I think we have to ask: What has the GPL done for us, or at least probably done for us?
Starting a decade ago several very large corporations poured significant resources into Linux development, and were compelled to keep their contributions open-licensed and essentially free (as in beer).
Do we think that would have been the case if Linux had been Apache or BSD-licensed, or would we instead see a division into deluxe IBMLinux (that works on multi-processors and new chips and 64-bit) and open Linux that scrapes along on simple 486 hardware.
The only thing wrong with applets is that they were hatched in 1995 with two serious limitations.
1. They had no effective way of caching code or data on the client machine (in a safe sandbox) and so had inherent performance limitations and interminable initial download waits for anything serious.
2. Microsoft successfully killed them by refusing to properly support (and default-install in the OS) a Java runtime environment.
If those two facts had been different, we would be living in a world of powerful rich-client web apps with Java on server-side and client-side.
Doctors' cursive writing needs to be banned, right quick. It's an embarrassment to the profession, and only they don't seem to realize it.
Data entry on a netbook would do just fine. Most people can type faster than they can write. And if you need abbreviations, a computer can assist with those too, with algorithms designed to prevent statistically likely data entry errors.
Tricks or affectations like cursive writing will have to go by the wayside. So will other similar "doctor as magician" incantations like the old trick of pretending to the patient that you know all about their disease simply because you have translated the words for their symptoms into latin, will have to go by the wayside, as information technology democratizes medical knowledge.
If that sounds elitist, so be it. Reality is that people have all kinds of different skills, and a small percentage are good programmers. I can't run a marathon or play a cello, and I don't mind anyone saying so.
While I agree with RMS that software should be free, I don't believe that means that people should not simply use information services that are provided for them on managed information infrastructure.
In the 70s if you wanted information, you hired a programmer to write a program for you.
In the 80s and 90s if you wanted information, you used a program that was already written.
In this decade, if you want information, you use an service on the web.
Unless you are that most rare breed; an open source software geek, in which case you may still be in the business of gluing together or even modifying programs and web services.
I would believe more that free software was intended for the masses if it had in general any kind of document quality or code simplicity. But expecting Joe Six-pack to deal with maven builds, hierarchical make files, and package dependency graphs. Hah!
Yes. If this were the nineteenth century, a patient could just take their charts around to different doctors by hand in a manila folder.
Firstly, I think we are running out of "manila":-)
More importantly, there is currently an inherent excuse for lousy misinformed care by the "team" of doctors that maintains a person. I didn't get the memo. It was in a manila folder somewhere and it didn't get to me.
In the future, an obvious mistake made by a physician that could have been easily avoided by a quick scan or search of the always-available patient history would be absolutely inexcusable, and less likely to happen.
This info, if "googly" available, would lead to better care overall.
Right now we maintain software with much better info tools, and way more care about contextual history, documentation, and procedure than we maintain people. And that's scary, because we don't maintain software very well.
The information should legally belong to the patient, and health care providers and government should be required to create a system whereby the health records follow the person for life, regardless of jurisdiction or health care provider.
So the records would live in an independent information infrastructure, not owned by any particular health care provider.
And of course open standards would be needed to ensure interoperability of info systems that dealt with the records.
Didn't the main MySQL developers bail already?
on
Oracle Buys Sun
·
· Score: 1
It seems clear to me there is going to be major forking action here, led by none other than some key leaders of the mysql project and company, who if I'm not terribly mistaken just recently left Sun.
I am hopeful that one of these forks becomes the dominant MySQL again.
I designed one of these about a decade ago and did some prototyping. Since I don't seem to have the time to realize it, here are a few extra features that could be added (if i2p does not already include these).
Encrypted-file-fragmenting, auto-globally-migrating, auto-redundant replicating "virtual" data store layer. Stored files automatically seek to be replicated enough times to be guaranteed perpetually persistent, and also seek to move to newer and better physical storage sites, and to globally distribute themselves, and auto-cache near user when needed.
