.. a massively international software company like Microsoft would have long ago figured already that making global software release date announcements based on seasons is just plain stupid. Or will those of us in the Southern Hemisphere get the software six months earlier? "This summer" this, "this fall" that, don't they teach geography there? Not to mention that "fall" is only used in a subset of the English-speaking world.
Granted it was most likely a mistake, but it's not unusual to report on both the first and second derivatives of things like sales (assume S = unit sales, S' = increase/decrease in unit sales, S'' is the rate at which S' is changing). In fact the second derivative is far more interesting, because if your absolute unit sales are increasing but the rate of increase is busy slowing down (i.e. S'' is negative), you will not see this important harbinger until it's too late (i.e. until S' goes negative) if you only look at the first derivative. S' can tell you where you are in the market, S'' tells you where you're going.
(Using the wrong derivative is a common way to "lie with statistics" or to incorrectly evaluate situations. E.g. people who want to ban violent computer games may point to "increased incarceration (I) for violent crimes" (positive first derivative I') as if to demonstrate rising violent crime linked to games, however I'' has been negative for many years now. People get confused between "rate of increase/decrease" and "rate of change of increase/decrease".)
Funny, I was just shopping for a new Nokia phone when I read about this, and also decided it's time to switch to another brand.
(I suppose that might make me a zealot in some eyes, but I have to deal with enough of MS's crappy overpriced half-broken junk APIs and OS in my "professional" life as software developer, and I really just don't want their brand anywhere else in my life, nor do I want to support a company that clearly has never cared about quality.)
We already know that carrots... can reduce the risk of cancer but until now we have not known which element of the vegetable has these special properties.
This is new (and good) news, they've discovered what element (or, at least one of the elements) that has the anti-carcinogen properties.
I must say I find rather tiresome the seemingly endless lineup of people eagerly waiting to reveal their "cleverness" by shooting down every single article as "old news", even when it's not.
You're right, human rights abuses are only interesting when it's new/exciting information.. because it's not about the information, it's all about the topical buzz, the fashionable memes, yeah man. I mean who wants to discuss China's ongoing human rights abuses, that's like sooo yesterday already! What's "cool" today?
Why the hell would it be smarter to "move apps to OS X"?
To put it another way: it's smarter because allowing yourself (or your customers) to be locked in to a single vendor means that single vendor can charge monopoly ("what the market will bear") pricing for their solutions. In other words, it's smarter because if everyone does it, single-vendors can't extort exorbitant profits from you. If two platform vendors stood on equal footing, unless they fixed prices it would naturally reduce the extortion rates (I don't know about you, but 80% profit margins seem to prove this point!)
Something else to consider is that porting to any second platform from Win32/MFC etc. is usually "the" major step, and porting to a third platform is usually minimal, cost-wise, because once you've ported once, you've already done the vast majority of the work in organizing your code for portability. If you do it right, and choose the right APIs, the cost proportions can look more or less like this e.g.:
(Step 1) Original Windows development: 2 man-years
(Step 2) Linux port: 4 months
(Step 3) Mac port: 6 weeks
This makes a Mac OS port almost a "no-brainer". Oh, and the above example is a real example of a project I'm currently nearing completion of.
Ha, I notice you carefully said "Windows generally wins out" and not "Windows is a better option". Because Windows is of course not a "better" desktop OS... it only "generally wins out" because of other factors not relating to OS quality, and in fact the primary factor is lack of application support (games, business apps etc.). But hang on, this is exactly the topic of the discussion: porting apps to platforms like Mac OS to fix the "lack of application support" problem.. so what was your point again? Actually all you just did is reference the "chicken and egg" problem. And the reason people want to solve this problem is that there are better eggs out there.. or is that better chickens? Whatever. It's "smarter" from a macro-economic perspective because using a better platform increases productivity and efficiency and lowers downtime and training costs, increasing the competitiveness and productivity of the economy, and makes peoples lives easier.
