"Biodiesel yields 3.2 units of fuel product energy for every unit of fossil energy consumed in its life cycle." The report continues, "By contrast, Petroleum diesel's life cycle yields only 0.83 units of fuel energy per unit of fossil energy consumed."
Although accidents could be a serious problems (along with terrorism), the real problem is waste disposal, and Europe doesn't have a good solution there either.
Right now, everybody is just keeping the stuff in more or less temporary holding facilities. And if you take into account the costs and resources required to maintain that kind of storage over decades and centuries, nuclear energy starts looking a lot less attractive. But we just allow nuclear power plants to pretend those costs don't exist, and in the long run, the tax payer has to shoulder them.
I tried just running it, but it doesn't seem to just work with the mailbox or preferences from Thunderbird 0.8. Furthermore, its "import" feature doesn't specifically talk about importing from Thunderbird 0.8, so it wasn't clear to me whether I could even import from 0.8 (with several hundred megabytes of mail, I didn't want to risk it).
Has anybody had more luck running 0.9 after using 0.8? Does import work?
Whether Apple wants to announce support for industry-standard features in their apps before they are ready to ship them is really for Apple management to decide. I actually think they should stop announcing features before they are ready to ship them.
The real question one has to ask is why Apple isn't already shipping these features. According to Apple, isn't Cocoa such a super-productive platform that implementing and testing such features should be really easy? So, why is it taking them so long to provide features that many other mail clients have had for a while?
The obvious political hurdles are (a) the left opposes nuclear energy,
Well, the problem is where to dispose of the stuff. While "the right" likes to talk about how wonderful nuclear energy is, it doesn't have a solution either. Right-wing and centrist ideology these days wants to leave stuff to the market, but it is pretty obvious that the market hasn't provided a safe, cost-effective solution for storing and disposing of the stuff. The only reason we have nuclear energy at all is because the government assumes the risk and takes the stuff off the hands of nuclear plant operators.
When the right talks about how wonderful nuclear energy is, what it really amounts to is a massive government program to subsidize nuclear power plant operators, who would not dream of building such a risky and costly power plant out of their own pocket, and it amounts to a massive taking of private property, namely those people whose lands are devalued or affected by the nuclear waste dump (but those people are just "the little people", so "the right" doesn't care).
In any case, there you have it: the reason why nuclear energy isn't used more widely is because it simply isn't cost effective; they only reason we are using it at all is because we are ignoring some of the costliest parts of it, foremost the disposal problem.
But the metal entity with your memories would be very different in many ways.
If somebody wakes up tomorrow thinking he's me, with some sufficient proportion of my memories, attitudes and other faculties all nicely intact, then he's me.
The question whether he "is" "you" is useless semantics IMO. The real question is: given the choice, would you like to create a second you with all your memories and should society permit you to do that.
You make the very same leap of faith every night when you go to sleep.
There is no "leap of faith" involved there: I very much hope that I become different persons day after day, and the choice is clearly proscribed. But with "uploading", it is entirely unclear what kind of person you would create, and you do actually have a choice whether and how to do it.
There was no clear delivery, no clear ideology, NO RESPONSE to the clear Republican attacks.
All other things aside, Kerry should have torn apart Bush on the military issue alone; it is simply amazing that a decorated Vietnam soldier had to take that kind of abuse from a coward and drunk like Bush.
1) There were no riots in the street. 2) All candidates who started the election process are still alive today. 3) No cities are on fire and there is no looting 4) We all witnessed a historical election which will set the tone for the next generation and we all traveled to work as if it was a normal day.
Well, the same could be said about elections in the former East Germany.
This is the process that the founding fathers envisioned.
The founding fathers did not envision democracy to go smoothly and easily every election, and they certainly did not want Americans to be turned into frightened sheep for the monetary gain of a president and his cronies.
A patent on "spherical planning" (maybe something related to planning sequences of viewpoints under contraints) might have had some novelty in the 1980's.
This patent seems to be on being able to "spherically pan", i.e., change the direction you are looking into, in a 3D graphics system. The claimed novelty, such as it is, isn't even that, it seems to be that the 3D models are "downloaded" and that the user can manipulate them "locally" within the 3D graphics "terminal".
The problems with this patent claim?
It shouldn't even have been granted in 1988.
Even if it were valid, the hardware manufacturers, not the game authors, would be infringing it.
