Re:when asked if the methane was biological in ori
on
Methane on Mars?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
RTF whole quote:
Asked whether the continual production of methane is strong evidence of a biological origin of the gas, Dr Mumma said: "I think it is, myself personally."
He added: "It's difficult to imagine that primordial methane [from geological activity] would continue outgassing for four billion years [the age of Mars]. This looks very intriguing."
Doesn't sound reckless to me. Sounds more like informed speculation.
Are you saying 100 years of playing God with forest fire has not screwed up any ecosystems anywhere?
No, we are just saying that your understanding of the science of forestry is pretty limited.
In North America, outside the unique ecosystem of the Pacific Northwest/Cascadia, where do trees live to 400 years?
Multi-100 year-old trees were quite common in the Smokey Mts prior to the 1920s when the loggers came in and took them down. There are still a few to be found if you know where to look.
Old growth lumber is a decadent, unnatural forest, that is caused by man supressing forest fires for the last 100 years, which is nature's only way of renewing a forest, believe-it-or-not. Cones won't open, releasing seeds, unless under extreme heat.
That is true for some forests and some species of pines in arid mountains out in the US West, but not at all true for the near rainforests composed of hardwood found in, say, the Smokey Mts. Most of the Eastern US before the arrival of Europeans was also a dark old-growth hardwood forest that behaved nothing like what you have described.
Old growth lumber, at the bottom of a lake, is going to rot, and is subject to parasites - ask the Japanese this. They tried to store logs underwater and found them infested with bugs when they brought them up.
Again, check your facts. Lake Superior is full of old growth logs lost when Northern MN, WI, and the Upper Penisula of MI were first logged. Those logs survived quite well thanks to the cold and limited O2. They are being hauled to the surface today and are being sold at a large premium to musical instrument makers and folks like Bill Gates for use as wood paneling. They have an incredible fine grain that cannot be found in wood harvested from today's forests since the wood grew so slowly due those decadent, unnatural forest conditions that makes up your standard Eastern old growth hardwood forest.
But then I'm lucky enough to live a block away from a branch of the local metropolitan library and two miles from a large university so I tend to keep my personal shelves filled with the expensive tech books that I need moment to moment and let the city and the university handle the rest.
I'm in the "They Both Suck Rocks" camp. I find them both to be equally a PITA. I'm quite disapointed that OO.o decided to copy the MS Office interface. Best word processor that I've used is WordPerfect 5.1. The "show codes" feature was great. Just turn the WP 5.1 format into XML with a stylesheet editor and I'd be a delighted customer. Right now, I use emacs for most of my document editing because it lets me concentrate on the semantics of what I'm trying to say rather than the formating hangups that I always get stuck in when trying to use either OO.o or MS Word.
A pox on both their heads. OO.o vs. MS Office? I'm rooting for injuries.
You may not realize it, but right now, primary schools in impovrished rural Indian areas are getting a world-class education in Computer Science and Mathematics.
I've lived and worked as a researcher in rural India (between Bangalore and Mysore) and I doubt that very many rural Indians are getting a world-class education in Computer Science and Mathematics. In fact, most rural Indians are lucky to be able to read at all -- especially the women.
I'm sure you like to pretend to think you know what you're talking about, but the design of this new file selector was not haphazard. There were long, arduous debates on the various, related lists about the UI and API and various use-cases for both beginner and advanced users.
Remember, though, that a camel is a horse designed by committee. Long, arduous debates do not guarantee a successful design.
At idle, with no applications running, the commit charge is at a whopping 483 MB!! Obviously, the final release or even the beta releases will not consume this much of the system resources.
What'd they do? Replace the Windows GUI with Gnome?
And who are YOU to decide how other people should raise their kids? You probably are not married, have no kids and no house payments to make. For most of the families on my block, most require two incomes just to stay even and maybe save a little for retirement. And this is in an average middle class neighborhood in the Midwest. We are raising our children just fine, thank you, and have a hell of a lot better understanding of how much responsibilty children are (and how much they cost) than you do to judge by your clueless opinion. I mean WTF? You think only the wealthy should have kids?
"The big Chill" - the Ice Age froze 'em all. Popular among scientists.
I'm really skeptical that a mammoth extinction caused by an Ice Age is popular among scientists. Mammoths seem to have been well adapted for the cold and died off when the climate became warmer.
