I think this is a great startup idea and unique opportunity - create Google Maps competitor on promise to have Lake Ontario and Gulf of Mexico named correctly, along with a promise to ignore other possible renamings in future. :)
Agreed. A documented data export or stable feed would complement the minimal UI well: it would let a quiet service stay intentionally simple without making a user's archive feel trapped.
Great article. What fascinate me about the current situation is how fast the old world died - literally within a couple of years. This is the best evidence that progress is not just moving forward - it accelerates.
I think maybe the old world (having seen about half a century) is always dying. For me it was a strange article (but worth the read). The good old days were not all bad and progress is not always the word I think of in these modern times.
The rate of climate change also accelerates. The scientists are projecting 3°C by 2050 with 98% statistical certainty. Other scientists estimate 3°C of warming will kill off about 4 billion people. So yeah the old world is dying. The new one too.
That 3°C by 2050 figure comes from one particular group of German scientists. It is not the broad consensus, which is that we'll reach 3°C by around 2100.
Either scenario is obviously terrible and we need to begin to deal with it firmly and immediately. But I thought it was worth making clear that "the scientists" here only a small set, not the community as a whole, who have an only-slightly-less dire scenario.
The IPCC consensus is limited to what politicians can agree on.
Scientists all over have been observing the acceleration of climate change for some time, but it has until now been difficult to tease real change out of conventional temperature variabilities.
The newsworthy part is that statisticians now have enough data to claim with strong certainty that warming has significantly accelerated.
Like everything else, modifying code of open-source tools has its cons and pros. The biggest advantage is of course an ability to customize the tool exactly to your needs. The problem is that it makes patching and upgrading impossible. This is the reason plugins exist - they do not break ability to patch the host product. So, if customization cannot be avoided even at the cost of losing ability to patch/upgrade - that would definitely work. Otherwise, plugins is probably the best approach.
