Traces of Lost Society Found in 'Pristine' Cloud Forest (nationalgeographic.com) 88
Deep in Ecuador's lush Quijos Valley, a society thrived -- and then disappeared. But a lake preserved its story. From a report: In the 1850s, a team of botanists venturing into the cloud forest in the Quijos Valley of eastern Ecuador hacked their way through vegetation so thick they could barely make their way forward. This, they thought, was the heart of the pristine forest, a place where people had never gone. But they were very wrong. Indigenous Quijo groups had developed sophisticated agricultural settlements across the region, settlements that had been decimated with the arrival of Spanish explorers in the 1500s. In their absence, the forest sprung back. This process of societal collapse and forest reclamation is described in a new study published today in Nature Ecology and Evolution.
The Quijos Valley lies in one of the most biodiverse cloud forests in the world, along a pre-Columbian trade route that linked the rich Amazonian lowlands with the high Andes. Thousands of people lived there centuries before the Spanish arrived, farming maize, squash, beans, and even passionfruit in poor soil of the valley floor. The study's researchers found a tiny lake in the valley and dug down into the silt at the bottom, pulling up a plug of sediment that had built up over the last 1000 years -- and found evidence of human occupation going back to the very oldest part of the core. In the oldest layers, scientists found tiny pieces of pollen -- swept from the valley and the surrounding forest into the lake by wind -- from maize and other plants that only grow in open, airy conditions, which told them that humans were cultivating plants on the valley floor. They also found plenty of charcoal bits, indications that people had lit fires nearby.
The Quijos Valley lies in one of the most biodiverse cloud forests in the world, along a pre-Columbian trade route that linked the rich Amazonian lowlands with the high Andes. Thousands of people lived there centuries before the Spanish arrived, farming maize, squash, beans, and even passionfruit in poor soil of the valley floor. The study's researchers found a tiny lake in the valley and dug down into the silt at the bottom, pulling up a plug of sediment that had built up over the last 1000 years -- and found evidence of human occupation going back to the very oldest part of the core. In the oldest layers, scientists found tiny pieces of pollen -- swept from the valley and the surrounding forest into the lake by wind -- from maize and other plants that only grow in open, airy conditions, which told them that humans were cultivating plants on the valley floor. They also found plenty of charcoal bits, indications that people had lit fires nearby.
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I know it's a hard battle to win, but surely it's about time that Slashdot did something about this spam.
Surely they have tools for controlling spammers other than moderation.
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I would just eliminate AC posting entirely. Those who post interesting AC comments will just get accounts, which offer exactly the same anonymity.
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im huge benis - Applehu Akbar
Thanks for making my point for me.
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AC posting is /. core functionality. It allows someone to post inside scoop without having to worry about getting doxed.
No it doesn't. You only need a throwaway email account to get a slashdot account, which is already enough to not worry about getting doxed so long as you don't use it anywhere else.
Re: I am God's gift to you rotten bastards... apk (Score:1)
That's exactly why eliminating AC isn't a helpful suggestion. There are plenty of troll accounts that are used for spamming, and it's very easy to create new ones. If the spammers use troll accounts, they might also post enough good comments to accumulate the karma to post with a starting score of 2. That would actually make the spam mote visible than it is now.
The desktop interface does a pretty good job of making spam threads easy to ignore. Adding that functionality to the mobile interface would make the
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That's exactly why eliminating AC isn't a helpful suggestion.
Of course it is. The existence of the AC login means that even lazy people leave no trail of identity, so you have no context in which to take comments. The very laziest people would be screened out (no great loss) while the people in between the current userbase and the AC posters would get accounts. It won't affect trolls, but it will still increase utility.
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After the thirst time an identical post is submitted (globally tracked) rather than actually add it to the discussion store it in a cookie so only the poster sees it.
Not perfect but if they did it quietly it'd probably nuke most of these.
Fuck this spam bullshit (Score:1)
Flag it, flag it, and flag it some more. If we all do it hopefully they'll get sick enough of the giant queue of reports and do something. As much as the v2 ones break my balls, I would be happy with captchas at this point. Word and IP filters are useless now days.