Modern 3D graphics systems have a completely different structure. In fact, they have just the structure that the patent derides as "inefficient".
But, I think it is great when the "McKool Smith's" of this world go out and start sueing everybody in sight. As long as the patent system only harms the little inventor and small companies, nothing is going to happen. But when the big boys get inconvenienced by lawsuits, maybe things will change.
It'll be hard to compete against Oracle, who is already a player in the linux market.
Yes, in particular since the reason most people use Oracle is the fact that everybody is running it ("you don't get fired for running the same DB software as all the other financial institutions"), not that it is necessarily actually faster or more reliable. It's hard to compete with that.
it calls a Trusted Open Source License. Despite retaining control over the products and features generated by the open source community, the Islandia, N.Y.-based company has generated a lot of interest in Ingres.
If CA "retains control over the products and features", then it doesn't sound like it's open source. It's only open source if people have the right to fork the project and make incompatible changes. And that's an important ability because that is what, ultimately, keeps the original developers on their toes.
People working in AI now are rather pessimistic about the prospects of engineering a sentient, human level artifical intelligence
Not as pessimistic as about uploading.
The process of scanning the information content of the relevant parts of the brain (perhaps with resolution down to the quantum level) might well be destructive.
OK, then uploading yourself into a machine amounts to making a copy of yourself followed by committing suicide. It just doesn't sound very appealing. Why would you want to do that?
and we know we have international committments for defense we need to meet. The rest is lower priority.
International commitments have not obligated the US to engage in the recent wars, to pull out of international treaties, or to sell arms to non-democratic nations.
Europeans act like the world would be all flowers and goodness if we would just stop being so damn militaristic. There was an old saying that "A Republican is a Democrat who got mugged". Seems applicable here.
Unlike Americans, Europeans have been through two horrible wars on their soil. They have experienced the consequences of nationalism and militarism first hand, and they actually have experience with different nations living side-by-side, both good and bad.
It's the Americans that are terribly naive, believing that by sending in the military or categorizing the world into "good and evil" and getting rid of the evil ones, they can make America or the world safer. In reality, often the opposite is true. And in the process, thousands of innocent civilians get killed. Of course, US soldiers get killed too, but in the absence of a draft, that doesn't usually affect the middle class or the decision makers.
It's a funny read today, but back then who would have known?
Yeah, because we all know that having a lot of market share proves good technical design, right? Besides, the NT kernel is more widely used than the Linux kernel, and one of the main complaints about Linux vs. NT is in the area of kernel configuration.
Through lots of hard work, Linux has become the most useful OSS kernel there is, but it could be so much better if it had been architected better from the start.
European governments would have to convince their besotted (with social programs) populace that spending more than 2% of their GDP on defense is required.
Required by what? To have a military that is as bloated and useless as the US military?
Most of your nations
You're making unwarranted assumptions.
still operate under a US-provided nuclear umbrella.
I gather most Europeans would prefer not to, if they ever did.
"Asserting leadership" is impossible without military might.
What is the US going to do with its military might? Bomb Europe? Bomb China? The instant that happened, the US economy would be in complete ruins and the US would be an international outcast. Those hundreds of billions of dollars spent on Iraq and Afghanistan haven't even been able to bring those nations under control. Military might is an outdated concept: what little the US has, it can't seriously exercise.
I don't consider Europe a threat, and neither does this administration
This whole notion of "threat" is so cold war. If you want to talk about "threats", Europe is an economic threat to the US, along with China and India. And if the US wants to counter that "threat", it can only do by becoming more open, more tolerant, and more competitive, not through more military power and intervention.
First of all every government security agency in the world believed that Saddam had WMDs.
Foreign government security services didn't say much about it at all, as far as I know. But US government experts, including weapons inspectors, said that there was no way there were WMD there anymore, or even to create them.
Just look at the financial relations that exist between the US and everyone else.
Yes: a result of the dollar having become the international standard of exchange after WWII. The question is: will the US let the Euro take over that role?
If we were so anti-global we would create tarrifs on imports that duplicate the tarrifs our good face when exported to other countries. Almost every country in the world has much more severe barriers to foreign competition and foreign ownership or acquisition of companies than the US.
