I think the Voluntary Human Extinction group is an example of going so far in making a very important point that they shoot themselves down. They point out the human activities that threaten our species and others with extinction, and then say we have to die off so other species won't. Most people won't listen to this, no change actually gets made, so we're back to square one. This means that the point has to be put across all over again, in more sober terms.
Fact is, the consumption inherent in our lifestyle, including the mining, logging, transportation, and manufacture, are such that we'd need this world's resources several times over to keep on doing it. Either we make real and effective changes - and I don't just mean buying things with cute logos or driving a hybrid - or we leave a big question over our offspring. How it is responsible to have many more children when that jeopardizes the world they'll live in, I don't know. It's tragic, like laying them straightaway in a grave. That is the heart of the matter, I think.
There's already quite a lot of children to care for who need more than egg and sperm donors to have a fair shot at a long and healthy if not materialistic life. I think anyone who chooses to increase the next generation's hopes rather than numbers deserves to feel good about it!
Like most things related to Big Oil and big car companies, you're being presented with an up-front cost for the renewable energy, and the subsidized costs you've paid for through your tax dollars. Our petroleum based economy is actually very costly, and it doesn't come down to dollars, but who wants to keep their hands on the tap.
This is good news. This is a sane source of electricity that will help solar power gain the momentum for an economy of scale.
Even if this planet has been whacked in the way Earth was, I think the amount of atmosphere this thing would have would be huge. Earth was smaller than Venus when it was hit. This means a very thick atmosphere may be reasonably expected, and together with the possibilities for tidal locking, I don't expect us to find paradise there.;)
And since chimpanzees are more evolved than human beings, and this includes immunity to SIV, seems to me that comparing the two species' immune systems would be most productive, right? And since some humans are already immune, we've got a shot at that. I wonder if this group is aiming high enough.
You can guarantee nothing, but this isn't a black and white world, and there's meaningful shades of good, better, and best for any observer. Gun control and licensing doesn't stop the black market, but it does keep the legally sold guns in safer hands.
I read a police officer saying that he was for gun control, where he had been against it, because he saw officers who made bad calls when it came time to start shooting. Nobody is really prepared to deal calmly and rationally with a situation like that, and if not a police officer, certainly not a scared guy in his house who assumes all his kids are in bed or the other things you hear about on the news.
The RIAA with its tentacles in both major parties does things that are corrupt and wrong when you want to make air use of your music.
Big Oil, which has been mainly a Republican thing, drives the things that make many question whether there's going to be a planet worth living in for our grandkids.
A little perspective on which political shark has which remora-like attachments. We've still made some progress here.
Well, let's look at what the most common elements are in the universe. A quick Google shows:
Hydrogen, helium, oxygen, carbon, neon, iron, nitrogen, silicon, magnesium, sulfur. There's your top ten, in that order. It's interesting that carbon, versatile as it is, is so very common. Considering that hydrogen and oxygen, hence water, rank even higher, I think that life as we know it has statistically higher odds of appearing, especially in conditions where water is liquid. The physics of these compounds is the same everywhere, assuming similar environmental conditions.
Now, life on earth has been through several mass extinctions and major evolutionary possibilities got cut off short. However, we have a lot of convergent evolution - for example, the similarities of fish, ichthysaurs, and dolphins being dictated by the properties of liquid water.
It might be interesting to consider the possibility that life out there will have some strong similarities, if superficial, to what we've seen.
That's one approach, if you're just rsyncing things around. Here's my script.
One benefit to it is that it won't try to repeat a step you've already done and wreck things. Pretty basic, but good enough. Don't just pick it up and run, though. It assumes you want to start with a static IP on a local network on a machine with nvidia video. You run this at your own risk; I take no responsibility.
