Wow, thanks for the info. I haven't been keeping up Eudora obviously, but if it's still quality software as it was before, it sounds like I might be recommending it to a few family and friends.
I wish I could recommend some free ones, but (fortunately) I haven't used Windows in a few years. I used to use Eudora (a *very* nice and very capable email client) back when I was using Windows. The only downfall is that it is commercial software that you must pay for. I'd say if I were still using Windows, I would buy Eudora.
In Linux, I used to use KMail until the latest release of KDE... For some reason, loading any KDE application takes an eternity on every computer I've tried it on. So I switched to Mozilla's email client, which isn't much better but it gets the job done.
I'm going to try out newer versions of some of the popular GTK mail clients soon.
Loving Junkbuster to get rid of ads and hating Smart Tags because they change content is being a hypocrate.
No, not quite. In fact, you're not even close. In both cases, (that is, detesting smart tags while installing junkbuster) it is the user's choice what he wants displayed in his web browser. Isn't it every person's choice to have a desire to see what information they want to see and block out that which they don't?
With Junkbuster, one has to make a conscious effort to install it and block advertisments from appearing on their computer.
If Microsoft (et al) had their way with Smart Tags, you would have no choice. You would see the links and if you clicked on them, you would be sent to a page that Microsoft wishes you to see, not neccessarily what you want to see or what information the content creator wanted to publish. The line is drawn at how you determine what "information" is. I do not consider any form of blatant advertising as information and I presume I'm not alone. Junkbuster gets rid of ads, smart tags modify information. It's really that simple.
Regardless, it all comes down to choice. Junkbuster is a choice for the user, smart tags are not. If you believe that smart tags are alright, then I presume you also wouldn't mind Microsoft adding dynamic animated GIFs to your Start Menu and the occasional pop-up reminding you to upgrade to Office XP everytime you opened a Word 97 document.
Well, I'll take this mainly as a troll. Nevertheless...
It appears that you are the one who has not fully grasped the entirety of the situation. I suppose it's not only 100% a matter of rights, but also a matter of ethics. Ever since the advent of VCRs, people have been able to time-shift their viewing in the name of convenience. It's commonplace. As such, most people consider it a fair-use right. Since the government is *supposed* to follow in the interests of the people, it *should* be a right by law. (De facto, I think they call it.)
For broadcasters to take that away from us while masquerading the action as an anti-piracy measure is not right, not ethical, and should be (in many people's minds, not just my own) considered illegal.
man, first of all, TV is FREE to watch because of advertising
As long as we are *forced* to watch the advertisements, TV is not free. The price does not always have to involve money. That aside, I would probably agree to having to watch advertisements if I could time-shift the program. But not if I had a choice.
As well, mandatory advertisement-watching disallowal of time-shifting would not be in the best interests of the industry either. (Take Napster for example. Is it any coincedence that CD sales have skyrockted in the last few years? Maybe. But I doubt it.) I currently record Star Trek episodes during the week on my VCR for viewing on the weekend because I'm typically a rather busy person. So, if the government came along and mandated this new HDTV technology that prohibits time-shifting and skipping over advertisements, I am one of many types of TV viewers who would be severely impacted. I would probably not watch Star Trek any more. That means I would not even have the *chance* to view the very commercials that pay them to run the show.
And I might note that I do not consider time-shifting as "stealing." By your own admission, you apparently do. Who's the "fucking kid" again?
Hmm. So let me get this straight. You *want* HDTV to succeed? Even though they're currently busy making it so that you can never make copies of anything broadcast over it, even well within your fair use rights?
And you then want this backed up by law?
I'm sorry, but if anything is going to be succeeded by anything, making the government do it is not the right way. It's not even their job! Hopefully, what's going to happen is that the backbone providers will see IPv6 as a great technical or strategical boon and they will more or less (through hopefully non-bullying means) convince their customers to switch over.
*That* is how progess happens. Remember that "law" and "progress" are seldom used in the same sentence on purpose.
When my sister moved into her new apartment recently, and was being shown around the place she came upon a closet, opened the door, and the landlord told her, "Oh, by the way. Don't mess with anything in this closet. If you do, everyone in the building looses their internet access and yours will be the first door the technician knocks on."
I later informed her that it was probably DSL and she noted that she had no idea that it was included with the apartment. She found out later that the service charge was included in the rent whether you actually used it or not.
Meanwhile, I'm still accessing the net from a 28.8 modem (because the lines won't go any higher) and my sister just bought a new computer. Grrrrrrr...
