Well, talk about BS, it wasn't a genius move to license MS-DOS to IBM; the genius was licensing it non-exclusively. Microsoft didn't have their own disk OS, they went frantically looking for a CP/M clone to license to IBM because Gates accurately foresaw that clones were coming.
Microsoft had text based word processing and spreadsheets before windows
You are talking about Multiplan. Multiplan and Visicalc sold well by modern standards, but this was boom time when PCs were getting shipped to companies by the truckload. Their market share of that boom was tiny. Lotus had almost the entire market, and even as late as 1988 accounted for 70% of the units sold despite being well over 2x as expensive as its competitors. Lotus was rolling in it. It's nearest competitor was Quattro Pro, and calling that "near" was a stretch. Multiplan never was a significant force in the spreadsheet market, although it made Microsoft money.
The CEO runs the company on a day to day basis, and all managers in the company report to him. The CEO and other C level executives are appointed and supervised by the board of directors, which is led by a chairman. The board can dismiss a CEO, veto his decisions; they decide on some kinds of proposals a CEO might make, in other cases choose whether to put something (like being acquired or going private) to the shareholders. The chairman on his own can do none of these things.
Chairman on paper is usually a first among equals position on the board; it's the board that calls the shots. In practice he's the guy favored by the biggest shareholders, and so wields a lot of influence. The power balance between CEO and chairman varies depending on the company and people involved. Some chairmen are hands off, just orchestrating board activities; other ones leverage their influence into an almost a co-CEO position.
Elon Musk owns about 11% of Tesla; in total Musk plus long time insiders who are likely loyal to him own about a quarter of Tesla stock. That's a big bloc, so it's unlikely the chairman will run roughshod over Musk. But 60% of Tesla stock his held by large institutional investors; so it's unlikely the chairman will be Musk's lapdog either.
Overall I see this as a very positive thing for Tesla.
It goes without saying the best employees are usually the ones that cause you the fewest headaches. But that doesn't mean that every time someone has a problem with a coworker they're just whining.
Let's say you hire a female engineer because she's the best candidate, and she comes to you and says another team member is hitting on her. Well, OK, I'd expect a professional woman to handle a little bit of that, but I'd still have a word with the guy. But let's say he just won't back off. This is a *completely* plausible situation. There are a lot of people who are great engineers but complete idiots at that stuff. If that guy is important, it becomes a big headache for you. You could just say, "well, he's more important than she is," but you're opening yourself to a lawsuit, and anyway, you have a right as the boss to expect professionalism. You're running a firm, not a social club, and people should be there to work.
The same goes for any source of friction in the workplace. It could be the MAGA bumper sticker on a conservative engineer's car; he might expect a little bit of ribbing, but you've got to be on top of that.
It's great when you put a team together and everyone likes working together. It's what we all should want as bosses because it makes our work easier and more enjoyable. But you don't always get that even after you've tried to hire the best people you can. Sometimes people act unprofessionally, and the first person to bring that to your attention is not necessarily the problem.
I find that interesting, because those versions stop just before the era that Lotus 1-2-3 became the killer app on DOS. The first version of Lotus came out at the start of 1983, and DOS 2.0 came out two months later.
Lotus was good for Microsoft, but dangerous: people bought PCs to run Lotus; DOS was just something you needed to have. Nobody saw any value in it. Had Lotus bundled its own DOS any time in the next five years, Microsoft would have been finished. Microsoft introduced its own spreadsheet in 87, running on an extremely crude version of Windows. Windows was just a simple graphical interface running on top of DOS, and it wasn't the first such to market or the best. Microsoft was competing with its vendors, and it did *not* have the strongest products.
There were a lot of really bad possible scenarios here which started with MS competitors getting their act together, which never happened. It was like a Gold Rush, everyone was making money hand over fist and nobody but MS was thinking very long-term.
So MS had a killer advantage: to run its competitor's software, you had to buy a (pretty expensive) MS-DOS license. This not only gave them the greatest cash cow in the history of technology, it also gave them a terrific opportunity to mess with their competitors on a technical level. From the late 80s on there were a lot of dark rumors about them abusing that position, some of which are pretty much substantiatable (Stac Electronics), others of which have never been proven ("DOS ain't done til Lotus won't run").
A complete archive of DOS source code through 5.0 might definitively answer questions that have been lingering about Microsoft's behavior in the late 80s early 90s.
