My mom used two footed driving as a form of control at very slow speed. The idle wasn't enough to start moving the car, but once moving it would move too fast for her comfort backing out the garage or out of a parking space. So she would drive with one foot on each.
To think: My mom had something in common with Pirrelli Jones/
Unfortunately you would start revolutions. Historically empires that have lasted have allowed the local people to keep all/most of their religion. (The Brits were successful in squashing the Indian practice of Suttee.)
Look at all the situations where one religion has tried to stamp out another.
A better solution is to change our education system. We need to teach kids from the moment they can reason to distinguish between logic, values and wishful thinking.
Methods that can help:
1. Teach formal logic and rhetoric in school. Teach all the standard fallacies in logic.
2. Teach history. Teach it in part as the collision of ideas and world views.
3. Teach kids to question values, to question authority.
4. Teach them tricks to isolate their feelings from the situation. The Kantian ethic, the golden rule, role reversal.
5. Teach them debate -- to be able to argue both sides of a case.
6. Teach science by building and destroying world views. On the first day, teach that everything is composed of Earth, air, fire, and water, but teach it as a factual theory, not as 'what fuddy-duddies believed way back wehn' Then bring in the things that can't be explained. Let them hang.
Teach Ptolomeic astronomy.
Teach them that the world is flat. And then go to a large lake and measure the curvature of the earth.
Get them used to the idea that your world view isn't you. That an attack on how you believe the world works is not a personal attack. You want them to hold a hundred views, and lose them over the course of their education.
I'm not a linux guru, but I've used it as my desktop for about 15 years. I've also used FreeBSD and Openbsd for server solutions. I worked as a sysadmin for 20 years. I'm not an ignorant peasant.
I tried for a week to get knoda to work. I finally found it faster to set up XP under VirtualBox, and run MS access.
Firefox 3.{5,6}* routinely crashes -- so much so, that I have reverted to 3.0.16. Yes, I've spent hours trying to figure out what's going on. Some interaction bewteen FF and javascript. Gmail crashes it consistently.
I had sound working on Fedora 9, have been unable to get it to work after upgrading to Fedora 10.
I've never been able to get any version of flash to work.
I had a hacked version of the FrameMaker Demo -- hacked to remove the time dependency. Ran reasonably for a Beta on Fedora 3 -- it would crash on certain X window events, but always saved to the recover file first, so I never lost data.
Adobe wasn't helpful (Nor did I expect them to be. And before anyone froths at me, I offered to Adobe to pay for FM, even at the 5.x level. Adobe has ignored me.)
I too have been quite pleased with both their price ($120/year) and their service. To date speed has never been an issue.
Their service level agreement does NOT guarantee backups, but I think this is CYA.
For my sites, I maintain a local copy on my personal box at home. These are rsync'd to Dreamhost once a day.
If you used an interactive site where users were putting signficant data on the site, you would need to figure out some way to sync the data. But to expect a shared host to take responsibility for your data for small amounts of money is unrealistic.
Decide what level of service interruption is tolerable, and what degree of data loss is tolerable.
E.g. if you run a phpBB forum you may decide that you can accept the loss of a single day's postings. In that case you have to sync the database between the host an your local machine once a day.
So now you need a way to do an incremental backup of phpBB.
I'm not an expert on OS databases. I don't know offhand which ones support incremental backups. That, however, would be a critical factor in my case since I have a slow link (500 kbits/s) from the world. (A faster link would require my constructing my own link for at least 10 kilometers, and a 90 foot tower. Not in my budget.)
You can read calculus books, but you don't get good at calculus until you solve a LOT of problems.
You can read about writing, but you only learn to write by writing. (Unless you have a career in Literary Criticism)
You can read about physics, but you only really understand physics by doing problems.
Take the parents advice.
Take a laptop with you. Code when you can. Think about your last set of error messages when you can't. Code in your head until you can write it down.
Read other people's code. Programming is a field where felines have multiple epidermis removal techniques. One of the problems of working alone is a reduced library of techniques.
Rewrite other people's code. Re-implement the hundred most common functions without using the equivalent of stdlib.
One guy learned new languages by building a database OF that language IN that language.
In his database he had every function, grammar rule, and reserved word defined, with several examples of use, and the database environment would compile/interpret the examples and show them running under a debugger so you could step through it.
I grew up in small town northern Idaho. In the 60's you could get a driver's license on your 14th birthday -- with driver's ed. It was limited to daylight-only until age 16. Meant that you weren't driving to a party until you had some experience, which decreased the butcher's bill considerably.
My folks thought that 14 yr olds generally weren't as cocky as 16 year olds. They were more cautious as drivers at that age, and this also gave them more experience before starting through the risky years. Insurance rates bore this out.