"The mission of the church is to make digital copies of
every music CD, every movie DVD, and every printed book and
then grep the digital version for any tell-tale signs of
'The Meaning Of Life'."
That won't be neccessary. I've got a copy of it on VHS that I'll loan you! (Warning: the flick is extremely British.)
My personal feelings are that the operating system should be called whatever the final product ends up being. Think about it. I say that my computer run Slackware Linux 8.0 because that is the title that the creator of the distribution chose.
Now, Slackware of course is comprised of several pieces of software (they being the Linux kernel, GNU utilities, X11R6, XFree86, Mozilla, Gnome, KDE, etc) but this package, as a whole, is different than, for example, Red Hat 7.1.
This is one of my arguments against the GNU/Linux phrase. Different distributions behave and perform can vary wildly, (even if they have the same underlying components) and therefore I don't see how reffering to your OS as "GNU/Linux" or even simply "Linux" could possibly be accurate.
In these little wars people seem to lose sight of the little fact that even though developers have put an enourmous amount of time and effort into writing the basic components (kernel, utilities), the ones who package these components into a working system seem to be occasionally ignored.
(No, this is not supposed to be a persuasive post on what you should call your operating system. I'm merely providing my point of view.)
Re:mandatory laptops
on
Dorm Storm?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
My friend once made an offhand remark a few years back. At the time, I thought he was merely being sarcastic. He said, "I kid you not, colleges exist only to make money."
I know, I know, acedemic institutions are supposed to exist solely for the purpose of education. And, for the most part, they fulfill that adequately. But why, when colleges get all these grants and donations, do the students have to pay through the arse for education?
Not just for the tuition either. Think about it. You have to pay for *everything*. Books, supplies, meals, rooms. Even frigging lab hours. This is one of the reasons I'm partially disgusted at colleges and universities. I'd like to hear other people's comments on this. Don't just mod me down (which I know you will), please tell me if and why I'm wrong.
My very first Linux distro was Slackware, downloaded over a modem back in about 1996 or so. I was mainly curious and managed to get it working into a usable system. Remember, back then, there was a LOT more configuration to do before you had a 100% functional system the way you wanted it. I toyed with it on and off for two years, but just as I was getting permanently hooked on Red Hat Linux 4.2 (bought on cheapbytes for $2), I had a bit of lifestyle change and effectively went without a computer for 8 months.
In the middle of 1999 I returned to the real world and decided that I really wanted Linux on my current computer, a laptop. While browsing through a department store, I happened upon Mandrake 6.0 for about $40 and up until about 1 month ago, remained a dedicated Mandrake fan.
A month ago, I purchased the Mandrake 8.0 PowerPack for around $75 and was immediately disgusted when neither machine I installed it on would boot. On one machine, it took about a week to customize it, that is, to remove all the extraneous crap. Don't get me wrong, Mandrake is probably a fine distribution for many people, but I've gotten to the point where I just want a minimal working system and then simply add my own customizations and software.
After cursing myself for the Mandrake debacle, I started looking for other distros. I considered Debian, Slackware, even FreeBSD. (Note: I know BSD is not Linux.) I even tried putting together my own system, but glibc proved to be too much of a challenge.
Just as I gave up on glibc and my homebrew distro, Slackware 8.0 was released that same week. I downloaded it, installed it on a crappy P166 to see how I liked it, and found that I liked it immensely! I installed it on the rest of my machines with no troubles and no regrets.
Funny how I had the right idea all along in the beginning of my Linux adventure.
Just to make this post a bit more on-topic, the Linux distros I've bought total about $150. The only copy of Windows I ever bought came with my laptop, and so cost me around $90. Glad to see that Linux has gotten more of my cash.
From what I understand, cancer cells are by nature, effectively immortal anyway. Sort of...
Every cell has it's own "time bomb", a set of molecules called telomeres. Each time a cell is divided, a few beads of the telomeres get cut off so that when no more beads are left, the cell merely dies instead of dividing.
Cancer cells produce a coating that covers the telomeres called telomerase. (I think that's the word.) When covered with this, the beads don't get cut off and the full telomeres get reproduced whenever the cell divides... thus, the group of rogue cells never stops dividing. The reason that cells are designed to die after a certain period of time is so that major mutations in the DNA don't spread too far or too quickly and kill the organism.
This is, however, uncontrolled growth. Cancer. It cannot make a normal functioning organism live forever. Besides, this wouldn't apply to certain organs such as the brain whose cells never reproduce.
