Its a conspiracy to keep the sheep out!

Yes the next time there's a Tsunami warning, let's look at it objectively and wait for the huge waves to appear on the horizon, before evacuating.

Rule of Thumb: Do not readily believe "Science" done on Excel.

Yes, next time there is a Tsunami warning, let's be objective and wait for the giant waves to be visible on the horizon before evacuating. I agree Scientific consensus can turn out to be wrong in the future; but what is important for us to realise are the possible implications if the Scientists turned out infact to be right. I do hope its not a Tsunami. I think the waves are already visible though; where I live the rains aren't nearly as heavy as they used to be - talking in time scales of decades, so that none of you pedants chide me about the difference between Weather and Climate. The spatial distribution is also messed up. I don't know the cause of all this; I will not pretend to.

Its amazing how Slashdot community went from ardently supporting man-made Global Warming to chiding anyone who thinks this could be still be true. Good luck, making up your mind. Science is concerned with the truth, we must however be concerned with our Survival, to avoid a possible Malthusian apocalypse. I might be paranoid, but the impending Peak Oil, along with possible Global Warming may cut off our life support systems. I think this Video does a fine job, of putting down the problem in as careful a way as possible. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zORv8wwiadQ

I think the only reason people use FORTRAN is because of the large number of (fast, well-tested, reliable) Numerical libraries available for it - all of course in Fortran 77. I find calling FORTRAN libraries from C, to be much less mind numbing - again thinking here of Fortran 77, not its modern evolute. Then again this also what MATLAB, Octave, Maxima, SciPy do; sometimes however endless layers of abstraction can be stifling. Things however are changing; FFTW is one fine example of this.

That's incidentally what it'd cost for a decent one in Bangalore. Funny how India can be both rich and poor at the same time.

Well, sure Terrorism might sound like a cliche to Americans, but before 26/11 in Mumbai, there was a similar - albeit on a smaller scale - at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore in 2008. There are bomb blasts every other week in India. If the Indian government had an inkling for war, the "terrorism" issue would do miracles by the way of propaganda.

But seriously, there are lots of poor people in India. Consider this: the HDI of India as a whole is less than that of West Bank by about 0.1. The general consensus is that Public schools are terrible in India; probably because of corrupt mid-level bureaucrats.

If only India could work with the OLPC, instead of blabbering about making $30 tablets. Most public schools here are terrible, to say the least, even in the most "developed" of places. Sigh.