You could get a special license at age 12. this allowed you to drive by the most direct non-highway route from your dad's farm to the grain elevator. Often the grain truck's pedals had blocks bolted to them so the kid could reach them.
I agree. Lots of farm kids around here are like that.
When I snoozed through my education classes, they brought up an interesting story. Sociologist did a study in Alaska comparing kids who were home schooled in mining and logging and fishing camps, and kids in the public school in hte larger centers.
He expected to find that the kids in the larger centers were better socialized. Not so.
The kids in the camps:
* Were used to working with a range of ages of people, each with different strengths. You had to watch out for the little ones, and be respectful to your grandma.
* Recognized that rights and responsibilities were both two way streets.
* Do your share of the work.
Generally they spent between 1/2 and 1/3 of the time doing academic stuff.
Modern life puts kids with their peers way too much of the time.
Modern life doesn't require kids to contribute much to the family life.
Being finished academically with high school, and being socially ready for college are not the same thing. I've known a few 16 year olds who were socially mature enough to do well in college. I've known a lot of 16 year olds who were so unchallenged by our pathetic education ssytem that they could easily finish two years early. The intersection is a smaller set that the raw numbers of both sets would indicate. One of the reasons some kids do well academically is that they aren't distracted by social interaction.
A better approach IMHO, would be to have some courses that aren't offered normally, and give them a choice.
* A real programming course. * Formal logic. (Words, not just boolean math) * Rhetoric, Demagoguery, & Advertising. * Writing for effect. * Any foreign language WITH an exchange program. * More math.
On the flip side: The Brits have O (Ordinary) Levels and A (Academic) levels. O levels are administered in grade 10. and for kids who aren't going to college, they're done. Most of them then go into an apprentice program of some sort.
So maybe my opinion is worth as much as you paid for it.
This may be code, but if I was doing it myself, I wouldn't follow it.
This code came into practice I think when large buildings rans lots of wires through the vent ducts of buildings. There were a couple cases of fires in one part of the building that caused the PVC to outgass and poison people in another part of the building while the evacuation was in progress.
The NATIONAL code only requires plenum rated wire in spaces where the HVAC system moves air. In some buildings the space above the suspended ceiling was used as return air path. I've heard these decisions go both ways.
There is so much other PVC in most houses that adding another 20 pounds of wire sheath isn't going to matter. And you aren't running it through the ducts.
(Plastic water line is PVC -- cross linked PVC for hot water. PEX radiant tubing is PVC. "vinyl" flooring is PVC. You've got a ton of it clinging to the outside of your house if you've got vinyl siding. Vinyl clad windows.)
Is there long term GW?
> I don't know. At least not on the scale of 1-3 centuries.
Is there longer term GW.
> Yes. Our neighborhood glacier left 9,000 years ago.
Is the GW caused by human activity?
> Irrelevant.
Our society is fragile, and for much of the world, climate change is not good news. It doesn't matter whether the cause is the orbit of the earth, the precession of the Earth, the increase of CO2, Decreased forestation in the tropics, increased forestation at temperate and arctic latitudes.
We *don't* understand water very well. We *don't* understand clouds very well.
Bus routes are seldom straight. In my small town, it regularly took 30-40 minutes to get to school on the bus. The buses did their pickups in pretty much the same order as the dropoffs, so if you had a short ride at one oend of the day, you had a long ride at the other end.
This for 2 miles to school.
By Grade 4, I was walking home most evenings. By grade 9, I was a nerd, and a fellow nerd and I walked to school (2.5 miles) to avoid the rowdy crowd on the bus. If the streets were dry, we'd bike, which was much FASTER than the bus.
As to bike speeds. Even as an over 50 year old, the 16 km (10 miles) to work at my last job, half on gravel roads, on a cheap mountain bike averaged about 50 minutes each way. As a kid, my power/mass ratio was a lot better.
If I had kids, I'd encourage them to walk or bike whenever the weather was reasonable. Sure there's a chance that they will get picked up and abused. But there is a near certainty of them becoming flabby, unadventurous blobs if they don't.
The average school bus doesn't carry 100 kids. The bigger busses will do 72. 36 to 48 is the more common size, with most school divisions also have a number of 'bitty busses' that carry about 16.
So if we use 40 for our average bus size, you're at $100 per kid.
Secondly: Judging the cost of running a school bus by the fuel cost alone is a crock. The rule of thumb I've used is that fuel = 1/3 of TCO, with another third for maintenance and miscellaneous expenses, and 1/3 for fixed costs and depreciation. (Depreciation is front loaded, maintenance and repair is back loaded.)
On top of that you have to pay for the bus drivers.