The US has low trade barriers in some areas (e.g., high tech) and high trade barriers others (e.g., agriculture). Those policies don't represent a general commitment to free trade, but the political influence of selected US constituencies. Some of those policies, like US (and EU) agricultural policies, can only be described as evil.
The US government sends more aid to other countries than any other country in the world. They probably (unsubstantiated) send more aid to other countries than the entire EU combined.
The US is one of the stingiest nations when it comes to foreign aid. And even those official figures are overestimates because what the US counts as "foreign aid" is often thinly disguised political or military aid, or tied to the purchase of US goods and services. So, in effect, that "foreign aid" is US corporate subsidies, which is not only bad foreign aid policy, but also in violation of fair trade principles.
If you told an average person on the streets that Europeans want to see Kerry elected, the instinctive response is to vote for Bush.
I think that is generally referred to as "cutting off your nose to spite your face".
Europeans would like good US/European relationships, and they are telling Americans what they think would help with that. If American voters don't care, it's at their own peril: in the end, the US has a lot more to lose, while ineffective US leadership may finally force European goverments to get their act together and assert their leadership.
Stuff like this whereby you get a load of co-operating computers and a multi level archtitecture to utilise it was done years ago , all built on top of RPC
Yes, and that's why it didn't work: thinking about distributed computing as a bunch of procedure calls that happen to be remote is wrong. The sad thing is that a sizeable number of people still thinks it's the way to go (e.g., all the SOAP adherents).
This to me is just a nother refashioning of age old ideas so the people involved can justify their research positions and so IBM (and others) can make a whole heap of cash out of gullible IT managers.
The problem with grid computing is more that there isn't much of a need for it right now. But if there were, research into it would be justified because existing technologies can't handle it.
I'm not saying overpopulation is not a problem. But we don't really know what impact does it have...
We know what impact overpopulation has: increased conversion of land for agricultural use, increased demand for fuel, increased emission of greenhouse gases, increased risk of pandemics, etc.
Did you notice the 1.7% of all greenhouse gas output is from active but not ERUPTING volcanos? It's quite long since the last serious eruption. If Mt. Helen goes boom, the proportions may change seriously.
I don't believe it would make a big difference. However, even if it did, it would make it even more important to reduce our own emissions. No matter what the human contribution is at this point, it is clear that we are heading in the direction of unusually high CO2 concentrations and unusually high temperatures. So, reducing our own, artifical contribution to the problem is prudent.
shouldn't we rather take care of helping them to "advance" to more pro-ecological anti-deforestation "1st world" instead of limiting their population by sending the marines or dropping da bomb? [...] In my case, the reaction is: Stand up from armchair and look around to check what's burning
I think we know what to do, and it's the conservative (in every sense of the word) thing to do:
educate people to assure them that energy efficiency, third world development, and sustainability can go hand in hand with prosperity and a high standard of living
change attitudes so that inefficient and wasteful choices will be frowned upon
switch to more energy efficient technologies and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to more traditional levels
help the third world develop by allowing them free trade access to our markets in those areas where they can be competitive: agriculture
change laws so that people who make lifestyle choices like living in energy inefficient homes, having long commutes, or driving inefficient vehicles actually pay for the true cost of their choices
I think politicians will pick up more on this when education and attitudes have changed more. Even Bush's feeble push for hydrogen and the repositioning of some major oil companies shows that there is increasing awareness.
Volcanos produce so much CO2 that what humans produce theoretically should be negligible
By the way, here is the data for the US, and despite 70 active volcanoes in the US, non-energy sources of CO2 only contribute 1.7% of all greenhouse gas output (compared to 82.8% energy related CO2 generation). Similarly detailed data is available for the rest of the world. We don't have to guess about these things.
Ockham's razor. How do you know the problems are caused by overpopulation?
We don't have to "know" before we act. To use your metaphor: our house is on fire, we have very little time, and the prudent thing is to remove everything combustible and extinguish all the flames that we can.
Volcanos produce so much CO2 that what humans produce theoretically should be negligible.
We don't have to guess because that's been measured: CO2 output by volcanoes is dwarved by human output. Also, increased solar output doesn't account for the observed warming.
Maybe the problem lies not in increased production of CO2 but in reduced removal by shrinking forests?
Deforestation is a huge problem, both because it decreases CO2 removal and because it causes lots of other environmental problems. So, yes, we should stop deforestation as well. (Incidentally, the primary cause of deforestation is population growth in third world nations.)
