Many companies have lax or no update control, and many allow logins from home computers and what not. People will end up in a version they didn't mean to get and that will create work for other people.

Not end of the world, and again I'm not saying the decision's wrong - I just think they're crazy if they don't expect some significant problems and complaints.

after they have assured there are no issues

IE 6 is a very, very different browser from IE 9. We've had plenty of clients who can't move off IE 6 (or are in the middle of a large project to do so) because it's the only one that will run their Intranet site correctly. I've seen MS make this type of mistake before - they don't see many public-facing sites using a technology, so they feel safe getting rid of it. Well, yes, very few public-facing sites are going to use crazy IE specific stuff, and most are (by now) going to be making reasonable efforts to work between browsers.

Intranet sites are a whole other kettle of fish; corporate programmers often target a single browser - and for many of them, that was IE for a long time. They got away with that from IE 4 to IE 6 because MS just added stuff. With IE 7 and, particularly, Vista, they started fixing insecure and non-standard behaviors - and that's part of why so many companies are still on XP and IE 6.

If MS does this, there will be a lot of pissed off people and gnashing of teeth. I'm not saying it's the wrong choice but "once they've assured there's no issues" sounds pretty silly.

I think they do realize that - and I think they realize that in many of these models there's no box for "publisher" at all. They're not fighting for artists or consumers, they're fighting for their own existence.

If Louis just sells stuff from his website to people, there's not a lot of other people who get to feed off that.

we use more paper, more space devoted to growing trees become available ... REALLY

Yes - obviously. If people want coffee, land will be used to grow coffee. If people want marijuana, land will be used to grow marijuana. Same with trees. The trees used for pulp and paper are a crop like any other.

and not instead deforest 3rd world countries cheaply to profit fast ?

Well... again this is a key point. A corporation doesn't "profit fast" by pulping jungle, because that isn't a terribly profitable thing to do. If you could make big money this way, the situation would be very different. But it isn't. Pulp just isn't worth enough for that to work. Again, that's why the farmers and ranchers who clear this land end up using most of the wood (other than the few valuable hardwoods and what not) as firewood. They would always sell the wood for pulp if that was a very profitable thing to do.

Instead, the way a corporation profits off logging is by intensively cycling forest on the same land over and over again. I think I've been clear that I don't think that process is sunshine and roses (it's like any other intensive farming, and it has significant environmental costs), but it's not the cause of deforestation. If you want to argue that corporations will be bad land stewards, and that they'll deplete soil over the next 100 years, use a lot of energy or pollute water or reduce biodiversity or something... then fine. You'd be right about all those things. But if they want to make real money off pulp they'll do so by planting trees and harvesting them.

Deforestation is probably the most urgent, important environmental issue there is right now and it's very misunderstood. The actual amounts of money involved here are honestly very small; the people involved are doing tremendous damage for very little, very temporary value. With better policies and understanding, this is a problem that could be made significantly smaller without that many resources.

the fact that major industries cutting forests are paper, furniture, construction (mainly in america tho - other countries dont use wood in 21st century large scale construction), and real estate

You're lumping all this together in a way that makes it very clear you don't understand the dynamics in play. You can't just say: here's what they make out of wood, and here's how much wood gets cut down. Your dangerously wrong assumptions are a significant part of the problem. It's naively intuitive to think the way you're thinking, and that's a large reason why so little has been accomplished in solving the problem.

Deforestation is mostly a problem of land use, not of wood products at all. "Tree poaching" for valuable wood can create a slippery slope for deforestation (by making territory more accessible), but these people are not cutting trees to have pulp. A tree that's clear cut from, say, a Brazillian rainforest is much more likely to be used as firewood than pulped. When you make pulp, you want consistency - you want farmed trees, and that's how you make a profit in the industry. To the extent that Brazil is becoming a larger player in paper, it's on the back of farmed, reasonably managed trees. In any pulp production, the bulk of your product is coming either from recycled paper (which has been happening for a longer time than you might think) or as byproduct of another wood product (like lumber). You don't just clear an acre of jungle and put all that stuff in the chipper.

