Having to replace a bunch of parts and drop $700 because a MacBook Pro's butterfly keyboard broke isn't green, Apple. These things have embodied energy, implicit in their manufacture. They're not disposable.
She is a Traitor to the country. This isn't because of any party loyalty. These were classified documents which she was working on as a member of the military. She chose to be in the military, and work in an area that had such access. This is different then Snowden who was a civilian consultant and wasn't given a way to report illegal actives. Or Assange who isn't an American Citizen.
Yes, and the Holocaust was both legal and mostly secret too. Your rhetoric discards all morality in favor of laws that corrupt people wrote to give their blood-soaked oil war cover. Every organized atrocity happens because someone carried out orders. You're hounding for people to just do as their told, no matter how blatantly evil it is.
The Iraq war murdered hundreds of thousands of civilians, displaced over a million, and created gulags where torture and rape were carried out in malice by American soldiers against those rounded up indiscriminately in an occupied country. The American people were broadly deceived about the cause of the Iraq War, as they have been for many previous wars waged on behalf of rich people's interest abroad, and our soldiers in particular were lied to about what they put their lives on the line for.
That is morally treasonous, and anyone who disobeyed an order from an official to restore basic human rights is a hero.
I will not hear of traitor from you sadistic authoritarian psychopaths. You're a traitor to humanity regardless of borders. Full stop.
We have absolutely got to do something about climate change. Most of what we've got to do would also make the world a lot better in sundry other ways.
If we helped the landscape keep multiple stories of vegetation, and worked out ways to scale orchards designed the same way, it would make for great resistance to drought and a stable food supply, and over time, correct for this spike in greenhouse gasses.
Entire horticultural and early agriculture civilizations have been founded not on controlling the landscape's entire harvest, but on enriching it and reaping the surplus. In this way of life, economy and environment are not at all at odds. In fact, they are interdependent. You can look at terra preta and its history in the Amazon basin for an example of a long-term, large-scale win-win scenario. http://news.cornell.edu/storie...
If you want to see what is happening in China, watch this video, "The Lessons of the Loess Plateau": https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Even if you don't exactly agree with *how* they got it done, the results for the landscape and the prosperity of the people there speak for themselves. Start asking how your local economic and political systems can start to do right by the soil too.
What happens when the food supply declines, because nutrients don't cycle with fauna, because pollinators are gone, because all the interrelated parts of nature unravel? That is the basis for a planet habitable to humans.
Do we use more pesticides to fight harder for what's left, considering that pesticides cause the implosion of the very ecosystem benefits we depend on to raise food to begin with? Then we're finished.
What happens to poor people when sustenance and shelter and resources that once came freely become scarce? I'm sure the rich will have their hydroponic gardens - atop places where oaks once rivaled wheat fields for output and salmon arrived to spawn in such numbers that it appeared possible to walk across rivers on their back. If manufactured solutions are a replacement for ecosystems for the many, though, why aren't we all snapping up real estate in places like the Sahara or Antarctica?
We are turning an Eden into a much more barren world, because we so insist on dominating and concentrating its wealth. We don't live where ecosystems aren't established. Humans have got to learn to share the world with others - or else.
Who wants to hang with, date, have kids with an unmotivated jackass who doesn't do anything with their life? Not just money-wise, I mean all sorts of development.
Creativity is a selective pressure. The rich overlords just don't get the lion's share of its benefit by default.
Part of the green revolution has to be an understanding that we don't replace one widget in the whole system. Solar panels are obviously not an in-place solution for fossil fuels everywhere they're used. This shouldn't deter us from making changes, because there's plenty of opportunity for other solutions.
For example, I'm often cooking my meals on a solar oven lately. Like the GoSun ovens out there, this thing reflects sunlight from a parabolic trough, onto a vacuum-insulated glass tube which has heat-absorbing elements behind the glass and vacuum. It's quite effective. It easily hits 280 degrees on a typical sunny day in the southern US. Let's break that down -> sunlight, concentrated, stored, directly used, without conversion. Because there's no flame, I just load it up and walk away for a half-hour. It's as convenient as a microwave, with just a bit of patience, and the food tastes great.