Maybe by something yet completely different and overlooked?
Maybe it is. But global warming has several contributing factors that we already know about and we need to address every single one we can address right now.
Your reaction reminds this: If somebody yells "Fire", you want to unload whole fire extinguisher charge at your ashtray with a single lit cigarette inside, without looking at the neighbour's house being of fire.
Your comparison is close, you just got it backwards: there is thick smoke all around you and you are saying "well, maybe it is just the cigarette", I'll just stay here on the couch doing nothing until I have definitive proof that it's something else. The prudent thing to do is to get up and act immediately.
we could do the research, but without an obvious need such as space flight creates, we generally wouldn't
Hibernation has been of interest to physiologists, medical doctors, and biologists for a long time because it has lots of practical applications. Claiming that its "origin" is related to manned space travel is false advertising.
Best of all would be to transplant our consciousness into durable robotic chassis with interchangeable/hot-swappable components so that we can effectively live forever and survive anywhere.
There is no reason transfering your consciousness into the robot should kill you. So, after this transfer, there is still a copy stuck in your body and there is a copy of you running around in a powerful robotic body. Why exactly do you want that? And, for that matter, why would anybody else want that? And how would that be different from just sending a robotic probe?
you should not be allowed to mmap() files or do demand-paged execution on remote file systems.
Correct. Both could be emulated in user code if you really wanted to, but neither makes a lot of sense anymore to begin with (if it ever did).
page fault handling should be able to use user-mode code or
Providing hooks for that is generally a good idea anyway; for data, I'm pretty sure you can do it already. For code, I'm not quite sure.
Unless by "trusted" you're referring to not getting packets-of-death sent to you (causing kernel buffer overflows and the like), that's not an obvious reason why it shouldn't be in the kernel.
I'm just arguing that there used to be a reason for NFS to be in the kernel and that reason is gone. These days, a remote NFS server has no reason to treat a user-mode NFS client any worse than a kernel-mode NFS client.
So, what reason remains to keep NFS in the kernel then?
That's not an NFS-specific issue - it's an issue for all "removable media" in the sense of "media not necessarily produced solely by this machine".
Well, there are two kinds of removable media: those produced solely by/for this machine, and those that get carried around. Arguably, it makes sense to handle the latter in user code as well, for the same reasons.
The cryptography and key management can be handled in user-mode helper
Some cryptographic and key management code has to be in the kernel for performance reasons, if the rest of the file system lives there.
I'm not sure why the new failure modes are a huge problem - ETIMEDOUT isn't that much different from EIO.
EIO is a rare occurrence and neither kernels nor applications generally handle it very well. Timeouts, on the other hand, are a regular occurrence with protocols like WebDAV.
Slashdot Mirror
And that's the right measure in this context.
Although accidents could be a serious problems (along with terrorism), the real problem is waste disposal, and Europe doesn't have a good solution there either.
Right now, everybody is just keeping the stuff in more or less temporary holding facilities. And if you take into account the costs and resources required to maintain that kind of storage over decades and centuries, nuclear energy starts looking a lot less attractive. But we just allow nuclear power plants to pretend those costs don't exist, and in the long run, the tax payer has to shoulder them.
Fortunately, there is a third choice: just use less energy and produce neither emissions nor nuclear waste.
I tried just running it, but it doesn't seem to just work with the mailbox or preferences from Thunderbird 0.8. Furthermore, its "import" feature doesn't specifically talk about importing from Thunderbird 0.8, so it wasn't clear to me whether I could even import from 0.8 (with several hundred megabytes of mail, I didn't want to risk it).
Has anybody had more luck running 0.9 after using 0.8? Does import work?
Whether Apple wants to announce support for industry-standard features in their apps before they are ready to ship them is really for Apple management to decide. I actually think they should stop announcing features before they are ready to ship them.
The real question one has to ask is why Apple isn't already shipping these features. According to Apple, isn't Cocoa such a super-productive platform that implementing and testing such features should be really easy? So, why is it taking them so long to provide features that many other mail clients have had for a while?
The obvious political hurdles are (a) the left opposes nuclear energy,
Well, the problem is where to dispose of the stuff. While "the right" likes to talk about how wonderful nuclear energy is, it doesn't have a solution either. Right-wing and centrist ideology these days wants to leave stuff to the market, but it is pretty obvious that the market hasn't provided a safe, cost-effective solution for storing and disposing of the stuff. The only reason we have nuclear energy at all is because the government assumes the risk and takes the stuff off the hands of nuclear plant operators.