"The big Kill" - hunted to death by humans, little evidence exists for this, popular with the tree hugging set.
There is plenty of evidence for human involvement in extinctions of mammals such as the mammoth. The models demonstrate that it doesn't take a whole lot of hunting to drive a population of large mammals to extinction.
If there's a north america, and a south america, then collectively the whole thing is america.
N. + S. America are collectively referred to as The Americas.
The united states is not the whole of america, they're maybe a quarter.
U.S. ~ 3,500,000 Sq. Miles
N. America ~ 9,000,000 Sq. Miles
That's about 38% of N.A. The figures are from the BBC which includes Canada, The U.S., Mexico, Central America, various Carribean islands, and Greenland as part of N.A. Ignore Greenland, which I've never before seen included as part of N. America, and the U.S. covers 42% of N.A.
Trivia Question: Is Panama part of North, Central, or South America?
I have no problem getting worked up over a person that causes harm to our soldiers, those men who were bravely carrying out their orders.
The German soldiers who invaded Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, France, Benelux, Denmark, Norway, and Russia were men who were bravely carrying out orders, too. Yet what they did was neither moral nor right. Individual soldiers are as responsible for what happened in Vietnam (and all wars) as their leaders. Remember the old slogan "Suppose they gave a war and nobody came?" Those soldiers each individually chose to fight in an unjust war and having made that choice they are fair game for those who found that choice to be morally loathsome. Or does the right pay service to the concept of individual responsibilty only when welfare mothers are involved?
Er, it was Eisenhower who sent the first advisors to Vietnam. Nixon could have ended the war in 1969/70 on just about the same terms he got 4 years later. Lots of American soldiers died during that time, far more than Jane Fonda killed.
While there were atrocities committed by certain parts of the government (such as the national guard at Kent), it was not some sort of conspiracy to end free speech, as you can plainly see with all the huge, relatively peaceful anti-war protests that were carried out in America by free Americans.
Killing college kids who disagree with your policies seems like killing free speech to me. Any idea how many of those peaceful anti-war demonstrators still have FBI files?
I'm sorry, which part of my reply made you think I agree with our government on all issues, don't condemn them for their stupid actions over the years, etc?
Vietnam was one of those stupid actions. It is real hard to get worked up over Jane Fonda when the nation we were defending at the time was a right wing military dictatorship that was as anti-freedom as you can get and especially when that war and similar actions have created as much ill will towards the US as they have.
Ummm, no, more than just the political right hate her guts. Anyone ever associated with the military hates her guts. Any (informed) patriotic American probably hates her guts.
Um, I used to be associated with the military. I'm more informed than most Americans (probably including yourself) and am pretty damn patriotic. I don't really want to refight the Vietnam war here, but the behavior of the U.S. government and military during that war towards those who chose to dissent was at least as shameful as what Jane Fonda did. That war, and the stupid "anyone who opposes our enemies is our friend, no matter how evil they are themselves" mentality still haunts America today. Like it or not, 9/11 happened because our illustrious leaders thought (and still think) that fomenting military coups in Guatemala, Iran, and Chile, helping Saddam Hussein against Iran, shipping weapons to Egyptian and Saudi dictators, etc, etc, etc is good foreign policy. Our leaders (of both Republicrat and Democan parties) speachify about all of the great things (capitalism, freedom) Amerika offers, but simply cannot grasp the hatred that those actions have provoked among the have-nots of the world who hear the speaches but end up on the receiving end of American bullets when they try and put those American ideals into practice in their own nations. It is sometimes very hard to be a patriotic American, and Fonda's actions have to be seen in that light.
But could someone explain the Jane Fonda thing? What did that forged photo purport to show?
Jane Fonda is an actress, daughter of Henry Fonda, formerly married to liberal media mogul Ted Turner and also to SDS activist Tom Hayden. She was an opponent of the Vietnam War who made a trip to North Vietnam at the height of the war thus earning the sobriquet "Hanoi Jane." The political right in the U.S. hates her guts. By placing John Kerry with Fonda, they seek to make Kerry appear as a left wing traitor.
In order to make a distro with 4.4 included, you would need to rewrite every app that links to X to the X licence, else you are breaking the gpl and as a distro maintainer, you'd be responcable for the breaks.
