Actually it's not nearly as far off as you say. Yes, the original NT core was unrelated to DOS, it's true. But the entire superstructure and ecosystem that went around that core was derived from the DOS world, and in addition the NT kernel over successive releases was compromised for compatibility (with the old dos world of course) and for performance.
Maybe the increase in energy will merely result in a slightly higher average temperature resulting in slightly higher water levels and then that becomes the basis for a new equilibrium.
Maybe the increase in temperature will result in more clouds which in turn will reflect more sunshine away and dropping the temperature resulting in larger temperature fluctuations over a span of multiple years like a sinusoid with an average temperature of what we have now just with a larger amplitude.
Maybe it'll run amok from a human perspective, raising average global temperatures 10 C, raise the sea levels 3 meters (10 feet) and make Scandinavia a lush tropical jungle.
This is very much what I am saying, except one thing. You are still looking at this assuming it's the result of human action. But we dont know for sure just how much effect human action has, we dont know how much of what we are seeing now is the result of human action and how much is normal periodicity. The current climate is quite rare in earth's history, and the most 'normal' profile is that hothouse roughly 10c hotter than historical times, so even if we could be sure that current changes are actually leading to that, that would not rule out the possibility that it would be happening anyway, regardless of any human action.
Also as you allude to climate change like any change tends to be a two-edged sword. Yes, some consequences could be truly catastrophic, especially if people just sit and wait for them to happen! But there is no need to focus exclusively and obsessively on the down-sides. Coastal cities may have to be abandoned to rising sea levels - it wont be the first time. When the glaciers last advanced, the sahara expanded even further than we see today as well, which one way or another made large areas under human habitation uninhabitable, but the lower sea level also exposed land bridges and productive coastal areas that would otherwise not have been available. As the big ice sheets melted off europe, increased rain turned the sahara green again, while the thawing of europe allowed for humans to move there again as well - but at the same time all those wonderfully productive coastal areas were flooded and lost.
Then desertification began again in the northern part, while the southern maintained a wet tropical environment thanks to the monsoon. A few thousand years later the input dropped a bit, the monsoon shifted further south, and the desert followed. This is a pattern that has been repeated over and over and over again, long before the industrial revolution or even the agricultural revolution.
One very common human weakness is simply our tendency to believe everything is about us. It isnt. The planet was here for billions of years before us and very likely will be around a very long time after we are gone.
Well, with what is usually being proposed, like reducing carbon emissions by driving more fuel efficient cars, no leaving lights on everywhere, how is that POSSIBLY a bad thing?
Sure, more efficient cars (as long as they arent less safe or something) is a great idea regardless. But if we are spending time and money (and energy) on one thing that is still less to spend on other things.
But conserving energy cannot do that, as we are simply choosing to reduce the energy input into a system that had previously had a moderately stable equilibrium before we started burning all those fossil fuels.
"Moderately stable equilibrium" might be optimistic. Long term earth's climate swings between hot house and ice age. We would like for it to hold right in the warmer part of the ice age cycle forever, but that's not an option. It's easy to say human activity affects environment - but it's hard to predict exactly how. We cant just run the earth back and forwards through time running different scenarios, outside of computer models, which are only as good as their underlying assumptions. The agricultural age probably had affects too. About 10k years ago the last glaciation reversed. We are due soon for either another glacial (cold) period or else a return to a hothouse, naturally. Which is it? There are several logical possibilities:
A glaciation should be starting, but anthropogenic effects have delayed it. Mitigation could result in a resumption of glaciation. Not generally good for mankind.
A glaciation should be starting, but anthropogenic effects have resulted in a swing to hothouse instead. Might or might not be possible to reverse. If not possible then todays mitigation efforts are a waste of resources that will soon be even more precious.
A hothouse should be starting anyway, human emissions or not. In this case it's very likely that all mitigation efforts will be entirely futile as well.
It takes so little to get people trolling for skeptics, just a subject line and a text-form eh?
And already modded up.
But logically speaking taking action before you know the consequence of the action can be very bad. Many of the demands made to mitigate postulated anthropogenic global warming involve considerable expense, so all the things that we know for sure need doing (like feeding people) that might otherwise be done with the money constitutes the minimum opportunity cost. The maximum would be far greater - we might well cause one climate catastrophe as we seek to avert the other.