With this addition, we may have the basis for, for example, a Facebook-like on-line identity avatar which is not owned by a single company like Facebook but just floats around all over the P2P network, and is truly owned by the person who it is about.
With that freeing up of the online identity from external control, we could extend it to include important identity information needed for the citizen to function in society. Medical records, different identity numbers for different government agencies, your real-world address, etc. All of these properties about you could be placed online by you following standard protocols and placed only onto a secure virtual site in the i2. Permission model would of course be default no permission, opened incrementally to authorized and authenticated other parties.
If we had this, the onus could now be placed on governments, medical systems, post offices, etc. to come to your avatar and request permission to know your address, or your medical number etc. No more change of address rigamerole. No more problems in your paperwork or medical history maintenance because you happen to move to another state or country. etc.
It all relies on the open standards for the info and privacy protocols, and on the confidence of the person to put their info into a secure, encrypted, and non-owned virtual internet location.
1. He/she has to know what he does and does not know. (Debugging code teaches you this, and the appropriate level of humility, in spades.)
2. More generally, he/she has to have a rational enough mind about what is going to work and what not, based on scientific principles, including scientific sociological principles.
3. He/she has to be creative enough to understand and be appropriately excited by other most creative "next big things". i.e. he/she has to be able to imagine the next turning points in the technological future based on the possibilities and gaps in the technological present.
4. He/she has to be an excellent listener, with full comprehension, and an understanding of peoples' motivations, and thus an excellent communicator and leader.
Was it only me that noticed that the US media coverage of Barack Obama's election victory speech was carpet-bombed with mindf**k ads showing green leaves on a white background and the words "Clean-Coal".
I have to ask, what is it about me that makes me understand exactly what these powerful interests are doing to me when they do it, whereas it seems to escape most peoples' attention. That's bloody frightening.
In any case, I don't care how the US generates its energy as long as it reduces its carbon emission footprint rapidly down to 20% of its current value.
My favourite computer still is my 1024x768 screen 12inch iBook.
It is ONLY acceptable because of the UI feature that quickly shows miniaturized versions of the windows of all my running applications, and lets me pick one and get back into it in one click. That gets rid of most of the need for a large screen.
And the iphone ui is optimized for its screen size, etc.
Linux might do better on netbooks if a similar gui optimized for the screen size was available and worked well. I understand a few of these may be available but haven't tried any.
Have to say I'm holding out for an Apple netbook. UI of MacOSX is too much better.
I am an extreme comp-sci geek, but I have way better things to do than configure the low-level settings of my laptop.
What with Google and the Internet Archive that must consitute "publishing" your invention.
However in the, let's just say really "interesting" US patent system, I believe that someone else can read your invention online and patent it themselves within a year,
and then force you yourself to stop using your invention.
I could be wrong but that is my interpretation of the US rules.
It's pretty simple. Dictating what customers can do with their Internet-connected computers when you are a pipe provider is a no-no. Don't go there.
You shouldn't even by listening in anyway, perverts.
If you need to charge differential monthly rates for different amounts of bandwidth used or available to differnet subscribers, then by all means create a tiered rate structure, and compete with competitors (like new wi-max services) on it.
The Internet is an open and free and flexible worldwide connection of information processing and display devices to each other, and it needs to remain unbiased with respect to, and ideally, unknowledgeable about, the semantics of the content it carries, except in that one could imagine data saying "I want to be real-time, please help me" in an extremely general sense.
If you can't offer such an Internet, stay out of the business of pretending to offer it.
It's clear that the world-wide information collected and cross-indexed by Google is a potent source from which knowledge (statistical patterns of concept association and concept prevalence) can be mined.
This knowledge base will in fact be immensely useful to intelligent programs going forward.
