French is the language of romance, but I understand that as a slashdotter, you might not know this. I read it in a book. Very intresting apparently it all is designed to lead to sex, whatever that might be. Further reading might be in order.
I have noticed in IT an almost physical revulsion of the idea of upgrading. I can't count the times I have worked on a system and found it to be several versions out of date, the reason? "Well it works".
No, it does not.
While for some software new releases indeed only happen to sell more copies and add useless features, for production software and OS, security, reliability and bug fixes tend to be improved. If nothing else, then at least you present a moving target.
A lot of exploits happen with code BASED on FIXES. So the bad guys learn what to attack by watching the patches that don't come out and basically attack everyone who hasn't patched.
Often the official excuse is that code must be tested... yeah... because you tested it so well before that you did not find the security holes. If you ever been told that you can't upgrade beyond IE6 because it hasn't been certified yet, ask yourself: "Who the hell certified IE6?" Really, how did that ever get approved if any ever did any real testing? Answer: Nobody ever did.
It is just that the support companies want to see big bucks first because if they upgrade their clients they got to retrain their people. Same with stuff that is developed for legacy systems, to cheap to do essential maintenance.
Car anology: It is like not replacing your brakes because they still stop your car eventually and you need to cut costs and then when the remains of the brakes have becomes fused to the rims you can't afford the now increased costs so you defend that you need the car as it is and everyone else is to blame for it being a road hazard.
UPGRADE. If you are afraid that you might be bitten by some new bug, then at least such a bug is an honest mistake, you might loose some data but that is what backups are for. If you do not, your data might not simply be lost but be stolen. And sooner or later someone will start to hold you accountable for your lousy business practices... oh we are talking the financial industry here? Never mind.
So what nations exactly de-nuked? Britain? France? Holland? Not sure about the others as I frankly don't give a damn, but a lot of nato countries got tactical nukes.
Most countries that did reduce the number of nukes did so simply because they are bloody expensive to maintain.
What you got to realize is that for most people unbiased really means: they are saying what I want to hear.
True unbiased reporting is non-existent. If you want to see it, go to your local government weather station and look up the temps of the day. That is unbiased news. Don't read the weather report because "cold" is already a bias based on the reporters view on temperatures. What I find cold is not what you find cold.
In one of the articles you link the BBC would not show an item that might insult muslims while allowing every other religion to be insulted. Clearly biased (and anyone who actually watches the BBC knows they are biased, recently they had several hours of "examination of Islam" that might as well have been written by Osama for its complete lack of any critism whatsoever, it was a travel brochure rather then a report let alone a documentary) but what can they do? People get killed over Islam, and the BBC would be roasted alive if it started a riot, so they shut up.
And by its nature TV attracts the super rich elite that does not actually life in the real world. Quick, name a single TV personality making less then 100.000 a year. Can't think of one can you. They don't exist. So they report on cultural problems when their only exposure to it is that the janitor has a dark skin. In Holland a few years ago you had a program "Ook dat nog" that started to be preachy towards the end about race issues. One problem, not a single non-white person on the panel AND the station that aired had a tv-cook who had refused muslims service. Did they happen to mention that? No sirree. Racism only exists in other people.
If you want real unbiased news, you got to roll your own. Follow several news sources, it can be very amusing to see what political leaning you can give to a story just by leaving out a few sentences.
It put my foot firmly down with shell, on the accelerator... they named me their customer of the day. Now if you excuse me, I got to lube up for the arab nations else they won't be selling me a barrel of oil I need to drive to the end of the street.
It is not like they make any money by selling it to Nintendo and others, they should opensource their code just because.
Opera is the perfect example of how closed source and opensource can exist next to each other AND show you the advantages and disadvantages of both models.
Firefox vs Opera has some interesting differences. Firefox is more adjustable especially with its extensions, Opera feels more solid like someone actually was in charge of all its different features and insisted they work together. Take mouse-gestures and tabbed browsing. Firefox gives more choice but it feels very clear that these things are bolted on, while in Opera they come as they are but are how the browser has been designed to work from the start.