It doesn't matter what the motivations are; it's not happening. This is just not the way you throw a snit in FOSS. You do that by forking.
The hypothesis here is that the Contributor Code of Conduct is intolerable, and that all the best contributors are going to take their balls and go home. But they *can't* take their ball back, the only thing they can take away is a copy of their ball.
Let's ignore all the contributors who are being paid by their employers to participate, and assume that every one of the roughly 10,000 people who contribute to the kernel is a gentleman programmer doing it on his own time. If the intolerability hypothesis is true, we'd see a mass revolt. Nobody has produced any evidence yet of such a mass revolt happening. I'm sure there are individuals who are so hacked off they won't work on it, certainly enough to get some media attention, but do you have enough to force anyone's hand?
Straw man much? But just for fun, let's examine the actual strength of that strawman.
The first version of Linux I downloaded was Debian 0.93R6, which came out in October of 1995. At the time, this wouldn't have been my first choice; my first choice was 386BSD, which boasted a *much* more mature kernel, and whose BSD userland I was more familiar with than the then-odd GNU patchwork you got with Linux. The thing was that BSD at the time was the subject of a lawsuit, and the 386BSD was not a party to the settlement. I had no confidence the project wouldn't disappear at any moment.
The legal cloud PC-based BSD variants were under was a major boost to Linux adoption in the early years, giving the then immature product a momentum it would not otherwise have had. And what's more BSD projects continued to provide innovative kernels that were technically competitive, if not superior, to Linux for many years, until the sheer wait of Linux adoption became insurmountable. Even today, BSD code contributions live on in every iPhone sold.
The point is, the Linux kernel has never encompassed all the talented people in the world. Not even most of them. If some important people left the project left the project, others would have replaced them. If Linus himself had abandoned the project early on, then the world we live in wouldn't e all that different, other than BSD standing where Linux does today.
Every employee is replaceable. That does not mean you treat your team badly, which in fact is the whole point of a professional code of conduct. I've been where you've been, running development teams for a small company, and let me give you a piece of advice I wish I'd had: don't tolerate prima donnas. They're seldom as good as they think they are, their attitude spoils the work of their colleagues, and they just suck up too much of your time and energy. If you're building your teams around prima donnas, it won't end well.
It is relevant to where the ridiculous idea (that you can stop people from using code you've previously released under an open source license) came from, and why.
It seems to be trolling. The GPL provisions which free code from its creators control go all the way back to 1989, and in all that time, and in the early 90s there was a big FUD debate over whether contributors could rescind their contributions that was largely intended to scare people into sticking with Microsoft. But in all these years, nobody has ever successfully taken control of his code back.
But if someone could it would be huge story. Which makes it a juicy troll for lazy reporters, either to write FUD pieces or prim little explanations of why it's all baloney. Eventually someone famous has to make a statement, and the troll has his existence validated.
Any team that relies on a gold laying goose is doomed when that goose inevitably gets cooked. And as bad as building your team around an individual indispensable goose is, it's even worse to build it around a flock of indispensable geese.
The truth is that a gold egg laying goose may be valuable, but it's not indispensable; its value is finite and it is replaceable. Eventually the world is going to get along fine without every single one of us.
Really I think a lot of what's going on here is the death of a fantasy: the one where you're so technically awesome that you get a pass on acting like an asshole. That's why people are so irrationally upset at Linus deciding he should probably be a bit less of a dick. That isn't just moving the goalposts for some people, it's taking them off the field.
As for the Code of Conduct, it's basic workplace propriety. That doesn't restrict your worldview, but it does mean you keep it on your own time.
We in the US ranked second in the world for totally carbon emissions, and third in the world on a per capita basis. China is the largest emitter on a net basis, but emits less than half of what we do on a per capita basis.
Now we green tards may be bad at math, but it's not really about math: The US emits 4x the CO2 that Japan does, but we have 2.5x the population of Japan, spread of 26x the area. It's apples to oranges.
Geographically large countries like Australia emit more carbon per capita than comparable but more compact countries like Austria, which has almost the same per capita GDP. Rich countries like Japan emit more carbon than poor ones like Zimbabwe, which has almost the same land area.
What this means is that there are endless arguments you can make about who is the most carbon-virtuous country on the planet, because every country is a special case.
This isn't about winning brownie points in a contest to see who can make his neurotic self-image concerns the center of attention. A 4C temperature increase by 2100 would be catastrophic for everyone. Well, most people, specifically non-rich people.