One hour. I've been using Ubuntu for a couple years on a few separate machines, and gotten this process down. This is because I always keep a separate/home partition, and on it I have scripts to automatically finish up the setup. A system administrator is supposed to document their changes, so why not do it in the form of a script? This script backs up the stock/etc/fstab,/etc/network/interfaces, and/etc/X11/xorg.conf, then proceeds to set them up as wish. I also install a specific package list, which since I symlink/var/cache/apt/archives to a directory on said retained/home partition, does not even require much in the way of downloads.
Compared to the constant rebooting needed to install all the drivers and programs needed to make a Windows system workable, it's luxury.
I would almost like skiing except that it definitely took away parts of the gameplay that you could tell that the developers intended. It took mods to bring some of it back.
I for one liked a mod that didn't throw a dozen armors at you, that had a few well-thought-out weapons and vehicles added, and had things in careful balance, as opposed to megaweapons and sheer speed. The turrets were more powerful, and this enforced a heads-down Rainbow Six style of gameplay which emphasised teamwork. I'm talking about the Combat mod, and I liked it so well that when the original developer had clearly gone on to other things, I extended it myself. It's still here.
And yes, you can ski, and in a Light Armor you even get a huge jump pack "beacon". You use that *after* you've broken your enemy's will to fight, plundered their base, and run off with their women.
"Truth does not demand belief. Scientists do not join hands every Sunday, singing, "Yes, gravity is real! I will have faith! I will be strong! I believe in my heart that what goes up, up, up must come down, down. down. Amen!" If they did, we would think they were pretty insecure about it.":)
We're working on it! Don't let the previous posters fool you, the majority of the American public mostly goes to work and then comes home and watches TV, but eventually the word spreads about jerks like those running the Capitol as of late and they can't buy votes with $600 tax dollar refunds. We're terribly sorry about the meanwhile.
"Meanwhile, microelectronics has different issues. Computers are used for approximately two to three years, compared with around 10 years for a car, and the recycling rate for all electronics is quite low. In addition, the manufacture of integrated circuits--the devices at the heart of all electronics products--requires the use of ultrapure materials and energy-intensive manufacturing processes... Furthermore, new technologies such as those used to produce and process nanoscale materials and other advanced manufacturing processes exceed the energy use of older technologies by six to eight orders of magnitude on a per-unit-of-material-processed basis, Gutowski said."
Also see this article which states that 81% of a computer's energy cost is in the manufacture.
You can't simply look at the cost of running a system and determine the overall impact. The energy costs of manufacturing and shipping are pretty significant. I for one advocate saving old laptops as much as you can. If you have someone using them instead of a desktop, you're saving energy. You keep them happy with their current hardware, you reduce overconsumption. We need to get away from thinking of gadgets as disposable anyhow.
I don't know about you, but having installed Windows and Linux multiple times, I find the many reboots involved in Windows to be more painful than the tweaks required to get the most out of a Linux distribution. Hell, a little extra configuration doesn't hurt so much, and people write scripts to automate that stage like EasyUbuntu or Automatix.
Try having Linux on a secondary machine. My experience is that older, cheaper laptops - ones that have good Linux hardware support - really shine with Linux. Windows needs anti-virus and firewall software that is that much more burden on these machines, and the one area that Linux is really short on, that being the latest greatest games, aren't really going on that laptop anyway. My girlfriend's old Averatec 3300 recently got saved from being pitched when I plugged in a bootable USB flash drive with Ubuntu Edgy in and showed her around. It's now replaced the two-years-old Windows XP she had on there before and she's quite happy with it. I'm not even kidding!
Would you say that algae farms that photosynthesize sunlight and produce hydrogen to burn to get energy is a more efficient energy path that soaking up the sunlight's energy directly with solar panels? I think not.
You have the right idea. I voted for Ubuntu, but as long as they can tell me that the hardware is completely functional with a Linux distribution free of proprietary drivers, I can strike out on my own and install my distro of choice. I can see why they'd want OpenSUSE, because of their previous business suggestions, and Gnome's simpler interface will be easier for them to support for now.