When the right talks about how wonderful nuclear energy is, what it really amounts to is a massive government program to subsidize nuclear power plant operators, who would not dream of building such a risky and costly power plant out of their own pocket, and it amounts to a massive taking of private property, namely those people whose lands are devalued or affected by the nuclear waste dump (but those people are just "the little people", so "the right" doesn't care).
In any case, there you have it: the reason why nuclear energy isn't used more widely is because it simply isn't cost effective; they only reason we are using it at all is because we are ignoring some of the costliest parts of it, foremost the disposal problem.
I believe in Leibniz' Identity of Indiscernibles
But the metal entity with your memories would be very different in many ways.
If somebody wakes up tomorrow thinking he's me, with some sufficient proportion of my memories, attitudes and other faculties all nicely intact, then he's me.
The question whether he "is" "you" is useless semantics IMO. The real question is: given the choice, would you like to create a second you with all your memories and should society permit you to do that.
You make the very same leap of faith every night when you go to sleep.
There is no "leap of faith" involved there: I very much hope that I become different persons day after day, and the choice is clearly proscribed. But with "uploading", it is entirely unclear what kind of person you would create, and you do actually have a choice whether and how to do it.
There was no clear delivery, no clear ideology, NO RESPONSE to the clear Republican attacks.
All other things aside, Kerry should have torn apart Bush on the military issue alone; it is simply amazing that a decorated Vietnam soldier had to take that kind of abuse from a coward and drunk like Bush.
1) There were no riots in the street. 2) All candidates who started the election process are still alive today. 3) No cities are on fire and there is no looting 4) We all witnessed a historical election which will set the tone for the next generation and we all traveled to work as if it was a normal day.
Well, the same could be said about elections in the former East Germany.
This is the process that the founding fathers envisioned.
The founding fathers did not envision democracy to go smoothly and easily every election, and they certainly did not want Americans to be turned into frightened sheep for the monetary gain of a president and his cronies.
This patent seems to be on being able to "spherically pan", i.e., change the direction you are looking into, in a 3D graphics system. The claimed novelty, such as it is, isn't even that, it seems to be that the 3D models are "downloaded" and that the user can manipulate them "locally" within the 3D graphics "terminal".
The problems with this patent claim?
But, I think it is great when the "McKool Smith's" of this world go out and start sueing everybody in sight. As long as the patent system only harms the little inventor and small companies, nothing is going to happen. But when the big boys get inconvenienced by lawsuits, maybe things will change.
It'll be hard to compete against Oracle, who is already a player in the linux market.
Yes, in particular since the reason most people use Oracle is the fact that everybody is running it ("you don't get fired for running the same DB software as all the other financial institutions"), not that it is necessarily actually faster or more reliable. It's hard to compete with that.
If CA "retains control over the products and features", then it doesn't sound like it's open source. It's only open source if people have the right to fork the project and make incompatible changes. And that's an important ability because that is what, ultimately, keeps the original developers on their toes.
People working in AI now are rather pessimistic about the prospects of engineering a sentient, human level artifical intelligence
Not as pessimistic as about uploading.
The process of scanning the information content of the relevant parts of the brain (perhaps with resolution down to the quantum level) might well be destructive.
OK, then uploading yourself into a machine amounts to making a copy of yourself followed by committing suicide. It just doesn't sound very appealing. Why would you want to do that?
and we know we have international committments for defense we need to meet. The rest is lower priority.
International commitments have not obligated the US to engage in the recent wars, to pull out of international treaties, or to sell arms to non-democratic nations.
Europeans act like the world would be all flowers and goodness if we would just stop being so damn militaristic. There was an old saying that "A Republican is a Democrat who got mugged". Seems applicable here.
Unlike Americans, Europeans have been through two horrible wars on their soil. They have experienced the consequences of nationalism and militarism first hand, and they actually have experience with different nations living side-by-side, both good and bad.
It's the Americans that are terribly naive, believing that by sending in the military or categorizing the world into "good and evil" and getting rid of the evil ones, they can make America or the world safer. In reality, often the opposite is true. And in the process, thousands of innocent civilians get killed. Of course, US soldiers get killed too, but in the absence of a draft, that doesn't usually affect the middle class or the decision makers.