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Word filters can only do so much, sure, but they force the spammer to do stupid shit like this:
remove spaces between characters & download
Now, really, who out there is really going to copy a URL filled with spaces and remove them just to download some totally-not-suspicious program?
And all they have to do is update the current anti-spam filter to check for strings after removing spaces to continue to block his URLs. Sure, it's an arm's race, but you'll end up with spam that is so obvious and odious, like what you see above, as to be practically use
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But then you miss the interesting points which may fly in the face of Slashdot group think, but are valid nonetheless. I read at -1 and apply my own mental filters. I don't need the opinion of the collective to decide that for me.
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Other options than setting filters at +1, and still seeing everything under +1?
I'm all ears.
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Most of the interesting-but-unpopular comments end up modded to 0, not to -1. I think the unofficial rule is that *no* comment which actually relates to the topic should be modded to -1, even if the comment is idiotic, abusive, or offensive. (Note that if a comment consists entirely of abuse, e.g. a comment consisting only of the words "You're a moron", then it doesn't contain any material relevant to the topic and qualifies for the -1 rating).
At least, that's the rule I follow when modding, and I get the
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(Can you name a website that has a *better* moderation system?)
Soylentnews.org has extended the moderation system in interesting ways. Mods like disagree and touche that don't affect the score, a spam mod that involves the editors (might not work here as it requires editor review), mod points for every account and the capability to mod and post in the same discussion with limitations.
It's based on the old open source slashcode.
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And you also eliminate the interesting AC comments.
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No they don't, at least the ones that aren't posted instantly. At that most good comments don't get modded up if they're towards the bottom of the page.
I've also seen numerous users actually comment that they don't mod AC's up as they seem to believe the moderation system is to reward users rather then promote good comments.
I also don't mod a lot of the time due to wanting to have the option to post.
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... hacked their way (Score:2)
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They probably used their digits to hold the machetes they hacked with.
Er...what's the "news"? (Score:2)
And who knew that "National Geographic" was still around? That was the yellow-spined magazine college-educated boomers kept stacked in their houses for some reason.
Re:Er...what's the "news"? (Score:5, Funny)
And also the first porn that young nerds ever encountered.
Re:Er...what's the "news"? (Score:5, Informative)
Don't knock Nat Geo, it is one of the best periodicals around. Recall the recent awareness around plastic straws? That was Nat Geo.
The two issues I hold dear are:
1982 - The Chip/Silicon Valley - Awesome article about the coming of the modern microprocessor and the rise of San Jose/Silicon Valley. Interviews with Steve Jobs, Marvin Minsky, and many others:
http://blog.modernmechanix.com... [modernmechanix.com]
1969 - Landing on the Moon
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Recall the recent awareness around plastic straws? That was Nat Geo.
So, fake news? Plastic straws are something like 0.03% of ocean plastic (and the US accounts for about 1% of ocean plastic). "Awareness" of them is feel-good hippie nonsense with no practical relevance. Ocean plastic itself is mostly the result of dumping trash at sea - that's the problem to fix.
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The actual news around non-decomposing straws is made clear by how many straws, per DAY, are used and disposed of in the United States alone.
500,000,000, which is about 1.4 straws per person, per day.
I found that surprisingly high when I read about it.
Re:Er...what's the "news"? (Score:5, Informative)
That number was made up by a 9-year old boy [reason.com].
No one has ever been able to validate it, and those that have tried have backed off the claim:
CORRECTION (April 22, 2018, 4:52 p.m. ET): An earlier version of this article included an incorrect statistic, attributed to the National Park Service, that Americans throw away 500 million drinking straws a day, or 1.6 a day per person. That figure, which has since been debunked in several publications, originally came from the environmental group Be Straw Free, and does not appear to have been based on serious research. There does not appear to be any reliable figure on how many straws are used per day or per year.
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Please mod AC up - an informative AC is a unicorn on Slashdot!
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This one plant makes 4 billion per year.
https://www.manufacturing.net/... [manufacturing.net]
My original info may not have been correct, but that's a shitload of straws and only one plant.
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You have pollen from cultivated crops. There's only one way they get there, somebody nearby was planting.