No, keep Opera closed source, competition from different suppliers is a good thing.
mind you, the cubic solver is nice looking and has a lot of attention paid to making it look good, but it seems to be using a netbook. The sudoko seems to be using ONLY its onboard lego controller, and it has that human touch of writing with a real pen that makes it spooky. The math may be simpler, the robotics seems far more complex. I can almost imagine that robot driving around looking for dropped newspapers to solve the puzzles:P
The sudoko also wins for me because while all the principles involved are simple enough, getting it all to work together so smoothly is anything but.
Cubestorm for looks and sheer speed, sudoko robot for neatness and purity.
I am usually pretty relaxed on all the YRO stuff like camera's on the street but this one REALLY deserves a "1984 is NOT a HOWTO".
Mind you, I am curious to see what has lead up to all this.
I am reminded of a level rail crossing. In the olden days it had just red lights, it was enough. Now it has full bars with folding down barriers across the entire road so absolutely nothing can pass, not even an emergency vehicle. Why? Because year after year people kept crossing and getting killed and so more and more protection was demanded when a red light should be all the warning you need (oh okay, it had a bell for the blind).
What in this school district prompted this action? Is it someone who lost it or what? Is this school district so out of control that this was the only way they could think of to keep things in check? Did an extremist gain total control over the system? What happened? I would be very intrested to hear what lead to all this. Is the district a particularry bad one, or a prudish one?
On Linux if you know you got enough ram and can life with the risk that if a program goes memory wild you are going to be in trouble, then you can turn swapping off. The problem on my own linux machine is that torrenting and large file serving confuses the machine, it tries to cache these file reads but this is rarely needed. So if it starts to swap, it is swapping stuff it will never need again.
It is fine that it caches files in memory, since this is fast, but caching stuff on the HD that it just read from that same HD and will never need again... that is pointless.
In theory, windows should be able to do the same, but its page file has become so much a part of the system that it seems to need it, even if it has tons of free memory. I had a 32bit game on a 12gig machine and it STILL insisted on a page file WHY?
So, turn of swap on linux if you got enough memory (and make sure you do because opera/firefox with plenty of tabs open suck up memory like you wouldn't believe) but on windows, you can't.
Mmm, well according to my Simpsons guide to everything I need to know about the US of A, it don't work if you invite them in. Could be called entrapment. Honey traps by the cops are legal because they don't entice people to break into those honey pots, they don't leave extra valuable stuff in the car or leave the door open or something like that, just another parked car, no enticement == funny arrest videos.
Really, I work less and do more. And that whole "in the groove" thing the summary mentions? Just don't bother me no more. I answer the phone, deal with e-mail, help juniors with problems, monitor several projects and mediors and debug stuff nobody else can figure out all while drinking coffee and without working insane hours and no longer needing to study night and day to keep up-to-date.
One of the best things you can learn? Use your juniors to keep up-to-date, if it is important enough, they will figure it all out, you then learn from them, ridicule them a bit for the mistakes and oversights they made then promote then ones that made the least and voila, senior/CTO salaries for a few hours work a day.
Really, I am never impressed when someone works overtime. 8 hours is more then enough to do a decent job, why do you need 16? Any boss that wants lots of overtime is doing the old IBM method of paying programmers by the line.
Take them both. One is a junior, he might know his own tiny little environment, but everything else is going to suck, while the experienced guy can pick up a new language in a flash and in the meantime keep the young guy from making to many basic mistakes.
Approaching the age of 40 at break neck speeds, I am going to find out how true it is that there are no old coders.
But frankly, I don't think it is going to be a huge issue unless 40 turns out to be a really magical number. I have had no problems before. Granted, junior positions are no longer open to me, but then, why would I want to?
I have found that at least in Holland there is a real shortage of good web developers, people who can not just put up a website but maintain it and worse, debug somebody elses mess. There are tons of LAMP developers it seems, and yet companies can't find them. But you got to be able to deliver, how many of the programmers who complain they can't find a job really just aren't any good?
