Yes, insects do produce a lot of methane, but they always have - our planet has been at a happy equilibrium with their emissions for several hundred million years. What humans are doing with CO2, however, is another matter entirely. I'll post this graph again as an indication of the influence of industrial activity on [CO2]. Do note the dramatic rise since industrialisation (~30% already) above the highest previously recorded level.
As far as insects go, you could also argue (which I believe has been suggested) that increasing temp will cause an increase in insect numbers, which beyond a certain point will drive positive feedback in greenhouse gas emissions (increase in temp -> greater number of insects -> more greenhouse gasses -> further increase in temp).
And yes, we are in an interglacial period right now when the Earth's temp is naturally at its warmest... but that only makes it worse, because human intervention will probably make it much, much warmer still!!
I just don't get your attitude. Maybe the current interpretations of the evidence are completely wrong and global warming isn't a danger - but right now, it seems unlikely. There's just too much at stake to take a risk on this one.
That's very true - insects easily outnumber us numerically. But I'd have to say that in terms of changing our environment we're the dominant life form right now. Or at least, no other life form has the ability to completely screw up the planet like we can...
That doesn't make you question all this a little?... Clearly there are other factors besides carbon dioxide that effect global temperatures.
Hmmm... I shouldn't have been so subtle. Of course other factors beside CO2 affect global temperatures - hell, everyone knows about ice ages, glacial and inter-glacial periods (although [CO2] is, AFAIK, still assumed to be a major contributing factor to these temperature fluctuations).
But what do you think happens when we're in a warm inter-glacial period (as we currently are), and we then start increasing the concentration of greenhouse gasses?? Even if there wasn't a clear correlation with an increase in global temperature, you'd think it wasn't a very smart idea. But when there is a clear correlation, as we're seeing now... do I have to spell it out completely??
Maybe, just maybe, [greenhouse gasses] is not related to global temperature. But Occam's Razor would suggest otherwise - why take such a terrible risk?
Why don't you stop driving your car and cut your electricity usage by 90% and then come back and tell us how its not going to hurt? Nevermind the billions in third world countries that will remain in poverty if we crippled their economic development to stop emitting greenhouse gases. Global warming is obviously a serious problem, but let's not be glib about the real costs of doing something about it.
I would have thought the answer was not to simply reduce energy usage, but to use alternatives. I might not want to stop driving my car, but I'd happily use a hybrid car and then a hydrogen-powered car - especially if government subsidies made them cheaper. And surely it's worth investing in nuclear power and renewable energy sources instead of coal-fired power stations (don't think it's possible? take a look at France's energy production sources sometime....)
Your point about third world countries is interesting. But regardless of whether they can do anything about it, we can.
Did they need "precautionary actions" the last time this happened 400-X000 years ago?
What about before that?
Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but the last time it happened the dominant life form wasn't industrialised and happily stuffing the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses...
Thing is, it's going to be very difficult to remove greenhouse gasses and stop global warming in 100 years' time should the majority of climate scientists actually turn out to be right. It's really not going to hurt us that much to stop producing greenhouse gasses now, and it might even turn out to be the right thing to do. Why not do it?
The thing is that Apple's hardware is proprietary. Unless you're buying from Apple or a cerified reseller, you can't get Apple hardware. Now, there's no such thing as proprietary Linux hardware. If you try to sell "Linux certified" hardware you'll find yourself competing with the likes of Newegg, who can easily undercut you due to their volume discounts and thinner profit margins.
Actually, I'd love to see a shop selling "Linux certified" laptops - i.e. all ACPI functions working out of the box (including the almost impossible S3 sleep state) on the latest vanilla kernel. That'd be worth an awful lot to me. Not having to pay the Windows tax would be an added bonus... (and would entice a lot of pirated Windows users too - good for revenue! Not to mention the fact that they might look at the preinstalled copy of linux before wiping, and be pleasantly surprised...)
Remember that the laptop market is the growing one right now, and it's not exactly easy, even for linux users, to build a laptop from scratch... it's definitely a niche where a company could make a profit.
My guess would be too much junk compiled into the default kernel and a huge init script.
