Sorry, I neither get the state of the onion, nor do I get Perl. I'm just writing a lot of Perl code again, and while the coverage of the libraries is stellar, the language itself is a constant source of irritation for me.
I think Haskell has lots of potential, but it has some usability problems: its syntax is highly unfamiliar and error prone for mainstream programmers, and some concepts are just packaged badly (e.g., monads). Also, it's type system is probably more complex than people can handle.
A dynamically typed lazy functional programming language might be a better start towards popularizing functional programming.
Mini ITX pioneered the small form factors, quiet desktops, and Nano ITX was supposed to go a step further. But complete and assembled Mini ITX systems are shipped only by a few obscure vendors and expensive for their limited performance, and Nano ITX has been MIA since 2003.
Apple, meanwhile, has grabbed the small, quiet desktop market with the Mac Mini, which is a beautiful piece of hardware, but is a bit limited in terms of software (pretty much OS X, since Linux isn't all that well supported).
Let's hope that Apple will come out with a Mac Mini/86, and that other PC vendors will clone the concept quickly. 640k may not be all you need, but a quart-sized PC ought to be all you need.
Whenever I access servers at work, I do it via SSH, or some other similar encrypted method. Why? Well it would be a problem if someone at the ISP got the root password, they could do a lot of damage and we might never even know. They shouldn't be monitoring me like that, but it is too important to trust them with, I take it in my own hands.
If you don't trust your ISP to some degree, you're in trouble; it would be easy for them to conduct man-in-the-middle attacks on your ssh sessions unless you transport your host keys by some other means. Ssh is useful, but primarily against listening, not against someone who has control of the network.
Security is one of Skype's selling points. The fact that there is no way to verify it, no way to audit the code, no way to check for a back door means that you can't rely on Skype security: you just don't know. Given the background of the company and its founder, it also seems doubtful that a lot of security expertise went into the product.
And the fact that eBay has been willing to work closely with law enforcement means that they may well put in back doors even if they aren't already there.
Bottom line: if you want secure communications, don't use closed source, use something you can audit.
But people keep saying that good programmers can avoid buffer overflows in C and C++ because they know what they are doing. Well, I guess neither Microsoft nor Firefox programmers are good enough...
With a class of 300, do the students actually gain anything from being physically there? Do they gain more than they would simply reading a book?
Lectures and books have different content and are different channels of communication. So, in short, yes, many people seem to benefit from having lectures in addition to reading the book. Some people, however, don't, and, of course, there are many bad lectures that aren't worth going to.
A better question to ask is, perhaps, whether watching a video of the lecture isn't just as good as going to the lecture. It's not a high resolution, the sound is worse, and you lose any possibility for feedback or interaction, but that may not be such a big deal to you individually in a large class. But the video needs to be produced, and the best way to produce a lecture video is during a live lecture. Since you need to watch the lecture around the time it's held anyway, you might as well be in the audience.
Without "taking the sun into account", there wouldn't be any global warming, there wouldn't be any warming at all: earth's surface would be not much warmer than interstellar space. So, of course, global warming models are taking the sun into account because global warming is caused by the interaction of solar radiation, the ground, and the atmosphere.
What you may be saying is that climate models have not been taking into account changes in solar output over time, but that would be wrong: people have used the data that has been available to them. In particular, for the period of which we have observed climate change on Mars, there is excellent data available for solar output, so we don't need to guess about it based on climate change on Mars, we already know.
Unfortunately, people with large investments in the current fossil fuel energy infrastructure have been manipulating the discussions in order to paralyze the political process; moving from fossil fuel to other energy sources would mean that big companies that now have markets nearly locked up would have to compete again, and there would be winners and losers. They don't like that risk. For the economy as a whole, moving away from fossil fuel is a big win, however.
In fact, even if climatologists were completely wrong about causality, reducing carbon emissions would still be the sensible thing to do as long as it is getting warmer, and it is getting warmer.