In fact in an interview Backbase, an small but international developer said in "De Pers" that they were so desperate for experienced developers they had put a freeze on hiring juniors because they did not have the people to train/lead them.
Yes, some companies might prefer to hire someone young, but these tend to be the grindhouses of the industry, were they churn out project after project with no quality for a low low price. You all know them, the companies that do government IT. If you IT department still insists you run IE6, then you got one of them.
But there are countless more companies that do try to work for their money were experience and maturity are needed to keep the enthusiasm of the younger developers in line. There has to be someone who can actually debug a third party app if the shit hits the fan and do it without constant hand holding. There is in development and certainly web-development a lot of grunt work that is really a waste to put a senior on, but I have seen what junior's today are 'capable' of. Or rather not capable. It is the parts of a project that go beyond the "teach yourself X in 24 hours" books or even school. It is the years of experience encountering all kind of problems that turn a junior into a senior.
A smart company therefor has both kinds, the juniors for the grind work and to bring in new ideas, the seniors to keep it all running smoothly.
And if your company ain't smart enough for that? Move on as fast as possible.
BUT I just re-read the summary AND the article and there is a problem. The article is about IT-workers while the summary is about programmers. I have started to notice that there is a difference to the point that developers really aren't part of IT at all. I always thought we were, but others disagree.
So, is the article about how their are no old help-desk jockey's? And could this be because there is a job for senior dev's but not for senior printer unjammers? Just what is IT? A 60+ senior developer is a respectable position, if you are 60+ and still have to install new PC's you screwed up and a kid can do your job cheaper.
In conclusion, I am not all that worried. Any company not willing to hire a 40+ developer with over 2 decades experience on countless successful projects, I wouldn't want to work for anyway.
If my own government is anything to go by (Netherlands) then the counteroffensive will be "you just don't understand it". The time politicians felt accountable to the public has long gone.
Mind you, the public keeps voting for the same guys over and over.
The biggest scammers are the media, in Holland you got something called to "kiez wijzer", a site that records the various parties (yes America, you can have more then 2) election PROMISES and ask you how you feel about various issues and then gives a recommendation. It is actually fairly fair, except that the attentive reader will have noticed I said PROMISES. It does NOT base its advice on YOUR preferences and a parties PAST behavior. So the advice in on what parties say they will do, not what they have done. And almost every falls for it.
Global climate change, means having to park your SUV. People don't want to do that, so they don't.
When will they be convinced? Look at tobacco, you still got people denying that smoking causes health problems. You can show them their lungs full of tar, and they just don't want to see it.
It is not for nothing that every single so called skeptic (real skeptics are horrified by them) has a direct connection to oil or another reason to not want to have to change. Same as all the people who doubt smoking is bad, are smokers or work for the tobacco industry. Gosh, what a suprise!
And you can easily debunk any so called skeptic because he hammers on global warming, while the real issue is GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE.
But they keep saying man can't have an effect on nature, even when you can see that the outside temp is warmer in cities and rain cloud patterns affected by build up areas. But man has no effect... none so blind as those that don't want to see, especially if they have their income depend on it.
The thing that is really worrying is not so much global warming, but global climate CHANGE. Some bits get dryer, some wetter. Some hotter, some colder. And this is a bigger problem then people who life in cities realize.
A simple thing as making hay, depends on there not being rain while the cut grass dries out. It is HUGELY important to feed our enormous cattle herds. And since hay takes a whole to dry and ONE hour of rain can soak it, there is a very fine balance going on.
Neither can the farmer just wait a few extra days because if left to long, the nutrition decreases. If he does not have enough food (not just in bulk but in nutritional value) then he needs to buy extra food, where is this coming from? It might have to driven in from hundreds if not thousands of miles away, and you now got TWO areas of theplanet being used to feed the same herd, all because of ONE rainy day. Next time you have a rainy fall and are complaining, think about those who have to harvest. It might be annoying to have to was your car a lot more, but it upsets the agriculture that has created western civilization.