Some of these programs may be used to create virtual info-butlers (info-concierges) for each of us. A pro-active searcher and "modern-living" assistant that helps you both organize your life (local events to attend etc) and helps you have waiting for you like the morning newspaper the next level of researched and collated detail on the topics you are or should be next interested in to solve your life or work problems, or sate your particular curiosity.
Other intelligent and "google-informed" intelligent programs will work for government and corporations, constantly digging for notable patterns of change in the behavour of people (individual and en masse) and competing entities.
I will keep an open mind to signs of God in my life, but to be honest I can only imagine God to be another word for the universe as a whole, the "why there is something rather than nothing" (and that doesn't help me out much in daily life other than by making it possible, in a general sense.)
Regarding your last point about teaching love, I did not mean to imply that teaching love is not necessary. The energy-efficiency (for living systems) of forgiving and cooperating strategies accrues at the society super-organism level, and only indirectly trickles down to the individual. So the society develops teaching institutions to teach these principles, for society-as-a-whole's own sake. People grudgingly accept these institutionalized admonitions against selfishness because they intuitively (correctly) admit it is better in general for all if we live that way.
As humans, we are two things: system builders, and story makers. And God is one of our greatest stories that brings other stories together into a theme for living. We do need story-guidance to live well, because otherwise we are creative enough to invent many bad, unsuccessful life paths and strategies that have been tried before and warned about in stories.
What I believe in is a careful reflection on how we should come to believe, and what it means to do so. I believe in other things too, but that is the over-arching meta-belief: "Think well, believe well, know well, and know when you don't know."
For the record, I was referring to the tactic of property damage as being heavily frowned upon, not the tactic of violence against people, which is universally condemned.
I submit that there is a large difference between, say, for the sake of argument;-) rolling your logging truck parked in the old growth forest off a cliff, and torching it with you in it. The mainstream media, and now the US government, makes no distinction, largely because they want to keep logging old growth forests.
Remember that while terrorism is a (repulsive and stupid) tactic, labelling activists terrorists is also a tactic in the conflict.
If the blog system had used something like TOR, and also not forced the creation of an account with a real email address, she would have had a better chance of staying 'muddy'.
Or I guess if she'd wanted to she could have posted from random web cafes, without logging in to an account, but I guess in Alaska, not too many of those cafes, and the neighbours would be gossipin' about her strange furtiveness in the cafe.
Firstly, humans (myself included) are not the be-all and end-all on this planet, and if you disagree with that you're an a$$.
Secondly, the overwhelming majority of environmental activists are strong believers in non-violence. It is contradictory to their cause not to be. There is a tiny fringe that believes that property destruction is justified to stop or bring attention to crimes against eco-systems, but they all stop short of hurting people, and the tactic is in any case heavily frowned upon within the movement as a whole.
The biggest problem with a "God did it" kind of theory, is it forces you to stop thinking at a big wall at some point, and just kind of go "Yeah ok, fine."
Examples of the wall. (Questions you have to avoid asking if you believe in God as source of way things are):
1. God created the universe and was particularly focussed on humans and gave us our character. a. So who or what created God? Not allowed to ask? b. What other things in the universe is God like? c. Is God physical in any way (embodied in matter and energy patterns somewhere/everywhere?) d. Why would God focus on an Ape species which happened to develop a generalized thinking and planning and language capability likely because it had very dexterous manipulators (arms and tree-branch gripping hands) that could be repurposed for a whole wide range of other tasks (spear chucking, house building, fire making etc) e. Why is the particular God of a particular human culture among many "the actual God" as opposed to just a "false god of myths" as other cultures' gods are? I want an actual reason, not some "that's just the way it is" claptrap.
2. Why do we need God to explain "Love thy neighbour" and co-operation/altruism strategies? We don't. These strategies are theromdynamically more efficient (more energy efficient) per unit of survival probability, through economies of scale and specialization that they permit.
