If I predict that July 4, 2104 will be rainy in Chicago I am making a weather prediction, and one that is surely no better than guesswork. If I predict that July 4 will be warmer than Christmas day there and then, I am making a climate prediction, and one that is a good bet.
The fact that there are predictability limits on weather does not mean there are the same predictability limits on the statistical properties of weather, i.e., on climate. The very existence of the concept of "climate" shows that this is the case.
Global warming is the new religion.
"Global warming" is sloppy jargon that tends to confuse discussions. It's an observation or a prediction or a prescription or a hypothesis depending on who you ask and when. I suggest avoiding the phrase if you want to have a reasonable conversation.
Climatology, on the other hand, is a physical science.
This proposal would allow countries to emit as much CO2 as they wanted, as long as it was reabsorbed by forests or whatever before it left their borders.
This suggestion is already part of the Kyoto protocol.
Note that equilibrium forests do not absorb atmospheric CO2 in the net, only growing forests do, while retreating forests emit CO2.
I have never before seen a claim that the US has zero net emissions after accounting for biomass sinks. Do you have any evidence for this or is it just a hunch?
We are talking about billions of tons of fossil fuel per year. (This is billions literally, not billions as in zillions. It's about 6 tons per capita per year globally averaged.) It's not hard to estimate who's digging it up and where they're shipping it.
The target is specifically fossil fuels. Biofuels (which includes food) merely recycle existing carbon and do not contribute to the problem.
There are some issues of how to account, but that's part of what the existing treaty does, and what any potential agreement the US might join would also have to do.
I am an expert on this matter. I hold a doctorate in atmospheric and oceanic sciences and I spend my time on the computer science aspects of climate models.
We have essentially bulletproof evidence that accumulating CO2 is caused by human activity. We understand the thermodynamic of atmospheres well enough to know that this is a significant perturbation. Paleonotological evidence indicates that this perturbation is occurring much more rapidly than any comparably large climate forcing event has occurred over at least the last fifty million years.
The first order prediction is that this will cause significant warming. Significant warming has been the consensus expectation of the scientific community starting in the early 80's, after a few years of debate as to whether human activity would cause cooling (through dust) or warming (through greenhouse gases). This prediction predates the observation of warming.
Since about 1990, computational models of sufficient fidelity to capture contemporary climate variations have been run with extrapolated greenhouse forcing.
Earliest and subsequent model results consistently predicted patterns of warming concentrated in the northern reaches of the continents. This is exactly the warming pattern that has emerged since then. These predictions show that the disruptions are expected to accelerate based on plausible emissions scenarios in the absence of policy constraints.
I encourage you to study the matter seriously rather than assert your hunches. The best place to start is the IPCC scientific working group report.
Actually the left is antinuclear in Europe as well, so much so that when my wife and I encounter a particularly PC leftist (here in America) we describe that person as "atomkraft nein danke" (nuclear power, no thanks), a bumper sticker common on beat up hippie cars in Germany, or at least formerly so.
It is striking though. The left believes in centralization and the right in decentralization, supposedly. Nuclear power works well in a tightly controlled civilization and disastrously in a loosely controlled one. Yet the left is horrified by it and the right is enthusiastic about it. The behavior of the right is as bizarre as that of the left in this matter if we look at it philosophically.
Culturally, the right is pro-military and the left is anti-military, which has the same character. The right supports centralized power and the left opposes it where the military is concerned, despite what they claim to believe. I think the nuclear energy position just inherits this paradox from its military association.
As for me, I am pronuclear because I am deeply concerned about global warming. That position is logically consistent but doesn't appeal to either "side".
I'm disappointed with this discussion so far. I'm actively looking for moral arguments for open source software in government.
This isn't purely an academic exercise. I have an appointment with the progressive mayor of a medium sized city to show off a LAMP project that I'm doing for the city bureaucracy. This city administration is stuck with a nightmarish tangle of legacy proprietary software garbage and yet the city is home to one of the world's leading CS departments and is a hotbed of OSS. It's absurd.
