It is useful right now, and has been for several years within the communities where doxing has become a known problem. It is a jargon word that is gaining mainstream use simply because the mainstream is now beginning to see a significant increase in the behavior it describes.

A similar term, "outing" (as in "John was deliberated outed last week by Jim, his ex lover") has been in use among the LBGT communities since at least the 1950s. But that refers explicitly to making public someone's very private sexual orientation.

However "doxing" is different from "outing": it is a more general term describing the unauthorized release of anyone's private information in a public forum. It is rarely an honorable act and in general those who dox others are persons without honor. And the honor of those who condone doxing is questionable. People who dox, or show support for doxing, are people you cannot trust. You should not associate with them, either, since that will raise questions about your personal honor.

"Doxing" is a concept that needs to come into the mainstream, right now.

The most practical solution for most persons is to get contacts that correct for distant vision, and use $10.00USD drugstore reading glasses for close up work. The readers are cheap enough that it makes sense to buy a couple of pair of different strengths: 1.50, 1.75, and 2.25 (jewelry work, etc).

I have one toric lens contact for mild astigmatism. If I'm laying on my side for a while to work on the car or take a nap, my vision will be strange for a minute or so when I straighten up. They might not be the best choice for someone into extreme sports, figure skating with lots of high speed twirling, aerobatic pilots, etc.

I have been near sighted since early grade school, needing pretty strong correction. I have probably used more than 100 prescription glasses over the years, including various bifocals and progressives.

I did okay with my first pair of bifocals, from about age 40 to 45. I was building custom computer systems and repairs, so a mix of close-up bench work and general vision.

Between 45 and 50 I was doing more classroom and group support and the bifocals were not working well for this. I was having to do a lot of middle distance work as well as close up and far distance. The job required standing at the back of the room and scanning client/student computer screens where distances ranged from 4 feet to 30 feet. Shifting focus in those middle distances was very fatiguing, which made me grumpier than my usual lovely self, which did not win awards from the managers. Fatigue from eyestrain can develop without you being aware of it; you might have a kind-of, sort-of headache or you might just get more obnoxious without realizing what's happening.

Progressives worked well for me, after I deliberately set out to learn how to use them. Your neck gets more of a workout, since you need to tilt your head to bring things into focus. It takes a few days of deliberate practice to get the habit. It is not natural for humans, though I'm told that it is common in other species. Horses were mentioned. I never really looked into it. Once I learned how to use them they were a delight: I never before had such good vision at all distances.

I am now retired. I wear contact lenses set for distance vision and carry reading glasses with me. I still have progressives as a backup. The contacts are partly vanity: near-sighted eye glasses make the eyes look a little smaller than is natural, in a sort of reverse-cute ugliness. But mostly the contacts are better for photography and outdoor sports (I can wear proper hazard glasses when bicycling, etc).

TL,DR SUMMARY: Progressive lenses require doing some training to learn to position your head correctly for different distances. They are very much worth the effort if one is constantly having to shift between middle distance viewing as well as far and near. For photography, hiking, bicycling, kayaking, etc the best is contacts set to make one mildly far sighted, and carry reading glasses.

You are thinking about it wrong.

The problem is that we are taking carbon that had been in a long term CO2 cycle of millions of years and injecting it into our daily CO2 cycle, and that is very disruptive.

The proposed solution is to move more carbon from the daily CO2 cycle into cycles that are measured in tens of thousands of years. Specifically, into the forest ecosystem cycles. Rebuilding the great forests of the Americas, Europe, and Asia will eventually stabilize the excess CO2 we have already generated. There probably is no other way to do it.

It would mean learning to manage the world as a forest. We can probably do that. Yeah, I think we could figure that out. Maybe.

Biochar converts roughly 1/3rd of the dry woody input to charcoal through pylorisis, the rest is consumed-- often as the fire that heats the retort. Biochar is charcoal that preserves the microstructures of the plants. Of itself, when added to soil, it is basically chemically inert and stable for 10k+ years. However its physical structure retains water and many plant nutrients like a sponge, and it acts as a slow release reservoir that benefits crops.

The biochar structure also acts like a reef providing microenvironments that foster rich and complex soil ecologies. So in addition to the carbon directly "sequestered" in making biochar, there is also the increased carbon absorbed by the enriched soil ecology.

A deciduous forest dumps tons of dead leaves every autumn. These leaves naturally compost, in a process broadly similar to biochar production but over a period of a couple of years where biochar batches are done in a couple of hours. The end result is the same though: a fraction of the carbon in the fallen leaves becomes a chemically inert but highly structured physical ammendment to the forest soil.

So far as I know, no one has attempted as yet to quantify how much more biomass biochar or compost produces when it is added to a soil. As a wild ass guess, perhaps in a poplar forest every year every 10 tons of autumn leaves produces 1.5 tons of finished compost (with the rest of the carbon leaving as CO2 during the winter rotting period). Between the inorganic soluble nutrients retained as the leaves rot, and the physical improvements with respect to drainage and environments conducive to soil microbes, the compost will at least double the amount of carbon that is "sequestered". So (again as a WAG) an acre or so of poplar forest that produces 10 tons of dry dead leaves each year could be sequestering 3 tons of carbon each year. Every year. For thousands of years.