The best solution is to not have any such system and simply DO example problems in lecture. The thing that college lectures lack is not something captivating (like hitting the button on a remote is actually captivating...) or innovative, but BETTER LECTURES. Period.
You know, professors are people, and they aren't perfect. They also can't read minds. In order to figure out how to improve their lectures, they need feedback. They can do that by talking to people, and they should continue to do that, but that only gives them a small, biased sample. With clickers, they get feedback from everybody about progress and attitudes.
Lecturers tend to go over things in too much of an 'overview' format (at least in the science/tech classes) and avoid doing actual example problems that might help us LEARN.
Sounds like your professors have the right idea: lectures are supposed to give you the general picture, you do examples in your homework, and you talk about them with your teaching assistants if you can't figure it out. And you are supposed to do the LEARNING yourself. Sorry if that comes as a surprise.
It is far more effective to try to interact with the students and understand where their learning is at, individually, then tailor my teaching to whatever common problems or such need the most attention.
<sarcasm>Yes, it's so easy to "personally interact" with a class of 300 students. And, of course, every one of those students is actually available to interact and is going to reveal all his questions and confusions to you, the person who is going to grade them, when you talk to them.</sarcasm>
The idea of clickers is a good one, and they have the potential for improving education. Whether they actually work remains to be seen. In any case, an open source implementation would make it easier for educators to tailor these devices to their needs, and that can only be good.
This is one obvious solution for providing an "infinite environment" in a finite space. Another is active floor tiles.
There are two problems with them. First, they can't actually give you completely natural motion anyway because, no matter what you do, the accelerations aren't going to work out correctly, and acceleration is what your brain senses.
Second, it's not clear why you need something even this complicated: your brain is adaptive enough that it will perceive even much simpler interfaces as the real thing after a short amount of time (and if it doesn't, a bit of weed may be cheaper and take up less space than this contraption:-).
(Of course, since Star Trek has artificial gravity, this isn't a problem for the Holodeck.)
I think you need to take a serious look at why you're swallowing one side's lines,
I'm not swallowing anybody's lines. I'm saying that your reasoning is clearly spurious and probably driven by a political agenda.
Which are probably flawed, because of insufficient measuring equipment and understanding of how the processes work together.
Of course, many climate models are flawed; that's not the issue here. We aren't discussing whether terrestrial climate models are accurate, we are discussing your spurious reasoning about conclusions we can draw from changes in martian climate.
and treating other people like idiots if they don't
Your statement was idiotic, regardless of whether one believes that global warming is man-made or not: global warming on Mars tells you nothing about global warming on earth, because the one common factor that is known, solar input, has been properly controlled for.
It's ironic, isn't it, that when climatologists make careful arguments about why correlations are causative, you people dismiss them saying that you don't accept that, but when two planets separated by half a light hour coincidentally warm, you immediately jump to conclusions about common causes. Get real, and start using your head for once.
No, his posting was uninformed and biased. It may seem "thoughtful" to you based on no data at all, but he is basically doing the equivalent of arguing that the earth is flat because "everybody can see that it is".
As I'm sure you well know, even scientists get it wrong sometimes. We are allowed to question them.
Of course, we are allowed to question them. A good place to start might be by actually asking questions. But he didn't ask questions, he accused climatologists of being idiots that ignore one of the most obvious factors. Face it, he wasn't questioning scientists, he was pushing a political agenda.
Interesting. What is the cause of that climate change? Can you point to a source, please?
Look for "climate change mars" on Google. You'll get lots of articles about tilt, the fact that the Martian atmosphere freezes out, chemical processes, and other factors. Whatever climate models apply to Mars, the two systems just are not comparable.
And why would that be "good"? Oh, you're part of the Microsoft-must-die jihad. *yawn*
Let me turn that question around: why do you think it's good that there is a single office suite, a product that costs hundreds of dollars every year, keeps its data in proprietary formats, and gives a single software company a huge profit margin? Wouldn't it be better for the economy as a whole if software were available cost-effectively? Do you want to pay more for your new car, or your food, or your books just so that Bill Gates can build a bigger mansion? Because that's what it all boils down to: Microsoft's profits ultimately come out of everybody's pockets.
