the Emacs vs VI war is over (Emacs won)

Nope. B-)

When I got my first UNIX box, back in the '80s, it had two megabytes and did NOT have demand paging, which would have allowe a larger virtual image to run. That was too small to compile emacs. (The joke at the time was that the name was really an acronym for Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping. B-) )

So I learned VI. Then I used it VERY heavily for years, on the original conferencing system whose software was later ported to The Well. After that a number of editing idioms were "wired into" my hindbrain and I could do the things I wanted to do with text very efficiently with vi.

As machines improved I tried emacs several times. Each time I found that the stuff I depended on took about 1.5 to 3 times as many keystrokes. This was too much of a penalty to pay for the handful of features it offered.

At one point I considered going to it but running in a vi emulator mode and gradually migrating to native idioms. But I discovered that, kitchen sink that it was, it had TWO vi emulator modes, each with distinct deviations from vi (alias "bug sets"). With one vi emulator, even with substantial shortcomings, I might still have made the shift. With two there was no easy way to chose, so I didn't bother.

Now I'm using vim, which is close enough. One of my regular colleagues is an emaxian rather than a vithian and we get along just fine. B-)

Also: It's not clear to me which group should be handling this. It seems to be a conflict between how two projects downstream of the compiler itself are handling a global namespace.

I'd only expect the compiler guys to fix it if they decided the downstream stuff was a problem and pulled part of it into their own stuff to settle the matter.

Wouldn't it be easier to check your bugzilla ticket?

There were already several tickets out on it (and flames from the maintainers about duplicates) so I didn't file another. None of them seemed to indicate that anyone, let alone the core compiler crew, were intending to do anything abut it.

I was hoping someone more actively engaged in either reporting or dealing with the issue might happen to be participating here and care to chime in. B-)

Meanwhile, others should know that there IS (or, we can hope, WAS) an issue before they make plans to try to use the toolset for a new project.

Did they fix the conflict between gcc-multilib and gcc-arm-linux-gnueabihf?

Since Ubuntu Trusty was released, over a year ago, there has been a conflict between gcc-multilib (needed for building and running 32-bit application on 64-bit Intel/AMD architectures) and several cross compiler suites including gcc-arm-linux-gnueabihf (the cross-compiler suite needed for developing applications for ARM processors, such as those on the BeagleBones and many Internet of Things devices.)

This means if you want to do cross-development and you have a 64-bit machine running a 64-bit install and doing builds for itself for both 64 and 32 bit environments, or running some 32-bit applications, you can't just install the cross-tools from the repository and dig in. You need a separate machines for cross-development, or you need to take time out to do your own hacking of the tools.

I've looked around the net for solutions: The issue seems to be a disconnect between teams, primarily over conflicting uses of the symlink at /usr/include/asm. But I haven't found any clear description of how to work around this, nor has the problem been fixed in the repositories. After over a year I find this very disappointing.

Has this been addressed with this new release of the underlying compilers?

In the end, companies will do what's best for stockholders, which is immediate financial gains, which is bringing in cheap slaves.

No, in the end they'll do what is perceived, by upper management, as being best for upper management.

This includes immediate financial gains, or at least the appearance of them on the bottom line. But it also includes a smooth ramp-up of this bottom line: A sudden opportunity must often be delayed or abandoned, rather than seized, because it would lead to a spike-and-dip on consecutive quarters.

It also includes cutting expenses - particularly R&D and salaries - giving the appearance of building the future while abandoning it and gradually tearing down the present as well. The quality of the current output shrinks while future products aren't finished or don't work. But the bottom linen looks great for a couple years. The executive suite pats themselves on the back, collects their bonuses, and moves on to the next victim company. Their successors inherit the house of cards, and the blame when it collapses.

Great for the execs. Rotten for the stockholders. But a necessary skill for executives is the ability to convince the stockholders (and maybe some of the board members) that they're really doing great - until they've moved on to the next suckers.

I see a lot of hand waving about the temperature adjustments but I seldom see any serious scientifically rigorous challenge that addresses the reasons and methods that scientists give for making the adjustments.

