After many long years, I have slipped Microsoft's clutches for good. Cedega took out the last reason I kept Windows around. As much work as Vista was to get working with games, I consider my Ubuntu desktop a much preferable solution. I'd rather send money to Cedega than MS.
I've got a question. Where did the parent say anything about "disappearing" anybody? Instead I thought that was a good approach to finding and prosecuting phishers of this variety.
Actually, at the rate our sun is heating up as a natural part of its life cycle, we've got about 500 million years to get off this rock. So, we don't get to see that firey end anyway.
While yes, you could imagine other forms of biochemistry out there, the fact that we are focusing efforts on forms of life as we know it isn't a lack of imagination, it's just good scientific practice. You work with the data you can get. It just so happens that the most common elements in the universe interact in productive ways that we know about based on the liquid state of water, itself comprised of the first and third most common elements in the whole shebang. That's the stuff of science, not fiction. Hey, I love science fiction, but it's the hard work to get tested observations and reproducible results to then draw conclusions that separates scientists from, say, "intelligent design" hacks.
Arguments for or against windmills just aren't the last word on wind powe r. The laddermill, kite generator, and wind belts previous mentioned here all present potential for different situations.
I think a diversified portfolio of renewable energy and superconductor research is the way to go.
I don't think there are many non-catastrophic ways to alter the environment as much as humanity has. Arguments based on "We've seen this in nature before" usually miss a significant point: there's never been anything like the industrial revolution before. Nothing. We've dug and pumped a sizable fraction of all the sequestered CO2 from hundreds of millions of years and put it into the atmosphere in less than two centuries, and we're not stopping. Then there's nitrogen trifluoride and things of our making that are new to this whole system. Next up, positive feedback loops from methane hydrates and other greenhouse gasses. We haven't even addressed the growth of the problem yet, let alone the acceleration of these trends. Volcanos, on the other hand, expel their gasses and ash and are done.
Yes, nature will correct for it, eventually. There's no telling how soon or what survives.
Spraying this stuff into the atmosphere won't do anything to fix the growing acidity of the oceans due to CO2 uptake, and might allow us to continue that kind of pollution longer. That's bad news for corals and shellfish.
I really believe that microgrids - peer-to-peer electricity grids wherein many small-scale power sources are used where optimal - are the answer to this. The big conventional grids lose a lot of electricity to resistance, and have to overproduce to get any redundancy at all. We need to revamp our infrastructure anyway, so why not?
You know, especially after seeing the recent opposition to solar farms based on "altering desert ecosystems", I'm convinced that the oil industry will put on an environmental face when convenient. None of the environmental groups I've participated in were anything but appalled by that stonewalling of solar power. There is no monolothic environmentalist group to have a fallacy; rather, there's shared concern from many groups for the state of the earth, and the faux-green capitalist crap trying to cash in on it.
I agree with you. Not only that, but I bet that with microgrids with many small generators, like solar panels or windmills or perhaps MIT's new solar heat dish (discussed earlier on this site) as needed, could do it. Improve public transportation and agriculture similarly, and my god, we'd have solved some problems.
At this point, the advantages are so compelling that it's only corrupt political fatcats in the way. Maybe when more of us Americans notice that Europe's superior energy efficiency is a big economic advantage with high energy prices, we'll make the switch whether Big Oil's paid lobbyists like it or not.
Put a bunch of these on a microgrid and you'll have a nice, efficient, blackout-resistant and green power grid. My god, why aren't we doing this already?
On the other hand, life has the self-replicating and efficient use of existing resources down pat. If it becomes clear that we've peaked on our energy resources, look for elephants to keep going while bulldozers rust. How much more so these frail, overhyped technologies? It takes an ecosystem to survive.
Give me biology, even with its hacks and kludges. It's just too magnificent to ignore and I think that we'll find that there's a species somewhere doing just about everything that's really important for our lives. Google biomimicry sometime. We're billions of years evolved - let Mr. Kurzweil put that in his pipe and smoke it a while.
A fundamental difference I see between a cult and a true religion is that members of a cult are not "allowed" to leave. A Christian might decide he no longer is one, but his Christian friends will not (generally) shun him, refuse to associate with him, actively try to harm him, or just plain hold him prisoner somewhere.
