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Comment Re:Yeah, that's just what the world needs (Score 1) 625

I'd hope that we in the first world can reduce our resource usage without a drastic decrease in quality of life. By sustainable I meant that there wouldn't necessarily be an increased number of people consuming at first world levels. I agree that that doesn't address the concern that our current consumption levels are not sustainable in the first place. Increasing lifespan need not make that much of a difference, though. (If our lifespans are finite, a birth rate of just over 2 is ultimately stable.) As more succinctly put in a modded down comment, how many children you have is more important to your resource footprint than how long you live.

Comment Re:Yeah, that's just what the world needs (Score 1) 625

If you correspondingly reduce the birth rate, the problem goes away. Many parts of Europe would already be at a sustainable level. A problem is that birth rate reductions seem to lag death rate reductions leading to large population increases in some parts of the world. A healthier old age where people can still be productive and less of a drain on health care resources would alleviate the dependency load problem much of the first world is/will be facing.

Comment Re:The urban poor subsidized the rich for a while (Score 2) 372

No, farm subsidies have a small effect on lowering food prices, but a large effect on transferring wealth to farmers. This is a variation of the broken window fallacy. For example, subsidized corn ends up being used for purposes where there are better alternatives. Consumers are of course always going to need food, but they might choose a different mix in the absence of subsidies and use some of the wealth that went to domestic agriculture for other purposes.
Image

Visually Demonstrating Chrome's Rendering Speed 140

eldavojohn writes "Recent betas of Google's Chrome browser are getting seriously fast. Couple that with better hardware, on average, and it's getting down to speeds that are difficult to demonstrate in a way users can appreciate. Which is why Google felt that some Rube Goldberg-ish demonstrations with slo-mo are in order. Gone are the days of boring millisecond response time metrics."

Comment Re:similar story with Fedora and hard drives (Score 1) 272

Let's face it here, if a person is running Windows, they aren't going to believe that there's a problem until they can't work 'cause Windows gives alert after alert after alert and how can you know which ones to believe unless you're a "techie"? Sure if, you're reading here, you'll know, but 98% of people just don't.

If you're reading here there's a good chance your aren't running Windows and just came for the Schadenfreude.

Open Source

Linux Kernel 2.6.32 Released 195

diegocg writes "Linus Torvalds has officially released the version 2.6.32 of the Linux kernel. New features include virtualization memory de-duplication, a rewrite of the writeback code faster and more scalable, many important Btrfs improvements and speedups, ATI R600/R700 3D and KMS support and other graphic improvements, a CFQ low latency mode, tracing improvements including a 'perf timechart' tool that tries to be a better bootchart, soft limits in the memory controller, support for the S+Core architecture, support for Intel Moorestown and its new firmware interface, run-time power management support, and many other improvements and new drivers. See the full changelog for more details."

Comment Re:Venus (Score 1) 435

I assume you are referring to climate scientists. I still have quite a bit of respect for academic science. I think the peer review process has a strong track record of sorting out fraudulent science. Scientists have a much cleaner record than business leaders and politicians, so I'm more inclined to trust them than naysayers which are often from the latter two groups.

Comment Re:Venus (Score 1) 435

According to the National Geographic piece, most climate scientists are skeptical about extraterrestrial warming. http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-other-planets-solar-system.htm Most of the the zealotism seems to be among the global warming deniers. They'll jump on anything that appears to refute anthropogenic warming without doing any investigation. Seems like more an excuse to further their own beliefs and behaviours than true skepticism.

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