So your $100 per year is now around $400 per year.
finally candy bars is probably not the most economical choice for fueling kids.
The girls are on facebook, chatting about the guys. The guys will wait for study hall and school to be on facebook. Right now they are in the back of the bus on porn sites.
History is hard to present objectively. If you read a significant number of histories, even the the way history is presented -- what's considered important -- varies both from book to book, and from era to era.
All history is simplification. It has to be. And every author has a bias in how he chooses to include as relevant, and what he leaves out. This is good. If he was totally unbiased, it would read like noise.
At the elementary and high school level, teaching history is pretty much deciding which myths you're going to teach.
Lot of U.S. histories present the U.S. as 'never being the aggressor' in a war. In grade school I was still taught the bit about Washington and the cherry tree, and Lincoln and the penny.
Things like choosing between "Living document" versus "Enduring document" for the Constitution is a matter of view point. It's both. And neither. It's hard to change. It's easy to re-interpret.
I'm a dual citizen, US and Canada. I see what's happening in Texas, and what's happening generally in the U.S.
Between Homeland security, and the Religious Right, I'm just waiting for an Evangelist named Nehemiah Scudder to rise as First Prophet.
Seriously -- I don't expect the U.S. to remain a free society in any meaningful sense of the word for more than another decade or so.
"You're implying that a group composed entirely of female animals will... breed?"
Umm. Substitute 'reproduce' for 'breed' then in fact yes. Consider the lowly aphid. All the aphids you see during the summer are female. They reproduce asexually during the summer, each female laying eggs that are clones of mom. In the fall, at lower temperatures, some of the larva develope into males. There is one generation of sexual reproduction.
An actually lethal gene, correct. A potentially lethal gene can easily be evolved away from.
As long as the organism has the ability to reproduce, there is potential to evolve away from a given genotype.
Consider Tay-Sachs disease. Get a single copy from your parents, you can live a normal life, Get two copies and die. Genes like this are culled from the pool fairly quickly until they get down to fairly low levels.
Consider susceptibility to bubonic plague. Typically this will run through a population, kill from 1/3 to 2/3 of the population, then the population has no further outbreaks for a few centuries. Consider the relative immunity of Europeans and west hemisphere natives to smallpox, measles, and mumps,
Breeding bacteria to be immune to a given antibiotic is fairly easy. But it isn't a stable mutation. Remove the antibiotic from the bug's environment and it loses it's immunity in a few hundred generations. Immunity costs energy. A bug that is immune can't reproduce as quickly. So a back mutation is very successful.
A while ago I read a report of fly in texas that not only developed an immunity to DDT, it developed a requirement for it. It apparently used DDT like a vitamin. Needed a few ppb in the environment.
A 'kill switch' has to be carefully thought out to be resistant to mutation:
* Evolving away from the gene should have an energy cost, thus not having the gene puts the organism at a disadvantage. * It should not be a single gene. It needs to require multiple mutations. * A single mutation should be fatal. * The organism should not have an alternate biochemical path.
As an example: Lot of our clan have lost the ability to synthesize vitamin C. This was not a harmful mutation -- there was lots of C in the fruit and veg we ate in the trees, and grubbing around the jungle floor.
C is used in a bunch of places in our metabolism. Evolving away from a need for C or evolving to produce it again would be hard.
So if the organism is created with a need for a synthetic compound, and that need is incorporated into several chemical pathways, then you may have a viable kill switch. Better: incorporate dependence of several synthetic compounds.
To test this, you take the organism, and give it just enough of the synthetic to stay alive. Cut back until some organisms die. Breed from them. See if you can breed a variety that no longer needs the compound.
That said, I'm not very worried. A super organism would be designed to be efficient. Efficiency is the enemy of robustness. One of the reasons organisms can evolve at the biochemical level is that there is usually multiple ways to get a job done. Some of the alternatives are less efficient.
Example: Pheromones are used as lures to remove breeders from insect populations. The original thought was that the bugs couldn't evolve immunity, since if they ignored the pheromone, they wouldn't breed. Problem was that the bug didn't produce a single chemical, it produced a bouquet of chemicals. This selected for bugs that ignored the original, but were still sensitive to one of the others. The bugs had a backup signal system.
1. Have a coffee lounge, not just a place to get coffee. You want a place where people can stop for 20 minutes and chill.
2. Make the hallways 4 feet wide. This means that if two people talk in the hall, anyone coming down the hall has to join the conversation, or shove them out of the way.
3. One place I worked brought in Pizza for lunch one day a week.
4. Mix up the offices. Don't let all the developers live in one corner, and all the HR people live in another. Move everyone once a year.
