I believe that the inequality we experience is directly related to the size of the corporations and economy in whole. If the planet was bigger, and could support ten times as many people than the inequality would be even greater. The richest in that world may have wealth that exceeds even the richest today -- likely by a factor of five to ten.
If Ted Nelson's Xanadu we could have had an ad-free net (or nearly so). In his Xanadu you would be paying out small fractions of cents for every word you read to the original authors. If you were an author you would get paid for all your work but not those you quote. This would have made the Internet more democratic and egalitarian. Also instead of traffic being highly concentrated among a small number of websites, it would be spread out more.
This system would have greatly reduced the need for advertising because it would provide another way to make money off the Internet. It would help us wean ourselves of the corruption of advertising and the rampant consumerism it causes. Perhaps Xanadu could have made us stand up to the religion of continuous economic growth before we completely trash our planet.
Human beings are currently with its power are winners against the rest of nature. If we can prevent the exhaustion of our resources we will be in better shape as the exhaustion of our resources is an issue that haunt us within our lifetimes.
Welcome, brother, grab a cowl and toss your razor in the bin on your right. Is it state the obvious Friday already, or is this just another opportunity for an argument about human impact on the climate?
Nobody is citing climate change and all the animals they cite in TFS were extinct well before humanity is supposed to have had an impact on the planet's climate. So I guess it's the former if your two choices are the only ones I've got.
But then again, I had no idea we were supposedly responsible for the extinction of mammoth.
According to Jared Diamond, human beings have caused the extinction of a large fraction of the megafauna after settling into new areas. North America had more big game animals than Africa has today prior to the arrival of the first people in North America 11,000 years ago. After 500 years, the Mammoth, Saber-tooth Tiger and many more were gone. This situation was least severe in Africa where human first evolved, but bad in Australia and every island in the world.
... we continue to drive animal extinctions today through the destruction of wild lands, consumption of animals as a resource or a luxury, and persecution of species we see as threats or competitors.
Well, I grant the "threats or competitors" part, to some degree. But the U.S. now has MORE forests and other wildlife habitat than it had 100 years ago. In my general area, wolves and peregrine falcons have been reintroduced, quite successfully (there is now a wolf hunting season). Not to mention the rebound of raptors like osprey and eagles. There are an abundance of other predators like badgers and mountain lions... which means a robust-enough prey population to support them.
I don't know where you live, but where I do, there's not much extinction going on. Quite the opposite, actually.
Not much has gone extinct in the USA or Canada likely. True. This also likely applies to Europe and other first world nations. In general, extinction rates are not too bad in the temperate part of the world. But the situation is bad in tropical places.
Compare:
People are richer in first world nations and can afford conservation instead of in a desperate fight for survival that leads to slash and burn practices.
Animals in temperate climates must adapt to harsher climatic conditions and have larger ranges. In tropical areas the biodiversity is great and animals have much smaller ranges.
On the other hand, even in first world nations the situation is not necessary rosy. Some plants and animals are declining and in trouble. Particularly freshwater mussels. The Photo Field Guide to the Freshwater Mussels of Ontario states that 28 out of 41 of the native species in Ontario are in decline. Aerial insectivores are the types of birds in the most trouble. This points to trouble with insects...
Also of note is the fact that much of the manufacturing and pollution has been moved to third world nations. We have a cleaner environment while the Chinese and others suffer.
Global warming is clouding the bigger issue of habitat destruction. Human beings have altered the planet significantly. We have taken a significant proportion of the planets biomass to devote to agriculture. The fact that aerial insectivores are doing badly suggest that flying insects are in significantly lower numbers and biodiversity. Bees are in trouble due to colony collapse disorder leading to losses of crops because flowers are not getting pollinated as often.
We have made great cities. Aside from the land these cities take, a substantial amount of resources are required to sustain them. Wood, fossil fuels and minerals are all required in vast quantities. Forests get altered, the air and water get polluted.
The oceans are in trouble due to overfishing. For most commercial fish there is only 10% or less of its original abundance. Plastic is accumulating in the ocean.
