First of all, I doubt the majority of those concerned about the environment want the human race to decrease in number. That particular agenda is shared by a number of groups.
Second of all, why there is no lack of water in the world, the supplies of fresh water don't seem to nicely mesh up to the areas of the planet we've decided to turn into arable land. Desalinization won't do you a lot of good in areas of the American Midwest that were, until recently, semi-arid areas with frequent drought cycles, as these are a long way from any ocean. Many of these arid and semi-arid areas rely heavily on aquifers, which appear in most cases not to be all that renewable at all.
The harm that a large multinational wasn't paying bribe. Have a heart for corrupt officials. There are so many in India it must be hard to commit a good old fashioned shakedown.
You know, I've been hearing this from Creationists about evolution for years, and it's as big a lie coming from the AGW pseudoskeptics as it is coming from their intellectual brethren in the Creationist camp.
Grow up, for fuck's sake. Only morons and children deny reality.
This seems to suggest that a theory must be complete to have utility, which is absurd. General Relativity and quantum mechanics aren't complete and in some ways are even contradictory and yet both are incredibly useful at describing physical phenomena. Hell, even string theory, which may not even describe a real physical system at all, has created useful mathematical and conceptual tools for physics.
The fact of the matter is that AGW models while not perfectly matching up, all generally agree on certain trends, so this idea that you have all these models with wildly contradictory and incompatible predictions is wrong, and is exactly the kind of hyper/pseudo-skepticism which isn't deserved.
How many actual scientific theories have been outright debunked. I don't count pseudoscientific bafflegab like phrenology or Ptolemaic cosmology as being science. I'm talking about out and out scientific theories posited under something approaching the methodological naturalism that evolved out of the Enlightenment.
Take Newtonian mechanics. While in the strictest terms it isn't right, but for most non-relativistic purposes (like building bridges or getting a probe into orbit around Saturn) it works just fine. In other words, Newtonian physics was never falsified so much as subsumed into relativity, and become a useful non-relativistic simplification.
A few theories that I can think of that were outright falsified would be cosmological theories like steady state theory, or some pre-plate tectonics geological theories. The ether theory, which had a brief reign could be classified in this category, but my understanding is even by 19th century physics it was highly problematic. Some of the softer sciences may have issues as well, though many of these "so-called" theories were often more philosophy and metaphysics than science anyways.
The bulk of scientific theories may get modified or subsumed into larger theories but never get outright falsified or debunked. Generally speaking, to become a theory means that a helluva lot of work and observation has gone into it. That isn't to say that any given theory might be not be wrong, but still I'd say it's a lot less likely.
I don't want a mobile GUI on a desktop, and I don't want a desktop GUI on a mobile. I doubt very many people ever have. That's like insisting your popup toaster, your microwave and your thermostat have identical controls.
I'm not clear here. Why should I use Start button replacement of dubious merits to replace functionality that was present prior to Windows 8. I'm in an enterprise environment, where GPOs rule the roost, and your suggestion is that I use a third party tool that likely won't integrate into that environment in any meaningful way.
You seem to be of the opinion that the world should bend to Metro. Pretty much every organization I deal with does not want it, will not use it, and wants it completely hidden. Most plan on using their Windows 7 licences until that becomes nonviable for security reasons.
And if you think, by 2020, there won't be challengers to Microsoft Office, then you're deluded. If Metro isn't invisible by 2020, we will be moving to other platforms. Period.
I'm not clear. Why is Metro the right thing for the staff of my company, who have basically been using the same GUI for the better part of 20 years now? What exactly does Metro offer my staff that they don't already have, and aren't already familiar with? Why should I spend my company's IT and training budgets on:
1. Teaching them a new GUI paradigm? 2. Investing in new technology like touch screens to actually use this GUI? 3. Invest even more money in new licensing costs to take advantage of the advantages you plan on specifying?
Here's what I think, if you want my 2 cents. Metro offers absolutely fuck all that wasn't already available, is a retard's GUI on a desktop, fucks up the kinds of multiasking that the taskbar makes easy, and has done fucking to sell Redmond's mobile offerings.
Here's what I want, if Microsoft ever wants to see me spend another fucking nickel on their operating systems. I want Metro if not outright removed, then made so that it can basically be ignored. I want the GUI that my staff have known for two decades back right in front where it fucking belongs.