How do you manage to equate existence of applications for an OS with quality of underlying OS? That's absurd. The apps run on top of the OS. That's like saying that my old rundown jalopy is a better car than your Porsche because I put an expensive radio in it.
Firstly, simple things like spawning threads/processes are typically the least of your worries when porting a Win32/MFC app, because these are small simple APIs with no or little dependencies and easy to abstract. It usually takes a few hours to give these wrappers and add a few simple preprocessor directives (e.g. #ifdef WIN32) to compile the right implementation on the right platform. GUI stuff is usually the big pain.
Secondly: I wonder what all these classes are then: wxCriticalSection, wxThread, wxMutex, etc. wxWidgets covers a lot of stuff, not just UI stuff. We use it for our apps, and it really is a great solution, not only is it a well-designed easy to use API, but has "native look and feel" on each platform.
Rather. I must say I've seen many examples of very successful and well-designed systems implemented by programmers that used HN. And likewise I've seen a lot of incredibly retarded code (far worse than not allocating space for the NULL terminator character) by people who didn't use HN. The key as with any tool is to use it properly. Bad programmers are going to produce bad code no matter what notation they use, and good programmers are going to be successful no matter what notation they use. Slam bad programmers for being bad programmers, and end it there. I'm not sure why GP has such rabid feelings about this issue.
Seriously though, all apes can think, not just humans, although we are probably better than the other apes. Many other animals can think too. I'm not sure what you meant by that.
We didn't "descend from apes", we're one type of ape. Just like we don't say tigers "descended from cats", they're just one type of cat.
And if I were on a Mac, I'd expect it to look and feel like on a Mac. I would _not_ want an app that looks and acts like Windows (e.g., wants me to right-click) in the middle of an Aqua desktop.
You are 100% right --- ported apps should have "native look and feel" on each platform! A good cross-platform API that has been designed with this goal in mind since the start is wxWidgets.
Reduced efficiency I'll give you, but because (and only because) Win32 and MFC are such mind-numbingly bad APIs, writing portable code can often be a massive time-saver if you use more well-designed libraries, like wxWidgets... for our company's main project, I estimate that choosing wxWidgets over Win32 or MFC easily cut down development time by 30% (and that's in spite of our developers all having Win32/MFC experience). And as a bonus, our code is now only a stone's throw away from Linux and Mac ports, which we fully intend on developing.
Darwinism doesn't explain everything as tidily as some may think
There are gaps in the scientific body knowledge regarding many of the various mechanisms by which evolution takes place. However this does not invalidate evolution at all, it simply means we don't yet understand all of its mechanisms. But the evidence strongly suggests there are mechanisms, and these are being studied, and one by one we are uncovering them through a rigorous scientific process, which yes, takes time, but is providing provable explanations for the gaps. Some may regard ID as one possibly hypothesis for explaining the gaps, however ID is abysmally poor as a scientific explanation, it's a little like waving your hand and saying, we had a species that looked like this "... and then as if by magic, poof..." it then looked like that. In other words ID is not really explaining anything at all, while in the meantime the real science continues, and is successully and increasingly uncovering knowledge of the "missing pieces" that actually makes sense, without the need for an 'intelligent designer'. ID is a pacifier for babies who can't handle a worldview that has gaps in it. Mankind's knowledge has always had gaps, and Christians, with their child-like need to never feel the anxiety and uncertainty of simply not knowing all the answers, have always tried to fill those gaps with God-based explanations... historically though they've been proven wrong every single time as science uncovered more provable knowledge to explain the gaps. Of course, those proponents of evolutionary theory who imply that we understand evolution perfectly are doing a disservice to science. That doesn't cast evolution's existence in doubt, in fact, evolution has long been proven far beyond any reasonable doubt. You would do yourself good to follow some of the current scientific literature on this. Some of the things are experiments you can verify "in your own back yard" if you like, e.g. studies on selection mechanisms, gene expression and so on in plant species. Evolution happens.