Anyway, even if that weren't the case there's a case to be made that governments should not merely tolerate OSS but demand it. This mayor and council would be open to such arguments if they were appropriately presented.
I'm sure it's been made somewhere by someone besides me, but Google has not been kind to me so far.
I'd appreciate any discussion or links on this topic. Resolved: a democratic government, in service to its constituency, should whenever possible refrain from building its public services around proprietary software built upon trade secrets.
I don't see much of interest in the article beyond some amazingly bad writing. In fact, someone who writes this badly in their own native language is almost invariably not worth listening to.
I think the author was rewarded in school for writing long sentences with big, trendy words. This sort of ridiculous blather is the result.
Some of my favorites:
Overuse of double quotes: It is important to note that autonomous agents compete to "make a living" in a fitscape, and as such tend to fill all possible "life sustaining" niches such as to provide for their specific "needs."
Wordy and vapid way of saying "sometimes economic activity changes the economy": While this may seem painfully obvious, when it comes to the study of economics, that feedback mechanism (i.e., the fitscape evolves as a result of agent activities) is often dismissed; a function of exogenous variables which are outside the scope of consideration for the problem in question.
Is this a poetic essay or a dry academic analysis? Try not to change your mind in the middle of a sentence please. Grotesque neither-fish-nor-fowl writing.
At first, the smithy was not aware that his hammer would soon ring no more, that machines would take the place of hammer and anvil, more efficiently creating the tools and weapons for an increasingly sophisticated cultural milieu.
Sixth grade level spelling error. A possesive is not a plural.
Smithy's also made the tools that were necessary for the daily household chores, such as pots and pans for the fireplace.
Uhh, "first order derivative"? If this doesn't rub you the wrong way you've never had a calculus class. There's no law against that, of course, but this comes in a paragraph about the scientific method!And the essence of measurement, in a capitalist system, will always be a first-order derivative of the much-maligned bottom line--it's not personal, it's just business.
Let me introduce you to the idea of a dictionary. "rubric" means "name", or at best "name of category".
Applying a similar rubric to the postmodern computer programmer might now yield some insight as to the coming fortunes of that trade.
(add your own comment here, I'm ovewhelmed)
The anarchistic, eclectic, and often incoherent ramblings that characterize much of the Pomo Jones mindset belie the importance and value it may conceptually provide. Computer programmers are icons of the postmodern age and sometimes idiosyncratic of its nature. As much as film, and more than television, architecture, or art, the postmodern programmer has enabled the cyber-collage, globally diverse viewless worldview that is the hallmark of Pomo entrails. Indeed, computer programmers (those of the Java, C#, and Perl caste, at least) are the Pomo elite.
uh-huh
and here I thought it was about algorithm and syntax...
Today, programming means breaking the bounded, solitary-node paradigm, enjoining a network that is effectively limitless but unique at every node.
Sure, they'll mechanize that one any day...
Ooh, let's throw in a random bit of computer history to show we know something about computers.
But just as the entire notion of "writing code" has changed dramatically since the earliest _stacked job batch systems_ [link to an undergrad CS lecture] of the 1960s...
"ignorant"?
The vast majority of coding today is ignorant of such constraints.
Do you know anyone who talks like this? The fact that the nature of programming is changing even as the demand for programming skills has abated, to serve what is otherwise an increasing global demand for IT-related products, should be a glaring indicator and something of a concern to skeptics; even the computer industry is not immure from the ephemeralizing virtuous cycles wr
us grizzled oldies remember the 70s when that same 95% of climate scientists, using the same data, assured us that a new Ice Age was just about to engulf us all and we had to panic to deal with *that* threat. So when we hear that everything's flipped 180 and now there's a 95% consensus around the exact opposite position, although the data hasn't changed; well, fool me once, and all that
Are you grizzled enough that your memory is failing you? There was never such a 95% consensus about global cooling.
Also you may not recall that computers have advanced since 1975, and as a result, complex sciences like climate have advanced considerably since then.
I usually cut Slashdot editorial some slack, but this is over the top. It's just a link to a tedious example of bad journalism as it stands. It should not have been posted as it stands. There's nothing to discuss.
