William Hill, in the UK, will take a bet on anything. So will most other bookies in the UK. If they can calculate the odds, they'll wager on it. However, I suspect that you'd need to make an astronomical bet before your winnings would even cover the commission.
There have been such sects throughout history, but the extreme religious radicalization and right-wing shifts globally make this a particularly dangerous apocalyptic prediction. I don't think that any will succeed in causing global mayhem, but I don't recommend hanging out with any fundamentalists that particular day - regardless of religion. (Mind you, I don't recommend hanging out with fundamentalists at all, but if there's a day they're likely to be dangerous on then that will be it.)
More realistically, I would expect Mexican archaeological sites to suffer widespread damage and looting as the date approaches, with fanatics determined to find "proof" of a reference that actually states there will be anything happening then at all. The only two references so far officially discovered say nothing of the sort*, so believers are likely to want something more tangible.
*What the two references DO say is that a god is supposed to return on that day. Not to pick up or drop off, seems more of a social visit.
Sell Mayan calendar countdown apps for phones, offer an end-of-the-world insurance policy to those escaping to that village in France, produce a filter that kills links to any web page with references to the Mayan calendar -- lots of ways.
Who is the post supposed to be a shill for? How is pointing out that Microsoft's support for rival OS' is more likely to be for regulatory purposes than interest in users in any way dubious? Most here know the history of MS Office on the Mac, of MS support within OS/2 being deliberately broken by changes in Windows 3.11? Of sabotage against DR-DOS and other rival systems? Why should we believe Microsoft supports Mac OS/X for anything but blatantly self-serving reasons, when the customers have been trodden on time and again?
Google's policy of "Do No Evil" is, at best, dubious. I like Google a lot but I would never claim that they are above reproach. Nor should anyone. They have grown at a fantastic rate, to the point where their share price has been known to dip whenever they exceed official revenue expectations by a smaller factor than usual. I'm willing to accept that their initial growth was merely through cost-effective engineering, but their applications have a high degree of tie-in and Google certainly leverages one to get traction with another. The chances of there being anti-trust potential should not be ignored and the chances that they're covering themselves (rather than their users) are not insignificant. We should take the possibility seriously.
I suspect you'd have seen much of the same cult leader tactics employed by Edison and Tesla in their fights with each other, ending in the pointless and stupid destruction of one protagonist and the adoption of a highly inefficient technology for the sole purpose of denouncing a rival's. When feuds are settled amicably, you tend to get best-of-breed hybrids and an incentive to move forwards. When feuds are settled at gunpoint (real or metaphorical), politics and Not Invented Here take over, leading to regression and an irrational desire to not move forwards lest the "other side" win.
HTTP-over-Torrent is hell. (It's basically what the whole Freenet concept works on. And Freenet makes molasses look high-speed.) Nonetheless, you are correct that this can be done. However, the ports can be blocked or degraded. That's what the whole deal is with biased traffic shaping*.
It would be faster, more reliable and less of a bandwidth hog if the physical topology was meshed. I'm sure you've heard the adage that the Internet could survive a nuclear bomb. Once upon a time, perhaps it might have. If it were mesh-based, it still could be. I'm also sure you've read stories where single fibres being cut have disconnected vast regions - be it an undersea cable, roadside cables, or some such. If a backhoe can destroy connectivity, then anyone controlling either end of that fibre can be just as destructive.
To use a cyberwarfare example, if a pipe carries all the traffic from a region you want to disconnect, you can DDoS the endpoint. Create a hot-spot where that switch/router is no longer able to cope with the traffic. There's nothing that Torrent or Web 2.0 can do to deal with that. That is a design flaw in the infrastructure and that flaw has to be fixed before you can do anything useful.
*Unbiased traffic shaping is certainly possible and is the correct form of it. Basically, dropping packets that would have collided anyway is a form of unbiased traffic shaping, as is dividing available upstream bandwidth according to the fraction of the downstream bandwidth a given pipe has. And so on. Nobody has any serious objection to unbiased traffic shaping.