That claim has been repeated several times during this discussion, but noone has explained exactly why it is true. And since noone has explained why, I have become quite skeptical of its truth. It looks very much to me as if the new XFree86 license could be easily satisfied by distributions such as Mandrake and Redhat simply including the new license in a text file in/usr/doc or/usr/X11R6 or someplace similar.
I fail to see why all programs merely linked against XFree86 libs must include the license advert again. If I write a GPL'd program that must link against the XFree86 libs in order to run, and distribute that program as either source or binary, I fail to see at all why I must include the XFree86 advert in my program since I am not redistributing XFree86, just my own work. The fact that my source and binary have a dependence on a non-GPL'd work is irrelevent for my program's own redistribution. That dependence may preclude doing useful work with my GPL'd program if a user does not have the required prerequisite, but it does not in any way violate the GPL on my code or binary. The caveat is that my program must link dynamically with those libs, rather than statically so that I am not including XFree86 code with my distribution.
But you would force me and the other six billion people to completely give up the only environment we have that is capable of supporting us so that you can continue your short-sighted, greedy, mad rush for consumer goods and monetary power.
I don't force them to do anything of the sort. Each of the 6+ billion (including yourself) have chosen to do this themselves! I do not force anyone to buy anything! I merely say that given what they have chosen, I can approximate how they value the environment relative to consumer goods.
It's so odd, and I guess symptomatic, that you could see my view as a desire to force my beliefs on others when I would like to see the natural conditions that created us and our prosperity continue for the benefit of us all. You, on the other hand, would sell us all out for a few pieces of gold for you and those who believe as you do. Go figure.
NO. I want you to be honest with yourself. Everything you do or buy creates an implicit tradeoff between your desire for consumer goods and some degree of environmental degradation. EVERYTHING! And since you are reading/., it is clear that you purchase environmentally destroying electricity at the very least. So you, too, are willing to make tradeoffs between the environment and consumer goods even while trying to tell 6+ billion other people that they should not.
So basically you believe that your ethical system should rule the day. Sorry, but not everyone believes as you do. You live on a planet with 6+ billion other people and your beliefs and needs are not going to prevail over the rest of us -- especially those without jobs in developing countries. People (including you) trade environmental qality for consumer goods everytime they shop. Economic thinking is one way of trying to decide where the optimal tradeoff between the environment and other goods lies. It is based on measuring the willingness of human beings to give up environmental quality for other things they also desire. There are other ethical systems where fish, say, have rights, but these systems are not well accepted by either the legal system or by most other people. And remember, (as per the title of this thread) everything carries a cost. Your demands for a perfect environment will cost millions of people their livelihood. 6+ billion people cannot live on this planet the way you want them to. Nor should they be forced to anymore than you should be forced to completely give up your desires for environmental quality.
The fallacy in this kind of reasoning is in trying to force an economic model onto a natural system -- trying to convert a healthy environment into a marketable commodity with some monetary value so that we can trade it away for money, the value of which can be determined through market forces.
You have missed the point. You are one of those who highly values environmental goods. So you have decided that environmental degradation has a very high cost -- i.e. you have very little willingness to trade environmental quality for other goods. But why should your preferences dominate those of other people who care very little about the environment? What makes you and your preferences special? The problem reverses itself for the guy who cares very little about the environment. Why should his preferences dominate yours? The problem is how to aggregate each individual's willingness to trade environmental quality for manufactured consumer goods in order to create a socially optimal amount of both environmental goods and consumer goods. And anytime there is a potential tradeoff between one class of goods and another because both goods are scarce, economics is involved. Indeed, understanding how people and societies make such tradeoffs along with the consequences of those tradeoffs is the what defines the domain of the science of economics.
You are right, but measuring the economic cost of environmental degradation is a real difficult problem for two reasons. First, since few environmental goods are traded in marketplaces, it is hard to get the required price/quantity data that would enable us to measure the demand curves for environmental goods(*) and, thus, the cost or amount of compensation individuals would require in order to tolerate a given quantity of environmental degradation. This is based on the idea that if a tree falls in a forest and nobody gives a damn, is its loss really a cost? The second problem is defining how we should aggregate these individual costs. One rich enviromentalist (with a high demand for environmental goods) could swamp the (perhaps negative) demand by many poor people without jobs. Should many poor folks go without jobs in order to satisfy the desires of a few rich folks for a high quality environment? If I read the anti-globalization types correctly, they essentially say yes, while the pro globalization folks seem willing to ignore the environmental problems completely. There is a "correct" balance in there somewhere, but calculating precisely where is hardly an exact science.