What you fail to understand is that the want/need/incentive to deny that our current way of doing things is causing big problems is many orders of magnitude greater (more people, with a greater vested interest)
than the need of a particular group of scientists or environmental lobbyists to keep up their funding.
Scientists are clever, competent, and creative people. If funding for one topic dries up, they'll move to another with very little difficulty.
Comparing their self-interest (or a single politician's self-interest) against the self-interest of every person involved/implicated in a potentially negative core economic activity of society, is ridiculous propaganda. The former is miniscule compared to the latter. It's just that we don't notice the bias of our society as a whole because we are embedded in it.
Specifically what the previous replier is getting at is that for many purposes (to do organized work with energy) you need organized energy (you need two regions of space with an energy-level difference between them, so energy can flow in one direction between them, and that flow be converted into other organized forms of energy like a crankshaft turning or electrons flowing down a wire and making a light bulb in a particular place light up, etc.)
Heat is disorganized energy (energy with high entropy) and it takes other energy to simply lower the entropy in the heat energy, so heat energy that is widely dispersed is incredibly inefficient to turn back into valuable organized energy (low-entropy energy flows.)
Firstly, if you don't understand the difference between a bio-diverse, complex, ancient forest eco-system, and a monoculture tree farm with pesticides, then, well, you don't understand the difference between a bio-diverse, complex, ancient forest eco-system, and a monoculture tree farm with pesticides.
Secondly, 1920 is the wrong benchmark year. Try 1720, before the Europeans arrived en masse.
And if you want to assess forest cover loss for, say England or Ireland, check it against 1020AD.
I agree that's the usually accepted equation. But if society's consensus opinion is to reach for the handle that is going to flush that society down the drain, perhaps we might need to reconsider our definitions.
(Unless we take it one step further and call the society's self-destructive urge a sane and noble decision to self-sacrifice. It does get very muddy, doesn't it.)
Slashdot Mirror
discuss
I think we have to ask: What has the GPL done for us, or at least probably done for us?
Starting a decade ago several very large corporations poured significant resources into Linux development, and were compelled to keep their contributions open-licensed and essentially free (as in beer).
Do we think that would have been the case if Linux had been Apache or BSD-licensed, or would we instead see a division into deluxe IBMLinux (that works on multi-processors and new chips and 64-bit) and open Linux that scrapes along on simple 486 hardware.
The only thing wrong with applets is that they were hatched in 1995 with two serious limitations.
1. They had no effective way of caching code or data on the client machine (in a safe sandbox) and so had inherent performance limitations and interminable initial download waits for anything serious.
2. Microsoft successfully killed them by refusing to properly support (and default-install in the OS) a Java runtime environment.
If those two facts had been different, we would be living in a world of powerful rich-client web apps with Java on server-side and client-side.
Doctors' cursive writing needs to be banned, right quick. It's an embarrassment to the profession, and only they don't seem to realize it.
Data entry on a netbook would do just fine. Most people can type faster than they can write. And if you need abbreviations, a computer can assist with those too, with algorithms designed to prevent statistically likely data entry errors.
Tricks or affectations like cursive writing will have to go by the wayside. So will other similar "doctor as magician" incantations like the old trick of pretending to the patient that you know all about their disease simply because you have translated the words for their symptoms into latin, will have to go by the wayside, as information technology democratizes medical knowledge.
and are not suited to doing it well.
If that sounds elitist, so be it. Reality is that people have all kinds of different skills, and a small percentage are good programmers. I can't run a marathon or play a cello, and I don't mind anyone saying so.
While I agree with RMS that software should be free, I don't believe that means that people should not simply use information services that are provided for them on managed information infrastructure.
In the 70s if you wanted information, you hired a programmer to write a program for you.
In the 80s and 90s if you wanted information, you used a program that was already written.
In this decade, if you want information, you use an service on the web.
Unless you are that most rare breed; an open source software geek, in which case you may still be in the business of gluing together or even modifying programs and web services.
