Americans don't like doing something half-assed. I'm convinced that deep inside, most don't really believe that stuff, but pretend to, in order to make a point. In for a penny, in for a pound.
I do not concur. Xfce is smaller, has fewer features you might not need and a smaller disk/memory footprint. This probably means it will work on less impressive hardware, but as soon as you have enough memory to prevent swapping, in my experience it doesn't seem to have any effect on how responsive the gui feels or how fast tasks run (mostly disk/network I/O and/or CPU bound anyway). In fact, it's almost as if it feels less responsive than unity or gnome classic, but 'responsiveness' is kind of subjective, I don't have any measurements to back this up.
Both Windows and OSX manage to provide many more features in a much more responsive and more stable GUI. Linux has been my server OS of choice since the mid '90s now, but as a desktop OS I've only come to dislike it more and more each day, and these days only use it at work.
There is no technical limitation that forces things to be this way. Apple has a fine gui on top of a BSD OS, and Linux as a fine gui on Android devices.
On the various computers where I've installed most "trendy" modern distros (ubuntu, etc), they actually run slower under Linux than Windows.
In what way?
Reduced CPU speed? Slower network access? How does your OS reduce the speed of your hardware? Do you have any benchmarks showing comparative speed?
(The incredible sluggishness of nautilus is one of the things that made me reinstall windows on one of my development machines).
You're a developer and you changed your entire OS because you couldn't change the settings to speed up a file manager? (hint: Nautilus shows thumbnails and previews audio). Please tell/warn us which projects you're working on!
Wouldn't help that much. When I worked for the provincial government IT, literally 90% of calls were people forgetting their passwords.
Seriously, that's your fault, with your password policies (passwords expire each month or two, have to be so and so long, contain the usualy mix of upper & lower case, numbers, special characters, and the icing on the cake: may not have 3 or more characters in common with a password ever used previously), the only way to remember your passwords is to write them down, which is officiallly a firing offense by the way. At some point, users, even the techies, are just not going to bother trying to come up with a new password that will pass the validation and can still be remembered, they'll simply call you and ask you to reset the password every time it expires. That's what I did.
Seeing what statistically significant humans think is highlight-worthy is incredibly depressing. Is it any wonder the One Percent can manage to stay in control? Humans have opposable thumbs and can manage language, but wise they aren't. They can't discern platitudes and doublespeak from actual wisdom.
I like to highlight completely inane random passages taken out of context on my kindle
Why would an H1-B bring wages down? Why would a skilled migrant work for substantially less than a native with the same qualifications? Sure, it's going be somewhat lower because your visa depends on a specific contract with a specific employer (meaning: if you get laid off, you also get deported), but if one potential employer is offering substantially less than another, he's going to have to settle with less qualified people to do the work.
Maybe you could use JNI for that, in certain very specialized cases, but if you write parts of your application in C/JNI you run the risk of just combining Java's weaknesses (memory, performance) with C's weaknesses (error prone). A nullpointer in a native code part of your application will unceremoniously crash your JVM and everything running in it.
JNI is often used for things that can only be done in native code. An example I can think of are atomic compare and swap operations in the java.util.concurrent package. These are implemented via a JNI method essentially calling just one machine instruction (on Intel, it may be a hand full on some architectures). Yes, this is for performance reasons - an atomic compare&swap is faster that using locks, not because native code runs faster but because it's the only efficient way to implement it.
It always astonishes me that on a geeky site like Slashdot with an audience that in theory puts such a high value on science, you get so many global warming denialists.
For some reason, everyone, both liberal and conservative, seems to take it as an obvious given that if a human influenced on the climate is happening, something should be done to stop this. This means that people who like our current way of life have no choice but to deny a human influence on the climate.
In my opinion, this is the wrong way of looking at it. Whether human activity influences the climate is a scientific question, best answered by scientists who have actually done the work to study the matter. It should not be a political question any more than research into the cause of cancer or earthquakes.