Otherwise, we'll just keep using our Windows 7 licenses until January 14, 2020, by which time the last software that requires Internet Explorer will have been updated and discarded, and we can abandon Windows on the desktop.
You see, in the business world, conservatism tends to reign over "the latest fucky dunky dunky" GUI set that the Redmond developtment teams seem to masturbate to these days.
But it isn't a natural conclusion. The workflows on mobile devices is entirely different than a PC. Metro was based on a false premise, and Microsoft is reaping the punishments of that false premise. Even Microsoft seems to know that, and Metro on the desktop has taken the first step towards becoming a gimicky new gadgets bar with Windows 8.1, and I'll wager by Windows 9 it will have completed that voyage.
I think his history in the company was what went horribly wrong, and if Gates were still around, the same mistakes would have been made. Microsoft operated under the old adage "don't change your horses in midstream", and that meant hanging on to Ballmer even as everyone saw the titanic shifts in the marketplace.
To my (admittedly untrained) eye, I'm not sure what Microsoft could have done differently. It had put forward mobile operating systems before; Windows Phone and Pen both had longstanding iterations. So while I think it's easy to blame Ballmer, it strikes me to some extent that Microsoft suffered a lot of bad luck. It's timing was wrong on some products, and after having won the PC wars it simply didn't know where to go.
In the meantime, RIM comes along and recreates the mobile computing industry, and then Apple, and a little later Google, take the initiative and basically create the computer marketplace we see today. Maybe Microsoft could have done something earlier, but the way I look at the chronology of smartphones, I don't see where Microsoft had a lot of room to take the initiative. I mean, who would have thought in the mid-00s that the smart device would become the pre-eminent consumer computing platform in less than a decade?
Where Ballmer screwed up, if you can call it that, was in the vain attempt to basically buy Microsoft a market; with the Surface tablet line and the Nokia purchase, and even worse, to try to force a homogeneous GUI on everyone from Windows Server customers to Surface RT users. Metro is the real Ballmer fuck up, the one that spread Microsoft's mobile weakness across its entire product line.
The chief problem in Syria is trying to decide who is worse; Assad or the al Qaeda-backed rebels that have become so dominant in the battle against Assad. There's little point to getting rid of Assad only to replace him with people who would likely be much much worse.
I think you misunderstand me. Frankly I think Russia's annexation of Crimea is a fait accompli, and I think the EU and the US knew it all along. They're gamble, I suspect, is that Crimea will be sufficient coin to buy Russia's acquiescence to the rest of Ukraine moving westward (so to speak). It strikes me that that is Russia's view as well, as it seems to have contented itself with putting Russian forces in a position to negate any real action by Ukraine military forces.
In other words, I'm not blind to real politik. At the same time, territorial integrity has been a rather large theme in the international sphere since the Allied Powers agreed to the creation of the United Nations during WWII. Sure, it hasn't been uniformly applied; there have been effective secessions, civil wars and the like, but in general, the idea of military forces entering a region of a sovereign state and annexing it has been viewed as a breach of international peace. In the case of Crimea, Russia was a signatory to an agreement guaranteeing Ukraine's territorial integrity in exchange for Ukraine giving up the nuclear arsenal that it had inherited after the collapse of the USSR, so I think it's pretty firm that the occupation of Crimea and the clear intent to annex it into the Russian Federation breaks international law on a number of counts.
But, as I said, I think it's a fait accompli, and I think the end of this story was written weeks, if not months ago. Russia will agree to restrict itself to "protecting" Crimea. There will be a referendum in Crimea that will inevitably lead to Crimea either being annexed proper into Russia, or being given a sufficiently strong autonomous status that Ukraine will permanently lose it. The forms of diplomacy have to be obeyed, so Western leaders and foreign ministers will wring their hands and cry foul, even though everyone knew how this would end.
Kosovo stolen??? Only after the Serbs made it very clear they had every intention of killing or driving out every ethnic Albanian in the place. Kosovo wasn't stolen, it was granted independence by NATO because Serbia was on the brink of wiping out every non-Serbian it could find.