I would believe more that free software was intended for the masses if it had in general any kind of document quality or code simplicity. But expecting Joe Six-pack to deal with maven builds, hierarchical make files, and package dependency graphs. Hah!
Yes. If this were the nineteenth century, a patient could just take their charts around to different doctors by hand in a manila folder.
Firstly, I think we are running out of "manila" :-)
More importantly, there is currently an inherent excuse for lousy misinformed care by the "team" of doctors that maintains a person. I didn't get the memo. It was in a manila folder somewhere and it didn't get to me.
In the future, an obvious mistake made by a physician that could have been easily avoided by a quick scan or search of the always-available patient history would be absolutely inexcusable, and less likely to happen.
This info, if "googly" available, would lead to better care overall.
Right now we maintain software with much better info tools, and way more care about contextual history, documentation, and procedure than we maintain people. And that's scary, because we don't maintain software very well.
The information should legally belong to the patient, and health care providers and government should be required to create a system whereby the health records follow the person for life, regardless of jurisdiction or health care provider.
So the records would live in an independent information infrastructure, not owned by any particular health care provider.
And of course open standards would be needed to ensure interoperability of info systems that dealt with the records.
It seems clear to me there is going to be major forking action here, led by none other than some key leaders of the mysql project and company, who if I'm not terribly mistaken just recently left Sun.
I am hopeful that one of these forks becomes the dominant MySQL again.
MySQL. No! MySQL! MySQL! Mine. Mine.
(no major forking action jokes in reply please.)
Ford and GM--
You mean to say Toyota and Honda, I presume.
I designed one of these about a decade ago and did some prototyping. Since I don't seem to have the time to realize it, here are a few extra features that could be added (if i2p does not already include these).
Encrypted-file-fragmenting, auto-globally-migrating, auto-redundant replicating "virtual" data store layer. Stored files automatically seek to be replicated enough times to be guaranteed perpetually persistent, and also seek to move to newer and better physical storage sites, and to globally distribute themselves, and auto-cache near user when needed.
With this addition, we may have the basis for, for example, a Facebook-like on-line identity avatar which is not owned by a single company like Facebook but just floats around all over the P2P network, and is truly owned by the person who it is about.
With that freeing up of the online identity from external control, we could extend it to include important identity information needed for the citizen to function in society. Medical records, different identity numbers for different government agencies, your real-world address, etc. All of these properties about you could be placed online by you following standard protocols and placed only onto a secure virtual site in the i2. Permission model would of course be default no permission, opened incrementally to authorized and authenticated other parties.
If we had this, the onus could now be placed on governments, medical systems, post offices, etc. to come to your avatar and request permission to know your address, or your medical number etc. No more change of address rigamerole. No more problems in your paperwork or medical history maintenance because you happen to move to another state or country.
etc.
It all relies on the open standards for the info and privacy protocols, and on the confidence of the person to put their info into a secure, encrypted, and non-owned virtual internet location.
Qualifications for National CTO:
1. He/she has to know what he does and does not know.
(Debugging code teaches you this, and the appropriate level of humility, in spades.)
2. More generally, he/she has to have a rational enough mind about what is going to work and what not, based on scientific principles, including scientific sociological principles.
3. He/she has to be creative enough to understand and be appropriately excited by other most creative "next big things". i.e. he/she has to be able to imagine the next turning points in the technological future based on the possibilities and gaps in the technological present.
4. He/she has to be an excellent listener, with full comprehension, and an understanding of peoples' motivations, and thus an excellent communicator and leader.
Was it only me that noticed that the US media coverage of Barack Obama's election victory speech was carpet-bombed with mindf**k ads showing green leaves on a white background and the words "Clean-Coal".
I have to ask, what is it about me that makes me understand exactly what these powerful interests are doing to me when they do it, whereas it seems to escape most peoples' attention. That's bloody frightening.
In any case, I don't care how the US generates its energy as long as it reduces its carbon emission footprint rapidly down to 20% of its current value.
