... and no-one said Macs were trojan-proof, nor even virus-proof - just that there's a lot less attack vectors than Windows, and a lot less attackers.
Not according to the guy who won the Pwn2own contest.
Why Safari? Why didn't you go after IE or Safari?
It's really simple. Safari on the Mac is easier to exploit. The things that Windows do to make it harder (for an exploit to work), Macs don't do. Hacking into Macs is so much easier. You don't have to jump through hoops and deal with all the anti-exploit mitigations you'd find in Windows.
It's more about the operating system than the (target) program. Firefox on Mac is pretty easy too. The underlying OS doesn't have anti-exploit stuff built into it.
Religion is solely about describing something fantastic to another human in order to make that human behave in a certain way. You're thinking about spirituality, which is more reflective and about interpretation; religion does not want you to interpret at all, religion wants to dictate to you how to interpret. Bill Maher's "Religulous" was excellent, it has a line about "we keep none of the ideas we had from the Bronze Age, except the creation myth." So, "Religion controls humans" was me choosing my words carefully.
Those may be your definitions of religion and spirituality respectively but that doesn't make them true. Most religions are actually interpretative or have been dominantly interpretative at some point in history. People like to view religion as some static set of rules but it is not. What you seem to be describing is fundamentalism vs mysticism, which is a battle that has been waged within monotheistic religions since their inception.
I am personally a fan of Bill Maher and his documentary but I disagree with him and his methods if his ultimate goal is to show all religion is stupid, which seems to be his goal. What he is really attacking for the entire movie is fundamentalism but he calls it "religion". This is disengenuous because some religions have no belief in God and some have no strict doctrines either and cannot be disqualified by his "tests". I agree that fundametalism is dangerous in any religion but it has no bearing on the efficacy or the harmfulness of religion in general.
Head in the sand? Now you're just being stupid. I don't know why or how I would come across a site that I cannot even use unless I was searching it out with prior knowledge of its existance. It's not like it is some kind of earth shattering new technology. It sound very similar to Last.FM and Pandora.
Seriously, if all the major Linux distro groups would just quit their bitching and work together, it could be amazing. But there is just way too much fragmentation right now. I really wish Red Hat would have absorbed Suse instead of Novell.
Linux distros do work together. The GPL doesn't allow them to keep their work from each other. The minor differentiation between distros is healthy competition and doesn't lock you out of anything.
Oh, but it's not an american site. No wonder you haven't heard about it.
Of course American's haven't heard of it, you can't even use it in the US so why would there be any buzz about it here? You are being naive and condescending at the same time. Congratulations.
RedHat, for instance, puts a lot of fun things into their kernels. Most of them are absolutely essential for supporting the latest hardware, and don't usually make it into the mainline kernel for at least a few months.
With the addition of staging drivers in the kernel this should not be much of an issue.
Some of their customizations, on the other hand, are buggy or too proprietary to ever make it into the mainstream kernel. One example I can think of is that the 2.4 RedHat kernels supported hot-swapping IDE drives on standard controllers. I don't think the standard kernel ever got that feature.
That's a pretty bad example considering the 2.4 kernel is several years old and not used in any desktop distribution and hasn't been for years. On top of that I would hardly call the inability to hot swap IDE drives a deal breaker. Who really needs that?
Exactly! The industry will need to settle on maybe 3 desktop distros (light, medium, pro) before there will be enough de-facto standardization for driver writers etc. to bother with.
Kernel devs make drivers. They are completely independent of distro other than the rare 3rd party driver. Nvidia is probably the only driver that a lot of people need to install separately and it is dead easy on any major distro. Standardizing on one or a few distros will do virtually nothing to get more drivers on Linux.
Yeah, it's ironic given the whole point of Gentoo / Portage is (well, was) access to bleeding-edge releases. But there's a reason, and it took me a long time to face: Gentoo has been dead for years.
The whole point of Gentoo was not bleeding edge releases. I don't think anyone claimed that it was but for the most part well known applications are updated very quickly. I think the biggest complaint about slow releases is due to GNOME generally being close to a full revision behind in stable. Overlays have become an important part of Gentoo and getting the latest and greatest is usually as easy as adding an overlay if the package hasn't made it to portage yet. As for Gentoo being dead, have you visited the site? The forums are as active as ever and my bug reports are followed up on much quicker than upstream generally does. It's hardly dead.