Simply rushing off to 'do something' seems to be a universal human instinct somehow, and certainly politicians feel justifiably that they are pressured to do that, but it just isnt smart.
Actually the ribbon style is not built for eye candy but rather for usability. The problem with menu style systems is that it is not intuitive.
Although technically a true statement the implication is errant nonsense. The 'ribbon style' is not intuitive either. No computer interface is intuitive or ever will be. Futile attempts to do the impossible usually produce pretty useless results, and this is no exception.
It was one of the first computers I learned to use. Despite its limited capabilities I still think it was in many ways superior to the personal computers made today. Certainly it was more encouraging to a young programmer than even a gnu/linux system would be today.
It used to be that people went to the Olympics as true amateurs to represent their countries and sports.
Actually, it used to be that only the idle rich could compete in the Olympics. The rules against "professional" athletes were aimed to ensure that the upper crust "amateurs" would not have to risk losing to a "social inferior."
A violent miscarriage of justice and an assault on everyone that uses email.
Which reminds me, anyone know the judges email address? I'm guessing he's a dinosaur that cant use email though - profit motive or no, I have a hard time believing anyone that actually uses it would make such an idiotic decision.
Differences between males and females are not so simple that weight-classes would eliminate them. A female's long bones stop growing earlier, and her fat content will be naturally higher, so an average woman facing an average man of the same weight is shorter and less muscular but still slightly heavier.
That said, it might in all reality be close enough. No matchup is perfectly fair to begin with.
Odd, I find that those automatic spell-checkers throw a few dozen false alarms for every time they are right. I find them horribly annoying and turn them off immediately.
After getting used to Apple laptops and buying an Acer instead recently, this is the one thing that most aggravates me. Apple does power management very well - both windows and linux fall very flat by comparison. I wouldnt be surprised if windows kills batteries faster than OSX on the same hardware - in fact I'd say something was very very wrong if it did not.
This is easy to do as I am typing it, but much harder to come back and re-create after the fact.
But LaTeX uses human-readable markup for this very reason! You can easily enter formatting information as you are working on the text without it getting in the way / becoming opaque and difficult to edit like in a wysiwyg. Basic structural stuff that fits that part of the creative process is entered easily without getting hung up and distracted by the minutiae of font sizes and the like. If you are doing a quick document, the minutiae can be filled in automatically from the basic structural information - and if it's a big project that has to be perfect you still have the option of micro-controlling the page layout as well.
They should just focus on writing a good word processing engine, and let others design user interfaces for it.
I almost agree. But "word processing" is a broken paradigm to begin with. Document preparation is a much better model. It has two completely different stages, each of which calls for its own program, instead of being thrown together in a half-baked mashup and called "word processing." Those stages are text editing and typesetting.
So use the right tool for the job. Get a good text editor and use it for what it's good for - whether you prefer emacs, vi, nano or whatever it's going to make a much better text editor than any "word processing" program offers. Then when it's time to do the typesetting, use LaTeX - again a FAR superior tool for the job than any pathetic "word processor" will ever be.
You ask the right question, but your answer is lacking. Netbooks are not subnotebooks, although after some arm-bending by Redmond a lot of people are confusing things by selling subnotebooks and calling them netbooks.
True netbooks are distinguished most easily by their lack of a hard drive. This reflects the specialisation for portable use, yielding longer battery life and a shock-proof design (even the best hdd systems with the very latest and greatest in shock protection and power management are not even in the same ballpark here.)
The EULAs are written to say that, yes. There are some precedents to say they can get away with it - and others to say they cannot, however. Hence 'they' are indeed still 'trying' although you are right to point out that it's pretty late in the game now.
If they claim you bought a service the proper response is 'no, I bought a product, that's what I negotiated and paid for, that's what I havent received, and that's why you WILL issue a chargeback on this.' Stick to that, keep repeating it, and dont stop until the charge has been reversed!
Didnt you get the memo?
Anyone showing any skepticism towards any element of the anthropogenic global warming dogma, regardless of qualifications, is a conspiracy nut, ipso facto.
Now webkit isnt a porous mass of malware-friendly hooks like you have on windows, it's true. At least not yet. Nonetheless, sometimes it's best just to accept that the fact you *can* do something stupid like make your window manager depend on an unrelated application, that doesnt mean it's actually a good idea.