It's not the kernel - that takes all of a few seconds to load. It is indeed the init scripts, many of which you're probably not using, and many of which are serial (i.e. not backgrounded) and cumbersome. On my old desktop, I tweaked the init scripts to remove all the useless crud and to background the important stuff that didn't need to be loaded in serial. The result was a boot time of 12 secs from power on to gdm.
However, on my laptop I haven't bothered - thanks to swsusp2 I hardly ever reboot so it's not worth worrying about...
Slightly OT, but have Linux and Schilling decided to let cdrecord work right when acting as an IDE device yet? Last I checked, it's still been broken since 2.6.8
I can write CDs just fine with the recorder as a normal IDE device (i.e not using ide-scsi). This has been the case for a very long time... is that what you're referring to?
Growisofs (for DVD writing) works too, for that matter...
Lord Rutherford was firing electrons at a sheet of gold foil and had no idea that the nucleus existed.
Actually, it was Geiger and Marsden (a post-doc and a student), not Rutherford, who performed the experiment. Rutherford just interpreted the unusual results (and - having regularly watched the head of my lab take credit for the insights of his underlings - one can't help wondering how much unacknowledged input Geiger and Marsden had into that interpretation...:)
Where is "Case Sensitivity" on this list? I mean, have you really ever used CASE to distinguish two different files? (Worse, have you ever had to try to describe cased files over the phone?)
Have you ever tried using Windows' tab-complete which lacks case sensitivity?? Drives you utterly nuts!
So why not publish the dissenting findings in a reputable, peer-reviewed journal? If there are sufficient grounds to question the research that has been published thus far, I would expect that it would not be difficult to promote a dissenting work.
Actually, it's not as easy as you'd think with an area like this. Consider for a moment how many scientists working on climate change would lose their grant money should it appear likely that climate change is not occurring... and now, consider who will be reviewing any article suggesting as much that gets submitted to a peer-reviewed journal. Yep, it's the same group of scientists! Peer-review is a good system, but not a fail-safe system - never be fooled into thinking it as such.
That said, from the arguments presented by http://realclimate.org/ (which also had a mostly favourable review of the Gore film) I would have to say that climate sceptics aren't getting published because their work is subjective and flawed, rather than any inherent bias in the system.
As "funny" as that may be, I'd bet the porn industry was wary of sexually transmitted disease and unwanted pregnancy far before the general public. I imagine it was a much more immediate matter of survival for them, in addition to being a more rapidly obvious problem.
Actually, that's not the case - or at least, I recall there being a news item about a year ago about HIV running rampant in the porn industry, solely because of the lack of safe sex practises. I'd do a google search for the story if I wasn't at work, but it shouldn't be too hard to find...
Yeah, discovered this myself after a bit. Unfortunately, I have to resize whenever I hide or show the sidebar, etc, etc. Not what you'd exactly call a polished product. But, hey, it's free as in beer, at least, and it mostly works... except for an awful lot of segfaults (five so far, and one crash which completely hung my machine - had to use the Magic SysRq keys to reboot)
Incidentally, does anyone know if it's still possible to load different mapping data with this version? I rather miss the large scale Blue Marble maps, but I can't see any place I can specify the data sets being used...
* So, I just downloaded & installed beta version 4 on my FC4 Athlon64 system and while it runs OK, the actual map data is all scrambled. As I zoom in/out it is constantly 'twinkling' with the wrong images. City names are dropping characters as well, so you can't even tell where you're looking when you get in close.
Actually, mine's way more scrambled than that - initial display is all screwed, with redraws not erasing properly, on my fairly generic Dapper system (ATI Radeon card, open-source drivers). Pity - it actually runs very fast and smooth, but I can't make anything else out! Turning off the side-panels works better, but the image is still corrupted.
I can't quite work Google out here - are they following a "release-early/release-often" model? I mean, I know it's beta software, but this is Google's first release of a native linux app (Picasa with WINE doesn't really count) - surely they'd try and make it an impressive one?
Actually, gameplay has been getting progressively worse - it often seems to have an inverse relationship with graphics capabilities. Taito could create far more entertainment with a 6Mhz processor than software companies today with processor speeds of several GHz and dedicated 3D graphics cards...