Friends of mine ask if it wouldn't be better to use solar panels to drive an electric slow cooker. Well, in that case, the energy conversions are radiant light -> electricity -> heat, via induction. The costs mount up pretty quickly. It's far more expensive, hardly more convenient, and way more impactful.
Most of our energy usage is in heating or cooling something. When we get more direct and sensible with how to do that in an environmental setting, it can be as simple as controlling the flow of sunlight, reflecting or absorbing passive heat, controlling shades and ventilation. You can get really far with just a soil berm like on the north side of an Earthship built in the northern hemisphere - just a pile of dirt moved into the right place.
So no, there's not enough rare earth to do things in a specifically wasteful and narrow way, but there's plenty of opportunity to use more appropriate technology, primitive or advanced, to solve our problems.
I'm not an Apple user anymore, but I completely feel that Electron is the software engineering equivalent of flinging poo.
Let's just look at the minimum requirements to run Atom, an Electron-based text editor with IDE extensions
Processor - 1.8 GHz or higher Pentium 4 (or equivalent) Memory - 2 GB RAM (minimum 1 GB dedicated to Atom, Molecule node, or Cloud Molecule) Hard disk - 50 MB for run-time and configuration, 10 GB for data archiving
Are you freaking kidding me? For a text editor? I don't care how much bling it has, that's inexcusable. All this engineering we've done, all the rare earths we've mined, all the research on battery life has to go down the toilet because we're sending Javascript developers to do a systems programmer's job? My phone's battery has to go to shit for Slack, and my laptop has to overheat and stay on a power cord for Atom?
That's freaking irresponsible. There's little these apps do that vim and emacs and IRC haven't done for decades for a tiny percentage of these requirements.
Cross-platform development has been done way better than this already. but the training wheel languages have got to go.
This is exactly how cities and villages are made around the whole world that haven't been bulldozed for a highway. I lived this way for years on the West Coast of the USA, and I saw it in Peru. Mixed-use densely populated centers, built to a human scale rather than an automobiles. Guess what? It's way more pleasant to be able to do your daily commute and socializing and basic grocery shopping in the course of a half-mile walk than sit in traffic. It's way more fun, way more affordable, way less accident-prone, way better for everyone to live around. And, it spares the environment of a lot of damage.
Expelling CO2 into the atmosphere faster than the rest of the system can take it up still has dire consequences. Ocean acidification, for example. If that worsens, anything that needs a shell to live is going to die off. That includes the base of the food web - coral and plankton. That will happen no matter how much sunlight you block.
So no, there is no substitute for a stable climate, and the wealth the rich will hoard from causing the decline will not help even them in the end.
We were clouds and dust bunnies, son. All the interstellar dust just lumped together around a swirl of cloud that got squished a bit from a star having a hiccup which smooshed the dust grains together. That's what they mean we're made of star stuff. It's actually dust bunnies. Rocks come later.
There's no such thing as an energy conversion without a lot of lost energy, 40% at least. That goes for heat to kinetic energy in the pistons of a car engine, kinetic to electric in a generator, and all sorts of technologies already in place. It's hardly unique to compressed air. In the end, energy solutions need to be weighed for the whole of their impact - resource inputs, pollution, renewability, environmental health. There's still a good reason for compressed air to be in the running for voluminous utility-grade projects.
I know insecure people like to imagine the human race as being so technologically advanced that we could affect the entire planet, but we aren't. AGW is crazy talk by crazy people and not a shred of evidence has even been shown to link humans to anything of the sort.