Well I dont think he did this with any expectation that other players would like him, though he seems to have been a bit shocked by the response I got the impression it was the level, and vehemence, not just the fact that some players didnt like it.
So far as getting rid of players that make the game suck, well obviously I think it's the type that was harshest in their denunciation of his tactics that fall into that category. A matter of perspective, sure. And it's understandable that there is an impulse on the part of the gaming companies to cater to whichever perspective is most popular for that reason alone. However when what becomes most popular is to neuter what I would see as the keystone of the game as designed and advertised, perhaps some questioning is in order, perhaps more creative solutions should be sought?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually it's not nearly as far off as you say. Yes, the original NT core was unrelated to DOS, it's true. But the entire superstructure and ecosystem that went around that core was derived from the DOS world, and in addition the NT kernel over successive releases was compromised for compatibility (with the old dos world of course) and for performance.
This is very much what I am saying, except one thing. You are still looking at this assuming it's the result of human action. But we dont know for sure just how much effect human action has, we dont know how much of what we are seeing now is the result of human action and how much is normal periodicity. The current climate is quite rare in earth's history, and the most 'normal' profile is that hothouse roughly 10c hotter than historical times, so even if we could be sure that current changes are actually leading to that, that would not rule out the possibility that it would be happening anyway, regardless of any human action.
Also as you allude to climate change like any change tends to be a two-edged sword. Yes, some consequences could be truly catastrophic, especially if people just sit and wait for them to happen! But there is no need to focus exclusively and obsessively on the down-sides. Coastal cities may have to be abandoned to rising sea levels - it wont be the first time. When the glaciers last advanced, the sahara expanded even further than we see today as well, which one way or another made large areas under human habitation uninhabitable, but the lower sea level also exposed land bridges and productive coastal areas that would otherwise not have been available. As the big ice sheets melted off europe, increased rain turned the sahara green again, while the thawing of europe allowed for humans to move there again as well - but at the same time all those wonderfully productive coastal areas were flooded and lost.
Then desertification began again in the northern part, while the southern maintained a wet tropical environment thanks to the monsoon. A few thousand years later the input dropped a bit, the monsoon shifted further south, and the desert followed. This is a pattern that has been repeated over and over and over again, long before the industrial revolution or even the agricultural revolution.
One very common human weakness is simply our tendency to believe everything is about us. It isnt. The planet was here for billions of years before us and very likely will be around a very long time after we are gone.
Sure, more efficient cars (as long as they arent less safe or something) is a great idea regardless. But if we are spending time and money (and energy) on one thing that is still less to spend on other things.
"Moderately stable equilibrium" might be optimistic. Long term earth's climate swings between hot house and ice age. We would like for it to hold right in the warmer part of the ice age cycle forever, but that's not an option. It's easy to say human activity affects environment - but it's hard to predict exactly how. We cant just run the earth back and forwards through time running different scenarios, outside of computer models, which are only as good as their underlying assumptions. The agricultural age probably had affects too. About 10k years ago the last glaciation reversed. We are due soon for either another glacial (cold) period or else a return to a hothouse, naturally. Which is it? There are several logical possibilities:
It takes so little to get people trolling for skeptics, just a subject line and a text-form eh?
And already modded up.
But logically speaking taking action before you know the consequence of the action can be very bad. Many of the demands made to mitigate postulated anthropogenic global warming involve considerable expense, so all the things that we know for sure need doing (like feeding people) that might otherwise be done with the money constitutes the minimum opportunity cost. The maximum would be far greater - we might well cause one climate catastrophe as we seek to avert the other.
Simply rushing off to 'do something' seems to be a universal human instinct somehow, and certainly politicians feel justifiably that they are pressured to do that, but it just isnt smart.
Although technically a true statement the implication is errant nonsense. The 'ribbon style' is not intuitive either. No computer interface is intuitive or ever will be. Futile attempts to do the impossible usually produce pretty useless results, and this is no exception.
It was one of the first computers I learned to use. Despite its limited capabilities I still think it was in many ways superior to the personal computers made today. Certainly it was more encouraging to a young programmer than even a gnu/linux system would be today.
Actually, it used to be that only the idle rich could compete in the Olympics. The rules against "professional" athletes were aimed to ensure that the upper crust "amateurs" would not have to risk losing to a "social inferior."
In which case the marketing of "Vista Ultimate Edition" would appear to be fraudulent.
