While it's a slightly advanced procedure, I'd highly recommend doing the following:
1a) Pick a hosed windows machine, or one with a empty hard drive to play around with. Linux takes all of 20 minutes to install now, (well, if you aren't installing gentoo) so it's worth beating through an install or two and getting a feel for it. If you mess it up, it's a snap to do it over. Slightly harder if it's on your precious windows box with your precious data. (Re)installing an OS always comes with risk if you have data somewhere else on the box that you're trying to keep.
1b) When installing linux, create an additional partition for your/home directory. The size you need will depend on if you're keeping just desktop and other settings there, or if you're installing games and movies to it. You can probably get away with just 0.5-1gb if you're not planning on installing games or piling in movies/music. If you are, they should be about the same size as in windows and you can budget your space appropriately.
2a) Ubuntu's installer lets you choose where to install bits of it - it can be somewhat confusing, but if you read and think, (and go back and redo it a few times after you mess it up) you should be able to get the hang of it. The nice thing is that after you set everything up, it shows you what it's going to do, and asks "are you really sure you want me to do this?"
2b) Tell it to install/home on the additional partition you made. All application settings are stored here, which means if you ever DO have problems with the actual install, you can reinstall the OS (or even a different linux OS!) and keep all your settings. Games installed here will either still work, or will still work with a minor bit of tweaking.
Most of my current settings and games have been carried over from a Gentoo install..3...4 years ago? They've gone through Gentoo on two different chipsets and (k)ubuntu on two different chipsets, on two different machines, with two sets of hardware each. For all that, I've installed Doom3 and Quake4 once apiece, kept all my IM settings/logs/contacts, browser prefs and bookmarks, etc. It's very much worth learning how to set up your/home directory on a separate partition, and it's one area in which linux is far ahead of windows in terms of "kindness to the end user".
The heck with a "recovery disk" - with my/home and/media dirs on different disks/partitions, I can use "$x OS disks" and all my stuff works, and it's all still there. I've had the same setup for Gentoo and 3 versions of Kubuntu32 and 1 (and soon to be 2) versions of Kubuntu64. My desktop stays the same, I keep my browser settings, my games, music, and videos are all there.
I can change operating systems, and my stuff still works.
Ask him what metrics he uses to determine the productivity of the building's fire insurance or security setup.
Because really, that's what sysadmins do. You're being paid for making it so that things don't break, and the better you are at that, the more valuable you are. And when there is a problem, you're being paid to find it and fix it as soon as possible. Whatever he uses for that should be able to be modified to sysadmin duties too. Unless he's replacing those folks, at which point you'd better do some really good development of your production metric.
Those are all things which would be damn nice to have. If you put those sorts of things in your flash videos, kudos to you! Unfortunately, flash by default doesn't have them, thus the source of my irritation with it. As an example, YouTube doesn't do it all that badly. It has most of the above. Heck, while it doesn't have a full stop, pause is pretty damn near good enough.
While you might be a decent enough designer to include such useful tools, the unfortunate fact is that there are many folks who don't. What I really want, more than anything, is to be able to right click on ANY flash and get that sort of menu, irregardless of what the designer did or did not bother to include. That would be useful, and would make me hate flash far less.
That wasn't his point - I too use FlashBlock. The problem is that there is no way to know what's there until you start it. At which point, you often can't easily stop the flash if it turns out to be an ad, or something else you didn't want. There often is no way to pause it to go grab a drink. There often is no way to rewind it and start over.
It's easy to "choose what flash items you want turned on individually" - it's damn near impossible most of the time to actually have any control over the flash item once started.
I hate flash with a passion because of this reason. If they put a useful, standard video menu in it which you could bring up via a right- click, I'd hate it far less. In fact, at that point it would be semi-useful. As-is, it's another example of "this is how you will see it, take it or leave it". Most of us want at least some semblance of control over the media presented to us. I prefer my eyelids not pried opened and stapled to my head.
The obvious answer to this is that everyone will be issued an "emergency PIN" to go with their biometric scan. It will be 4 digits, and while everyone will have one, they will only be used in an emergency when the biometrics aren't able to be used. Because doing it this way would make it *much* more secure than just having the PIN like we do now.