In fact, I liked a lot about gentoo (well, besides the fact that it was about a 50/50 shot updating your system would work right)... i really like how all their console stuff was color and have liberally ripped a lot of their bash configuration stuff on my freebsd boxes. I sure wish more *unix systems would take a hint and colorize their consoles.
You have a real talent for hyperbole. Upgrading Gentoo is a 50/50 shot? I must be the luckiest SOB in existance because I use a mix of out-of-tree, unstable, and proprietary applications and I have about a 95% chance of a successful upgrade and when something does fail 99% of the time it's because I'm using something from unstable. Considering I've been using Gentoo for several years (and you probably used it for 30 seconds) I would say that's pretty good.
I love how you so narrowly define it as a "raster editor". Almost as if you are waiting for me to bite and ask you how to draw lines, circles and maybe even easy-to-resize test. Have these gotten better since when I last tried using it?
Use Inkscape. Seriously. It's actually a drawing app (unlike GIMP) and is used widely even on Windows. GIMP is a photo editor. Just because some apps decide to include everything and the kitchen sink for options doesn't mean it's a good thing.
ut everybody wants to use the product that has them all "just in case". The idea of software bloat is something dreamed up by grey-beards who used to do work on punch cards. As long as they are properly presented and organized in the program, the more features the merrier.
I'm no gray beard and I hate software bloat. It's simply not possible to keep adding features and keep everything "properly presented and organized". Featuritis complicates code and can cause all kinds of race conditions when multiple options/tools/features are used together. It can make some features near impossible to find and therefore useless.
But you can't - you simply plainly can't have that level of centralization. Even Microsoft came to that conclusion very early. What do you think the whole "developers, developers, developers" thing is all about? Gazillions of "consumer applications" are developed daily for Windows - small business software, MS Access-based databases,.Net software for every conceivable purpose from MP3 players to serious corporate software - the huge shareware and freeware market is just the very tip of the iceberg. And all of this should somehow be packaged by a Central Authority? Just imagine if someone else - Microsoft or Apple tried to do this! Apple in part does it for iPhone - have you missed all the bad karma heading their way for doing it?
A centralized packaging system has nothing to do with application developers. Distro maintainers deal with that. The majority of software used on Linux systems is free software that is compiled from source, there are a several big name proprietary applications available for Linux but very few shareware apps to worry about. I think Microsoft not having a centralized repository is actually the problem. Without a centralized repository application updates and configuration updates cannot be managed in a sane way. It's a security nightmare for a desktop system and at this point is is virtually impossible to implement considering the current software landscape on Windows as you describe it. I have over 10,000 available packages for my system and could have more if I wanted to add more repositories so I hardly call this a problem for Linux.
If you think Gimp is even close to the same as Photoshop, you are smoking crack
You fail reading comprehension.
While these applications are (to be honest) still far behind their commercial counterparts...
Blender vs the other guys? I dont know, I tried blender for about 30 seconds before giving up and playing around with the student editions of the big-boys stuff
30 seconds? You honestly believe you can learn a 3D modelling program in 30 seconds? If you gave up that quickly you didn't even try. A computer illiterate friend of mine who is an artist managed to learn it. It tooks a while to get used to for him but the difference between $2000+ and free is significant enough motivator to learn Blender.
Apache, Lighttpd and my current favorite nginx are awesome, but they dont have the close integration with their development tools and operating system that IIS does.
Considering Apache has a significant lead in marketshare over IIS I don't think lack of integration with development tools is an issue for anyone actually implmenting a web server and really why should it be?
there is no open source equivalant of Visual Studio
There is no common way to install and remove software
Installing software on a mobile phone is actually pretty similar to installing software through a package manager and people don't seem to have any issues when it comes to that.
There is no stable base to write drivers (thus no hardware support)
Kernel developers write drivers and even offer to write drivers for any company that delivers specs. Linux supports a ton more hardware then Windows and Intel has developers working on kernel code for their devices. Stating that Linux has "no hardware support" is the overstatement of the century.