Anyways, for the Brazilians (for example) doing the deforesting, what they want isn't - to a large extent at least - the trees at all, it's the land. They use it for subsistence agriculture, and for growing grass for ranching. And they need more and more of it, because the deforested land is not sustainable. It's a land use problem first, and a valuable-wood problem second. Pulp wood pretty much doesn't enter into it. To the extent that they are doing forestry for producing paper, it's actually stopping deforestation because that land use is now sustainable, and they're producing something without having to clear an ever-increasing swath of land.

If you make a profit by selling the trees off land for pulp, there's good motivation to plant more trees. If you just want pulp, trees grow very, very fast. It's a crop mostly like any other. The problem, again (and you can read about this yourself, anywhere, on any serious environmentalist or industry site alike) is that they aren't making the money off the clear cut trees. They're burning them because they aren't worth money - and then using the land in a way that isn't working (and the result is land that used to be forest and is now garbage).

your proposition that there is no relevance in between recycling and keeping forests safe is not rational. decreasing factors contributing to deforestation will decrease deforestation.

I'll go back to my original analogy: if farmers quit killing pigs, would there be more pigs? I guess that sounds rational, if you don't understand the relationship between pigs and farmers.

If the world uses more paper, then that will mean it has more space - not less - devoted to growing trees. Again, I'm not saying that switching off paper is not a good idea or that farming trees doesn't have environmental impact (as does all the other steps of making paper). I'm just saying the relationship between "amount of paper used" and "amount of forests there are" doesn't go the way you think it does.

This graph looks about right to me. And the 3% for "logging" is going to be almost entirely about harvesting valuable woods. Because, again, you don't make money pulping jungle.

thats canada and the u.s. are you aware that there are 190+ countries in addition to those two ?

I know that. Look at deforestation in, for example, Brazil. This is people burning forest for subsistence agriculture and to sell timber as wood, not the insatiable needs of the paper industry. That was my point... I mean, uh, read my post. And I think you understood my point, probably found a lot of confirmation for it when you Googled, but for some reason felt like you had to defend your honor to the zero people reading these posts on Slashdot.

and, even in that, you are wrong :

Wrong about what, that the US and Canada are large paper consumers or that they've had the same levels of forest for 100 years? Because both those things are true. And I imagine you confirmed both of those facts for yourself while frantically Google wanking.

And during your digging, the best you found was "the US imports a lot of paper"? I'm surprised you didn't find something better - I mean, there probably is somewhere where they're clear cutting sensitive forest for pulp (or something), and that would have been a point actually supporting your argument in a substantive way.

Anyways, what you say is clearly true; the US imports paper. It's also true Canada exports a lot of paper. They're probably the top paper exporter. I notice you didn't put anything about that in your post. I'm sure you - again - came across that fact. Why pretend you didn't? Were you hoping to somehow "win" this sad little argument, despite discovering for yourself facts that had to make you at least question your original position?

Look; I reacted to your initial post because it's a common misunderstanding. People think that by buying recycled paper Christmas cards they're going to save the rainforest. There's just not an important connection between those things. That doesn't mean that switching off paper isn't an environmental win or a good idea. Again, my point was only that paper production isn't a leading cause of deforestation - and that focusing on paper conservation is not an effective strategy in dealing with a very real, very serious problem.

Blaming the paper industry for deforestation is like blaming the pork industry for the lack of pigs. Deforestation is happening in places, obviously, but it has little or nothing to do with cutting down trees to make paper. Canada and the US are both large consumers of paper (and have been for a long time). They've had the pretty much the same levels of forest for 100 years.

You don't cut down expensive old wood in sensitive places to make paper. Maybe you don't think farmed forests are environmentally sound, but they definitely produce oxygen.

If there's a limited number of suppliers in a market, they can (and do, often) collude to keep prices at a certain level. It's perfectly natural to call that "artificial price fixing". In a perfect market, they would be replaced by a competitor whose price was closer to the marginal cost of production - but that's not how actually economies work.

I suppose to an extent, your interpretation IS what's taught in Econ 101 (assuming Econ 101 is "General Microeconomics" at your school, and focuses on theory), but that isn't the end truth or something. Price fixing is a concern in real market economies - and often it's shortages like this that effectively give cover for companies to try it (you see this all the time with oil/gasoline prices).

OK, that's fine - but that's still pretty much the opposite of the general hygiene hypothesis. Unless you were specifically trolling for the response you got, surely you could have made yourself clearer if you actually understand this stuff.