I don't think it's as simple as that. If you're using GMail, you're likely logged in to Google every time you do a search.
Solution: use your country's google search address (google.com.au in this case) and block cookies from that address - result: no saved search history, whilst Gmail stays logged in.
I have to admit that the idea of storing firefox profiles on Google's web server scares me just a bit... I guess that until there's evidence of misuse by one of the big free email providers, or Microsoft, or Google, people are going to (perhaps naively) trust those big corporations to secure their data.
Worst thing of all, by not changing it at the same time as posting an announcement story, all the meta-discussion about the new look is stuck here in a story making it impossible to read.
I think you've hit the nail on the head there...:)
They claim "for licensing reasons" that their software can't compress movies or play music under Linux. Bullshit -- Vorbis and Theora are completely Free, even for proprietary applications like Picasa.
How neccessary is it to be able to play music, anyway??? I mean - is it really that difficult to have xmms/bmpx/audacious playing the backgroud whilst you do your funky slideshow? Last time I checked, most OSes could manage multi-tasking...:)
This is the kind of quality software that linux desperately lacks. It is interesting how wine was used here.
Except that using Wine to make your app cross-platform is a bit of a cop-out solution. Good that Google is finally taking an interest in linux; bad that they're only using the Corel solution.
I wonder if this will lead to the porting of other google apps like google earth.
Well, in the mean time, there's always WW2D combined with WW2D plus one...
4-5 hours is a lot of time for a simple operation. #1 is infeasable for anyone who resides completely in Linux (I would, for example, have over 70G of backing up to do). The freedos/ReactOS (or BartPE, since I have a copy laying around) option would be best.
If you've got more data on your system than you can backup, then I'm concerned for you anyway! Seriously - find some way to back up - take it from one who's seen hard drives die without being backed up...
Anyway, if you've got BartPE lying around, then what's the problem??? Yes, it sucks to have to use windows, but jeez, never let software ethics get in the way of practicality!;-)
Have you not read the (many) other posts attached to this article: newer RPC2 drives disallow raw access to the data if your region code doesn't match, rendering any software such as libdvdcss useless.
Sorry, I wasn't aware of this - I didn't understand the distinction! But then, my most recent DVD drive is nearly a year old now. Mind you, I'm surprised that such RPC2 drives can be sold here in Australia, given the ACCC ruling on region coding...
The problem is that it's a lot of effort for me to flash the drive because I would have to do one of: 1. Install Windows on my machine - not going to happen. This would be a *lot* of effort and I'm not buying Windows just so I can install some firmware.
Now, come on - you must know *someone* with a bootleg copy!! (and you can hardly have ethical issues in using a copy just to flash your drive!) Failing that, someone could make you a Windows boot floppy, couldn't they? Win95 used to be able to do that... don't know about later versions, though.
As for the effort... well, it's as simple as backing up your system with mondo-rescue, installing windows, flashing the drive, and restoring your system from the mondo backup. Total time ~4-5 hrs, with the amount of hands-on time being ~15 mins. Hardly a lot of time for something that clearly matters a lot to you...
(I agree that the fact that you have to do this at all sucks majorly, though...)
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Yes, insects do produce a lot of methane, but they always have - our planet has been at a happy equilibrium with their emissions for several hundred million years. What humans are doing with CO2, however, is another matter entirely. I'll post this graph again as an indication of the influence of industrial activity on [CO2]. Do note the dramatic rise since industrialisation (~30% already) above the highest previously recorded level.
... but that only makes it worse, because human intervention will probably make it much, much warmer still!!
As far as insects go, you could also argue (which I believe has been suggested) that increasing temp will cause an increase in insect numbers, which beyond a certain point will drive positive feedback in greenhouse gas emissions (increase in temp -> greater number of insects -> more greenhouse gasses -> further increase in temp).
And yes, we are in an interglacial period right now when the Earth's temp is naturally at its warmest
I just don't get your attitude. Maybe the current interpretations of the evidence are completely wrong and global warming isn't a danger - but right now, it seems unlikely. There's just too much at stake to take a risk on this one.