But research is currently active on studying cell mitochondria, which are apparently directly linked to aging. It goes that if you can make the cell mitochondira work forever, that your body would never age.
IANABiologist, so any of the above is not guaranteed to be accurate and might be plain wrong. I'd love to hear some input from someone who actually studies the science.
Well, try telling that to the MPAA. We're just using their own tools against them to at least make some some sort of stand in regards to their profiting off the stupidity of the general populous.
I tried to make it say, "Go and boil your bottoms, sons of a silly person.". Pronounced everything right, even sounded halfway realistic, but it sounded much more like a radio newscaster announcing the current stock quotes or something.:P
Well, it might be that the partition I was trying to export was 40 gigs in size... I don't know if that's large enough to cause the problem.
At first, I had 2.4.5 with Reiser. It worked, but would choke whenever I copied lage files (100+ MB) so I upgraded to 2.4.6.
With kernel 2.4.6, I could get neither filesystem to work properly with NFS. Creating a subdir would work fine, but creating any files or directories underneat that resulted in the standard utilities telling me that the file didn't exist. Something along the lines of:
$ cd/share
$ mkdir foo
$ ls
... foo
$ cd/share/foo
$ ls
[no output]
$ touch bar
bash: touch: bar: no such file or directory
$ mkdir bar
bash: mkdir: bar: no such file or directory
(Note that these error messages are not exact.) I then went back to 2.4.5 and tried making the NFS partition ext2 and all of my problems seem to have gone away. Granted, it's going to be pain in the ass to fsck that 40GB partition when the time comes, but for now I guess I have to keep ext2.
Not an altogether bad idea, but remember that the kernel maintainers are programmers at heart, not activists. I can imagine Linus right now saying something along the lines of "Let the activists activate, I'll keep writing code."
Oh boy, where to begin on the NFS issues in the latest kernels... I've been tearing my hear out for the last week trying to figure out how to get NFS working properly...
First I had 2.4.5 and Reiser... that didn't work. After reading a lot of mailing list archives, I came to the conclusion that Reiser+NFS just plain didn't work with each other.
Then someone tells me that 2.4.6 fixed it, so I patched my kernel to find that it was not, in fact, fixed. NFS wouldn't work properly even with ext2 as the underlying fileystem.
So I went back and tried 2.4.5 with ext2 and this *appears* to work so far. Ergo, I'm not hedging my bets on ReiserFS and NFS working in Linux anytime soon.
I should have emphasized my main point a bit more. We are not merely putting CO2 into the atmosphere (we do that anyway just by breathing), we are putting HUGE AMOUNTS of CO2 into the air.
The trees use some in photosynthesis and the oceans can absorb some but we have simply released too much CO2 for some kind of worldwide change not to happen, as I was trying to mention above.
Actually, ya know, some of us prefer to use our brains a little rather than just point to some old madmen and say "they were wrong, everyone else must be."
The actual science behind global warming is simple enough I'm sure even you can understand. Global warming is occuring (measurably) due to the high volume of carbon dioxide that is in the atmosphere now as opposed to before the industrial revolution. What was literally the fuel for the industrial revolution? You guessed it: coal, oil, and gas. Fossil Fuels.
These fossil fuels come from a society of organisms that have been long since dead, but were not able to decompose because they somehow got buried quickly. Decompsing organisms (bacteria, etc) might certainly have been present, but unable to do their job without oxygen.
Hence, you have all these billions and billions of pounds of organic material laying around underneat the earch, whereupon humans step in, pump it all out and burn it. Sounds good, in theory, except that when you burn all this organic material you get huge quantities of waste, mainly carbon dioxide gas, in addition to the energy released by burning the fuel.
The point is that we are taking all that carbon dioxide from below the earth and releasing it into the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is good for plants, but it also has the effect of trapping heat within the atmosphere itself, like a big blanket.
To put it simply, the fact remains that you simply cannot put huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere and NOT get global warming. If you're in doubt as to how much CO2 we've been adding, I invite you stop and think about how long we've been using fossil fuels and on what scale. The answer will come to you.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, thanks for the info. I haven't been keeping up Eudora obviously, but if it's still quality software as it was before, it sounds like I might be recommending it to a few family and friends.
I wish I could recommend some free ones, but (fortunately) I haven't used Windows in a few years. I used to use Eudora (a *very* nice and very capable email client) back when I was using Windows. The only downfall is that it is commercial software that you must pay for. I'd say if I were still using Windows, I would buy Eudora.
