Rest assured, there's prior art for everything.

Mr Garak, it is against the values of your society to favour any agenda that imperils the survival of the State. As a former high-ranking member of the Obsidian Order, you of all people would know that ignoring the fallout from a disaster, even a natural disaster, would be a direct threat to civil order. It is the State's duty to protect its people, not to simply shove its hands in its pockets and shrug in the face of Nature's capriciousness. Should it abandon this mandate, it no longer has the right to govern. Should you abandon this mandate, you would longer have the right to represent Cardassia. Do not invite us lowly Terrans to do the same.

I am not an ornithologist, but I would hesitate to expect anything to be useful that hasn't been essential for millions of years. In general, though, it is fair to assume that (flying) birds are likely to do well during drastic global changes because they're already migratory and capable of following the climate.

Doing some very quick reading, the penguins are perhaps a useful case study. Estimates range on the clade being anywhere from 70 to 100 million years old, at a time and place which would have been quite a lot warmer than today, but they seem to have favoured the coldest reaches of the planet back then, as well. Although there are tropical penguins (as far north as Galapagos, above the equator!) they only arrived much more recently, perhaps as little as 4 million years ago.

So, with that one piece of evidence, while birds may be pretty good at getting away from the heat, they probably won't be exceptional at colonizing extreme environments. When biologists talk about organisms "remembering" conditions their ancestors experienced, they're usually referring to plant epigenetics, which, in computer nerd terms, is like saving a config file full of auto-calibrated settings for the next generation. Plants that have been exposed to certain soil or weather conditions will tend to produce seeds that are more resilient to those conditions, but their genes haven't changed, just a few pieces of metadata that tip the scales toward better adaptation. It's likely that these can encode short-term weather cycles (e.g. El Nino years) but long, irregular trends (much less short, sudden, anthropogenic ones) could not possibly constitute a selective pressure to drive the evolution of a specific memory-like mechanism; at best the plants of each new generation will have to spend some effort adapting directly. (Fortunately, a single field of corn produces an absurd number of offspring. Plants are very good at exploring the problem space of evolution!)

If you see any other mention of "genetic memory," that's a misunderstood reference to Frank Herbert's Dune, and it is not real science. There are cases where the body alters its own genome for practical purposes—the immune system creates new antibodies by randomly deleting blocks of code from a master template protein sequence, and there's some evidence neurons use their own DNA as a limited form of data storage—but nothing substantial is heritable. Heritable epigenetic phenomena do exist in animals as well, but they're probably not very interesting and seem almost vestigial or dysfunctional.

I know this may be hard to believe, but the global average temperatures from the Cretaceous period are not very compatible with Earth's current biosphere. Even if the current period of global heating were principally driven by natural causes (and the scientific consensus is that it most certainly isn't, no matter how many arguments on Slashdot you win through attrition), we would have a duty to intervene as the de facto caretakers of our planet.

Probably some big web-scraping project—this is all based on browser user agents, so any spiders would show up as unidentifiable. (Or maybe it's zombie Amigas from outer space.)

Are you sure? Slashdot itself isn't even 'full' of that. Now, apk's HOSTS file crusade, on the other hand...

This is an incredibly niche point, but Gresham's law is about people melting down coins for their metal content whenever one particular specie is of a higher gold or silver content than another. The "good money" and "bad money" in question are literally "pure coins" and "debased coins." You could extend this to, say, grey market economies where USD or Euros might be preferred over an unstable local currency that supposedly has the same face value, but that's about it as far as modern applications go. It certainly has nothing to do with the market competitiveness of cheaply-priced goods.

Please, tell us more about Russia minding its own business.

Sometimes exciting conspiracies hide boring ones. Wuhan is the epicentre of the Chinese wildlife exploitation industry, where endangered animals like pangolins and bats are factory-farmed in disgraceful conditions for folk medicine—conditions that are perfect for naturally accelerating evolution of coronaviruses. The CCP and regional government understandably knew this would look bad if there was global coverage of it, so they kept foreign journalists out.

Unfortunately, some (Facebook-loving) Americans took this tacit admission of wrongdoing and let their imaginations run wild because, true or not, the claim served their political agenda. There's plenty of blame to be heaped at the feet of both Chinese society and the Chinese government for allowing this to happen, but the circlejerk of accusation and hatred keeping the topic in the public consciousness isn't about accountability, so it has no time for anything less than the most salacious and sensational claims.

And to disable thumbnails. And to hide drive letters. And...

I am somewhat appalled at the Ars writer for pretending these options somehow constitute obstruction of progress. No, expecting a prompt before merging folders does not cause random outdated Windows 95 interface elements to burst out of every corner of the OS.

It may be worth mentioning that if you go west far enough from Australia, you'll eventually reach New Zealand.

While it's easy to wax poetic about the virtues of the Slashdot moderation system, it can't fix a bland news feed or an ageing community. It's also not entirely immune to bad actors, as the meta-moderation process takes time to work, and an abusive user can still bully you within the scope of a single thread. Take a look at one of the multi-thousand-comment Slashdot stories about political issues and you'll see plenty of people who got voted "-1, Fuck You" by folks that were otherwise upstanding moderators because the other threads, where their reputations for good moderation were built, never really tested their ability to remain impartial—essentially the Slashdot system has the potential to give out fake credentials for sobriety.

I'm afraid I'm a horrifyingly real person and have a pretty long comment history, which you definitely could have read instead of posting this comment.

I dunno. Most of the time I find the YCombinator "Hacker News" feed decent. It might not be your cup of tea if you're genuinely allergic to machine learning, but despite its close association with venture capitalism, it seems to me to be almost entirely free from sponsored bullshit and articles that are obviously motivated by people trying to manipulate investors. While modern Slashdot's AI stories are invariably low-quality second-hand journalism about ethical dilemmas or self-driving, the posts on HN tend to be actually technical. (Like they used to be on Slashdot!) This is something SoylentNews never really attained, since it was emulating a Slashdot that was already pretty run down by the time of the Beta crisis.

I can't help but wonder if Slashdot would have gone down a different path if it had been more Firehose and less "posted-by-editor-so-and-so", but perhaps it's really just found a local minimum where an ageing, ad-clicking readership is kept content with a glorified RSS feed aggregator that just reposts soft, tech-curious Ars Technica, Engadget, and Wired articles without any voice or soul of its own.