Has anyone here ever wondered just why civilization is western? We are not the oldest race, and there is no biological difference, so why are black people still living in stone age times while we put a man on the moon? Because Africa's climate sucks donkey balls. A european farmer could for hundreds of years more or less count on reaping what he sows. In Africa, this is not the case, drought is near constant and there is nothing that an African farmer can do about it. And to see the effect a famine has on society, check the potato famin.
We don't think about our food in the west because we take it for granted that it just arrives in the shops everyday. Nature to us is just the stuff that soaks us or gives us a nice tan, but to the farmer we all depend on, it is the controller of his entire process. And if it changes, our food production has to change and we might not like the results.
The price in potatoes in Holland has been entirely depended on the amount of rain. To much and it can't be harvested, to little and it doesn't grow. Yes, crops have rotted away in the ground in recent years, no it did NOT lead to famine because we could import food at "slightly" higher prices, but what effect does that have on the rest of the world? Poor nations whose harvest also failed now find the prices to be even higher.
Global climate change is to big a risk to take changes. People who worry about the icecaps melting and tidal surges just like drama. Far worse will be an upset in our food production. If petrol prices rice, the economy chokes, now imagine the price of bread being doubled. You can ride a bike, you can telecommute, but there is little saving on food.
I think you will find that there are worse things then nerd rage.
You might think you are cool because you capped 10.000 people in the head online, and they can count their kills on the fingers of one hand, but their score is in real life.
Me and some gamer mates are going to beat up the Amsterdam chapter of the Hell's Angels. I mean, we are thougher then them right? What could possibly go wrong? They are wusses and I will make sure to tell them loudly and clearly, what are they going to do? None of them has scored as many kills in Counterstrike as I have.
Slashdot Mirror
It was in a Henson the storyteller like production, that did Greek mythology.
French is the language of romance, but I understand that as a slashdotter, you might not know this. I read it in a book. Very intresting apparently it all is designed to lead to sex, whatever that might be. Further reading might be in order.
I have noticed in IT an almost physical revulsion of the idea of upgrading. I can't count the times I have worked on a system and found it to be several versions out of date, the reason? "Well it works".
No, it does not.
While for some software new releases indeed only happen to sell more copies and add useless features, for production software and OS, security, reliability and bug fixes tend to be improved. If nothing else, then at least you present a moving target.
A lot of exploits happen with code BASED on FIXES. So the bad guys learn what to attack by watching the patches that don't come out and basically attack everyone who hasn't patched.
Often the official excuse is that code must be tested... yeah... because you tested it so well before that you did not find the security holes. If you ever been told that you can't upgrade beyond IE6 because it hasn't been certified yet, ask yourself: "Who the hell certified IE6?" Really, how did that ever get approved if any ever did any real testing? Answer: Nobody ever did.
It is just that the support companies want to see big bucks first because if they upgrade their clients they got to retrain their people. Same with stuff that is developed for legacy systems, to cheap to do essential maintenance.
Car anology: It is like not replacing your brakes because they still stop your car eventually and you need to cut costs and then when the remains of the brakes have becomes fused to the rims you can't afford the now increased costs so you defend that you need the car as it is and everyone else is to blame for it being a road hazard.
UPGRADE. If you are afraid that you might be bitten by some new bug, then at least such a bug is an honest mistake, you might loose some data but that is what backups are for. If you do not, your data might not simply be lost but be stolen. And sooner or later someone will start to hold you accountable for your lousy business practices... oh we are talking the financial industry here? Never mind.
So what nations exactly de-nuked? Britain? France? Holland? Not sure about the others as I frankly don't give a damn, but a lot of nato countries got tactical nukes.
Most countries that did reduce the number of nukes did so simply because they are bloody expensive to maintain.
What you got to realize is that for most people unbiased really means: they are saying what I want to hear.
True unbiased reporting is non-existent. If you want to see it, go to your local government weather station and look up the temps of the day. That is unbiased news. Don't read the weather report because "cold" is already a bias based on the reporters view on temperatures. What I find cold is not what you find cold.