In Linux, I used to use KMail until the latest release of KDE... For some reason, loading any KDE application takes an eternity on every computer I've tried it on. So I switched to Mozilla's email client, which isn't much better but it gets the job done.
I'm going to try out newer versions of some of the popular GTK mail clients soon.
Loving Junkbuster to get rid of ads and hating Smart Tags because they change content is being a hypocrate.
No, not quite. In fact, you're not even close. In both cases, (that is, detesting smart tags while installing junkbuster) it is the user's choice what he wants displayed in his web browser. Isn't it every person's choice to have a desire to see what information they want to see and block out that which they don't?
With Junkbuster, one has to make a conscious effort to install it and block advertisments from appearing on their computer.
If Microsoft (et al) had their way with Smart Tags, you would have no choice. You would see the links and if you clicked on them, you would be sent to a page that Microsoft wishes you to see, not neccessarily what you want to see or what information the content creator wanted to publish. The line is drawn at how you determine what "information" is. I do not consider any form of blatant advertising as information and I presume I'm not alone. Junkbuster gets rid of ads, smart tags modify information. It's really that simple.
Regardless, it all comes down to choice. Junkbuster is a choice for the user, smart tags are not. If you believe that smart tags are alright, then I presume you also wouldn't mind Microsoft adding dynamic animated GIFs to your Start Menu and the occasional pop-up reminding you to upgrade to Office XP everytime you opened a Word 97 document.
Erm, wouldn't that mean that 1.0 should have been hit on the 5th iteration?
Well, I'll take this mainly as a troll. Nevertheless...
It appears that you are the one who has not fully grasped the entirety of the situation. I suppose it's not only 100% a matter of rights, but also a matter of ethics. Ever since the advent of VCRs, people have been able to time-shift their viewing in the name of convenience. It's commonplace. As such, most people consider it a fair-use right. Since the government is *supposed* to follow in the interests of the people, it *should* be a right by law. (De facto, I think they call it.)
For broadcasters to take that away from us while masquerading the action as an anti-piracy measure is not right, not ethical, and should be (in many people's minds, not just my own) considered illegal.
man, first of all, TV is FREE to watch because of advertising
As long as we are *forced* to watch the advertisements, TV is not free. The price does not always have to involve money. That aside, I would probably agree to having to watch advertisements if I could time-shift the program. But not if I had a choice.
As well, mandatory advertisement-watching disallowal of time-shifting would not be in the best interests of the industry either. (Take Napster for example. Is it any coincedence that CD sales have skyrockted in the last few years? Maybe. But I doubt it.) I currently record Star Trek episodes during the week on my VCR for viewing on the weekend because I'm typically a rather busy person. So, if the government came along and mandated this new HDTV technology that prohibits time-shifting and skipping over advertisements, I am one of many types of TV viewers who would be severely impacted. I would probably not watch Star Trek any more. That means I would not even have the *chance* to view the very commercials that pay them to run the show.
And I might note that I do not consider time-shifting as "stealing." By your own admission, you apparently do. Who's the "fucking kid" again?
Hmm. So let me get this straight. You *want* HDTV to succeed? Even though they're currently busy making it so that you can never make copies of anything broadcast over it, even well within your fair use rights?
And you then want this backed up by law?
I'm sorry, but if anything is going to be succeeded by anything, making the government do it is not the right way. It's not even their job! Hopefully, what's going to happen is that the backbone providers will see IPv6 as a great technical or strategical boon and they will more or less (through hopefully non-bullying means) convince their customers to switch over.
*That* is how progess happens. Remember that "law" and "progress" are seldom used in the same sentence on purpose.
When my sister moved into her new apartment recently, and was being shown around the place she came upon a closet, opened the door, and the landlord told her, "Oh, by the way. Don't mess with anything in this closet. If you do, everyone in the building looses their internet access and yours will be the first door the technician knocks on."
I later informed her that it was probably DSL and she noted that she had no idea that it was included with the apartment. She found out later that the service charge was included in the rent whether you actually used it or not.
Meanwhile, I'm still accessing the net from a 28.8 modem (because the lines won't go any higher) and my sister just bought a new computer. Grrrrrrr...
"The mission of the church is to make digital copies of
every music CD, every movie DVD, and every printed book and
then grep the digital version for any tell-tale signs of
'The Meaning Of Life'."
That won't be neccessary. I've got a copy of it on VHS that I'll loan you! (Warning: the flick is extremely British.)