BTW, Office12 makes OpenOffice look like a dinosaur. Users will choose apps that look and feel modern over outdated garbage
Whatever. With Microsoft's glacial development schedules, Office 12 is pretty much set in stone at this point. OpenOffice, on the other hand, gets to pick and choose the features from Office 12 that it wants to clone and may even beat Office 12 to market with that. Or, the OOo developers may decide that conservatism is better.
Functionally, it makes little difference. For people like you who believe in appearances of substance, Office 12 may be a big change, but functionally, it's miniscule.
You fundamentally misunderstand what environmentalism is about. The environmentalist's desire to keep the planet pristine is about human survival, human preferences, human ethics, and economics. There are no reasons other than those to act one way or another towards the environment.
In terms of human survival, many people are completely naive about how much their survival depends on a functioning environment. Their absurd notions also come to light when talking about colonizing space. We are intricately linked with a complex web of organisms; our long-term survival depends on it.
But it's not just about survival. Humans also have preferences: there are environments we like to live in and ones we don't like to live in. Anti-environmentalist policies generally lead to environments few people would actually want to live in, they just don't realize the long-term consequences of their actions.
Finally, there is the question of ethics. There are radical environmentalists who believe that all life deserves strong protection, they don't represent the environmentalist mainstream. But it is clear that vertebrates, and in particular mammals, have enough intelligence that some of the ethical considerations we apply to causing suffering to other human beings ought to apply to them as well. That's another reason we can't just change the environment arbitrarily.
Finally, it's about economics. People understimate the economic value of a intact environment. When we let people destroy the environment for industrial purposes, it is the equivalent of letting them chop off bits and pieces of our homes for firewood: they are destroying something economically very valuable for a small benefit, and they are not even paying for that.
Just because those responses are predictable doesn't mean that some of them aren't also true.
Besides, Microsoft is constantly broadcasting the message that Linux sucks, and they are paying billions a year to have that message repeated wherever they can. Do you expect Linux supporters to just respond once and then shut up?
Microsoft has bought the airwaves, print publications, billboards, and face time to get their message across. Leave the rest of us a little space on discussion groups for expressing our views.
It is one of those That is *so* obvious features that ends up in every product because it is just so *DUHHH* after someone popularises the concept.:-)
Contrary to what you may think, developers in the past weren't too stupid to come up with such obvious ideas, they simply made a reasonable tradeoff between features, hardware requirements, and development effort.
Furthermore, after Microsoft has killed off all the commercial competition (through proprietary formats, bundling, and other anti-competitive tricks), which products exactly are you talking about when you say "every product"? Microsoft currently has no commercial competitors, and they can leisurely pull one obvious feature after another out of a hat and bask in the glory of being "innovative". Adding injury to insult, I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to patent this.
Now, you may say that OpenOffice is a competitor. You are right. But Microsoft's dirty tricks make the work of OpenOffice developers much harder than the Microsoft Office team. Furthermore, Microsoft Office compatibility (both in terms of UI and in terms of features and formats) is the primary driver of OpenOffice development, so the degree to which OpenOffice can innovate are very limited. In the long run, you can bet, though, that an open source office suite, not Microsoft Office, will become the driver for innovation in this space.
Gathering data from Mars gives a possible 'control' in the experiment we're all running with earth's atmosphere. If we find earth's temperature rise slows (or goes backwards) at the same time Mars does the apparent same, then there's more study to be done on what's affecting earth.
Studying Mars climate is useful in general to help improve climate models, but it doesn't work the way you think it does.
Climate change on Mars is predicted and expected, and it is based on factors that are radically different from those you get on earth.
"Look at that waistline, it's bulging. Oh, well, just live with it, things change."