So we shouldn't judge countries by how much carbon they emit, but by the steps they could be taking to reduce their carbon footprint.
You don't want to contact the legal team; they're job is to secure everything they can for their client, regardless of whether it is reasonable or even legally justifiable. In their world view there's no reason to ever back down from a C&D letter unless that letter is somehow itself illegal, and it's not illegal to exaggerate your rights.
The people you want to get to are the marketing and PR types, who are more concerned about the court of public opinion.
Oppression is like gluten sensitivity. It's a real thing, and a huge problem for the people who have it, but there's a lot of people that have latched onto it as an explanation for things they're unsatisfied with in their lives.
This includes people who bellyache about people bellyaching about oppression; they show a startling lack of irony-awareness.
The fact is that people are just a PITA, and we all have to just learn to live with that, and doing that means recognizing someone can be an asshole without necessarily actually harming us. Our problem is we've lost all concept of that vast middle ground between an innocent slip and outright harmful behavior. We went though a kind of cultural revolution in the 1960s in which concepts of graciousness, politeness, and decency were thrown over for the romantic cult of authenticity.
This has stripped our working vocabulary of words like maladroit, rude, and indecent, leaving us only with the vocabulary of harm.
Blind spot car detection is a great safety net, particularly in situations where you're dealing with traffic with poor lane discipline. If you're moving from the center to the right lane and someone in the right lane is going *much* faster than you, he can move into your blind spot in the fraction of a second it takes to flick your attention between either mirror and the forward view.
But it's not going to help you when you pass a car on the right and the car behind you tries to pass him on the left, for example.
So overall I think blind spot detection is a big plus, as long as you don't rely on it.
I'm also a stickler on two-hand steering, except for backing up. But I think there's no practical reason these days to prefer manual over automatic, even though I still drive a stick. I think the world should standardize on automatics, or at the very least require electronic clutches. This would allow people to brake with their left foot. Studies have shown that moving the right foot from the gas to brake accounts for over half of a driver's braking reaction time.
However it does mean you should give serious consideration to the possibility.
Everyone's an asshole some of the time. If you accept that, you don't have to feel defensive about it. It's maintaining the false pretense that your behavior is utterly assholery-proof that's the problem. As long as that's the basis from which most people argue, an argument is all about who argues for the fantasy version of themselves most effectively.
Well, where you live affects which transportation mode is best for you. That's not surprising.
When my wife and I lived in the city, sometimes we'd look in the fridge and see there was no cream for our morning coffee. Then we'd ask ourselves whether we wanted to go downstairs to the bodega to buy some, or around the corner to the French bakery to have freshly baked brioche and a pot of jam with our coffee. The first time that happened after we moved into our suburban house, I realized that I'd have to get in my car and drive ten minutes to buy cream. So I learned to drink it black.
What I'm saying is that people are more adaptable than they think. Cities, suburbs and rural areas all have their advantages and disadvantages. The extreme concentration of cities has the offsetting advantages of convenience. In NYC "marijuana delivery boy" is a job. Wherever you live, you have to take advantage of what is offered. If you live in the country, you should hike, fish and hunt. If you live in the city you should go to museums, the theater, and weird little shops and restaurants. Suburban life is by far the least interesting life there is; we moved there mainly for the schools.
Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.
Emphasis mine here: acting ethically doesn't mean you have to cripple yourself by focusing solely on other peoples's rights. But they're part of the constraints you actually operate under, so it's best not to ignore them.
This isn't just an ethical prescription, it's practical advice. Treating your coworkers with respect doesn't precluding fighting over technical details. In fact, if you've never tried it you'll be amazed at how much more productive a heated but respectful argument is over one where everyone's objective is to beat the other guy by any means available. That's the difference between the best ideas winning and the loudest dickheads winning.
I propose slashdotters from a joint stock company, similar to the Hudson's Bay Company, for the economic exploitation of Middle Earth.
We'll promise that by 2030 to our first colony of 3000 settlers collecting Mûmakil ivory, to be followed by large scale ranching of the Kine of Araw and of course independent mithril prospecting with our trading stations enjoying a monopoly on gear and a monopsony on ore.
It'd work just as well as this Moon venture if you could get people excited enough to pay our salaries for a few years.