Except we arent talking about "cheap versions" as you imply, but about among others the "Ultimate" edition.
A violent miscarriage of justice and an assault on everyone that uses email.
Which reminds me, anyone know the judges email address? I'm guessing he's a dinosaur that cant use email though - profit motive or no, I have a hard time believing anyone that actually uses it would make such an idiotic decision.
Differences between males and females are not so simple that weight-classes would eliminate them. A female's long bones stop growing earlier, and her fat content will be naturally higher, so an average woman facing an average man of the same weight is shorter and less muscular but still slightly heavier.
That said, it might in all reality be close enough. No matchup is perfectly fair to begin with.
Odd, I find that those automatic spell-checkers throw a few dozen false alarms for every time they are right. I find them horribly annoying and turn them off immediately.
After getting used to Apple laptops and buying an Acer instead recently, this is the one thing that most aggravates me. Apple does power management very well - both windows and linux fall very flat by comparison. I wouldnt be surprised if windows kills batteries faster than OSX on the same hardware - in fact I'd say something was very very wrong if it did not.
But LaTeX uses human-readable markup for this very reason! You can easily enter formatting information as you are working on the text without it getting in the way / becoming opaque and difficult to edit like in a wysiwyg. Basic structural stuff that fits that part of the creative process is entered easily without getting hung up and distracted by the minutiae of font sizes and the like. If you are doing a quick document, the minutiae can be filled in automatically from the basic structural information - and if it's a big project that has to be perfect you still have the option of micro-controlling the page layout as well.
I almost agree. But "word processing" is a broken paradigm to begin with. Document preparation is a much better model. It has two completely different stages, each of which calls for its own program, instead of being thrown together in a half-baked mashup and called "word processing." Those stages are text editing and typesetting.
So use the right tool for the job. Get a good text editor and use it for what it's good for - whether you prefer emacs, vi, nano or whatever it's going to make a much better text editor than any "word processing" program offers. Then when it's time to do the typesetting, use LaTeX - again a FAR superior tool for the job than any pathetic "word processor" will ever be.
It got them this far, why stop now?
You ask the right question, but your answer is lacking. Netbooks are not subnotebooks, although after some arm-bending by Redmond a lot of people are confusing things by selling subnotebooks and calling them netbooks.
True netbooks are distinguished most easily by their lack of a hard drive. This reflects the specialisation for portable use, yielding longer battery life and a shock-proof design (even the best hdd systems with the very latest and greatest in shock protection and power management are not even in the same ballpark here.)
The EULAs are written to say that, yes. There are some precedents to say they can get away with it - and others to say they cannot, however. Hence 'they' are indeed still 'trying' although you are right to point out that it's pretty late in the game now.
Dont let them get by with that crap, man.
If they claim you bought a service the proper response is 'no, I bought a product, that's what I negotiated and paid for, that's what I havent received, and that's why you WILL issue a chargeback on this.' Stick to that, keep repeating it, and dont stop until the charge has been reversed!
I rather think if this were a game I had already paid for, sans ads, that suddenly started showing them I would find the change quite offensive.
Fixed that for you.
Actually you have it reversed.
Slackware is a huge timesaver. Hence the name.
It's so refreshing to deal with an OS that does what it's told, instead of trying to be clever.
Didnt you get the memo? Anyone showing any skepticism towards any element of the anthropogenic global warming dogma, regardless of qualifications, is a conspiracy nut, ipso facto.
Indeed.
Now webkit isnt a porous mass of malware-friendly hooks like you have on windows, it's true. At least not yet. Nonetheless, sometimes it's best just to accept that the fact you *can* do something stupid like make your window manager depend on an unrelated application, that doesnt mean it's actually a good idea.
Well I dont think he did this with any expectation that other players would like him, though he seems to have been a bit shocked by the response I got the impression it was the level, and vehemence, not just the fact that some players didnt like it.
So far as getting rid of players that make the game suck, well obviously I think it's the type that was harshest in their denunciation of his tactics that fall into that category. A matter of perspective, sure. And it's understandable that there is an impulse on the part of the gaming companies to cater to whichever perspective is most popular for that reason alone. However when what becomes most popular is to neuter what I would see as the keystone of the game as designed and advertised, perhaps some questioning is in order, perhaps more creative solutions should be sought?