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Comment Re:Indeed (Score 1) 34

It's hard to overstate how bad it would be. Iceland doesn't just get glaciated in ice ages, it gets catastrophically glaciated. As in "mass kills almost all of our plant species". That's why there's currently no native conifers even though there used to be, for example - virtually the whole island ends up under an extremely thick sheet of ice.

Of course, a shorter localized ice age, in an otherwise warming world, isn't as bad as a Milankovitch Cycle ice age. But it'd be pretty awful for us. Right now, we're benefiting from a warming world (though losing our glaciers and regularly getting annoying new insect species which previously couldn't survive here :P). Our growing reason is so short, and the difference between our winter and summer temperatures so small, that even a small amount of warming drastically lengthens our growing season, and makes a vast difference to how well things can grow in it.

Comment Re:So Iceland is worried that it may become ... (Score 2) 34

It does get overplayed though, with people acting like there was no reason to name Iceland "Ísland" and no reason to name Greenland "Grænland". There's plenty of ice here (much of the middle of the country doesn't melt until quite late in the year, and settlers approaching from the south and east sailed past the huge terminal glaciers of Vatnajökull), and the places that were settled in Greenland weren't all that different from e.g. Vestfir(th)ir. Grænland was chosen as a name to advertise it, but it's not like it was some sort of lie - most new settlements, even random villages wherever you are, are generally given pleasing names to try to attract people.

Also, Iceland got its name due to Flóki "Raven" Vilgerðarson, the viking-discoverer of Iceland (though the Irish already knew of Iceland). He had a clever trick to find islands, which was having ravens (land birds) on his boat; they'd fly up, look for land, and if they spotted it, beeline for it, but otherwise had no choice but to return to the boat. Ravens are quite large, black birds and thus easily visible to track from a boat. Anyway, his first winter at Bar(th)arströnd was abnormally cold, and there was sea ice visible offshore (something quite rare in Iceland), so he chose the name "Ísland".

Comment Re:So Iceland is worried that it may become ... (Score 1) 34

It's "ís" (accented), and is pronounced "eece" :) "Eece-land" (land said like with a British accent, not an American one)

Fun fact: while ís does indeed mean "ice", it's not the colloquial word for ice - like, if you want ice at a restaurant, you ask for "klaki" (people sometimes jokingly refer to being in Iceland as "á klakanum" ("on the ice" ;) ). "Ís" these days is used as short for "rjómaís", lit. "cream-ice", aka ice cream - if you ask for "ís" at a restaurant, you'll get ice cream.

So in modern parliance, the country is "Ice Cream Land". ;) (Honestly, our ice cream is really good here - try the bilberry ice cream at Erpssta(th)ir for example :) )

Comment Re:So is it... (Score 1) 34

Do you think it is interesting that the century during which an ice age was ending is the one used as a baseline for climate analysis?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

"The Little Ice Age (LIA) was a period of regional cooling, particularly pronounced in the North Atlantic region.[2] It was not a true ice age of global extent.[3] "

Literally right at the top of the article.

Also, for the record, there is no single "baseline timeperiod for climate analysis".

Comment Re: YAAF (Score 1) 201

The font is a deliberate decision whether it's a bot or not, on which I have no firm opinion. A variety of accounts (how many different people are involved is anyone's guess) have chosen to set their output in monospace over the years here. I think of them like hipsters. Monospace is inferior for the majority of tasks (except arguably for programming, and for a few data processing tasks where the data is naturally columnar when represented with fixed character width) so they're making a decision to make you read their thoughts in an inferior fashion. You could of course override fixed width text but my recollection is that Slashdot uses the classic HTML for this purpose and not something you could conveniently override without affecting other text that you might not want to make monospace. However, I haven't looked at the CSS recently so you might have options there.

I handle it by simply not reading anything they write. As a speed reader I unfortunately sometimes read parts of their comments by accident, but otherwise I choose not to consume any of it. They want to make it harder to read? Fine, in that case I'll pass.

Comment Re: Exported deflation (Score 1) 201

they could easily retool to deliver for another market while selling the existing inventory slowly to domestic buyers.

Domestic buyers have to have money, so they have to have jobs, etc etc. They have official unemployment over 5% and among employable youth it's over 13%. Cars which sit degrade. This is more true for ICEVs but it's still true for EVs. And actually it's more true for EVs if they aren't kept charged, but I was assuming basic maintenance (washes, waxes, fluid changes, battery charging) being done in both cases to be generous.

Comment Re:ACs are shit (Score 1) 111

I think the better request would be to turn back on the ability to register an account first and foremost, then maybe the ability to post anonymously.

I agree that those two things should happen at the same time. But I stand by the vast majority of AC comments being trolling or worse (e.g. uncreative trolling) and the "feature" being a huge detriment to the quality of Slashdot.

Comment Re:Not high end (Score 1) 96

So how many people do you know who have 2.5 Gb at home?

I don't know many people these days, so I'm the wrong guy to ask. However, it's super common for people with fiber to have 2.5GbE to the routermodem. I also live in a BFE county that's just now getting fiber to ONE city, so even if I knew a lot of people, I'd still be the wrong person to ask. But I'm also not representative in general, so again, wrong person to ask.

Comment *some* games (Score 3, Informative) 96

Linux currently plays Windows games better than Windows in side-by-side tests.

I have experienced this myself, but I have also experienced the reverse many times. There are also many games that won't run on Linux at all. Most of these have Windows kernel DRM, so I wouldn't buy them anyway myself, but I'm not the whole market.

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