Perhaps the most important thing inherent in your list of "addressed complaints" is the fact that so many complaints...have been addressed. Yes, it's taken quite some time, but the things which were most pressing have been slowly taken care of. And by and large, there haven't been any major regressions.
I came into the linux game later than a lot of the posters here. Between 2000 and 2004 I installed some flavor of linux/bsd about every six months. And two weeks later, almost without fail, I'd switch back to Win2k, because I got frustrated trying to get something to work, I was missing some major driver, etc. But then five months later I'd get so pissed off at the idiocy of Windows that I'd try another flavor.
Over that time, linux got better and better. More and more desktop hardware was supported, package managers got better, desktops became more functional, and everything ran and looked better and better. Linux became easier and easier to install. Multi-media became more and more well supported.
I can't say the same for windows. XP was not a significant upgrade from Win2k. I've told my friends and family that I will be unable to help them with Vista. Why? Because it's a nightmare. And because I haven't had to deal with the idiocy of windows for the last 3 years. And because it doesn't seem to be a significant upgrade. In fact, it might even be a step backwards in some regards.
I just installed Kubuntu for my mom. At her request. Because she said to me, "I'm trying to help your grandmother with her new Dell running Vista, and it's so stupid. I hate it. I don't know why it has to be so difficult. I want what you have." I do not know where the Microsoft train is going, so I'm choosing to ride the linux train, which has been going forward for the last 6 years or so. And I'm starting to get friends and family to come with me.
I tried to mod the article "-1 Not Redundant" but it wasn't an option. And I didn't have mod points. At least my inability to function only warrants a comment, rather than a slashdot article.
Actually, it's likely that the owl, if large, would be the one rendering Schrodinger's cat dead or alive. In the wooded NE of the US, owls are the top predator of both skunks and cats.
For two semi-private forums I help run, we've done just that. If you can't usefully answer some semi-difficult, mostly forum-topic-specific questions, you don't get to register. Spam has dropped to 0. Random idiots have dropped to 0. If these were completely public forums, we'd probably be screening a little too well, but we're small enough that if someone really wants to join, they will either know enough about the topic to answer the questions, email us for help, or leave unhappy. And we're ok with all of those options.
Does someone have a list of the works they were offering? I ask, because (and it's pre-coffee and I don't know a ton of patent/copyright details) if the copyright owner doesn't pursue violations, does that not negate the copyright? Or is that patents?
Basically, I'm wondering what happens if the owners of the copyrighted works don't go after this company for sharing their works. Any freebees there for us?
If you want to try kde, just do it: $sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop
When it's done, log out, and choose KDE from the menu. You don't really have to *think* about trying it out, unless you are severely limited on space. As for speeding up the boot process, damned if I know how. I just have faith that at some point someone will mainstream a way to do it without more custom hacks. I'm too lazy at this stage in my life to work on fixing it myself, so I just boot *before* going to get my coffee. I don't think I've watched/timed a boot in ages.
You hit the nail on the head. We run our own UT2k4 server. We occasionally get decent players on. We also occasionally get people who magically get 6, 7, 8 kills in a row in on people that they can't see, or as they round corners. If someone seems just too good to be true, they get the banstick. Have we possibly banned people for just being super-good players? Possibly. But there are a couple hundred other servers for them to play on. Have we banned downright cheaters? Yep. My favorite was the kid in igib Hall of Giants - if you know the map, you'll know how amazing it is to get a "HOLY SH*T!" twice in a row. Yeah, that's 16 kills in a row, with a max of 3 seconds between each one. All the more impressive was that he did it from...the bottom of the map...and shot someone directly above him in the air immediately after shooting someone on the ground, and then immediately shot someone behind him and to the side. I was spectating for the second round of kills, and most of the people who died you couldn't see, due to the distance limitations. Many were nearly 180 degrees apart from each other at huge distances, but they were located and killed in the span of a second or so. Not overly hard to justify a ban for things like that.