So as the computer simulations become increasingly sophisticated, can we expect the virtual organisms to at some point become intelligent enough to start pondering whether or not their Universe is real, or if they're just part of some huge computer simulation? Hehe.. it seems plausible.. nay, it seems inevitable. Presumably intelligent virtual creatures might study the mechanics of the world they live in, as we study physics, and perhaps they may even uncover evidence that it is a simulation. In any case, the current models are obviously far too simple for that.
I think it takes more faith to believe in the (ever changing) beliefs of science
Well there's your problem right there: If you want beliefs that are comfortingly and reassuringly rock solid and stable and never change, then science really isn't for you. The "beliefs" in science must change as we learn new information that either adds to or contradicts previous theories. Only babies need comforting 'fairy tale explanations' of the world (because the idea that Santa doesn't exist is too upsetting)... science is for grown-ups, who are able to handle the idea that we don't yet know all the answers but are still learning without crumbling. And science, ironically, is why we have chairs and computers - the computer you're using was created by the very scientists you're dissing, using "beliefs" that go far beyond the information the Bible has to offer. If we stuck to your faith, we'd still be living in mud huts and fetching water from the river, thank God for science is all I can say.
An additional benefit with large organisms (or rather, organisms with brains) is that they can also actively play a part in the gene selection process by evaluating potential mates in an intelligent and decidedly non-random way. Usually (but not always) there is some reasonably rational basis for the selection that ties in with suitability to survival (and more importantly rejecting mates that are poorly suited to survival), so we see with many animals that females will choose the strongest males to mate with, and ignore weaker males or those that appear to have defects. Similar thing when males choose females, although other criteria may be used, usually these are linked to child bearing and raising capabilities.
Weaver birds as an example are notoriously picky about choosing males that are good at building nests - obviously important for successful reproduction.
Intelligent organisms are thus active participants in the evolutionary process - they/we guide it. Each species collectively makes these unintended decisions every time an individual chooses a mate about which "direction" they would like the species to go.
Asexual reproduction doesn't provide an organism the opportunity to make intelligent decisions about the genetic material of its offspring.
There is an interesting book on this topic called "The Mating Mind : How sexual choice shaped the evolution of human nature". It's interesting that sometimes a characteristic may be chosen not out of suitability to survival, but purely out of a kind of "cultural" preference that develops. E.g. Orangotans at some point in their past must have decided they like to be that particular shade of orange. We may "culturally" decide that blondes are hot, thereby "guiding" our species towards becoming increasingly blonde (although that is unlikely to happen, it's just an example).
Heh.. I'd +1 you insightful if I could. I don't know of any living thing that automatically maintains an equilibrium with it's environment, and certainly not any of the other mammals. If you study population dynamics you learn about the wild fluctuations that continually naturally occur as populations stretch back and forth between consuming excess populations of their prey, and then snap back as they either basically run out and/or their own predators catch up to them. Lacking enemies, all animals/insects etc. will consume every last bit of food available that they can. E.g. a bunch of aphids on a lone bush will multiply out of hand and literally kill that bush leaving themselves with no food. When elephant populations in game parks get out of control, they destroy everything, they'll uproot every last tree if some means like culling isn't used to limit the population. It's all actually very chaotic, and I'm sure many species relatively often die out during these natural cycles, and often come close.
The difference with humans is that we regard animals as "not knowing any better", while we are "supposed to" have the ability to understand and control what we are doing, and be able to be more sensible about it. And humans can and do in some cases live in equilibrium with their environment too... the closest we have to this are some agrarian cultures, and a few other hunter-gatherer groups like Amazonian tribes and the African Khoi/San ("bushmen"). It seems a little ironic to me that we tend to regard such cultures as "backwards" and "primitive" when in fact I would consider "having a sustainable system" a characteristic of an intelligent/advanced culture. Of course I'm not advocating a return to a technologically primitive society, I think we can have technology and sustainability too, if we are smart about it, technology holds potential solutions to sustainability.