"Look at that bank account, it's emptying. Oh, well, just keep spending, things change."
Fact is that if you do something that hurts you, you ought to change your behavior. If external factors make the consequences of your behavior even more serious, then you have to be extra careful to change your behavior.
Yes, the climate always changes, and that has consequences. Whether NO was caused by global warming or not, it is the kind of thing that is caused by global warming. Since we generally don't like our cities flooded and destroyed, that's something we need to do something about.
Well if Mars is going through what appears to be similar changes as the Earth then perhaps we need to go back and look at what we share in common, namely the sun.
Congratulations! That's an excellent use of rhetoric. In a single stroke, you make climatologists look like idiots ("The sun! Oh my god, we forgot about the sun!") and you push your political agenda.
Do you really expect readers to be naive enough to believe that Martian or terrestrial climatologists have not incorporated solar output into their models? Of course they have, for as far back as those measurements exist. Solar output is taken into account both for climate models on Mars and on earth, and it fails to account for global warming on earth. Climate change on Mars is expected and has been predicted.
I am not allowed to borrow a book from a library and make a complete photocopy of it even for private use.
That's because you make a photocopy for reading the book, not for indexing it. So, while the copyright holder loses a sale on you when you photocopy, they don't lose a sale on Google.
Google will argue that copying the book as part of indexing it is fair use and should be permitted.
C# will not replace Java. It is a wonderful Java knock-off with a great IDE (Visual Studio), but it is not a Java killer.
Java is doomed whether or not C# will replace it: except for a few specialized niches, Java has failed to become a factor in mainstream software development.
The Mono project gives you all the good stuff from.NET (the language, the core libraries), plus all the good stuff from Linux and open source (Gnome, Gtk+, other standard libraries), while avoiding all the bad Microsoft stuff (XP, Windows APIs, Windows libraries, etc.).
So,.NET may well become the de-facto standard for development on Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, I neither get the state of the onion, nor do I get Perl. I'm just writing a lot of Perl code again, and while the coverage of the libraries is stellar, the language itself is a constant source of irritation for me.
I think Haskell has lots of potential, but it has some usability problems: its syntax is highly unfamiliar and error prone for mainstream programmers, and some concepts are just packaged badly (e.g., monads). Also, it's type system is probably more complex than people can handle.
A dynamically typed lazy functional programming language might be a better start towards popularizing functional programming.
Mini ITX pioneered the small form factors, quiet desktops, and Nano ITX was supposed to go a step further. But complete and assembled Mini ITX systems are shipped only by a few obscure vendors and expensive for their limited performance, and Nano ITX has been MIA since 2003.
Apple, meanwhile, has grabbed the small, quiet desktop market with the Mac Mini, which is a beautiful piece of hardware, but is a bit limited in terms of software (pretty much OS X, since Linux isn't all that well supported).
Let's hope that Apple will come out with a Mac Mini/86, and that other PC vendors will clone the concept quickly. 640k may not be all you need, but a quart-sized PC ought to be all you need.
Whenever I access servers at work, I do it via SSH, or some other similar encrypted method. Why? Well it would be a problem if someone at the ISP got the root password, they could do a lot of damage and we might never even know. They shouldn't be monitoring me like that, but it is too important to trust them with, I take it in my own hands.
If you don't trust your ISP to some degree, you're in trouble; it would be easy for them to conduct man-in-the-middle attacks on your ssh sessions unless you transport your host keys by some other means. Ssh is useful, but primarily against listening, not against someone who has control of the network.
Security is one of Skype's selling points. The fact that there is no way to verify it, no way to audit the code, no way to check for a back door means that you can't rely on Skype security: you just don't know. Given the background of the company and its founder, it also seems doubtful that a lot of security expertise went into the product.
And the fact that eBay has been willing to work closely with law enforcement means that they may well put in back doors even if they aren't already there.
Bottom line: if you want secure communications, don't use closed source, use something you can audit.
