The white rhino was saved due to the efforts of a few visionaries who convinced the South African government and Swaziland, if I recall correctly, to allow the commercial breeding of white rhino (which means for profit, in case you don't understand economics 101). The fact that people, including Mericuns, could hunt them for large sums of money, meant that there was money to protect them and breed them. That's what saved them

The timing simply doesn't support this theory as sole or primary driver--the hunting program wasn't launched until 1968. By then conservation measures had already resulted in a tenfold increase in the white rhino population from their turn-of-the-century lows.

Want to see the true value of an endangered species act, look at the rhino. It regrettably has a high economic value and it is on the path to extinction despite protective acts.

The white rhinoceros is one of the biggest success stories in environmental conservation. It was down to about 200 individuals by the late 19th century. Following the imposition of hunting restrictions, populations have rebounded to over 20,000 individuals and it was de-listed as an endangered species under CITES in 1995; limited hunting is now allowed to control population growth.

The black rhinoceros has recovered significantly as well, from a low of about 2400 to almost 5000 current individuals, and it's been reintroduced into at least 3 countries (Botswana, Malawi, and Zambia) where it had been extinct.

The Indian rhinoceros has also shown rebounding populations in the wake of conservation efforts.

The Javan and Sumatran rhinos have seen continuing declines in population, as has the northern white rhino (which is either a separate species or a population of normal white rhinos depending on classification); all 3 are now conservation-dependent. But rhinoceri on the whole have shown remarkable comebacks since the advent of environmental protection laws.

You're comparing raptors and protozoans, there.

It could easily be true that both eagle populations recovered _and_ thousands of people died of malaria because of DDT restrictions (especially pre-2006, when the WHO endorsed the use of DDT to fight malaria). It could also be true that DDT can save lives by reducing malaria rates and also has a negative impact on fertility in humans and is carcinogenic and potentially carries other health risks.

It is true that Carson never advocated for banning DDT and that the anti-malarial effects have been overstated by some, but it's probably also true that negative press surrounding DDT caused many deaths (though nowhere near Michael Crichton's "worse than Hitler" assessment).

No, it shouldn't. It's a computer science degree, not a programming degree, it shouldn't be trying to prepare you for a career in programming any more than a mechanical engineering degree should be preparing you to be an auto mechanic.

In fact, it's not a professional program at all; the idea that college degrees are supposed to prepare you for a job of any sort is one of the biggest problems with the modern university system in the US (it began partially when professional programs like law schools and med schools got folded into universities, and has caused a dramatic falloff in the respect given to vocational schools that aren't part of the university system).

I don't remember software engineering degrees at CMU when I was there. It was the beginning of the B.S. in computer science though. Until then they only had a doctoral program. People who wanted to go into CS took Math or Physics with a specialization in CS. They developed an undergraduate CS degree when they realized that the CS majors were taking over the other programs.

I was there during the end of the Mathematics/CS degree era (1993-1997). The SEI was definitely around and offering degrees (Masters only, IIRC) then. I worked for them one summer, 1995ish.

Graduates come out with a particularly strong background in unit testing, something that my CS training skipped entirely. This is odd since unit testing may well be the most important aspect of programming.

It's not odd to me. Unit testing is one of the most important aspects of programming, but it's largely irrelevant to most computer science. To extend the analogy above, it's like a mechanical engineer not knowing how to change brake pads. That's pretty crucial for a mechanic, but largely irrelevant to most mechanical engineers.

Computer Science is teaching EXACTLY what Computer Science is supposed to. Theory. It's an academic pursuit, not an applied skills program.

If you want to learn how to build usable software, that is a different skillset.

Precisely. Getting a computer science degree in order to become a programmer is like getting a mechanical engineering degree before becoming a mechanic. Yeah, it's kind of vaguely field related and will help give you some background about why things are done a certain way, but it's not at all necessary to the occupation and for many people is a big waste of time. Conversely, a typical programmer can't do CS work (just as a typical mechanic can't do most mech E work) without significant training in that arena.

There should be a professional "Software Engineering" (or call it something else if the Engineers get upset about the term) program for those that want to actually build code.

My school had these, http://www.sei.cmu.edu/ vs http://www.cs.cmu.edu/ The SEI only offered masters and higher level degrees, though, which seems backward if anything.

A bunch?

There are tons of pseudo/local services that are used to start a reasonably functional, secure Linux box: apparmor, networking, apport, dbus, dmesg, hostname, hwclock, procps, udev, urandom, etc.
There's mysql for the music catalog, a nameserver for caching DNS lookups, sshd for remote admin, and nginx for remote control.

And then there's X with attendant support daemons and the media player software itself (XBMC).