In one of the articles you link the BBC would not show an item that might insult muslims while allowing every other religion to be insulted. Clearly biased (and anyone who actually watches the BBC knows they are biased, recently they had several hours of "examination of Islam" that might as well have been written by Osama for its complete lack of any critism whatsoever, it was a travel brochure rather then a report let alone a documentary) but what can they do? People get killed over Islam, and the BBC would be roasted alive if it started a riot, so they shut up.
And by its nature TV attracts the super rich elite that does not actually life in the real world. Quick, name a single TV personality making less then 100.000 a year. Can't think of one can you. They don't exist. So they report on cultural problems when their only exposure to it is that the janitor has a dark skin. In Holland a few years ago you had a program "Ook dat nog" that started to be preachy towards the end about race issues. One problem, not a single non-white person on the panel AND the station that aired had a tv-cook who had refused muslims service. Did they happen to mention that? No sirree. Racism only exists in other people.
If you want real unbiased news, you got to roll your own. Follow several news sources, it can be very amusing to see what political leaning you can give to a story just by leaving out a few sentences.
It put my foot firmly down with shell, on the accelerator... they named me their customer of the day. Now if you excuse me, I got to lube up for the arab nations else they won't be selling me a barrel of oil I need to drive to the end of the street.
It is not like they make any money by selling it to Nintendo and others, they should opensource their code just because.
Opera is the perfect example of how closed source and opensource can exist next to each other AND show you the advantages and disadvantages of both models.
Firefox vs Opera has some interesting differences. Firefox is more adjustable especially with its extensions, Opera feels more solid like someone actually was in charge of all its different features and insisted they work together. Take mouse-gestures and tabbed browsing. Firefox gives more choice but it feels very clear that these things are bolted on, while in Opera they come as they are but are how the browser has been designed to work from the start.
No, keep Opera closed source, competition from different suppliers is a good thing.
mind you, the cubic solver is nice looking and has a lot of attention paid to making it look good, but it seems to be using a netbook. The sudoko seems to be using ONLY its onboard lego controller, and it has that human touch of writing with a real pen that makes it spooky. The math may be simpler, the robotics seems far more complex. I can almost imagine that robot driving around looking for dropped newspapers to solve the puzzles :P
The sudoko also wins for me because while all the principles involved are simple enough, getting it all to work together so smoothly is anything but.
Cubestorm for looks and sheer speed, sudoko robot for neatness and purity.
You know, like printed? Dead wood backup? The ancients had amazing tech that we no longer can replicate, must be because they had help from aliens.
I am usually pretty relaxed on all the YRO stuff like camera's on the street but this one REALLY deserves a "1984 is NOT a HOWTO".
Mind you, I am curious to see what has lead up to all this.
I am reminded of a level rail crossing. In the olden days it had just red lights, it was enough. Now it has full bars with folding down barriers across the entire road so absolutely nothing can pass, not even an emergency vehicle. Why? Because year after year people kept crossing and getting killed and so more and more protection was demanded when a red light should be all the warning you need (oh okay, it had a bell for the blind).
What in this school district prompted this action? Is it someone who lost it or what? Is this school district so out of control that this was the only way they could think of to keep things in check? Did an extremist gain total control over the system? What happened? I would be very intrested to hear what lead to all this. Is the district a particularry bad one, or a prudish one?
I killed for my gmail invite... I mean, I would have killed. Yeah, that is it. No skeletons in my closet, no sirree.
On Linux if you know you got enough ram and can life with the risk that if a program goes memory wild you are going to be in trouble, then you can turn swapping off. The problem on my own linux machine is that torrenting and large file serving confuses the machine, it tries to cache these file reads but this is rarely needed. So if it starts to swap, it is swapping stuff it will never need again.
It is fine that it caches files in memory, since this is fast, but caching stuff on the HD that it just read from that same HD and will never need again... that is pointless.
In theory, windows should be able to do the same, but its page file has become so much a part of the system that it seems to need it, even if it has tons of free memory. I had a 32bit game on a 12gig machine and it STILL insisted on a page file WHY?
So, turn of swap on linux if you got enough memory (and make sure you do because opera/firefox with plenty of tabs open suck up memory like you wouldn't believe) but on windows, you can't.
10am, hibernating.
