i'm sure some habitats will get destroyed because of this, but imagine removing the dependence and waste of fossil fuels, this would benefit everyone.
Everyone benefits except for the aforementioned species and habitats that will get destroyed, and any human or other animal that depends on those species and habitats for its survival.
I prefer solar over fossil fuel power and this program sounds like it could be a big improvement over, oh, I don't know, say offshore oil drilling as an example that comes to mind for some reason. But "everyone benefits" ignores the fact that there will be losers. On average, everyone benefits. In specific, some do and some don't.
I've long wondered about the short-sightedness of modern farming practices where farmers need to buy both seeds and fertilizer each year to produce a crop, when once upon a time in the not-to-distant past, both were free, and in the present, the abundance of animal waste has become an environmental problem.
Wendell Berry said it very nicely:
The Unsettling of America : Culture & Agriculture (1996), p. 62
The additional snag is that 2.1 hectares per person is only a viable number assuming industrial agriculture. Traditional agriculture, or "bio" products, or "sustainable farming" need between 10 times and 100 times that.
Citation needed, as the saying goes.
Furthermore, industrial agriculture also has negative side effects (like the one in the TFA) that reduce our ability to produce food elsewhere. Another example is the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico (unrelated to the recent and ongoing oil spill) which is largely a result of nutrient runoff from industrial ag. Cheap midwestern corn has a price not reflected in the tag on the shelf.
TFS gets it wrong; this research was done at North Carolina State University (NCSU), not University of North Carolina (UNC).
Here's the NSCU press release:
http://news.ncsu.edu/releases/degraffnarayan09/
Really, most people in the free software and open source software communities are staying away from Apple because of their hostility
On what grounds do you make that assertion? About half of the developers I counted at the 2009 Scipy (scientific Python) conference were toting Apple laptops.
Granted, mine was an unscientific observation, but if you've got better data that counters mine, I'd sincerely like to hear it.
what they have not done is bend one inch from the basic philosophy that Apple controls the user experience on its products.
On the iPad & iPhone, maybe. But under regular OS X, that's not at all true. Apple even supplies X for the Mac so I can run any X Windows app I want to (the GIMP, for example). The meta keys are all wrong, the widgets look ugly, and the focus doesn't behave as I expect.
That's exactly the kind of experience that Apple doesn't want people to associate with the its brand, but they're willing to enable it under the right circumstances. In this case, "the right circumstances" means someone who has purchased a computer (e.g. Mac Mini) as opposed to a entertainment appliance (iPad) and knows enough to download X from Apple's site and is therefore probably well aware of what s/he's getting into.
Apple sold 10 millions Macs in 2009; don't think the company is now defined solely by the iPod/Pad/Phone.
As an aside, honey is almost identical in composition to HFCF55, so if you meet any holistics bemoaning HFCF and championing honey, you can tell them to screw off.
For some types of honey, that's probably true. But the sugars in honey vary depending on the flowers the bees were feasting on. Here's a short PDF (sorry) with some actual numbers.
As another aside, the glucose content of honey is a major factor in its tendency to crystallize. Higher fructose, lower glucose honeys resist crystallization. That's one of the reasons tupelo honey is well-regarded.
I don't mean to pick on you; yours is not the first comment I've seen in this thread mistaking "lamb" for "lam". The two words sound exactly alike, but the correct phrase for someone who is trying to escape pursuit is "on the lam".
Wikipedia entry for fugitive
Shouldn't our priorities be focused on more energy-expensive things like heating/cooling?
Well, since 90% of an incandescent bulb's electricity usage is lost as heat, and central air-conditioning is responsible for the greatest share of household electricity use, I'd say that incandescents and cooling costs are intimately related.
If all new home standards were increased to "PassivHaus" standards, which bring heat/cooling to almost nothing, we'd save HUGE amount of energy.
Amen.
I (or *anyone* I know) don't have any equipment that speaks 802.11n
You don't know anyone that has a Macbook Pro?
http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/specs.html
...this is only going to be true where the water isn't properly sanitized. Most US systems are designed to have residual chlorine all the way to delivery...