A very good point. A lot of the debate over Afghanistan was over de jure vs. de facto governments. At the end of the day, only two or three countries in the world recognized the Taliban as the government of Afghanistan.
The US president is actually, for the duties he performs, paid a pretty small amount. The President currently makes $400,000 a year (a helluva lot less than the CEO of many major US corporations). Yes, he lives in a mansion and has the use of a number of vacation and recreational areas like Camp David, but these all belong to the people of the United States and upon the end of his term, the President will receive no benefit from them. A President's personal wealth comes from his activities prior to and after his time in office; which is why Bill Clinton has made a career out of speaking engagements.
I can think of no example, even among the more corrupt US Presidents, of the level of self-aggrandizement and enrichment that has been seen with Yanukovich. The situations are not comparable to my mind.
From what I understand, the impeachment vote vacated the presidency, with new elections in May. I'm no expert on Ukraine's constitution, but what I read suggests Parliament was within its rights. Furthermore, Yanukovich pulled a James II and fled into Russia hands, thus effectively vacating his position.
By the same token, justifying one dubious or illegal act by bringing up another strikes me as a pretty flawed argument. That the US invaded Iraq in 2003 doesn't mean Russia invading Ukraine in 2014 is appropriate.
This is exactly the tit-for-tat Great Power games that lead to WWI... The US, I think, has come to deeply regret the Iraq invasion, which happened a decade ago under an entirely different Administration.
If only nations as pure as the driven snow could call out infamous acts by other nations, there would be virtually no one to complain.
What does the parliament in Crimea have to do with this? And as other posters have pointed out, Yanukovych was abandoned by members of his own party. The Parliament of Ukraine, as authorized by the Ukraine constitution, voted to remove Yanukovych from power. We can debate all day whether they felt forced by the protesters, but that is the facts. No one prevented Yanukovych's supporters in Ukraine's parliament from voting, so your whole point is false.
Get over it. The removal of Yanukovych was constitutional.
Slashdot Mirror
Nature may recycle it, but it may not end up anywhere near where you need it.
First of all, I doubt the majority of those concerned about the environment want the human race to decrease in number. That particular agenda is shared by a number of groups.
Second of all, why there is no lack of water in the world, the supplies of fresh water don't seem to nicely mesh up to the areas of the planet we've decided to turn into arable land. Desalinization won't do you a lot of good in areas of the American Midwest that were, until recently, semi-arid areas with frequent drought cycles, as these are a long way from any ocean. Many of these arid and semi-arid areas rely heavily on aquifers, which appear in most cases not to be all that renewable at all.
Judging by your use of the word "enviornazi", I'm dubious that any amount of evidence would sway you.
The harm that a large multinational wasn't paying bribe. Have a heart for corrupt officials. There are so many in India it must be hard to commit a good old fashioned shakedown.
I am... A future where MS is driven out of the consumer market.
You know, I've been hearing this from Creationists about evolution for years, and it's as big a lie coming from the AGW pseudoskeptics as it is coming from their intellectual brethren in the Creationist camp.
Grow up, for fuck's sake. Only morons and children deny reality.
This seems to suggest that a theory must be complete to have utility, which is absurd. General Relativity and quantum mechanics aren't complete and in some ways are even contradictory and yet both are incredibly useful at describing physical phenomena. Hell, even string theory, which may not even describe a real physical system at all, has created useful mathematical and conceptual tools for physics.
The fact of the matter is that AGW models while not perfectly matching up, all generally agree on certain trends, so this idea that you have all these models with wildly contradictory and incompatible predictions is wrong, and is exactly the kind of hyper/pseudo-skepticism which isn't deserved.
How many actual scientific theories have been outright debunked. I don't count pseudoscientific bafflegab like phrenology or Ptolemaic cosmology as being science. I'm talking about out and out scientific theories posited under something approaching the methodological naturalism that evolved out of the Enlightenment.
Take Newtonian mechanics. While in the strictest terms it isn't right, but for most non-relativistic purposes (like building bridges or getting a probe into orbit around Saturn) it works just fine. In other words, Newtonian physics was never falsified so much as subsumed into relativity, and become a useful non-relativistic simplification.