MInor in comparison are street lights. Nocturnal bugs get trapped by lights and are easy prey in the morning. Many nocturnal species of bugs are getting reduced in numbers or going extinct.
Massive habitat change will cause climate change... and the consequences are complex and unpleasant.
If it is nature of life to expand and utilize every niche available then any spacefaring civilization should be able to expand into the universe at a significant fraction of the speed of light while utilizing every sizable rock in every solar system on the way. That means a civilization could take over a significant portion of the whole universe in a billion years or so. How can that not be detectable? See the book Millennial Project by Marshall Savage.
If life expands in this matter than our universe probably has many planets with primitive life (bacteria/viruses) or a few very old civilizations that span millions or even billions of light years. Other civilizations at our stage of development are unlikely due to the extreme short time scale of a technological but pre-space colonizing civilization like ours.
What has been released so far is a tease. It demonstrates nicely the transclusion and transcopyright concepts. For it to be truly useful it needs the ability to make your own documents with the ability to charge micropayments. Even then it will take awhile before people start to use it, but once it hits critical mass, it will be a solid alternative for publishing. Much better than the web. A global publishing system based on transclusions and micropayments would even things out -- and put serious but smaller scale publishing in the hands of ordinary people. The power would not be concentrated among the worlds most popular web sites and our culture would be less subverted by the need to advertise to pay the bills.
What hasn't been shone in the docs well is what the authoring tools will be like. The better the authoring tools, the better the adoption of this software. Ted Nelson wants something called "real cut and paste". This is simply slicing and dicing a document into pieces and rearranging them. Astonishing that no software today can do this. So software today will even allow you to draw sentences around. Freeplane, a mind-mapping program, comes to doing real cut-and-paste. Rearranging text like you rearrange text in a mind-mapping program would be best accomplished on a 4K monitor, although dual HD monitors would do. Cut-and-paste as it is today is more like hide-and-plug -- the text is temporarily taken off the screen and put into a new place.
Give the Xanadu project its due. It is still relevant today and needed. And while the Xanadu project is Ted's big idea... he has others as well. I particularly like his Floating World(tm) spec. I myself have been working towards creating part of this Floating World idea in my spare time (development has been slow, oh well). Though I want to get the photo organizer and checklist software parts done first. If the programmers on this latest attempt at Xanadu succeed they may beat me to getting around to the Floating World ideas (although of course not quite as laid out in the old design). If so, I am OK with that.
We are at the top of the food chain because 50,000 years ago we were the first animals with the ability to accumulate knowledge. Not to mention fossil fuels in the last couple hundred years that provides each individual with thousands perhaps millions times more energy than food alone can provide. The rest of nature didn't stand a chance.
I do rolling stops at stop signs and complete stops at red lights (I sometimes process to cross on the red light if the intersection is completely empty and I see no cars coming from any direction). I always try to get the eye contact of anyone stopped at an intersection, if they do not see me I will slow down or stop until they do see me or they leave the intersection. Very important. I once tried to cross a busy intersection and the car turning left from the opposite intersection didn't see me as I was making my way across. I had to adjust my path considerable to avoid him/her. I never try to cross that intersection anymore.
I disagree. Mars is the only planet in the solar system where terraforming would be possible, and for that reason it should be done. Of course, it will take a very long time and won't even be started in our lifetimes. Humans may well live there for centuries until domes before terraforming starts. Terraforming provides opportunities to a solar system based civilization. It is a second life arc. Endangered species could be put there. Or experiments with new ecosystems and new lifeforms could be tried there as well. On Mars, some things can be done for life that simply can't be done on the countless asteroids we will colonize.
My assumption is that an intelligent civilization will expand fast once it really starts to colonize outer space. It might take about 1000 years after the start of colonizing the solar system to build up the technology and spare energy resources to expand to other star systems. Once a race starts to reach out to other star system, it will do at a significant fraction of the speed of light. So a galaxy like the Milky Way could be colonized in 200,000 years. Every star system in that galaxy would have almost every world colonized (planets, moon, asteroids, kuiperoids, etc) in a mere 10,000 years after it is first reached if not sooner.