I did this on one forum I help admin. There are such tricky questions as:
If three sticks of dynamite were forcefully inserted into the chest of a spammer and detonated, would a spammer from Russia splatter better than a spammer from the US? (Remember, any dead spammer is a good spammer.)
(acceptable answers are)
No
no
nyet
So far, no spammers have registered. I don't know if it's because the bots can't answer the questions, or because the humans are smart enough not to.
I agree. On our personal UT server, we have a fairly extensive ban-list. While a few are people who refuse to play nice with their team, the vast majority of our bans are "Fuck U HOMO!" bans. Since we started getting aggressive with our bans, we haven't noticed any real drop in the number of users - less seem to be leaving due to getting fed up with the offensive kids. Once the "regulars" of the offensive crowd got banned, more people stay for a longer time.
Moderation is the only real answer - anything else can be abused and manipulated. As sad as it is, you need cops to weed out the bad eggs, so that everyone else can do what they want to do.
Actually, "boobies" aren't the problem - we're ok with boobies. Look at any movie, or even TV show or magazine, and you'll see a fair amount of boob. Maybe not a full nipple, but just about all of the rest of it.
Have you seen a movie which is rated "R" due in part to nudity lately? 90% chance that's because you get a glimpse of a boobie. The other 10% are ass-cheeks.
It's the stuff below the belly button that's the problem. God forbid that the children find internet porn which shows someone with a body part that they don't have! It will destroy them for LIFE!
As a HS teacher, my response to this sort of problem is "show me that you can". I've moved a bit away from "tell me what you know", precisely because of how easy it is now to find information. Having or finding knowledge is trivial these days. Actually being able to make use of it, and applying it to different situations is really what it's all about anyway.
What I run into is that students panic and freeze up, because the vast bulk of their schooling career was all about "spit out the right answer", and that's all they know how to do. I spend the first 3/4 of the year breaking them of the "is this the right answer" habit. I want to see the process, not the final result. It frustrates the hell out of them when I respond to "is this right" with "show me how you did it". If there's one thing I've learned in teaching, it's that kids can get the right answer with the wrong method, and they can get the wrong answer with the right method. Really, the only thing worth looking at at the HS level is the process.
When it comes to papers, I generally follow the same thought process. Research some information, and then SHOW me that you can do something new with it. Use it as a basis for estimation. Prove that it is currently infeasible technology based on energy requirements or current manufacturing abilities. Actually make something new with it. Sure, you could pay someone to do it for you, but at least at the HS level, I can be a part of the process, and I'll know if either A) 6 pages magically show up overnight, or B) the final paper is substantially different than the versions I've been seeing. If you're teaching hands-on, interacting with your students, it's harder to cheat. If you're teaching by "go do this all by yourself", it's far easier to cheat. My preference is to teach by being a part of the process, because to me, the process is the most important part.
Microsoft is in a major bind with piracy - they MUST make it easy for large-scale, unattended corporate installs. This means no serial number to punch in every time, and no major verification routine. As long is this is the case, pirates (aaaarrr) will just snag these installs and run with them. When you're trying to get something like 50 million corporate installs, your bread and butter, going all streamlined and easily, you're never going to be able to adequately protect against piracy.
At the same time, the harder they make it to pirate windows, and the more people have to upgrade to even do it, the easier it is to "pirate" Ubuntu. Which, with every passing version, adds another couple % of people onto the list of "does everything I usually need to do". That % is nowhere near 100% yet, but it covers a sizable chunk of the largely computer illiterate "email and interweb" crowd. And it's almost easy enough for them to pirate at the moment. Have you seen install.exe yet?
Good luck with that. There's some mental block that shows up in most people when they are given evidence that the last 10,000 years of relative stability in our climate was an abnormality, rather than the norm. On about a yearly basis now I'm reading about some new evidence pointing to some dramatic climate shift (on the order of 5-20 yrs) that happened sometime in the last hundred thousand years or so.