My favourite computer still is my 1024x768 screen 12inch iBook.
It is ONLY acceptable because of the UI feature that quickly shows miniaturized versions of the windows of all my running applications, and lets me pick one and get back into it in one click. That gets rid of most of the need for a large screen.
And the iphone ui is optimized for its screen size, etc.
Linux might do better on netbooks if a similar gui optimized for the screen size was available and worked well. I understand a few of these may be available but haven't tried any.
Have to say I'm holding out for an Apple netbook. UI of MacOSX is too much better.
I am an extreme comp-sci geek, but I have way better things to do than configure the low-level settings of my laptop.
What with Google and the Internet Archive that must consitute "publishing" your invention.
However in the, let's just say really "interesting" US patent system, I believe that someone else can read your invention online and patent it themselves within a year,
and then force you yourself to stop using your invention.
I could be wrong but that is my interpretation of the US rules.
It's pretty simple. Dictating what customers can do with their Internet-connected computers when you are a pipe provider is a no-no. Don't go there.
You shouldn't even by listening in anyway, perverts.
If you need to charge differential monthly rates for different amounts of bandwidth used or available to differnet subscribers, then by all means create a tiered rate structure, and compete with competitors (like new wi-max services) on it.
The Internet is an open and free and flexible worldwide connection of information processing and display devices to each other, and it needs to remain unbiased with respect to, and ideally, unknowledgeable about, the semantics of the content it carries, except in that one could imagine data saying "I want to be real-time, please help me" in an extremely general sense.
If you can't offer such an Internet, stay out of the business of pretending to offer it.
It's clear that the world-wide information collected and cross-indexed by Google is a potent source from which knowledge (statistical patterns of concept association and concept prevalence) can be mined.
This knowledge base will in fact be immensely useful to intelligent programs going forward.
Some of these programs may be used to create
virtual info-butlers (info-concierges) for each of us. A pro-active searcher and "modern-living" assistant that helps you both organize your life (local events to attend etc) and helps you have waiting for you like the morning newspaper the next level of researched and collated detail on the topics you are or should be next interested in to solve your life or work problems, or sate your particular curiosity.
Other intelligent and "google-informed" intelligent programs will work for government and corporations, constantly digging for notable patterns of change in the behavour of people (individual and en masse) and competing entities.
Scary but inevitable, that last bit.
"The web gives AI something to do".
I will keep an open mind to signs of God in my life, but to be honest I can only imagine God to be another word for the universe as a whole, the "why there is something rather than nothing" (and that doesn't help me out much in daily life other than by making it possible, in a general sense.)
Regarding your last point about teaching love, I did not mean to imply that teaching love is not necessary. The energy-efficiency (for living systems) of forgiving and cooperating strategies accrues at the society super-organism level, and only indirectly trickles down to the individual. So the society develops teaching institutions to teach these principles, for society-as-a-whole's own sake. People grudgingly accept these institutionalized admonitions against selfishness because they intuitively (correctly) admit it is better in general for all if we live that way.
As humans, we are two things: system builders, and story makers. And God is one of our greatest stories that brings other stories together into a theme for living. We do need story-guidance to live well, because otherwise we are creative enough to invent many bad, unsuccessful
life paths and strategies that have been tried before and warned about in stories.
What I believe in is a careful reflection on how we should come to believe, and what it means to do so. I believe in other things too, but that is the over-arching meta-belief: "Think well, believe well, know well, and know when you don't know."
For the record, I was referring to the tactic of property damage as being heavily frowned upon, not the tactic of violence against people, which is universally condemned.
I submit that there is a large difference between, say, for the sake of argument ;-) rolling your logging truck parked in the old growth forest off a cliff, and torching it with you in it. The mainstream media, and now the US government, makes no distinction, largely because they want to keep logging old growth forests.