The political question should be: given that evidence shows that human activity influences the climate, what should be done with this data. A very valid answer could be: nothing can realistically be done about it, so stop talking about it.
The economic and social cost of reversing our effect on the climate would be staggering, and vast amounts of political and military force would have to be used to make sure every country cooperates (because any unrestricted outlier will soon start to dominate the world economy). People would have to get used to living in a state we would now consider poverty. No personal cars, very few gadgets, no airco, definitely no air travel. A huge sacrifice, and all just to keep the climate very slightly colder, which doesn't necessarily benefit everyone equally. Many parts of the world will become more pleasant and productive with a slightly warmer climate...
You're right, I phrased that poorly. What I mean to say is: the propulsion is a problem that will not be solved (even if a solution exists), because investments are just not made in projects on the time scale of more than a human life time. Even if there were profit in it, noone paying for it will ever even know whether it worked.
Don't underestimate the might of exponential growth. Accelerating at 1G for two years (ship time) gets you to over 95% of light speed. Five years (ship time) of constant acceleration at 1G gets you to over 99.99% of light speed. The real challenge is that it's a fire and forget mission: children born on earth at the time of the launch will have died of old age before the message that they arrived safely arrives back on earth.
Does an article like this serve a purpose other than flame bait?
Ok, I'll bite. Any foo Europe had that was better than foo in another part of the world moved to the (former) colonies long ago, leaving Europe second to last on the human civilization scale, only narrowly beating Antarctica on account of the slightly better food.
Not to mention the fact that plutonium is far more valuable than copper. Thieves from all over the world, and possibly from other worlds, would hurry over to come and steal the plutonium clad wires.
What does this have to do with Floyd Landis? Just that epi/natural testosterone comparisons aren't cut and dried, and that the French do like to find winning non-French bikers to be dopers,
You do know that he has admitted doping, right? He has since described how it happened: The suspicious blood levels and performance spike were the result of a transfusion with blood carelessly taken too shortly after taking testosterone during training. Blood transfusions can be detected by the presence of blood preservatives and plastic weakeners from the blood bag, but tests for these are not considered conclusive evidence on their own, if i understand correctly from the Alberto Contador case last summer.
Another sign is a skewed balance between mature and young red blood cells. Floyd Landis described how this was masked by taking small doses of EPO immediately after the doping test, to give the body enough time to break down the evidence before the next test.
and under the French Napoleonic code of justice you are guilty until proven innocent.
I thought the code mainly concerned itself with mandating death by anal rape for speaking French insufficiently fluently, but I wasn't sure, so I looked it up
Basing A.I. on psychology will be only a stop gap measure, on the way to the true solution to this sort of problems: basing A.I. on evolutionary anthropology. You see, both the crew and the passengers can be modeled as as tribe, trying to adapt their stable trajectory based culture to changing conditions, namely a nose dive. As more and more air tribes experience such disruptions to their familiar environment, you will find that some develop better coping strategies than others. After a number of generations, all air passengers will be descendants of the air tribes with the more successful coping strategies, and you will find that nose dive causing bugs no longer matter. The people on board will have learned to deal with it. They will probably even have developed tools, either to survive the crash, or to patch firmware on board.
I'm pretty sure this Canadian desert isn't caused by heat, don't you agree?
As for global warming, when I was in college, before global warming became a political issue, I learned that many common species, such as diatoms, termites and krill influence the climate with their effect on atmospheric chemistry. None of this used to be controversial before it became a political issue.
Now we probably don't quite represent as much biomass as diatoms yet (just an educated guess), but if you count our factories, vehicles and machines, we probably leave termites and krill well behind. Atmospheric chemistry has measurably changed since the industrial revolution started, and in a way that would be very difficult to attribute to 'natural' causes. In addition to that, we have changed the run of most major and less major rivers in the world, drained swamps, cleared forests or caused others to appear by removing the herds of large grazers. I'd be utterly amazed if all this didn't influence the climate.