There are too many distros with too many proprietary ways of doing things. Too many proprietary repositories, too many proprietary package systems, to many proprietary filesystem layouts.
None of the things you mentioned are proprietary. It's impossible to create a proprietary GPL application.
Gimp is *not* Photoshop. Sorry. I know I mentioned this, but I'll repeat it again. You insult people who actually use Photoshop by making this claim
Insurance companies tend to use COBOL to generate and process policies, but that isn't a very fast paced environment either. Mostly old-timers that don't know much about technology in general nevermind multiple programming languages.
As unlikely as changes in the atmosphere of less then.28% (.0028) of the total green house gasses in the atmosphere is going to cause catastrophic issues when it doesn't even bring the air temp above freezing? You seem to be wanting to claim one is absurd when ignoring that absurdity of your prefered explaination. When you consider the water vapor which is a greenhouse gas, man made Co2 makes up a tiny fraction of the total.
All of your points have been debunked time and time again or are unproven theories. Realclimate has an answer for all the bunk you have espoused so far, including the BS nugget you just crapped.
Now wait a minute, your getting a little presumptuous as well as alarmist here. Nothing has been shown to suggest that neither of us nor wildlife will_not_be able to adapt. From all the rational accounts I can find, the entire shift is going to take centuries if not more before it's all done
Maybe you should read up on the mass extinctions that have precedeed us.
Genetically engineered crops, pesticides and the old fashioned mosquito netting, antibiotics, are all just a few high tech and low tech solutions. However, you did not say how no polar ice caps would effect either of those outside or above all the other doom and gloom warned about without them disappearing. In fact, nothing drastically will change if the ice caps do disappear outside of what is already claimed to be forecast. Nothing magical will happen if we lose the polar caps, it will just be more of the same that we are already warned about. In other words, your just being an alarmist.
At this point I'm going to stop arguing. It's obvious we are not going to agree. I just don't understand how you can call me an alarmist when you and people like you are fear mongering just as much about the economy. It's a bit hypocritical. There is literally mounds of evidence that support global warming and the damage it can cause but if you choose to ignore it for political reasons then so be it. It's just the nature of science. In ten more years or so no one will be questioning it. I guess turning a blind eye to the fact that the ice caps are in worse shape than they have ever been in human history is something some people are going to continue to do until their own house is under water.
Anyways, I'm bitching about it because no matter what the truth about global warming is, the political solutions simply don't address it. But you seem to be encouraging the acceptance of anything labeled "green" under the guise of if we are wrong, lets be wrong about the bad stuff about to happen.
Wow, another argument that I didn't make. You should stick to things I have actually said instead of continuing to make up arguments out of whole cloth, but then you would only be left with lame arguments that have been debunked years ago but true believers continue to cling to. Global warming deniers remind me of creationists. They'll find one otherwise credible scientist and hang their whole argument on his/her lack of understanding on the subject or their complete lunacy.
As for the warm water, there are many causes of that including the volcanic activity at the polar caps..
So volcanoes are responsible for the caps melting in both the north and south pole at the same time when this has never been seen before (in human history) on either pole? That sounds very unlikely.
First, the catastrophic floods would be covered by the other crap like the weather changes and stuff wouldn't it? Second, the entire worlds ecosystem isn't static, it's continually evolving and adapting and changing. The worlds ecosystem would be different but fucked up would only be a relative term to an arbitrary point in time. The earth's ecosystem is fucked right now compared to 20 million years ago. Finally, the point I was attempting to extract from you was what will be so catastrophic about the ice caps disappearing that the entire human race is endangered of mass extinction?
It's true that the climate has changed in the past and the Earth itself will survive and I have no doubt that life itself will survive but drastic changes in ecosystems in a very short time has proven to cause mass extinctions. We should be very worried about this. It's extremely naive to think we'll survive just because of our resourcefulness as a species. This is a real challenge.