You're half-right, it was a little exaggerated... we can sometimes "get it right"; the global response to the ozone hole problem, although delayed by +/- 15 years too long, proves we are able to overcome large problems like this. For some reason though, I just don't see the same thing happening (yet?) with the global climate change problem. Maybe it just needs more time. I hope so. People only moved on the ozone layer once it became indisputably obvious there was a very serious problem. With climate change we're pretty much at the point where scientific evidence shows conclusively there is a very serious problem. But right now though, we're pretty much scoring equal with the virus in terms of action, I'm afraid. Recognizing a problem is meaningless if you don't or can't act on it.
Uhm.. believe it or not I only saw the first one, of which I don't remember terribly much as it was long ago, and I remember my opinion being that although it wasn't bad, it was rather overrated.
Interesting site that. Tell me, as an "outsider", why are discussions relating to ecology so highly politicized in the US? This seems strange to everyone elsewhere, where "science is science", and regarding the natural world isn't totally tangled up with political rhetoric. It's just science, which makes it all seem clearer to begin with.
Oh I get it, you're saying that it's OK to mod someone as "-1, Flamebait" if they don't agree with me. I've got news for you, that's NOT the definition of flamebait.
Oh, and it has nothing to do with whether or not the person disagrees with me, I don't care if they disagree with me, but they are "disagreeing" with a very large body of published peer-reviewed science. Would you moderate all that science down "-1 flamebait" too? Yes? Well that makes you an idiot. Don't argue with me.. argue with the facts.
Mt. Saint Helens released methane equal to traffic jams for the next 5 years, and this is per day
That's so interesting, except it's just not true.
If you don't "see how humans have a major impact", then perhaps you should read some science journals that publish the findings of why this is so, and study the underlying science, and maybe you'll start to understand why it is so. A large body of published reviewed science based on proper data and models trumps your uninformed intuition, I'm afraid.
Slashdot Mirror
.. a massively international software company like Microsoft would have long ago figured already that making global software release date announcements based on seasons is just plain stupid. Or will those of us in the Southern Hemisphere get the software six months earlier? "This summer" this, "this fall" that, don't they teach geography there? Not to mention that "fall" is only used in a subset of the English-speaking world.
Granted it was most likely a mistake, but it's not unusual to report on both the first and second derivatives of things like sales (assume S = unit sales, S' = increase/decrease in unit sales, S'' is the rate at which S' is changing). In fact the second derivative is far more interesting, because if your absolute unit sales are increasing but the rate of increase is busy slowing down (i.e. S'' is negative), you will not see this important harbinger until it's too late (i.e. until S' goes negative) if you only look at the first derivative. S' can tell you where you are in the market, S'' tells you where you're going.
(Using the wrong derivative is a common way to "lie with statistics" or to incorrectly evaluate situations. E.g. people who want to ban violent computer games may point to "increased incarceration (I) for violent crimes" (positive first derivative I') as if to demonstrate rising violent crime linked to games, however I'' has been negative for many years now. People get confused between "rate of increase/decrease" and "rate of change of increase/decrease".)
Funny, I was just shopping for a new Nokia phone when I read about this, and also decided it's time to switch to another brand.
(I suppose that might make me a zealot in some eyes, but I have to deal with enough of MS's crappy overpriced half-broken junk APIs and OS in my "professional" life as software developer, and I really just don't want their brand anywhere else in my life, nor do I want to support a company that clearly has never cared about quality.)
From the FS (Summary), never mind the FA:
We already know that carrots ... can reduce the risk of cancer but until now we have not known which element of the vegetable has these special properties.
This is new (and good) news, they've discovered what element (or, at least one of the elements) that has the anti-carcinogen properties.
I must say I find rather tiresome the seemingly endless lineup of people eagerly waiting to reveal their "cleverness" by shooting down every single article as "old news", even when it's not.