11am, hibernating.
12am, hibernating.
1pm, hibernating.
2pm, hibernating.
3pm, hibernating.
4pm, hibernating.
5pm, hibernating.
6pm, hibernating.
7pm, ate hitchhiker.
8pm, hibernating.
9pm, hibernating.
Mind you, considering the average tweeter, this is actually pretty riveting stuff.
Mmm, well according to my Simpsons guide to everything I need to know about the US of A, it don't work if you invite them in. Could be called entrapment. Honey traps by the cops are legal because they don't entice people to break into those honey pots, they don't leave extra valuable stuff in the car or leave the door open or something like that, just another parked car, no enticement == funny arrest videos.
23:00 - crap, forgot to feed the rotwheiler. Ah well, I am sure he can find something around the house.
Really, I work less and do more. And that whole "in the groove" thing the summary mentions? Just don't bother me no more. I answer the phone, deal with e-mail, help juniors with problems, monitor several projects and mediors and debug stuff nobody else can figure out all while drinking coffee and without working insane hours and no longer needing to study night and day to keep up-to-date.
One of the best things you can learn? Use your juniors to keep up-to-date, if it is important enough, they will figure it all out, you then learn from them, ridicule them a bit for the mistakes and oversights they made then promote then ones that made the least and voila, senior/CTO salaries for a few hours work a day.
Really, I am never impressed when someone works overtime. 8 hours is more then enough to do a decent job, why do you need 16? Any boss that wants lots of overtime is doing the old IBM method of paying programmers by the line.
Take them both. One is a junior, he might know his own tiny little environment, but everything else is going to suck, while the experienced guy can pick up a new language in a flash and in the meantime keep the young guy from making to many basic mistakes.
Approaching the age of 40 at break neck speeds, I am going to find out how true it is that there are no old coders.
But frankly, I don't think it is going to be a huge issue unless 40 turns out to be a really magical number. I have had no problems before. Granted, junior positions are no longer open to me, but then, why would I want to?
I have found that at least in Holland there is a real shortage of good web developers, people who can not just put up a website but maintain it and worse, debug somebody elses mess. There are tons of LAMP developers it seems, and yet companies can't find them. But you got to be able to deliver, how many of the programmers who complain they can't find a job really just aren't any good?
In fact in an interview Backbase, an small but international developer said in "De Pers" that they were so desperate for experienced developers they had put a freeze on hiring juniors because they did not have the people to train/lead them.
Yes, some companies might prefer to hire someone young, but these tend to be the grindhouses of the industry, were they churn out project after project with no quality for a low low price. You all know them, the companies that do government IT. If you IT department still insists you run IE6, then you got one of them.
But there are countless more companies that do try to work for their money were experience and maturity are needed to keep the enthusiasm of the younger developers in line. There has to be someone who can actually debug a third party app if the shit hits the fan and do it without constant hand holding. There is in development and certainly web-development a lot of grunt work that is really a waste to put a senior on, but I have seen what junior's today are 'capable' of. Or rather not capable. It is the parts of a project that go beyond the "teach yourself X in 24 hours" books or even school. It is the years of experience encountering all kind of problems that turn a junior into a senior.
A smart company therefor has both kinds, the juniors for the grind work and to bring in new ideas, the seniors to keep it all running smoothly.
And if your company ain't smart enough for that? Move on as fast as possible.
BUT I just re-read the summary AND the article and there is a problem. The article is about IT-workers while the summary is about programmers. I have started to notice that there is a difference to the point that developers really aren't part of IT at all. I always thought we were, but others disagree.
So, is the article about how their are no old help-desk jockey's? And could this be because there is a job for senior dev's but not for senior printer unjammers? Just what is IT? A 60+ senior developer is a respectable position, if you are 60+ and still have to install new PC's you screwed up and a kid can do your job cheaper.
In conclusion, I am not all that worried. Any company not willing to hire a 40+ developer with over 2 decades experience on countless successful projects, I wouldn't want to work for anyway.
They had enough problems already, anybody going to mess with it this time is going home in boxes.
