The Sunda clouded leopard.

Fits right in with Apple's clouded future.

I was just looking at that, that's a beautiful pattern on their coat.

I couldn't get the Flash to load in either Safari or Firefox; did you have any better luck?

I heard on the news (or some tv show/documentary) that there are less than 4000 Tigers in existence now.

That blew me away.

[i think the Asian markets use their body parts for various things]

The current figure is quite a bit lower....somewhere just around 3,200....and you're right, they're mostly poached for body parts. Maybe it's time for a poacher cull with a sufficient reward per poacher trigger finger to provide sufficient motivation to get the cull started.

And, if that works, there are a few other endangered species being poached.

ryck

If humans keep going they way they are (overpopulation, global warming, pollution, etc.), we will be the endangered species. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that we already are. Knowing that the supply of stupidity is unlimited, I can't say that I'm very optimistic.

While I tend to agree with you here, not everyone (surprise, surprise) seems to think that way: Population timebomb a myth?

A scary aspect is not only that the supply seems limitless but also that stupidity so often seems to be invincible.

ryck

Of course, we speak as if stupidity is external to our own cozy lives. But if we're so smart, how do we manage never to be in control of what transpires?

Are those who are supposed to represent our interests stupid, or just corrupt? In either case, shame on us, no?

No, I don't think so. I'm pretty sure we can all look back on times when we did something and then thought "Why did I do that? That was really stupid." The trick, of course, is not doing it a second time.


I'm not quite sure I've caught your drift. Assuming you mean those things in our our lives, I think we control outputs as much as we can (by thinking about what we're doing) within the realm of those things that we can control. But...there's always going to be a chance that things just don't work out. Shades of Robbie Burns' little mouse.


Or both.....and you can toss in greed. I'm not sure it means shame on us....unless we voted for the stupid, corrupt, greedy individuals more than once.

ryck

There's a thriving market in asia for parts from rare animals. Basically they associate powerful (take your pick) properties with anything rare. Of course if it's a justifiably associated body part its generally a stronger reference. You can guess what part the asian community considers the "tiger viagra". That one's very very pricey.

Doesn't matter what it is, doesn't matter what part it is. If it's rare, it must be magic. This drives prices up. Which increases poaching. Which lowers numbers. Which drives prices up.... and round it goes till they're all gone. Rhino horns are another more specific example.

There are very few subjects that really boil my blood, and senselessly wiping out magnificent creatures like that is one of them.

I guess I was speaking collectively. As a species, or as a people, are we not ultimately responsible for the direction we move in?

I get tired of folks [not referring to you] making fatalistic remarks about how things are going to hell in a handbasket; they seem to imply that the commentator is above the fray, gifted with acute powers of critical insight but somehow absolved of responsibility.

"If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem."

I've heard that simplistic saying for 40 years. One of the big problems that we have, as a species, is the fact that we die by the time that we understand how things work. The younger generation cannot possibly know these things even if they are explained. As the saying goes, life can only be understood by looking backward. Unfortunately, we have to live it while looking forward. Do any of us truly understand what it means to get old and die when we are younger than 50? I know that I didn't. Do any of us, while young, truly understand the pitfalls and fallacies of romantic ideas about marriage? These are just two examples.

This means that the new generation is condemned to make the same mistakes as the old. It reminds me of that spurious way of claiming that an organization is competent, namely referring to "collective experience". If a hospital claims that its nurses have 150 years of collective experience, does that mean that there are three nurses with 50 years apiece in the profession? Does it mean that there are 150 nurses with 1 year experience apiece? If the latter, I wouldn't trust that hospital's judgment too much.

You may disagree about my pessimism but I think that it is entirely realistic.

I've often been called negative/a pessimist, but I prefer to call myself a realist, and I'm saddened by the (what I perceive to be) huge percentage of people who are simply unable to deal with reality.

(My paraphrase: The true lesson of history is that man is the only animal on the face of the planet that is so dumb it never learns a lesson.)

And then there is the Amur Leopard .....only 35 of them left.

I had never heard of them except that my daughters got me the Planet Earth DVDs for Christmas and the Amur was shown.

ryck

Love my BluRay on that series. There's actually several releases with different numbers of episodes on it. That has some of the most stunning 1080p video you can find anywhere. (I've been told by several people now that they consider that set to be the ideal test standard for HDTVs/bluray players)

There's a scene where they are showing a flock of white birds, I forget what species, but they say that all the birds in the species are in the flock at that time. They spend about a solid minute zooming out slowly, by the time they're done it's like white shimmering sand on the screen there's so many of them. The bitrate at that point is just off the charts because basically every pixel of the screen is changing every single frame, and will cause all but the best gear to lag.

No slight about big cats, but ...

Isn't the real question: What comes after X?
[And don't say Borg units.]

And when is it due? And what type of hardware is mooted in the ether?

Y comes after X

RE Y comes after X

Not if it's a Roman numeral.

These go to eleven...



Edit: here's a regular link for iDevices: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuzpsO4ErOQ
(the forum's tagged version doesn't even redirect to YouTube on my iPad.)

Edit2: oh foo... even that doesn't work.
CURSES!!!

Clicking to watch your embedded video generates this error message: "Embedding disabled by request/Watch on YouTube."

Have you never seen that before? [i tried 3 different links and they all did that, so it's quite intentional on their part.]

I've seen that happening a LOT of places just recently. Youtube must have just started something.

From the wording of the message, it sounds like the person that posted the video can disable embedding. But from a strictly youtube-perspective, it's to their advantage (google's) to get you to go to their page to view it because then you get hit with all the other related videos, they can collect metrics, and do some ads. So it may be something that is now default-disable unless the content provider specifically marks the video as embeddable?