Extinction is not bad, nor is it good, it simply is. It is evolution.

No, it's not. Evolution is a process where species diverge. It can only occur when one species splits into two, and/or a species radically changes as an adaptation to the environment.

It isn't 'survival of the fittest' or any other moronic thing they taught you in third grade.

The fossil record shows that there were sabre-tooth marsupials in South America before the land bridge at Panama connected the two continents. There was no 'evolution' at play when the land bridge occurred and sabre-tooth cats moved into the range and out-competed the marsupials. There was only extinction. There were then fewer species living on the planet, for better or worse.

I gave two separate and specific contexts where extinction is a clear loss to humanity

That's a very anthropocentric way of looking at things. It's really sad when even the people 'defending' the natural order feel the need to shape their argument in a way so that 'people' benefit.

It always strikes me that at least some of the scientists say 'damn, now how will I get tenure!?!' when an extinction event happens before they can study something.

It's worst with Archaeologists, whose goal in life is to root up everything and use 'the most modern techniques possible' to tear apart the historical evidence, then deposit some of the 'good bits' in modern steel and glass buildings.

The effects would probably be worse than DDT.

It wouldn't be difficult for the effect to be worse than DDT.

DDT was a problem mainly because it came out in the moronic era when any new 'miracle chemical' that came out was spread as widely as possible. It was dispersed so widely that it became a real problem. Selective and very controlled use of DDT is effective for controlling mosquito problems. It's simply a boogeyman thing, like 'nukes' for a lot of people.

They're not Gay. They're one of the other letters in that GBLTQ dealie.

There's even a game in all that data, somewhere.

Apparently, it means, 'no salary for jones_supa' by the look of it. I agree, that isn't plausible. For you.

The Internet historically has hated fucking spammers and advertisers. That hasn't changed. And the tools are in need of continual sharpening.

Supposedly there is one 'Kinder, friendlier' advertiser who we are supposed to fellate eagerly.

Hey. I still use FVWM on my X11 desktops. Once you have a good working .fvwm2rc there's no need for anything more.

Except for where I use the Tab Window Manager (TWM), which has the advantage of being as default a part of X11 as the Xterm program.

Sometimes you just want to get stuff done with your computer.

system mail?

I've been carrying Sylpheed along with me from Windows 2000, through my NetBSD desktop days, and into the future.

Good lord, do people actually use the 'built in' email provided with Windows?

At the very least, we want to stop giving them more money.

They don't want a whole bowl of gruel.

Diodes. It's diodes they really want. Huge, huge arrays of them stretching into the distance.

Also, lots of jumper wires.

Electric cars are only tangentially related to AI.

There are theories that PayPal constitutes an evil form of AI. Maybe we better at least listen to what Musk has to say...

naw...

To be fair, everything that Musk has done in the last decade just reeks of him begging our forgiveness for creating PayPal. Also, he's terrified of the possibility that he might wind up being the latest Paul Allen.

Musk knows what a nerd is, he even knows how to give nerds money. He is not a nerd. (if you're on Slashdot because you are an 'IT' person and the very idea of being called a 'nerd' scares you, please just go away and stop ruining this site for the rest of us)

To look at Bill Gates' code you just have to disassemble it. Most of his work is in Assembly Language. For instance, he wrote the Word Processor component of the software in the TRS-80 Model 100. In Intel 8085 Assembly Language. He's probably not as good at whatever abstracted monster language is trendy this week. Back a few decades ago I remember reading he enjoyed dabbling around with Visual Basic 3.0. But he wrote the Basic interpreter in everyone's computers more than a decade before that, so he was entitled to some fun time.

Go sling some Drupal or whatever. Maybe they'll promote you to making the salads later on.

Well, go ahead and get carried away describing the 'method' that you apparently think will be the most successful.

Don't discount the idea, though, that sooper dooper fast 'stuff-we-already-have' might not provide the breakthrough.

Super biga gigahertz is just stomping all over a huge data set with statistics. How boring. It's really disappointing how much of that shit goes on these days in the name of 'science.'

But it gets grant dollars, yessirre.