Remember that while terrorism is a (repulsive and stupid) tactic, labelling activists terrorists is also a tactic in the conflict.
If the blog system had used something like TOR, and also not forced the creation of an account with a real email address, she would have had a better chance of staying 'muddy'.
Or I guess if she'd wanted to she could have posted from random web cafes, without logging in to an account, but I guess in Alaska, not too many of those cafes, and the neighbours would be gossipin' about her strange furtiveness in the cafe.
Firstly, humans (myself included) are not the be-all and end-all on this planet, and if you disagree with that you're an a$$.
Secondly, the overwhelming majority of environmental activists are strong believers in non-violence. It is contradictory to their cause not to be. There is a tiny fringe that believes that property destruction is justified to stop or bring attention to crimes against eco-systems, but they all stop short of hurting people, and the tactic is in any case heavily frowned upon within the movement as a whole.
The biggest problem with a "God did it" kind of theory, is it forces you to stop thinking at a big wall at some point, and just kind of go "Yeah ok, fine."
Examples of the wall. (Questions you have to avoid asking if you believe in God as source of way things are):
1. God created the universe and was particularly focussed on humans and gave us our character.
a. So who or what created God? Not allowed to ask?
b. What other things in the universe is God like?
c. Is God physical in any way (embodied in matter and energy patterns somewhere/everywhere?)
d. Why would God focus on an Ape species which happened to develop a generalized thinking and planning and language capability likely because it had very dexterous manipulators (arms and tree-branch gripping hands) that could be repurposed for a whole wide range of other tasks (spear chucking, house building, fire making etc)
e. Why is the particular God of a particular human culture among many "the actual God" as opposed to just a "false god of myths" as other cultures' gods are? I want an actual reason, not some "that's just the way it is" claptrap.
2. Why do we need God to explain "Love thy neighbour" and co-operation/altruism strategies? We don't. These strategies are theromdynamically more efficient (more energy efficient) per unit of survival probability, through economies of scale and specialization that they permit.
What you fail to understand is that the want/need/incentive to deny that our current way of doing things is causing big problems is many orders of magnitude greater (more people, with a greater vested interest)
than the need of a particular group of scientists or environmental lobbyists to keep up their funding.
Scientists are clever, competent, and creative people. If funding for one topic dries up, they'll move to another with very little difficulty.
Comparing their self-interest (or a single politician's self-interest) against the self-interest of every person involved/implicated in a potentially negative core economic activity of society, is ridiculous propaganda. The former is miniscule compared to the latter. It's just that we don't notice the bias of our society as a whole because we are embedded in it.
Specifically what the previous replier is getting at is that for many purposes (to do organized work with energy) you need organized energy (you need two regions of space with an energy-level difference between them, so energy can flow in one direction between them, and that flow be converted into other organized forms of energy like a crankshaft turning or electrons flowing down a wire and making a light bulb in a particular place light up, etc.)
Heat is disorganized energy (energy with high entropy) and it takes other energy to simply lower the entropy in the heat energy, so heat energy that is widely dispersed is incredibly inefficient to turn back into valuable organized energy (low-entropy energy flows.)
Clear as mud?
Firstly, if you don't understand the difference between a bio-diverse, complex, ancient forest eco-system, and a monoculture tree farm with pesticides,
then, well,
you don't understand the difference between a bio-diverse, complex, ancient forest eco-system, and a monoculture tree farm with pesticides.
Secondly, 1920 is the wrong benchmark year.
Try 1720, before the Europeans arrived en masse.
And if you want to assess forest cover loss for, say England or Ireland, check it against 1020AD.
For Greece, check it against 1000BC
You get my point.
I agree that's the usually accepted equation. But if society's consensus opinion is to reach for the handle that is going to flush that society down the drain, perhaps we might need to reconsider our definitions.
(Unless we take it one step further and call the society's self-destructive urge a sane and noble
decision to self-sacrifice.
It does get very muddy, doesn't it.)