You do indeed see natural speciation through sexual selection. Predicting this for a global and intermingling population is absurd, especially in the next thousand years. More dramatic things would have to happen to divide the species than this researcher's supposed sexual hierarchy.
KOffice has been for a long time the contender that has not gotten its due. Like KDE, it is mildly clunky, but quite powerful, and programming things in the C++/Qt/KDE paradigm makes it faster on its feet than OpenOffice. Qt 4.x should make it possible for this suite to make a splash on Windows and OSX too, so this year should be very... interesting.
Exactly. That's why I prefer keeping an inexpensive and replaceable laptop cooler around. I just grabbed one of these and it works, and I don't need to worry about working the fans on my laptop.
The argument for manufacturers for the recycling or disposal costs is rather better than that. Working individuals don't have a lot of time to figure out recycling options, and there's no incentive. This option provides incentive for the manufacturer to make goods and packaging that produce less waste. The idea is to make the free market take environmental factors into account, something that just isn't readily done on an individual basis.
Actually, western agriculture has been shaped by experience with Europe's very rich, deep, and forgiving soil, and when Europeans went elsewhere, Africa especially, pushing their methods on the locals, the results were very short-lived. Africa is a scene of desertification while Europe survives, and this is a major reason why.
The wobble method that they are using to detect these gas giants rely on the gravitational pull of the planet to affect the star. This means that the most readily detected planets will be the ones that produce a lot of wobble - gas giants close to their star especially. The fact that we're detecting so many in the beginnings of this science poses this question: are hot jupiters the overwhelming majority of planets out there? There is no reason to say this. We should wait until our methods of detection improve to propose any verdict on how common terrestrial planets orbiting in their star's habitable zones are.
There are other factors involved, not just hindsight bias. There is a huge difference in theory between Bush and his long-term critics. One views history in the light of Hunington's "clash of civilizations" thesis and had a movie night watching French military action in Algeria up to the point that they blew up the supposed Islamist HQ, and forgot that the conflict was lost thereafter anyway. They think that the way to defeating extremism is to demolish whole cities with cluster bombs, and write off collateral civilian damage. The ordnance and Agent Orange are still killing and maiming in Vietnam, but clearly the lessons were lost on these people.
They create the very conditions of a moral outrage that someone might want to resist. You would, too, if it were done in your town. That wouldn't automatically make you a terrorist, though terrorists can certainly recruit with much greater success from a seething and angry population than they can from a peaceful, orderly one.
In short, the core of the critics aren't people who are saying they could have worked the lobbies and old boy's networks of DC better, or worded their denials more smartly, or spelled out the new white man's burden with less faux-Texas twang. They're the ones saying that the whole mindset is intellectually and morally debauched from the start. We don't want imperialism, we want justice, and that includes behaving justly towards others.
Sir, if they can make an all-electric and very sweet sports car with a range of 250 miles per charge, they can make a workable electric commuter car. Our energy grid needs an upgrade, period, and it needn't been a nightmare as it was with Enron's deliberate shenanigans.
I have a dream, and part of it is solar panels over the black asphalt of all our parking lots.
Actually, I would challenge "simple, obvious, and wrong" here. I agree that gas taxes shouldn't be ramped up too quickly, but here's a question: if we had put a tax on gas equivalent to the rise in its price over the past two years and invested in better public transportation, where would we be? What prevents us from doing the right thing, or to be penny-wise and pound-foolish as it were?
Also, a gasoline tax would curb some behavior that is economically workable for the moment, but still stupidly wasteful. For example, in 2004, Germany and the U.K. exported equal amounts of potatoes to each other. This kind of thing happens all the time, and it's pointless. Organic food is nice, but buying closer to home will help the environment a great deal too.
In my view, our society's thinking is being skewed by the PR of those companies that get the most government subsidies and profit from automobiles and oil. Let's get that sacred cow. When cars are no longer a necessity for most people, we'll be much better off. As much as the car companies used political pressure to shape transportation in the US, they should answer to this. Go California!
As if cars are the only form of transportation. California isn't Europe, but I find public transport a lot better here than in most of the rest of the country. You've heard of San Francisco's trolleys haven't you?
The average of one combustion engine per commuter is such a stupid concept, really, especially all packed into traffic jams.
You would have to look at who holds the reins on Philip Morris. The other commenters have mentioned a general interest in fighting scientific findings because of the business they're in, but you must consider who owns them, and who the shareholders are. There's a tangled and very incestuous web there.
You're right in a general sense. The transition to any hotter climate is going to bite, though. There are a lot of co-evolved species, pollinators and plants for example, that won't be able to move or adapt at the same rate, which means extinction. That can only happen so much before the ecosystem falls apart.
