Well, I have family in the US and I've seen pictures the kids took of their cafeteria 'meal'. I first thought it was some joke: every day a burger with fries, some packaged peanut butter cake and milk. Every day. Never a fruit or a vegetable. No wonder they have record high obesity in the US.

There's someone else posting about this in another thread. The reason it doesn't happen twice is that often the first specie to do a major step 'takes all'. The 2nd one on land finds the 1st one already there and more adapted, so it's clear cut who wins. Still in this case it _did_ happen: the plants and the animals moved to the land separately. As for the animals, the arthropods did, becoming insects, then the fish did, becoming amphibians and then reptiles. So it was a bad example.

Well, 'convergent evolution' begs to differ. Plenty of things in life have been invented many times over.

As for basic lifeforms themselves, look up those weird and very ancient fossils found in Africa a couple years ago that seem to indicate multicellular organisms way before and way different than what came next. Dead-end or ancestors ?

I have to point out that Antarctica is geothermally balanced. There's about 4km of ice in W Antarctica (much less in the east), with only a few cm added each year it turns out that the oldest ice at the base is only about 1 million years old. Why is that since it's been a continent of ice for tens of times that duration ? Glaciers calving in the sea are not enough to explain it as they run too slowly in the center. It's simply because the ice at the base melts off and the water runs to the ocean in underground (or rather under-ice) river runways. At the base of the ice, there is a thermal equilibrium between the weight of ice (lower melting point, only about -6C in the center) and the geothermal flux.

Huh ? Why is it that for most jobs you have a 2 weeks test period (or 2 months), and then you get a permanent job; what in the teaching profession makes it so different that they should be on a ejecting seat for years ?

I design embedded systems. None of my systems are connected to a public internet, so why should it matter if they aren't ever updated ?!? Sure the command/control PCs that connect to them WILL be regularly updated, but those won't. And always remember: "'Always apply the latest updates' and 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it' are the two rules of system administration..."

I remember when I was still using windows (a long time ago), if you connected a TC-encrypted disk (at the device level), it of course wouldn't recognise it, but would ask to 'sign' it (or some other similar term), which would actually write some tag in the first sector and nuke the TC header, thus rendering the drive unusable. 99% Windows fault, but maybe TC should have a backup of the header in some later sectors.

Anyway, I've been using TC on linux for a decade, very happy about it, and just like everybody else I wonder what's coming.

Ever heard of the Carboniferous ? It's the period between 350 and 300 million years ago when the plants invented lignin, thus becoming trees, and the time when the first microorganisms became able to digest it. Dead trees that wouldn't rot accumulated over hundreds of meters of thickness. Those are the layers of carbons we now know as coal. And the over next 300 million another extra lot of plants accumulated and became petroleum.

My point is, it took 350 millions years for all that carbon to accumulate and we are burning it all and releasing it _all_ in the atmosphere in the span of 200 years. Doesn't that sound to you a little bit... fast ? Maybe ?

Full disclosure: I used to be a climate scientist, but now I work on experimental nuclear reactor designs because I think It's the only thing that'll get us out of this mess. Maybe.

...and the most violent winds, the 300km/h katabatic winds, come full blast from the south. But they just slide over the sea ice: it's flat so there's no resistance, no traction. I have plenty of info and pics on my site as I used to be a climate scientist, the kind that goes on the field to take measurements.

As someone who's seen sea-ice breakups in Antarctica, they don't happen when the temperature warms up, but when there's a storm in certain directions, usually from the north, leading to waves breaking and carrying away the ice quickly. Emperor penguin chicks pay a heavy tribute to those every few years.

I briefly tried awesome... but there were no instructions at all and no default config. It was also impossible to _search_ for help on google with a name like 'awesome' (just imagine the kind of results you get). I was supposed to start writing config files for all my windowing needs without even knowing what it _could_ look like since there was no default. And I had to memorize a whole bunch of keypresses in order to do anything from the very beginning. Needless to say I found this philosophy stupid and deleted the things after 2 hours of trying. Oh, and also I often _like_ to have overlapping windows.

It's been good reading you.

I develop on Linux, and for when I need Windows I use XP in a virtual machine. Plenty good enough for only runnign an IDE. Today I had to touch Win7 for the first time because one of my apps wouldn't install. It felt like being raped by Fisher Price.

I remember from my long ago courses of optics that you can't simply block the light from a pinpoint source: it creates diffusion around the blocking object. How do they work around this ?