Experts at British Gas indeed. Why? How? No one is even telling us the quantity that is being calculated in this dubious formula.
If you don't know, guys, kindly don't pass it on. So far it's just noise. Here's a slightly better link, but still not, in my opinion, enough to bother with.
There's lots of room for real scientific controversy, and huge amounts of room for policy controversy, but the points I asserted as settled are indeed settled.
The idea that "nobody would argue" if it were that cut and dried only applies to pure science. In an applied science with implications for policy that threatens some economic interests, those interests inevitably trump up doubt.
That's to be expected. The tragedy is that they get away with it.
I would love it if the technical audience went and looked at the evidence I pointed to, thanks very much.
You are very quick to openly dismiss the potential for sources other than industrial pollution causing an increase in CO2.
Isotopic evidence is absolutely clear; the increased carbon in the environment is coming from fossil sources; it's completely C14 depleted. Where else would it be coming from, anyway? It's the term in the mass balance that's changed. If the increase in CO2 isn;t anthropogenic, you have two big questions. 1) where *is* it coming from and 2) where *did* the carbon we emitted go? Occam doesn't really have to work very hard here.
most environmentalist are quick to point...
(massive sigh)
Can we talk about science, please, and not about why some ill-informed group of people you don't like picks some opinion that isn't the opinion preferred by the ill-informed people you do like?
This thread isn't about ideology, it's about measurable and understandable physical processes in the atmosphere and ocean. It wasn't "environmentalists" who brought ideology into it, it was you.
A) given that it has not yet been established that there actually IS any long term warming due to green house gases or due to anything else for that matter (because nobody has measured it yet),
Absolutely and demonstrably false.
and given that there's no conclusive evidence (measurements)that human activity is even a significant contribution to this as-yet unmeasured warming, much less causative,
We know conclusively that greenhouse gases cause warming, that humans have caused the abrupt spike in greenhouse gases, and that there has been recent warming of about the size predictable from the change in greenhouse gases. That doesn't leave much wiggle room, but people are still trying to wiggle just a little.
and given the amount of foul play there's been lately in the "scientific" community regarding the subject of warming (google up "Death Valley temperature sensor" for a giggle, or "urban heat island effect" or "hockey stick chart debunked" or "Bjorn Lomborg" maybe)
You can google up any damn thing you want, but that doesn't mean these allegations hold water.
Predictions of increased tropical storms are a new result, that had heretofore been suspected but not shown across a wide range of dynamical models. Neither the suspicion nor the result have anything other than coincidental relationship to the recent bad luck in Florida and the Caribbean one way or the other, which indeed has not been sufficiently extraordinary to count as evidence of climate change in itself.
The actual opinion of the leadership of the relevant scientific communities is explained in a serious but accessible way. People in certain less responsible corners of the fossil fuel industry are actively trying to lie to you about the nature of these documents, but if you take the time to read them you will see that they are not political at all but an evenhanded and responsible summary of the state of scientific evidence.
There was a serious effort to get high-performance computing extensions into Java, called the Java Grande initiative. It would have required a few minor changes to the language spec to work. (Plus a huge effort in developing libraries of course.)
Despite some interest at Sun, in the end this was rebuffed and compute-intensive scientific Java never happened, unfortunately. It subverted some of their run-time requirements.
Basically all Java Grande wanted was a set of "relax this constraint" flags at compile time, e.g., turn off array bounds checks, but this was happening when the idea was that Java was going to do everything everywhere. Scientific programming was considered too small of a market to pollute the language spec. This may even have been the right business decision on Sun's part, but it unfortunately slows down the end of fortran.
As for "the entire code base being recompiled" versus "dropping in an object", you may be confusing the older and newer meanings of "object". Fortran compilers produce "object files" which have nothing to do with OOP, and do not have to be recompiled to be linked into an executable. Avoiding recompiles is not especially an advantage of OOP!
OK, my intuition was wrong. I hereby withdraw my snarky comment.
As a first pass, using the numbers above, the energy in a kg of fuel is roughly sufficient to launch a ton of material into the sun.