What I really want is an affordable source of Linux-based laptops. The things Linux is short on, like fancy 3D games, tend to not be what you do on a cheap laptop, and the two are really a great match, so long as the hardware is supported and the laptop's power-saving features work. Just give me my browser and zsh shell to go, thank you.
I ran Gentoo for a couple years. I'm now running a mix of Ubuntu and OSX, mostly because to get all the software options I wanted, I couldn't pare down the libraries enough that my system was substantially different at the end from Ubuntu. I'd be sad to see Gentoo go downhill, though. There's a lot of value for the Linux community in people hammering on bleeding edge software. Where else would you have seen so much interest in applying genetic algorithms to find the best gcc optimization flags for compiling software?
Well, not to reopen that can of worms, but they did give back the code, albeit after huge changes and without revision control metadata. That still counts. I don't get the sense that they meant any spite to the KDE developers, they just have their own way of doing things. After all, they use Objective C.
In addition to other office suits like NeoOffice available for the Mac, KOffice and a bevy of other KDE-related software is about to become easily portable to the Mac as a native application, thanks to Qt 4.x. People will be looking at it more in the future. What if Apple got the incentive to do with KOffice as they did with KHTML to make Safari?
To paraphrase: the more you tighten your grip, Microsoft, the more users will slip through your fingers.;)
If you use KDE and then run FireFox and Gimp and any other non-QT or KDE application you want, KDE is a largely wasted investment. The key is to get those big reusable libraries loaded. Once you do, other KDE applications all load and run quite fast and without hogging much more memory. The KDE philosophy, from this user's perspective, is get everything including the kitchen sink up front. As I would rather wait a little longer to boot up and log in than to wait during the whole day's usage, this is a very good thing.
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I think the Voluntary Human Extinction group is an example of going so far in making a very important point that they shoot themselves down. They point out the human activities that threaten our species and others with extinction, and then say we have to die off so other species won't. Most people won't listen to this, no change actually gets made, so we're back to square one. This means that the point has to be put across all over again, in more sober terms.
Fact is, the consumption inherent in our lifestyle, including the mining, logging, transportation, and manufacture, are such that we'd need this world's resources several times over to keep on doing it. Either we make real and effective changes - and I don't just mean buying things with cute logos or driving a hybrid - or we leave a big question over our offspring. How it is responsible to have many more children when that jeopardizes the world they'll live in, I don't know. It's tragic, like laying them straightaway in a grave. That is the heart of the matter, I think.
There's already quite a lot of children to care for who need more than egg and sperm donors to have a fair shot at a long and healthy if not materialistic life. I think anyone who chooses to increase the next generation's hopes rather than numbers deserves to feel good about it!
Like most things related to Big Oil and big car companies, you're being presented with an up-front cost for the renewable energy, and the subsidized costs you've paid for through your tax dollars. Our petroleum based economy is actually very costly, and it doesn't come down to dollars, but who wants to keep their hands on the tap.
This is good news. This is a sane source of electricity that will help solar power gain the momentum for an economy of scale.
Even if this planet has been whacked in the way Earth was, I think the amount of atmosphere this thing would have would be huge. Earth was smaller than Venus when it was hit. This means a very thick atmosphere may be reasonably expected, and together with the possibilities for tidal locking, I don't expect us to find paradise there. ;)
And since chimpanzees are more evolved than human beings, and this includes immunity to SIV, seems to me that comparing the two species' immune systems would be most productive, right? And since some humans are already immune, we've got a shot at that. I wonder if this group is aiming high enough.
You can guarantee nothing, but this isn't a black and white world, and there's meaningful shades of good, better, and best for any observer. Gun control and licensing doesn't stop the black market, but it does keep the legally sold guns in safer hands.
I read a police officer saying that he was for gun control, where he had been against it, because he saw officers who made bad calls when it came time to start shooting. Nobody is really prepared to deal calmly and rationally with a situation like that, and if not a police officer, certainly not a scared guy in his house who assumes all his kids are in bed or the other things you hear about on the news.