In all seriousness, ancient Rome was probably the first habitation that would strike a modern urban dweller as a "city", with a population of about a million. Most of the more ancient cities would have been towns at best. Babylon was the largest city in the world in 1600 BCE, with a population of maybe 200,000. Thebes has maybe 40,000 inhabitants in 2000 BCE, and Uruk in its heyday was maybe 80,000.
Go back further, to the dawn of cities in the neolithic period, and cities get even smaller. In its day Çatalhöyük in Turkey may have been the largest city in the world with a population of around 5000 through most of its history. To put that in perspective, the world's population at the time was about 1000x smaller, starting at 6 million at the dawn of the neolithic.
The Moon is literally a whole new world. What counts as a "city" needs to be scaled to the population of that world. To qualify as a "city", then, a small settlement would have to perform the cultural, economic and administrative functions of a much larger terrestrial city.
You're quibbling. Nobody is suggesting public transportation as an alternative for 4x4 offroading.
We humans are creatures of habit; we automatically compare the best case for the way we habitually do things to the worst case when we contemplate doing something differently.
Of course under ideal conditions for driving it's better to drive. If you're driving from your house to your reserved parking space twenty minutes away on uncongested roads, it's going to be impossible to even imagine a more convenient public transit option. But there's a lot of stuff about driving that sucks too. Traffic jams. Cops. Accidents. Road construction. Insurance. Breakdowns. Finding parking. Theft and vandalism. Snow in some places. And until you have fully autonomous cars, driving is downtime; you can't read or really pay attention to entertainment.
A public transit system that (a) has frequent service and (b) is reliable and (c) has all-day service isn't a problem to schedule your travel on. Take NYC's subway. Sure the MTA is far from perfect, but it's a much better way to get around than driving and much cheaper than Uber. But an ultra-dense urban city core is the ideal scenario for public transit.
I know more about mosquito control, since I worked in that industry for decades, but in that field the common pesticides are chosen because they have low toxicity for non-target species and low potential for bioaccumulation because once deployed in the environment they break down rapidly into non-toxic byproducts. I assume that herbicides are approved using similar criteria.
Now herbicides are targeted at the plant kingdoom, and bees are in the animal kingdom. Glycophosphate in particular targets a metabolic pathway that is found in plants and fungi, but not animals. That tells you exactly zero about whether it's harmless to animals; it might kill animals in a completely different way. You have to conduct tests.
Tests show that glycophosphates have a high LD50 (i.e., low toxicity) for animals, but that's acute toxicity. It takes a lot of Roundup to kill an animal outright, but that doesn't mean it can't affect the animals behavior and reproduction in ecologically disruptive ways. If you exposed all humans to a drug which was harmless but made men impotent, human populations would crash even if the drug had an infinitely high LD50.
If this sounds complicated, that's because it is. But that's no reason to throw our hands up in the air and assume everything will be OK. At this point nobody's in any position to state anything definitive about the impact of glycophosphates on bees; this study has successfully opened a question we don't have an answer for yet. But if we study this problem, we'll get a definitive answer. Either way some people might not like that answer, but at least it's a rational basis for making policy.
He started pestering legislators, met with one of them, started a petition that has drawn support from national organizations.
"Leading" in this context means "exercising leadership", so I'd say yes, he qualifies as *a* leading advocate. "*The*" leading advocate is clearly hyperbole, but that's the way people think about these things. We like to personify abstract issues, to put a single face on complicated political movements. George Washington is the undisputed "Father of His Country", but there were many others who could lay claim to that title with equal justice.
I'd like to turn this around and ask, what is it about this person that makes him undeserving of recognition as a leader?
The error bars on carbon are wide, because it's a lot more dynamic. Nitrous oxide is destroyed slowly by solar energy, but CO2 is absorbed through several mechanisms that aren't quite in equilibrium. If you take the most optimistic possible assumptions CO2 is shorter lived than N20; if you take the most pessimistic it's longer lived.
This is the problem with a killer demo. People focus on the wrong thing.
The problem isn't lakes burping methane, it's methane escaping from thawing permafrost. The process is visible in Arctic lakes, but that doesn't mean the problem is Arctic lakes. They just trap the methane temporarily until they, as you say, overturn.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, talk about BS, it wasn't a genius move to license MS-DOS to IBM; the genius was licensing it non-exclusively. Microsoft didn't have their own disk OS, they went frantically looking for a CP/M clone to license to IBM because Gates accurately foresaw that clones were coming.