It shouldn't be a political question at all, whether we influence the climate or not. I think it's a strange mindset to assume that scientists who spend years studying something must be mistaken, simply because we don't want their conclusions to be true. Let scientists provide the data, that's their expertise. Deciding how to act on that data, that should be the task of politicians and pundits, not the decision whether the data is true or not.
The decision to embrace global warming because a few degrees rise in temperature would sooner be a boon than a threat to a country like Canada may well be valid, I wouldn't know.
They are assuming that the desert in the Southwest USA will never reach them.
That's the attitude normally called "hubris"
.
It is a common misconception that deserts are caused by heat. There are cold deserts and hot rain forests. Deserts tend to be caused by other factors, primarily latitude (see a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_pressure_area#Climatology" this) and the rain shadow of mountain ranges.
An increase in temperature will not necessarily cause deserts to expand, though they might move if the equatorial low pressure (=wet) area expands. In the tropics, the summer tends to be the wet season: more heat leads to more evaporation in the oceans. The land gets much hotter than the sea, forcing hot moist air to rise, forming clouds and bringing rain. During the exceptionally hot 90's and early 2000's, the deserts in northern Africa actually receded. During the cooler 80's, the same area suffered droughts and desertification.
Will an X degree increase in temperature cause the deserts to shift all the way north to Canada? This is equivalent to asking whether and X degree increase in temperature will cause the southern Mexican jungle to expand all the way into the Mojave desert. X would likely have to be pretty large.
None of the above is relevant to TFA by the way. Canada pulled out of this treaty because they argue it is pointless as long as China and the US, the two largest polluters, aren't bound by it.
I've worked in Java and COBOL shops. The average age is pretty similar: most are in their late 20s to early 40s, with only a small minority older or younger than that range. I don't know if this is because people stop working as programmers by their early 40s, or if it's just an artifact of the fact that the field has been growing so fast in the last 20 years or so, adding so many new programmers every year that the older guys remain a minority.
To me (gut feeling, not having done any research on the matter) it makes more sense that the effect in TFA has more to do with the fact that Java is used for a much wider variety of uses than COBOL, and has very sophisticated analysis tools available, which I'm sure they've used to find the violations mentioned.
I worked with a team of programmers from India for a year. They were mostly young and inexperienced, but smart and with a good work ethic and a positive attitude. Basically they were geeks just like us, just more conservatively dressed. I'm assuming they cost more than $14 per hour, but apparently it was still cheaper to fly them over and provide housing for them than it would have been to hire local geeks.
I have mixed feelings about outsourcing. Outsourcing software development and support seems to work out ok. You get what you pay for, so if you go for the cheapest crap company in India, you'll get the same stuff you'd get from the cheapest crap company in the US. It may or may not be cheaper, depending on who you ask and what costs you include, but the quality can be very high.
On the other hand, outsourcing the IT department was a disaster in my opinion. The people you depend on to keep everything running smoothly and on time, and from time to time bend the rules to deal with a crisis should have the same primary interest as you: the success of your company. Not the success of a supplier.
A server is on fire? Oh it's URGENT you say? Well, file an incident report. Don't forget the claim code, the work order number, the foobar form. As soon as we have the signature of your manager, the product owner and your business contact, we'll see if it is covered by the SLA.
Dutch people, like you, are increasingly easy to identify on the internet, even behind anonymous nick names.
When communicating with an international audience, please keep in mind that Dutch, translated to English, is not proper English. The spelling errors are not the problem, the way of expressing oneself is - it comes across as incredibly blunt, arrogant and somewhat racist. In the English speaking world, sweeping generalizations about Turks, Muslims, Amish and 'hillbillies', filled with spelling errors and needless shouting in all caps is considered somewhat unsophisticated.
To explain what I mean in a way a Dutch poster will understand: you tend come across as if you're high on cocaine all the time.
The pine bark beetle is native to the Americas. It occurs high up in the smoky mountains, Canada, Alaska. It can take a good frost. Its spread in recent decades probably has more to do with people moving wood all over the country. The eggs sometimes survive in logs and planks for construction.