Having been subjected to an exorcism and been hit with versus like:
"For it is impossible for those who were once enlightened, and have tasted of the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost, and have tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the world to come, if they shall fall away, to renew then again unto repentance; seeing they crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh, and put him to an open shame."...I assure you there are some extremely cultish groups within the bounds of christianity that do shun friends and family who don't believe as they do.
Cultishness is cultishness, no matter what label, and it's ugly.
Our oil issues have been artificially prolonged by lobbies that wish to remain the rich gatekeepers. This is just one of many solutions that we have. The problem is not lack of ability or imagination - it's pure politics and greed.
I really liked how Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan closed out their book Comet: they imagined comets, with their water and mineral reserves, being seeded with highly engineered trees whose branches would extend far into the surrounding space, gathering the light to maintain themselves. The base could then be engineered into a human colony.
The best way to make it in space would be to engineer life that can sustain an ecology there, if you ask me. I think that was visionary.
What might follow is arguments of who is more important, the man who discovers this science or the man who makes it easily accessible and digestible by a vast majority of the five billion simpletons living on the earth?
You know you're on Slashdot when someone speaks so condescendingly of most of humanity for their lack of PhD-level expertise in a specific field and gets modded interesting. I challenge you to take a few good cultural anthropology classes. Just a few. The human experience does not begin or end in a physics lab.
Here a great man has passed in a great field, and we mar that with misanthropy.
I don't get why, if your tastes are so specific, you need worry about the default desktop looks. Come on, themes are available all over the place!
I like the OSX balance, where it's clearly visible what's a button and what's just a pane or widget, which is not the case with simply embossed looks. KDE and even Windows have decent setups available, too. But hey, if you really prefer something else, where are the screenshots?
Right, true for now, but that's due to KDE4 being in early development, whereas the Gnome developers have stripped that kind of thing out over the years based on their design philosophy.
Historically, KDE has been much more configurable than Gnome. All through the KDE 3.x days my first step on a fresh install was to reconfigure the toolbars to reduce clutter, set up the keyboard shortcuts so that I could reach for the mouse less, so forth - or of course, copying over the.kderc folder from a machine where I'd done this before. Doing this in Gnome is problematic, and often Gnome distros bundle applications that will pay no attention to your customizations. The KDE integration advantage really comes through here.
Right now, Gnome is being so conservative about their interface that you actually can't "do the same in the other direction".
You're quite clever to know a brat from the average guy over the internet. Me, I know my parents got their college paid for by their family members back when it didn't cost so much, while I carry the full weight of my tuition that is several times theirs even figuring in inflation. Yes, sir, I'm next in line.
Sounds like your reasons for keeping Windows all boil down to playing games. A solid OS for playing games is a different thing from a solid OS for development or server duty. I for my part have been an OSX/Linux guy for work needing to be done for years.
So we're back to those games. Something's got to be done about that. We need more and better open source games, and with engines like OGRE and all the content that modders put out, we really could be doing better. 'Tis a shame, because modders are contenting themselves with second-class status.
Do catch up on your history of American dealings in the third world. You learn how the likes of Osama bin Laden are created, why they get motivated against us, why they think they can gain support for hitting us. It was cruel and murderous, but it was not out of the blue, and it's part of a vicious cycle.
Googling "CIA" and "blowback" will get you started nicely.
I got stuck with a Vista upgrade when several too many games told me that my aging Windows 2000 installation was not supported and refused to install. That's all I want Windows for anymore, really. I've got Linux and OSX for real work, right? So I went for the Home Basic, reasoning that for simply running games, that was all I wanted, and I didn't want to fill MS's coffers more than necessary. I also reasoned that I didn't want Aero, and would be trimming the services to the bare minimum.
Mission accomplished, right? Except the hard drives thrash a great deal more than they used to. So far, I've had to upgrade my sound card, but that's not so bad. The real deal is that the security model spams you so much that you regard its pop-ups as noise. Also, the software incompatibilities tend to undermine the sole reason that I keep Windows around at all.
I much prefer my experience with OSX or Linux or *BSD. Game makers ought to get serious about porting their titles, because I believe at this point that that's the main reason home users are still putting up with this crap. I won't pretend that there aren't obstacles to this, but for the love of god, let's dump this old broken system.
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After many long years, I have slipped Microsoft's clutches for good. Cedega took out the last reason I kept Windows around. As much work as Vista was to get working with games, I consider my Ubuntu desktop a much preferable solution. I'd rather send money to Cedega than MS.