If this assumption is right, an intelligent race would stick out and be easily detected. Because we haven't detected an intelligent race they may not be out there. However, plenty of planets without interstellar civilizations may well exist. Who knows.
Humanity's power started to take off once we developed sophisticated speech and thereby the means to accumulate knowledge generation after generation. Our current power comes from fossil fuels that provides access to thousands of times more energy per capita than without it. The fossil fuel era on our planet will be short compared to age of the universe. Like a star that is burning fusing silcon before it goes supernova...
Getting off this dirtball will not happen in our lifetimes, of course. But apart from a significant collapse of civilization, it will likely happen. Though it will take hundreds if not thousands of years. Even after we get off Earth, we will be colonizing our solar system for hundreds, perhaps close to a thousand years before we venture out into the stars.
As far habitable planets out there... a planet in the habitable zone is no guarantee it is habitable, let alone have life on it.
Given the nature of life, when given the resource, life grows exponentially, I tend to believe that humanity is the most intelligent life in the universe. If there were other intelligent races out there they would colonize space at blinding speed compared to how old the universe is now. It would be difficult if not impossible to hide a civilization that has colonize entire galaxies.
Even if you get rid of all bugs, there will still be security holes. Fixing these security holes can potentially jeopardize the functionality of the software. For example, if you allow scripting in software, you introduce many difficult to fix security holes. If those security holes were fixed, the scripting will inevitability be less useful.
Before we can even seriously think about sending people to other solar systems, we should colonize ours. We have not only seven other planets, over 150 known moons but also hundreds of thousands of small worlds -- the asteroids, the Kuiper Belts and beyond. With all these worlds the human population could reach into the trillions. Colonizing the solar system would allow us to build the infrastructure necessary to give us access to a lot more energy than fossil fuels could ever provide. With this energy and infrastructure it will then be a serious possibility to start sending out interstellar spaceship with the intent to colonize other solar systems.
Before we can even colonize the solar system, we must prepare for the end of our fossil fuel subsidy and stabilize our civilization and the environment. Then we can bank our collected energy savings from renewable energy generators like solar panels etc to start our colonization of the solar system.
Agreed. But part of what makes programming hard is politics and conventions. Applications, file formats and database are complicated ways of handling information. An application is a package of functionality. You can't easily if at all directly use the feature of somebody's else program. So a programmer has to reinvent them. File formats and database are packages of information. The ways that information can be stored in file formats and databases are immense complicating the programmers job at getting at information.
What if it were possible for programmers and even users to combine software features into packages of their design easily? What if simpler ways to handle information were available and in wide use, such as the zigzag data structure? Could business tolerate such simplification of software development?
760,000 songs may be close to all the digital songs in existence. If you don't need your hard drive to hold movies (and some other niches like scientific data) then today's hard drives are more than big enough in size. You can easily get a solid state drive nowadays that can hold everything. They are much faster than hard drive, but have shorter lives. So the future is in increasing the speed of storage while also increasing the lifespan of the storage. If 20 TB hard drives come out in five years -- I'll say so what.
No. Learning to code is necessary for only a small part of the population, although I bet most on Slashdot have tried a bit of coding.
I don't think there is any subject important enough that I would recommend everyone learn it. Although on the other hand, it is easy to come up with arguments why this subject and that subject is useful.
Unfortunately, the education system is not designed to be ideal environment for learning, far from it. http://www.johntaylorgatto.com...
The key problem is teaching subjects kids are not interested in at the time it is taught. Very few kids have the option of learning things in school in the order they want. Gobs of time is wasted trying to shove down information kids are not motivated to learn.
