This is a selfish view of the world in that it is ours for the taking
And it is. We just have to be careful to not destroy what may be useful later.
There is no other personalities in the natural world we have to account for. All other earthly living beings can't be preserved at the expense of humans.
we need to learn how to co-exist in harmony with our natural environment
There is no such thing as harmony in nature, unless you mean birds singing and so on: harmony is a musical concept. What nature has is predation.
Your condescending view of nature belongs in the middle ages, not the 21st century.
It is not condescending, it is objective. Your view, by contrast, is Romantic; only that you don't seem to be aware of the fact.
As I said, changes are painful, and we can't judge the global situation by local effects only. Also, I doubt we know enough to really be sure if it will be for the worse like that; for all I know, Australia could well benefit for having a milder climate due to a smaller are far from the ocean. I would like to know better, though.
So all that land that is not currently arable is magically going to become able to support crops? You don't think maybe there's more currently preventing that than just annual temperature variations?
Who mentioned that? I am just thinking about annual averages.
Looking at northern Canada, for example, all of the land that has cultivatable soil is already cultivated.
But with which productivity? Higher temperatures are good for animals and plants, barring the extremes in deserts (and our ingrained habits).
Even if we were to slash and burn the northern boreal forest, nothing would grow in that mix of peat and muskeg... except maybe specially-bred rice
So there is a forest there, but nothing would grow?
there was no world shortage of food in general last time I checked. Just how would having more arable land benefit the world, even if it could happen? It still wouldn't put food in the hands of those who need it.
Sure indeed, this is all a cultural and political problem. But economy plays its part, so further abundance would do some good. Also, more extensive habitable land would help easing population distribution, which is a big part of all that.
But you actually made my point for me. We have much worse, pressing problems to think about than a few degrees, a small, slow variation in sea levels and some hurricanes. Including people who are dying now.
The idea that Global Warming will result in more crops is pure conjecture
At least is a reasonable conjecture, while the opposite idea just flies in the face of logic. I might accept there is more to the climate than simple logic, but would need data. Haven't seen any yet.
The Sahara is in the tropics, but that land is not particularly productive.
Nor are Gobi or the siberian tundra. So what? Compare arable land to arable land and deserts to deserts. Or do statistics.
Climate change coming from more energy in the atmosphere increases unpredictability (though you'll probably not accept that assertion).
Why wouldn't I? I already accepted there are painful transition costs.
the nagging question is this: how many people will die in the meantime?
How many people will die if we don't deal with misery first? Worse, what can we do without dealing with misery first? Most proposals I see floating around have costs that will hinder the minoration of misery, and miserable people will produce a lot of pollution while they try to get some wealth. Or would we rather they die?
I am all for taxing externalities and the such. But it must be rational.
This is selfish, and i wholeheartedly disagree with it.
It is not selfish if I aim to help humankind, and not myself or my family and friends only. And it is the only rational thing to do, if we believe in a difference between man and nature. If we don't, then there is no reason to try to be more rational than animals, and in this case we should just consider ourselves part of nature and do what other animals do: prey.
let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth."...hence, caretakers in my view...but apparently not in yours.
Do you grasp the difference between caretaking and dominion?
I do believe dominion includes caretaking. But the end is human ('go forth and multiply, and replenish the Earth' or something the like), not natural.
But in the end, the issue is that, if you believe in the Bible, you also have to accept that without people being converted there is no salvation, neither of souls nor of the Earth. And then the focus must be not global warming, but our sinfulness and the cross of Christ.
We(Humans) have become the caretakers of the world environment through our technology and population growth.
Not. We have to take care of ourselves. If that necessitates our taking care of the environment, so be it; but we must be clear about what is the goal. Romanticising nature won't help when the poor of the world revolt against about we caring more about a few coastal areas than about human misery, and if their misery and ignorance end up compounding the possible problems of global warming.
I believe it even says something about this in the bible.
Either you believe in the Bible or not. If you do, you have to convert and evangelise, because everything else would be counterproductive in this fallen world. If you don't, it isn't honest to quote it.