A few theories that I can think of that were outright falsified would be cosmological theories like steady state theory, or some pre-plate tectonics geological theories. The ether theory, which had a brief reign could be classified in this category, but my understanding is even by 19th century physics it was highly problematic. Some of the softer sciences may have issues as well, though many of these "so-called" theories were often more philosophy and metaphysics than science anyways.
The bulk of scientific theories may get modified or subsumed into larger theories but never get outright falsified or debunked. Generally speaking, to become a theory means that a helluva lot of work and observation has gone into it. That isn't to say that any given theory might be not be wrong, but still I'd say it's a lot less likely.
I don't want a mobile GUI on a desktop, and I don't want a desktop GUI on a mobile. I doubt very many people ever have. That's like insisting your popup toaster, your microwave and your thermostat have identical controls.
I'm not clear here. Why should I use Start button replacement of dubious merits to replace functionality that was present prior to Windows 8. I'm in an enterprise environment, where GPOs rule the roost, and your suggestion is that I use a third party tool that likely won't integrate into that environment in any meaningful way.
You seem to be of the opinion that the world should bend to Metro. Pretty much every organization I deal with does not want it, will not use it, and wants it completely hidden. Most plan on using their Windows 7 licences until that becomes nonviable for security reasons.
And if you think, by 2020, there won't be challengers to Microsoft Office, then you're deluded. If Metro isn't invisible by 2020, we will be moving to other platforms. Period.
I'm not clear. Why is Metro the right thing for the staff of my company, who have basically been using the same GUI for the better part of 20 years now? What exactly does Metro offer my staff that they don't already have, and aren't already familiar with? Why should I spend my company's IT and training budgets on:
1. Teaching them a new GUI paradigm?
2. Investing in new technology like touch screens to actually use this GUI?
3. Invest even more money in new licensing costs to take advantage of the advantages you plan on specifying?
Here's what I think, if you want my 2 cents. Metro offers absolutely fuck all that wasn't already available, is a retard's GUI on a desktop, fucks up the kinds of multiasking that the taskbar makes easy, and has done fucking to sell Redmond's mobile offerings.
Here's what I want, if Microsoft ever wants to see me spend another fucking nickel on their operating systems. I want Metro if not outright removed, then made so that it can basically be ignored. I want the GUI that my staff have known for two decades back right in front where it fucking belongs.
Otherwise, we'll just keep using our Windows 7 licenses until January 14, 2020, by which time the last software that requires Internet Explorer will have been updated and discarded, and we can abandon Windows on the desktop.
You see, in the business world, conservatism tends to reign over "the latest fucky dunky dunky" GUI set that the Redmond developtment teams seem to masturbate to these days.
The life of a repo man is always intense.
But it isn't a natural conclusion. The workflows on mobile devices is entirely different than a PC. Metro was based on a false premise, and Microsoft is reaping the punishments of that false premise. Even Microsoft seems to know that, and Metro on the desktop has taken the first step towards becoming a gimicky new gadgets bar with Windows 8.1, and I'll wager by Windows 9 it will have completed that voyage.
I think his history in the company was what went horribly wrong, and if Gates were still around, the same mistakes would have been made. Microsoft operated under the old adage "don't change your horses in midstream", and that meant hanging on to Ballmer even as everyone saw the titanic shifts in the marketplace.
To my (admittedly untrained) eye, I'm not sure what Microsoft could have done differently. It had put forward mobile operating systems before; Windows Phone and Pen both had longstanding iterations. So while I think it's easy to blame Ballmer, it strikes me to some extent that Microsoft suffered a lot of bad luck. It's timing was wrong on some products, and after having won the PC wars it simply didn't know where to go.
In the meantime, RIM comes along and recreates the mobile computing industry, and then Apple, and a little later Google, take the initiative and basically create the computer marketplace we see today. Maybe Microsoft could have done something earlier, but the way I look at the chronology of smartphones, I don't see where Microsoft had a lot of room to take the initiative. I mean, who would have thought in the mid-00s that the smart device would become the pre-eminent consumer computing platform in less than a decade?
Where Ballmer screwed up, if you can call it that, was in the vain attempt to basically buy Microsoft a market; with the Surface tablet line and the Nokia purchase, and even worse, to try to force a homogeneous GUI on everyone from Windows Server customers to Surface RT users. Metro is the real Ballmer fuck up, the one that spread Microsoft's mobile weakness across its entire product line.