Well done! Only 2 sentences in the fp and yet nearly half of the discussion is a reply (or a reply to a reply...) to your original! Is that a/. record?
...who used IBM Holorith cards to track the progress of the Holocaust. So I guess we shouldn't hold IBM and Thomas J. Watson responsible for that, either, even though they clearly knew what the technology was being used for.
Jeez, man, have you even tried developing Java code in eclipse? It has all the benefits that a parsing editor can have. It even displays an error if you make a switch with two the same case statements. Refactoring is great, if only for searching and renaming. Before Eclipse I must say most Java development was done in ultra edit, but that's over now. It's a bit late to go into a plain editor vs IDE don't you think?
That's all available in emacs. And, yeah, I've tried developing code in eclipse. Eclipse doesn't
play nice with other development tools. I, the developer, am forced to reorg my directory and code structures to conform to eclipse's bad idea of what a project should look like. Hell, one of my team members uses eclipse and it won't let her check out code from CVS that both emacs and a cmd line cvs client handle just perfectly.
It is buggy, bloated, and it still won't print using the Linux/GTK version. I suspect that eclipse's problem is that the people who developed it had no experience with real editors. Didn't it also derive from WebSphere which had that funny notion that code belonged in some repostitory that the tool owned making it difficult to use an outside editor? If the authors thought that was good idea, it is easy to see why eclipse is as poorly designed as it is. BTW, what is the keyboard shortcut (if there is one) for jumping to a line number in an editor so you can see where an exception occured when you run your java program outside of eclipse? All I have found is a "where's my mouse again? so I can click on something to get a dialog box that lets me fill in the line number that finally takes me to the line." WTF is that? What's wrong with M-X goto-line? Eclipse behaves as if I should never leave eclipse during my development process. But my production code isn't going to be running under eclipse's direction. It'll be on a different box with a different OS than what I use to develop on. This means I need to be able to seamlessly move from one environment to another during development and testing and production upgrades. Eclipse makes it hard to do this.
Slashdot Mirror
RTF whole quote:
Asked whether the continual production of methane is strong evidence of a biological origin of the gas, Dr Mumma said: "I think it is, myself personally."
He added: "It's difficult to imagine that primordial methane [from geological activity] would continue outgassing for four billion years [the age of Mars]. This looks very intriguing."
Doesn't sound reckless to me. Sounds more like informed speculation.
Are you saying 100 years of playing God with forest fire has not screwed up any ecosystems anywhere?
No, we are just saying that your understanding of the science of forestry is pretty limited.
In North America, outside the unique ecosystem of the Pacific Northwest/Cascadia, where do trees live to 400 years?
Multi-100 year-old trees were quite common in the Smokey Mts prior to the 1920s when the loggers came in and took them down. There are still a few to be found if you know where to look.
Old growth lumber is a decadent, unnatural forest, that is caused by man supressing forest fires for the last 100 years, which is nature's only way of renewing a forest, believe-it-or-not. Cones won't open, releasing seeds, unless under extreme heat.
That is true for some forests and some species of pines in arid mountains out in the US West, but not at all true for the near rainforests composed of hardwood found in, say, the Smokey Mts. Most of the Eastern US before the arrival of Europeans was also a dark old-growth hardwood forest that behaved nothing like what you have described.
Old growth lumber, at the bottom of a lake, is going to rot, and is subject to parasites - ask the Japanese this. They tried to store logs underwater and found them infested with bugs when they brought them up.
Again, check your facts. Lake Superior is full of old growth logs lost when Northern MN, WI, and the Upper Penisula of MI were first logged. Those logs survived quite well thanks to the cold and limited O2. They are being hauled to the surface today and are being sold at a large premium to musical instrument makers and folks like Bill Gates for use as wood paneling. They have an incredible fine grain that cannot be found in wood harvested from today's forests since the wood grew so slowly due those decadent, unnatural forest conditions that makes up your standard Eastern old growth hardwood forest.
Real men don't keep books.
They let their local library do it for them.
But then I'm lucky enough to live a block away from a branch of the local metropolitan library and two miles from a large university so I tend to keep my personal shelves filled with the expensive tech books that I need moment to moment and let the city and the university handle the rest.