You're right, human rights abuses are only interesting when it's new/exciting information .. because it's not about the information, it's all about the topical buzz, the fashionable memes, yeah man. I mean who wants to discuss China's ongoing human rights abuses, that's like sooo yesterday already! What's "cool" today?
Why the hell would it be smarter to "move apps to OS X"?
To put it another way: it's smarter because allowing yourself (or your customers) to be locked in to a single vendor means that single vendor can charge monopoly ("what the market will bear") pricing for their solutions. In other words, it's smarter because if everyone does it, single-vendors can't extort exorbitant profits from you. If two platform vendors stood on equal footing, unless they fixed prices it would naturally reduce the extortion rates (I don't know about you, but 80% profit margins seem to prove this point!)
Something else to consider is that porting to any second platform from Win32/MFC etc. is usually "the" major step, and porting to a third platform is usually minimal, cost-wise, because once you've ported once, you've already done the vast majority of the work in organizing your code for portability. If you do it right, and choose the right APIs, the cost proportions can look more or less like this e.g.:
This makes a Mac OS port almost a "no-brainer". Oh, and the above example is a real example of a project I'm currently nearing completion of.
Ha, I notice you carefully said "Windows generally wins out" and not "Windows is a better option". Because Windows is of course not a "better" desktop OS ... it only "generally wins out" because of other factors not relating to OS quality, and in fact the primary factor is lack of application support (games, business apps etc.). But hang on, this is exactly the topic of the discussion: porting apps to platforms like Mac OS to fix the "lack of application support" problem .. so what was your point again? Actually all you just did is reference the "chicken and egg" problem. And the reason people want to solve this problem is that there are better eggs out there .. or is that better chickens? Whatever. It's "smarter" from a macro-economic perspective because using a better platform increases productivity and efficiency and lowers downtime and training costs, increasing the competitiveness and productivity of the economy, and makes peoples lives easier.
Feeding the troll .. ugh ..
How do you manage to equate existence of applications for an OS with quality of underlying OS? That's absurd. The apps run on top of the OS. That's like saying that my old rundown jalopy is a better car than your Porsche because I put an expensive radio in it.
Firstly, simple things like spawning threads/processes are typically the least of your worries when porting a Win32/MFC app, because these are small simple APIs with no or little dependencies and easy to abstract. It usually takes a few hours to give these wrappers and add a few simple preprocessor directives (e.g. #ifdef WIN32) to compile the right implementation on the right platform. GUI stuff is usually the big pain.
Secondly: I wonder what all these classes are then: wxCriticalSection, wxThread, wxMutex, etc. wxWidgets covers a lot of stuff, not just UI stuff. We use it for our apps, and it really is a great solution, not only is it a well-designed easy to use API, but has "native look and feel" on each platform.
Rather. I must say I've seen many examples of very successful and well-designed systems implemented by programmers that used HN. And likewise I've seen a lot of incredibly retarded code (far worse than not allocating space for the NULL terminator character) by people who didn't use HN. The key as with any tool is to use it properly. Bad programmers are going to produce bad code no matter what notation they use, and good programmers are going to be successful no matter what notation they use. Slam bad programmers for being bad programmers, and end it there. I'm not sure why GP has such rabid feelings about this issue.
Seriously though, all apes can think, not just humans, although we are probably better than the other apes. Many other animals can think too. I'm not sure what you meant by that.
We didn't "descend from apes", we're one type of ape. Just like we don't say tigers "descended from cats", they're just one type of cat.
show me the ape which has conquered the planet, which has tamed the forces of nature, which thinks
Here.
And if I were on a Mac, I'd expect it to look and feel like on a Mac. I would _not_ want an app that looks and acts like Windows (e.g., wants me to right-click) in the middle of an Aqua desktop.
You are 100% right --- ported apps should have "native look and feel" on each platform! A good cross-platform API that has been designed with this goal in mind since the start is wxWidgets.