"Sequestered" as used in the above refers to carbon that is removed from the daily CO2 cycle to some longer term cycle that is measurable in tens of thousands of years. These would be the lifetimes of entire forest ecologies. What we have been doing for the last century or so is moving carbon from very long term cycles of millions of years and pumping it into the daily CO2 cycle. What we can do (we've got the technology yaddayadda) is move more carbon from the daily CO2 cycle into cycles of 10k+ years. It is a matter of identifying the forest types that are best for over-all carbon absorption and then getting down on our knees and planting some trees.

Creating biochar from woody vegetation sequesters carbon for up to tens of thousands of years. The stuff is also a great soil ammendment. About 33% of the carbon in woody waste can be converted to biochar. This is charcoal in a form that is biochemically inert but with physical structures that, like reefs, promote a rich ecology-- but in the soil rather than in sea water.

It is reasonable to presume that naturally composting woody vegetation on the forest floor is undergoing a process of conversion that is broadly similar to biochar manufacture, though much slower: a couple of years as opposed to a couple of hours. That suggests that for every 10 tons of forest litter generated in a year, somewhere between 1 and 3 tons is sequestered as the final product of composting after a year or two.

It is not too long a step from this to recognizing that the more vibrant soil ecologies of a forest are holding a lot more carbon in the form of microorganisms than can be found in corn fields or wheat fields. While that is not "sequestered" in the same way as biochar, carbon in those ecosystems is removed from the daily CO2 cycle (by moving it into cycles measured in 10k years).

The summary: planting trees, especially deciduous in climates with a cold season, does "sequester" carbon for the long term (in the sense that carbon is moved from the daily CO2 cycle to much longer CO2 cycles). While only a fraction of the carbon in a dead tree is "sequestered" in that way, there are multipliers in the soil ecosystems that significantly increase the amount of carbom removed from the daily cycle.

Go plant a tree. At present it is the best thing a person can do to directly counter the increasing CO2 levels.

What seems to be missing from these accounts (I have not done an exhaustive search of them, though) is that Tudor was clever enough to recognize that waste from one local industry-- the saw mills of New England-- could be used as one of the key raw materials of his distributed ice product. He was one of the first to recognize that a waste stream could be repurposed this way.

New England still had plenty of waterwheel driven lumber mills at the time, and was in a unique position to create an ice distribution network servicing both sides of the Atlantic. Except for Alaska that was milling a lot of lumber for the San Francisco build up, there were few regions with all three components: natural ice, lots of saw dust (or the equivalent lightweight, cheap insulation), and good harbors.

That's the nature of slashdot, no matter what the subject of any given thread.

I read slashdot at least daily, sometimes visiting several times a day if a topic is of great interest to me. But I don't read it for information about any subject. I read it to find out what the attitudes and biases of one vocal segment of the technoratti are. Sometimes that helps me shape my own opinion; sometimes it helps me identify where I should invest my limited argumentative resources. But almost never does slashdot give me any solid information; it is always just a jumbled of mismatched anecdotes.

There can be little question that what the USA needs now is another Teddy Roosevelt trust-buster. Big corporations-- and banks-- are exerting way too much influence on the USA's politics and marketplace. Time to do what T.R. did about100 years ago: use government to regulate Big Business so that the marketplace and politics can work the way the founding fathers intended. Instead of twisting governments-- state as well as federal-- to do what Big Business thinks is best for themselves.

I'm not sure that Saint Hilliary is earthy enough to get the job done. I'm not sure that Ms Warren has the skills and shrewdness of thought the work requires. Maybe they could combine forces.

What I am pretty sure of is we need a Mommy in the White House who can restore order in the nursery and rumpus room and do whatever enforcement is needed to get all the kids to play nicely with each other.

There is such technology. On Earth. In space there are limitations of weight and energy consumption to contend with.

An excellent discussion and I learned a couple of things.

I will continue to use .png for archival needs where bandwidth issues do not apply, and I can avoid worrying about the copy-of-copy degradation of .jpg without the excessive size of .tiff or other lossless formats. I will convert to .jpg at as high compression as is workable when preparing images for the web.

This leads to another question, now that several persons who know something about this stuff are gathered together on this one thread:

Blender can work with images from a number of different sources and these can be stored within the .blend database. These might be reference images during modeling or textures used in the finished product. They are usualy the major contributor to the size of the .blend file. So, does anyone know whether there would be an advantage to using one image format over another when working with Blender?

Why is there no mention of Portable Network Graphics in this discussion? .png has an alpha channel, has broad support, and uses *lossless* compression. What's not to like? It does not compress as tightly as highly compressed .jpg, but as several have pointed out, that's not as big an issue any more.

So am I missing something? Or is it just some kind of marketing thing that .png does not see much use?

If YOU had read the studies, you would know that the risk of lung cancer was a major talking point only for the anti-smoking marketeers, who felt that the very high risks of smoking induced heart disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease were not scary enough to cause addicts to give up their habit.

To continue smoking or to give it up is the one decision that will have the greatest impact on a person's health twenty years and more down the road. Whether this is from the nicotine addiction or from all the other crud in inhaled tobacco smoke is an unknown.

That is not the question.

The question is, now that climate change has become inevitable, what should we do about it?

The answer varies considerably for different values of "we". However for most values of "we", it would make sense to do what can be done to reduce the greenhouse gases our human activities produce. For while this might not make a difference, it might make a big difference since everything suggests that that the climate's near future is characterized by one or more tipping points, and even a minor reduction in the rate of greenhouse gas production could be enough to keep from tumbling over a cliff.