Yep!

But doing science isn't free.

You're not going to get funding for that study from a government agency, or from a family trust managed by "progressive" administrators (regardless of the political position of the rich dead guy who established it).

If you take funding from, say, an oil company, or from a family trust started by a conservative that is somehow still managed by conservatives, any results not agreeing with the Global Heat Death scenario will be flamed as comparable to tobacco company sponsored lung cancer research - and can go whistle for a journal to publish them. (Isn't it amazing how research that DOES agree doesn't seem to have these problems, no matter how much the data has been "adjusted"?)

Other funding sources have similar issues.

So do you have any suggestions on where researchers can get funding for that study (and for all their future work in the field after it's done, if it doesn't agree with the dominant paradigm?)

Perhaps you have a few million to spare?

Not all Hackers are cyber criminals. Despite what CSI:Cyber might say.

For the record, there actually was never a civil war where one side fought for the right to own white people under the banner of a "black power" flag. Also, there is not to this day (nor was there ever) a state that still flies that flag of white oppression.

For the record. the Civil War was not about one side fighting for the right to own black people under the banner of a "white power" flag, either.

The slavery issue was used in recruiting, convincing normally anti-war religious factions to drop their opposition (or even support it) under the "just war" doctrine, and eventually as a tactic near the end of the war to try to promote a slave revolt in the Confederacy. But the original fight (like the American Revolution, the "occupy" movement, and the RIAA/MPAA inspired draconian copyright regime) was about a crony capitalists / government axis using tariffs and laws to keep a large segment of the population as captive customers for overpriced monopoly products, suppressing both their trade with suppliers in other countries and their ability to make their own, lower-priced, replacement products.

It was the north's "1%" against the south-as-ghetto.

(Note that I say this as a descendant of a number of people who fought on the Union side.)

Unfortunately, the actual history of the conflict has been largely suppressed. IMHO the current anti-confederate-battle-flag move is both an attempt to finish off the suppression of the history of the conflict and to pre-emptively propagandize against any move by southern border states to take their own measures against what they perceive as a massive invasion across the southern border.

"Those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it." applies here - even if the history isn't studied because books about it are suppressed (e.g. removed from book stores and libraries because they contain the "evil racist flag").

... as in FIVE YEARS OLD and has already been figured into the equations for AGW, which is real, and is getting worse.

Get a grip.

It doesn't matter whether the Global Warming is Anthropogenic or not (other than to tell us that, if anything needs to be done about it, anthropogenesis says we CAN affect it because we already DID).

What matters is where it's going, whether the destination is disastrous, annoying, ho-hum, or maybe even good, whether it will sort itself without help, and if not, how much and how we need to intervene to make things better than if we don't bother.

Once climate change really kicks in ... an Alaskan winter is going to feel more like Death Valley does today.

Really? I though even the worst models were only predicting single-digit C changes to temperature averages.

You're talking well over an order of magnitude more warming that the doom-and-gloom crowd. They're talking the ideal ranges of various crops moving a couple hundred miles toward the poles or a couple hundred feet upslope (even when trying to spin it into extinction events). You're talking frying eggs on the ground in the dead of the Alaskan winter. They're not comparable.

What they say is that the short-term solar cycles have no effect on the climate.

"Little Substantial Effect" of the ups and downs of the individual cycles themselves and their usual cycle-to-cycle variations (rather than the exceptional cases of multi-cycle sunspot minimums), if I'm not mistaken.

If the Maunder Minimum (about five cycles long) was responsible, or even a substantial contributer to, the Little Ice Age, the effect of that variation Was substantial. It's the largest of three sunspot minima events that have been observed since sunspots were first noted as a significant phenomenon of scientific interest, and each of the minima was accompanied by a substantial worldwide cold snap. So let's not claim the scientists are dismissing it out-of-hand.

How about we set up a fund. You will all your assets to it. If global warming turns out to be wrong then your great-grandchildren get the money. If not then Al Gore's great-grandchildren get the money.