Reduced efficiency I'll give you, but because (and only because) Win32 and MFC are such mind-numbingly bad APIs, writing portable code can often be a massive time-saver if you use more well-designed libraries, like wxWidgets ... for our company's main project, I estimate that choosing wxWidgets over Win32 or MFC easily cut down development time by 30% (and that's in spite of our developers all having Win32/MFC experience). And as a bonus, our code is now only a stone's throw away from Linux and Mac ports, which we fully intend on developing.
Darwinism doesn't explain everything as tidily as some may think
There are gaps in the scientific body knowledge regarding many of the various mechanisms by which evolution takes place. However this does not invalidate evolution at all, it simply means we don't yet understand all of its mechanisms. But the evidence strongly suggests there are mechanisms, and these are being studied, and one by one we are uncovering them through a rigorous scientific process, which yes, takes time, but is providing provable explanations for the gaps. Some may regard ID as one possibly hypothesis for explaining the gaps, however ID is abysmally poor as a scientific explanation, it's a little like waving your hand and saying, we had a species that looked like this "... and then as if by magic, poof ..." it then looked like that. In other words ID is not really explaining anything at all, while in the meantime the real science continues, and is successully and increasingly uncovering knowledge of the "missing pieces" that actually makes sense, without the need for an 'intelligent designer'. ID is a pacifier for babies who can't handle a worldview that has gaps in it. Mankind's knowledge has always had gaps, and Christians, with their child-like need to never feel the anxiety and uncertainty of simply not knowing all the answers, have always tried to fill those gaps with God-based explanations ... historically though they've been proven wrong every single time as science uncovered more provable knowledge to explain the gaps. Of course, those proponents of evolutionary theory who imply that we understand evolution perfectly are doing a disservice to science. That doesn't cast evolution's existence in doubt, in fact, evolution has long been proven far beyond any reasonable doubt. You would do yourself good to follow some of the current scientific literature on this. Some of the things are experiments you can verify "in your own back yard" if you like, e.g. studies on selection mechanisms, gene expression and so on in plant species. Evolution happens.
So as the computer simulations become increasingly sophisticated, can we expect the virtual organisms to at some point become intelligent enough to start pondering whether or not their Universe is real, or if they're just part of some huge computer simulation? Hehe .. it seems plausible .. nay, it seems inevitable. Presumably intelligent virtual creatures might study the mechanics of the world they live in, as we study physics, and perhaps they may even uncover evidence that it is a simulation. In any case, the current models are obviously far too simple for that.
I think it takes more faith to believe in the (ever changing) beliefs of science
Well there's your problem right there: If you want beliefs that are comfortingly and reassuringly rock solid and stable and never change, then science really isn't for you. The "beliefs" in science must change as we learn new information that either adds to or contradicts previous theories. Only babies need comforting 'fairy tale explanations' of the world (because the idea that Santa doesn't exist is too upsetting) ... science is for grown-ups, who are able to handle the idea that we don't yet know all the answers but are still learning without crumbling. And science, ironically, is why we have chairs and computers - the computer you're using was created by the very scientists you're dissing, using "beliefs" that go far beyond the information the Bible has to offer. If we stuck to your faith, we'd still be living in mud huts and fetching water from the river, thank God for science is all I can say.
An additional benefit with large organisms (or rather, organisms with brains) is that they can also actively play a part in the gene selection process by evaluating potential mates in an intelligent and decidedly non-random way. Usually (but not always) there is some reasonably rational basis for the selection that ties in with suitability to survival (and more importantly rejecting mates that are poorly suited to survival), so we see with many animals that females will choose the strongest males to mate with, and ignore weaker males or those that appear to have defects. Similar thing when males choose females, although other criteria may be used, usually these are linked to child bearing and raising capabilities.
Weaver birds as an example are notoriously picky about choosing males that are good at building nests - obviously important for successful reproduction.
Intelligent organisms are thus active participants in the evolutionary process - they/we guide it. Each species collectively makes these unintended decisions every time an individual chooses a mate about which "direction" they would like the species to go.
