Yes, this is definitely a "WTF?" moment in the history of Slashdot. I suggest that you all just move on to the next story and refuse to feed the troll by asking him questions.

Slashdot, obviously, has to innovate in order to stay current. Thus, they are now taking the next step after "Anonymous Cowards". The new "Identified Troll" feature will include interviews of people who have prostituted their personal credibility to some company's calculated disinformation campaign.

Nah; it's not coming at all. It's here. And we're not gonna do a thing about it, so we'll just have to adapt. And migrate inland as our coastal areas slowly flood out.

Here in New England, one of the running jokes for the past decade or so has been for one person to ask what time the robins arrived this year, and another person says "They didn't return; they never left."

Actually, it is a bit more complicated than that. They're one of the many semi-migratory birds now. Part of the population heads south when it gets too cold. But we've seen robins in our yard (in a western suburb of Boston) every month of the year for about 10 years now, while before that, they were almost never seen in December, January or February. This was never exact, though, since their normal winter range did extend to around New York (and southern Nova Scotia ;-), and they were reported around Boston occasionally during warm winters. If you look in older bird books, you can see the robins' winter range ending somewhere south of us, depending on the book, while the current books show it extending to around the New Hampshire border.

But still, they're a locally obvious sign that the climate has shifted north by a hundred miles or so. And a casual search of the topic will make it clear that the US government and most of the population have no intention of doing anything serious to change the trend. The scientists have clearly pinned the blame on human activity, and the engineers point out that this means we now know how to control the climate if we want to. But we (collectively) don't want to.

(Then there's the local joke about all the folks in New Hampshire and Maine who think global warming sounds like a fine idea. Myself, I intend to plant a palm tree in our yard as soon as they become available in the nurseries, which may happen soon. ;-)

Heh. The example I like to use is to point out that killing one cow (or steer) means around 100 meals for a human, while eating a single slice of bread means you're responsible for the death of around 100 baby wheat plants (and probably a thousand living, breathing yeasts). Or: When you eat a hamburger, the meat part is entails less than .01 deaths, while the bread part caused the death of 100 to 1000 living creatures. So it's the vegetarians that are doing the real mass killing of prey.

Of course, this is a bit disingenuous, since the animal was probably fed on grains. But you can confuse this issue a bit by pointing out that cattle actually evolved as grazers mostly on the vegetative parts of their grassy "prey", not the seeds, and the plants can quickly regrow their leaves. Our feedlots are responsible for lots of deaths of little baby grains, true, but naturally-raised beef wouldn't do this. They do ingest at least a few of the seeds, so the issue isn't quite so clear, but it's basically accurate.

For some reason, people with ethical concerns about eating animals never seem to consider that plants are also living creatures. They seem to think that killing a single animal is something horrible, while there's nothing wrong with mass murder of baby grain plants. But you can confuse them a bit by talking about the plants as living creatures. Produce the image of an animal thousands of times our size, collecting our babies and tossing them alive into large hoppers, to be ground to a paste for the next meal. That's what we do to wheat plants. Hiding it in a grain mill doesn't change the fact.

Unfortunately, we're animals, and we can't get our food from the sun, air and dirt. To live, we must kill other living things and eat them. There are marginal cases, such as fruits that were evolved as animal food (to trick animals into transporting the seeds). But we humans can't live on fruit alone; we do have to kill other species for most of our food. This slightly complicates the moral and ethical issues.

And they all stood on Newton's shoulders.

No, wait; Newton came after Euclides. So Newton must have stood on his shoulders.

The human pyramid is getting rather tall, and a bit top-heavy.

Is it really? I've always read of it being a conclusion, not a postulate. Maybe I should finally go dig up the original papers and see who's been getting it wrong all along.

(Not that doing so would likely effect much in the ongoing flame wars, uh, I mean serious scientific discussions about such things. ;-)

Heh.

Forgive me. I stopped reading the front page some time ago.

So how would we know? Since it's all going on in secret, with severe punishments for anyone who speaks openly and truthfully about what they've been ordered to do, the only assumption that the proverbial "reasonable man" (or woman? ;-) would make is that we have no idea what they're planning to do to us next. This story could all be just "theater" to lead us to think that things are improving.

As long as the question "How would we know" is illegal for the participants to answer, we should simply assume the worst. We have a lot of history telling us what powerful leaders are likely to be doing to their own population when they enforce secrecy about their actions.

I used Synergy when i switched to the Mac, though i hardly ever turn the Windows box on anymore. I suppose i will use it again should i get a new box, which has a good chance of being Linux again. And Synergy works everywhere, they're awesome.

Of course it was and is. Why do you think they keep it secret from their own citizens (and law-enforcement agencies)?

In Soviet Russia, you watch Adobe!

Wait, wait, something's wrong here....

One of my common experiences is that when I buy something online, for weeks after I get lots of ads for the thing that I just bought. In most cases, my reaction is "Why are you trying to sell this to me? I just bought one, and I won't be buying another for years."

If the folks writing the ad software can't figure out why (for durable rather than consumable goods) this doesn't make sales, it should be no surprise that all the rest of their software's decisions are equally goofy.

Actually, out in the wide-open rural spaces of the western US and Canada, "flying cars" are rather common and quite practical. Of course, they're usually called small planes, typically 2- or 4-seaters with some cargo space. And you'd usually want a ground car, too, since aircraft can be somewhat impractical on days of high winds, thunderstorms, etc. It's common for small-town shopping strips in that area to have a runway that's parallel to the main street, with stores in between, for the benefit of people using their small planes.

The reason so many people are complaining that most people live in urban areas nowadays, and having all your neighbors getting into the air during morning or evening rush hours is clearly impractical in the extreme.

I wonder where else in the world this is common. I've read similar comments from Australia, but I don't recall any info about other parts of the world. I'd think that such small planes could be practical in many other rural farming areas.