Now, that's not as bad as I expected, but it's not as good as you think. For U-235 fission, you have a 150-fold hit just separating out the isotopes.
There's other stuff besides the spent fuel, of course, and you still have to account for losses in generation and transmission, and you still have to get something useful out of it.
It seems like a long shot with the U-235, but Pu-239 doesn't have the 150-fold hit, and might just work.
I stand corrected and apologize for my remark.
Meanwhile I am more pro-nuclear inclined as a result of this calculation. The masses involved are so much smaller than the masses of fossil fuel that the risks seem much more controllable, and that's even with the 150-fold hit.
mt
the amount of power being extracted from the atmosphere would be more than the increase in greenhouse gas atmospheric energy forcing since 1600 ?
Well, since we're comparing energy and power, that doesn't really make sense. And as others point out, redirecting mechanical energy around doesn't reduce heat dissipation, so its nonsense on that basis as well.
Anyway, the reason we are worried about greenhouse gas forcing rather than direct thermal pollution is because the power of the surface anthropogenic greenhouse forcing (about 3 watts per square meter and climbing) exceeds the direct human utilization of energy by some orders of magnitude.
Exercise: Calculate per capita wattage of 3 watts per square meter worldwide divided by 6e9 people. That is your current share of artifical greenhouse heating, assuming you are a mean contributor. If you are North American or Australian, you may reasonably quadruple it for good measure.
You are joking, right? Word is the shining example of the non-infallibility of the marketplace. It's buggy, non-intuitive, smarmy and bloated. WordStar was better tha Word in 1980 for God's sake.
Of course e) all my clients have it is the only real advantage of this pestilential rot called "Word". The solution of course is not to send them editable documents, which usually isn't what you want anyway. If I need to send a client a formatted document I send a PDF.
If you are co-editing a document with someone out of your company on a regular basis, you can both switch.
If you do this all the time with a lot of customers, you need to rethink your workflow anyway. A web-based application would be better.
Most probably your clients don't need to edit the documents you send. Either use plain text or if you need formatting, use PDF, and they'll see exactly what you sent, not some garbled half-legible version, which is actually what their version of Word is rendering most likely anyway.
Or, if you do use Windows, switch to Word Pro, which is a thing of beauty, and which saves to doc format no worse than the various version of Word do anyway.
Every time I think about forgiving Microsoft I recall all the needless pain they have inflicted on the world with this pig. The world is so far unable to see how much time and effort is being wasted trying to get the thing to produce useful documents.
I find this immensely discouraging. Any progress away from it wouldn't solve the world's great problems of course, but it's hard to imagine that a world which can't abandon universal use of one of the worst pieces of major software ever written can solve more difficult problems.
That's a factor, too, I agree. I'm not sure it dominates, though. Also, though I am no fan of Microsoft, I can't fault them for making things that ought to be easy easy.
I acknowledge that there are a lot of jobs that are more "power user" gigs than real programmer jobs. Still I would expect the total intellectual challenge of the coding problems being solved today worldwide exceeds any past time, possibly excepting the dot-com blip.
It seems to me that this discussion will be remiss if it fails to compare and contrast Phil Greenspun's idealistic Ars Digita University which attempted to deliver an MIT-equivalent CS education in a year.
Some of the best coders I've ever encountered were under 20. It doesn't really take that long for someone with the right sort of intelligence to develop the skills. So the idea of a two-year crash course isn't unreasonable.
The real problem is, that sort of intelligence isn't all that rare. Which is why a coding career isn't as lucrative as it once was, I guess. These crash courses beguile their audiences into thinking they can be fabulously wealthy just as coders. You need a great deal more to convert computing skill into something other than a moderately paid high stress job.
Know computing, but also know something else, is my advice for most people. What else? Something that you can apply the computing to, basically. There's a lot of choices. Pick one.
A friend of mine had it done and had bad complications. He was legally blind for months and while he recovered somewhat I don't think his eyesight is better than when he started. My eyesight is starting to decline but I will put up with the reading glasses thankyouverymuch.
I don't recall the Drake equation referring to "space-faring races", but merely intelligent ones at about our level of intelligence.
