Lepaca Kliffoth - Slashdot User

Global Warming Irreversible, NOAA Scientist Finds 1061

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday January 27, 2009 @03:57AM from the is-it-hot-in-here dept.

Tibor the Hun writes "NPR reports that Susan Solomon, one of the world's top climate scientists, finds in her new study that global warming is now irreversible. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, concludes that even if we could immediately cease our impact on pollution and greenhouse gasses emissions, global climate change would continue for more than a thousand years. The reason is the saturation of oceans with carbon dioxide. Her study looked at the consequences of long-term effect in terms of sea-level rise and drought."

We're In Danger of Losing Our Memories 398

Posted by kdawson on Monday January 26, 2009 @11:11PM from the black-hole-of-history dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "The chief executive of the British Library, Lynne Brindley, says that our cultural heritage is at risk as the Internet evolves and technologies become obsolete, and that historians and citizens face a 'black hole' in the knowledge base of the 21st century unless urgent action is taken to preserve websites and other digital records. For example, when Barack Obama was inaugurated as US president last week, all traces of George W. Bush disappeared from the White House website. There were more than 150 websites relating to the 2000 Olympics in Sydney that vanished instantly at the end of the games and are now stored only by the National Library of Australia. 'If websites continue to disappear in the same way as those on President Bush and the Sydney Olympics... the memory of the nation disappears too,' says Brindley. The library plans to create a comprehensive archive of material from the 8M .uk domain websites, and also is organizing a collecting and archiving project for the London 2012 Olympics. 'The task of capturing our online intellectual heritage and preserving it for the long term falls, quite rightly, to the same libraries and archives that have over centuries systematically collected books, periodicals, newspapers, and recordings...'" Over the years we've discussed various aspects of this archiving problem.

Comment Re:No. Fuck you. (Score 1) 168

by Lepaca Kliffoth on Sunday August 17, 2008 @05:18AM (#24633161) Attached to: ECMAScript 4.0 Is Dead

People who complain about Javascript usually don't really understand anything about it - Activation & Variable, [[scope]], closures etc etc. They try to write a program in traditional OOP fashion and maybe they accidentally form lexical closures and see unexpected behaviour that they interpret as variable visibility issues. Or, they touch one of the many places where JS is incompatible across browsers and become confused. Then they go on some forum to explain in how many ways JS sucks. I wish they just studied the language and took the time to understand it.

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