I'm in the "They Both Suck Rocks" camp. I find them both to be equally a PITA. I'm quite disapointed that OO.o decided to copy the MS Office interface. Best word processor that I've used is WordPerfect 5.1. The "show codes" feature was great. Just turn the WP 5.1 format into XML with a stylesheet editor and I'd be a delighted customer. Right now, I use emacs for most of my document editing because it lets me concentrate on the semantics of what I'm trying to say rather than the formating hangups that I always get stuck in when trying to use either OO.o or MS Word.
A pox on both their heads. OO.o vs. MS Office? I'm rooting for injuries.
You may not realize it, but right now, primary schools in impovrished rural Indian areas are getting a world-class education in Computer Science and Mathematics.
I've lived and worked as a researcher in rural India (between Bangalore and Mysore) and I doubt that very many rural Indians are getting a world-class education in Computer Science and Mathematics. In fact, most rural Indians are lucky to be able to read at all -- especially the women.
I'm sure you like to pretend to think you know what you're talking about, but the design of this new file selector was not haphazard. There were long, arduous debates on the various, related lists about the UI and API and various use-cases for both beginner and advanced users.
Remember, though, that a camel is a horse designed by committee. Long, arduous debates do not guarantee a successful design.
At idle, with no applications running, the commit charge is at a whopping 483 MB!! Obviously, the final release or even the beta releases will not consume this much of the system resources.
What'd they do? Replace the Windows GUI with Gnome?
ducks
And who are YOU to decide how other people should raise their kids? You probably are not married, have no kids and no house payments to make. For most of the families on my block, most require two incomes just to stay even and maybe save a little for retirement. And this is in an average middle class neighborhood in the Midwest. We are raising our children just fine, thank you, and have a hell of a lot better understanding of how much responsibilty children are (and how much they cost) than you do to judge by your clueless opinion. I mean WTF? You think only the wealthy should have kids?
"The big Chill" - the Ice Age froze 'em all. Popular among scientists.
I'm really skeptical that a mammoth extinction caused by an Ice Age is popular among scientists. Mammoths seem to have been well adapted for the cold and died off when the climate became warmer.
"The big Kill" - hunted to death by humans, little evidence exists for this, popular with the tree hugging set.
There is plenty of evidence for human involvement in extinctions of mammals such as the mammoth. The models demonstrate that it doesn't take a whole lot of hunting to drive a population of large mammals to extinction.
If there's a north america, and a south america, then collectively the whole thing is america.
N. + S. America are collectively referred to as The Americas.
The united states is not the whole of america, they're maybe a quarter.
U.S. ~ 3,500,000 Sq. Miles
N. America ~ 9,000,000 Sq. Miles
That's about 38% of N.A. The figures are from the BBC which includes Canada, The U.S., Mexico, Central America, various Carribean islands, and Greenland as part of N.A. Ignore Greenland, which I've never before seen included as part of N. America, and the U.S. covers 42% of N.A.
Trivia Question: Is Panama part of North, Central, or South America?
I have no problem getting worked up over a person that causes harm to our soldiers, those men who were bravely carrying out their orders.
The German soldiers who invaded Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, France, Benelux, Denmark, Norway, and Russia were men who were bravely carrying out orders, too. Yet what they did was neither moral nor right. Individual soldiers are as responsible for what happened in Vietnam (and all wars) as their leaders. Remember the old slogan "Suppose they gave a war and nobody came?" Those soldiers each individually chose to fight in an unjust war and having made that choice they are fair game for those who found that choice to be morally loathsome. Or does the right pay service to the concept of individual responsibilty only when welfare mothers are involved?
Er, it was Eisenhower who sent the first advisors to Vietnam. Nixon could have ended the war in 1969/70 on just about the same terms he got 4 years later. Lots of American soldiers died during that time, far more than Jane Fonda killed.
While there were atrocities committed by certain parts of the government (such as the national guard at Kent), it was not some sort of conspiracy to end free speech, as you can plainly see with all the huge, relatively peaceful anti-war protests that were carried out in America by free Americans.
Killing college kids who disagree with your policies seems like killing free speech to me. Any idea how many of those peaceful anti-war demonstrators still have FBI files?
I'm sorry, which part of my reply made you think I agree with our government on all issues, don't condemn them for their stupid actions over the years, etc?