It doesn't. My point is that it should. There are large ranges of the parameter space for which the feasibility of deep space travel is highly relevant, on the grounds of very basic principles of evolutionary biology.
Slashdot Mirror
Weather is not climate.
If I predict that July 4, 2104 will be rainy in Chicago I am making a weather prediction, and one that is surely no better than guesswork. If I predict that July 4 will be warmer than Christmas day there and then, I am making a climate prediction, and one that is a good bet.
The fact that there are predictability limits on weather does not mean there are the same predictability limits on the statistical properties of weather, i.e., on climate. The very existence of the concept of "climate" shows that this is the case.
Global warming is the new religion.
"Global warming" is sloppy jargon that tends to confuse discussions. It's an observation or a prediction or a prescription or a hypothesis depending on who you ask and when. I suggest avoiding the phrase if you want to have a reasonable conversation.
Climatology, on the other hand, is a physical science.
This suggestion is already part of the Kyoto protocol.
Note that equilibrium forests do not absorb atmospheric CO2 in the net, only growing forests do, while retreating forests emit CO2.
I have never before seen a claim that the US has zero net emissions after accounting for biomass sinks. Do you have any evidence for this or is it just a hunch?
The target is specifically fossil fuels. Biofuels (which includes food) merely recycle existing carbon and do not contribute to the problem.
There are some issues of how to account, but that's part of what the existing treaty does, and what any potential agreement the US might join would also have to do.
We have essentially bulletproof evidence that accumulating CO2 is caused by human activity. We understand the thermodynamic of atmospheres well enough to know that this is a significant perturbation. Paleonotological evidence indicates that this perturbation is occurring much more rapidly than any comparably large climate forcing event has occurred over at least the last fifty million years.
The first order prediction is that this will cause significant warming. Significant warming has been the consensus expectation of the scientific community starting in the early 80's, after a few years of debate as to whether human activity would cause cooling (through dust) or warming (through greenhouse gases). This prediction predates the observation of warming.
Since about 1990, computational models of sufficient fidelity to capture contemporary climate variations have been run with extrapolated greenhouse forcing.
Earliest and subsequent model results consistently predicted patterns of warming concentrated in the northern reaches of the continents. This is exactly the warming pattern that has emerged since then. These predictions show that the disruptions are expected to accelerate based on plausible emissions scenarios in the absence of policy constraints.
I encourage you to study the matter seriously rather than assert your hunches. The best place to start is the IPCC scientific working group report.
Michael Tobis
It is striking though. The left believes in centralization and the right in decentralization, supposedly. Nuclear power works well in a tightly controlled civilization and disastrously in a loosely controlled one. Yet the left is horrified by it and the right is enthusiastic about it. The behavior of the right is as bizarre as that of the left in this matter if we look at it philosophically.
Culturally, the right is pro-military and the left is anti-military, which has the same character. The right supports centralized power and the left opposes it where the military is concerned, despite what they claim to believe. I think the nuclear energy position just inherits this paradox from its military association.
As for me, I am pronuclear because I am deeply concerned about global warming. That position is logically consistent but doesn't appeal to either "side".
This isn't purely an academic exercise. I have an appointment with the progressive mayor of a medium sized city to show off a LAMP project that I'm doing for the city bureaucracy. This city administration is stuck with a nightmarish tangle of legacy proprietary software garbage and yet the city is home to one of the world's leading CS departments and is a hotbed of OSS. It's absurd.
Anyway, even if that weren't the case there's a case to be made that governments should not merely tolerate OSS but demand it. This mayor and council would be open to such arguments if they were appropriately presented.
I'm sure it's been made somewhere by someone besides me, but Google has not been kind to me so far.
I'd appreciate any discussion or links on this topic. Resolved: a democratic government, in service to its constituency, should whenever possible refrain from building its public services around proprietary software built upon trade secrets.
Thanks in advance.
I think the author was rewarded in school for writing long sentences with big, trendy words. This sort of ridiculous blather is the result.
Some of my favorites:
uh-huh
Sure, they'll mechanize that one any day...