Kudos to you for your rational viewpoint on climate change. I'm not nearly the environmentalist you are, but I still detest the smoke belching and waste of our current world. I'm actually looking forward to the US switching to low-sulfur diesel in the next year, and like a lot of people I greatly detest the current trend of big-ass, wasteful SUVs. But like you I realize that climate has been changing for most of the earth's history, and our current understanding of the large-scale mechanics of climate change is fairly limited.
Compare the climate shifts of the Younger Dryas and Dansgaard-Oeschger events to the Holocene climatic optimum, the stable climate we're currently moving out of. In the distant past, climate has changed often and rapidly. In the recent past, it has not.
It kills me that people fail to understand that roughly 10,000 years ago we had a rapid, major climate shift. About 10,000 years before that, we had another one. And in the 100,000 years before that, we had around 23 major climate shifts. And all of these occurred on the order of a decade or two, at most. From 110,000 BP to modern times we've had 25 major climate shifts, many of them confined to one hemisphere. And we average one every 4400 years. But quite luckily for human civilization, we've had a relatively hospitable and stable climate for the last 10,000 years.
Yes, we're messing up the environment, and yes we need to do better on that front. But saying that humans are responsible for climate change is like pushing a truck down a hill - Even if you stop pushing, it's going to keep going down the hill, because that's how gravity works. It may not be going down the hill as quickly, but it will still be going down the hill. And to complete the shitty car analogy, we don't know how steep the hill is. We know how hard we're pushing, but that's about it.
Part of the beauty of Settlers of Catan is that it is constructive - no matter who wins, you're always able to achieve something useful. Even if you're behind, you may be trying to build a city, or make a road to a good location, or claim a good harbor. And even if someone else wins, you can still say, I built x cities, or I claimed y resources.
I too have struggled with those sorts of people - what helps is a game where you can be successful without winning. In monopoly or poker either you get crushed or you win. In Settlers of Catan, you can "almost win". You "could have won" if you had gotten x roll of the dice. You were y close to winning if z had occurred. For people who suck to play games with, it's quite nice. We still play with my sister, even though after every game she swears that she'll never play again. Yet she's the one who always asks to play...
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You'd better watch it, crossing my bridge like that. Come back when you're fatter.
This is still being done - just compare Gentoo and Debian.
While it's a slightly advanced procedure, I'd highly recommend doing the following:
/home directory. The size you need will depend on if you're keeping just desktop and other settings there, or if you're installing games and movies to it. You can probably get away with just 0.5-1gb if you're not planning on installing games or piling in movies/music. If you are, they should be about the same size as in windows and you can budget your space appropriately.
/home on the additional partition you made. All application settings are stored here, which means if you ever DO have problems with the actual install, you can reinstall the OS (or even a different linux OS!) and keep all your settings. Games installed here will either still work, or will still work with a minor bit of tweaking.
/home directory on a separate partition, and it's one area in which linux is far ahead of windows in terms of "kindness to the end user".
1a) Pick a hosed windows machine, or one with a empty hard drive to play around with. Linux takes all of 20 minutes to install now, (well, if you aren't installing gentoo) so it's worth beating through an install or two and getting a feel for it. If you mess it up, it's a snap to do it over. Slightly harder if it's on your precious windows box with your precious data. (Re)installing an OS always comes with risk if you have data somewhere else on the box that you're trying to keep.
1b) When installing linux, create an additional partition for your
2a) Ubuntu's installer lets you choose where to install bits of it - it can be somewhat confusing, but if you read and think, (and go back and redo it a few times after you mess it up) you should be able to get the hang of it. The nice thing is that after you set everything up, it shows you what it's going to do, and asks "are you really sure you want me to do this?"
2b) Tell it to install
Most of my current settings and games have been carried over from a Gentoo install..3...4 years ago? They've gone through Gentoo on two different chipsets and (k)ubuntu on two different chipsets, on two different machines, with two sets of hardware each. For all that, I've installed Doom3 and Quake4 once apiece, kept all my IM settings/logs/contacts, browser prefs and bookmarks, etc. It's very much worth learning how to set up your
The heck with a "recovery disk" - with my /home and /media dirs on different disks/partitions, I can use "$x OS disks" and all my stuff works, and it's all still there. I've had the same setup for Gentoo and 3 versions of Kubuntu32 and 1 (and soon to be 2) versions of Kubuntu64. My desktop stays the same, I keep my browser settings, my games, music, and videos are all there.