But people keep saying that good programmers can avoid buffer overflows in C and C++ because they know what they are doing. Well, I guess neither Microsoft nor Firefox programmers are good enough...
With a class of 300, do the students actually gain anything from being physically there? Do they gain more than they would simply reading a book?
Lectures and books have different content and are different channels of communication. So, in short, yes, many people seem to benefit from having lectures in addition to reading the book. Some people, however, don't, and, of course, there are many bad lectures that aren't worth going to.
A better question to ask is, perhaps, whether watching a video of the lecture isn't just as good as going to the lecture. It's not a high resolution, the sound is worse, and you lose any possibility for feedback or interaction, but that may not be such a big deal to you individually in a large class. But the video needs to be produced, and the best way to produce a lecture video is during a live lecture. Since you need to watch the lecture around the time it's held anyway, you might as well be in the audience.
Without "taking the sun into account", there wouldn't be any global warming, there wouldn't be any warming at all: earth's surface would be not much warmer than interstellar space. So, of course, global warming models are taking the sun into account because global warming is caused by the interaction of solar radiation, the ground, and the atmosphere.
What you may be saying is that climate models have not been taking into account changes in solar output over time, but that would be wrong: people have used the data that has been available to them. In particular, for the period of which we have observed climate change on Mars, there is excellent data available for solar output, so we don't need to guess about it based on climate change on Mars, we already know.
Unfortunately, people with large investments in the current fossil fuel energy infrastructure have been manipulating the discussions in order to paralyze the political process; moving from fossil fuel to other energy sources would mean that big companies that now have markets nearly locked up would have to compete again, and there would be winners and losers. They don't like that risk. For the economy as a whole, moving away from fossil fuel is a big win, however.
In fact, even if climatologists were completely wrong about causality, reducing carbon emissions would still be the sensible thing to do as long as it is getting warmer, and it is getting warmer.
The best solution is to not have any such system and simply DO example problems in lecture. The thing that college lectures lack is not something captivating (like hitting the button on a remote is actually captivating...) or innovative, but BETTER LECTURES. Period.
You know, professors are people, and they aren't perfect. They also can't read minds. In order to figure out how to improve their lectures, they need feedback. They can do that by talking to people, and they should continue to do that, but that only gives them a small, biased sample. With clickers, they get feedback from everybody about progress and attitudes.
Lecturers tend to go over things in too much of an 'overview' format (at least in the science/tech classes) and avoid doing actual example problems that might help us LEARN.
Sounds like your professors have the right idea: lectures are supposed to give you the general picture, you do examples in your homework, and you talk about them with your teaching assistants if you can't figure it out. And you are supposed to do the LEARNING yourself. Sorry if that comes as a surprise.
It is far more effective to try to interact with the students and understand where their learning is at, individually, then tailor my teaching to whatever common problems or such need the most attention.
<sarcasm>Yes, it's so easy to "personally interact" with a class of 300 students. And, of course, every one of those students is actually available to interact and is going to reveal all his questions and confusions to you, the person who is going to grade them, when you talk to them.</sarcasm>
The idea of clickers is a good one, and they have the potential for improving education. Whether they actually work remains to be seen. In any case, an open source implementation would make it easier for educators to tailor these devices to their needs, and that can only be good.
This is one obvious solution for providing an "infinite environment" in a finite space. Another is active floor tiles.
:-).
There are two problems with them. First, they can't actually give you completely natural motion anyway because, no matter what you do, the accelerations aren't going to work out correctly, and acceleration is what your brain senses.
Second, it's not clear why you need something even this complicated: your brain is adaptive enough that it will perceive even much simpler interfaces as the real thing after a short amount of time (and if it doesn't, a bit of weed may be cheaper and take up less space than this contraption
(Of course, since Star Trek has artificial gravity, this isn't a problem for the Holodeck.)
I think you need to take a serious look at why you're swallowing one side's lines,
I'm not swallowing anybody's lines. I'm saying that your reasoning is clearly spurious and probably driven by a political agenda.