I already answering you question as to why humans will be endangered. A lack of diversity can have devastating consequences like a disease wiping out entire crops of food or animal species that are depended upon by another species in turn destroying that population. It is very likely that diversity will be diminished by global warming as it affects the Earth as a whole, altering virtually every ecosystem simultaneously. A good example of this is Nepal where some regions are seeing outbreaks of malaria where it never was warm enough for mosquitos to live before. Just think about how much disease a mosquito can spread and how much that can affect all mammals in that area. There are so many layers to the global warming problem that it's childishly simplistic to think that everything will stay the same except that your each front property in Maine is going to skyrocket in value because it's summer year round.
Well, if you payed attention to the rest of the post, you will see that it was about NOT FIXING THE PROBLEM in the first place while taking yours and mine as well as our children and their future generation's freedoms away. I don't have a problem with doing something, as long as something is at least as effective as the costs of implementing it are. I'm sorry that I'm not of the church of global warming and fall goo goo eyed in support of anything labeled green.
All I read was more speculation about the costs without any analyzation of the benefits economically. Personally it frustrates me that people are not behind green technology because any sane person knows that fossil fuels are not an endless resource and regardless of what you believe about human impact on the environment we are going to have to start worrying about our finite resources at some point and it might as well be now. Economically, for the US at least, I can only see this being a good thing for so many reasons. The United States' economy thrives on innovation and pumping money into green technology solves a lot of problems in my opinion is a good thing. If we don't start producing something new in this country things can only get worse. We have the worst trade gap of any country in the world. We might as well ride the green wave and start investing in green technology. Whether you like it or not that is the direction the modern world is heading in and we might as well capitalize on it.
As for cap and trade I don't know where you get the idea that I'm for it. I never even mentioned it. Most of your post seems to be based around something I never even mentioned. Cap and trade looks like it got cut off at the knees anyway so I don't know why you are still bitching about it. There are a lot of ways we can promote green, and more efficient technology without resorting to cap and trade.
So how is the ICE melting from global warming when the air temp rarely gets above freezing
I hope you're not seriously suggesting that ICE isn't melting at the caps. As for why...It's quite simple actually. It's the warm WATER not the air.
if the Excess Co2 and carbon is already absorbing the heat. what is so different about the land absorbing a portion of it and reflecting it back?
A lot of things. First if the caps were gone... I hope you don't live in a coastal city because that would be under water. Second, ICE refects sunlight much more efficiently than land and just the change in where the heat is will fuck up the entire world's current ecosystem.
I don't feel like responding to the rest of the post because it's the same old garbage about how it will take years to happen and it could be a good thing...blah blah blah. None of it is scientific. You people always claim climatotlogists are fear mongering but in the same breath you fear monger how going green will bankrupt our country with absolutely no evidence. Pot...meet kettle.
A lot of your problems seem like issues with Ubuntu not Linx in general. You shouldn't need to touch xorg.conf for the most part, a lot of the configuration has been pushed out of xorg.conf. I have been using transmission for quite a while and have never had the problem you describe. Have you submitted a bug report? Same goes for Nautilus. Hotkey support is entirely dependent on WM.
Your missing a huge point. Global warming doesn't just mean that we'll all be a few degrees warmer. Entire ecosystems will collapse, especially colder regions where the life there depends on the cold. Ocean currents and hurricane activity could be drastically altered leading to a lot of unforseen changes in weather, including getting a lot colder in some places. If the ice caps melt the sun won't reflect off them anymore and the Earth will heat up at an even faster rate which has the ability to cause mass extinctions, lowering diversity, and leaving the possibility of endangering the entire human race. We know that burning fossil fuels isn't good for the environment. Even if you aren't sure that we are emitting enough to cause a problem don't you think it would be a good idea in this case to err on the side of not potentially annihilating our habitat and species?
It would be such a waste for NASA not to use "Colbert". If he won the contest it just proves that he has more fans than NASA. They would be smart to take advantage of the publicity especially considering most people don't care too much about space exlporation during an economic crisis. It would probably be better for Colbert if they don't name it after him though. NASA will be a new punchline.
I was in America 2 years ago. I speak perfect English, it's my primary language but i still have to slow down for Americans to understand me. Even when i was trying my hardest to speak as clearly as possible it was quite common to get comments like "How am i supposed to understand what you are saying? Learn English!" followed by a refusal of service.