If we don't care about our environment - in which we live - than may we go extinct as well, since we will deserve nothing less.
As if we could if we wanted, short of global nuclear war.
Sorry. You can't romanticise nature and keep a rational conversation.
As the temperature rises, climate patterns change, usually making dry places more dry and wet places more wet. This means increased flooding for the wet places and droughts for the dry. It's hard to grow most of our current produce staples in either of those environments.
These are two ideas that are very difficult to reconcile. There must be lots of place with the opposite effects, and places with no significant humidity difference. BTW, less ice and more sea would in the average mean more humidity, which would be a net gain. Again, it seems to me most people are just repeating scare lines about worst cases and generalising them. References welcome, though.
If the sea level rises, earth's total land mass will decrease significantly, displacing millions to hundreds of millions of people. With that many "refugees", areas that were once habitable would become wastelands while trying to support them.
The numbers seem exaggerated, and turning habitable areas into wastelands would just fly in the face of logic. More people need better support structures, more intensive farming and so on. Again, references welcome.
we now have to completely relocate or rebuild our infrastructures for manufacturing, agricultural, and basically every other aspect of modern life.
How naïve. So many societies have recovered from such destruction, and all we are talking about here is planned moving to higher lands. It is not like sea levels will rise in a repentine tsunami. As things go, most business will just plan their new installations in higher land and possibly more to the North, as old ones get obsolete.
They would need to continue to move inland due to the massive hurricanes/typhoons that would be destroying anything built along the coast, which would considerably decrease the amount of habitable land. Living in Africa or around the Equator would be pretty much out of the question due to the increased heat in the summer, again leaving less space for people.
Again, how naïve. Extreme heat is not found around the Equator, but in deserts and in deeply continental areas, both of which would most probably decrease. Hurricanes and typhoons are not nearly as destructive as you make them, as witnessed by the high populational density in historically affected areas; even that Katrina would find so many people to affect in her path is a witness to how well people have dealt with them in the past, and how naïvely comfortable they had become.
if you had said that you think global warming might be good because hundreds of millions of people will die, giving our global economy and political systems a chance to rebuild itself from scratch due to anarchy, revolutions, and war, then that's a different story.
Just what I thought. Ecofascism is on the rise. Keep your nature, I stand with people.
I was merely considering the predicament of other species who have less of an ability to migrate, and less adabtability that humans have due to technology and information.
So what? It will be neither the first nor the last mass extinction. Nature has recovered everytime, and the Earth has been shaken quite a few times. If anything, it seems that biological diversity has been increasing except for some minor human-induced damage in the last two or three centuries.
We can't be sentimental about nature. It isn't a person, and humans are different from animals; we can care for them, and plants too, and even inanimate nature, but not to the point of romanticising anything. I am still for caring for people over nature, if a choice must be made; and in the end it may prove to be the best course, as people suffering from misery aren't likely to care for nature.
I'll also point out that one of the large issues involved in global warming is that the disease malaria is carried by mosquitos. As the climate warms globally, these mosquitos will span greater distances - spreading malaria to communities that have not had to deal with malarial outbreaks, or have less resistance to malaria due to a lack of any significant anemic populations.
Why so many environmentalists assume static environments? Malaria is fougth with success anywhere there is a sufficiently dense and resourceful human population. Brazil is an example: it has all but erradicated malaria from most of its more densely inhabitated regions, so that only a small minority of population still has to really care about it.
...more disease vectors, greater drought, more flooding, colder and longer winters, drier summers... The list goes on.
Bzzt. The list is all about local effects, and part of what I described as painful adaptation may include migration from areas adversely affected to areas favourably affect. In fact, it is ludicrous to think about colder and longer winters globally when the issue is global warming.
Anyway, Russians haven't migrated in masse from Moscow because it has cold, long winters and hot, dry summers. Human society is incredibly adaptable, and we have lots of other more important issues to care about, such as literacy, malaria, AIDS, and the cultural wars. Caring about global warming when most people are still striving to make a living (not talking about unemployment in the First World, but misery in the Third) may be after all counter-productive, as our culture could well crumble in a few generations if it continues its decadence and so many people continue without their share in its riches.