Microsoft had text based word processing and spreadsheets before windows
You are talking about Multiplan. Multiplan and Visicalc sold well by modern standards, but this was boom time when PCs were getting shipped to companies by the truckload. Their market share of that boom was tiny. Lotus had almost the entire market, and even as late as 1988 accounted for 70% of the units sold despite being well over 2x as expensive as its competitors. Lotus was rolling in it. It's nearest competitor was Quattro Pro, and calling that "near" was a stretch. Multiplan never was a significant force in the spreadsheet market, although it made Microsoft money.
This means Musk is going to have a boss.
The CEO runs the company on a day to day basis, and all managers in the company report to him. The CEO and other C level executives are appointed and supervised by the board of directors, which is led by a chairman. The board can dismiss a CEO, veto his decisions; they decide on some kinds of proposals a CEO might make, in other cases choose whether to put something (like being acquired or going private) to the shareholders. The chairman on his own can do none of these things.
Chairman on paper is usually a first among equals position on the board; it's the board that calls the shots. In practice he's the guy favored by the biggest shareholders, and so wields a lot of influence. The power balance between CEO and chairman varies depending on the company and people involved. Some chairmen are hands off, just orchestrating board activities; other ones leverage their influence into an almost a co-CEO position.
Elon Musk owns about 11% of Tesla; in total Musk plus long time insiders who are likely loyal to him own about a quarter of Tesla stock. That's a big bloc, so it's unlikely the chairman will run roughshod over Musk. But 60% of Tesla stock his held by large institutional investors; so it's unlikely the chairman will be Musk's lapdog either.
Overall I see this as a very positive thing for Tesla.
It goes without saying the best employees are usually the ones that cause you the fewest headaches. But that doesn't mean that every time someone has a problem with a coworker they're just whining.
Let's say you hire a female engineer because she's the best candidate, and she comes to you and says another team member is hitting on her. Well, OK, I'd expect a professional woman to handle a little bit of that, but I'd still have a word with the guy. But let's say he just won't back off. This is a *completely* plausible situation. There are a lot of people who are great engineers but complete idiots at that stuff. If that guy is important, it becomes a big headache for you. You could just say, "well, he's more important than she is," but you're opening yourself to a lawsuit, and anyway, you have a right as the boss to expect professionalism. You're running a firm, not a social club, and people should be there to work.
The same goes for any source of friction in the workplace. It could be the MAGA bumper sticker on a conservative engineer's car; he might expect a little bit of ribbing, but you've got to be on top of that.
It's great when you put a team together and everyone likes working together. It's what we all should want as bosses because it makes our work easier and more enjoyable. But you don't always get that even after you've tried to hire the best people you can. Sometimes people act unprofessionally, and the first person to bring that to your attention is not necessarily the problem.
I find that interesting, because those versions stop just before the era that Lotus 1-2-3 became the killer app on DOS. The first version of Lotus came out at the start of 1983, and DOS 2.0 came out two months later.
Lotus was good for Microsoft, but dangerous: people bought PCs to run Lotus; DOS was just something you needed to have. Nobody saw any value in it. Had Lotus bundled its own DOS any time in the next five years, Microsoft would have been finished. Microsoft introduced its own spreadsheet in 87, running on an extremely crude version of Windows. Windows was just a simple graphical interface running on top of DOS, and it wasn't the first such to market or the best. Microsoft was competing with its vendors, and it did *not* have the strongest products.
There were a lot of really bad possible scenarios here which started with MS competitors getting their act together, which never happened. It was like a Gold Rush, everyone was making money hand over fist and nobody but MS was thinking very long-term.
So MS had a killer advantage: to run its competitor's software, you had to buy a (pretty expensive) MS-DOS license. This not only gave them the greatest cash cow in the history of technology, it also gave them a terrific opportunity to mess with their competitors on a technical level. From the late 80s on there were a lot of dark rumors about them abusing that position, some of which are pretty much substantiatable (Stac Electronics), others of which have never been proven ("DOS ain't done til Lotus won't run").
A complete archive of DOS source code through 5.0 might definitively answer questions that have been lingering about Microsoft's behavior in the late 80s early 90s.
It doesn't matter what the motivations are; it's not happening. This is just not the way you throw a snit in FOSS. You do that by forking.
The hypothesis here is that the Contributor Code of Conduct is intolerable, and that all the best contributors are going to take their balls and go home. But they *can't* take their ball back, the only thing they can take away is a copy of their ball.