It's a funny read today, but back then who would have known?
Yeah, because we all know that having a lot of market share proves good technical design, right? Besides, the NT kernel is more widely used than the Linux kernel, and one of the main complaints about Linux vs. NT is in the area of kernel configuration.
Through lots of hard work, Linux has become the most useful OSS kernel there is, but it could be so much better if it had been architected better from the start.
European governments would have to convince their besotted (with social programs) populace that spending more than 2% of their GDP on defense is required.
Required by what? To have a military that is as bloated and useless as the US military?
Most of your nations
You're making unwarranted assumptions.
still operate under a US-provided nuclear umbrella.
I gather most Europeans would prefer not to, if they ever did.
"Asserting leadership" is impossible without military might.
What is the US going to do with its military might? Bomb Europe? Bomb China? The instant that happened, the US economy would be in complete ruins and the US would be an international outcast. Those hundreds of billions of dollars spent on Iraq and Afghanistan haven't even been able to bring those nations under control. Military might is an outdated concept: what little the US has, it can't seriously exercise.
I don't consider Europe a threat, and neither does this administration
This whole notion of "threat" is so cold war. If you want to talk about "threats", Europe is an economic threat to the US, along with China and India. And if the US wants to counter that "threat", it can only do by becoming more open, more tolerant, and more competitive, not through more military power and intervention.
First of all every government security agency in the world believed that Saddam had WMDs.
Foreign government security services didn't say much about it at all, as far as I know. But US government experts, including weapons inspectors, said that there was no way there were WMD there anymore, or even to create them.
Just look at the financial relations that exist between the US and everyone else.
Yes: a result of the dollar having become the international standard of exchange after WWII. The question is: will the US let the Euro take over that role?
If we were so anti-global we would create tarrifs on imports that duplicate the tarrifs our good face when exported to other countries. Almost every country in the world has much more severe barriers to foreign competition and foreign ownership or acquisition of companies than the US.
The US has low trade barriers in some areas (e.g., high tech) and high trade barriers others (e.g., agriculture). Those policies don't represent a general commitment to free trade, but the political influence of selected US constituencies. Some of those policies, like US (and EU) agricultural policies, can only be described as evil.
The US government sends more aid to other countries than any other country in the world. They probably (unsubstantiated) send more aid to other countries than the entire EU combined.
The US is one of the stingiest nations when it comes to foreign aid. And even those official figures are overestimates because what the US counts as "foreign aid" is often thinly disguised political or military aid, or tied to the purchase of US goods and services. So, in effect, that "foreign aid" is US corporate subsidies, which is not only bad foreign aid policy, but also in violation of fair trade principles.
If you told an average person on the streets that Europeans want to see Kerry elected, the instinctive response is to vote for Bush.
I think that is generally referred to as "cutting off your nose to spite your face".
Europeans would like good US/European relationships, and they are telling Americans what they think would help with that. If American voters don't care, it's at their own peril: in the end, the US has a lot more to lose, while ineffective US leadership may finally force European goverments to get their act together and assert their leadership.
Stuff like this whereby you get a load of co-operating computers and a multi level archtitecture to utilise it was done years ago , all built on top of RPC
Yes, and that's why it didn't work: thinking about distributed computing as a bunch of procedure calls that happen to be remote is wrong. The sad thing is that a sizeable number of people still thinks it's the way to go (e.g., all the SOAP adherents).
This to me is just a nother refashioning of age old ideas so the people involved can justify their research positions and so IBM (and others) can make a whole heap of cash out of gullible IT managers.
The problem with grid computing is more that there isn't much of a need for it right now. But if there were, research into it would be justified because existing technologies can't handle it.
We know what impact overpopulation has: increased conversion of land for agricultural use, increased demand for fuel, increased emission of greenhouse gases, increased risk of pandemics, etc.
Did you notice the 1.7% of all greenhouse gas output is from active but not ERUPTING volcanos? It's quite long since the last serious eruption. If Mt. Helen goes boom, the proportions may change seriously.