Global warming does not imply more crops, or more habitable lands. It implies less.
Sorry, but I can't take your word for it. I would need references. All I have seen up to now are scare lines about the advent of warming, not complete assessments about the state of a warmer Earth. I am not even sure we know enough about these things.
For example, a significant fraction of the world relies on the glaciers in the Himalayas for water. If those go, there will be vastly less habitable lands.
Never heard about glaciers in Himalaya are going. They may be diminishing, but they will still be there in all probability. Shorter winters would give us more crops, as tropical lands already have higher productivity than temperate and cold ones.
Been there, done that. "Big Iron" was it name, and it was Oracle on SunOS 5. You could install it on one pass, and Oracle supported it. Not a big success.
Perhaps they really liked the idea, and think that it would be easier on free software. One wonders why not OpenSolaris, given it really scales better still; but perhaps they think the freeing of Solaris too late, too little.
One must, when running Firefox, either remove MS IE totally (not only with MS tools) or preload Firefox in order to compare their memory usages.
Little in the way of structuring data
on
Inside the Google-Plex
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Everyone is talking about GoogleFS. But no one is talking about how they manage structured data. How do they do it? Some SQL stuff, some homegrow potion, or have they managed to create a sensible interface for structured data on top of GoogleFS?
how Wikipedia works and why these three practitioners believe it will keep working.
Does that mean they will shed MySQL? Sorry if it sounds like trolling, but quite often Wikipedia problems (and problems at other very high load sites such as/. itself, my email provider etc) are traced back to MySQL. Or is MySQL getting so much better so soon?
Here's hoping they just buy Alphora and package Dataphor with Ajax for portal integration. Thus (or by creating some other D-class database language implementation) they could give us a sanitized SQL to avoid its many pitfalls, while having a much more powerful and simple native database engine and language.
One is that WinFS was not promised for now: it was promised for, say, 15 years ago. MS Access was said by Microsoft to be a first step towards a totally relational OS really soon then. Just as Cairo (MS Windows NT 4) was supposed to be totally OO, and now we are told native code will still be with us for several years yet.
But the worst thing is that they don't understand what they intend to ship. WinFS is not relational, not it can ever be, since being based on (a bastardised version of) ISO SQL it violates the basic fundaments of the relational model. Incidentally, this non-relationalness makes it much larger, less performant, more complex, less powerful than it should be. Coincidence?
Take a look at Alphora Dataphor. While it is not an end-user tool, it has the potential to lower your development costs so much you will be able to actually serve your users.
Postgres has changed interface languages before. Switching to a Tutorial D style syntax could happen if there was sufficient demand for it.
Some years ago I floated the idea, but there wasn't much interest in it if memory serves me. But the hackers' talk at the time flew over my head, so I might be mistaken.
Do remember that, when PostGres became PostgreSQL, it had to shed QUEL, because SQL isn't relational. It might be easier to start from scratch (Rel?), or from the last version of PostGres. Please note the current product is called PostgreSQL; PostGres was the version that used QUEL, with no SQL corruption yet.
Slashdot Mirror
And it is. We just have to be careful to not destroy what may be useful later.
There is no other personalities in the natural world we have to account for. All other earthly living beings can't be preserved at the expense of humans.
There is no such thing as harmony in nature, unless you mean birds singing and so on: harmony is a musical concept. What nature has is predation.
It is not condescending, it is objective. Your view, by contrast, is Romantic; only that you don't seem to be aware of the fact.
As I said, changes are painful, and we can't judge the global situation by local effects only. Also, I doubt we know enough to really be sure if it will be for the worse like that; for all I know, Australia could well benefit for having a milder climate due to a smaller are far from the ocean. I would like to know better, though.
Who mentioned that? I am just thinking about annual averages.
But with which productivity? Higher temperatures are good for animals and plants, barring the extremes in deserts (and our ingrained habits).
So there is a forest there, but nothing would grow?
Sure indeed, this is all a cultural and political problem. But economy plays its part, so further abundance would do some good. Also, more extensive habitable land would help easing population distribution, which is a big part of all that.