Are you grizzled enough that your memory is failing you? There was never such a 95% consensus about global cooling.
Also you may not recall that computers have advanced since 1975, and as a result, complex sciences like climate have advanced considerably since then.
Experts at British Gas indeed. Why? How? No one is even telling us the quantity that is being calculated in this dubious formula.
If you don't know, guys, kindly don't pass it on. So far it's just noise. Here's a slightly better link, but still not, in my opinion, enough to bother with.
The idea that "nobody would argue" if it were that cut and dried only applies to pure science. In an applied science with implications for policy that threatens some economic interests, those interests inevitably trump up doubt.
That's to be expected. The tragedy is that they get away with it. I would love it if the technical audience went and looked at the evidence I pointed to, thanks very much.
Isotopic evidence is absolutely clear; the increased carbon in the environment is coming from fossil sources; it's completely C14 depleted. Where else would it be coming from, anyway? It's the term in the mass balance that's changed. If the increase in CO2 isn;t anthropogenic, you have two big questions. 1) where *is* it coming from and 2) where *did* the carbon we emitted go? Occam doesn't really have to work very hard here.
most environmentalist are quick to point ...
(massive sigh)
Can we talk about science, please, and not about why some ill-informed group of people you don't like picks some opinion that isn't the opinion preferred by the ill-informed people you do like?
This thread isn't about ideology, it's about measurable and understandable physical processes in the atmosphere and ocean. It wasn't "environmentalists" who brought ideology into it, it was you.
Anyway, y'all have a look at the IPCC reports, ok?
That's here
Absolutely and demonstrably false.
and given that there's no conclusive evidence (measurements)that human activity is even a significant contribution to this as-yet unmeasured warming, much less causative,
We know conclusively that greenhouse gases cause warming, that humans have caused the abrupt spike in greenhouse gases, and that there has been recent warming of about the size predictable from the change in greenhouse gases. That doesn't leave much wiggle room, but people are still trying to wiggle just a little.
and given the amount of foul play there's been lately in the "scientific" community regarding the subject of warming (google up "Death Valley temperature sensor" for a giggle, or "urban heat island effect" or "hockey stick chart debunked" or "Bjorn Lomborg" maybe)
You can google up any damn thing you want, but that doesn't mean these allegations hold water.
Predictions of increased tropical storms are a new result, that had heretofore been suspected but not shown across a wide range of dynamical models. Neither the suspicion nor the result have anything other than coincidental relationship to the recent bad luck in Florida and the Caribbean one way or the other, which indeed has not been sufficiently extraordinary to count as evidence of climate change in itself.
The actual opinion of the leadership of the relevant scientific communities is explained in a serious but accessible way. People in certain less responsible corners of the fossil fuel industry are actively trying to lie to you about the nature of these documents, but if you take the time to read them you will see that they are not political at all but an evenhanded and responsible summary of the state of scientific evidence.
See here
Despite some interest at Sun, in the end this was rebuffed and compute-intensive scientific Java never happened, unfortunately. It subverted some of their run-time requirements.
Basically all Java Grande wanted was a set of "relax this constraint" flags at compile time, e.g., turn off array bounds checks, but this was happening when the idea was that Java was going to do everything everywhere. Scientific programming was considered too small of a market to pollute the language spec. This may even have been the right business decision on Sun's part, but it unfortunately slows down the end of fortran.
As for "the entire code base being recompiled" versus "dropping in an object", you may be confusing the older and newer meanings of "object". Fortran compilers produce "object files" which have nothing to do with OOP, and do not have to be recompiled to be linked into an executable. Avoiding recompiles is not especially an advantage of OOP!
OK, my intuition was wrong. I hereby withdraw my snarky comment. As a first pass, using the numbers above, the energy in a kg of fuel is roughly sufficient to launch a ton of material into the sun. Now, that's not as bad as I expected, but it's not as good as you think. For U-235 fission, you have a 150-fold hit just separating out the isotopes. There's other stuff besides the spent fuel, of course, and you still have to account for losses in generation and transmission, and you still have to get something useful out of it. It seems like a long shot with the U-235, but Pu-239 doesn't have the 150-fold hit, and might just work. I stand corrected and apologize for my remark. Meanwhile I am more pro-nuclear inclined as a result of this calculation. The masses involved are so much smaller than the masses of fossil fuel that the risks seem much more controllable, and that's even with the 150-fold hit. mt
I hate to be rude, but why isn't there a
moderation?Um, exactly how much energy does it take to launch a used nuclear reactor and its spent fuel into the sun? Do you expect gravity to be repealed?