They don't want that. What they want is that desktop gradually retreats to acting more like a guest OS / GUI on a Metro based system. Moreover that is really suboptimal even now. Far better is:
large screen = desktop
small touch screen = metro
A touch interface could have a niche on a desktop. Rearranging mind maps by touch would be nice on a desktop. Also nice would be old-style cut-and-paste. Say you write a document and you cut it up into a bunch of text fragments. Then you can rearrange the pieces as you wish. Would be nice on those $500 4K monitors...
Although wind power does not contribute to global warming through greenhouse gas emission, it does extract kinetic energy from the atmosphere and therefore may alter global climate even at continental scales
It may be the lesser of evils compared to some other supplemental energy options but it isn't perfect- and it isn't a good candidate for base load
All energy sources have pitfalls. The advantage of renewables such as wind, solar, geothermal and others is its renewable and key to the long term survival of the human race at a decent but lower standard of living. When we lose fossil fuels in the coming centuries, provided that civilization doesn't collapse, being forced to rely on renewables will destroy our throwaway culture. To get our money's worth out of renewables will require doing everything in our power to extend the lifespan of our solar panels, wind turbines and so on particularly after all the low hanging fruit is taken.
The principle disadvantages of renewables are the amount of space required and the unpredictability of them. Wind has unknown effects on global climate and kills flying animals (birds, bats and insects). Solar could have an effect at global scales like wind power. Solar could withdraw some heat from the planet. But could that withdrawal compensate for global warming? I doubt it.
Fossil fuels have the primary advantages of being energy dense and predicable. So fossil fuels take up less space. But fossil fuels are polluting and will not last much longer.
Also nonrenewable is nuclear. Nuclear is extremely energy dense and will take longer to use up than fossil fuels. Aside from extremely hazardous nuclear waste that could be used for nuclear bombs, nuclear is relatively clean. Nuclear will likely be turned to when the rate that fossil fuels that can extracted from the planet go into sharp declines and renewables are unable to meet the gap.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe that the inequality we experience is directly related to the size of the corporations and economy in whole. If the planet was bigger, and could support ten times as many people than the inequality would be even greater. The richest in that world may have wealth that exceeds even the richest today -- likely by a factor of five to ten.
If Ted Nelson's Xanadu we could have had an ad-free net (or nearly so). In his Xanadu you would be paying out small fractions of cents for every word you read to the original authors. If you were an author you would get paid for all your work but not those you quote. This would have made the Internet more democratic and egalitarian. Also instead of traffic being highly concentrated among a small number of websites, it would be spread out more.
This system would have greatly reduced the need for advertising because it would provide another way to make money off the Internet. It would help us wean ourselves of the corruption of advertising and the rampant consumerism it causes. Perhaps Xanadu could have made us stand up to the religion of continuous economic growth before we completely trash our planet.
Gee whiz, we can't call it Internet Exploder anymore.
Human beings are currently with its power are winners against the rest of nature. If we can prevent the exhaustion of our resources we will be in better shape as the exhaustion of our resources is an issue that haunt us within our lifetimes.
Human beings are the most dangerous invasive species on the planet.
There are efforts to bring back the Passenger Pigeon from extinction. Even if successful, don't expect too much from this strategy.
Welcome, brother, grab a cowl and toss your razor in the bin on your right. Is it state the obvious Friday already, or is this just another opportunity for an argument about human impact on the climate?
Nobody is citing climate change and all the animals they cite in TFS were extinct well before humanity is supposed to have had an impact on the planet's climate. So I guess it's the former if your two choices are the only ones I've got.
But then again, I had no idea we were supposedly responsible for the extinction of mammoth.
According to Jared Diamond, human beings have caused the extinction of a large fraction of the megafauna after settling into new areas. North America had more big game animals than Africa has today prior to the arrival of the first people in North America 11,000 years ago. After 500 years, the Mammoth, Saber-tooth Tiger and many more were gone. This situation was least severe in Africa where human first evolved, but bad in Australia and every island in the world.
... we continue to drive animal extinctions today through the destruction of wild lands, consumption of animals as a resource or a luxury, and persecution of species we see as threats or competitors.
