The science will always be intertwined with politics though, because it's about people's lifestyles and the environmental framework we live in.

It's not about someone doing science to just to increase the bit density on hard disk platters.

The problem is that serious science in this field is still questionable depending on which data sources you believe to be reliable, which extrapolations are considered reliable. There will never be any more consensus than there already is, without actual climate catastrophe happening. If it doesn't happen then the naysayers will feel vindicated, and the believers will simply adjust their models and timeframes.

Haven't there been plenty of peasant rebellions though? Some have led to the fall of dynasties such as the Han.

I agree with the basic thrust of your post, in that the Confucian society encourages knowing your place and acting accordingly. But I wouldn't say that rebellion is alien (as if unfamiliar), rather that it's familiar but considered more radical than it is in Western societies.

Hmm are you in the US? Since corn is a much smaller crop here in Australia, I'd be surprised if there was anywhere near the equal numbers of supermarket products here that would find it economical to use, even as a processed form.

In Australia I understand our main source of biomass is sugar cane waste, that being our main source of sugar. Corn farming & prices never make the news here, but cane farming and sugar prices do.

At least with respect to most Western countries, I'm not sure this is actually true. It's definitely not true of Australia, where I don't think HFCS is cheaper than sugar. Wikipedia seems to hint it is most true of the USA & Canada.

I don't really understand the big deal Americans seem to make about how their country is large. I live in Australia, and Australia is large too. Not as large as the USA or Canada, but sufficiently large to still encompass a decent number of other countries. I too can drive for many hours across Australia (the country is ~4000 km or ~2500 miles east-west). Reading some of these posts talking about distance, I don't see the big deal. Australia is far from just about everywhere except southeast Asia, yet Australians love travelling to Europe, north Asia and the Americas. Sure, the Europeans may not understand the size factor of the US, but Australia is in a somewhat similar situation and yet Australians travel a lot.

That's why I think the reason is more cultural than geographical; Australia is a country with a sense that it's just a smallish-middlish player in the world, one that's culturally spartan and always been a long distance from other English-speaking countries. The US is large, culturally rich (and somewhat diverse) and has a much stronger sense of ingrained pride/patriotism than Australia.

Is being on a plane is that hard or out of reach for most American city dwellers? I have sat on a plane for ~22 hours to get from Sydney to London and 14+ hours to get from Sydney to Los Angeles. To me it's no big deal, but I don't have the long lanky legs that make flying intolerable.

I have become Facebook friends with one or two people through playing an app that was a trading game - just a distracting waste of time actually. It's true that I'm not really "friends" with these people, but the point is that we interacted enough for one of us to add the other as a friend and be accepted.

This is one of the things some people just don't understand about Facebook, partly because they are too hung up on it using the term "friend". You can use it just to reconnect with your real-life friends, because they are friends. But you can also use Facebook groups, apps, fan pages or whatever to find people who aren't your real-life friends, but have common interests, like-minded or fun to talk to, *if you want*.

It's no different to hanging out on IRC in channels about Linux or animal photography or posting in a Buffy newsgroup and becoming friends with those people over time. IRC, newsgroups, Facebook and Twitter are just all ways of socialising. Certainly Twitter et al are nothing special, but neither are they something awful that signals the end of intelligence.

That may be possible (though not inevitable). But on the plus side, if you settle in Sydney/Melbourne there would be sizeable ethnic communities, especially from China and probably India. From Africa this would be less true, but you're also likely to hit less xenophobia if you are black; to most white Anglo Australians, black people are interesting and non-threatening culturally.

I'm Australian, I just went to New Orleans and that did not happen :) Then again, I am not white-skinned.

A lot of Slashdotters seem to ascribe no value to Twitter, or maybe they're just more vocal. Here's my experience, and a general comment on the social media scorn we read here.

Like perhaps many geeks/nerds I'm not a very social person, but I used a Twitter client that let me see messages from people in my local area (Sydney), much like an IRC channel except people write from places other than home/work. After a while of reading and occasional replying I found it quite enjoyable, followed a bunch and and managed to become somewhat friends with some.

There's no fundamental difference between IRC, a forum, Facebook or Twitter; they are all mediums of socialising. Slashdotters laugh at the last two because they are seen as "not special", which is true, but not the same as being "of no value". My local Thai restaurant is nothing special but that doesn't mean it has no value.

On Facebook, I understand the scorn that you don't want to be friends with classmates you never cared about then or now. But you don't have to use it for that, so it's like complaining that you don't like pad thai (I don't) so why go to a Thai restaurant? One of the reasons Facebook provides groups, fan pages and even apps is to provide other ways for you to interact with users. Yes some of those apps (like the quiz ones) are VERY annoying, but a small number of apps have been pretty fun and addictive (generally trading games) and I've made a few more online Facebook friends that way, people who I otherwise would never have met or interacted with.

It has been ephemeral, some of those people I don't talk to much anymore. But that is just like IRC and real life, where some of my friendships have lapsed over the years and new ones have taken their place. People move in and out of our lives, and Facebook and Twitter are just another ordinary way for this to happen. They are not worthy of the hype, but neither are they worthy of the derision.

I've never claimed that plants feel pain, but what irritates me is the holier-than-thou nature of some vegans about it. It's fair enough for them to believe as they do, I have some sympathy, but I wish more of them realised what you pointed out - that it's just about where you draw the line. Their position isn't somehow a quantum level better, they've just drawn the line further along.

As for hte "right to life" argument, why doesn't this apply to omnivorous creatures such as bears?

Either the US doesn't think it needs ariel recon of hot area

I didn't realise the little mermaid worked for the US government.

Works here, I see just the number 1 being echoed, and then the script exits with status 1.

I just finished PoP as well and I like the lack-of-dying. I'm the kind of nervous gamer that always saves compulsively because I hate dying and redoing bits, so Elika's autosaving fits me perfectly. I agree the game does feel a bit easy, as if progress is semi-inevitable. But that tends to be true in all platform games, you just have to pull off the moves and you advance. I remember playing Sands of Time and dying repeatedly, that didn't make me enjoy it more. But at the same time, knowing the penalty is there does make success more satisfying. With a sufficiently good game though, I tend to desire progress due to the story, and the puzzles are just tasks before the story continues.

No-one's mentioned the directional assistance, which I think may have gone too far. Part of the platforming puzzle is figuring out how to get from here to there, or where to go next, and Elika's pathfinding magic takes that challenge away completely - sometimes I just want to know which way at a fork in the path, no need for the "climb this, jump there" tip.

I agree that collecting the light seeds was a bit tedious, especially as most levels to collect them all you get to the top, heal the land, then find your way down and then all the way back up again (via plates), just to get back to where you started. That's poor game design, even if the levels themselves are often lovely.