5. Provide day care on site. This will help get family people talking to eachother.
6. Move the company location to a neighborhood, then engage in taking over the neighborhood. Your goal: Everyone who wishes can live withing walking distance to work.
7.. Sponsor a company X team where X is one or more of {curling, bowling, softball}
8. Make sure your social networking software is set up so people can coordinate non-company activities. E.g. can I use the social network to find a canoe partner.
9. Friday after work is pub night. Company buys the first round. Pick a pub that is quiet enough for conversation.
10. A bulletin board with everyone's photo and name on it. This allows you to actually learn everyone's name if you wish. (You have a crib sheet.)
11. Encourage personal web pages for people to talk about their own interests.
12. Sponsor a bunch of activities each summer, with the company picking up part of the tab. These can either be family oriented, or team oriented. E.g. I'll take you down the McFarlane River in voyageur canoes. Three weeks. Nothing like carrying a 22 foot canoe to build team spirit. Or take all the assistant VP's rock climbing.
So, perhaps a modification of patent law so that you have to prove that the patent is in active use in order to maintain control of it. Say you have a year to show that you have either:
1. Have started production of a product using this patent 2. Are spending X% of your annual gross cashflow creating infra-structure to use this patent. 3. Have licensed this patent to someone else who has to demonstrate #1 or #2 4. Have sold this patent to someone else who has a year. (This extension happens only once -- it's one year from the first resale date.)
This would prevent a lot of speculation on patents.
I don't see microphone/earphone headset as being an insuperable financial block. Indeed, I would see it as an essential component so that all the little snippy comments that go on in a classroom aren't broadcast.
Ideally you probably want a laptop per user too. 1 laptop window has the presentation. 1 window for the moderator/insturctor, one window for the current person who has the floor.
It could bring manners back to the classroom: Raise your hand or stand, or press a button to say you want to speak. When you are recognized, have your say.
Meanwhile, you can have a text chat with your girl friend the next row over.
So when the torrent goes up, Black Hats up identically named torrents that have ascii dumps of/dev/random.
(Indeed: I don't understand why the big media companies don't put up tons of torents with corrupt copies of music and movies. The first 30% is perfect, and it gradually decays into white noise. If you had to download 10-20 copies of a movie to find one that is complete, you'd say to hell with it and buy it instead.)
If you subscribe, you have access as soon as the story is available.
If you don't subscribe you can access only stuff that is over a week old.
If you are from an 'oppressive regime' you have automatic access to stories that are datelined with your country.
Connections are throttled on the basis of how much is downloaded. E.g. If one IP tries to mirror WL they get speeds so slow they can't keep up with the new stuff -- unless they subscribe to mirroring with no republication of anything but analysis.
A given IP would be allowed to access N links a day without cost, but not able to access current indexes so that published stories could refer to the original source in a credible manner. Sure there will be ways to spoof it. And this crowd can come up with better mechanisms.
Key: Limited current access to subscribers and people who are following up on subscribers stories. Full access to week old data. Full access to stories concerning their own country to people living under oppressive regimes.
It would be nice to see a set of mini-series based on some of the better SF novels. A Peter Jackson LOTR style treatment -- containing most of the book.
* The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
* The Fountains of Paradise
* All of Larry Niven's "Known Space" (The Ringworld books alone could go for 5-6 years.)
First run through: I read the cover letter. If it's generic -- shows no customization for THIS job -- goes to the discard pile.
If the cover letter has significant grammatical errors I read that as someone who doesn't take care over details. Pet peaves: incorrect use of homonyms (there-their-they're; affect, effect); incorrect use of apostrophe (plurals do not take an apostrophe) It goes to the discard pile. I tolerate the use of slang. I also like to see humour in a cover letter, if in context. (Anything to keep my eyes from glazing over after 30 cover letters)
The cover letter filter eliminates about 2/3 of the applicants, and can be done by any good secretary.
Now I'll look at the qualifications, sorting them in to three piles. The bottom pile is discard. If there are over 10 in the excellent pile, the middle pile is discard too.
Now I'll send an email to the top 10 asking them a mix of questions, all things they would do on the job. This could be a mix of programming, problem solving, and workplace ethics situations.
What I'm looking for here are people who are competent at written communication.
The top 5 from this run are asked to come in for an interview.
Slashdot Mirror
My mom used two footed driving as a form of control at very slow speed. The idle wasn't enough to start moving the car, but once moving it would move too fast for her comfort backing out the garage or out of a parking space. So she would drive with one foot on each.
To think: My mom had something in common with Pirrelli Jones/
Unfortunately you would start revolutions. Historically empires that have lasted have allowed the local people to keep all/most of their religion. (The Brits were successful in squashing the Indian practice of Suttee.)