Sorry, had to crow. It just feels so clean.
I've got a question. Where did the parent say anything about "disappearing" anybody? Instead I thought that was a good approach to finding and prosecuting phishers of this variety.
Actually, at the rate our sun is heating up as a natural part of its life cycle, we've got about 500 million years to get off this rock. So, we don't get to see that firey end anyway.
While yes, you could imagine other forms of biochemistry out there, the fact that we are focusing efforts on forms of life as we know it isn't a lack of imagination, it's just good scientific practice. You work with the data you can get. It just so happens that the most common elements in the universe interact in productive ways that we know about based on the liquid state of water, itself comprised of the first and third most common elements in the whole shebang. That's the stuff of science, not fiction. Hey, I love science fiction, but it's the hard work to get tested observations and reproducible results to then draw conclusions that separates scientists from, say, "intelligent design" hacks.
Arguments for or against windmills just aren't the last word on wind powe r. The laddermill, kite generator, and wind belts previous mentioned here all present potential for different situations.
I think a diversified portfolio of renewable energy and superconductor research is the way to go.
I don't think there are many non-catastrophic ways to alter the environment as much as humanity has. Arguments based on "We've seen this in nature before" usually miss a significant point: there's never been anything like the industrial revolution before. Nothing. We've dug and pumped a sizable fraction of all the sequestered CO2 from hundreds of millions of years and put it into the atmosphere in less than two centuries, and we're not stopping. Then there's nitrogen trifluoride and things of our making that are new to this whole system. Next up, positive feedback loops from methane hydrates and other greenhouse gasses. We haven't even addressed the growth of the problem yet, let alone the acceleration of these trends. Volcanos, on the other hand, expel their gasses and ash and are done.
Yes, nature will correct for it, eventually. There's no telling how soon or what survives.
Spraying this stuff into the atmosphere won't do anything to fix the growing acidity of the oceans due to CO2 uptake, and might allow us to continue that kind of pollution longer. That's bad news for corals and shellfish.
I really believe that microgrids - peer-to-peer electricity grids wherein many small-scale power sources are used where optimal - are the answer to this. The big conventional grids lose a lot of electricity to resistance, and have to overproduce to get any redundancy at all. We need to revamp our infrastructure anyway, so why not?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4245584.stm
http://certs.lbl.gov/certs-der-micro.html
http://www.ingenia.org.uk/ingenia/articles.aspx?Index=329
http://www.fuelcellmarkets.com/fuel_cell_markets/news_and_information/3,1,1,1,14428.html
You know, especially after seeing the recent opposition to solar farms based on "altering desert ecosystems", I'm convinced that the oil industry will put on an environmental face when convenient. None of the environmental groups I've participated in were anything but appalled by that stonewalling of solar power. There is no monolothic environmentalist group to have a fallacy; rather, there's shared concern from many groups for the state of the earth, and the faux-green capitalist crap trying to cash in on it.
I agree with you. Not only that, but I bet that with microgrids with many small generators, like solar panels or windmills or perhaps MIT's new solar heat dish (discussed earlier on this site) as needed, could do it. Improve public transportation and agriculture similarly, and my god, we'd have solved some problems.
At this point, the advantages are so compelling that it's only corrupt political fatcats in the way. Maybe when more of us Americans notice that Europe's superior energy efficiency is a big economic advantage with high energy prices, we'll make the switch whether Big Oil's paid lobbyists like it or not.
Put a bunch of these on a microgrid and you'll have a nice, efficient, blackout-resistant and green power grid. My god, why aren't we doing this already?
On the other hand, life has the self-replicating and efficient use of existing resources down pat. If it becomes clear that we've peaked on our energy resources, look for elephants to keep going while bulldozers rust. How much more so these frail, overhyped technologies? It takes an ecosystem to survive.
Give me biology, even with its hacks and kludges. It's just too magnificent to ignore and I think that we'll find that there's a species somewhere doing just about everything that's really important for our lives. Google biomimicry sometime. We're billions of years evolved - let Mr. Kurzweil put that in his pipe and smoke it a while.
A fundamental difference I see between a cult and a true religion is that members of a cult are not "allowed" to leave. A Christian might decide he no longer is one, but his Christian friends will not (generally) shun him, refuse to associate with him, actively try to harm him, or just plain hold him prisoner somewhere.