To be clear: I understand that there's further mechanisms that can be triggered by natural infections that aren't triggered by vaccinations... but it's still a very uphill argument to suggest that at least many of these diseases aren't more detrimental than whatever immunological benefit they give. If you had phrased this in the context of avoiding auto-immune disorders, I don't think 90 people would have jumped on.

I think his point was that your idea was backwards. If you get attenuated vaccines (which I assume most of these are), you're effectively exposing yourself to several extra things - not less things. If the idea was priming immune systems through exposure, then attenuated vaccines would almost certainly be a positive. If these vaccines didn't do that, then they wouldn't work. And they do.

healthy from an evolutionary standpoint

I assume you're not suggesting that we should let people die (or be sterilized, as by mumps) by exposure to serious illness - thus to improve humans through evolutionary processes? I'm guessing you mean (and are saying in a roundabout way) something like "humans evolved with viruses around, so it's natural for people to get sick sometimes and something, something" (ie. you're making a general health argument, and you're couching it on some vague "evolutionary status quo" thing).

But, again, I'd say exactly the opposite: for most of primate history, we didn't have nearly the varied social contact and mobility that humans have now. All the mechanics of epidemiology have changed in a nano-second of evolutionary time. If we think of "priming the pump through exposure to a variety of viruses", I'd say that - vaccinations and hygiene or not - we are exposed to way more different strains than our ancestors would have been (because our social groups are vastly larger, more interconnected, and varied).

Yes, Facebook makes mistakes with features. But how many high profile platforms has it abandoned?

Yes, Apple makes mistakes with hardware and software features. Sometimes they burn a developer by not approving an app. But how many high profile platforms has it abandoned?

Having worked at places that make software, I bring you the bad news it's normal for most software projects to fail.

Wow - you worked at a place that makes software! Maybe you should do some kind of ask/tell thing?

I manage software R+D at a large company. Sure I've seen failed projects. But our clients don't see many of them. We do our pissing around behind closed doors, and when we launch something we support it. We're saddled with a number of legacy projects that we lose money on and our developers hate, but we don't burn them because that would burn our reputation. And when we pick software tools, we look at precisely this kind of thing - how can we know this vendor is committed to the product.

So some developers wasted their life on a failed project's API, you think that situation is new or only applicable to google?

No, it's applicable to a number of companies. Most of them are small, and nobody pays any attention to them when they launch something until it's proven successful. This makes their job a lot harder. They have a chicken/egg problem with everything they do, no matter how good their stuff is. Does Google want to be in that boat?

And, clearly, this new product dilemma is something that Microsoft is constantly fighting with, simply because of the space they're in. But they've learned to be careful with it. Google is not being careful with it. They benefit hugely from the reputation with developers, but that's really starting to sour.

And it's getting soured by stuff that shouldn't matter - they're letting their reputation be sunk by stuff that was never that compelling, and didn't have anywhere near the launch effort they should have got. If you let developers have time (which they do), they'll make all sorts of stuff. Sometimes it'll be diamonds. But sometimes it's coal, and you need to have enough control (and ego-management) to say "No, we're not releasing this outside."

Yes, what they have now makes money. But their new products keep failing to. That isn't a winning long term strategy.

Their failures are largely because they don't build out and commit to platforms. Every time they have a high profile product or service that gets launched too early, fails to grow, doesn't get supported, and then gets cancelled, they lose credibility with developers. Why be an early adopter for a new Google platform if they aren't going to put some time into making it work and grow? Why make your app work with a Google API that won't last through your product's lifetime? It isn't all about costs and benefits right now, it's about building relationships with people.

How many developers will swarm to any new thing from Apple or Facebook? Tons - and those companies are reaping huge benefits by supporting and growing their platforms.

Google? They're still well respected, obviously - but this kind of thing is hurting Google+, and it will hurt every new platform they launch.

No, uh... I'm right. There's a simple algorithm to sort them in an polynomial number of flips.

The hard part is computing an optimal set of flips (ie. not just a polynomial one, but a minimum count).

This is exactly the distinction I was trying to make in my initial post. Solving the problem is easy. Solving the problem optimally is hard.

Looking at every pancake every time would involve O(N^2) looks. That's polynomial in "looks" (N^2 is not exponential). And it's still linear in "flips".

And this is a completely separate from problem than computing an optimal pattern for minimum number of flips (which, again, I don't know - the naive computation there would be exponential).