Look at all the situations where one religion has tried to stamp out another.
A better solution is to change our education system. We need to teach kids from the moment they can reason to distinguish between logic, values and wishful thinking.
Methods that can help:
1. Teach formal logic and rhetoric in school. Teach all the standard fallacies in logic.
2. Teach history. Teach it in part as the collision of ideas and world views.
3. Teach kids to question values, to question authority.
4. Teach them tricks to isolate their feelings from the situation. The Kantian ethic, the golden rule, role reversal.
5. Teach them debate -- to be able to argue both sides of a case.
6. Teach science by building and destroying world views. On the first day, teach that everything is composed of Earth, air, fire, and water, but teach it as a factual theory, not as 'what fuddy-duddies believed way back wehn' Then bring in the things that can't be explained. Let them hang.
Teach Ptolomeic astronomy.
Teach them that the world is flat. And then go to a large lake and measure the curvature of the earth.
Get them used to the idea that your world view isn't you. That an attack on how you believe the world works is not a personal attack. You want them to hold a hundred views, and lose them over the course of their education.
I have.
I'm not a linux guru, but I've used it as my desktop for about 15 years. I've also used FreeBSD and Openbsd for server solutions. I worked as a sysadmin for 20 years. I'm not an ignorant peasant.
I tried for a week to get knoda to work. I finally found it faster to set up XP under VirtualBox, and run MS access.
Firefox 3.{5,6}* routinely crashes -- so much so, that I have reverted to 3.0.16. Yes, I've spent hours trying to figure out what's going on. Some interaction bewteen FF and javascript. Gmail crashes it consistently.
I had sound working on Fedora 9, have been unable to get it to work after upgrading to Fedora 10.
I've never been able to get any version of flash to work.
I had a hacked version of the FrameMaker Demo -- hacked to remove the time dependency. Ran reasonably for a Beta on Fedora 3 -- it would crash on certain X window events, but always saved to the recover file first, so I never lost data.
Adobe wasn't helpful (Nor did I expect them to be. And before anyone froths at me, I offered to Adobe to pay for FM, even at the 5.x level. Adobe has ignored me.)
It wouldn't operate on Fedora 4.
It then would operate again on fedora 5.
I too have been quite pleased with both their price ($120/year) and their service. To date speed has never been an issue.
Their service level agreement does NOT guarantee backups, but I think this is CYA.
For my sites, I maintain a local copy on my personal box at home. These are rsync'd to Dreamhost once a day.
If you used an interactive site where users were putting signficant data on the site, you would need to figure out some way to sync the data. But to expect a shared host to take responsibility for your data for small amounts of money is unrealistic.
Decide what level of service interruption is tolerable, and what degree of data loss is tolerable.
E.g. if you run a phpBB forum you may decide that you can accept the loss of a single day's postings. In that case you have to sync the database between the host an your local machine once a day.
So now you need a way to do an incremental backup of phpBB.
I'm not an expert on OS databases. I don't know offhand which ones support incremental backups. That, however, would be a critical factor in my case since I have a slow link (500 kbits/s) from the world. (A faster link would require my constructing my own link for at least 10 kilometers, and a 90 foot tower. Not in my budget.)
I echo and amplify the parent.
You can read calculus books, but you don't get good at calculus until you solve a LOT of problems.
You can read about writing, but you only learn to write by writing. (Unless you have a career in Literary Criticism)
You can read about physics, but you only really understand physics by doing problems.
Take the parents advice.
Take a laptop with you. Code when you can. Think about your last set of error messages when you can't. Code in your head until you can write it down.
Read other people's code. Programming is a field where felines have multiple epidermis removal techniques. One of the problems of working alone is a reduced library of techniques.
Rewrite other people's code. Re-implement the hundred most common functions without using the equivalent of stdlib.
One guy learned new languages by building a database OF that language IN that language.
In his database he had every function, grammar rule, and reserved word defined, with several examples of use, and the database environment would compile/interpret the examples and show them running under a debugger so you could step through it.
I wouldn't want to try this in APL
I grew up in small town northern Idaho. In the 60's you could get a driver's license on your 14th birthday -- with driver's ed. It was limited to daylight-only until age 16. Meant that you weren't driving to a party until you had some experience, which decreased the butcher's bill considerably.
My folks thought that 14 yr olds generally weren't as cocky as 16 year olds. They were more cautious as drivers at that age, and this also gave them more experience before starting through the risky years. Insurance rates bore this out.
You could get a special license at age 12. this allowed you to drive by the most direct non-highway route from your dad's farm to the grain elevator. Often the grain truck's pedals had blocks bolted to them so the kid could reach them.
