I can say from the painful experience of my colleagues that Gems are just broken. It's hard to say precisely what the problem is, but I *think* it's human rather than technical. It's telling that several solutions to "fix" Gems have sprung up in the past few months.

The problem stems, I think, from a tendency for software developers to attach themselves to the cargo-cult of major-minor-teeny version numbers. Without solid release engineering, you've got no indication that (for instance) a minor version bump doesn't include functionality breakage, or that a certain release only includes bug and security fixes *and nothing else*. What it boils down to is that you might as well only have two versions: current and edge.

I also see no reason *whatsoever* to allow more than one gem version on a production server. This being supported has caused us some *hideous* problems in the past. It's not helped by gem authors completely ignoring that some libraries (rake is an example) that are available both as gems and as ordinary system libraries. What happens then is that you can have one version installed, a gem requiring a version that should match, and that require failing because rake exists outside gems.

One way to fix it would be to have a "distribution" layer on top of gems, where people would nominate a specific set of gem versions, and make sure that they work happily together *without* the Gem namespace existing. End users could then install gems from a specific distribution without caring about specific version numbers, knowing that version conflicts couldn't happen. Optionally, the distribution could take care of building binary gems, so that production hosts didn't need compilation tools installed. A not insignificant benefit of this would be that it could make gems compatible with the Debian packaging policy.

The only downside is that people would have to stop living on the edge. I don't see this as a bad thing.

Let's assume your numbers are correct, and that we have the highly simplified situation that you describe, with a simple absorption-reradiation day-night cycle.

Now, take a 100-year period. What difference between energy absorption and radiation do we need to induce in order to make the air temperature increase by 1 degree C, assuming no change in albedo? That's simple - it's the total energy required (1273 J/m3) divided by the time period (3e9 seconds), which is roughly 0.4e-6 W/m3 or, in other words, half a billionth of the incident energy. That's an order of magnitude which puts the effect in the "plausible, but needs verifying" range for me, and not something to be dismissed out of hand.

CO2 levels TRAIL [wikipedia.org] temperature increases (note the graph is read from right to left)

Actually they don't. At least, not in that graph. It's an optical illusion. Open the image in an image editor and draw vertical lines; you'll see that the peaks of CO2 and temperature match perfectly, which tells us nothing about causation whatsoever.

And any scientist worth his salt knows that the MAIN greenhouse gas is WATER VAPOR, not CO2. Well, if you heat the planet, of course you're going to evaporate more water into the atmosphere, which keeps the planet warmer. However the water vapor wasn't the CAUSE of the heating. It's merely acting as an insulator. If you remove the heat, the atmosphere cools, water condenses, and you're back to the beginning.

That's right. Assume we are heating the planet by adding carbon dioxide; it's made worse by the extra water vapour chucked into the atmosphere by the excess heat.

Considering the huge amounts of energy involved, the complete inability of mankind to produce even a small fraction of that energy even if we wanted to

That's irrelevant. We're not producing energy. The argument is that we've artificially increased the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 30%ish.

the minimal REAL impact that CO2 (the alleged "culprit") has on the greenhouse effect when compared to water vapor

It's 25%ish we (might be able to) influence as opposed to 70%ish we can't. I don't view that as "minimal".

or even methane

The human-driven change in methane levels has had one third the effect of human-driven changes in carbon dioxide levels. Yes, methane can *potentially* be really nasty, but comparatively it hasn't been - yet. Insert your standard "methane sink going critical" apocalyptic scare story here; there are more than enough to go around.

and the fact that the martian polar caps are also receding,

That avenue's a bust, unfortunately.

and atmospheric phenomena on Jupiter is recently increasing

That tells us very little. All we know there is that something changed. The equatorial temperature *appears to have* increased, with a corresponding drop at the poles. What we definitely do know is that a chaotic system underwent dramatic change, which is not exactly surprising in itself.

it's much more reasonable to conclude that our solar system is receiving more radiation, either from the sun or nearby stars, for whatever as yet unknown reason.

Not really, given a) the above, and b) a sound physical hypothesis for man-made warning.

What he's actually saying is that *this has already been done*, and they have already been vindicated.

Can some stats bod calculate how likely these events are given a normal ergodic process, please? I'm surprised I haven't seen it done yet; it'd be good to know how unlikely the counterclaims are.

I think when the GP says "namespaces" what he might mean is "namespaces used in the standard library." PHP's stdlib is, and always has been, dreadful in that regard.

I do know of a vehicle braking system that was coded in C, but the C was generated by a Haskell code generator. I wouldn't be at all surprised if that sort of thing was quite common.

I know for a fact that the insurance companies have non-medically qualified people denying claims on the basis of JPEGS of radiograms.

There's a lot to be said for the idea that they should be sued for practising medicine without a license.

Except they suffer from the slight drawback of neither actually existing, nor having particularly strong fields in the first place. Besides, that doesn't solve anything - you've just swapped a nasty field generation power problem for a nasty superconductor cooling problem.

Quite. Clearly anything over 10 years is just showing off.

Er - that didn't help, did it?

I'm not interested in having those freedoms of which you speak.

Then I hope you can at least understand why those of us that do, and can see why losing them would be a really bad thing, will try to educate you on this.

I want my corporation to have the freedoms that it deservers.

Uh... what? There's a statement that needs justifying. What freedoms does any corporation *deserve*?

I am a business owner, although I honestly can't see why that matters.

a) Good luck with that. Seriously. If you can get the Constitution changed on the basis that current copyright enforcement is insufficient, then it's probably overdue being ripped up and thrown away.

b) How do you define "products"? If I'm a professional speechwriter, is something I write protected as speech, or unprotected as a product? How about a news report? How about source code?

c) see a)

d) Yes.

You are mistaken. I don't have to move to a country with a dictator. The nice part about living in a democracy is that I can influence that democracy.

I can change the current laws to suit my needs. Not often single-handedly (although sometimes), but it can be done.

You are asking to increase copyright. Copyright is an entirely artificial right. If you're going to rely on democracy, you have to remember that copyright exists entirely because the people have effectively volunteered to give up certain capabilities to encourage you, the copyright holder, to enrich their lives and the content of the Public Domain.

You are making the argument that the copyright regime, already vastly expanded to the detriment of the Public Domain, is not sufficient, because it doesn't restrict everyone else's behaviour enough. This strikes me as utterly greedy and ungrateful. Is there a reason I should not react that way?

No, you live in a corporatist republic

I don't think so - UK, most likely.

There is no indication so far that this balance exists, that there are any requirements for meaningful penalties for false accusations written into ACTA. At least, not that I'm aware of. The fact that it's all being done in secret means we *have* to assume the worst.

The thing is, we're already in an environment where the users are trained that if they don't do things right, Bad Things Happen, most likely to them. We're not dealing with untrained users, they have a real incentive to pay attention. Just as an example, look at any photo of a Patriot launch. There's a *huge* flame plume out behind the launcher. Any team member standing there, or any fuel stored there, will have a really, really bad day if Newbie McNewberson pushes the button at the wrong time. So, there must be procedures, and the procedures must be trained-in.

Yes, in an ideal world, the whole thing would be idiot-proof. However, in this case, you don't really have a choice. You need to resync every so often. You can't force a reboot automatically, because it only takes that happening once during a high-stress situation for the crew to lose all confidence in the system. The alternative is to show a timer, so that the crew knows that they need to resync at some point in the next 12 hours, say, or that they're 10 hours overdue. Once you've made that decision, unless you adequately communicate to the crew the consequences of not obeying the timer, you've created precisely the conditions that actually happened.