Plants use solar, but very few natural things use wind or tidal power. Nature has had a very long time to try and fill these energy niches, so it is a safe guess that they can't produce enough energy to sustain a large population at a reasonable standard of living.

The productive renewable path is solar - and this article suggests we have quite a way to go for mass production there - or relying on difficult to access energy sources like coal or uranium, maybe geothermal - which the biosphere has difficulty getting to.

If tidal power was really an option, I would expect to see more coastal trees taking advantage of it. If wind was an option, there would be plants using it to survive. Both these things probably exist, but neither in the numbers to suggests they represent a better deal than solar power.

Victory doesn't have to imply something as strong as war. It is possible to be victorious over self, or in a friendly struggle.

>> they should probably scrap it and start over by porting KDE3 to Qt4.

I agree 100% that the KDE 4 lacks a horrible level of features for a release series, thus far. The 4.2 betas are more stable and usable for users than 4.0 and 4.1 combined (:P Literally if combining means combining bugs)

That said, since porting would involve re-reading and recoding the whole old codebase, and reimplementing would also involve re-reading and recoding the whole old codebase, I think that scrapping the _very nice_ desktop framework is a very poor suggestion.

Really the new Desktop model is better than the old. The current implementation sucks from lack of features - but it is a better start than a 3.x port. The underlying work are complete enough that a port is now simply beyond a waste of effort. KDE 4 is here to stay, and this is not a bad thing.

But none of the linux systems in common use run on anything other than GNU. GNU runs on everything (Mac, Windows, Linux, *BSD, GNU Hurd). Most importantly, the GNU project does actually include it's own kernel, which was written before Linux, and is fully capable of independent existence. That is why the GNU people claim it is more fundamental, and make a big deal about the GNU/Linux thing.