I can change operating systems, and my stuff still works.
That blows a recovery disk out of the water.
Borrowing from part of what you just said:
Ask him what metrics he uses to determine the productivity of the building's fire insurance or security setup.
Because really, that's what sysadmins do. You're being paid for making it so that things don't break, and the better you are at that, the more valuable you are. And when there is a problem, you're being paid to find it and fix it as soon as possible. Whatever he uses for that should be able to be modified to sysadmin duties too. Unless he's replacing those folks, at which point you'd better do some really good development of your production metric.
Those are all things which would be damn nice to have. If you put those sorts of things in your flash videos, kudos to you! Unfortunately, flash by default doesn't have them, thus the source of my irritation with it. As an example, YouTube doesn't do it all that badly. It has most of the above. Heck, while it doesn't have a full stop, pause is pretty damn near good enough.
While you might be a decent enough designer to include such useful tools, the unfortunate fact is that there are many folks who don't. What I really want, more than anything, is to be able to right click on ANY flash and get that sort of menu, irregardless of what the designer did or did not bother to include. That would be useful, and would make me hate flash far less.
That wasn't his point - I too use FlashBlock. The problem is that there is no way to know what's there until you start it. At which point, you often can't easily stop the flash if it turns out to be an ad, or something else you didn't want. There often is no way to pause it to go grab a drink. There often is no way to rewind it and start over.
It's easy to "choose what flash items you want turned on individually" - it's damn near impossible most of the time to actually have any control over the flash item once started.
I hate flash with a passion because of this reason. If they put a useful, standard video menu in it which you could bring up via a right- click, I'd hate it far less. In fact, at that point it would be semi-useful. As-is, it's another example of "this is how you will see it, take it or leave it". Most of us want at least some semblance of control over the media presented to us. I prefer my eyelids not pried opened and stapled to my head.
The obvious answer to this is that everyone will be issued an "emergency PIN" to go with their biometric scan. It will be 4 digits, and while everyone will have one, they will only be used in an emergency when the biometrics aren't able to be used. Because doing it this way would make it *much* more secure than just having the PIN like we do now.
Perhaps the most important thing inherent in your list of "addressed complaints" is the fact that so many complaints...have been addressed. Yes, it's taken quite some time, but the things which were most pressing have been slowly taken care of. And by and large, there haven't been any major regressions.
I came into the linux game later than a lot of the posters here. Between 2000 and 2004 I installed some flavor of linux/bsd about every six months. And two weeks later, almost without fail, I'd switch back to Win2k, because I got frustrated trying to get something to work, I was missing some major driver, etc. But then five months later I'd get so pissed off at the idiocy of Windows that I'd try another flavor.
Over that time, linux got better and better. More and more desktop hardware was supported, package managers got better, desktops became more functional, and everything ran and looked better and better. Linux became easier and easier to install. Multi-media became more and more well supported.
I can't say the same for windows. XP was not a significant upgrade from Win2k. I've told my friends and family that I will be unable to help them with Vista. Why? Because it's a nightmare. And because I haven't had to deal with the idiocy of windows for the last 3 years. And because it doesn't seem to be a significant upgrade. In fact, it might even be a step backwards in some regards.
I just installed Kubuntu for my mom. At her request. Because she said to me, "I'm trying to help your grandmother with her new Dell running Vista, and it's so stupid. I hate it. I don't know why it has to be so difficult. I want what you have." I do not know where the Microsoft train is going, so I'm choosing to ride the linux train, which has been going forward for the last 6 years or so. And I'm starting to get friends and family to come with me.
I tried to mod the article "-1 Not Redundant" but it wasn't an option. And I didn't have mod points. At least my inability to function only warrants a comment, rather than a slashdot article.
There are a few people who agree with you on the OS feeling. Like these folks:
Three Dead Trolls: Every OS sucks!
Actually, it's likely that the owl, if large, would be the one rendering Schrodinger's cat dead or alive. In the wooded NE of the US, owls are the top predator of both skunks and cats.
