You have only to look at the jungle compared to that arctic to realize that...
Unless you also compare the jungle to, say, the Sahara.
Incidentally, the arctic is classified as a desert. There's very little precipitation, just like with any other desert.
Thirty gigs will barely hold the coredumps and you've got to take account of the space needed for the Clippy Presentation of the Complete Works of Shakespere.
*Freddy Mercury impression*
One Core, One System!
The bright neon looks oh-so tacky.
They've screwed it up, it's now worse than wacky!
Oh oh oh, give them some vision!
No true, no false, the GUI will only do a slow waltz
No blood, no vein, MS zombies wanna much on your brain
No specs, no mission, the code's just some fried chicken!
*Switches to Gandal*
Nine cores for mortal tasks, doomed to die()
Seven for the Intel lords, in their halls of silicon
Three for the MIPS under the NSA
One for the Dark Hoarde on their Dark Campus.
One Core to rule them all, One Core to crash them,
One Core to freeze them all and in the darkness mash them!
In the land of Redmond, where the dotnet lies!
This is a quote from Elon Musk on what he thinks about "process":
"I don't believe in process. In fact, when I interview a potential employee and he or she says that 'it's all about the process,' I see that as a bad sign.
"The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You're encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren't that smart, who aren't that creative."
This just about nails it for me.
We've been doing unintentional geoengineering for hundreds of years now, why would some intentional geoengineering be so bad?
Because it might allow us to continue with global trade, industrial capitalism and rising prosperity.
Show me any practical, proven technology whose wide-spread deployment would significantly reduce GHG emissions and I will show you a green activist group vehemently opposed to it.
Wind: http://www.energyenvironmental...
Solar: http://www.kcet.org/news/redef...
Hydro: http://www.theglobeandmail.com...
And of course Nuclear: http://www.nationaljournal.com...
Some people will claim that green activists aren't opposed to all these (and other) technologies per se but rather to these specific projects... and yet there is in fact opposition to every single specific project of sufficient scale or scope to make a difference, so that is clearly false. It is simply not plausible that every single project regardless of technology just happens to be so bad for the Earth it is worthy of vigorous opposition, unless you're against industrial capitalism, global trade and rising prosperity regardless, in which case you should just be honest and say so, and stop with all the irrelevant distractions about the climate.
Green activists are like anti-contraception activists: they believe their target activity (industrial capitalism/sex) is bad in and of itself, and cannot ever be made good, but they disingenuously and dishonestly claim that they are opposed to it because of its potential negative consequences... and then do everything they can to prevent anyone from ameliorating those consequences.
GA: "Global warming is bad! We must shut down industrial capitalism!"
Technologist: "Hey, I can fix things so industrial capitalism wouldn't cause global warming."
GA: "We must not do that!:
Tech: "Why not?"
GA: "Because industrial capitalism is bad!"
Tech: "How come?"
GA: "Because it causes global warming!"
Tech: "But I just showed you how we can avoid that."
GA: "We can't! You're lying! It's a trap! Industrial capitalism can't be made good because it's bad!"
Tech: "Fuck you. I'm going to go ahead anyway."
GA: goes away muttering, waving copy of Malthus...
It seems you forgot to quote the later part of that post, where I did acknowledge the problem of content that comes malware-laden... Personally, I don't buy AAA games any more (nor do I pirate them instead). I got bored of the generally poor quality and accompanying malware breaking things a few years ago. Given the comments I see every time gamers' enjoyment of a big new title is spoiled because someone's DRM screwed up again, I suspect my life is still better that way. However, I do miss and would gladly pay for the kind of experience I used to enjoy from the top end games of yesteryear, before everything went downhill when the Internet became an excuse for shipping software that wasn't finished yet (we'll just patch it later, or not) and using ever more obnoxious DRM schemes (of course we can expect gamers to be online with a perfect connection any time they're playing our game).
We screwed up the ozone layer but are already well along the way to fix it. reference
We can create conditions favorable for earthquakes (fracking) and we can redirect lava flows. reference
The reason why people think climate can not be engineered is ignorance.
The differences are more along the lines of:
1) You often don't know code is bad - or how to write good code - until after you have done the work once. So effectively it can take twice as long to write the good code - once to write it badly, then again to write it well.
2) Good code usually requires a good working environment. You can never write good code while your boss is demanding you hurry up and finish the project.
Of course they are. But the fact is that when the law says things are required to work a certain way, and everyone knows the deal up-front, breaking that law is a different issue to just not doing something entirely voluntary that someone else would have preferred you to do.
Laws may not perfectly follow morals and ethics, but the intent is that they do at least reflect them reasonably well and provide a common standard for acceptable behaviour that everyone knows.
I've been burned before, although as a kid and in a less developed country. You also need to protect your internet line.
So far, I don't see a lot of that happening. Occasionally I see sites begging you to turn your ad-blocker off, and if they're sites I like then I do have some sympathy.
Unfortunately, from bitter personal experience, ad networks are a threat. There is currently no way to reliably distinguish which parts are dangerous soon enough, so the default safest option is to block the lot.
Very occasionally, I do find a site that doesn't work properly because of the things I block, and then I just go somewhere else instead. Exactly zero sites I need to use have this problem, or rely on ads at all for that matter. It would be sad if all those ad-funded sites went away, but frankly it wouldn't break the Internet and whatever replaced them would probably be a better model for all concerned (except middle-man ad networks).
So how does this not make you a worthless freeloader?
I may be literally worthless to such sites. I just don't think they ever had a reasonable expectation that I would be any more than that, any more than someone paying for an ad on a billboard has a reasonable expectation that every driver will stop and read it, or any TV advertiser has a reasonable expectation that no-one is going to go take a leak during the ad break.
There is no law requiring someone to give their time to the ads just because they are there, and there never has been, making this a fundamentally different situation to copyright infringement, fraud, or whatever other bad analogies people are throwing around in today's discussion.
Ultimately, if someone wants a promise to be paid in return for their work, there are a number of options available to them, starting with charging for it just like every other industry in the world that produces value. And if the work has some modest value to a lot of people but the overheads of formally charging are too great, there are plenty of other ways to accumulate minor contributions without spamming disreputable ad networks all over your site.
Because when you do this, you are giving google information on all the websites you visit.
Want to advertise to people that visit the Onion? Well, google can do that now - as soon as you leave the Onion, your next ad will be for Cracked.com or some other funny website in competition with The Onion.
Just like all the people who "share" music or software without paying the artists/creator a dime for their work.
Not really.
One obvious difference is that the law generally prohibits copying a copyrighted work without complying with the copyright holder's terms for payment etc. There is no analogous law about downloading freely available content without viewing the ads, unless you want to start arguing that the implicit permission to access that content does not apply if you don't view the ads as well, which is quite the can of worms to open.
Another obvious difference is that buying a legal copy of a creative work does not in itself subject me to severely degraded system performance, wasting arbitrary amounts of bandwidth I'm already paying for on things I didn't ask for, or assorted security and privacy risks. Not blocking ads and trackers on-line does all of these things. (Obviously some content comes with DRM and similar malware that also does some or all of these things, but let's not conflate buying from dubious sources with buying at all.)
Modeling paged and segmented memories is tricky business. -- P.J. Denning
