That sounds plausible. Though, since all those soft drinks are made with high fructose corn syrup, doesn't that make your point kind of irrelevant in this case?

Actually plenty countries in (rich parts of) Europe use glass bottles. It depends on how good people are at recycling and, I suspect, how far you have to ship the bottles back and forth. Last I heard, they were still bickering over which option uses less fossil fuels though.

When you're packaging for a distro, you're working in a fixed environment (you set it that way through dependencies). Debian (python) policy is to always hardcode the path to the interpreter so you know you're using the one you're depending on. When a user actually does put a broken or newer/older version of python in their path, it otherwise tends to break in interesting ways. This is a bit lazy on the developer's part perhaps, but you don't really want to be dealing with bug reports about bugs that don't really exist and are the result of some misconfiguration on the client's side. The more you can minimize that, the better. It really isn't as insane as you make it out to be, it seems you just target a different environment.

You almost always want a specific VM anyway. No 2.6 script except the most trivial will work with 3.x. I haven't used virtualenv extensively but I thought you could just have it spawn the VM, instead of letting the shell decide.

And your perl programmers really need a better deployment process.

It's definitely useful when working with large data sets. I've used them extensively parsing a couple tens of gigs worth of files (larger than main memory on any box I have access to). They're not necessary, of course, but I'd argue they are if you don't want to be writing python as if it were C.

It's not "bad practice". Sometimes having the chosen VM depend on what your path happens to be set to is a bad idea, which is why a lot of the scripts in distros have the path hardcoded.

Some policies directly screw over the environment and are just a bad idea, i.e. biofuels. It's a pretty simple trade-off there that we can now see, where basically increasing demand directly hurts the goal of using biofuels in the first place (against global warming). Mining for (rare earth) metals is a completely different matter, as that is something that can be done somewhat safely (though there will of course always be environmental damage), but it is for some reason not done that way. That is the responsibility of the Chinese and other mining countries. We can't dictate policy to them.

What we can recognize is that if we don't switch to this technology, we will be stuck relying on other technology which is almost certainly more damaging for our environment. The coal and petroleum driving our infrastructure is often mined in damaging ways, not to mention the impact of singular events such as wars (iraqis setting their wells on fire) or accidents (gulf of mexico).

Saying that green energy isn't always green is all well and good, but it's not a very useful position. Unless you're the type advocating a return to stone age technology, which if you think it a good idea involves killing off the majority of the world's population.

It's telling that you don't have a problem with the violence, but the nudity somehow upsets you. Like it's a cheap trick to get you to watch something. I've got my issues with the movie, but it's one of the few that actually approached nudity in an adult manner, instead of going "oh look here, partly obscured titties!".

That would be Rage, which is crossplatform and according to Carmack is an OpenGL game. Though the fact that it runs on Xbox must mean there's at least a D3D layer in there somewhere.

Still, one has to wonder why using the API in broken ways would have to crash your X server.

Other than that it's X, of course.

Apple won't allow WebM on their iPhones either. I don't really see where you're going with this.

No we won't, because we'll be dead.

All the other reasons you mention are good ones to explore Mars, not to colonize it.

There's a big difference in cost effectiveness. Even if we could put a viable colony down there, one that wouldn't just die out after we get wiped out, the cost would be immense, creating untold havoc on hundreds of millions of people who could have been helped where that money spent on basic things like scientific research, any and all approaches against global warming, economic development, etc.

I'm sorry but I really hate space cadettes. You were born a couple centuries too soon it seems. Suck it up.

I don't get what the problem is here. Students that are so misguided to think they can just skate by usually end up facing the results in the long run. If they don't, it's either the mark of a bad school or the hard work the student put in at other times when he was not in class. I know in my day there were a bunch of classes that really weren't worth sitting through, and I preferred studying them at my own pace. And I might have missed an assignment or two, sure, but I worked my ass off for my degree and I'm damn proud of it.

How bout you just stop overgeneralising and realise you're getting a bit too old and bitter to see things clearly, hmmm?

Actually video conferencing fills a real need. People like being able to look at each other when they talk (we get a lot out of nonverbal communication).

On current mobile networks you just can't do that though (that's why facetime is wifi only, I gather). Not to mention that it will still drain your battery pretty damn fast. You make it sound like it's really easy to do right now, while the conditions haven't even yet arrived.

3D displays on phones seems fairly implausible. An extra camera will take space, and why would we want to use that much extra resources just to see our buddy's face in 3D? Now if they had said "in 4 years time, we will have video calling generally available on phones", that sounds pretty damn plausible.

Oh, you mean your star scientist friend? If he can study stars I'd say we can study computers (and not just computing).

That's the nicest thing I've read on /. in a while. Have a merry christmas. :-)

The term informatics is often used too. The problem being that people might not recognize it as being the same thing as computer science though. In English, I usually use computer science because people have a better grasp of what that is. Not that they have any idea what it really entails.

On the other hand, I'd argue that the use of computers is not just incidental to the field. A lot of computer science is the study of automated computing tools, i.e. what can we calculate, how, how fast, what are good abstractions/representations of data and algorithms, ... If it was just about computing (in the narrow sense), it would still be a subfield of mathematics. Computer science isn't really a misnomer, because while the ideas can stand on their own without the presence of a computing device to use them with, that very device is often the corner stone of what we do.