Let's ignore all the contributors who are being paid by their employers to participate, and assume that every one of the roughly 10,000 people who contribute to the kernel is a gentleman programmer doing it on his own time. If the intolerability hypothesis is true, we'd see a mass revolt. Nobody has produced any evidence yet of such a mass revolt happening. I'm sure there are individuals who are so hacked off they won't work on it, certainly enough to get some media attention, but do you have enough to force anyone's hand?
Oy. Never hand an ignoramus a golden hammer.
Straw man much? But just for fun, let's examine the actual strength of that strawman.
The first version of Linux I downloaded was Debian 0.93R6, which came out in October of 1995. At the time, this wouldn't have been my first choice; my first choice was 386BSD, which boasted a *much* more mature kernel, and whose BSD userland I was more familiar with than the then-odd GNU patchwork you got with Linux. The thing was that BSD at the time was the subject of a lawsuit, and the 386BSD was not a party to the settlement. I had no confidence the project wouldn't disappear at any moment.
The legal cloud PC-based BSD variants were under was a major boost to Linux adoption in the early years, giving the then immature product a momentum it would not otherwise have had. And what's more BSD projects continued to provide innovative kernels that were technically competitive, if not superior, to Linux for many years, until the sheer wait of Linux adoption became insurmountable. Even today, BSD code contributions live on in every iPhone sold.
The point is, the Linux kernel has never encompassed all the talented people in the world. Not even most of them. If some important people left the project left the project, others would have replaced them. If Linus himself had abandoned the project early on, then the world we live in wouldn't e all that different, other than BSD standing where Linux does today.
Every employee is replaceable. That does not mean you treat your team badly, which in fact is the whole point of a professional code of conduct. I've been where you've been, running development teams for a small company, and let me give you a piece of advice I wish I'd had: don't tolerate prima donnas. They're seldom as good as they think they are, their attitude spoils the work of their colleagues, and they just suck up too much of your time and energy. If you're building your teams around prima donnas, it won't end well.
It is relevant to where the ridiculous idea (that you can stop people from using code you've previously released under an open source license) came from, and why.
It seems to be trolling. The GPL provisions which free code from its creators control go all the way back to 1989, and in all that time, and in the early 90s there was a big FUD debate over whether contributors could rescind their contributions that was largely intended to scare people into sticking with Microsoft. But in all these years, nobody has ever successfully taken control of his code back.
But if someone could it would be huge story. Which makes it a juicy troll for lazy reporters, either to write FUD pieces or prim little explanations of why it's all baloney. Eventually someone famous has to make a statement, and the troll has his existence validated.
Any team that relies on a gold laying goose is doomed when that goose inevitably gets cooked. And as bad as building your team around an individual indispensable goose is, it's even worse to build it around a flock of indispensable geese.
The truth is that a gold egg laying goose may be valuable, but it's not indispensable; its value is finite and it is replaceable. Eventually the world is going to get along fine without every single one of us.
Really I think a lot of what's going on here is the death of a fantasy: the one where you're so technically awesome that you get a pass on acting like an asshole. That's why people are so irrationally upset at Linus deciding he should probably be a bit less of a dick. That isn't just moving the goalposts for some people, it's taking them off the field.
As for the Code of Conduct, it's basic workplace propriety. That doesn't restrict your worldview, but it does mean you keep it on your own time.
We in the US ranked second in the world for totally carbon emissions, and third in the world on a per capita basis. China is the largest emitter on a net basis, but emits less than half of what we do on a per capita basis.
Now we green tards may be bad at math, but it's not really about math: The US emits 4x the CO2 that Japan does, but we have 2.5x the population of Japan, spread of 26x the area. It's apples to oranges.
Geographically large countries like Australia emit more carbon per capita than comparable but more compact countries like Austria, which has almost the same per capita GDP. Rich countries like Japan emit more carbon than poor ones like Zimbabwe, which has almost the same land area.
What this means is that there are endless arguments you can make about who is the most carbon-virtuous country on the planet, because every country is a special case.
This isn't about winning brownie points in a contest to see who can make his neurotic self-image concerns the center of attention. A 4C temperature increase by 2100 would be catastrophic for everyone. Well, most people, specifically non-rich people.
So we shouldn't judge countries by how much carbon they emit, but by the steps they could be taking to reduce their carbon footprint.