Where you in the south perchance? I'm American and they can't understand me down there either. I wouldn't take too much offense. I would hardly call what they speak English.:)
Americans don't seem to have any patience for those of use with non-American accents.
We wouldn't get very far if that were the case considering there are immigrants from all around there world in metro areas. Now again if you were off the beaten path I can understand your sentiment but to categorize all Americans (or even most) as inpatient with non-American accents is hyperbole. People always demonize the US as uncultured hicks when the majority of Americans live on the coasts, near or in cities with major immigrant populations, and for the most part people get along fine. The US was uniquely colloquial for much of its history because people lived outside of the cities for much of the time. This is no longer the case and immigration (legal or otherwise) is high in the cities with a lot of first and second generation Americans living there.
Sure - never would an American store set up one of these signs.
Nativism isn't strictly American. I would have to agree with the original statement about American businesses. In general they are very accomodating to non-native speakers, especially in the major hotspots for tourists like NYC. I live in an area where you will regulary hear English, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Russian, and even Albanian being spoken in stores by both employees and customers. I've never seen someone snubbed for not speaking English. I'm sure it does happen but it's definitely not the norm in places that most tourists are going to visit. Personally I think the whole French snobbiness thing is overblown. Sure some people seemed less than thrilled about my prescence, I was actually completely snubbed once by a bartender, but overall the people were nice, just a little more uptight than in other parts of the world.
That's quite likely. I doubt you met anybody who couldn't speak English, but you would meet a lot who didn't. Especially in the holiday season. When I was working in Paris I found that almost everyone spoke English until the tourists arrived, and then nobody did.
It was not difficult for me to find English speakers in Paris when I was there. The key in any country is to attempt to speak the native language first. Most people will respect your attempt and immediately switch to English if they detect your French (or whatever langauge) is weaker than their English. If you go around shouting "Does anyone speak English?" or just start your sentence with "Parlez-vous Anglais?" you aren't going to get very far. Montreal was a completely different story. EVERYONE speaks English and they can tell you are American right away. Only a couple of times did anyone even start to talk to me in French. They are also extremely friendly much more so than the French in Paris (from my limited experience). Madrid was another experience entirely. Not as many people seem to speak English but there are enough of them around and everyone was very accomodating regardless of the language barrier. Spain was my best experience abroad despite being the only country I visited where I was physically threatened for being American, although I believe the perpetrators were Moroccan.
My Spanish teacher in high school would agree about the simplicity of Spanish but I know quite a few native Spanish speakers who have told me that learning English was not difficult at all. I know a trilinguist whose primary language is Italian and he also believes English was easier to learn than Spanish, which surprised me considering how much closer the languages are to each other. I think there are a few reasons for this. First English has fewer characters than a lot of languages. There are no accented characters, and most (if not all) of the characters that make up English are represented in all Latin and and Germanic based languages so this adds to its universality. Also, considering the abundance of spoken and written English throughout the world it is very easy to be exposed to English no matter where you live. English is already a hodge podge of other languages anyway, with many words being ripped directly from their language of origin. This is even more true in the US than it is in the UK as the culture has evolved around many different languages like Dutch, German, and Spanish.
Slashdot Mirror
Not according to the guy who won the Pwn2own contest.
Why Safari? Why didn't you go after IE or Safari?
It's really simple. Safari on the Mac is easier to exploit. The things that Windows do to make it harder (for an exploit to work), Macs don't do. Hacking into Macs is so much easier. You don't have to jump through hoops and deal with all the anti-exploit mitigations you'd find in Windows.
It's more about the operating system than the (target) program. Firefox on Mac is pretty easy too. The underlying OS doesn't have anti-exploit stuff built into it.
Those may be your definitions of religion and spirituality respectively but that doesn't make them true. Most religions are actually interpretative or have been dominantly interpretative at some point in history. People like to view religion as some static set of rules but it is not. What you seem to be describing is fundamentalism vs mysticism, which is a battle that has been waged within monotheistic religions since their inception.