My personal feelings are that the operating system should be called whatever the final product ends up being. Think about it. I say that my computer run Slackware Linux 8.0 because that is the title that the creator of the distribution chose.
Now, Slackware of course is comprised of several pieces of software (they being the Linux kernel, GNU utilities, X11R6, XFree86, Mozilla, Gnome, KDE, etc) but this package, as a whole, is different than, for example, Red Hat 7.1.
This is one of my arguments against the GNU/Linux phrase. Different distributions behave and perform can vary wildly, (even if they have the same underlying components) and therefore I don't see how reffering to your OS as "GNU/Linux" or even simply "Linux" could possibly be accurate.
In these little wars people seem to lose sight of the little fact that even though developers have put an enourmous amount of time and effort into writing the basic components (kernel, utilities), the ones who package these components into a working system seem to be occasionally ignored.
(No, this is not supposed to be a persuasive post on what you should call your operating system. I'm merely providing my point of view.)
My friend once made an offhand remark a few years back. At the time, I thought he was merely being sarcastic. He said, "I kid you not, colleges exist only to make money."
I know, I know, acedemic institutions are supposed to exist solely for the purpose of education. And, for the most part, they fulfill that adequately. But why, when colleges get all these grants and donations, do the students have to pay through the arse for education?
Not just for the tuition either. Think about it. You have to pay for *everything*. Books, supplies, meals, rooms. Even frigging lab hours. This is one of the reasons I'm partially disgusted at colleges and universities. I'd like to hear other people's comments on this. Don't just mod me down (which I know you will), please tell me if and why I'm wrong.
who said the Linux desktop was dead?
Actually, they keep saying that BSD is dying...
I have no first-hand experience, but a few posts on here already imply that both of those work.
My very first Linux distro was Slackware, downloaded over a modem back in about 1996 or so. I was mainly curious and managed to get it working into a usable system. Remember, back then, there was a LOT more configuration to do before you had a 100% functional system the way you wanted it. I toyed with it on and off for two years, but just as I was getting permanently hooked on Red Hat Linux 4.2 (bought on cheapbytes for $2), I had a bit of lifestyle change and effectively went without a computer for 8 months.
In the middle of 1999 I returned to the real world and decided that I really wanted Linux on my current computer, a laptop. While browsing through a department store, I happened upon Mandrake 6.0 for about $40 and up until about 1 month ago, remained a dedicated Mandrake fan.
A month ago, I purchased the Mandrake 8.0 PowerPack for around $75 and was immediately disgusted when neither machine I installed it on would boot. On one machine, it took about a week to customize it, that is, to remove all the extraneous crap. Don't get me wrong, Mandrake is probably a fine distribution for many people, but I've gotten to the point where I just want a minimal working system and then simply add my own customizations and software.
After cursing myself for the Mandrake debacle, I started looking for other distros. I considered Debian, Slackware, even FreeBSD. (Note: I know BSD is not Linux.) I even tried putting together my own system, but glibc proved to be too much of a challenge.
Just as I gave up on glibc and my homebrew distro, Slackware 8.0 was released that same week. I downloaded it, installed it on a crappy P166 to see how I liked it, and found that I liked it immensely! I installed it on the rest of my machines with no troubles and no regrets.
Funny how I had the right idea all along in the beginning of my Linux adventure.
Just to make this post a bit more on-topic, the Linux distros I've bought total about $150. The only copy of Windows I ever bought came with my laptop, and so cost me around $90. Glad to see that Linux has gotten more of my cash.
No, it had italicized the entire page. Both the front page and the comments. It probaby got fixed quickly so no one believes me now. *sigh*
From what I understand, cancer cells are by nature, effectively immortal anyway. Sort of...
Every cell has it's own "time bomb", a set of molecules called telomeres. Each time a cell is divided, a few beads of the telomeres get cut off so that when no more beads are left, the cell merely dies instead of dividing.
Cancer cells produce a coating that covers the telomeres called telomerase. (I think that's the word.) When covered with this, the beads don't get cut off and the full telomeres get reproduced whenever the cell divides... thus, the group of rogue cells never stops dividing. The reason that cells are designed to die after a certain period of time is so that major mutations in the DNA don't spread too far or too quickly and kill the organism.
This is, however, uncontrolled growth. Cancer. It cannot make a normal functioning organism live forever. Besides, this wouldn't apply to certain organs such as the brain whose cells never reproduce.