You don't want to contact the legal team; they're job is to secure everything they can for their client, regardless of whether it is reasonable or even legally justifiable. In their world view there's no reason to ever back down from a C&D letter unless that letter is somehow itself illegal, and it's not illegal to exaggerate your rights.
The people you want to get to are the marketing and PR types, who are more concerned about the court of public opinion.
Oppression is like gluten sensitivity. It's a real thing, and a huge problem for the people who have it, but there's a lot of people that have latched onto it as an explanation for things they're unsatisfied with in their lives.
This includes people who bellyache about people bellyaching about oppression; they show a startling lack of irony-awareness.
The fact is that people are just a PITA, and we all have to just learn to live with that, and doing that means recognizing someone can be an asshole without necessarily actually harming us. Our problem is we've lost all concept of that vast middle ground between an innocent slip and outright harmful behavior. We went though a kind of cultural revolution in the 1960s in which concepts of graciousness, politeness, and decency were thrown over for the romantic cult of authenticity.
This has stripped our working vocabulary of words like maladroit, rude, and indecent, leaving us only with the vocabulary of harm.
Blind spot car detection is a great safety net, particularly in situations where you're dealing with traffic with poor lane discipline. If you're moving from the center to the right lane and someone in the right lane is going *much* faster than you, he can move into your blind spot in the fraction of a second it takes to flick your attention between either mirror and the forward view.
But it's not going to help you when you pass a car on the right and the car behind you tries to pass him on the left, for example.
So overall I think blind spot detection is a big plus, as long as you don't rely on it.
I'm also a stickler on two-hand steering, except for backing up. But I think there's no practical reason these days to prefer manual over automatic, even though I still drive a stick. I think the world should standardize on automatics, or at the very least require electronic clutches. This would allow people to brake with their left foot. Studies have shown that moving the right foot from the gas to brake accounts for over half of a driver's braking reaction time.
It always amazes me the degree to which drivers trust their lives to other drivers.
There's no avoiding doing that *some* times, but there is such a thing as pushing your luck too far.
However it does mean you should give serious consideration to the possibility.
Everyone's an asshole some of the time. If you accept that, you don't have to feel defensive about it. It's maintaining the false pretense that your behavior is utterly assholery-proof that's the problem. As long as that's the basis from which most people argue, an argument is all about who argues for the fantasy version of themselves most effectively.
Well, where you live affects which transportation mode is best for you. That's not surprising.
When my wife and I lived in the city, sometimes we'd look in the fridge and see there was no cream for our morning coffee. Then we'd ask ourselves whether we wanted to go downstairs to the bodega to buy some, or around the corner to the French bakery to have freshly baked brioche and a pot of jam with our coffee. The first time that happened after we moved into our suburban house, I realized that I'd have to get in my car and drive ten minutes to buy cream. So I learned to drink it black.
What I'm saying is that people are more adaptable than they think. Cities, suburbs and rural areas all have their advantages and disadvantages. The extreme concentration of cities has the offsetting advantages of convenience. In NYC "marijuana delivery boy" is a job. Wherever you live, you have to take advantage of what is offered. If you live in the country, you should hike, fish and hunt. If you live in the city you should go to museums, the theater, and weird little shops and restaurants. Suburban life is by far the least interesting life there is; we moved there mainly for the schools.
... of the Categorical Imperative:
Emphasis mine here: acting ethically doesn't mean you have to cripple yourself by focusing solely on other peoples's rights. But they're part of the constraints you actually operate under, so it's best not to ignore them.
This isn't just an ethical prescription, it's practical advice. Treating your coworkers with respect doesn't precluding fighting over technical details. In fact, if you've never tried it you'll be amazed at how much more productive a heated but respectful argument is over one where everyone's objective is to beat the other guy by any means available. That's the difference between the best ideas winning and the loudest dickheads winning.
I propose slashdotters from a joint stock company, similar to the Hudson's Bay Company, for the economic exploitation of Middle Earth.
We'll promise that by 2030 to our first colony of 3000 settlers collecting Mûmakil ivory, to be followed by large scale ranching of the Kine of Araw and of course independent mithril prospecting with our trading stations enjoying a monopoly on gear and a monopsony on ore.
It'd work just as well as this Moon venture if you could get people excited enough to pay our salaries for a few years.
That's a large size city for the Moon.
