Pypi seems to install crap from all over the place, it could pull from someone's personal website, sourceforge, wherever.
A minor quibble -- PyPI doesn't install anything from anywhere. PyPI stands for Python Package Index, the key word there being "index". It's a catalog that tells you where to find packages. Once PyPI points you to the package, it's up to you to decide whether or not you want to install it.
My 1997 Saturn SC has driver & front passenger airbags, front/rear crumple zones and side door beams, although no ABS. It has enough power to let me pass people without shifting out of 5th gear, and I still get 40MPG (5.88 l/100km) on the highway. When it was new, it was a mid-priced passenger car and not what you'd call state-of-the-art.
The auto industry has had 13 years to improve on that and has very little to show for it, especially in the USA. They did come out with a bunch of Hummers though. My suspicion is that the lack of improvement on fuel efficiency stems not from lack of ability but from lack of interest.
TFA and TFS fail to mention that SciPy, Numpy and Matplotlib have been added only to the Business, Enterprise, and OEM Editions of ActivePython. The Community Edition (the only one that's free) doesn't contain these libraries.
i'm sure a few species will die because of this, i'm sure some habitats will get destroyed because of this, but imagine removing the dependence and waste of fossil fuels, this would benefit everyone.
Everyone benefits except for the aforementioned species and habitats that will get destroyed, and any human or other animal that depends on those species and habitats for its survival.
I prefer solar over fossil fuel power and this program sounds like it could be a big improvement over, oh, I don't know, say offshore oil drilling as an example that comes to mind for some reason. But "everyone benefits" ignores the fact that there will be losers. On average, everyone benefits. In specific, some do and some don't.
I've long wondered about the short-sightedness of modern farming practices where farmers need to buy both seeds and fertilizer each year to produce a crop, when once upon a time in the not-to-distant past, both were free, and in the present, the abundance of animal waste has become an environmental problem.
Wendell Berry said it very nicely:
Once plants and animals were raised together on the same farm -- which therefore neither produced unmanageable surpluses of manure, to be wasted and to pollute the water supply, nor depended on such quantities of commercial fertilizer. The genius of America farm experts is very well demonstrated here: they can take a solution and divide it neatly into two problems.
The Unsettling of America : Culture & Agriculture (1996), p. 62
The additional snag is that 2.1 hectares per person is only a viable number assuming industrial agriculture. Traditional agriculture, or "bio" products, or "sustainable farming" need between 10 times and 100 times that.
Citation needed, as the saying goes.
Furthermore, industrial agriculture also has negative side effects (like the one in the TFA) that reduce our ability to produce food elsewhere. Another example is the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico (unrelated to the recent and ongoing oil spill) which is largely a result of nutrient runoff from industrial ag. Cheap midwestern corn has a price not reflected in the tag on the shelf.
TFS gets it wrong; this research was done at North Carolina State University (NCSU), not University of North Carolina (UNC).
Here's the NSCU press release:
Really, most people in the free software and open source software communities are staying away from Apple because of their hostility
On what grounds do you make that assertion? About half of the developers I counted at the 2009 Scipy (scientific Python) conference were toting Apple laptops.
Granted, mine was an unscientific observation, but if you've got better data that counters mine, I'd sincerely like to hear it.
what they have not done is bend one inch from the basic philosophy that Apple controls the user experience on its products.
On the iPad & iPhone, maybe. But under regular OS X, that's not at all true. Apple even supplies X for the Mac so I can run any X Windows app I want to (the GIMP, for example). The meta keys are all wrong, the widgets look ugly, and the focus doesn't behave as I expect.
That's exactly the kind of experience that Apple doesn't want people to associate with the its brand, but they're willing to enable it under the right circumstances. In this case, "the right circumstances" means someone who has purchased a computer (e.g. Mac Mini) as opposed to a entertainment appliance (iPad) and knows enough to download X from Apple's site and is therefore probably well aware of what s/he's getting into.
Apple sold 10 millions Macs in 2009; don't think the company is now defined solely by the iPod/Pad/Phone.
As an aside, honey is almost identical in composition to HFCF55, so if you meet any holistics bemoaning HFCF and championing honey, you can tell them to screw off.
For some types of honey, that's probably true. But the sugars in honey vary depending on the flowers the bees were feasting on. Here's a short PDF (sorry) with some actual numbers.
As another aside, the glucose content of honey is a major factor in its tendency to crystallize. Higher fructose, lower glucose honeys resist crystallization. That's one of the reasons tupelo honey is well-regarded.
I don't mean to pick on you; yours is not the first comment I've seen in this thread mistaking "lamb" for "lam". The two words sound exactly alike, but the correct phrase for someone who is trying to escape pursuit is "on the lam".
Shouldn't our priorities be focused on more energy-expensive things like heating/cooling?
Well, since 90% of an incandescent bulb's electricity usage is lost as heat, and central air-conditioning is responsible for the greatest share of household electricity use, I'd say that incandescents and cooling costs are intimately related.
If all new home standards were increased to "PassivHaus" standards, which bring heat/cooling to almost nothing, we'd save HUGE amount of energy.
Amen.
I (or *anyone* I know) don't have any equipment that speaks 802.11n
You don't know anyone that has a Macbook Pro?
8 Catfish = 1 Octo-puss