*sniff*
You just made a beautifully appropriate commentary on a common fixture of my childhood. Dude.
The RIAA with its tentacles in both major parties does things that are corrupt and wrong when you want to make air use of your music.
Big Oil, which has been mainly a Republican thing, drives the things that make many question whether there's going to be a planet worth living in for our grandkids.
A little perspective on which political shark has which remora-like attachments. We've still made some progress here.
Well, let's look at what the most common elements are in the universe. A quick Google shows:
Hydrogen, helium, oxygen, carbon, neon, iron, nitrogen, silicon, magnesium, sulfur. There's your top ten, in that order. It's interesting that carbon, versatile as it is, is so very common. Considering that hydrogen and oxygen, hence water, rank even higher, I think that life as we know it has statistically higher odds of appearing, especially in conditions where water is liquid. The physics of these compounds is the same everywhere, assuming similar environmental conditions.
Now, life on earth has been through several mass extinctions and major evolutionary possibilities got cut off short. However, we have a lot of convergent evolution - for example, the similarities of fish, ichthysaurs, and dolphins being dictated by the properties of liquid water.
It might be interesting to consider the possibility that life out there will have some strong similarities, if superficial, to what we've seen.
That's one approach, if you're just rsyncing things around. Here's my script.
One benefit to it is that it won't try to repeat a step you've already done and wreck things. Pretty basic, but good enough. Don't just pick it up and run, though. It assumes you want to start with a static IP on a local network on a machine with nvidia video. You run this at your own risk; I take no responsibility.
One hour. I've been using Ubuntu for a couple years on a few separate machines, and gotten this process down. This is because I always keep a separate /home partition, and on it I have scripts to automatically finish up the setup. A system administrator is supposed to document their changes, so why not do it in the form of a script? This script backs up the stock /etc/fstab, /etc/network/interfaces, and /etc/X11/xorg.conf, then proceeds to set them up as wish. I also install a specific package list, which since I symlink /var/cache/apt/archives to a directory on said retained /home partition, does not even require much in the way of downloads.
Compared to the constant rebooting needed to install all the drivers and programs needed to make a Windows system workable, it's luxury.
I would almost like skiing except that it definitely took away parts of the gameplay that you could tell that the developers intended. It took mods to bring some of it back.
I for one liked a mod that didn't throw a dozen armors at you, that had a few well-thought-out weapons and vehicles added, and had things in careful balance, as opposed to megaweapons and sheer speed. The turrets were more powerful, and this enforced a heads-down Rainbow Six style of gameplay which emphasised teamwork. I'm talking about the Combat mod, and I liked it so well that when the original developer had clearly gone on to other things, I extended it myself. It's still here.
And yes, you can ski, and in a Light Armor you even get a huge jump pack "beacon". You use that *after* you've broken your enemy's will to fight, plundered their base, and run off with their women.
Also consider dropping OSX. We're all using OS/2 now.
Faith in evolution? Faith? Quoth Dan Barker:
:)
"Truth does not demand belief. Scientists do not join hands every Sunday, singing, "Yes, gravity is real! I will have faith! I will be strong! I believe in my heart that what goes up, up, up must come down, down. down. Amen!" If they did, we would think they were pretty insecure about it."
We're working on it! Don't let the previous posters fool you, the majority of the American public mostly goes to work and then comes home and watches TV, but eventually the word spreads about jerks like those running the Capitol as of late and they can't buy votes with $600 tax dollar refunds. We're terribly sorry about the meanwhile.
Broken link! Sorry, it's here.
:)
So, install xubuntu on as many old laptops as you can!