Vietnam was one of those stupid actions. It is real hard to get worked up over Jane Fonda when the nation we were defending at the time was a right wing military dictatorship that was as anti-freedom as you can get and especially when that war and similar actions have created as much ill will towards the US as they have.
Ummm, no, more than just the political right hate her guts. Anyone ever associated with the military hates her guts. Any (informed) patriotic American probably hates her guts.
Um, I used to be associated with the military. I'm more informed than most Americans (probably including yourself) and am pretty damn patriotic. I don't really want to refight the Vietnam war here, but the behavior of the U.S. government and military during that war towards those who chose to dissent was at least as shameful as what Jane Fonda did. That war, and the stupid "anyone who opposes our enemies is our friend, no matter how evil they are themselves" mentality still haunts America today. Like it or not, 9/11 happened because our illustrious leaders thought (and still think) that fomenting military coups in Guatemala, Iran, and Chile, helping Saddam Hussein against Iran, shipping weapons to Egyptian and Saudi dictators, etc, etc, etc is good foreign policy. Our leaders (of both Republicrat and Democan parties) speachify about all of the great things (capitalism, freedom) Amerika offers, but simply cannot grasp the hatred that those actions have provoked among the have-nots of the world who hear the speaches but end up on the receiving end of American bullets when they try and put those American ideals into practice in their own nations. It is sometimes very hard to be a patriotic American, and Fonda's actions have to be seen in that light.
But could someone explain the Jane Fonda thing? What did that forged photo purport to show?
Jane Fonda is an actress, daughter of Henry Fonda, formerly married to liberal media mogul Ted Turner and also to SDS activist Tom Hayden. She was an opponent of the Vietnam War who made a trip to North Vietnam at the height of the war thus earning the sobriquet "Hanoi Jane." The political right in the U.S. hates her guts. By placing John Kerry with Fonda, they seek to make Kerry appear as a left wing traitor.
In order to make a distro with 4.4 included, you would need to rewrite every app that links to X to the X licence, else you are breaking the gpl and as a distro maintainer, you'd be responcable for the breaks.
/usr/doc or /usr/X11R6 or someplace similar.
That claim has been repeated several times during this discussion, but noone has explained exactly why it is true. And since noone has explained why, I have become quite skeptical of its truth. It looks very much to me as if the new XFree86 license could be easily satisfied by distributions such as Mandrake and Redhat simply including the new license in a text file in
I fail to see why all programs merely linked against XFree86 libs must include the license advert again. If I write a GPL'd program that must link against the XFree86 libs in order to run, and distribute that program as either source or binary, I fail to see at all why I must include the XFree86 advert in my program since I am not redistributing XFree86, just my own work. The fact that my source and binary have a dependence on a non-GPL'd work is irrelevent for my program's own redistribution. That dependence may preclude doing useful work with my GPL'd program if a user does not have the required prerequisite, but it does not in any way violate the GPL on my code or binary. The caveat is that my program must link dynamically with those libs, rather than statically so that I am not including XFree86 code with my distribution.
But you would force me and the other six billion people to completely give up the only environment we have that is capable of supporting us so that you can continue your short-sighted, greedy, mad rush for consumer goods and monetary power.
/., it is clear that you purchase environmentally destroying electricity at the very least. So you, too, are willing to make tradeoffs between the environment and consumer goods even while trying to tell 6+ billion other people that they should not.
I don't force them to do anything of the sort. Each of the 6+ billion (including yourself) have chosen to do this themselves! I do not force anyone to buy anything! I merely say that given what they have chosen, I can approximate how they value the environment relative to consumer goods.
It's so odd, and I guess symptomatic, that you could see my view as a desire to force my beliefs on others when I would like to see the natural conditions that created us and our prosperity continue for the benefit of us all. You, on the other hand, would sell us all out for a few pieces of gold for you and those who believe as you do. Go figure.
NO. I want you to be honest with yourself. Everything you do or buy creates an implicit tradeoff between your desire for consumer goods and some degree of environmental degradation. EVERYTHING! And since you are reading
So basically you believe that your ethical system should rule the day. Sorry, but not everyone believes as you do. You live on a planet with 6+ billion other people and your beliefs and needs are not going to prevail over the rest of us -- especially those without jobs in developing countries. People (including you) trade environmental qality for consumer goods everytime they shop. Economic thinking is one way of trying to decide where the optimal tradeoff between the environment and other goods lies. It is based on measuring the willingness of human beings to give up environmental quality for other things they also desire. There are other ethical systems where fish, say, have rights, but these systems are not well accepted by either the legal system or by most other people. And remember, (as per the title of this thread) everything carries a cost. Your demands for a perfect environment will cost millions of people their livelihood. 6+ billion people cannot live on this planet the way you want them to. Nor should they be forced to anymore than you should be forced to completely give up your desires for environmental quality.
