masomenos

but can you build and maintain a wind turbine without using fossil fuels?

Or mine and refine uranium?

Total lifecycle analysis is complicated, and important in these questions.

Catastrophic for many, not for all. In particular island nations, and nations already susceptible to drought.

...until you forget to check in important changes, or neglect to add a seemingly trivial configuration file to your SCM.

Whereas, a policy of automatically backing up everything except for your exclude list would have saved your bacon.

I protest! In places where folks squat for the toilet their whole lives, adults actually maintain the strength and flexibility to squat, whereas we soft types lose it.

I've been reading a bit about small houses, and one point people make over & over is that going small makes it much easier to afford doing things nicely.

Sure, if you're planning on flipping the house in a few years it'll be harder to get the price you think is right, but otherwise, there's a lot to be said for looking at a house as a place to live vs. just as a financial instrument.

It used to be way complicated, but Passenger has made everything orders of magnitude easier. Tried it?

I guess using twitter for political organizing falls in the same category as DDT: fine for other nations, illegal in the US.

Pet peeve of mine: Teresa was not necessarily the greatest person to walk the earth. From her Wikipedia entry ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Teresa ):

She has been praised by many individuals, governments and organizations; however, she has also faced a diverse range of criticism. These include objections by various individuals and groups, including Christopher Hitchens, Michael Parenti, Aroup Chatterjee, Vishva Hindu Parishad, against the proselytizing focus of her work including a strong stance against abortion, a belief in the spiritual goodness of poverty and alleged baptisms of the dying. Medical journals also criticised the standard of medical care in her hospices and concerns were raised about the opaque nature in which donated money was spent.

http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/161233418/analysis-paralys... addresses this very question.

... which is relevant since Chris seems to have removed the original from his webserver

Do you live in the Alps?

Assuming reasonably flat ground, it's not hard to walk a mile in well under 20 minutes. Bicycling around 15 mph ain't too hard, either -- which would get you 1.5 miles in 10 minutes.

Cool, hadn't heard that electrics were so far along.

As soon as they're $65,000 cheaper, I'm signing up.

Plenty of studies suggest that organic can be as or more productive than chemical intensive. A quick google produces the following from the University of Michigan: http://www.ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id=5936

I'd say that the sustainability of the practices is _the_ issue. Depleting groundwater, eroding topsoil, reducing crop genetic diversity, and changing the climate may all be reducing the long-term carrying capacity.

Way too early to evaluate the green revolution. It may have just allowed us to temporarily overshoot the earth's carrying capacity, which wouldn't be much fun on the ride down.

We didn't get ultra low sulfur diesel here until a few years ago: http://www.greencarcongress.com/2006/06/ultra_lowsulfur.html

That's a fallacy, addressed by the site -- in short, the benefit gained by minimizing jams more than offsets the increased space between vehicles.

I generally follow the stated driving pattern on 95, and it works just fine.

While I have not conducted any format experiments in the efficacy of the advocated driving method, I can report that it's far more relaxing than tailgating. Give it a try!

Nuclear plants were cheap in the 60s?

note to downvoters: "camping" is a brilliant and bizarre microframework for MVC web apps, courtesy of our friend why.

compared to? Subjectively, hulu's flash works much better than netflix' sliverlight.

Not the most informative URL to share for the project -- like the top of the page says, most of the action seems to be in the mailing list (http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/discuss-gnuradio/2009-05/t...) and trac (http://gnuradio.org/trac/wiki)

"software hipster" -- this speaks volumes. nice.

Interestingly, the work of many highly regarded "artistic" architects fails the basic test of keeping water from leaking on the inhabitants - Wright, Gehry, etc.

Maybe best not to look at contemporary architecture as a model.

not for full-time programmers, but SM's audience seems to be more designers who may dip into code now and again

Air: 13" screen, GeForce 9400M, Core 2 Duo

netbook: 9-10" screen, integrated graphics, Atom processor

likewise.

Now that actual crime-on-the-seas piracy is a going concern, there's even more reason to stop using the term for filesharing.

and Drupal:

http://groups.drupal.org/files/DrupalUsabilityResearchReport...