But you actually made my point for me. We have much worse, pressing problems to think about than a few degrees, a small, slow variation in sea levels and some hurricanes. Including people who are dying now.
At least is a reasonable conjecture, while the opposite idea just flies in the face of logic. I might accept there is more to the climate than simple logic, but would need data. Haven't seen any yet.
Nor are Gobi or the siberian tundra. So what? Compare arable land to arable land and deserts to deserts. Or do statistics.
Why wouldn't I? I already accepted there are painful transition costs.
How many people will die if we don't deal with misery first? Worse, what can we do without dealing with misery first? Most proposals I see floating around have costs that will hinder the minoration of misery, and miserable people will produce a lot of pollution while they try to get some wealth. Or would we rather they die?
I am all for taxing externalities and the such. But it must be rational.
It is not selfish if I aim to help humankind, and not myself or my family and friends only. And it is the only rational thing to do, if we believe in a difference between man and nature. If we don't, then there is no reason to try to be more rational than animals, and in this case we should just consider ourselves part of nature and do what other animals do: prey.
Do you grasp the difference between caretaking and dominion?
I do believe dominion includes caretaking. But the end is human ('go forth and multiply, and replenish the Earth' or something the like), not natural.
But in the end, the issue is that, if you believe in the Bible, you also have to accept that without people being converted there is no salvation, neither of souls nor of the Earth. And then the focus must be not global warming, but our sinfulness and the cross of Christ.
Not. We have to take care of ourselves. If that necessitates our taking care of the environment, so be it; but we must be clear about what is the goal. Romanticising nature won't help when the poor of the world revolt against about we caring more about a few coastal areas than about human misery, and if their misery and ignorance end up compounding the possible problems of global warming.
Either you believe in the Bible or not. If you do, you have to convert and evangelise, because everything else would be counterproductive in this fallen world. If you don't, it isn't honest to quote it.
As if we could if we wanted, short of global nuclear war.
Sorry. You can't romanticise nature and keep a rational conversation.
These are two ideas that are very difficult to reconcile. There must be lots of place with the opposite effects, and places with no significant humidity difference. BTW, less ice and more sea would in the average mean more humidity, which would be a net gain. Again, it seems to me most people are just repeating scare lines about worst cases and generalising them. References welcome, though.
The numbers seem exaggerated, and turning habitable areas into wastelands would just fly in the face of logic. More people need better support structures, more intensive farming and so on. Again, references welcome.
How naïve. So many societies have recovered from such destruction, and all we are talking about here is planned moving to higher lands. It is not like sea levels will rise in a repentine tsunami. As things go, most business will just plan their new installations in higher land and possibly more to the North, as old ones get obsolete.
Again, how naïve. Extreme heat is not found around the Equator, but in deserts and in deeply continental areas, both of which would most probably decrease. Hurricanes and typhoons are not nearly as destructive as you make them, as witnessed by the high populational density in historically affected areas; even that Katrina would find so many people to affect in her path is a witness to how well people have dealt with them in the past, and how naïvely comfortable they had become.
Just what I thought. Ecofascism is on the rise. Keep your nature, I stand with people.
So what? It will be neither the first nor the last mass extinction. Nature has recovered everytime, and the Earth has been shaken quite a few times. If anything, it seems that biological diversity has been increasing except for some minor human-induced damage in the last two or three centuries.
We can't be sentimental about nature. It isn't a person, and humans are different from animals; we can care for them, and plants too, and even inanimate nature, but not to the point of romanticising anything. I am still for caring for people over nature, if a choice must be made; and in the end it may prove to be the best course, as people suffering from misery aren't likely to care for nature.
Why so many environmentalists assume static environments? Malaria is fougth with success anywhere there is a sufficiently dense and resourceful human population. Brazil is an example: it has all but erradicated malaria from most of its more densely inhabitated regions, so that only a small minority of population still has to really care about it.
Bzzt. The list is all about local effects, and part of what I described as painful adaptation may include migration from areas adversely affected to areas favourably affect. In fact, it is ludicrous to think about colder and longer winters globally when the issue is global warming.