The fallacy in this kind of reasoning is in trying to force an economic model onto a natural system -- trying to convert a healthy environment into a marketable commodity with some monetary value so that we can trade it away for money, the value of which can be determined through market forces.
You have missed the point. You are one of those who highly values environmental goods. So you have decided that environmental degradation has a very high cost -- i.e. you have very little willingness to trade environmental quality for other goods. But why should your preferences dominate those of other people who care very little about the environment? What makes you and your preferences special? The problem reverses itself for the guy who cares very little about the environment. Why should his preferences dominate yours? The problem is how to aggregate each individual's willingness to trade environmental quality for manufactured consumer goods in order to create a socially optimal amount of both environmental goods and consumer goods. And anytime there is a potential tradeoff between one class of goods and another because both goods are scarce, economics is involved. Indeed, understanding how people and societies make such tradeoffs along with the consequences of those tradeoffs is the what defines the domain of the science of economics.
You are right, but measuring the economic cost of environmental degradation is a real difficult problem for two reasons. First, since few environmental goods are traded in marketplaces, it is hard to get the required price/quantity data that would enable us to measure the demand curves for environmental goods(*) and, thus, the cost or amount of compensation individuals would require in order to tolerate a given quantity of environmental degradation. This is based on the idea that if a tree falls in a forest and nobody gives a damn, is its loss really a cost? The second problem is defining how we should aggregate these individual costs. One rich enviromentalist (with a high demand for environmental goods) could swamp the (perhaps negative) demand by many poor people without jobs. Should many poor folks go without jobs in order to satisfy the desires of a few rich folks for a high quality environment? If I read the anti-globalization types correctly, they essentially say yes, while the pro globalization folks seem willing to ignore the environmental problems completely. There is a "correct" balance in there somewhere, but calculating precisely where is hardly an exact science.
* Disclaimer: I used to do this for a living.
You must be a very average, boring person.
Well done! Only 2 sentences in the fp and yet nearly half of the discussion is a reply (or a reply to a reply...) to your original! Is that a /. record?
...who used IBM Holorith cards to track the progress of the Holocaust. So I guess we shouldn't hold IBM and Thomas J. Watson responsible for that, either, even though they clearly knew what the technology was being used for.
Jeez, man, have you even tried developing Java code in eclipse? It has all the benefits that a parsing editor can have. It even displays an error if you make a switch with two the same case statements. Refactoring is great, if only for searching and renaming. Before Eclipse I must say most Java development was done in ultra edit, but that's over now. It's a bit late to go into a plain editor vs IDE don't you think?
That's all available in emacs. And, yeah, I've tried developing code in eclipse. Eclipse doesn't play nice with other development tools. I, the developer, am forced to reorg my directory and code structures to conform to eclipse's bad idea of what a project should look like. Hell, one of my team members uses eclipse and it won't let her check out code from CVS that both emacs and a cmd line cvs client handle just perfectly. It is buggy, bloated, and it still won't print using the Linux/GTK version. I suspect that eclipse's problem is that the people who developed it had no experience with real editors. Didn't it also derive from WebSphere which had that funny notion that code belonged in some repostitory that the tool owned making it difficult to use an outside editor? If the authors thought that was good idea, it is easy to see why eclipse is as poorly designed as it is. BTW, what is the keyboard shortcut (if there is one) for jumping to a line number in an editor so you can see where an exception occured when you run your java program outside of eclipse? All I have found is a "where's my mouse again? so I can click on something to get a dialog box that lets me fill in the line number that finally takes me to the line." WTF is that? What's wrong with M-X goto-line? Eclipse behaves as if I should never leave eclipse during my development process. But my production code isn't going to be running under eclipse's direction. It'll be on a different box with a different OS than what I use to develop on. This means I need to be able to seamlessly move from one environment to another during development and testing and production upgrades. Eclipse makes it hard to do this.