I'd be tempted to throw 10% of my assets into such a fund (paying my heirs, if not actual great-grandchildren) IF Al Gore did the same. B-)

But since Al Gore is heavily betting his assets (and those of others that he manages) on businesses profiting from draconian government actions to combat "global warming" (such as carbon credit and pollution license marketplace schemes), if I "won" his assets would be substantially devalued, if they were still worth anything at all. Meanwhile, considering our relative net worths, he'd be a fool to engage in such a bet even if he had near-certainty odds of winning. B-b

In the summary Geoffrey.landis writes:

Phil Plait, known for his "bad astronomy" column, does a more detailed analysis of the claims,

I also find it ironic that, according to the Slashdot summary, Plait allegedly wrote, four years ago, a "detailed analysis" of last week's report (of a new solar model with a 97% match to the sun's actual behavior).

In the referenced article, Plait was deconstructing a previous report suggesting maybe the next solar cycle might be low, on the basis of extrapolations of the diclines seen in its two predecessors. He was not discussing the new model, which predicts, with substantial confidence, that (at least) the next TWO solar cycles would be almost nonexistent, comparable to the first two of Maunder Minimum's five nearly-missing cycles.

I also find it ironic that nobody else (that I've noticed) has commented on this yet.

If we're going to discuss this, let's at least have a reference to an authoritative article that is ACTUALLY TALKING ABOUT the model under discussion and the fallout if its predictions are accurate. B-)

A train system designed to reduce friction has better metrics in a vacuum environment?

Mars is NOT without atmosphere. It's about 1/100th as dens as that of Earth, but that's still not trivial.

The moon has an atmosphere, too. It's density is 13 orders of magnitude down from that of Earth, which makes it a pretty good vacuum. But that's because it loses air more quickly - on GEOLOGICAL time scales - compared with Earth. On HUMAN time scales, on the other hand, things like oxygen, nitrogen, water, and carbon dioxide hang around for quite a long time. (I THINK the half-life is longer than human written history.)

The moon's surface escape velocity is more than a fifth that of earth, and a non-trivial multiple of the speed of sound at ordinary (or even lunar) temperatures, so the molecules aren't just going to fly off any time soon. It doesn't have a magnetic field to protect it from the solar wind and its associated magnetic fluctuations. So over time scales compared to continental drift the Moon is leaky. But on human time scales it's not. Exhaust a bottle of air on the surface of the moon when your child is born and most of it will still be around when he dies of old age (assuming only current medical technology. B-) )

This has been a planning issue for those considering lunar industrialization. Much science fiction has industrial processes on the lunar surface, for the "cheap vacuum". But both the industry itself and human habitation in general will "Pollute the Moon with Air", quickly rendering the vacuum too "dirty" for such things (though still good enough to eliminate the need for a "roughing pump" for at least decades, if that's the ONLY source of new atmosphere). That would also be very good for evacuated-passageway transport systems like Hyperloop - PROVIDED they're only using motors, not compressed air, for propulsion. B-) But...

The length of time air would hang around has led to proposals to terraform the Moon, giving it a breathable atmosphere by crashing a LOT of icy orbital objects into it. (This, of course, would put it back to the Earth's situation. B-) )

While it would be back to a pretty good vacuum in time scales comparable to the evolution of life, it wouldn't decay substantially for time scales comparable to A life. Even if it started to become noticeably (without sensitive instruments) thinner in a few centuries, any space-going civilization capable of GIVING it the atmosphere would be capable of maintaining it.

I think the leakage is slow enough for civilization to fall - to stone-age levels - and rise again (maybe from descendants of apes) before it would be an issue, but I'm not sure: Looking up the half life of Lunar air loss on the net is a tad complicated: It's not talked about much. But the plotline involving an artificial Lunar atmosphere, in the game Half Life, is talked about a LOT. B-)

^ this 100 times.

I don't understand why we aren't talking about colonizing the moon at all. It doesn't make any sense to go straight to Mars. Robots sure; but humans, why send people there to die? At least on the moon, if something bad happens, there's a slight possibility of recovery. If something happens on the way to, or on Mars, the team is pretty much screwed.

What am I missing here?