In the meantime, the refrigerants that have already caused huge holes in the ozone layer are also some of the worst of the greenhouse gasses, we've demonstrably burned hundreds of millions of years' worth of fossil fuels in a few centuries that would have remained sequestered in the ground indefinitely in anything short of a Permian-Triassic level extinction event, and the oceans are already acidifying enough from the CO2 that shellfish are already impacted.
You could just go ask around in Alaska, since the polar regions are warming at almost twice the rate of the rest of the globe.
But first, you have to look at why you're willfully living in a fact-free alternate reality.
What are the resources in the clouds above Venus? How do you get the raw materials to maintain the balloons? What's the economy there? What's the draw? How come we're not living in blimps floating above Earth?
The one thing I see is more solar gain for energy, but that's better gotten in space. Terraforming? Even if you screened the planet from the sun entirely, it would take vast amounts of time for the heat trapped in the atmosphere to dissipate.
Venus seems like the hot version of Antarctica; a place for long, quiet scientific missions, but hardly a place to live.
I really think our chances for self-sustaining colonies elsewhere in the solar system are those places where we can dig in for protection from radiation, seal up a breathable atmosphere, and try to sustain an ecosystem. The lava caves on the Moon seem to me like the best place to do this. They're easier to reach, delay for signals to reach there isn't long, resupply and evac are doable. If we can get things right there, then I beieve we're ready for Mars and beyond.
It's on the hot side of the habitable zone, and if my understanding is correct, the higher gravity is likely to mean it has a large atmosphere and quite a greenhouse effect. I'm going to guess this one to be a super-Venus.
I think most of the readership here is aware that neither Apple nor Google/Samsung invented the multitouch screen. Those go back to 1982 at the University of Toronto. Engineering prototypes for multitouch phones outside of Apple before the iPhone. What Apple did was bring it to market first. Really, the article is cajoling us to think everyone else is hanging their identity on this stuff, and then giving it the shallow treatment and missing key history. At this point... this isn't worth our eyes.
Because isn't parenthood just as as common and basic to a human being as shipping other humans in shackles across the seas, accepting that a third of them die along the way, splitting them from their families, siccing patrols and dogs on them, keeping them from education and voting, sneaking out and impregnating them when the missus won't be bothered, and keeping them living in hovels without wages until they die?
Why, if that institution and its cultural artifacts aren't safe, nothing is!!
I completely agree with the above statement. Psychopathy, narcissism, and machiavellianism comprise a "dark triad" of personality disorders in the DSM, and the callous lack of empathy they engender, the shameless harm done to others, is frightful. The problem is that these people tend to be compulsive social climbers, and will claw their way to the top and then try to remake society in their image. And they have. Thing is, they are a minority, and we have the science to keep extremely toxic people from responsibilities they shouldn't be trusted with. We should use it.
The faculty and most of the staff are almost as screwed over as the students themselves. They're not the comfortably tenured gentry with huge studies in lavish mansions some people are thinking of. It's the top brass that have locked down that lifestyle for themselves. In turn, rich landlords who've inherited ownership to huge sprawls of real estate the normal person can hardly afford a closet in are the price-gouging profiteers with little interest in the actual health of those living there. I think the ones renting out giant victorians they got with their trust fund just to cover their monthly wine bill - yes I'm thinking of specific actual people I've encountered - are the ones whose resources exceed their current contribution or merit, and might need to foot some extra bills. Hey, they used to call that noblesse oblige.
What they're not telling you, and NASA may well deny a little too quickly, is that they found a gap for some other hexagonal shapes that Cassini was able to drop in for a perfect fit, whereupon the entire layer immediately disappeared.
Slashdot Mirror
Having to replace a bunch of parts and drop $700 because a MacBook Pro's butterfly keyboard broke isn't green, Apple. These things have embodied energy, implicit in their manufacture. They're not disposable.
She is a Traitor to the country. This isn't because of any party loyalty. These were classified documents which she was working on as a member of the military. She chose to be in the military, and work in an area that had such access. This is different then Snowden who was a civilian consultant and wasn't given a way to report illegal actives. Or Assange who isn't an American Citizen.