We don't just have an emissions problem with CO2, we have an uptake problem. We've poisoned and chopped down the oceans and forests that would have been sinking it. I certainly am not implying that the solution is simple, because we can't even do enough by restraining emissions to 1990 levels. Simply getting that far will require re-tooling with cleaner technology. We need to change our way of life to go further than that - curb suburban sprawl, crack down on the use of disposables. There's room for technology to help, but culture and lifestyle are the biggest issues by far.
Mars has an incredibly thin atmosphere, no protection from ultraviolet, water resources are still limited, and that's just for starters. If it gets to the point that Earth becomes so inhospitable, so help us, we'd have lost far more than we even know, but we did it to ourselves.
Re: the previous comment, we have no lack of ideas for how to let nature catch its balance. It's a societal problem with valuing immediate consumption over long term well-being. If we can't fix our priorities, technology will only a tiny number of people, and you bet the rest won't be left out without a fight.
I've de-converted from the ranks of technological messianists.
I'm a big fan of Attenborough too, but I think Irwin's show reached a different kind of person, and everybody could stand to have more appreciation of nature. Really, sneaking a nature show into a stunt show is what he did, and it's really sad that the odds caught up with him. Steve Irwin's off-camera work showed he really cared about wildlife, and it's really sad to lose someone like that.
A stingray barb to the chest - ouch, that's a painful way to go. If I'm right, only one person has ever survived that.
Yes, but I don't know that anyone has clearly resolved why Pluto's orbit is so ecliptic (I realize good theories exist), and our study of extrasolar planets has shown that highly ecliptic orbits are nothing unusual. Also, Saturn's moon Titan is bigger than the planet Mercury, so size is proving a purely arbitrary thing in this argument.
I firmly believe that geological features and activity should define the lower bound of what we call planets. Pluto has a atmosphere during parts of its year, and most likely has or has had a crust, mantle, and core. I might be wrong, but that knocks Ceres out of the running, which I wouldn't call a planet.
Fact is, the word "planet" belongs to much simpler times.
I will willingly burn karma to emphasize that people working on open source projects deserve compensation.
I agree completely with the spirit of your post, but you miss the kind of compensation that one will realistically ask for in releasing open source. The compensation is participation. If you want to keep all the programming work to yourself and get paid, that's one model, but there's a number of things to consider. I personally dislike the risk of support being only from one company that could go out of business. The more important a program is to your work, the more you should consider that factor. I myself have released code for MUDs and things like the Foundation, a Python modding framework for Bridge Commander, and my experience is that the better you enable people to use their talent to add to your work, the more impressive the end result will be. There's a place for both models, but I feel good about having empowered other programmers.
It wouldn't be so eaasy to redo GAIM or Gimp in Qt. What you can do to force the essential features of GUI programming differs from what is considered good practice in C++. Besides, the Qt applications are often KDE-oriented, and it makes no sense not to leverage that framework when you can, and get a more consistent, interoperating environment. So, instead of rewrites, you have Kopete and Krita. Sometimes programming libraries get shared, as with Beagle, but that's about it.
I'm more of a C++ and Python guy, so I like what Qt has under the hood, but you're best off leaving programmers to use whatever they're most effective in, rather than try to tell them which is better.
Besides, I get a kick of using gtk_qt and making all my GTK apps draw with Qt without worrying about any inconsistency of themes.:)
It's important to point out that the core libraries of Qt, with the signal/slot mechanisms and base containers and classes, are now decoupled from the GUI libraries. This is now a good general purpose thread-safe programming library. It strikes me that signals and slots supply the advantages of weak binding, much like in Objective C and Smalltalk, and you almost wish the language had had libraries like this all along.
I for my part am very interested in PyQt or some other approach of wrapping Qt into Python as such. This could make for some very rapid development, with Python prototyping and scripting, not to mention the way you can have either C++ or Python objects receive Qt signals. Has anyone experimented with this approach? Any comments on the overhead and ease of use?
Now, explain to me how we reliably hit "restore", post-apocalypse?
That's the real trick. The Noah's Ark scenario creates a very weak gene pool because you don't have the genetic variation to filter out the bad mutations, let alone adapt well to the environment. That said, it's still a wonderful project, and not just for apocalyptic scenarios, and I applaud their long-term thinking.
Slashdot Mirror
You do indeed see natural speciation through sexual selection. Predicting this for a global and intermingling population is absurd, especially in the next thousand years. More dramatic things would have to happen to divide the species than this researcher's supposed sexual hierarchy.