Well, since we're comparing energy and power, that doesn't really make sense. And as others point out, redirecting mechanical energy around doesn't reduce heat dissipation, so its nonsense on that basis as well.
Anyway, the reason we are worried about greenhouse gas forcing rather than direct thermal pollution is because the power of the surface anthropogenic greenhouse forcing (about 3 watts per square meter and climbing) exceeds the direct human utilization of energy by some orders of magnitude.
Exercise: Calculate per capita wattage of 3 watts per square meter worldwide divided by 6e9 people. That is your current share of artifical greenhouse heating, assuming you are a mean contributor. If you are North American or Australian, you may reasonably quadruple it for good measure.
The fact that it got modded up is alarming.
You are joking, right? Word is the shining example of the non-infallibility of the marketplace. It's buggy, non-intuitive, smarmy and bloated. WordStar was better tha Word in 1980 for God's sake.
Of course e) all my clients have it is the only real advantage of this pestilential rot called "Word". The solution of course is not to send them editable documents, which usually isn't what you want anyway. If I need to send a client a formatted document I send a PDF.
If you are co-editing a document with someone out of your company on a regular basis, you can both switch.
If you do this all the time with a lot of customers, you need to rethink your workflow anyway. A web-based application would be better.
Most probably your clients don't need to edit the documents you send. Either use plain text or if you need formatting, use PDF, and they'll see exactly what you sent, not some garbled half-legible version, which is actually what their version of Word is rendering most likely anyway.
Or, if you do use Windows, switch to Word Pro, which is a thing of beauty, and which saves to doc format no worse than the various version of Word do anyway.
Every time I think about forgiving Microsoft I recall all the needless pain they have inflicted on the world with this pig. The world is so far unable to see how much time and effort is being wasted trying to get the thing to produce useful documents.
I find this immensely discouraging. Any progress away from it wouldn't solve the world's great problems of course, but it's hard to imagine that a world which can't abandon universal use of one of the worst pieces of major software ever written can solve more difficult problems.
Biofuels recycle atmospheric CO2; they don't add new CO2 to the active reservoirs the way fossil fuels do.
Biofuels do not contribute to the accumulation of greenhouse gases.
That's a factor, too, I agree. I'm not sure it dominates, though. Also, though I am no fan of Microsoft, I can't fault them for making things that ought to be easy easy.
I acknowledge that there are a lot of jobs that are more "power user" gigs than real programmer jobs. Still I would expect the total intellectual challenge of the coding problems being solved today worldwide exceeds any past time, possibly excepting the dot-com blip.
There's just a lot more people to address them.
--
Some of the best coders I've ever encountered were under 20. It doesn't really take that long for someone with the right sort of intelligence to develop the skills. So the idea of a two-year crash course isn't unreasonable.
The real problem is, that sort of intelligence isn't all that rare. Which is why a coding career isn't as lucrative as it once was, I guess. These crash courses beguile their audiences into thinking they can be fabulously wealthy just as coders. You need a great deal more to convert computing skill into something other than a moderately paid high stress job.
Know computing, but also know something else, is my advice for most people. What else? Something that you can apply the computing to, basically. There's a lot of choices. Pick one.
A friend of mine had it done and had bad complications. He was legally blind for months and while he recovered somewhat I don't think his eyesight is better than when he started. My eyesight is starting to decline but I will put up with the reading glasses thankyouverymuch.
All my good ideas are like that. Dang.
Got a reference? Thanks.
It doesn't. My point is that it should. There are large ranges of the parameter space for which the feasibility of deep space travel is highly relevant, on the grounds of very basic principles of evolutionary biology.