I... first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love. Yes, a uh, a profound sense of fatigue... a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I... I was able to interpret these feelings correctly. Loss of essence.
>> Our money is far, far better spent learning to cope with a warmer planet
I'm sure a strong economy will be consolation to the plant and animal life that will be lost forever. Sorry Mr Polar Bear - you don't have any habit left, but look around you - the economy has never been stronger!
>> Frankly, the technological advances on our planet are going to decrease greenhouse gas emissions without any kind of treaty or government mandate.
If that's true, why haven't emissions decreased with technology over the past 100 years?
I think that a lot of times, improvements just mean increased expectation which wipe out any benefits. It's like how low interest rates just cause bigger loans, increasing fuel efficiency will probably just lead to bigger SUVs.
I love how many economists say that the American consumer is the driving force of the world. Consumption is easy, heck, you could throw things into the ground or burn them to achieve the same effect. Production, efficiency, inovation etc are now secondary to buying on credit at Walmart sales.
If you have no elections, it is obvious that you are a crook. If you control how elections are counted with no external audit, then the results are the same, but it is really hard to prove you are a crook.
"Do really bad thing X so sayeth W" will not motivate people to do something they initially resist. "We've under attack by terrorists, do X, anyone who is against this is un-american and wants to terrorists to win" is a different story.
Well question 1 (could IE run on other browsers) was mine. I deliberatly asked it that way because it wasn't hostile but neatly brought up all the points about Microsoft (Application div) being constrained by Microsoft (Operating System Monopoly div).
That IE should be classified as an application is obvious to you, me and everyone else with half a clue. But Microsoft claim that IE is an integral part of the operating system, that can't be easily removed from the core OS (and thus ported to other OSes). Don't you remember?
Just as an example the earth has a built-in mechanism for regulating global temperature. As temperatures rise, the ice caps melt, and sea levels rise. This has two major effects: One, it leads to additional evaporation, which causes cooling; the other is that it covers more land, which results in more light being reflected back into space, which also causes cooling.
The difference in reflectivity is called albedo, and white ice reflects far more back into space than dark ocean. So instead of a negative feedback to regulate temperature like you say, if you look at the history of the earth what you find is positive feedback loops, meaning the earth changes state sometimes quite rapidly (ie in/out of an ice age in 10 years) then stays at that new state for thousands/millions of years.
We're intelligent species, that's great. But in global timelines, we've only just become so.
Maybe instead of the only intelligent species, we should have been the first of many? But if we keep going like we are, we'll never know. Wouldn't that be terribly lonely?
A tool-using ape doesn't have real intelligence if the machines of reasonable complexity he builds cost the incredible biological machines which took millions of years to evolve. We've been to the moon, but wiped out thousands of species on the earth. Every beautiful biological system destroyed is an irreparable loss, which would you rather have, a world of cans of fly spray, or of spider webs?
I guess most of Google's stock holders are in orbit right now and thus do not benefit from a world less choked by pollution.
Your kind of maths says that if you could perform some kind of widget manufacturing that would make $1 for each stockholder but produce $3 billion dollars of pollution (spread over 6 billion) then each stock holder gets $1 - $3*10e9/6*10e9 = 50c profit! Let's do it! Raises all round for the board!
>> why people fight a war, then what criteria do you propose for determining the morality of a war?
Why the leaders, not the individual soldiers, started the war.
>> It's pretty difficult to determine if one country invading another to replace the government is moral
Maybe I'm bitter about this because I live in a country that had a democratically elected government ousted from power because it threatened US interests in my country. I live in the southern hemisphere, this is hardly an exclusive club.
Even worse, there's actually few penalties here for killing other people (in cars or on bikes) in traffic, even if negligence is proven.
link - this woman's husband was killed by a driver. His fine? $1000. Kill a biker with your SUV and you only have to pay $1000.
I know, this makes me really mad.
Kill someone with a few grams of metal, in the form of bullets, or knives, and you go to jail. Kill someone with a tonne of metal, in the form of a car, and you get a slap on the wrist.
President Bush: I supported my government. I did. And would have gone had my unit been called up, by the way.
Russert: But you didn't volunteer or enlist to go.
President Bush: No, I didn't. You're right. I served. I flew fighters and enjoyed it, and provided a service to our country. In those days we had what was called "air defense command," and it was a part of the air defense command system.
>> it's making a change so disruptive that it would cause untold economic destruction
I think this is the crux of the issue. To solve the looming problems in the world we may find that life gets harde and we have to make sacrifices, but surely we can afford this? Why not have the same number of TVs than people, rather than more? Why not use your own effort to get around more, or read on the bus rather than burn fuel sitting in a multi-tonne vehicle carrying a 70kg person?
