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Thanks for the link to the PNAS paper. From what I could tell from an admittedly quick read of the article, though, it makes no claims about a "300 year drought" during the medieval period in North America. What it does say is that drought events were common during this time period, and that they often persisted for one or more decades. For example, the article says, "the 12th century medieval drought persisted with an extent and severity displayed in the worst-case decade, 1146–1155, for two decades, 1140–1159". That's not 300 years of continuous drought. Yes, the overall mean precipitation in the Southwest was lower during the medieval centuries, but that doesn't mean there was continuous drought during this time.

For what it's worth, the conclusions of the PNAS paper are pretty much in total agreement with what the researchers in the NASA study found.

+5 insightful? What is insightful about this?

The linked Wikipedia article mentions the supposed "300 year drought" in a single sentence that ends with... wait for it... "citation needed". Nice.

If you actually bother to read TFA, you will see that the entire point is that droughts in the near future are likely to be similar to those that occured around the time the Anasazi were abandoning their villages. The researchers never claim that "there is no record of long droughts in the US". Their conclusion is that there were long droughts in the past, and we are likely to soon see them again.

And your arguments seem to be based on appealing to yourself as an authority; e.g. your claim that you "know Earth history and geology well to know that AGW is bunk".

I find PopeRatzo's appeal to legitimate expertise much more compelling.

I absolutely agree that better city and development planning will be essential to deal with this problem. The trend of building huge residential-only developments where residents have to drive everywhere to do *anything* (work, shop, etc.) has surely created massive amounts of traffic.

However, I suspect that even if we are successful in promoting mixed-use developments so people can, in theory, live near their jobs, it will have much less impact on traffic than we would hope. For much of the 20th century, it was typical for only one person in a household to work full time. Today, though, both partners in middle- to lower-income families often must work full time just to make ends meet. Because of wage stagnation, today's two-income families actually have less discretionary income than comparable single-income families of a few generations ago. And, of course, many people want to have their own career regardless of what their partner does.

The consequence is that efforts to eliminate commuting through intelligent urban planning would probably have been far more successful in the '50s and '60s than they could be today. For many couples with two careers, it just won't be possible to live where neither person has to commute. Furthermore, couples often decide to live somewhere that is approximately equidistant between their two jobs so that neither person has to carry the full commuting burden. Thus, you still end up with two cars on the road every day, and better city planning seems unlikely to change that.

Thanks for that informative comment. I haven't had such terrible luck running GTK+ applications cross-platform, but you (and others) have clearly had some very bad experiences. And I readily admit that getting GTK+ to work on OSX is a pain. It really is too bad that the support isn't better. There are some good ideas in the GTK+ toolkit, and Cairo is nice for graphics work, but I agree -- developers ultimately want something that "just works".

There's nothing polite about derogatory hyperbole. The portability of the Windows and OSX UI frameworks could properly be called "utter rubbish", because they're not intended to be portable at all. In contrast, GTK+ apps can and do run on both Windows and OSX, and many applications work quite well on both platforms. I don't think that can reasonably be described as "utter rubbish".

Developing GTK+ apps on OSX is not as easy as it should be, but in my experience, at least, it's not all that difficult, either. It would be great to see this improved, though.

Betteridge's law of headlines says the answer is... wait a minute. TFA says the answer is "yes"?!?

Does this researcher know she has disproved one of the most oft-cited Slashdot axioms?

From the summary:

Encryption everywhere is great. But as long as the majority of us remain willing to hand over everything about our personal lives to Facebook, Google, etc., then mass surveillance by either private entities or governments will remain ridiculously easy. To me, that seems like the really hard problem to solve. There is no way those companies will deny themselves access to their users' unencrypted data.

Both of the linked articles present this as if it is a major problem requiring federal congressional action. Several other posters here have pointed out, though, that actually pulling something back out of public domain via this copyright "loophole" might actually be extremely difficult or even (practically) impossible.

It is perhaps telling that neither article presents a single example of a piece of work that was initially donated to the public domain by its author(s) and then removed from the public domain via this mechanism. So, does anyone know if this has ever actually happened? Given that neither article gives even one such example, I suspect this is not really a problem at all from a pragmatic point of view. Attempting to "fix" it by asking Congress to pass new copyright legislation could even backfire, because the additional provisions and changes that would inevitably get added to any such bill might end up creating new, real problems.

From the summary:

Wikipedia proved that "no cost and good enough most of the time" outcompetes "expensive and authoratative/reliable". I think this has a lot more to do with Wikipedia's success than the supposed quality of the contents.

Wikipedia also wins on its huge breadth. If what you want from your encyclopedia is plot summaries of television shows and extensive biographies of those shows' fictional characters, Wikipedia is really your only choice.

Exactly. One could use the exact same study design to "test" the hypothesis that any or all of the things you mentioned are why we evolved language, and the results would undoubtedly be the same. The only general conclusion one might draw is that humans evolved language to more effectively communicate with each other, which is practically self-evident.

That, and also that humans who spend their entire lives depending on language to communicate with one another can't communicate as effectively when they suddenly aren't allowed to use language for a few minutes. Who'd have thunk?

It must be fun to work in a field where experiments like this can get you published in a Nature-affiliated journal.

From what I can tell from TFA, this study purports to test the hypothesis that language evolved as a means to transmit the knowledge of how to make tools. The researchers found that present-day humans (college students, to be exact) can best teach other how to make a stone tool if they are allowed to talk to each other. The authors interpret this as evidence in support of their hypothesis.

The obvious problem, though, is that they ran the experiment on a bunch of subjects that have spent their entire lives (minus the first year or so) using language as their primary means of communication. So what result would you expect with this study population? The experiment is hardly a test of the conditions under which early language might have evolved.

You think that's why Brownback got re-elected as governor? If your analysis were even remotely correct, he would have had absolutely no chance at winning on Tuesday: he's led your state to huge upcoming budget deficits, an increased poverty rate, much lower economic growth than all four neighboring states, and a downgraded state credit rating.

Yet, despite all of the above, Brownback still kept his job, because, you know... "liberals and taxes are bad." Never mind if the alternative is flushing your state down the toilet.

I had the same thought. The cynic in me thinks that the big tech players are pushing these "learn to code" initiatives because they see it as a way to gain much lower operating expenses in the future. If they can eventually flood the labor market with a huge excess of coders, reduced wages and benefits will become the norm.