The chief problem in Syria is trying to decide who is worse; Assad or the al Qaeda-backed rebels that have become so dominant in the battle against Assad. There's little point to getting rid of Assad only to replace him with people who would likely be much much worse.
I think you misunderstand me. Frankly I think Russia's annexation of Crimea is a fait accompli, and I think the EU and the US knew it all along. They're gamble, I suspect, is that Crimea will be sufficient coin to buy Russia's acquiescence to the rest of Ukraine moving westward (so to speak). It strikes me that that is Russia's view as well, as it seems to have contented itself with putting Russian forces in a position to negate any real action by Ukraine military forces.
In other words, I'm not blind to real politik. At the same time, territorial integrity has been a rather large theme in the international sphere since the Allied Powers agreed to the creation of the United Nations during WWII. Sure, it hasn't been uniformly applied; there have been effective secessions, civil wars and the like, but in general, the idea of military forces entering a region of a sovereign state and annexing it has been viewed as a breach of international peace. In the case of Crimea, Russia was a signatory to an agreement guaranteeing Ukraine's territorial integrity in exchange for Ukraine giving up the nuclear arsenal that it had inherited after the collapse of the USSR, so I think it's pretty firm that the occupation of Crimea and the clear intent to annex it into the Russian Federation breaks international law on a number of counts.
But, as I said, I think it's a fait accompli, and I think the end of this story was written weeks, if not months ago. Russia will agree to restrict itself to "protecting" Crimea. There will be a referendum in Crimea that will inevitably lead to Crimea either being annexed proper into Russia, or being given a sufficiently strong autonomous status that Ukraine will permanently lose it. The forms of diplomacy have to be obeyed, so Western leaders and foreign ministers will wring their hands and cry foul, even though everyone knew how this would end.
Translation: I'm a fucking moron who fears and doesn't understand science.
In other words, people are fucking morons.
Kosovo stolen??? Only after the Serbs made it very clear they had every intention of killing or driving out every ethnic Albanian in the place. Kosovo wasn't stolen, it was granted independence by NATO because Serbia was on the brink of wiping out every non-Serbian it could find.
A very good point. A lot of the debate over Afghanistan was over de jure vs. de facto governments. At the end of the day, only two or three countries in the world recognized the Taliban as the government of Afghanistan.
The US president is actually, for the duties he performs, paid a pretty small amount. The President currently makes $400,000 a year (a helluva lot less than the CEO of many major US corporations). Yes, he lives in a mansion and has the use of a number of vacation and recreational areas like Camp David, but these all belong to the people of the United States and upon the end of his term, the President will receive no benefit from them. A President's personal wealth comes from his activities prior to and after his time in office; which is why Bill Clinton has made a career out of speaking engagements.
I can think of no example, even among the more corrupt US Presidents, of the level of self-aggrandizement and enrichment that has been seen with Yanukovich. The situations are not comparable to my mind.
From what I understand, the impeachment vote vacated the presidency, with new elections in May. I'm no expert on Ukraine's constitution, but what I read suggests Parliament was within its rights. Furthermore, Yanukovich pulled a James II and fled into Russia hands, thus effectively vacating his position.
By the same token, justifying one dubious or illegal act by bringing up another strikes me as a pretty flawed argument. That the US invaded Iraq in 2003 doesn't mean Russia invading Ukraine in 2014 is appropriate.
This is exactly the tit-for-tat Great Power games that lead to WWI... The US, I think, has come to deeply regret the Iraq invasion, which happened a decade ago under an entirely different Administration.
If only nations as pure as the driven snow could call out infamous acts by other nations, there would be virtually no one to complain.
What does the parliament in Crimea have to do with this? And as other posters have pointed out, Yanukovych was abandoned by members of his own party. The Parliament of Ukraine, as authorized by the Ukraine constitution, voted to remove Yanukovych from power. We can debate all day whether they felt forced by the protesters, but that is the facts. No one prevented Yanukovych's supporters in Ukraine's parliament from voting, so your whole point is false.
Get over it. The removal of Yanukovych was constitutional.
But in all cases, the kernel is still Linux. If I run nothing but Cygwin userland on Windows, I'm still running Windows.