Which are probably flawed, because of insufficient measuring equipment and understanding of how the processes work together.
Of course, many climate models are flawed; that's not the issue here. We aren't discussing whether terrestrial climate models are accurate, we are discussing your spurious reasoning about conclusions we can draw from changes in martian climate.
and treating other people like idiots if they don't
Your statement was idiotic, regardless of whether one believes that global warming is man-made or not: global warming on Mars tells you nothing about global warming on earth, because the one common factor that is known, solar input, has been properly controlled for.
It's ironic, isn't it, that when climatologists make careful arguments about why correlations are causative, you people dismiss them saying that you don't accept that, but when two planets separated by half a light hour coincidentally warm, you immediately jump to conclusions about common causes. Get real, and start using your head for once.
His post was reasonable and thoughtful.
No, his posting was uninformed and biased. It may seem "thoughtful" to you based on no data at all, but he is basically doing the equivalent of arguing that the earth is flat because "everybody can see that it is".
As I'm sure you well know, even scientists get it wrong sometimes. We are allowed to question them.
Of course, we are allowed to question them. A good place to start might be by actually asking questions. But he didn't ask questions, he accused climatologists of being idiots that ignore one of the most obvious factors. Face it, he wasn't questioning scientists, he was pushing a political agenda.
Interesting. What is the cause of that climate change? Can you point to a source, please?
Look for "climate change mars" on Google. You'll get lots of articles about tilt, the fact that the Martian atmosphere freezes out, chemical processes, and other factors. Whatever climate models apply to Mars, the two systems just are not comparable.
And why would that be "good"? Oh, you're part of the Microsoft-must-die jihad. *yawn*
Let me turn that question around: why do you think it's good that there is a single office suite, a product that costs hundreds of dollars every year, keeps its data in proprietary formats, and gives a single software company a huge profit margin? Wouldn't it be better for the economy as a whole if software were available cost-effectively? Do you want to pay more for your new car, or your food, or your books just so that Bill Gates can build a bigger mansion? Because that's what it all boils down to: Microsoft's profits ultimately come out of everybody's pockets.
BTW, Office12 makes OpenOffice look like a dinosaur. Users will choose apps that look and feel modern over outdated garbage
Whatever. With Microsoft's glacial development schedules, Office 12 is pretty much set in stone at this point. OpenOffice, on the other hand, gets to pick and choose the features from Office 12 that it wants to clone and may even beat Office 12 to market with that. Or, the OOo developers may decide that conservatism is better.
Functionally, it makes little difference. For people like you who believe in appearances of substance, Office 12 may be a big change, but functionally, it's miniscule.
OOo may end up being the more comfortable and familiar environment for current MS Office users than Office 12.
You fundamentally misunderstand what environmentalism is about. The environmentalist's desire to keep the planet pristine is about human survival, human preferences, human ethics, and economics. There are no reasons other than those to act one way or another towards the environment.
In terms of human survival, many people are completely naive about how much their survival depends on a functioning environment. Their absurd notions also come to light when talking about colonizing space. We are intricately linked with a complex web of organisms; our long-term survival depends on it.
But it's not just about survival. Humans also have preferences: there are environments we like to live in and ones we don't like to live in. Anti-environmentalist policies generally lead to environments few people would actually want to live in, they just don't realize the long-term consequences of their actions.
Finally, there is the question of ethics. There are radical environmentalists who believe that all life deserves strong protection, they don't represent the environmentalist mainstream. But it is clear that vertebrates, and in particular mammals, have enough intelligence that some of the ethical considerations we apply to causing suffering to other human beings ought to apply to them as well. That's another reason we can't just change the environment arbitrarily.
Finally, it's about economics. People understimate the economic value of a intact environment. When we let people destroy the environment for industrial purposes, it is the equivalent of letting them chop off bits and pieces of our homes for firewood: they are destroying something economically very valuable for a small benefit, and they are not even paying for that.