Anyway, Russians haven't migrated in masse from Moscow because it has cold, long winters and hot, dry summers. Human society is incredibly adaptable, and we have lots of other more important issues to care about, such as literacy, malaria, AIDS, and the cultural wars. Caring about global warming when most people are still striving to make a living (not talking about unemployment in the First World, but misery in the Third) may be after all counter-productive, as our culture could well crumble in a few generations if it continues its decadence and so many people continue without their share in its riches.
Sorry, but I can't take your word for it. I would need references. All I have seen up to now are scare lines about the advent of warming, not complete assessments about the state of a warmer Earth. I am not even sure we know enough about these things.
Never heard about glaciers in Himalaya are going. They may be diminishing, but they will still be there in all probability. Shorter winters would give us more crops, as tropical lands already have higher productivity than temperate and cold ones.
Politics apart, if sea levels forecasts are lowered, that in itself represents a lower risk.
The logic is so simple, it is even ridiculous: part of the risk of global warming is higher sea levels.
If sea levels are not expected to be so high, to the expected risk is not so high.
Now if (these) scientists think the risk is still high enough to still warrant our worries, that is quite another thing.
I for myself still think global warming could be nice, after the initial, inevitable adaptation pains. More crops, more habitable lands.
You need a Data Administrator, who would have told you not to use unsigned because it is non-standard -- and to use PostgreSQL because it has DOMAINs.
Been there, done that. "Big Iron" was it name, and it was Oracle on SunOS 5. You could install it on one pass, and Oracle supported it. Not a big success. Perhaps they really liked the idea, and think that it would be easier on free software. One wonders why not OpenSolaris, given it really scales better still; but perhaps they think the freeing of Solaris too late, too little.
It is still not fully functional. I can't make it understand a non-US zip code or city/country combination.
No need to worry about macro portability. Just create your documents in OpenOffice.org and have them everywhere.
Just hope OOo macros will make it into a future version of ODF.
One must, when running Firefox, either remove MS IE totally (not only with MS tools) or preload Firefox in order to compare their memory usages.
Everyone is talking about GoogleFS. But no one is talking about how they manage structured data. How do they do it? Some SQL stuff, some homegrow potion, or have they managed to create a sensible interface for structured data on top of GoogleFS?
Does that mean they will shed MySQL? Sorry if it sounds like trolling, but quite often Wikipedia problems (and problems at other very high load sites such as /. itself, my email provider etc) are traced back to MySQL. Or is MySQL getting so much better so soon?
Here's hoping they just buy Alphora and package Dataphor with Ajax for portal integration. Thus (or by creating some other D-class database language implementation) they could give us a sanitized SQL to avoid its many pitfalls, while having a much more powerful and simple native database engine and language.
There are some fishy things here.
One is that WinFS was not promised for now: it was promised for, say, 15 years ago. MS Access was said by Microsoft to be a first step towards a totally relational OS really soon then. Just as Cairo (MS Windows NT 4) was supposed to be totally OO, and now we are told native code will still be with us for several years yet.
But the worst thing is that they don't understand what they intend to ship. WinFS is not relational, not it can ever be, since being based on (a bastardised version of) ISO SQL it violates the basic fundaments of the relational model. Incidentally, this non-relationalness makes it much larger, less performant, more complex, less powerful than it should be. Coincidence?
Take a look at Alphora Dataphor. While it is not an end-user tool, it has the potential to lower your development costs so much you will be able to actually serve your users.
I am not interested until some of these will have some basic free access over WebNFS (NFSv4).
Not in Debian.
Some years ago I floated the idea, but there wasn't much interest in it if memory serves me. But the hackers' talk at the time flew over my head, so I might be mistaken.
Do remember that, when PostGres became PostgreSQL, it had to shed QUEL, because SQL isn't relational. It might be easier to start from scratch (Rel?), or from the last version of PostGres. Please note the current product is called PostgreSQL; PostGres was the version that used QUEL, with no SQL corruption yet.