I know, it is a shocker but I found out when I went outside that A: the light, it burns and B: Star Trek ain't real.
If my own government is anything to go by (Netherlands) then the counteroffensive will be "you just don't understand it". The time politicians felt accountable to the public has long gone.
Mind you, the public keeps voting for the same guys over and over.
The biggest scammers are the media, in Holland you got something called to "kiez wijzer", a site that records the various parties (yes America, you can have more then 2) election PROMISES and ask you how you feel about various issues and then gives a recommendation. It is actually fairly fair, except that the attentive reader will have noticed I said PROMISES. It does NOT base its advice on YOUR preferences and a parties PAST behavior. So the advice in on what parties say they will do, not what they have done. And almost every falls for it.
Global climate change, means having to park your SUV. People don't want to do that, so they don't.
When will they be convinced? Look at tobacco, you still got people denying that smoking causes health problems. You can show them their lungs full of tar, and they just don't want to see it.
It is not for nothing that every single so called skeptic (real skeptics are horrified by them) has a direct connection to oil or another reason to not want to have to change. Same as all the people who doubt smoking is bad, are smokers or work for the tobacco industry. Gosh, what a suprise!
And you can easily debunk any so called skeptic because he hammers on global warming, while the real issue is GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE.
But they keep saying man can't have an effect on nature, even when you can see that the outside temp is warmer in cities and rain cloud patterns affected by build up areas. But man has no effect... none so blind as those that don't want to see, especially if they have their income depend on it.
The thing that is really worrying is not so much global warming, but global climate CHANGE. Some bits get dryer, some wetter. Some hotter, some colder. And this is a bigger problem then people who life in cities realize.
A simple thing as making hay, depends on there not being rain while the cut grass dries out. It is HUGELY important to feed our enormous cattle herds. And since hay takes a whole to dry and ONE hour of rain can soak it, there is a very fine balance going on.
Neither can the farmer just wait a few extra days because if left to long, the nutrition decreases. If he does not have enough food (not just in bulk but in nutritional value) then he needs to buy extra food, where is this coming from? It might have to driven in from hundreds if not thousands of miles away, and you now got TWO areas of theplanet being used to feed the same herd, all because of ONE rainy day. Next time you have a rainy fall and are complaining, think about those who have to harvest. It might be annoying to have to was your car a lot more, but it upsets the agriculture that has created western civilization.
Has anyone here ever wondered just why civilization is western? We are not the oldest race, and there is no biological difference, so why are black people still living in stone age times while we put a man on the moon? Because Africa's climate sucks donkey balls. A european farmer could for hundreds of years more or less count on reaping what he sows. In Africa, this is not the case, drought is near constant and there is nothing that an African farmer can do about it. And to see the effect a famine has on society, check the potato famin.
We don't think about our food in the west because we take it for granted that it just arrives in the shops everyday. Nature to us is just the stuff that soaks us or gives us a nice tan, but to the farmer we all depend on, it is the controller of his entire process. And if it changes, our food production has to change and we might not like the results.
The price in potatoes in Holland has been entirely depended on the amount of rain. To much and it can't be harvested, to little and it doesn't grow. Yes, crops have rotted away in the ground in recent years, no it did NOT lead to famine because we could import food at "slightly" higher prices, but what effect does that have on the rest of the world? Poor nations whose harvest also failed now find the prices to be even higher.
Global climate change is to big a risk to take changes. People who worry about the icecaps melting and tidal surges just like drama. Far worse will be an upset in our food production. If petrol prices rice, the economy chokes, now imagine the price of bread being doubled. You can ride a bike, you can telecommute, but there is little saving on food.
I think you will find that there are worse things then nerd rage.
You might think you are cool because you capped 10.000 people in the head online, and they can count their kills on the fingers of one hand, but their score is in real life.
Me and some gamer mates are going to beat up the Amsterdam chapter of the Hell's Angels. I mean, we are thougher then them right? What could possibly go wrong? They are wusses and I will make sure to tell them loudly and clearly, what are they going to do? None of them has scored as many kills in Counterstrike as I have.