Close, planetary atmospheric physicist

Two possible explanations here:

1) auto-correct typo.

2) a subtle reference to Giovanni Schiaparelli's Martian canali.

You'll never know.

The basic phenomena is equivalent to a hydraulic in a river downstream of a rock. Kayakers have lots of fun playing in them. If the vertical density gradient in the atmosphere is small enough the waves can grow quite large without too much trouble. With a softly defined upper Venetian atmosphere I'd view it more as an internal wave than a surface wave, then it isn't too surprising.

I am surprised at the apparent lack of Coriolis and no sign of something similar to Hadley cells at latitudes less than 60 degrees, but then again IANAPAP.

You are twisting the meaning to fit a particular straw man you want to knock down. I obviously wasn't talking about Berkley vs. Bell Labs UNIX as being interchangeable cogs and was talking about the philosophy governing the interaction of the various sub and support systems within a modern Linux deployment.

What was a better way, the UNIX way, was having multiple interchangeable options for any particular cog in the machine. No reliance on a sole supplier. In Debian even HURD or BSD could be swapped out for the Linux kernel in a semi-official, if experimental, way.

Avoiding a mono-culture has huge industry implications for surviving horrific infrastructure bugs, engaging competition and A/B tests, and filling niches with the best tool for the day's particular job. If systemd was truly optional in official Debian there would be no crisis, no endless talking past each other hate filled forum threads. Instead there was an unfortunate slim-vote by a Debian technical committee and major community damage to the project with a large number of DDs and contributors losing passion for the greater project. Which is the real horror and tragedy of the thing.

Obesity kills more people than lack of healthcare.

Therefore we don't need to invest anything in heath care!
Great argument there buddy.

> I hear it does great things

Only because it has a well funded marketing campaign and VP9 doesn't. At this point VP9 is ahead but perhaps only because they had a bit of a head start as H.265 was delayed due to the member companies squabbling over who's patent protected tech got premier submarine status.

We'll have to wait for H.265 to be properly tuned before we can make a real comparison between it and VP9. VP9 has already won on the licensing front. H.265 might be faster at the initial encode but as mentioned it isn't entirely finished yet and new features could easily make the final product bloatier.

You do not want to use either of these codecs without dedicated hardware support. They aren't too different from H.264 and VP8, the primary change is trading disk space now for CPU cycles later. Think gzip vs. bzip2 - each has their place but different compromises are made.

I don't disagree, but keep in mind that the production of fertilizer is a major consumer of fossil hydrocarbons.

Nobody is making or destroying carbon.

Who cares if it's "fossil carbon"? Carbon from a dead tree (or animal) that has fallen and is rotting on the forest floor is in no way different from carbon trapped in a pool of goo deep within the earth which began as a tree (or animal) that fell and died a million years ago.

There are two carbon cycles. The atmosphere-lithosphere quick turn-around one, and the larger much slower one which includes that plus the crust and upper mantle.

Time scales and orders of magnitude matter. In the last 200 years we've increased the amount of atmospheric carbon by about 40% and the acidity of the ocean by about 30%. In 100 million years time the carbon cycle will be back in balance, but in 500 years it will be experiencing a major wobble. That major wobble may cause enough problems to destroy our civilization one way or another. Let's avoid that, eh?

It's not about saving the Earth, the Earth will be just fine. It's about saving our civilization and a large percentage of the species on the planet.

Good grief! It starts to appear than nobody is getting even a basic education anymore in REAL subjects and that many are instead being indoctrinated into brain-dead political ideologies.

I can tell you about subduction and the major forms of carbon-silicates in the Earth's mantle if you want me to, but I'm guessing you don't.

This tired old argument again? It's been known for years, usually brought up as part of anti-hydro power campaigns typically funded by our pro-fossil fuel lobbying friends.

While not good, this isn't really that bad. Consider for a moment why we call them fossil fuels. That is taking carbon which was long out of play and adding it into the system.

With lakes dams and still rivers it is burping up atmospheric carbon which was already in play over the last decades or centuries anyway and wasn't neccesarily on track to be sequestered. That orgaic matter recently took the carbon out of the atmosphere, thus no net change to the amount of carbon in the system. If it comee up as methane that's not good for 125 years or so until it breaks down to CO2 again, but that pales in comparison to the effect of ancient carbon being added to the system.

Add the "Hide tab bar with one tab" Firefox extension and you'll recover even more wasted screen real estate.

They had insurance, two forms actually.

Transport insurance is relatively cheap, ~0.6% of the $200M.
Launch insurance is much more, about 6% of the cost.

Since this was pre-launch it is covered by the transport insurance and the transport insurance writer is having a very bad day.

What the Israeli company is really upset about is that their acquisition (aka massive payday for their execs) by a large Chinese company was contingent on a successful launch, and has now fallen through. This has caused their stock price to drop 40% and they are freaking out, blaming everything and everyone for their failure to manage the risk better.

[Free and] Open Source is what allows a project to survive a corporate purge like this. If it was closed and proprietary when they shut things down and fired everybody that would be the end of the road. But in this case the beat goes on.

> Who does?

In this context https://meet.jit.si/ is good. Actually scratch that they're awesome. Fully open source and zero install beyond already having Firefox or Chrome installed on any platform. Because there is no install there is no social network or geek barrier, everyone just visits a common url at the same time. link and time sent via text message or email beforehand which isn't quite the same as a phone ringing but a txt saying "hey get online https://meet.jit.si/YourFamily..." really isn't that bad.

http://meet.jit.si/ for the WebRTC win!