I am personally a fan of Bill Maher and his documentary but I disagree with him and his methods if his ultimate goal is to show all religion is stupid, which seems to be his goal. What he is really attacking for the entire movie is fundamentalism but he calls it "religion". This is disengenuous because some religions have no belief in God and some have no strict doctrines either and cannot be disqualified by his "tests". I agree that fundametalism is dangerous in any religion but it has no bearing on the efficacy or the harmfulness of religion in general.
Head in the sand? Now you're just being stupid. I don't know why or how I would come across a site that I cannot even use unless I was searching it out with prior knowledge of its existance. It's not like it is some kind of earth shattering new technology. It sound very similar to Last.FM and Pandora.
Linux distros do work together. The GPL doesn't allow them to keep their work from each other. The minor differentiation between distros is healthy competition and doesn't lock you out of anything.
Of course American's haven't heard of it, you can't even use it in the US so why would there be any buzz about it here? You are being naive and condescending at the same time. Congratulations.
With the addition of staging drivers in the kernel this should not be much of an issue.
That's a pretty bad example considering the 2.4 kernel is several years old and not used in any desktop distribution and hasn't been for years. On top of that I would hardly call the inability to hot swap IDE drives a deal breaker. Who really needs that?
Kernel devs make drivers. They are completely independent of distro other than the rare 3rd party driver. Nvidia is probably the only driver that a lot of people need to install separately and it is dead easy on any major distro. Standardizing on one or a few distros will do virtually nothing to get more drivers on Linux.
The whole point of Gentoo was not bleeding edge releases. I don't think anyone claimed that it was but for the most part well known applications are updated very quickly. I think the biggest complaint about slow releases is due to GNOME generally being close to a full revision behind in stable. Overlays have become an important part of Gentoo and getting the latest and greatest is usually as easy as adding an overlay if the package hasn't made it to portage yet. As for Gentoo being dead, have you visited the site? The forums are as active as ever and my bug reports are followed up on much quicker than upstream generally does. It's hardly dead.
You have a real talent for hyperbole. Upgrading Gentoo is a 50/50 shot? I must be the luckiest SOB in existance because I use a mix of out-of-tree, unstable, and proprietary applications and I have about a 95% chance of a successful upgrade and when something does fail 99% of the time it's because I'm using something from unstable. Considering I've been using Gentoo for several years (and you probably used it for 30 seconds) I would say that's pretty good.
Use Inkscape. Seriously. It's actually a drawing app (unlike GIMP) and is used widely even on Windows. GIMP is a photo editor. Just because some apps decide to include everything and the kitchen sink for options doesn't mean it's a good thing.
I'm no gray beard and I hate software bloat. It's simply not possible to keep adding features and keep everything "properly presented and organized". Featuritis complicates code and can cause all kinds of race conditions when multiple options/tools/features are used together. It can make some features near impossible to find and therefore useless.
A centralized packaging system has nothing to do with application developers. Distro maintainers deal with that. The majority of software used on Linux systems is free software that is compiled from source, there are a several big name proprietary applications available for Linux but very few shareware apps to worry about. I think Microsoft not having a centralized repository is actually the problem. Without a centralized repository application updates and configuration updates cannot be managed in a sane way. It's a security nightmare for a desktop system and at this point is is virtually impossible to implement considering the current software landscape on Windows as you describe it. I have over 10,000 available packages for my system and could have more if I wanted to add more repositories so I hardly call this a problem for Linux.
You fail reading comprehension.
While these applications are (to be honest) still far behind their commercial counterparts...
30 seconds? You honestly believe you can learn a 3D modelling program in 30 seconds? If you gave up that quickly you didn't even try. A computer illiterate friend of mine who is an artist managed to learn it. It tooks a while to get used to for him but the difference between $2000+ and free is significant enough motivator to learn Blender.
Considering Apache has a significant lead in marketshare over IIS I don't think lack of integration with development tools is an issue for anyone actually implmenting a web server and really why should it be?
Yes there is.
Installing software on a mobile phone is actually pretty similar to installing software through a package manager and people don't seem to have any issues when it comes to that.
Kernel developers write drivers and even offer to write drivers for any company that delivers specs. Linux supports a ton more hardware then Windows and Intel has developers working on kernel code for their devices. Stating that Linux has "no hardware support" is the overstatement of the century.
