Not necessarily. Greenland ice core records show that in the past the planet has seen temperature shifts of up to 7 C in as little as 30 years. 7 C is huge. It's like transporting Moscow to Rome. Of course, we have no idea what caused such rapid changes in the past. It wasn't CO2 levels, or particulates.

I would. If one or more isolated populations managed to survive more than a couple of generations after the event, I think it's highly likely that they'd continue to survive indefinitely. The worst of the changes would be past, and they'd clearly have learned how to survive in the new environment, else they'd have died sooner.

Human intelligence makes us highly adaptable, as evidenced by the extraordinary diversity of environments in which we live, and lived even before the advent of modern technology. Humans who lack the necessary knowledge of how to survive in a particular environment are at severe risk of death any place on the planet, but if they manage to survive for even a year or two, odds are that they'll have learned enough to be able to extend that time almost indefinitely.

Which is doubly annoying/funny because Google, at least, doesn't give people brain teasers.

You missed the point, I think.

The bionic foot in the article doesn't receive signals directly from the brain. It receives signals as they arrive at existing muscles. So we're talking about a brain that has already been wired naturally to control normally-grown muscles, and hijacking that message to also actuate motors. To use this process for additional limbs, you'd have to have a person who had grown those limbs to begin with.

I wish you all the best, and hope your mom really does figure out that if you're the most important thing in her life, she's really doing it wrong.

I do have sympathy for her; I'm sure that like my daughter her choices aren't wholly under her own control, and that as hellish as it is to live with her, it's got to be a thousand times worse to be her. But that doesn't change the fact that close contact with someone like that wears on you in ways that you don't even realize until they're gone. My family is still recovering from the unbelievable tension and stress she put on all of us until she moved out. I didn't even realize until she was gone how irrationally snappish and defensive her brothers had gotten, but now I see it because they're finally unclenching their jaws. Me, too.

Your mother is mentally ill, and she needs help. But until she decides that, and decides that she needs to get help to change, or until she bottoms out in some way that legally removes all choice from her, it won't happen. Having compassion for her suffering is good... as long as you don't get sucked in, and that's really hard. I don't think I could bring myself to cut ties, but maybe it would be best. Nobody can tell you what's right, and odds are that whatever you do will bring some misery. It's balancing on razors and job #1 is not getting cut any more than you can avoid :-/

Wow, you're hilarious.

I know exactly what GCD is, and have worked with it. I just am under this strange belief that there's no magic in software and that computers still succumb to the laws of physics. Better power management comes primarily from hardware... and while GCD is a very good framework for controlling that hardware it's not a magical route to better battery life. Software can help with coordination but you still need the hardware.

While I won't argue the concept and implementation of this framework are good, most of the magical gains you'll hear about because of GCD are marketing numbers and not real-world.

Why? It's a reasonable living.

In one way it's sad, because she's a very intelligent young woman. Easily capable -- intellectually -- of any university curriculum she wants to pursue. But her mental illness and concomitant emotional instability make it difficult for her to handle that sort of challenge. More to the point, she is convinced that she will fail in a university setting, which guarantees that she will. We can't convince her otherwise. She believes she can do beauty school, and she enjoys that sort of thing. So, fingers crossed that she succeeds.

Yet other laptops running Windows get just fine battery life with the same or smaller battery. Simply put; Apple develops their own EFI to manage fans and power states and when the driver doesn't exist or is non-optimal, the hardware runs "hot". Grand Central Dispatch is a nice technology but does NOT magically increase your battery life despite what Apple wants to claim. It merely provides a common framework for addressing the EFI and power management customizations in a way that is pretty nice, but not a magic bullet. As Scotty was fond of saying, "You cannae change the laws of physics, Captain".

The level of ignorance and bias you display are unfortunately all too common. I get it; you're an Apple fan. Just because you read an article on a nice API doesn't mean you know diddly about hardware and power management. I don't claim to be an expert, but after doing embedded systems development for a while in my youth I think I might have some more knowledge of which I speak.

Indeed. What they should have done was get the writer/director of the original film, who I gather had been trying to get a sequel made for over a decade, to come and write and direct the new one. Clearly whoever they got to write this didn't really understand Max's character at all.</sarcasm>

So... during a 2 hour flight (30 minutes of which is spent climbing and descending) there wasn't one person or flight attendant who noticed the guy pushing the person next to him out of their seat to squeeze down in the pitiful space between coach seats to fiddle with the SEB? I'm sorry, I don't buy it. Doesn't matter how familiar you are with the hardware... in order to tamper with it to the extent that you can then plug your laptop into it you can't do that by touch, or quickly. Given all the paranoia about security I imagine he wouldn't have been able to do any of this without someone screaming "Terrorist!!" on the flight... then we'd be reading a very different story.