The NY Times version of the same article says, "[Mycobacterium] avium tends to be a particular problem in municipal water supplies, Dr. Pace said. The reason is that cities treat their water with chlorine, a poison that kills most bacteria but gives avium a selective advantage."
If you are a serious UI designer, and you first priority is not *C*H*O*I*C*E*, then you are a failure at your job and have so stop working *right now*.
Just to play Devil's Advocate, I'll point out that having too many options can be just as bad a having too few. It's easy to overwhelm people with too many choices. Some Linux distros could be accused of having too many options (although the newer ones like Ubuntu do a pretty good job of making things simpler) whereas Apple's OS X leans toward the other end of the spectrum.
OS X has a good reputation for ease of use, and in part it is because one doesn't have futz with a lot of configuration. That said, if OS X makes a non-configurable choice and you don't like it, there's not much you can do about it. As I said above, it's a balance.
Congrats!
If you want to build a solid foundation with this wonderful person, one way to do it would be by acknowledging that she's a woman, not a "girl". (Unless she's 12, that is.)
Using "girl" instead of "woman" is extremely common but there's a world of difference between the two. Why not use the right word?
Good luck
I know what you meant, but diluted != deluded
I also worry about the amount of rainfall that would be lost if Bill Gates plan actually works. Believe it or not there are some useful aspects to a hurricane and more importantly tropical storms.
Hugely useful. Here in central North Carolina (NC), the ends of our summers (August - October) are hot and often very dry. We get thunderstorms now and again but for a nice steady, soaking rain we rely on a tropical storm or hurricane running up the coast or moving north through the Gulf of Mexico, breaking up over land and then sweeping east over us as the remnants get caught up in normal weather patterns.
Have a look at the paths of the storms in 2007. Notice how few approach NC? That was also the year of the worst drought in over 100 years. We didn't get those late summer storms to mitigate an abnormally dry year.
Compare that to the 2006 map and the 2008 map. Lots more rainfall for us.
whatcouldpossiblygowrong indeed. Read John McPhee's Control of Nature for some examples. The story of the defense of the harbor on Iceland's Heimaey is inspiring. The story of redirecting mudslides near LA is a cautionary tale. Similarly, the story of how the US Army Corps of Engineers tool control ("permanent" control from humanity's point of view, "temporary" control from Nature's) of the flow between the Mississippi and Atchafalaya. Before that, the river rose and fell and people accepted it because they had no choice. Afterwards, people complained that the water was too high, or too low, and probably too wet as well.
Control a hurricane? Even if I had a magic wand with which to do it, I'd say no thanks. I would not want to catch that tiger by the tail.
You used your bidet fork for the salad?
It's just "Ukraine", not "the Ukraine".
Someone once said "I never meta dupe I didn't like."
That someone was not me.
It is now!
Try to build a new browser or new *nix kernel and see how many people you project gets.
You'll get some if the software fills a need that's not addressed well by existing tools.
...is Homo sapiens not an animal?
I don't care what anybody else says, we need a new protocol for messaging.
Given that you don't care what anybody else says, you can invent and use your own spam-preventing protocol. No one else will be able to communicate with you, but hey, who needs other people! =)
Sorry for the cheap shot, but your comment struck me as funny even if you didn't mean it that way. The raison d'être of a messaging protocol is caring about what other people say, both at the protocol level and the message level.
On a more serious note: if solving the problem was as simple as drafting a new RFC, don't you think Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc. who spend millions (billions?) battling spam would have come up with a new protocol by now? They've certainly got the money, talent and influence to make it happen.
Why would any nation want to isolate itself the way the DPRK is isolated?
Same reason they might start a war they couldn't possibly win -- because their leader is an unpredictable nutjob.
They suck. I do NOT want to have sounds in my environment if it is not neccesairy.
Suit yourself! In a typical cube farm, keyboard racket is perfect for drowning out the doofus in the next cubicle who is on the phone yakking about his recent prostate exam.
Me, I love my Unicomp replacement for my old IBM Dreadnought a.k.a. Model M. I only got the Unicomp because it has the three meta keys I need for OS X, whereas the Model M has only two. The Model M still works fine and will be 18 years old in July. I'm not sure I could buy a piece of computer equipment today that I'd expect would still work in 2017.