I agree. Lots of farm kids around here are like that.
When I snoozed through my education classes, they brought up an interesting story. Sociologist did a study in Alaska comparing kids who were home schooled in mining and logging and fishing camps, and kids in the public school in hte larger centers.
He expected to find that the kids in the larger centers were better socialized. Not so.
The kids in the camps:
* Were used to working with a range of ages of people, each with different strengths. You had to watch out for the little ones, and be respectful to your grandma.
* Recognized that rights and responsibilities were both two way streets.
* Do your share of the work.
Generally they spent between 1/2 and 1/3 of the time doing academic stuff.
Modern life puts kids with their peers way too much of the time.
Modern life doesn't require kids to contribute much to the family life.
Being finished academically with high school, and being socially ready for college are not the same thing. I've known a few 16 year olds who were socially mature enough to do well in college. I've known a lot of 16 year olds who were so unchallenged by our pathetic education ssytem that they could easily finish two years early. The intersection is a smaller set that the raw numbers of both sets would indicate. One of the reasons some kids do well academically is that they aren't distracted by social interaction.
A better approach IMHO, would be to have some courses that aren't offered normally, and give them a choice.
* A real programming course.
* Formal logic. (Words, not just boolean math)
* Rhetoric, Demagoguery, & Advertising.
* Writing for effect.
* Any foreign language WITH an exchange program.
* More math.
On the flip side: The Brits have O (Ordinary) Levels and A (Academic) levels. O levels are administered in grade 10. and for kids who aren't going to college, they're done. Most of them then go into an apprentice program of some sort.
So maybe my opinion is worth as much as you paid for it.
This may be code, but if I was doing it myself, I wouldn't follow it.
This code came into practice I think when large buildings rans lots of wires through the vent ducts of buildings. There were a couple cases of fires in one part of the building that caused the PVC to outgass and poison people in another part of the building while the evacuation was in progress.
The NATIONAL code only requires plenum rated wire in spaces where the HVAC system moves air. In some buildings the space above the suspended ceiling was used as return air path. I've heard these decisions go both ways.
There is so much other PVC in most houses that adding another 20 pounds of wire sheath isn't going to matter. And you aren't running it through the ducts.
(Plastic water line is PVC -- cross linked PVC for hot water. PEX radiant tubing is PVC. "vinyl" flooring is PVC. You've got a ton of it clinging to the outside of your house if you've got vinyl siding. Vinyl clad windows.)
Is there GW?
> Yes
Is there long term GW?
> I don't know. At least not on the scale of 1-3 centuries.
Is there longer term GW.
> Yes. Our neighborhood glacier left 9,000 years ago.
Is the GW caused by human activity?
> Irrelevant.
Our society is fragile, and for much of the world, climate change is not good news. It doesn't matter whether the cause is the orbit of the earth, the precession of the Earth, the increase of CO2, Decreased forestation in the tropics, increased forestation at temperate and arctic latitudes.
We *don't* understand water very well. We *don't* understand clouds very well.
We'd better learn how to control our climate.
Bus routes are seldom straight. In my small town, it regularly took 30-40 minutes to get to school on the bus. The buses did their pickups in pretty much the same order as the dropoffs, so if you had a short ride at one oend of the day, you had a long ride at the other end.
This for 2 miles to school.
By Grade 4, I was walking home most evenings.
By grade 9, I was a nerd, and a fellow nerd and I walked to school (2.5 miles) to avoid the rowdy crowd on the bus.
If the streets were dry, we'd bike, which was much FASTER than the bus.
As to bike speeds. Even as an over 50 year old, the 16 km (10 miles) to work at my last job, half on gravel roads, on a cheap mountain bike averaged about 50 minutes each way. As a kid, my power/mass ratio was a lot better.
If I had kids, I'd encourage them to walk or bike whenever the weather was reasonable. Sure there's a chance that they will get picked up and abused. But there is a near certainty of them becoming flabby, unadventurous blobs if they don't.
(Gross over simplification, I know.)
The average school bus doesn't carry 100 kids. The bigger busses will do 72. 36 to 48 is the more common size, with most school divisions also have a number of 'bitty busses' that carry about 16.
So if we use 40 for our average bus size, you're at $100 per kid.
Secondly: Judging the cost of running a school bus by the fuel cost alone is a crock. The rule of thumb I've used is that fuel = 1/3 of TCO, with another third for maintenance and miscellaneous expenses, and 1/3 for fixed costs and depreciation. (Depreciation is front loaded, maintenance and repair is back loaded.)
On top of that you have to pay for the bus drivers.
So your $100 per year is now around $400 per year.
finally candy bars is probably not the most economical choice for fueling kids.