Yes, and the Holocaust was both legal and mostly secret too. Your rhetoric discards all morality in favor of laws that corrupt people wrote to give their blood-soaked oil war cover. Every organized atrocity happens because someone carried out orders. You're hounding for people to just do as their told, no matter how blatantly evil it is.
The Iraq war murdered hundreds of thousands of civilians, displaced over a million, and created gulags where torture and rape were carried out in malice by American soldiers against those rounded up indiscriminately in an occupied country. The American people were broadly deceived about the cause of the Iraq War, as they have been for many previous wars waged on behalf of rich people's interest abroad, and our soldiers in particular were lied to about what they put their lives on the line for.
That is morally treasonous, and anyone who disobeyed an order from an official to restore basic human rights is a hero.
I will not hear of traitor from you sadistic authoritarian psychopaths. You're a traitor to humanity regardless of borders. Full stop.
I'm sure with the state of technology and all, the costs to keep track of these records are rising and the credit card companies are just keeping up.
We have absolutely got to do something about climate change. Most of what we've got to do would also make the world a lot better in sundry other ways.
If we helped the landscape keep multiple stories of vegetation, and worked out ways to scale orchards designed the same way, it would make for great resistance to drought and a stable food supply, and over time, correct for this spike in greenhouse gasses.
Entire horticultural and early agriculture civilizations have been founded not on controlling the landscape's entire harvest, but on enriching it and reaping the surplus. In this way of life, economy and environment are not at all at odds. In fact, they are interdependent. You can look at terra preta and its history in the Amazon basin for an example of a long-term, large-scale win-win scenario. http://news.cornell.edu/storie...
If you want to see what is happening in China, watch this video, "The Lessons of the Loess Plateau": https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Even if you don't exactly agree with *how* they got it done, the results for the landscape and the prosperity of the people there speak for themselves. Start asking how your local economic and political systems can start to do right by the soil too.
Insects provide $57 billion in ecological services to the USA alone, and that's just dealing with quantifiable things.
https://www.scientificamerican...
I propose you see if there is actually a problem before acting or panicking. Wow, what a radical concept, to insist on replication of results.
Why not check to see if there are other comparable results before using rhetoric which depends on their non-existence?
https://journals.plos.org/plos...
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
What happens when the food supply declines, because nutrients don't cycle with fauna, because pollinators are gone, because all the interrelated parts of nature unravel? That is the basis for a planet habitable to humans.
Do we use more pesticides to fight harder for what's left, considering that pesticides cause the implosion of the very ecosystem benefits we depend on to raise food to begin with? Then we're finished.
What happens to poor people when sustenance and shelter and resources that once came freely become scarce? I'm sure the rich will have their hydroponic gardens - atop places where oaks once rivaled wheat fields for output and salmon arrived to spawn in such numbers that it appeared possible to walk across rivers on their back. If manufactured solutions are a replacement for ecosystems for the many, though, why aren't we all snapping up real estate in places like the Sahara or Antarctica?
We are turning an Eden into a much more barren world, because we so insist on dominating and concentrating its wealth. We don't live where ecosystems aren't established. Humans have got to learn to share the world with others - or else.
Who wants to hang with, date, have kids with an unmotivated jackass who doesn't do anything with their life? Not just money-wise, I mean all sorts of development.
Creativity is a selective pressure. The rich overlords just don't get the lion's share of its benefit by default.
I'd say it's fast zombie, as opposed to slow. Possibly infected with rage after a bite from Larry Ellison of Oracle.
Part of the green revolution has to be an understanding that we don't replace one widget in the whole system. Solar panels are obviously not an in-place solution for fossil fuels everywhere they're used. This shouldn't deter us from making changes, because there's plenty of opportunity for other solutions.