I don't believe it would make a big difference. However, even if it did, it would make it even more important to reduce our own emissions. No matter what the human contribution is at this point, it is clear that we are heading in the direction of unusually high CO2 concentrations and unusually high temperatures. So, reducing our own, artifical contribution to the problem is prudent.
shouldn't we rather take care of helping them to "advance" to more pro-ecological anti-deforestation "1st world" instead of limiting their population by sending the marines or dropping da bomb? [...]
In my case, the reaction is: Stand up from armchair and look around to check what's burning
I think we know what to do, and it's the conservative (in every sense of the word) thing to do:
I think politicians will pick up more on this when education and attitudes have changed more. Even Bush's feeble push for hydrogen and the repositioning of some major oil companies shows that there is increasing awareness.
Volcanos produce so much CO2 that what humans produce theoretically should be negligible
By the way, here is the data for the US, and despite 70 active volcanoes in the US, non-energy sources of CO2 only contribute 1.7% of all greenhouse gas output (compared to 82.8% energy related CO2 generation). Similarly detailed data is available for the rest of the world. We don't have to guess about these things.
Ockham's razor. How do you know the problems are caused by overpopulation?
We don't have to "know" before we act. To use your metaphor: our house is on fire, we have very little time, and the prudent thing is to remove everything combustible and extinguish all the flames that we can.
Volcanos produce so much CO2 that what humans produce theoretically should be negligible.
We don't have to guess because that's been measured: CO2 output by volcanoes is dwarved by human output. Also, increased solar output doesn't account for the observed warming.
Maybe the problem lies not in increased production of CO2 but in reduced removal by shrinking forests?
Deforestation is a huge problem, both because it decreases CO2 removal and because it causes lots of other environmental problems. So, yes, we should stop deforestation as well. (Incidentally, the primary cause of deforestation is population growth in third world nations.)
Maybe by something yet completely different and overlooked?
Maybe it is. But global warming has several contributing factors that we already know about and we need to address every single one we can address right now.
Your reaction reminds this: If somebody yells "Fire", you want to unload whole fire extinguisher charge at your ashtray with a single lit cigarette inside, without looking at the neighbour's house being of fire.
Your comparison is close, you just got it backwards: there is thick smoke all around you and you are saying "well, maybe it is just the cigarette", I'll just stay here on the couch doing nothing until I have definitive proof that it's something else. The prudent thing to do is to get up and act immediately.
we could do the research, but without an obvious need such as space flight creates, we generally wouldn't
Hibernation has been of interest to physiologists, medical doctors, and biologists for a long time because it has lots of practical applications. Claiming that its "origin" is related to manned space travel is false advertising.
Best of all would be to transplant our consciousness into durable robotic chassis with interchangeable/hot-swappable components so that we can effectively live forever and survive anywhere.
There is no reason transfering your consciousness into the robot should kill you. So, after this transfer, there is still a copy stuck in your body and there is a copy of you running around in a powerful robotic body. Why exactly do you want that? And, for that matter, why would anybody else want that? And how would that be different from just sending a robotic probe?
you should not be allowed to mmap() files or do demand-paged execution on remote file systems.
Correct. Both could be emulated in user code if you really wanted to, but neither makes a lot of sense anymore to begin with (if it ever did).
page fault handling should be able to use user-mode code or
Providing hooks for that is generally a good idea anyway; for data, I'm pretty sure you can do it already. For code, I'm not quite sure.
Unless by "trusted" you're referring to not getting packets-of-death sent to you (causing kernel buffer overflows and the like), that's not an obvious reason why it shouldn't be in the kernel.
I'm just arguing that there used to be a reason for NFS to be in the kernel and that reason is gone. These days, a remote NFS server has no reason to treat a user-mode NFS client any worse than a kernel-mode NFS client.
So, what reason remains to keep NFS in the kernel then?
That's not an NFS-specific issue - it's an issue for all "removable media" in the sense of "media not necessarily produced solely by this machine".
Well, there are two kinds of removable media: those produced solely by/for this machine, and those that get carried around. Arguably, it makes sense to handle the latter in user code as well, for the same reasons.
The cryptography and key management can be handled in user-mode helper
Some cryptographic and key management code has to be in the kernel for performance reasons, if the rest of the file system lives there.
I'm not sure why the new failure modes are a huge problem - ETIMEDOUT isn't that much different from EIO.
EIO is a rare occurrence and neither kernels nor applications generally handle it very well. Timeouts, on the other hand, are a regular occurrence with protocols like WebDAV.