For two semi-private forums I help run, we've done just that. If you can't usefully answer some semi-difficult, mostly forum-topic-specific questions, you don't get to register. Spam has dropped to 0. Random idiots have dropped to 0. If these were completely public forums, we'd probably be screening a little too well, but we're small enough that if someone really wants to join, they will either know enough about the topic to answer the questions, email us for help, or leave unhappy. And we're ok with all of those options.
Does someone have a list of the works they were offering? I ask, because (and it's pre-coffee and I don't know a ton of patent/copyright details) if the copyright owner doesn't pursue violations, does that not negate the copyright? Or is that patents?
Basically, I'm wondering what happens if the owners of the copyrighted works don't go after this company for sharing their works. Any freebees there for us?
If you want more of your girlfriend, just feed her more chocolate cake. She'll love it; you'll love it; everyone wins!
If you want to try kde, just do it: $sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop
When it's done, log out, and choose KDE from the menu. You don't really have to *think* about trying it out, unless you are severely limited on space. As for speeding up the boot process, damned if I know how. I just have faith that at some point someone will mainstream a way to do it without more custom hacks. I'm too lazy at this stage in my life to work on fixing it myself, so I just boot *before* going to get my coffee. I don't think I've watched/timed a boot in ages.
You hit the nail on the head. We run our own UT2k4 server. We occasionally get decent players on. We also occasionally get people who magically get 6, 7, 8 kills in a row in on people that they can't see, or as they round corners. If someone seems just too good to be true, they get the banstick. Have we possibly banned people for just being super-good players? Possibly. But there are a couple hundred other servers for them to play on. Have we banned downright cheaters? Yep. My favorite was the kid in igib Hall of Giants - if you know the map, you'll know how amazing it is to get a "HOLY SH*T!" twice in a row. Yeah, that's 16 kills in a row, with a max of 3 seconds between each one. All the more impressive was that he did it from...the bottom of the map...and shot someone directly above him in the air immediately after shooting someone on the ground, and then immediately shot someone behind him and to the side. I was spectating for the second round of kills, and most of the people who died you couldn't see, due to the distance limitations. Many were nearly 180 degrees apart from each other at huge distances, but they were located and killed in the span of a second or so. Not overly hard to justify a ban for things like that.
So far, no spammers have registered. I don't know if it's because the bots can't answer the questions, or because the humans are smart enough not to.
I agree. On our personal UT server, we have a fairly extensive ban-list. While a few are people who refuse to play nice with their team, the vast majority of our bans are "Fuck U HOMO!" bans. Since we started getting aggressive with our bans, we haven't noticed any real drop in the number of users - less seem to be leaving due to getting fed up with the offensive kids. Once the "regulars" of the offensive crowd got banned, more people stay for a longer time.
Moderation is the only real answer - anything else can be abused and manipulated. As sad as it is, you need cops to weed out the bad eggs, so that everyone else can do what they want to do.
Actually, "boobies" aren't the problem - we're ok with boobies. Look at any movie, or even TV show or magazine, and you'll see a fair amount of boob. Maybe not a full nipple, but just about all of the rest of it.
Have you seen a movie which is rated "R" due in part to nudity lately? 90% chance that's because you get a glimpse of a boobie. The other 10% are ass-cheeks.
It's the stuff below the belly button that's the problem. God forbid that the children find internet porn which shows someone with a body part that they don't have! It will destroy them for LIFE!
As a HS teacher, my response to this sort of problem is "show me that you can". I've moved a bit away from "tell me what you know", precisely because of how easy it is now to find information. Having or finding knowledge is trivial these days. Actually being able to make use of it, and applying it to different situations is really what it's all about anyway.
What I run into is that students panic and freeze up, because the vast bulk of their schooling career was all about "spit out the right answer", and that's all they know how to do. I spend the first 3/4 of the year breaking them of the "is this the right answer" habit. I want to see the process, not the final result. It frustrates the hell out of them when I respond to "is this right" with "show me how you did it". If there's one thing I've learned in teaching, it's that kids can get the right answer with the wrong method, and they can get the wrong answer with the right method. Really, the only thing worth looking at at the HS level is the process.