Well, I grant the "threats or competitors" part, to some degree. But the U.S. now has MORE forests and other wildlife habitat than it had 100 years ago. In my general area, wolves and peregrine falcons have been reintroduced, quite successfully (there is now a wolf hunting season). Not to mention the rebound of raptors like osprey and eagles. There are an abundance of other predators like badgers and mountain lions... which means a robust-enough prey population to support them. I don't know where you live, but where I do, there's not much extinction going on. Quite the opposite, actually.
Not much has gone extinct in the USA or Canada likely. True. This also likely applies to Europe and other first world nations. In general, extinction rates are not too bad in the temperate part of the world. But the situation is bad in tropical places.
Compare:
People are richer in first world nations and can afford conservation instead of in a desperate fight for survival that leads to slash and burn practices. Animals in temperate climates must adapt to harsher climatic conditions and have larger ranges. In tropical areas the biodiversity is great and animals have much smaller ranges.
On the other hand, even in first world nations the situation is not necessary rosy. Some plants and animals are declining and in trouble. Particularly freshwater mussels. The Photo Field Guide to the Freshwater Mussels of Ontario states that 28 out of 41 of the native species in Ontario are in decline. Aerial insectivores are the types of birds in the most trouble. This points to trouble with insects ...
Also of note is the fact that much of the manufacturing and pollution has been moved to third world nations. We have a cleaner environment while the Chinese and others suffer.
But cooking at home does reduce having to drive to a restaurant...
Global warming is clouding the bigger issue of habitat destruction. Human beings have altered the planet significantly. We have taken a significant proportion of the planets biomass to devote to agriculture. The fact that aerial insectivores are doing badly suggest that flying insects are in significantly lower numbers and biodiversity. Bees are in trouble due to colony collapse disorder leading to losses of crops because flowers are not getting pollinated as often.
We have made great cities. Aside from the land these cities take, a substantial amount of resources are required to sustain them. Wood, fossil fuels and minerals are all required in vast quantities. Forests get altered, the air and water get polluted.
The oceans are in trouble due to overfishing. For most commercial fish there is only 10% or less of its original abundance. Plastic is accumulating in the ocean.
MInor in comparison are street lights. Nocturnal bugs get trapped by lights and are easy prey in the morning. Many nocturnal species of bugs are getting reduced in numbers or going extinct.
Massive habitat change will cause climate change ... and the consequences are complex and unpleasant.
If it is nature of life to expand and utilize every niche available then any spacefaring civilization should be able to expand into the universe at a significant fraction of the speed of light while utilizing every sizable rock in every solar system on the way. That means a civilization could take over a significant portion of the whole universe in a billion years or so. How can that not be detectable? See the book Millennial Project by Marshall Savage.
If life expands in this matter than our universe probably has many planets with primitive life (bacteria/viruses) or a few very old civilizations that span millions or even billions of light years. Other civilizations at our stage of development are unlikely due to the extreme short time scale of a technological but pre-space colonizing civilization like ours.
What has been released so far is a tease. It demonstrates nicely the transclusion and transcopyright concepts. For it to be truly useful it needs the ability to make your own documents with the ability to charge micropayments. Even then it will take awhile before people start to use it, but once it hits critical mass, it will be a solid alternative for publishing. Much better than the web. A global publishing system based on transclusions and micropayments would even things out -- and put serious but smaller scale publishing in the hands of ordinary people. The power would not be concentrated among the worlds most popular web sites and our culture would be less subverted by the need to advertise to pay the bills.
What hasn't been shone in the docs well is what the authoring tools will be like. The better the authoring tools, the better the adoption of this software. Ted Nelson wants something called "real cut and paste". This is simply slicing and dicing a document into pieces and rearranging them. Astonishing that no software today can do this. So software today will even allow you to draw sentences around. Freeplane, a mind-mapping program, comes to doing real cut-and-paste. Rearranging text like you rearrange text in a mind-mapping program would be best accomplished on a 4K monitor, although dual HD monitors would do. Cut-and-paste as it is today is more like hide-and-plug -- the text is temporarily taken off the screen and put into a new place.