None of the things you mentioned are proprietary. It's impossible to create a proprietary GPL application.
He didn't make that claim. You just made that up.
Insurance companies tend to use COBOL to generate and process policies, but that isn't a very fast paced environment either. Mostly old-timers that don't know much about technology in general nevermind multiple programming languages.
All of your points have been debunked time and time again or are unproven theories. Realclimate has an answer for all the bunk you have espoused so far, including the BS nugget you just crapped.
Maybe you should read up on the mass extinctions that have precedeed us.
At this point I'm going to stop arguing. It's obvious we are not going to agree. I just don't understand how you can call me an alarmist when you and people like you are fear mongering just as much about the economy. It's a bit hypocritical. There is literally mounds of evidence that support global warming and the damage it can cause but if you choose to ignore it for political reasons then so be it. It's just the nature of science. In ten more years or so no one will be questioning it. I guess turning a blind eye to the fact that the ice caps are in worse shape than they have ever been in human history is something some people are going to continue to do until their own house is under water.
Wow, another argument that I didn't make. You should stick to things I have actually said instead of continuing to make up arguments out of whole cloth, but then you would only be left with lame arguments that have been debunked years ago but true believers continue to cling to. Global warming deniers remind me of creationists. They'll find one otherwise credible scientist and hang their whole argument on his/her lack of understanding on the subject or their complete lunacy.
So volcanoes are responsible for the caps melting in both the north and south pole at the same time when this has never been seen before (in human history) on either pole? That sounds very unlikely.
It's true that the climate has changed in the past and the Earth itself will survive and I have no doubt that life itself will survive but drastic changes in ecosystems in a very short time has proven to cause mass extinctions. We should be very worried about this. It's extremely naive to think we'll survive just because of our resourcefulness as a species. This is a real challenge.
I already answering you question as to why humans will be endangered. A lack of diversity can have devastating consequences like a disease wiping out entire crops of food or animal species that are depended upon by another species in turn destroying that population. It is very likely that diversity will be diminished by global warming as it affects the Earth as a whole, altering virtually every ecosystem simultaneously. A good example of this is Nepal where some regions are seeing outbreaks of malaria where it never was warm enough for mosquitos to live before. Just think about how much disease a mosquito can spread and how much that can affect all mammals in that area. There are so many layers to the global warming problem that it's childishly simplistic to think that everything will stay the same except that your each front property in Maine is going to skyrocket in value because it's summer year round.
All I read was more speculation about the costs without any analyzation of the benefits economically. Personally it frustrates me that people are not behind green technology because any sane person knows that fossil fuels are not an endless resource and regardless of what you believe about human impact on the environment we are going to have to start worrying about our finite resources at some point and it might as well be now. Economically, for the US at least, I can only see this being a good thing for so many reasons. The United States' economy thrives on innovation and pumping money into green technology solves a lot of problems in my opinion is a good thing. If we don't start producing something new in this country things can only get worse. We have the worst trade gap of any country in the world. We might as well ride the green wave and start investing in green technology. Whether you like it or not that is the direction the modern world is heading in and we might as well capitalize on it.
As for cap and trade I don't know where you get the idea that I'm for it. I never even mentioned it. Most of your post seems to be based around something I never even mentioned. Cap and trade looks like it got cut off at the knees anyway so I don't know why you are still bitching about it. There are a lot of ways we can promote green, and more efficient technology without resorting to cap and trade.
I hope you're not seriously suggesting that ICE isn't melting at the caps. As for why...It's quite simple actually. It's the warm WATER not the air.
A lot of things. First if the caps were gone... I hope you don't live in a coastal city because that would be under water. Second, ICE refects sunlight much more efficiently than land and just the change in where the heat is will fuck up the entire world's current ecosystem.
I don't feel like responding to the rest of the post because it's the same old garbage about how it will take years to happen and it could be a good thing...blah blah blah. None of it is scientific. You people always claim climatotlogists are fear mongering but in the same breath you fear monger how going green will bankrupt our country with absolutely no evidence. Pot...meet kettle.