That's a fair statement, and here you go:
article at Sciencdaily.com:
"Meanwhile, microelectronics has different issues. Computers are used for approximately two to three years, compared with around 10 years for a car, and the recycling rate for all electronics is quite low. In addition, the manufacture of integrated circuits--the devices at the heart of all electronics products--requires the use of ultrapure materials and energy-intensive manufacturing processes... Furthermore, new technologies such as those used to produce and process nanoscale materials and other advanced manufacturing processes exceed the energy use of older technologies by six to eight orders of magnitude on a per-unit-of-material-processed basis, Gutowski said."
Also see this article which states that 81% of a computer's energy cost is in the manufacture.
You can't simply look at the cost of running a system and determine the overall impact. The energy costs of manufacturing and shipping are pretty significant. I for one advocate saving old laptops as much as you can. If you have someone using them instead of a desktop, you're saving energy. You keep them happy with their current hardware, you reduce overconsumption. We need to get away from thinking of gadgets as disposable anyhow.
I don't know about you, but having installed Windows and Linux multiple times, I find the many reboots involved in Windows to be more painful than the tweaks required to get the most out of a Linux distribution. Hell, a little extra configuration doesn't hurt so much, and people write scripts to automate that stage like EasyUbuntu or Automatix.
Try having Linux on a secondary machine. My experience is that older, cheaper laptops - ones that have good Linux hardware support - really shine with Linux. Windows needs anti-virus and firewall software that is that much more burden on these machines, and the one area that Linux is really short on, that being the latest greatest games, aren't really going on that laptop anyway. My girlfriend's old Averatec 3300 recently got saved from being pitched when I plugged in a bootable USB flash drive with Ubuntu Edgy in and showed her around. It's now replaced the two-years-old Windows XP she had on there before and she's quite happy with it. I'm not even kidding!
If you need any help picturing what they're studying, this professor's here to tell you why a supernova would be totally awesome!
Would you say that algae farms that photosynthesize sunlight and produce hydrogen to burn to get energy is a more efficient energy path that soaking up the sunlight's energy directly with solar panels? I think not.
You have the right idea. I voted for Ubuntu, but as long as they can tell me that the hardware is completely functional with a Linux distribution free of proprietary drivers, I can strike out on my own and install my distro of choice. I can see why they'd want OpenSUSE, because of their previous business suggestions, and Gnome's simpler interface will be easier for them to support for now.
What I really want is an affordable source of Linux-based laptops. The things Linux is short on, like fancy 3D games, tend to not be what you do on a cheap laptop, and the two are really a great match, so long as the hardware is supported and the laptop's power-saving features work. Just give me my browser and zsh shell to go, thank you.
I ran Gentoo for a couple years. I'm now running a mix of Ubuntu and OSX, mostly because to get all the software options I wanted, I couldn't pare down the libraries enough that my system was substantially different at the end from Ubuntu. I'd be sad to see Gentoo go downhill, though. There's a lot of value for the Linux community in people hammering on bleeding edge software. Where else would you have seen so much interest in applying genetic algorithms to find the best gcc optimization flags for compiling software?
Well, not to reopen that can of worms, but they did give back the code, albeit after huge changes and without revision control metadata. That still counts. I don't get the sense that they meant any spite to the KDE developers, they just have their own way of doing things. After all, they use Objective C.
In addition to other office suits like NeoOffice available for the Mac, KOffice and a bevy of other KDE-related software is about to become easily portable to the Mac as a native application, thanks to Qt 4.x. People will be looking at it more in the future. What if Apple got the incentive to do with KOffice as they did with KHTML to make Safari?
;)
To paraphrase: the more you tighten your grip, Microsoft, the more users will slip through your fingers.
If you use KDE and then run FireFox and Gimp and any other non-QT or KDE application you want, KDE is a largely wasted investment. The key is to get those big reusable libraries loaded. Once you do, other KDE applications all load and run quite fast and without hogging much more memory. The KDE philosophy, from this user's perspective, is get everything including the kitchen sink up front. As I would rather wait a little longer to boot up and log in than to wait during the whole day's usage, this is a very good thing.