I work as a software developer. In coding, it's pretty cool to be able to build complex stuff, get it to work with things and even have programs write programs. Over millions of years, another form of code has developed, via randomness where some things do better than others, and thus make more copies on and on and on.
When I compare what systems we humans construct compared to what nature has done, it is truly humbling. And as each species becomes extinct, we are losing millions and millions of pieces of source code that ingeniously solve problems. In a few hundred years, the loss of biodiversity (in effect, trillions of years worth of computation) and the unbalancing of natural systems will be revealed as the true economic loss of these times.
We can either be cursed by the people who have to use smaller cars, get out of cars onto public transport or onto a bike, or we can be cursed forever by our decendants, who single out our generation as the worst... sure others destroyed the earth, but we KNOW we're doing it, and keep going, because we like our lifestyles too much.
>> If transportation is so important to you, then you should move somewhere where the transportation situation is more to your liking.
I already have:) I walk and ride everywhere. Someone will give me a lift in a car once every 1-2 weeks, if that. It's a bit harder, sometimes, but I like the feeling of using my own body to get around, rather than being carried around by fossil fuel powered machines.
he put himself at risk of being sent into war for over 5 years as a young man
Like most rich dads, Bush's father pulled strings to get him a safe posting.
the war has been going on long enough that most if not every soldier currently in Iraq knew they had a good chance of going there when they enlisted or re-upped
There are actually soldiers in Iraq who WANTED to come home at the end of their service, but were forced to stay on due to lack of numbers.
The headline that would cause the US to invade North Korea isn't North Korea says it has conducted nuclear tests, but North Korea discovers large deposit of oil.
Slashdot Mirror
I... first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love.
Yes, a uh, a profound sense of fatigue... a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I... I was able to interpret these feelings correctly. Loss of essence.
>> Our money is far, far better spent learning to cope with a warmer planet
I'm sure a strong economy will be consolation to the plant and animal life that will be lost forever. Sorry Mr Polar Bear - you don't have any habit left, but look around you - the economy has never been stronger!
>> Frankly, the technological advances on our planet are going to decrease greenhouse gas emissions without any kind of treaty or government mandate.
If that's true, why haven't emissions decreased with technology over the past 100 years?
I think that a lot of times, improvements just mean increased expectation which wipe out any benefits. It's like how low interest rates just cause bigger loans, increasing fuel efficiency will probably just lead to bigger SUVs.
I love how many economists say that the American consumer is the driving force of the world. Consumption is easy, heck, you could throw things into the ground or burn them to achieve the same effect. Production, efficiency, inovation etc are now secondary to buying on credit at Walmart sales.
If you have no elections, it is obvious that you are a crook.
If you control how elections are counted with no external audit, then the results are the same, but it is really hard to prove you are a crook.
"Do really bad thing X so sayeth W" will not motivate people to do something they initially resist.
"We've under attack by terrorists, do X, anyone who is against this is un-american and wants to terrorists to win" is a different story.
>> not ever gun owner likes the current administration
That was his point, and did having guns stop those restrictions of freedom that he mentioned?
>>>> my registrar took my renewal payment for two years
>>let your domain expire and snipe your own domain back
So your solution is to let him wait TWO YEARS? That's an awfully long time for internet visitors to remember.
Surely you can just write to the CSS standard and IE will render it perfectly. Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha!
(sorry, I've gone mad from yelling out "internet FUCKING explorer" all day at work.)
Well question 1 (could IE run on other browsers) was mine. I deliberatly asked it that way because it wasn't hostile but neatly brought up all the points about Microsoft (Application div) being constrained by Microsoft (Operating System Monopoly div).
That IE should be classified as an application is obvious to you, me and everyone else with half a clue. But Microsoft claim that IE is an integral part of the operating system, that can't be easily removed from the core OS (and thus ported to other OSes). Don't you remember?
>> IIRC Australia has a 50 year limit on copyright.
Had. Before we welcomed our new American overlords with the free trade agreement in 2005.
The baby's blood type? Delicious, mostly
Well good thing the man keeps the dolphin down!
Just as an example the earth has a built-in mechanism for regulating global temperature. As temperatures rise, the ice caps melt, and sea levels rise. This has two major effects: One, it leads to additional evaporation, which causes cooling; the other is that it covers more land, which results in more light being reflected back into space, which also causes cooling.
The difference in reflectivity is called albedo, and white ice reflects far more back into space than dark ocean. So instead of a negative feedback to regulate temperature like you say, if you look at the history of the earth what you find is positive feedback loops, meaning the earth changes state sometimes quite rapidly (ie in/out of an ice age in 10 years) then stays at that new state for thousands/millions of years.
We're intelligent species, that's great. But in global timelines, we've only just become so.
Maybe instead of the only intelligent species, we should have been the first of many? But if we keep going like we are, we'll never know. Wouldn't that be terribly lonely?