The pest I was referring to are various species of Adelgids, introduced from Asia. In some places, entire mountain sides resemble bone yards, with all the dead pines.
I don't know what tree species that was referring to, but an increase in temperature doesn't necessarily lead to desertification.
From what I recall, it wasn't just the increase in temperature, but the drought and insect infestations that the higher temperatures bring that was causing certain species, specifically types of pines and poplars. Now, other species are replacing some of the ones that are not doing so well, but there's also a lot of areas that are becoming grassland or desert sooner than expected.
In what part of the world? In North America pines are dying of a pest accidentally introduced from the old world. Something similar happened or is happening to chestnuts, elms and a number of other tree species and families. This is related to the columbian exchange, not to climate change.
I read an article in Science about how many tree species are not adapting to AGW-driven changes and how much forest land is going to become savannah or desert way ahead of previous predictions
I don't know what tree species that was referring to, but an increase in temperature doesn't necessarily lead to desertification. People in temperate zones (especially those in Cs climates, which are rare outside California and southern Europe) may associate 'hot weather' with 'dry', but in the tropics, summer tends to be the rain season. During the exceptionally warm 90's and early 2000's, the deserts actually receded in Northern Africa. Now after a cooler than usual summer, drought is causing crops to fail again.
By very far the major reason for the disappearance of forest land is the growing population cutting or burning it down to make farm land.
Would a degree in Physics have been fun for four years? Sure. Would living in permanent unemployable poverty be fun for the next sixty years? Not so much.
You're being overly dramatic. Most (?) physics graduates probably don't end up working as physicists, but that doesn't mean they're unemployable, it just means they find a place to work other than a university or lab. Very likely a better paying one.
The money and the social status must be a factor though. It's clear that not some college degrees (law, medicine?) offer a better career prospect with a higher social status and a higher pay than some others (computer science, math?) in this society. Probably because the demand for specialists in law and medicine is so much higher in this largely services oriented society.
Slashdot Mirror
Americans don't like doing something half-assed. I'm convinced that deep inside, most don't really believe that stuff, but pretend to, in order to make a point. In for a penny, in for a pound.
I do not concur. Xfce is smaller, has fewer features you might not need and a smaller disk/memory footprint. This probably means it will work on less impressive hardware, but as soon as you have enough memory to prevent swapping, in my experience it doesn't seem to have any effect on how responsive the gui feels or how fast tasks run (mostly disk/network I/O and/or CPU bound anyway). In fact, it's almost as if it feels less responsive than unity or gnome classic, but 'responsiveness' is kind of subjective, I don't have any measurements to back this up.
Both Windows and OSX manage to provide many more features in a much more responsive and more stable GUI. Linux has been my server OS of choice since the mid '90s now, but as a desktop OS I've only come to dislike it more and more each day, and these days only use it at work.
There is no technical limitation that forces things to be this way. Apple has a fine gui on top of a BSD OS, and Linux as a fine gui on Android devices.
On the various computers where I've installed most "trendy" modern distros (ubuntu, etc), they actually run slower under Linux than Windows.
In what way?
Reduced CPU speed? Slower network access? How does your OS reduce the speed of your hardware? Do you have any benchmarks showing comparative speed?
(The incredible sluggishness of nautilus is one of the things that made me reinstall windows on one of my development machines).
You're a developer and you changed your entire OS because you couldn't change the settings to speed up a file manager? (hint: Nautilus shows thumbnails and previews audio). Please tell/warn us which projects you're working on!
Don't be fanboi, fanbois suck.
Wouldn't help that much. When I worked for the provincial government IT, literally 90% of calls were people forgetting their passwords.
Seriously, that's your fault, with your password policies (passwords expire each month or two, have to be so and so long, contain the usualy mix of upper & lower case, numbers, special characters, and the icing on the cake: may not have 3 or more characters in common with a password ever used previously), the only way to remember your passwords is to write them down, which is officiallly a firing offense by the way. At some point, users, even the techies, are just not going to bother trying to come up with a new password that will pass the validation and can still be remembered, they'll simply call you and ask you to reset the password every time it expires. That's what I did.