In all seriousness, ancient Rome was probably the first habitation that would strike a modern urban dweller as a "city", with a population of about a million. Most of the more ancient cities would have been towns at best. Babylon was the largest city in the world in 1600 BCE, with a population of maybe 200,000. Thebes has maybe 40,000 inhabitants in 2000 BCE, and Uruk in its heyday was maybe 80,000.
Go back further, to the dawn of cities in the neolithic period, and cities get even smaller. In its day Çatalhöyük in Turkey may have been the largest city in the world with a population of around 5000 through most of its history. To put that in perspective, the world's population at the time was about 1000x smaller, starting at 6 million at the dawn of the neolithic.
The Moon is literally a whole new world. What counts as a "city" needs to be scaled to the population of that world. To qualify as a "city", then, a small settlement would have to perform the cultural, economic and administrative functions of a much larger terrestrial city.
You're quibbling. Nobody is suggesting public transportation as an alternative for 4x4 offroading.
We humans are creatures of habit; we automatically compare the best case for the way we habitually do things to the worst case when we contemplate doing something differently.
Of course under ideal conditions for driving it's better to drive. If you're driving from your house to your reserved parking space twenty minutes away on uncongested roads, it's going to be impossible to even imagine a more convenient public transit option. But there's a lot of stuff about driving that sucks too. Traffic jams. Cops. Accidents. Road construction. Insurance. Breakdowns. Finding parking. Theft and vandalism. Snow in some places. And until you have fully autonomous cars, driving is downtime; you can't read or really pay attention to entertainment.
A public transit system that (a) has frequent service and (b) is reliable and (c) has all-day service isn't a problem to schedule your travel on. Take NYC's subway. Sure the MTA is far from perfect, but it's a much better way to get around than driving and much cheaper than Uber. But an ultra-dense urban city core is the ideal scenario for public transit.
It doesn't necessarily follow.
I know more about mosquito control, since I worked in that industry for decades, but in that field the common pesticides are chosen because they have low toxicity for non-target species and low potential for bioaccumulation because once deployed in the environment they break down rapidly into non-toxic byproducts. I assume that herbicides are approved using similar criteria.
Now herbicides are targeted at the plant kingdoom, and bees are in the animal kingdom. Glycophosphate in particular targets a metabolic pathway that is found in plants and fungi, but not animals. That tells you exactly zero about whether it's harmless to animals; it might kill animals in a completely different way. You have to conduct tests.
Tests show that glycophosphates have a high LD50 (i.e., low toxicity) for animals, but that's acute toxicity. It takes a lot of Roundup to kill an animal outright, but that doesn't mean it can't affect the animals behavior and reproduction in ecologically disruptive ways. If you exposed all humans to a drug which was harmless but made men impotent, human populations would crash even if the drug had an infinitely high LD50.
If this sounds complicated, that's because it is. But that's no reason to throw our hands up in the air and assume everything will be OK. At this point nobody's in any position to state anything definitive about the impact of glycophosphates on bees; this study has successfully opened a question we don't have an answer for yet. But if we study this problem, we'll get a definitive answer. Either way some people might not like that answer, but at least it's a rational basis for making policy.
He started pestering legislators, met with one of them, started a petition that has drawn support from national organizations.
"Leading" in this context means "exercising leadership", so I'd say yes, he qualifies as *a* leading advocate. "*The*" leading advocate is clearly hyperbole, but that's the way people think about these things. We like to personify abstract issues, to put a single face on complicated political movements. George Washington is the undisputed "Father of His Country", but there were many others who could lay claim to that title with equal justice.
I'd like to turn this around and ask, what is it about this person that makes him undeserving of recognition as a leader?
The error bars on carbon are wide, because it's a lot more dynamic. Nitrous oxide is destroyed slowly by solar energy, but CO2 is absorbed through several mechanisms that aren't quite in equilibrium. If you take the most optimistic possible assumptions CO2 is shorter lived than N20; if you take the most pessimistic it's longer lived.
This is the problem with a killer demo. People focus on the wrong thing.
The problem isn't lakes burping methane, it's methane escaping from thawing permafrost. The process is visible in Arctic lakes, but that doesn't mean the problem is Arctic lakes. They just trap the methane temporarily until they, as you say, overturn.
CO2 is not the top planet-warming greenhouse gas, sweety, neither in abundance nor potency.
But it's a champ when it comes to *longevity*, sugar pie.