That's very true - insects easily outnumber us numerically. But I'd have to say that in terms of changing our environment we're the dominant life form right now. Or at least, no other life form has the ability to completely screw up the planet like we can ...
Hmmm
But what do you think happens when we're in a warm inter-glacial period (as we currently are), and we then start increasing the concentration of greenhouse gasses?? Even if there wasn't a clear correlation with an increase in global temperature, you'd think it wasn't a very smart idea. But when there is a clear correlation, as we're seeing now
Maybe, just maybe, [greenhouse gasses] is not related to global temperature. But Occam's Razor would suggest otherwise - why take such a terrible risk?
Take a look at this graph. (Yes, the Y-axis isn't rooted at 0, but over the last 100 years there's been around a 30% increase in CO2
I would have thought the answer was not to simply reduce energy usage, but to use alternatives. I might not want to stop driving my car, but I'd happily use a hybrid car and then a hydrogen-powered car - especially if government subsidies made them cheaper. And surely it's worth investing in nuclear power and renewable energy sources instead of coal-fired power stations (don't think it's possible? take a look at France's energy production sources sometime
Your point about third world countries is interesting. But regardless of whether they can do anything about it, we can.
Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but the last time it happened the dominant life form wasn't industrialised and happily stuffing the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses
Thing is, it's going to be very difficult to remove greenhouse gasses and stop global warming in 100 years' time should the majority of climate scientists actually turn out to be right. It's really not going to hurt us that much to stop producing greenhouse gasses now, and it might even turn out to be the right thing to do. Why not do it?
Actually, I'd love to see a shop selling "Linux certified" laptops - i.e. all ACPI functions working out of the box (including the almost impossible S3 sleep state) on the latest vanilla kernel. That'd be worth an awful lot to me. Not having to pay the Windows tax would be an added bonus
Remember that the laptop market is the growing one right now, and it's not exactly easy, even for linux users, to build a laptop from scratch
It's not the kernel - that takes all of a few seconds to load. It is indeed the init scripts, many of which you're probably not using, and many of which are serial (i.e. not backgrounded) and cumbersome. On my old desktop, I tweaked the init scripts to remove all the useless crud and to background the important stuff that didn't need to be loaded in serial. The result was a boot time of 12 secs from power on to gdm.
However, on my laptop I haven't bothered - thanks to swsusp2 I hardly ever reboot so it's not worth worrying about
I can write CDs just fine with the recorder as a normal IDE device (i.e not using ide-scsi). This has been the case for a very long time
Growisofs (for DVD writing) works too, for that matter
Actually, it was Geiger and Marsden (a post-doc and a student), not Rutherford, who performed the experiment. Rutherford just interpreted the unusual results (and - having regularly watched the head of my lab take credit for the insights of his underlings - one can't help wondering how much unacknowledged input Geiger and Marsden had into that interpretation
Have you ever tried using Windows' tab-complete which lacks case sensitivity?? Drives you utterly nuts!
Actually, it's not as easy as you'd think with an area like this. Consider for a moment how many scientists working on climate change would lose their grant money should it appear likely that climate change is not occurring
That said, from the arguments presented by http://realclimate.org/ (which also had a mostly favourable review of the Gore film) I would have to say that climate sceptics aren't getting published because their work is subjective and flawed, rather than any inherent bias in the system.
Actually, that's not the case - or at least, I recall there being a news item about a year ago about HIV running rampant in the porn industry, solely because of the lack of safe sex practises. I'd do a google search for the story if I wasn't at work, but it shouldn't be too hard to find
Well, it's good to see the pr0n industry finally taking safe sex seriously
Yeah, discovered this myself after a bit. Unfortunately, I have to resize whenever I hide or show the sidebar, etc, etc. Not what you'd exactly call a polished product. But, hey, it's free as in beer, at least, and it mostly works ... except for an awful lot of segfaults (five so far, and one crash which completely hung my machine - had to use the Magic SysRq keys to reboot)
...
Incidentally, does anyone know if it's still possible to load different mapping data with this version? I rather miss the large scale Blue Marble maps, but I can't see any place I can specify the data sets being used
Actually, mine's way more scrambled than that - initial display is all screwed, with redraws not erasing properly, on my fairly generic Dapper system (ATI Radeon card, open-source drivers). Pity - it actually runs very fast and smooth, but I can't make anything else out! Turning off the side-panels works better, but the image is still corrupted.