Seeing what statistically significant humans think is highlight-worthy is incredibly depressing. Is it any wonder the One Percent can manage to stay in control? Humans have opposable thumbs and can manage language, but wise they aren't. They can't discern platitudes and doublespeak from actual wisdom.
I like to highlight completely inane random passages taken out of context on my kindle
Why would an H1-B bring wages down? Why would a skilled migrant work for substantially less than a native with the same qualifications? Sure, it's going be somewhat lower because your visa depends on a specific contract with a specific employer (meaning: if you get laid off, you also get deported), but if one potential employer is offering substantially less than another, he's going to have to settle with less qualified people to do the work.
foreigners, non native speakers
Maybe you could use JNI for that, in certain very specialized cases, but if you write parts of your application in C/JNI you run the risk of just combining Java's weaknesses (memory, performance) with C's weaknesses (error prone). A nullpointer in a native code part of your application will unceremoniously crash your JVM and everything running in it.
JNI is often used for things that can only be done in native code. An example I can think of are atomic compare and swap operations in the java.util.concurrent package. These are implemented via a JNI method essentially calling just one machine instruction (on Intel, it may be a hand full on some architectures). Yes, this is for performance reasons - an atomic compare&swap is faster that using locks, not because native code runs faster but because it's the only efficient way to implement it.
It always astonishes me that on a geeky site like Slashdot with an audience that in theory puts such a high value on science, you get so many global warming denialists.
For some reason, everyone, both liberal and conservative, seems to take it as an obvious given that if a human influenced on the climate is happening, something should be done to stop this. This means that people who like our current way of life have no choice but to deny a human influence on the climate.
In my opinion, this is the wrong way of looking at it. Whether human activity influences the climate is a scientific question, best answered by scientists who have actually done the work to study the matter. It should not be a political question any more than research into the cause of cancer or earthquakes.
The political question should be: given that evidence shows that human activity influences the climate, what should be done with this data. A very valid answer could be: nothing can realistically be done about it, so stop talking about it.
The economic and social cost of reversing our effect on the climate would be staggering, and vast amounts of political and military force would have to be used to make sure every country cooperates (because any unrestricted outlier will soon start to dominate the world economy). People would have to get used to living in a state we would now consider poverty. No personal cars, very few gadgets, no airco, definitely no air travel. A huge sacrifice, and all just to keep the climate very slightly colder, which doesn't necessarily benefit everyone equally. Many parts of the world will become more pleasant and productive with a slightly warmer climate...
You're right, I phrased that poorly. What I mean to say is: the propulsion is a problem that will not be solved (even if a solution exists), because investments are just not made in projects on the time scale of more than a human life time. Even if there were profit in it, noone paying for it will ever even know whether it worked.
Don't underestimate the might of exponential growth. Accelerating at 1G for two years (ship time) gets you to over 95% of light speed. Five years (ship time) of constant acceleration at 1G gets you to over 99.99% of light speed. The real challenge is that it's a fire and forget mission: children born on earth at the time of the launch will have died of old age before the message that they arrived safely arrives back on earth.
Does Europe have better foo than us?
Does an article like this serve a purpose other than flame bait?
Ok, I'll bite. Any foo Europe had that was better than foo in another part of the world moved to the (former) colonies long ago, leaving Europe second to last on the human civilization scale, only narrowly beating Antarctica on account of the slightly better food.
Not to mention the fact that plutonium is far more valuable than copper. Thieves from all over the world, and possibly from other worlds, would hurry over to come and steal the plutonium clad wires.
What does this have to do with Floyd Landis? Just that epi/natural testosterone comparisons aren't cut and dried, and that the French do like to find winning non-French bikers to be dopers,
You do know that he has admitted doping, right? He has since described how it happened: The suspicious blood levels and performance spike were the result of a transfusion with blood carelessly taken too shortly after taking testosterone during training. Blood transfusions can be detected by the presence of blood preservatives and plastic weakeners from the blood bag, but tests for these are not considered conclusive evidence on their own, if i understand correctly from the Alberto Contador case last summer.