Re:Traces (Score:4, Insightful)
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"Cultivated" crops can also grow wild.
Corn and beans can not. They need human assistance.
Re:Traces (Score:5, Informative)
I know this is slashdot, but RTFA. It is not just a few samples of pollen and charcoal, it is hundreds of years of pollen and charcoal. And then, right when the Spaniards arrived, there is even heavier charcoal. Then the maize pollen and charcoal disappear and are replaced by grasses and fast growing trees then slower growing trees for 130 years. Then there are traces of people again.
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You just like to jump into conclusion from pick-and-choose bits of presented information. Actually, the summary gave you the information that completely negates your statement.
Just to point out the information from TFA in TFS, the analysis comes from plugging into the ground to find out the ground sediment layers. The matters they found (e.g. charcoal, pollen, etc.) exist in the layers of the sediment. They could also calculate/estimate the time period from the layers.
If you don't know what process I'm talk
So the takeaway should be? (Score:2)
...had been decimated with the arrival of Spanish? (Score:5, Informative)
Let's be honest, they were annihilated BY the Spanish. The Spanish get a bit too much "forgiveness" or is it just plain forgetfulness, of their history of destruction across the Americas these days. The Spanish owned slaves (African and natives [nytimes.com]), pretty much created the Atlantic slave trade, they pillaged whole societies for gold and silver to fund a religious war in Europe, they defined the very term "Love Christ or we'll cut you".
One of the most hilarious cases of modern historical blindness are the groups in California that demand we return California to Mexico. Because we "stole" it from them. As if it just fell into their possession and wasn't stolen itself. Then there's the groups of African Mexicans descended from Mexico's slaves [bbc.com] who didn't get officially recognized until 2016, even though they routinely would get deported because Mexicans didn't believe they existed.
Re:...had been decimated with the arrival of Spani (Score:5, Informative)
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The conquistadors also physically killed a lot of the natives. They had better technology and horses along with a moral framework that allowed them to act like total arseholes.
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And as much as this is commonly laid at the feet of old-worlders, let's recognize that fundamentally it was going to happen at SOME time and the fact that new worlders hadn't much gotten past the stone age was ultimately (if you believe Jared Diamond) the reason they hadn't developed stronger general immunities.
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Let's be honest, they were annihilated BY the Spanish.
They were annihilated by disease that Spanish accidentally brought over from Europe. I am certain Spanish killed some, but not 19 million people from multiple centralized and established nations that were stable prior to their arrival. The reason Spaniards had such astonishing success in conquests is because natives were in the midst of extremely fatal epidemic.
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Spare me your bullshit. The "peaceful" natives of the Americas were constructing literal towers of skulls [sciencemag.org], adults and infants alike. The Aztec Empire had been farming its neighbors for a century, by pushing them onto marginal land, then challenging the survivors to combat. The slaves they collected from these flower wars fed their cannibalistic cult of genocide.
There is no way to negotiate with a society like that. For the sake of humanity, it must be shattered and blown to the wind. Had they not wallowed i
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Yep, the inventors of the Spanish Inquisition were quite moral, along with so many Europeans of the time. Look at Columbus, chopping the arms of the natives who didn't bring him enough gold (had to pay off his backers).
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I don't think the article really gives them a free pass.
When the Spanish arrived in the 1540s, they wreaked havoc on the indigenous Quijos, killing many and conscripting others to brutal forced labor. The Quijos revolted, but by 1578 most of them had been killed or driven away, and the Spanish eventually retreated out of the valley.
"Possibly one of the worst tragedies in human histories occurred during this period," says Nick Loughlin, the lead author of the study, as millions of indigenous people across the region died after the arrival of European colonizers.
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Why waste energy being angry at people that died many centuries ago? Why mourn for people that died many centuries ago?
Can you change the past?
Be nice if people could learn from the past.
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systemd (Score:2)
I bet it was forcing everyone to use the pre-computer version of systemd that caused their downfall.
Charcoal and Pollen (Score:2)
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Or they burned the remains of the crop (stalks, leaves) to fertilize the next harvest. Not that I actually know if that was practiced by anyone.
Decimated? (Score:2)