Just because those responses are predictable doesn't mean that some of them aren't also true.
Besides, Microsoft is constantly broadcasting the message that Linux sucks, and they are paying billions a year to have that message repeated wherever they can. Do you expect Linux supporters to just respond once and then shut up?
Microsoft has bought the airwaves, print publications, billboards, and face time to get their message across. Leave the rest of us a little space on discussion groups for expressing our views.
Steve Balmer is going to have a good day today.
Yes, he scheduled it that way.
It is one of those That is *so* obvious features that ends up in every product because it is just so *DUHHH* after someone popularises the concept. :-)
Contrary to what you may think, developers in the past weren't too stupid to come up with such obvious ideas, they simply made a reasonable tradeoff between features, hardware requirements, and development effort.
Furthermore, after Microsoft has killed off all the commercial competition (through proprietary formats, bundling, and other anti-competitive tricks), which products exactly are you talking about when you say "every product"? Microsoft currently has no commercial competitors, and they can leisurely pull one obvious feature after another out of a hat and bask in the glory of being "innovative". Adding injury to insult, I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to patent this.
Now, you may say that OpenOffice is a competitor. You are right. But Microsoft's dirty tricks make the work of OpenOffice developers much harder than the Microsoft Office team. Furthermore, Microsoft Office compatibility (both in terms of UI and in terms of features and formats) is the primary driver of OpenOffice development, so the degree to which OpenOffice can innovate are very limited. In the long run, you can bet, though, that an open source office suite, not Microsoft Office, will become the driver for innovation in this space.
Gathering data from Mars gives a possible 'control' in the experiment we're all running with earth's atmosphere. If we find earth's temperature rise slows (or goes backwards) at the same time Mars does the apparent same, then there's more study to be done on what's affecting earth.
Studying Mars climate is useful in general to help improve climate models, but it doesn't work the way you think it does.
Climate change on Mars is predicted and expected, and it is based on factors that are radically different from those you get on earth.
"Look at that waistline, it's bulging. Oh, well, just live with it, things change."
"Look at that bank account, it's emptying. Oh, well, just keep spending, things change."
Fact is that if you do something that hurts you, you ought to change your behavior. If external factors make the consequences of your behavior even more serious, then you have to be extra careful to change your behavior.
Yes, the climate always changes, and that has consequences. Whether NO was caused by global warming or not, it is the kind of thing that is caused by global warming. Since we generally don't like our cities flooded and destroyed, that's something we need to do something about.
Well if Mars is going through what appears to be similar changes as the Earth then perhaps we need to go back and look at what we share in common, namely the sun.
Congratulations! That's an excellent use of rhetoric. In a single stroke, you make climatologists look like idiots ("The sun! Oh my god, we forgot about the sun!") and you push your political agenda.
Do you really expect readers to be naive enough to believe that Martian or terrestrial climatologists have not incorporated solar output into their models? Of course they have, for as far back as those measurements exist. Solar output is taken into account both for climate models on Mars and on earth, and it fails to account for global warming on earth. Climate change on Mars is expected and has been predicted.
I am not allowed to borrow a book from a library and make a complete photocopy of it even for private use.
That's because you make a photocopy for reading the book, not for indexing it. So, while the copyright holder loses a sale on you when you photocopy, they don't lose a sale on Google.
Google will argue that copying the book as part of indexing it is fair use and should be permitted.
C# will not replace Java. It is a wonderful Java knock-off with a great IDE (Visual Studio), but it is not a Java killer.
Java is doomed whether or not C# will replace it: except for a few specialized niches, Java has failed to become a factor in mainstream software development.
The Mono project gives you all the good stuff from .NET (the language, the core libraries), plus all the good stuff from Linux and open source (Gnome, Gtk+, other standard libraries), while avoiding all the bad Microsoft stuff (XP, Windows APIs, Windows libraries, etc.).
.NET may well become the de-facto standard for development on Linux.
So,