Another sign is a skewed balance between mature and young red blood cells. Floyd Landis described how this was masked by taking small doses of EPO immediately after the doping test, to give the body enough time to break down the evidence before the next test.
and under the French Napoleonic code of justice you are guilty until proven innocent.
I thought the code mainly concerned itself with mandating death by anal rape for speaking French insufficiently fluently, but I wasn't sure, so I looked it up
Basing A.I. on psychology will be only a stop gap measure, on the way to the true solution to this sort of problems: basing A.I. on evolutionary anthropology. You see, both the crew and the passengers can be modeled as as tribe, trying to adapt their stable trajectory based culture to changing conditions, namely a nose dive. As more and more air tribes experience such disruptions to their familiar environment, you will find that some develop better coping strategies than others. After a number of generations, all air passengers will be descendants of the air tribes with the more successful coping strategies, and you will find that nose dive causing bugs no longer matter. The people on board will have learned to deal with it. They will probably even have developed tools, either to survive the crash, or to patch firmware on board.
I'm pretty sure this Canadian desert isn't caused by heat, don't you agree?
As for global warming, when I was in college, before global warming became a political issue, I learned that many common species, such as diatoms, termites and krill influence the climate with their effect on atmospheric chemistry. None of this used to be controversial before it became a political issue.
Now we probably don't quite represent as much biomass as diatoms yet (just an educated guess), but if you count our factories, vehicles and machines, we probably leave termites and krill well behind. Atmospheric chemistry has measurably changed since the industrial revolution started, and in a way that would be very difficult to attribute to 'natural' causes. In addition to that, we have changed the run of most major and less major rivers in the world, drained swamps, cleared forests or caused others to appear by removing the herds of large grazers. I'd be utterly amazed if all this didn't influence the climate.
It shouldn't be a political question at all, whether we influence the climate or not. I think it's a strange mindset to assume that scientists who spend years studying something must be mistaken, simply because we don't want their conclusions to be true. Let scientists provide the data, that's their expertise. Deciding how to act on that data, that should be the task of politicians and pundits, not the decision whether the data is true or not.
The decision to embrace global warming because a few degrees rise in temperature would sooner be a boon than a threat to a country like Canada may well be valid, I wouldn't know.
"If you want to make enemies, try to change something"
They are assuming that the desert in the Southwest USA will never reach them.
That's the attitude normally called "hubris"
.
It is a common misconception that deserts are caused by heat. There are cold deserts and hot rain forests. Deserts tend to be caused by other factors, primarily latitude (see a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_pressure_area#Climatology" this) and the rain shadow of mountain ranges.
An increase in temperature will not necessarily cause deserts to expand, though they might move if the equatorial low pressure (=wet) area expands. In the tropics, the summer tends to be the wet season: more heat leads to more evaporation in the oceans. The land gets much hotter than the sea, forcing hot moist air to rise, forming clouds and bringing rain. During the exceptionally hot 90's and early 2000's, the deserts in northern Africa actually receded. During the cooler 80's, the same area suffered droughts and desertification.
Will an X degree increase in temperature cause the deserts to shift all the way north to Canada? This is equivalent to asking whether and X degree increase in temperature will cause the southern Mexican jungle to expand all the way into the Mojave desert. X would likely have to be pretty large.
None of the above is relevant to TFA by the way. Canada pulled out of this treaty because they argue it is pointless as long as China and the US, the two largest polluters, aren't bound by it.
I've worked in Java and COBOL shops. The average age is pretty similar: most are in their late 20s to early 40s, with only a small minority older or younger than that range. I don't know if this is because people stop working as programmers by their early 40s, or if it's just an artifact of the fact that the field has been growing so fast in the last 20 years or so, adding so many new programmers every year that the older guys remain a minority.