The girls are on facebook, chatting about the guys. The guys will wait for study hall and school to be on facebook. Right now they are in the back of the bus on porn sites.
History is hard to present objectively. If you read a significant number of histories, even the the way history is presented -- what's considered important -- varies both from book to book, and from era to era.
All history is simplification. It has to be. And every author has a bias in how he chooses to include as relevant, and what he leaves out. This is good. If he was totally unbiased, it would read like noise.
At the elementary and high school level, teaching history is pretty much deciding which myths you're going to teach.
Lot of U.S. histories present the U.S. as 'never being the aggressor' in a war. In grade school I was still taught the bit about Washington and the cherry tree, and Lincoln and the penny.
Things like choosing between "Living document" versus "Enduring document" for the Constitution is a matter of view point. It's both. And neither. It's hard to change. It's easy to re-interpret.
I'm a dual citizen, US and Canada. I see what's happening in Texas, and what's happening generally in the U.S.
Between Homeland security, and the Religious Right, I'm just waiting for an Evangelist named Nehemiah Scudder to rise as First Prophet.
Seriously -- I don't expect the U.S. to remain a free society in any meaningful sense of the word for more than another decade or so.
[Allusion to R.A. Heinlein's "Revolt in 2100"]
A kill switch has to be a 'deadman' switch. Encode it as a dependency, not as a susceptibility.
E.g. Plants are dependent on magnesium. There's an atom of Mg in the middle of every chlorophyll molecule. No Mg, no photosynthesis.
So you encode a dependency on something that is uncommon in nature. E.g. Chromium.
Man's love of beef is God's punishment to cows for being stupid.
"You're implying that a group composed entirely of female animals will... breed?"
Umm. Substitute 'reproduce' for 'breed' then in fact yes. Consider the lowly aphid. All the aphids you see during the summer are female. They reproduce asexually during the summer, each female laying eggs that are clones of mom. In the fall, at lower temperatures, some of the larva develope into males. There is one generation of sexual reproduction.
Google "parthenogenesis"
An actually lethal gene, correct. A potentially lethal gene can easily be evolved away from.
As long as the organism has the ability to reproduce, there is potential to evolve away from a given genotype.
Consider Tay-Sachs disease. Get a single copy from your parents, you can live a normal life, Get two copies and die. Genes like this are culled from the pool fairly quickly until they get down to fairly low levels.
Consider susceptibility to bubonic plague. Typically this will run through a population, kill from 1/3 to 2/3 of the population, then the population has no further outbreaks for a few centuries. Consider the relative immunity of Europeans and west hemisphere natives to smallpox, measles, and mumps,
Breeding bacteria to be immune to a given antibiotic is fairly easy. But it isn't a stable mutation. Remove the antibiotic from the bug's environment and it loses it's immunity in a few hundred generations. Immunity costs energy. A bug that is immune can't reproduce as quickly. So a back mutation is very successful.
A while ago I read a report of fly in texas that not only developed an immunity to DDT, it developed a requirement for it. It apparently used DDT like a vitamin. Needed a few ppb in the environment.
A 'kill switch' has to be carefully thought out to be resistant to mutation:
* Evolving away from the gene should have an energy cost, thus not having the gene puts the organism at a disadvantage.
* It should not be a single gene. It needs to require multiple mutations.
* A single mutation should be fatal.
* The organism should not have an alternate biochemical path.
As an example: Lot of our clan have lost the ability to synthesize vitamin C. This was not a harmful mutation -- there was lots of C in the fruit and veg we ate in the trees, and grubbing around the jungle floor.
C is used in a bunch of places in our metabolism. Evolving away from a need for C or evolving to produce it again would be hard.
So if the organism is created with a need for a synthetic compound, and that need is incorporated into several chemical pathways, then you may have a viable kill switch. Better: incorporate dependence of several synthetic compounds.
To test this, you take the organism, and give it just enough of the synthetic to stay alive. Cut back until some organisms die. Breed from them. See if you can breed a variety that no longer needs the compound.
That said, I'm not very worried. A super organism would be designed to be efficient. Efficiency is the enemy of robustness. One of the reasons organisms can evolve at the biochemical level is that there is usually multiple ways to get a job done. Some of the alternatives are less efficient.
Example: Pheromones are used as lures to remove breeders from insect populations. The original thought was that the bugs couldn't evolve immunity, since if they ignored the pheromone, they wouldn't breed. Problem was that the bug didn't produce a single chemical, it produced a bouquet of chemicals. This selected for bugs that ignored the original, but were still sensitive to one of the others. The bugs had a backup signal system.
Community is hard.
1. Have a coffee lounge, not just a place to get coffee. You want a place where people can stop for 20 minutes and chill.