KOffice has been for a long time the contender that has not gotten its due. Like KDE, it is mildly clunky, but quite powerful, and programming things in the C++/Qt/KDE paradigm makes it faster on its feet than OpenOffice. Qt 4.x should make it possible for this suite to make a splash on Windows and OSX too, so this year should be very... interesting.
Exactly. That's why I prefer keeping an inexpensive and replaceable laptop cooler around. I just grabbed one of these and it works, and I don't need to worry about working the fans on my laptop.
The argument for manufacturers for the recycling or disposal costs is rather better than that. Working individuals don't have a lot of time to figure out recycling options, and there's no incentive. This option provides incentive for the manufacturer to make goods and packaging that produce less waste. The idea is to make the free market take environmental factors into account, something that just isn't readily done on an individual basis.
Actually, western agriculture has been shaped by experience with Europe's very rich, deep, and forgiving soil, and when Europeans went elsewhere, Africa especially, pushing their methods on the locals, the results were very short-lived. Africa is a scene of desertification while Europe survives, and this is a major reason why.
The wobble method that they are using to detect these gas giants rely on the gravitational pull of the planet to affect the star. This means that the most readily detected planets will be the ones that produce a lot of wobble - gas giants close to their star especially. The fact that we're detecting so many in the beginnings of this science poses this question: are hot jupiters the overwhelming majority of planets out there? There is no reason to say this. We should wait until our methods of detection improve to propose any verdict on how common terrestrial planets orbiting in their star's habitable zones are.
There are other factors involved, not just hindsight bias. There is a huge difference in theory between Bush and his long-term critics. One views history in the light of Hunington's "clash of civilizations" thesis and had a movie night watching French military action in Algeria up to the point that they blew up the supposed Islamist HQ, and forgot that the conflict was lost thereafter anyway. They think that the way to defeating extremism is to demolish whole cities with cluster bombs, and write off collateral civilian damage. The ordnance and Agent Orange are still killing and maiming in Vietnam, but clearly the lessons were lost on these people.
They create the very conditions of a moral outrage that someone might want to resist. You would, too, if it were done in your town. That wouldn't automatically make you a terrorist, though terrorists can certainly recruit with much greater success from a seething and angry population than they can from a peaceful, orderly one.
In short, the core of the critics aren't people who are saying they could have worked the lobbies and old boy's networks of DC better, or worded their denials more smartly, or spelled out the new white man's burden with less faux-Texas twang. They're the ones saying that the whole mindset is intellectually and morally debauched from the start. We don't want imperialism, we want justice, and that includes behaving justly towards others.
Sir, if they can make an all-electric and very sweet sports car with a range of 250 miles per charge, they can make a workable electric commuter car. Our energy grid needs an upgrade, period, and it needn't been a nightmare as it was with Enron's deliberate shenanigans.
I have a dream, and part of it is solar panels over the black asphalt of all our parking lots.
Actually, I would challenge "simple, obvious, and wrong" here. I agree that gas taxes shouldn't be ramped up too quickly, but here's a question: if we had put a tax on gas equivalent to the rise in its price over the past two years and invested in better public transportation, where would we be? What prevents us from doing the right thing, or to be penny-wise and pound-foolish as it were?
Also, a gasoline tax would curb some behavior that is economically workable for the moment, but still stupidly wasteful. For example, in 2004, Germany and the U.K. exported equal amounts of potatoes to each other. This kind of thing happens all the time, and it's pointless. Organic food is nice, but buying closer to home will help the environment a great deal too.
In my view, our society's thinking is being skewed by the PR of those companies that get the most government subsidies and profit from automobiles and oil. Let's get that sacred cow. When cars are no longer a necessity for most people, we'll be much better off. As much as the car companies used political pressure to shape transportation in the US, they should answer to this. Go California!
As if cars are the only form of transportation. California isn't Europe, but I find public transport a lot better here than in most of the rest of the country. You've heard of San Francisco's trolleys haven't you?
The average of one combustion engine per commuter is such a stupid concept, really, especially all packed into traffic jams.
You would have to look at who holds the reins on Philip Morris. The other commenters have mentioned a general interest in fighting scientific findings because of the business they're in, but you must consider who owns them, and who the shareholders are. There's a tangled and very incestuous web there.
You're right in a general sense. The transition to any hotter climate is going to bite, though. There are a lot of co-evolved species, pollinators and plants for example, that won't be able to move or adapt at the same rate, which means extinction. That can only happen so much before the ecosystem falls apart.