For example, I'm often cooking my meals on a solar oven lately. Like the GoSun ovens out there, this thing reflects sunlight from a parabolic trough, onto a vacuum-insulated glass tube which has heat-absorbing elements behind the glass and vacuum. It's quite effective. It easily hits 280 degrees on a typical sunny day in the southern US. Let's break that down -> sunlight, concentrated, stored, directly used, without conversion. Because there's no flame, I just load it up and walk away for a half-hour. It's as convenient as a microwave, with just a bit of patience, and the food tastes great.
Friends of mine ask if it wouldn't be better to use solar panels to drive an electric slow cooker. Well, in that case, the energy conversions are radiant light -> electricity -> heat, via induction. The costs mount up pretty quickly. It's far more expensive, hardly more convenient, and way more impactful.
Most of our energy usage is in heating or cooling something. When we get more direct and sensible with how to do that in an environmental setting, it can be as simple as controlling the flow of sunlight, reflecting or absorbing passive heat, controlling shades and ventilation. You can get really far with just a soil berm like on the north side of an Earthship built in the northern hemisphere - just a pile of dirt moved into the right place.
So no, there's not enough rare earth to do things in a specifically wasteful and narrow way, but there's plenty of opportunity to use more appropriate technology, primitive or advanced, to solve our problems.
I'm not an Apple user anymore, but I completely feel that Electron is the software engineering equivalent of flinging poo.
Let's just look at the minimum requirements to run Atom, an Electron-based text editor with IDE extensions
Processor - 1.8 GHz or higher Pentium 4 (or equivalent)
Memory - 2 GB RAM (minimum 1 GB dedicated to Atom, Molecule node, or Cloud Molecule)
Hard disk - 50 MB for run-time and configuration, 10 GB for data archiving
Are you freaking kidding me? For a text editor? I don't care how much bling it has, that's inexcusable. All this engineering we've done, all the rare earths we've mined, all the research on battery life has to go down the toilet because we're sending Javascript developers to do a systems programmer's job? My phone's battery has to go to shit for Slack, and my laptop has to overheat and stay on a power cord for Atom?
That's freaking irresponsible. There's little these apps do that vim and emacs and IRC haven't done for decades for a tiny percentage of these requirements.
Cross-platform development has been done way better than this already. but the training wheel languages have got to go.
This is exactly how cities and villages are made around the whole world that haven't been bulldozed for a highway. I lived this way for years on the West Coast of the USA, and I saw it in Peru. Mixed-use densely populated centers, built to a human scale rather than an automobiles. Guess what? It's way more pleasant to be able to do your daily commute and socializing and basic grocery shopping in the course of a half-mile walk than sit in traffic. It's way more fun, way more affordable, way less accident-prone, way better for everyone to live around. And, it spares the environment of a lot of damage.
Expelling CO2 into the atmosphere faster than the rest of the system can take it up still has dire consequences. Ocean acidification, for example. If that worsens, anything that needs a shell to live is going to die off. That includes the base of the food web - coral and plankton. That will happen no matter how much sunlight you block.
So no, there is no substitute for a stable climate, and the wealth the rich will hoard from causing the decline will not help even them in the end.
We were clouds and dust bunnies, son. All the interstellar dust just lumped together around a swirl of cloud that got squished a bit from a star having a hiccup which smooshed the dust grains together. That's what they mean we're made of star stuff. It's actually dust bunnies. Rocks come later.
There's no such thing as an energy conversion without a lot of lost energy, 40% at least. That goes for heat to kinetic energy in the pistons of a car engine, kinetic to electric in a generator, and all sorts of technologies already in place. It's hardly unique to compressed air. In the end, energy solutions need to be weighed for the whole of their impact - resource inputs, pollution, renewability, environmental health. There's still a good reason for compressed air to be in the running for voluminous utility-grade projects.
I know insecure people like to imagine the human race as being so technologically advanced that we could affect the entire planet, but we aren't. AGW is crazy talk by crazy people and not a shred of evidence has even been shown to link humans to anything of the sort.