2. Make the hallways 4 feet wide. This means that if two people talk in the hall, anyone coming down the hall has to join the conversation, or shove them out of the way.
3. One place I worked brought in Pizza for lunch one day a week.
4. Mix up the offices. Don't let all the developers live in one corner, and all the HR people live in another. Move everyone once a year.
5. Provide day care on site. This will help get family people talking to eachother.
6. Move the company location to a neighborhood, then engage in taking over the neighborhood. Your goal: Everyone who wishes can live withing walking distance to work.
7.. Sponsor a company X team where X is one or more of {curling, bowling, softball}
8. Make sure your social networking software is set up so people can coordinate non-company activities. E.g. can I use the social network to find a canoe partner.
9. Friday after work is pub night. Company buys the first round. Pick a pub that is quiet enough for conversation.
10. A bulletin board with everyone's photo and name on it. This allows you to actually learn everyone's name if you wish. (You have a crib sheet.)
11. Encourage personal web pages for people to talk about their own interests.
12. Sponsor a bunch of activities each summer, with the company picking up part of the tab. These can either be family oriented, or team oriented. E.g. I'll take you down the McFarlane River in voyageur canoes. Three weeks. Nothing like carrying a 22 foot canoe to build team spirit. Or take all the assistant VP's rock climbing.
So, perhaps a modification of patent law so that you have to prove that the patent is in active use in order to maintain control of it. Say you have a year to show that you have either:
1. Have started production of a product using this patent
2. Are spending X% of your annual gross cashflow creating infra-structure to use this patent.
3. Have licensed this patent to someone else who has to demonstrate #1 or #2
4. Have sold this patent to someone else who has a year. (This extension happens only once -- it's one year from the first resale date.)
This would prevent a lot of speculation on patents.
I don't see microphone/earphone headset as being an insuperable financial block. Indeed, I would see it as an essential component so that all the little snippy comments that go on in a classroom aren't broadcast.
Ideally you probably want a laptop per user too. 1 laptop window has the presentation. 1 window for the moderator/insturctor, one window for the current person who has the floor.
It could bring manners back to the classroom: Raise your hand or stand, or press a button to say you want to speak. When you are recognized, have your say.
Meanwhile, you can have a text chat with your girl friend the next row over.
Right.
So when the torrent goes up, Black Hats up identically named torrents that have ascii dumps of /dev/random.
(Indeed: I don't understand why the big media companies don't put up tons of torents with corrupt copies of music and movies. The first 30% is perfect, and it gradually decays into white noise. If you had to download 10-20 copies of a movie to find one that is complete, you'd say to hell with it and buy it instead.)
So it works like this:
If you subscribe, you have access as soon as the story is available.
If you don't subscribe you can access only stuff that is over a week old.
If you are from an 'oppressive regime' you have automatic access to stories that are datelined with your country.
Connections are throttled on the basis of how much is downloaded. E.g. If one IP tries to mirror WL they get speeds so slow they can't keep up with the new stuff -- unless they subscribe to mirroring with no republication of anything but analysis.
A given IP would be allowed to access N links a day without cost, but not able to access current indexes so that published stories could refer to the original source in a credible manner. Sure there will be ways to spoof it. And this crowd can come up with better mechanisms.
Key: Limited current access to subscribers and people who are following up on subscribers stories. Full access to week old data. Full access to stories concerning their own country to people living under oppressive regimes.
It would be nice to see a set of mini-series based on some of the better SF novels. A Peter Jackson LOTR style treatment -- containing most of the book. * The Moon is a Harsh Mistress * The Fountains of Paradise * All of Larry Niven's "Known Space" (The Ringworld books alone could go for 5-6 years.)
First run through: I read the cover letter. If it's generic -- shows no customization for THIS job -- goes to the discard pile. If the cover letter has significant grammatical errors I read that as someone who doesn't take care over details. Pet peaves: incorrect use of homonyms (there-their-they're; affect, effect); incorrect use of apostrophe (plurals do not take an apostrophe) It goes to the discard pile. I tolerate the use of slang. I also like to see humour in a cover letter, if in context. (Anything to keep my eyes from glazing over after 30 cover letters) The cover letter filter eliminates about 2/3 of the applicants, and can be done by any good secretary. Now I'll look at the qualifications, sorting them in to three piles. The bottom pile is discard. If there are over 10 in the excellent pile, the middle pile is discard too. Now I'll send an email to the top 10 asking them a mix of questions, all things they would do on the job. This could be a mix of programming, problem solving, and workplace ethics situations. What I'm looking for here are people who are competent at written communication. The top 5 from this run are asked to come in for an interview.