Give the Xanadu project its due. It is still relevant today and needed. And while the Xanadu project is Ted's big idea ... he has others as well. I particularly like his Floating World(tm) spec. I myself have been working towards creating part of this Floating World idea in my spare time (development has been slow, oh well). Though I want to get the photo organizer and checklist software parts done first. If the programmers on this latest attempt at Xanadu succeed they may beat me to getting around to the Floating World ideas (although of course not quite as laid out in the old design). If so, I am OK with that.
Would it not be pointless? How could the people on planet Earth gain any benefits from putting printable people on other worlds?
We are at the top of the food chain because 50,000 years ago we were the first animals with the ability to accumulate knowledge. Not to mention fossil fuels in the last couple hundred years that provides each individual with thousands perhaps millions times more energy than food alone can provide. The rest of nature didn't stand a chance.
I do rolling stops at stop signs and complete stops at red lights (I sometimes process to cross on the red light if the intersection is completely empty and I see no cars coming from any direction). I always try to get the eye contact of anyone stopped at an intersection, if they do not see me I will slow down or stop until they do see me or they leave the intersection. Very important. I once tried to cross a busy intersection and the car turning left from the opposite intersection didn't see me as I was making my way across. I had to adjust my path considerable to avoid him/her. I never try to cross that intersection anymore.
I disagree. Mars is the only planet in the solar system where terraforming would be possible, and for that reason it should be done. Of course, it will take a very long time and won't even be started in our lifetimes. Humans may well live there for centuries until domes before terraforming starts. Terraforming provides opportunities to a solar system based civilization. It is a second life arc. Endangered species could be put there. Or experiments with new ecosystems and new lifeforms could be tried there as well. On Mars, some things can be done for life that simply can't be done on the countless asteroids we will colonize.
My assumption is that an intelligent civilization will expand fast once it really starts to colonize outer space. It might take about 1000 years after the start of colonizing the solar system to build up the technology and spare energy resources to expand to other star systems. Once a race starts to reach out to other star system, it will do at a significant fraction of the speed of light. So a galaxy like the Milky Way could be colonized in 200,000 years. Every star system in that galaxy would have almost every world colonized (planets, moon, asteroids, kuiperoids, etc) in a mere 10,000 years after it is first reached if not sooner.
If this assumption is right, an intelligent race would stick out and be easily detected. Because we haven't detected an intelligent race they may not be out there. However, plenty of planets without interstellar civilizations may well exist. Who knows.
Humanity's power started to take off once we developed sophisticated speech and thereby the means to accumulate knowledge generation after generation. Our current power comes from fossil fuels that provides access to thousands of times more energy per capita than without it. The fossil fuel era on our planet will be short compared to age of the universe. Like a star that is burning fusing silcon before it goes supernova...
Getting off this dirtball will not happen in our lifetimes, of course. But apart from a significant collapse of civilization, it will likely happen. Though it will take hundreds if not thousands of years. Even after we get off Earth, we will be colonizing our solar system for hundreds, perhaps close to a thousand years before we venture out into the stars.
As far habitable planets out there ... a planet in the habitable zone is no guarantee it is habitable, let alone have life on it.
Given the nature of life, when given the resource, life grows exponentially, I tend to believe that humanity is the most intelligent life in the universe. If there were other intelligent races out there they would colonize space at blinding speed compared to how old the universe is now. It would be difficult if not impossible to hide a civilization that has colonize entire galaxies.
Even if you get rid of all bugs, there will still be security holes. Fixing these security holes can potentially jeopardize the functionality of the software. For example, if you allow scripting in software, you introduce many difficult to fix security holes. If those security holes were fixed, the scripting will inevitability be less useful.