I can't quite work Google out here - are they following a "release-early/release-often" model? I mean, I know it's beta software, but this is Google's first release of a native linux app (Picasa with WINE doesn't really count) - surely they'd try and make it an impressive one?
Actually, gameplay has been getting progressively worse - it often seems to have an inverse relationship with graphics capabilities. Taito could create far more entertainment with a 6Mhz processor than software companies today with processor speeds of several GHz and dedicated 3D graphics cards
All the excitement of DNF, condensed into a line of Perl ...
perl -e '$i=2006;{print$i++,": Duke Nukem Forever Due This Year.\n";print"No, really, we mean it this time!!\n\n"if(rand)<0.2;sleep 1;redo}'
I don't think it's as simple as that. If you're using GMail, you're likely logged in to Google every time you do a search.
... I guess that until there's evidence of misuse by one of the big free email providers, or Microsoft, or Google, people are going to (perhaps naively) trust those big corporations to secure their data.
Solution: use your country's google search address (google.com.au in this case) and block cookies from that address - result: no saved search history, whilst Gmail stays logged in.
I have to admit that the idea of storing firefox profiles on Google's web server scares me just a bit
Worst thing of all, by not changing it at the same time as posting an announcement story, all the meta-discussion about the new look is stuck here in a story making it impossible to read.
... :)
I think you've hit the nail on the head there
Really, the whole site should be marked Redundant.
...
I'll second that! Oh, wait
They claim "for licensing reasons" that their software can't compress movies or play music under Linux. Bullshit -- Vorbis and Theora are completely Free, even for proprietary applications like Picasa.
... :)
How neccessary is it to be able to play music, anyway??? I mean - is it really that difficult to have xmms/bmpx/audacious playing the backgroud whilst you do your funky slideshow? Last time I checked, most OSes could manage multi-tasking
This is the kind of quality software that linux desperately lacks. It is interesting how wine was used here.
...
Except that using Wine to make your app cross-platform is a bit of a cop-out solution. Good that Google is finally taking an interest in linux; bad that they're only using the Corel solution.
I wonder if this will lead to the porting of other google apps like google earth.
Well, in the mean time, there's always WW2D combined with WW2D plus one
4-5 hours is a lot of time for a simple operation. #1 is infeasable for anyone who resides completely in Linux (I would, for example, have over 70G of backing up to do). The freedos/ReactOS (or BartPE, since I have a copy laying around) option would be best.
...
;-)
If you've got more data on your system than you can backup, then I'm concerned for you anyway! Seriously - find some way to back up - take it from one who's seen hard drives die without being backed up
Anyway, if you've got BartPE lying around, then what's the problem??? Yes, it sucks to have to use windows, but jeez, never let software ethics get in the way of practicality!
Have you not read the (many) other posts attached to this article: newer RPC2 drives disallow raw access to the data if your region code doesn't match, rendering any software such as libdvdcss useless.
...
... don't know about later versions, though.
... well, it's as simple as backing up your system with mondo-rescue, installing windows, flashing the drive, and restoring your system from the mondo backup. Total time ~4-5 hrs, with the amount of hands-on time being ~15 mins. Hardly a lot of time for something that clearly matters a lot to you ...
...)
Sorry, I wasn't aware of this - I didn't understand the distinction! But then, my most recent DVD drive is nearly a year old now. Mind you, I'm surprised that such RPC2 drives can be sold here in Australia, given the ACCC ruling on region coding
The problem is that it's a lot of effort for me to flash the drive because I would have to do one of:
1. Install Windows on my machine - not going to happen. This would be a *lot* of effort and I'm not buying Windows just so I can install some firmware.
Now, come on - you must know *someone* with a bootleg copy!! (and you can hardly have ethical issues in using a copy just to flash your drive!) Failing that, someone could make you a Windows boot floppy, couldn't they? Win95 used to be able to do that
As for the effort
(I agree that the fact that you have to do this at all sucks majorly, though