When it comes to papers, I generally follow the same thought process. Research some information, and then SHOW me that you can do something new with it. Use it as a basis for estimation. Prove that it is currently infeasible technology based on energy requirements or current manufacturing abilities. Actually make something new with it. Sure, you could pay someone to do it for you, but at least at the HS level, I can be a part of the process, and I'll know if either A) 6 pages magically show up overnight, or B) the final paper is substantially different than the versions I've been seeing. If you're teaching hands-on, interacting with your students, it's harder to cheat. If you're teaching by "go do this all by yourself", it's far easier to cheat. My preference is to teach by being a part of the process, because to me, the process is the most important part.
Why all the fancy talk? In my day, we used to call it "porn".
Microsoft is in a major bind with piracy - they MUST make it easy for large-scale, unattended corporate installs. This means no serial number to punch in every time, and no major verification routine. As long is this is the case, pirates (aaaarrr) will just snag these installs and run with them. When you're trying to get something like 50 million corporate installs, your bread and butter, going all streamlined and easily, you're never going to be able to adequately protect against piracy.
At the same time, the harder they make it to pirate windows, and the more people have to upgrade to even do it, the easier it is to "pirate" Ubuntu. Which, with every passing version, adds another couple % of people onto the list of "does everything I usually need to do". That % is nowhere near 100% yet, but it covers a sizable chunk of the largely computer illiterate "email and interweb" crowd. And it's almost easy enough for them to pirate at the moment. Have you seen install.exe yet?Good luck with that. There's some mental block that shows up in most people when they are given evidence that the last 10,000 years of relative stability in our climate was an abnormality, rather than the norm. On about a yearly basis now I'm reading about some new evidence pointing to some dramatic climate shift (on the order of 5-20 yrs) that happened sometime in the last hundred thousand years or so.
Kudos to you for your rational viewpoint on climate change. I'm not nearly the environmentalist you are, but I still detest the smoke belching and waste of our current world. I'm actually looking forward to the US switching to low-sulfur diesel in the next year, and like a lot of people I greatly detest the current trend of big-ass, wasteful SUVs. But like you I realize that climate has been changing for most of the earth's history, and our current understanding of the large-scale mechanics of climate change is fairly limited.
Compare the climate shifts of the Younger Dryas and Dansgaard-Oeschger events to the Holocene climatic optimum, the stable climate we're currently moving out of. In the distant past, climate has changed often and rapidly. In the recent past, it has not.
It kills me that people fail to understand that roughly 10,000 years ago we had a rapid, major climate shift. About 10,000 years before that, we had another one. And in the 100,000 years before that, we had around 23 major climate shifts. And all of these occurred on the order of a decade or two, at most. From 110,000 BP to modern times we've had 25 major climate shifts, many of them confined to one hemisphere. And we average one every 4400 years. But quite luckily for human civilization, we've had a relatively hospitable and stable climate for the last 10,000 years.
Yes, we're messing up the environment, and yes we need to do better on that front. But saying that humans are responsible for climate change is like pushing a truck down a hill - Even if you stop pushing, it's going to keep going down the hill, because that's how gravity works. It may not be going down the hill as quickly, but it will still be going down the hill. And to complete the shitty car analogy, we don't know how steep the hill is. We know how hard we're pushing, but that's about it.
Part of the beauty of Settlers of Catan is that it is constructive - no matter who wins, you're always able to achieve something useful. Even if you're behind, you may be trying to build a city, or make a road to a good location, or claim a good harbor. And even if someone else wins, you can still say, I built x cities, or I claimed y resources.
I too have struggled with those sorts of people - what helps is a game where you can be successful without winning. In monopoly or poker either you get crushed or you win. In Settlers of Catan, you can "almost win". You "could have won" if you had gotten x roll of the dice. You were y close to winning if z had occurred. For people who suck to play games with, it's quite nice. We still play with my sister, even though after every game she swears that she'll never play again. Yet she's the one who always asks to play...