Before we can even seriously think about sending people to other solar systems, we should colonize ours. We have not only seven other planets, over 150 known moons but also hundreds of thousands of small worlds -- the asteroids, the Kuiper Belts and beyond. With all these worlds the human population could reach into the trillions. Colonizing the solar system would allow us to build the infrastructure necessary to give us access to a lot more energy than fossil fuels could ever provide. With this energy and infrastructure it will then be a serious possibility to start sending out interstellar spaceship with the intent to colonize other solar systems.
Before we can even colonize the solar system, we must prepare for the end of our fossil fuel subsidy and stabilize our civilization and the environment. Then we can bank our collected energy savings from renewable energy generators like solar panels etc to start our colonization of the solar system.
Agreed. But part of what makes programming hard is politics and conventions. Applications, file formats and database are complicated ways of handling information. An application is a package of functionality. You can't easily if at all directly use the feature of somebody's else program. So a programmer has to reinvent them. File formats and database are packages of information. The ways that information can be stored in file formats and databases are immense complicating the programmers job at getting at information.
What if it were possible for programmers and even users to combine software features into packages of their design easily? What if simpler ways to handle information were available and in wide use, such as the zigzag data structure? Could business tolerate such simplification of software development?
760,000 songs may be close to all the digital songs in existence. If you don't need your hard drive to hold movies (and some other niches like scientific data) then today's hard drives are more than big enough in size. You can easily get a solid state drive nowadays that can hold everything. They are much faster than hard drive, but have shorter lives. So the future is in increasing the speed of storage while also increasing the lifespan of the storage. If 20 TB hard drives come out in five years -- I'll say so what.
No. Learning to code is necessary for only a small part of the population, although I bet most on Slashdot have tried a bit of coding.
I don't think there is any subject important enough that I would recommend everyone learn it. Although on the other hand, it is easy to come up with arguments why this subject and that subject is useful.
Unfortunately, the education system is not designed to be ideal environment for learning, far from it. http://www.johntaylorgatto.com...
The key problem is teaching subjects kids are not interested in at the time it is taught. Very few kids have the option of learning things in school in the order they want. Gobs of time is wasted trying to shove down information kids are not motivated to learn.
They don't want that. What they want is that desktop gradually retreats to acting more like a guest OS / GUI on a Metro based system. Moreover that is really suboptimal even now. Far better is:
large screen = desktop small touch screen = metro
A touch interface could have a niche on a desktop. Rearranging mind maps by touch would be nice on a desktop. Also nice would be old-style cut-and-paste. Say you write a document and you cut it up into a bunch of text fragments. Then you can rearrange the pieces as you wish. Would be nice on those $500 4K monitors...
Although wind power does not contribute to global warming through greenhouse gas emission, it does extract kinetic energy from the atmosphere and therefore may alter global climate even at continental scales
It may be the lesser of evils compared to some other supplemental energy options but it isn't perfect- and it isn't a good candidate for base load
All energy sources have pitfalls. The advantage of renewables such as wind, solar, geothermal and others is its renewable and key to the long term survival of the human race at a decent but lower standard of living. When we lose fossil fuels in the coming centuries, provided that civilization doesn't collapse, being forced to rely on renewables will destroy our throwaway culture. To get our money's worth out of renewables will require doing everything in our power to extend the lifespan of our solar panels, wind turbines and so on particularly after all the low hanging fruit is taken.
The principle disadvantages of renewables are the amount of space required and the unpredictability of them. Wind has unknown effects on global climate and kills flying animals (birds, bats and insects). Solar could have an effect at global scales like wind power. Solar could withdraw some heat from the planet. But could that withdrawal compensate for global warming? I doubt it.
Fossil fuels have the primary advantages of being energy dense and predicable. So fossil fuels take up less space. But fossil fuels are polluting and will not last much longer.
Also nonrenewable is nuclear. Nuclear is extremely energy dense and will take longer to use up than fossil fuels. Aside from extremely hazardous nuclear waste that could be used for nuclear bombs, nuclear is relatively clean. Nuclear will likely be turned to when the rate that fossil fuels that can extracted from the planet go into sharp declines and renewables are unable to meet the gap.