(Personally, I also like to be able to play locally recorded files on other media devices, so there's a UPNP server for that too)

Add:

Useful on many embedded devices. When you flip on your media player, the less time you're sitting there waiting at the boot screen the better.

Age related myopia is a fact of life. It affects your reading ability and pretty much everyone gets it.

You're completely wrong here:
1. Myopia affects your ability to see at a distance, it does not affect your reading ability. Most people do not get it; it typically develops until age 20-25 in those who do get it. It's the reason for most glasses and contacts in people under age 40. LASIK is most commonly used as a correction for those with myopia.
2. Presbyopia is the age-related age decline that most people get; it affects your ability to focus, which is why many old people need reading glasses or bifocals. It tends to start sometime after age 40 and progress.
3. People with myopia absolutely tend to have much-delayed onset of significant presbyopia, less severe cases, and sometimes avoid it entirely; LASIK eliminates those delays.

See, e.g., the American Optometric Association's Care of the Patient with Presbyopia:
http://www.aoa.org/documents/o...
Patients with uncorrected or undercorrected myopia are less likely to experience difficulty with near tasks... Due to lens effectivity, patients who wear spectacle
corrections for myopia experience presbyopia later than those with emmetropia or hyperopia. Patients with myopia typically require less powerful bifocal additions than same-age patients who wear spectacle corrections for hyperopia.

You don't eveb need to deep-dive into the AOA to find this out, either; even Wikipedia says "Many people with myopia (near-sightedness) can read comfortably without eyeglasses or contact lenses even after age 40. However, their myopia does not disappear and the long-distance visual challenges remain. Myopes considering refractive surgery are advised that surgically correcting their nearsightedness may be a disadvantage after age 40, when the eyes become presbyopic and lose their ability to accommodate or change focus, because they will then need to use glasses for reading. Myopes with astigmatism find near vision better, though not perfect, without glasses or contact lenses when presbyopia sets in, but the more astigmatism, the poorer their uncorrected near vision". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

Thats' not my understanding at all. my understanding is that when you get old your vision doesn't so much "change" as become less "elastic", you loose the ability to easily re-focus.

That much is true, but myopic individuals are naturally focused at nearer range. It's not uncommon for presybobia--or at least significant enough to need reading glasses--to be delayed past age 50 in people with myopia (especially those with little or no astigmatism), or even avoided altogether. Well, that's not entirely correct: if you're wearing your contacts or glasses, you'll need to take them off to see at close range during that interim period.

http://www.aoa.org/documents/o...

"Due to lens effectivity, patients who wear spectacle corrections for myopia experience presbyopia later than those with emmetropia or hyperopia. Patients with myopia typically require less powerful bifocal additions than same-age patients who wear spectacle corrections for hyperopia."

That's what you'll have to do if you have LASIK. If you don't have LASIK, you'll avoid the need for reading glasses or push it back by many years. That's kind of the point.

Yep. My dad's an ophthalmologist, and he doesn't recommend LASIK for anyone over 30 because of this (except in a handful of unusual circumstances). You're trading off future reading vision for distance vision now, and the older you get the closer "now" becomes.

I'll gladly keep my ability to read without holding things at arm's length or putting on reading glasses for as long as possible, though admittedly my distance vision isn't that bad (I wear my contacts if I'm going to a movie or something, but I don't need to wear them for normal daily life) and I was already pushing 30 by the time LASIK really matured (about 10 years ago)

If you're, say, 26 now (so you'll get a good 14-20 years of fully corrected vision) and have terrible distance vision, LASIK may make a lot more sense.

No, generally emacs users are happy with systems that have both emacs and vi, and emacs won't prevent vi (and all the tools depending on ex/ed) from working.

Except when distributions screw up their dependencies, which they almost all did for about the first 10 years.

Emacs' crappy legacy ctags was part of the emacs package rather than a separate ctags package (despite the fact that emacs itself prefers etags). Hence it was impossible to install emacs and have modern functional code navigation in vi (vim/elvis/nvi) without overriding the rpm/dpkg dependencies or some other hack.

(This is not emacs' fault, it's the distributors who screwed it up for years).

Gravity was modelled and absolutely key in Starflight--if you tried to land on planets that were too high-grav, your lander would crash and you'd die. So scanning for gravity was among the more important aspects of a landing mission.

Braben boasts that his games predicted extra-solar planets ('These were pretty close to those that have been since discovered, demonstrating that there is some validity in our algorithms'), and that the game's use of current planet-formation theories has shown the sheer number of different systems that can exist according to the rules, everything from nebulous gas giants to theoretically habitable worlds.

Starflight did this in 1986.