In the meantime, the refrigerants that have already caused huge holes in the ozone layer are also some of the worst of the greenhouse gasses, we've demonstrably burned hundreds of millions of years' worth of fossil fuels in a few centuries that would have remained sequestered in the ground indefinitely in anything short of a Permian-Triassic level extinction event, and the oceans are already acidifying enough from the CO2 that shellfish are already impacted.
You could just go ask around in Alaska, since the polar regions are warming at almost twice the rate of the rest of the globe.
But first, you have to look at why you're willfully living in a fact-free alternate reality.
What are the resources in the clouds above Venus? How do you get the raw materials to maintain the balloons? What's the economy there? What's the draw? How come we're not living in blimps floating above Earth?
The one thing I see is more solar gain for energy, but that's better gotten in space. Terraforming? Even if you screened the planet from the sun entirely, it would take vast amounts of time for the heat trapped in the atmosphere to dissipate.
Venus seems like the hot version of Antarctica; a place for long, quiet scientific missions, but hardly a place to live.
I really think our chances for self-sustaining colonies elsewhere in the solar system are those places where we can dig in for protection from radiation, seal up a breathable atmosphere, and try to sustain an ecosystem. The lava caves on the Moon seem to me like the best place to do this. They're easier to reach, delay for signals to reach there isn't long, resupply and evac are doable. If we can get things right there, then I beieve we're ready for Mars and beyond.
It's on the hot side of the habitable zone, and if my understanding is correct, the higher gravity is likely to mean it has a large atmosphere and quite a greenhouse effect. I'm going to guess this one to be a super-Venus.
I think most of the readership here is aware that neither Apple nor Google/Samsung invented the multitouch screen. Those go back to 1982 at the University of Toronto. Engineering prototypes for multitouch phones outside of Apple before the iPhone. What Apple did was bring it to market first. Really, the article is cajoling us to think everyone else is hanging their identity on this stuff, and then giving it the shallow treatment and missing key history. At this point... this isn't worth our eyes.
Because isn't parenthood just as as common and basic to a human being as shipping other humans in shackles across the seas, accepting that a third of them die along the way, splitting them from their families, siccing patrols and dogs on them, keeping them from education and voting, sneaking out and impregnating them when the missus won't be bothered, and keeping them living in hovels without wages until they die?
Why, if that institution and its cultural artifacts aren't safe, nothing is!!
"Mindful people" feel less pain, cause more in those hearing their Lululemon'ed asses preach.
I completely agree with the above statement. Psychopathy, narcissism, and machiavellianism comprise a "dark triad" of personality disorders in the DSM, and the callous lack of empathy they engender, the shameless harm done to others, is frightful. The problem is that these people tend to be compulsive social climbers, and will claw their way to the top and then try to remake society in their image. And they have. Thing is, they are a minority, and we have the science to keep extremely toxic people from responsibilities they shouldn't be trusted with. We should use it.
The faculty and most of the staff are almost as screwed over as the students themselves. They're not the comfortably tenured gentry with huge studies in lavish mansions some people are thinking of. It's the top brass that have locked down that lifestyle for themselves. In turn, rich landlords who've inherited ownership to huge sprawls of real estate the normal person can hardly afford a closet in are the price-gouging profiteers with little interest in the actual health of those living there. I think the ones renting out giant victorians they got with their trust fund just to cover their monthly wine bill - yes I'm thinking of specific actual people I've encountered - are the ones whose resources exceed their current contribution or merit, and might need to foot some extra bills. Hey, they used to call that noblesse oblige.
What they're not telling you, and NASA may well deny a little too quickly, is that they found a gap for some other hexagonal shapes that Cassini was able to drop in for a perfect fit, whereupon the entire layer immediately disappeared.
Well I say the Anonymous Coward who's been posting here on Slashdot all these years should publicly resign!