Asexual reproduction doesn't provide an organism the opportunity to make intelligent decisions about the genetic material of its offspring.
There is an interesting book on this topic called "The Mating Mind : How sexual choice shaped the evolution of human nature". It's interesting that sometimes a characteristic may be chosen not out of suitability to survival, but purely out of a kind of "cultural" preference that develops. E.g. Orangotans at some point in their past must have decided they like to be that particular shade of orange. We may "culturally" decide that blondes are hot, thereby "guiding" our species towards becoming increasingly blonde (although that is unlikely to happen, it's just an example).
Heh .. I'd +1 you insightful if I could. I don't know of any living thing that automatically maintains an equilibrium with it's environment, and certainly not any of the other mammals. If you study population dynamics you learn about the wild fluctuations that continually naturally occur as populations stretch back and forth between consuming excess populations of their prey, and then snap back as they either basically run out and/or their own predators catch up to them. Lacking enemies, all animals/insects etc. will consume every last bit of food available that they can. E.g. a bunch of aphids on a lone bush will multiply out of hand and literally kill that bush leaving themselves with no food. When elephant populations in game parks get out of control, they destroy everything, they'll uproot every last tree if some means like culling isn't used to limit the population. It's all actually very chaotic, and I'm sure many species relatively often die out during these natural cycles, and often come close.
The difference with humans is that we regard animals as "not knowing any better", while we are "supposed to" have the ability to understand and control what we are doing, and be able to be more sensible about it. And humans can and do in some cases live in equilibrium with their environment too ... the closest we have to this are some agrarian cultures, and a few other hunter-gatherer groups like Amazonian tribes and the African Khoi/San ("bushmen"). It seems a little ironic to me that we tend to regard such cultures as "backwards" and "primitive" when in fact I would consider "having a sustainable system" a characteristic of an intelligent/advanced culture. Of course I'm not advocating a return to a technologically primitive society, I think we can have technology and sustainability too, if we are smart about it, technology holds potential solutions to sustainability.
You're half-right, it was a little exaggerated ... we can sometimes "get it right"; the global response to the ozone hole problem, although delayed by +/- 15 years too long, proves we are able to overcome large problems like this. For some reason though, I just don't see the same thing happening (yet?) with the global climate change problem. Maybe it just needs more time. I hope so. People only moved on the ozone layer once it became indisputably obvious there was a very serious problem. With climate change we're pretty much at the point where scientific evidence shows conclusively there is a very serious problem. But right now though, we're pretty much scoring equal with the virus in terms of action, I'm afraid. Recognizing a problem is meaningless if you don't or can't act on it.
Uhm .. believe it or not I only saw the first one, of which I don't remember terribly much as it was long ago, and I remember my opinion being that although it wasn't bad, it was rather overrated.
Interesting site that. Tell me, as an "outsider", why are discussions relating to ecology so highly politicized in the US? This seems strange to everyone elsewhere, where "science is science", and regarding the natural world isn't totally tangled up with political rhetoric. It's just science, which makes it all seem clearer to begin with.
What are you talking about? I don't get it.
Oh I get it, you're saying that it's OK to mod someone as "-1, Flamebait" if they don't agree with me. I've got news for you, that's NOT the definition of flamebait.
Oh, and it has nothing to do with whether or not the person disagrees with me, I don't care if they disagree with me, but they are "disagreeing" with a very large body of published peer-reviewed science. Would you moderate all that science down "-1 flamebait" too? Yes? Well that makes you an idiot. Don't argue with me .. argue with the facts.
Mt. Saint Helens released methane equal to traffic jams for the next 5 years, and this is per day
That's so interesting, except it's just not true.
If you don't "see how humans have a major impact", then perhaps you should read some science journals that publish the findings of why this is so, and study the underlying science, and maybe you'll start to understand why it is so. A large body of published reviewed science based on proper data and models trumps your uninformed intuition, I'm afraid.