But research is currently active on studying cell mitochondria, which are apparently directly linked to aging. It goes that if you can make the cell mitochondira work forever, that your body would never age.
IANABiologist, so any of the above is not guaranteed to be accurate and might be plain wrong. I'd love to hear some input from someone who actually studies the science.
Well, try telling that to the MPAA. We're just using their own tools against them to at least make some some sort of stand in regards to their profiting off the stupidity of the general populous.
I tried to make it say, "Go and boil your bottoms, sons of a silly person.". Pronounced everything right, even sounded halfway realistic, but it sounded much more like a radio newscaster announcing the current stock quotes or something.
Sorry I clicked on the wrong post to reply. Disregard the above.
The only thing that's up there is a mailinglist, no files, no mirrored webpage, etc...
Well, it might be that the partition I was trying to export was 40 gigs in size... I don't know if that's large enough to cause the problem.
At first, I had 2.4.5 with Reiser. It worked, but would choke whenever I copied lage files (100+ MB) so I upgraded to 2.4.6.
With kernel 2.4.6, I could get neither filesystem to work properly with NFS. Creating a subdir would work fine, but creating any files or directories underneat that resulted in the standard utilities telling me that the file didn't exist. Something along the lines of:
$ cd
$ mkdir foo
$ ls
.
$ cd
$ ls
[no output]
$ touch bar
bash: touch: bar: no such file or directory
$ mkdir bar
bash: mkdir: bar: no such file or directory
(Note that these error messages are not exact.) I then went back to 2.4.5 and tried making the NFS partition ext2 and all of my problems seem to have gone away. Granted, it's going to be pain in the ass to fsck that 40GB partition when the time comes, but for now I guess I have to keep ext2.
Not an altogether bad idea, but remember that the kernel maintainers are programmers at heart, not activists. I can imagine Linus right now saying something along the lines of "Let the activists activate, I'll keep writing code."
Oh boy, where to begin on the NFS issues in the latest kernels... I've been tearing my hear out for the last week trying to figure out how to get NFS working properly...
First I had 2.4.5 and Reiser... that didn't work. After reading a lot of mailing list archives, I came to the conclusion that Reiser+NFS just plain didn't work with each other.
Then someone tells me that 2.4.6 fixed it, so I patched my kernel to find that it was not, in fact, fixed. NFS wouldn't work properly even with ext2 as the underlying fileystem.
So I went back and tried 2.4.5 with ext2 and this *appears* to work so far. Ergo, I'm not hedging my bets on ReiserFS and NFS working in Linux anytime soon.
Umm, pal.
I should have emphasized my main point a bit more. We are not merely putting CO2 into the atmosphere (we do that anyway just by breathing), we are putting HUGE AMOUNTS of CO2 into the air.
The trees use some in photosynthesis and the oceans can absorb some but we have simply released too much CO2 for some kind of worldwide change not to happen, as I was trying to mention above.
Actually, ya know, some of us prefer to use our brains a little rather than just point to some old madmen and say "they were wrong, everyone else must be."
The actual science behind global warming is simple enough I'm sure even you can understand. Global warming is occuring (measurably) due to the high volume of carbon dioxide that is in the atmosphere now as opposed to before the industrial revolution. What was literally the fuel for the industrial revolution? You guessed it: coal, oil, and gas. Fossil Fuels.
These fossil fuels come from a society of organisms that have been long since dead, but were not able to decompose because they somehow got buried quickly. Decompsing organisms (bacteria, etc) might certainly have been present, but unable to do their job without oxygen.
Hence, you have all these billions and billions of pounds of organic material laying around underneat the earch, whereupon humans step in, pump it all out and burn it. Sounds good, in theory, except that when you burn all this organic material you get huge quantities of waste, mainly carbon dioxide gas, in addition to the energy released by burning the fuel.
The point is that we are taking all that carbon dioxide from below the earth and releasing it into the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is good for plants, but it also has the effect of trapping heat within the atmosphere itself, like a big blanket.
To put it simply, the fact remains that you simply cannot put huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere and NOT get global warming. If you're in doubt as to how much CO2 we've been adding, I invite you stop and think about how long we've been using fossil fuels and on what scale. The answer will come to you.
On the topic of \$, I've recently run into something strange...
For some reason, for Bash on Linux, I have to use \\$ to have the $ change to a # for the root user. Otherwise, I get $ even at the root prompt.
But for Bash on FreeBSD, I have to use \$ or else I get the same situation as above. Wackyness. My prompts on both systems are identical otherwise.