We don't just have an emissions problem with CO2, we have an uptake problem. We've poisoned and chopped down the oceans and forests that would have been sinking it. I certainly am not implying that the solution is simple, because we can't even do enough by restraining emissions to 1990 levels. Simply getting that far will require re-tooling with cleaner technology. We need to change our way of life to go further than that - curb suburban sprawl, crack down on the use of disposables. There's room for technology to help, but culture and lifestyle are the biggest issues by far.
Mars has an incredibly thin atmosphere, no protection from ultraviolet, water resources are still limited, and that's just for starters. If it gets to the point that Earth becomes so inhospitable, so help us, we'd have lost far more than we even know, but we did it to ourselves.
Re: the previous comment, we have no lack of ideas for how to let nature catch its balance. It's a societal problem with valuing immediate consumption over long term well-being. If we can't fix our priorities, technology will only a tiny number of people, and you bet the rest won't be left out without a fight.
I've de-converted from the ranks of technological messianists.
Hey, just quit picking at it. It's not going to get any better if you won't let it heal on its own.
No, you can't have another planet. Learn to take care of the one you got first.
I'll turn this rocket right around!
I'm a big fan of Attenborough too, but I think Irwin's show reached a different kind of person, and everybody could stand to have more appreciation of nature. Really, sneaking a nature show into a stunt show is what he did, and it's really sad that the odds caught up with him. Steve Irwin's off-camera work showed he really cared about wildlife, and it's really sad to lose someone like that.
A stingray barb to the chest - ouch, that's a painful way to go. If I'm right, only one person has ever survived that.
No, man, not jalapeños, habañeros. Those things will sneak up on the thief about a minute after and then give him a kick in the pants.
Turns out my information is out of date. Ceres most likely has differentiated layers, and is generally more interesting than previously thought.
Yes, but I don't know that anyone has clearly resolved why Pluto's orbit is so ecliptic (I realize good theories exist), and our study of extrasolar planets has shown that highly ecliptic orbits are nothing unusual. Also, Saturn's moon Titan is bigger than the planet Mercury, so size is proving a purely arbitrary thing in this argument.
I firmly believe that geological features and activity should define the lower bound of what we call planets. Pluto has a atmosphere during parts of its year, and most likely has or has had a crust, mantle, and core. I might be wrong, but that knocks Ceres out of the running, which I wouldn't call a planet.
Fact is, the word "planet" belongs to much simpler times.
I will willingly burn karma to emphasize that people working on open source projects deserve compensation.
I agree completely with the spirit of your post, but you miss the kind of compensation that one will realistically ask for in releasing open source. The compensation is participation. If you want to keep all the programming work to yourself and get paid, that's one model, but there's a number of things to consider. I personally dislike the risk of support being only from one company that could go out of business. The more important a program is to your work, the more you should consider that factor. I myself have released code for MUDs and things like the Foundation, a Python modding framework for Bridge Commander, and my experience is that the better you enable people to use their talent to add to your work, the more impressive the end result will be. There's a place for both models, but I feel good about having empowered other programmers.
Have you ever read the story of nail soup?
Indeed I do. ;)
It wouldn't be so eaasy to redo GAIM or Gimp in Qt. What you can do to force the essential features of GUI programming differs from what is considered good practice in C++. Besides, the Qt applications are often KDE-oriented, and it makes no sense not to leverage that framework when you can, and get a more consistent, interoperating environment. So, instead of rewrites, you have Kopete and Krita. Sometimes programming libraries get shared, as with Beagle, but that's about it.
:)
I'm more of a C++ and Python guy, so I like what Qt has under the hood, but you're best off leaving programmers to use whatever they're most effective in, rather than try to tell them which is better.
Besides, I get a kick of using gtk_qt and making all my GTK apps draw with Qt without worrying about any inconsistency of themes.
It's important to point out that the core libraries of Qt, with the signal/slot mechanisms and base containers and classes, are now decoupled from the GUI libraries. This is now a good general purpose thread-safe programming library. It strikes me that signals and slots supply the advantages of weak binding, much like in Objective C and Smalltalk, and you almost wish the language had had libraries like this all along.
I for my part am very interested in PyQt or some other approach of wrapping Qt into Python as such. This could make for some very rapid development, with Python prototyping and scripting, not to mention the way you can have either C++ or Python objects receive Qt signals. Has anyone experimented with this approach? Any comments on the overhead and ease of use?
Now, explain to me how we reliably hit "restore", post-apocalypse?
That's the real trick. The Noah's Ark scenario creates a very weak gene pool because you don't have the genetic variation to filter out the bad mutations, let alone adapt well to the environment. That said, it's still a wonderful project, and not just for apocalyptic scenarios, and I applaud their long-term thinking.