So what you're saying is that Windows implements logical and useful locking mechanisms whereas OSX implements something bound to break eventually? Wow... what a crime. I've used Mac OS, Windows, Linux, BSD and more flavours of UNIX than you can shake a stick at... I think Windows' file locking semantics are just fine the way they are. Anything else can lead to confusion, corruption and lost files.

Having said that, I do wish Windows would implement a "Can't do this because file is open in (blah).exe" error message instead of "Access denied", which is really dumb.

Actually, PowerShell is really good. I wasn't a believer the first time I used it but once you got the semantics and ideas down in your head it becomes an incredibly powerful tool for systems administration. At my last job I had a folder full of .ps scripts that I used daily to simplify my job, run reporting and generally make myself stand out among my GUI-focused peers on the Windows networks. That standing out helped me get a job where I no longer need them, but that's cool because I like my new job even better. And I still have them if I need them again.

And on Windows you can install Cygwin. I have MobaXTerm installed on all my Windows machines and it's really good; fully functional Cygwin and X-Server environment with a single click of the mouse... compatibility with a lot of my Linux scripts. Awesome.

So what you're saying is that a 14 year old operating system performs better in a suboptimal virtual environment where the programmers have specifically targeted the performance profiles of said OS for about 10 of those years? Stop the freaking presses, mate.

Seriously? Windows 10 isn't final, and QEMU-KVM optimization for Win10 will probably lag at least 6 months to a year after release. Let me know then how it performs given your adjustments. I'm not a Microsoft fanboy but even I can tell you that your test is even more horrendously flawed than the article poster's.

Why? Seriously?

First tool I install on my Windows boxes is MobaXTerm which contains a fully configured and set up cygwin including X Server. Works like a champ for me managing my Linux boxes, and all I had to do was install it. SSH works, remoted X works, and I can run bash scripts even referencing /proc entries from my Linux box and most of them work with no modifications.

What you're seeing here really is driver issues. Apple doesn't put the resources into developing the Boot Camp drivers properly for Windows... they're good enough so they're shipped. Apple doesn't want you to run Windows, or Linux or anything else. They want their beautiful machines running their beautiful OS, to hell with what the end user actually needs. A good set of power management drivers would go a long way to fix Windows on Mac hardware but they're not going to put the time and energy into it.

This philosophy of Apple's is part of the reason I've abandoned them as a platform for my own use.

I will preface this by saying that I was a Mac user and developer for over a decade until very recently...

Sorry, will have to call this one out. At the time that classical MacOS was around, most users were either running Windows 98 or Windows 2000. Few people ran ME... I worked in the industry and I think at the time for every 10 Win2K boxes I saw, I saw maybe one ME and 15 Windows 98. Noone saw a compelling need for ME so they didn't upgrade. And early versions of OSX up to Jaguar (10.2) were horrendous messes under the hood. The interface was gorgeous but some of the APIs were kludged together wrecks.

Now, I'm not saying that Windows was much better, at least on the 98/ME track... but the Windows 2000 API cleanup actually produced some really nice results. This was at the same time (roughly) as Mac OS9 which was one of the most awful kludges of an OS I think I've ever had the displeasure to work on. It was obvious that OS9 was created in a place where OSX was getting all the attention, but even OSX wasn't really properly clean until 10.2... and even then it was slow. Have you ever used 10.0 or 10.1 on hardware of the time? It was horrifyingly slow to do anything and the only thing it really had going for it was the interface.

Speaking of the interface... seriously... Finder is significantly worse than Explorer in terms of threading, resource utilization and stability. You want to see a kludged mess, check out Finder circa... well... any version of OSX actually. Of course, I've recently abandoned the Mac platform for Windows 8 for various reasons so I can't speak to Yosemite... but every time I work on a machine running Yosemite I just feel like the entire OS is going in a direction I don't appreciate.

Vista and Windows 8 both had huge improvements under the hood. Windows 8 in particular has gotten a bad rep simply because it has a UI that people find really polarizing... but it's seriously a fast and efficient OS that really takes advantage of the underlying hardware. It actually is a better operating system than the much-vaunted Windows 7 (which was itself an improvement over Vista) but most people never get to see it because they get hung up on the UI.

I have played with Windows 10, and I like it. I run 8.1 on my computers today but will switch to 10 when it comes out. That's not to say it's a fundamentally "better" operating system than OSX... but for my needs the priorities are all screwed up in OSX. They're both modern, stable and secure operating systems... and if that's all you need then great. However, running the same applications on both platforms does show the weaknesses of OSX; memory management is of questionable value in OSX and the storage management is kludgy at best.

Windows has been faster than OSX on the same hardware since Windows 7. I know; I've always had a Windows Boot Camp installation on my Macs. My last Mac is still a good one (2012 15" MBP) but has now been surpassed significantly. It used to be that Macs had a 5 year lifespan whereas Windows had a 3... that's one reason I liked Macs. Nowadays, not so much... and it's not changing workloads that are killing it but rather the overly heavy APIs and core problems with OSX that just don't scale quite so well... so new versions get heavier and slower on the same hardware.