A tool-using ape doesn't have real intelligence if the machines of reasonable complexity he builds cost the incredible biological machines which took millions of years to evolve. We've been to the moon, but wiped out thousands of species on the earth. Every beautiful biological system destroyed is an irreparable loss, which would you rather have, a world of cans of fly spray, or of spider webs?
>> If I owned any Google stock, I'd be pissed.
I guess most of Google's stock holders are in orbit right now and thus do not benefit from a world less choked by pollution.
Your kind of maths says that if you could perform some kind of widget manufacturing that would make $1 for each stockholder but produce $3 billion dollars of pollution (spread over 6 billion) then each stock holder gets $1 - $3*10e9/6*10e9 = 50c profit! Let's do it! Raises all round for the board!
What part of "Do no evil" do you not understand?
I currently have a BMI of 31, and can do 10 chinups. I'm overweight though not by as much as the figures would say.
When I did hard-core running, and could run 13.5km in 1 hour (and do 15 chinups) my BMI was still in the obese range.
>> why people fight a war, then what criteria do you propose for determining the morality of a war?
Why the leaders, not the individual soldiers, started the war.
>> It's pretty difficult to determine if one country invading another to replace the government is moral
Maybe I'm bitter about this because I live in a country that had a democratically elected government ousted from power because it threatened US interests in my country. I live in the southern hemisphere, this is hardly an exclusive club.
The number of people who sign up for a war is completely orthagonal to the morality of that war.
Evidence? People always sign up for both sides.
Even worse, there's actually few penalties here for killing other people (in cars or on bikes) in traffic, even if negligence is proven.
link - this woman's husband was killed by a driver. His fine? $1000. Kill a biker with your SUV and you only have to pay $1000.
I know, this makes me really mad.
Kill someone with a few grams of metal, in the form of bullets, or knives, and you go to jail.
Kill someone with a tonne of metal, in the form of a car, and you get a slap on the wrist.
Here you go:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4179618/
Russert: Were you favor of the war in Vietnam?
President Bush: I supported my government. I did. And would have gone had my unit been called up, by the way.
Russert: But you didn't volunteer or enlist to go.
President Bush: No, I didn't. You're right. I served. I flew fighters and enjoyed it, and provided a service to our country. In those days we had what was called "air defense command," and it was a part of the air defense command system.
>> Bush actually volunteered for a unit that was very likely to be sent over to Vietnam
"No, I didn't."
-- President Bush, Feb. 8, responding to a question on NBC's "Meet the Press" about whether he volunteered to go to Vietnam
>> it's making a change so disruptive that it would cause untold economic destruction
:) I walk and ride everywhere. Someone will give me a lift in a car once every 1-2 weeks, if that. It's a bit harder, sometimes, but I like the feeling of using my own body to get around, rather than being carried around by fossil fuel powered machines.
I think this is the crux of the issue. To solve the looming problems in the world we may find that life gets harde and we have to make sacrifices, but surely we can afford this? Why not have the same number of TVs than people, rather than more? Why not use your own effort to get around more, or read on the bus rather than burn fuel sitting in a multi-tonne vehicle carrying a 70kg person?
I work as a software developer. In coding, it's pretty cool to be able to build complex stuff, get it to work with things and even have programs write programs. Over millions of years, another form of code has developed, via randomness where some things do better than others, and thus make more copies on and on and on.
When I compare what systems we humans construct compared to what nature has done, it is truly humbling. And as each species becomes extinct, we are losing millions and millions of pieces of source code that ingeniously solve problems. In a few hundred years, the loss of biodiversity (in effect, trillions of years worth of computation) and the unbalancing of natural systems will be revealed as the true economic loss of these times.
We can either be cursed by the people who have to use smaller cars, get out of cars onto public transport or onto a bike, or we can be cursed forever by our decendants, who single out our generation as the worst... sure others destroyed the earth, but we KNOW we're doing it, and keep going, because we like our lifestyles too much.
>> If transportation is so important to you, then you should move somewhere where the transportation situation is more to your liking.
I already have
I'd probably be arrested.
I didn't pass any judgement on whether it was a good decision or not (I would probably try and save my children if I had them too)
I was simply using that to refute the poster I replied to, who said that Bush put himself in danger in the military.
he put himself at risk of being sent into war for over 5 years as a young man
Like most rich dads, Bush's father pulled strings to get him a safe posting.
the war has been going on long enough that most if not every soldier currently in Iraq knew they had a good chance of going there when they enlisted or re-upped
There are actually soldiers in Iraq who WANTED to come home at the end of their service, but were forced to stay on due to lack of numbers.
The headline that would cause the US to invade North Korea isn't North Korea says it has conducted nuclear tests, but North Korea discovers large deposit of oil.