...I assure you there are some extremely cultish groups within the bounds of christianity that do shun friends and family who don't believe as they do.
Having been subjected to an exorcism and been hit with versus like:
"For it is impossible for those who were once enlightened, and have tasted of the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost, and have tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the world to come, if they shall fall away, to renew then again unto repentance; seeing they crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh, and put him to an open shame."
Cultishness is cultishness, no matter what label, and it's ugly.
Our oil issues have been artificially prolonged by lobbies that wish to remain the rich gatekeepers. This is just one of many solutions that we have. The problem is not lack of ability or imagination - it's pure politics and greed.
A better species would be on the moon, now.
I really liked how Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan closed out their book Comet: they imagined comets, with their water and mineral reserves, being seeded with highly engineered trees whose branches would extend far into the surrounding space, gathering the light to maintain themselves. The base could then be engineered into a human colony.
The best way to make it in space would be to engineer life that can sustain an ecology there, if you ask me. I think that was visionary.
You know you're on Slashdot when someone speaks so condescendingly of most of humanity for their lack of PhD-level expertise in a specific field and gets modded interesting. I challenge you to take a few good cultural anthropology classes. Just a few. The human experience does not begin or end in a physics lab.
Here a great man has passed in a great field, and we mar that with misanthropy.
I don't get why, if your tastes are so specific, you need worry about the default desktop looks. Come on, themes are available all over the place!
I like the OSX balance, where it's clearly visible what's a button and what's just a pane or widget, which is not the case with simply embossed looks. KDE and even Windows have decent setups available, too. But hey, if you really prefer something else, where are the screenshots?
Right, true for now, but that's due to KDE4 being in early development, whereas the Gnome developers have stripped that kind of thing out over the years based on their design philosophy.
"And THIS is the galaxy he lived in!..."
*maniacal laughter*
Historically, KDE has been much more configurable than Gnome. All through the KDE 3.x days my first step on a fresh install was to reconfigure the toolbars to reduce clutter, set up the keyboard shortcuts so that I could reach for the mouse less, so forth - or of course, copying over the .kderc folder from a machine where I'd done this before. Doing this in Gnome is problematic, and often Gnome distros bundle applications that will pay no attention to your customizations. The KDE integration advantage really comes through here.
Right now, Gnome is being so conservative about their interface that you actually can't "do the same in the other direction".
You're quite clever to know a brat from the average guy over the internet. Me, I know my parents got their college paid for by their family members back when it didn't cost so much, while I carry the full weight of my tuition that is several times theirs even figuring in inflation. Yes, sir, I'm next in line.
Heh.
Sounds like your reasons for keeping Windows all boil down to playing games. A solid OS for playing games is a different thing from a solid OS for development or server duty. I for my part have been an OSX/Linux guy for work needing to be done for years.
So we're back to those games. Something's got to be done about that. We need more and better open source games, and with engines like OGRE and all the content that modders put out, we really could be doing better. 'Tis a shame, because modders are contenting themselves with second-class status.
Do catch up on your history of American dealings in the third world. You learn how the likes of Osama bin Laden are created, why they get motivated against us, why they think they can gain support for hitting us. It was cruel and murderous, but it was not out of the blue, and it's part of a vicious cycle.
Googling "CIA" and "blowback" will get you started nicely.
I find it mildly desturbing that the parent was modded "Informative" by anyone.
But now you know. And knowing is half the battle!
I got stuck with a Vista upgrade when several too many games told me that my aging Windows 2000 installation was not supported and refused to install. That's all I want Windows for anymore, really. I've got Linux and OSX for real work, right? So I went for the Home Basic, reasoning that for simply running games, that was all I wanted, and I didn't want to fill MS's coffers more than necessary. I also reasoned that I didn't want Aero, and would be trimming the services to the bare minimum.
Mission accomplished, right? Except the hard drives thrash a great deal more than they used to. So far, I've had to upgrade my sound card, but that's not so bad. The real deal is that the security model spams you so much that you regard its pop-ups as noise. Also, the software incompatibilities tend to undermine the sole reason that I keep Windows around at all.
I much prefer my experience with OSX or Linux or *BSD. Game makers ought to get serious about porting their titles, because I believe at this point that that's the main reason home users are still putting up with this crap. I won't pretend that there aren't obstacles to this, but for the love of god, let's dump this old broken system.