To me (gut feeling, not having done any research on the matter) it makes more sense that the effect in TFA has more to do with the fact that Java is used for a much wider variety of uses than COBOL, and has very sophisticated analysis tools available, which I'm sure they've used to find the violations mentioned.
I worked with a team of programmers from India for a year. They were mostly young and inexperienced, but smart and with a good work ethic and a positive attitude. Basically they were geeks just like us, just more conservatively dressed. I'm assuming they cost more than $14 per hour, but apparently it was still cheaper to fly them over and provide housing for them than it would have been to hire local geeks.
I have mixed feelings about outsourcing. Outsourcing software development and support seems to work out ok. You get what you pay for, so if you go for the cheapest crap company in India, you'll get the same stuff you'd get from the cheapest crap company in the US. It may or may not be cheaper, depending on who you ask and what costs you include, but the quality can be very high.
On the other hand, outsourcing the IT department was a disaster in my opinion. The people you depend on to keep everything running smoothly and on time, and from time to time bend the rules to deal with a crisis should have the same primary interest as you: the success of your company. Not the success of a supplier.
A server is on fire? Oh it's URGENT you say? Well, file an incident report. Don't forget the claim code, the work order number, the foobar form. As soon as we have the signature of your manager, the product owner and your business contact, we'll see if it is covered by the SLA.
Dutch people, like you, are increasingly easy to identify on the internet, even behind anonymous nick names.
When communicating with an international audience, please keep in mind that Dutch, translated to English, is not proper English. The spelling errors are not the problem, the way of expressing oneself is - it comes across as incredibly blunt, arrogant and somewhat racist. In the English speaking world, sweeping generalizations about Turks, Muslims, Amish and 'hillbillies', filled with spelling errors and needless shouting in all caps is considered somewhat unsophisticated.
To explain what I mean in a way a Dutch poster will understand: you tend come across as if you're high on cocaine all the time.
The pine bark beetle is native to the Americas. It occurs high up in the smoky mountains, Canada, Alaska. It can take a good frost. Its spread in recent decades probably has more to do with people moving wood all over the country. The eggs sometimes survive in logs and planks for construction.
The pest I was referring to are various species of Adelgids, introduced from Asia. In some places, entire mountain sides resemble bone yards, with all the dead pines.
From what I recall, it wasn't just the increase in temperature, but the drought and insect infestations that the higher temperatures bring that was causing certain species, specifically types of pines and poplars. Now, other species are replacing some of the ones that are not doing so well, but there's also a lot of areas that are becoming grassland or desert sooner than expected.
In what part of the world? In North America pines are dying of a pest accidentally introduced from the old world. Something similar happened or is happening to chestnuts, elms and a number of other tree species and families. This is related to the columbian exchange, not to climate change.
I read an article in Science about how many tree species are not adapting to AGW-driven changes and how much forest land is going to become savannah or desert way ahead of previous predictions
I don't know what tree species that was referring to, but an increase in temperature doesn't necessarily lead to desertification. People in temperate zones (especially those in Cs climates, which are rare outside California and southern Europe) may associate 'hot weather' with 'dry', but in the tropics, summer tends to be the rain season. During the exceptionally warm 90's and early 2000's, the deserts actually receded in Northern Africa. Now after a cooler than usual summer, drought is causing crops to fail again.
By very far the major reason for the disappearance of forest land is the growing population cutting or burning it down to make farm land.
Would a degree in Physics have been fun for four years? Sure. Would living in permanent unemployable poverty be fun for the next sixty years? Not so much.
You're being overly dramatic. Most (?) physics graduates probably don't end up working as physicists, but that doesn't mean they're unemployable, it just means they find a place to work other than a university or lab. Very likely a better paying one.
The money and the social status must be a factor though. It's clear that not some college degrees (law, medicine?) offer a better career prospect with a higher social status and a higher pay than some others (computer science, math?) in this society. Probably because the demand for specialists in law and medicine is so much higher in this largely services oriented society.