A lot of your problems seem like issues with Ubuntu not Linx in general. You shouldn't need to touch xorg.conf for the most part, a lot of the configuration has been pushed out of xorg.conf. I have been using transmission for quite a while and have never had the problem you describe. Have you submitted a bug report? Same goes for Nautilus. Hotkey support is entirely dependent on WM.
Your missing a huge point. Global warming doesn't just mean that we'll all be a few degrees warmer. Entire ecosystems will collapse, especially colder regions where the life there depends on the cold. Ocean currents and hurricane activity could be drastically altered leading to a lot of unforseen changes in weather, including getting a lot colder in some places. If the ice caps melt the sun won't reflect off them anymore and the Earth will heat up at an even faster rate which has the ability to cause mass extinctions, lowering diversity, and leaving the possibility of endangering the entire human race. We know that burning fossil fuels isn't good for the environment. Even if you aren't sure that we are emitting enough to cause a problem don't you think it would be a good idea in this case to err on the side of not potentially annihilating our habitat and species?
Nope. It's a little more complex than that. While it has a FreeBSD interface the kernel is a bastardization for FBSD and Mach.
Anonymous Coward Questions Relevance of Red Hat CEO
It would be such a waste for NASA not to use "Colbert". If he won the contest it just proves that he has more fans than NASA. They would be smart to take advantage of the publicity especially considering most people don't care too much about space exlporation during an economic crisis. It would probably be better for Colbert if they don't name it after him though. NASA will be a new punchline.
Where you in the south perchance? I'm American and they can't understand me down there either. I wouldn't take too much offense. I would hardly call what they speak English. :)
We wouldn't get very far if that were the case considering there are immigrants from all around there world in metro areas. Now again if you were off the beaten path I can understand your sentiment but to categorize all Americans (or even most) as inpatient with non-American accents is hyperbole. People always demonize the US as uncultured hicks when the majority of Americans live on the coasts, near or in cities with major immigrant populations, and for the most part people get along fine. The US was uniquely colloquial for much of its history because people lived outside of the cities for much of the time. This is no longer the case and immigration (legal or otherwise) is high in the cities with a lot of first and second generation Americans living there.
Nativism isn't strictly American. I would have to agree with the original statement about American businesses. In general they are very accomodating to non-native speakers, especially in the major hotspots for tourists like NYC. I live in an area where you will regulary hear English, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Russian, and even Albanian being spoken in stores by both employees and customers. I've never seen someone snubbed for not speaking English. I'm sure it does happen but it's definitely not the norm in places that most tourists are going to visit. Personally I think the whole French snobbiness thing is overblown. Sure some people seemed less than thrilled about my prescence, I was actually completely snubbed once by a bartender, but overall the people were nice, just a little more uptight than in other parts of the world.
It was not difficult for me to find English speakers in Paris when I was there. The key in any country is to attempt to speak the native language first. Most people will respect your attempt and immediately switch to English if they detect your French (or whatever langauge) is weaker than their English. If you go around shouting "Does anyone speak English?" or just start your sentence with "Parlez-vous Anglais?" you aren't going to get very far. Montreal was a completely different story. EVERYONE speaks English and they can tell you are American right away. Only a couple of times did anyone even start to talk to me in French. They are also extremely friendly much more so than the French in Paris (from my limited experience). Madrid was another experience entirely. Not as many people seem to speak English but there are enough of them around and everyone was very accomodating regardless of the language barrier. Spain was my best experience abroad despite being the only country I visited where I was physically threatened for being American, although I believe the perpetrators were Moroccan.
My Spanish teacher in high school would agree about the simplicity of Spanish but I know quite a few native Spanish speakers who have told me that learning English was not difficult at all. I know a trilinguist whose primary language is Italian and he also believes English was easier to learn than Spanish, which surprised me considering how much closer the languages are to each other. I think there are a few reasons for this. First English has fewer characters than a lot of languages. There are no accented characters, and most (if not all) of the characters that make up English are represented in all Latin and and Germanic based languages so this adds to its universality. Also, considering the abundance of spoken and written English throughout the world it is very easy to be exposed to English no matter where you live. English is already a hodge podge of other languages anyway, with many words being ripped directly from their language of origin. This is even more true in the US than it is in the UK as the culture has evolved around many different languages like Dutch, German, and Spanish.