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Comment Re:Cheers to my old teacher (Score 1) 490

What's unrealistic? You are simply making numbers up, without any data to support them. I could do the same if I wanted to, it proves nothing at all.

"I did not. If the plates rise, the area of sea becomes smaller, so the "sea level" is rising."

Incorrect. There are two types of plates. When ice melts, one type will sink (the sea floors in many areas will move deeper into the mantle under increased water weight) while most of the other type will raise (continental plates weighted down under ice which will be released.) This means deeper oceans and higher land, both of which means LOWER sea levels. But it's not a simple formula to figure out the net results, which might vary greatly (Africa, lacking any ice, would see the most raise/least increase in sea level, while Antarctica, currently covered in deep glaciers, would certainly rebound heavily gaining both altitude and land area.

"That is not an argument but an insult."

Unfortunately, it appears to simply be a true observation. See above.

Comment Re:There is a way (Score 1) 321

I am not a huge fan of ICEWM personally but the same thing seems to have happened as with WindowMaker. The thing is pretty much done. There's nothing exciting left to be done, maybe a little updating of compatibility features (but that is never fun, when you just have to take what the other project gives you as-is and cant do anything cool with it yourself) and an occasional small bugfix is needed to keep it going though. But most everyone DOES have orders of magnitude more computing resources than they need these days, so it's easy to go with the herd mentality and move to one of the other projects, particularly if you are an employed programmer with plenty of cash and free time - exactly the people who normally volunteer to do this sort of work on projects that are still useful.

The thing is, these projects obviously ARE still useful to some of us. And I didnt read his question as implying he didnt want to pay at all - but that he didnt feel he could pay it all alone. If we pooled our resources it really doesnt seem like it would take too many people pitching in $50/year or something for needed maintenance work on a program of this size and scope.

Comment Re:Cheers to my old teacher (Score 1) 490

"Not more complicated than calculating how much area a cubic meter of sand will cover if you distribute it in a 1cm thick layer.

Only the numbers are "different" (and bigger)."

Unfortunately you are entirely wrong. I already hinted at at least one reason for this but it seems to have sailed right over your head. You see, the earth is NOT a flat box with walls which can be filled uniformly with water. It is roughly a globe, but far from a perfect one - the surface is covered in giant plates of rock that MOVE. Ice sheets in place on most continents actually weigh those plates down, pressing them further into the underlying magma, and as they melt the continents rise up. Imagine a toy boat, floating in a pond. Put an ice-cube on it, it dips lower in the water. But as the ice cube melts (assuming it can run off instead of being trapped in the boat) the boat rises higher again.

Calculating the actual net effect of a glacier melt on sea levels is thus a much more complicated task than you imagined. And I wouldnt be at all surprised if I have only scratched the surface with this extra variable - there may well be several more I am completely unaware of.

Comment Re:Try KDE4 (Score 1) 321

"Dude, it's disk space, not RAM."

It increases RAM requirements significantly as well.

"If you got space for a single movie you got space for KDE."

And what if I have devices that dont have space for a movie? Particularly free and un-needed?

Or what if I have more disk and ram than I know what to do with, I am still supposed to go through the equivalent of downloading a movie just to manage my windows? Whether I have the space/ram/time/bandwidth or not does not settle the question of whether or not I really want to use it on this in particular.

"That's like the lamest "hater" argument ever."

Wait a moment, let me get this straight, preferring a window manager to your DE makes me a 'hater?'

FFS grow up.

"You realize you can customize your install and it's not a monolithic package in any distro, do you?"

It's still hundreds of megabytes for the absolute minimum install just to get kwin (the window manager in KDE) up and running. Why would I do that when I can get a WM I like better, and do it with a tiny fraction of the resources?

Comment Re:Cheers to my old teacher (Score 1) 490

Are you certain of that?

I suspect if you've bothered to try and calculate it you have left a few things out. There was a time a few million years ago when the planet was that hot, and London was not under nearly that much water - it appears to have been a swamp.

Calculating the end result of changes like that is extremely complicated, and even people that have spent their entire life on the subject may easily miscalculate. Melting ice caps historically have *increased* elevations across Scandinavia, for instance, though that doesnt affect London directly.

Comment Re:Cheers to my old teacher (Score 2) 490

In fact we arent heading *into* an ice-age, we are living in one. The climate we consider normal is an ice age climate, specifically the interglacial, periods colder than typical for earth, but not the most extreme cold in earths cycle - times when there are solid ice caps at the poles, but they dont extend very far from them. The next phase of the ice-age climate is the shift from interglacial to glacial, a period of greater cold when the glaciers will grow down towards the equators as they have done many times before. And that's 'imminent' on a timescale of tens of thousands of years.

What we're being told to worry about now is that our co2 emissions will cause such drastic warming as to over-ride the Milankovitch and other natural cycles and vault us quickly OUT of our current ice-age, into a hot-house earth state - a much more common state for earth in general but one we should naturally have a few million years to prepare for. In that state, the ice-caps disappear entirely, and the next thing you know you have alligators and palm trees in London again.

Frankly I suspect the forces involved need to be understood a little better before anyone is going to know for sure what will actually wind up happening. Climatology is a rather young discipline tasked with sorting out some incredibly complicated subject matter.

Comment Not really (Score 4, Insightful) 179

Obama is hardly going to pardon someone that outed his own criminal behaviour.

But what should be happening is a special prosecutor. Snowden would be easy to get back in the country, just give him immunity. I am sure he would be happy to come back and testify in a real court about the crimes he has knowledge of.

Comment Re:How to attract developers? (Score 1) 321

It doesnt happen in exactly the same way with proprietary software. Instead of the developers going off to chase whatever they think is new and exciting, they get sent off every so often to chase what marketing thinks is new and exciting, but either way projects are never finished. Programs which become generally mature, in danger of reaching bug free and feature complete, are always phased out in favor of new and shiny one way or another.

Comment Re:Try KDE4 (Score 1) 321

What's the KDE base system? 500 megs or more these days? I havent looked at it in years. But tell me, why would I download and install all that for a window manager when I can get one that works better in less than a meg? Really?

Dont get me wrong, KDE is ok. A lot better than GNOME. But I think it's absolutely ludicrous to talk about installing KDE just to get a WM. Which is what we are talking about. ICEWM, it's even in the name.

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