The problem is that spell-checkers aren't grammar-checkers. There hasn't been a decent grammar checker since the days of Grammatik. The ones out there now are, frankly, pathetic.
I can't say I've seen that on all articles on Wikipedia, but certainly I have seen it on some. I've seen articles dumbed down to suit the majority of the readers, rather than split and refined to allow the majority a summary and those wanting more information access to that. This certainly discourages those who are subject matter experts - what's the point in being an expert in something if all that's wanted is pub quiz grade?
However, I emphasize that this is NOT what I've seen for the majority of articles. Some articles have been abandoned (occasionally in mid-edit, from the looks of it), some are constantly being updated with updates in conflict with each other, yet others are updated and are of extraordinarily high quality. It runs the full gamut.
I would far prefer a layered approach, so that you could get access to whatever level of detail you wanted, but the contributors just aren't there to get that. It's a pity, and the net result is uneven quality, but Wikipedia is a case where it's better to have an imperfect something than a perfect nothing.
The only access to the ISS is via the Russian Soyuz, right now, and this will remain the case for at least 20 years - the time it'll take for a functional Shuttle replacement to be designed, built, tested and launched given the current available funding (or lack thereof), the very limited number of rocket designers in the US (rockets are updated regularly, but when was the last time the US actually invented one from scratch through to completion?) and the extreme age of all existing launch facilities.
If a Soyuz carrying US astronauts reaches orbit but cannot dock with the ISS, the astronauts will be stranded. There's no rescue service possible. (Even with the Shuttle, there was a case where Russia almost did lose a Soyuz capsule with astronaut in space - it would have taken far too long for a Shuttle to have been readied and the altitude would have made it extremely difficult if not impossible.) More likely, if a stage failed, the rocket would be remotely destroyed along with the crew. Or it would smear itself over the landscape with much the same effect. We're increasingly aware that space is unsafe, but nobody is willing to stump up the cash to make it safe enough. It would also require total trust and cooperation between the US and Russia - and that would be political suicide for anyone in either country to suggest, let alone try.
I think you need an "s" on the end of "replacement". NASA has shut down a staggering number of Shuttle replacement projects over the years. Politicians also caused many of the problems that eventually killed the Shuttle (such as causing the boosters to be chopped up for long-distance transport, removing the escape mechanisms that the original Shuttle design was supposed to have, slashing the budget to the point where the Shuttle was too small to carry the payloads intended and/or needed, etc).
There was an effort to keep the Shuttle program going for a couple of years, but by the time it was in a position to do anything, all the factories had been shut down, all the expertise had been dissipated and all the infrastructure had been repurposed. So the effort came to nothing.
It would have been good if NASA and Russia had been free to work together to get the Russian Shuttle fully operational, but US law prohibited any such international project at the time and still interferes horribly with collaboration with other nations today. You don't do space solo. You especially don't do space solo on a shoestring budget, a packet of airline peanuts and a promise by Government appointees to not blow you up next time.
The moment nations - any nations, US included - decided that the Internet was territory that could be owned rather than a virtual complex of ideas where data merely happened to reside in certain machines at certain times and where wiring merely happened to be the transport of choice for now, cyberwarfare was inevitable. That the Internet has adopted a spanning tree topology in many places, rather than a mesh topology, has worsened things. It's very easy to set up roadblocks on a spanning tree, it's much much harder to shut down a mesh.
(If you can't own it and can't prevent others using it, then you have nothing you can fight over. Ownership and conflict are only possible where resource denial is possible. Which is fine for end-points, I've no problem with end-points being owned and governed, but it should never have become fine for the backbone.)
You've got to be extremely careful on your second point, precisely because there's an M:N relationship between causes and effects, not a 1:1. Just as a wild example, let's say there are 50 different factors involved, of which any 10 - any 10 at all - is required to cause CCD, of which only one factor out of the 50 is GM, then there will be a staggeringly large number of cases where GM is not involved. GM would not be a common factor and, indeed, there would be no common factors. GM would still be a factor, though.
However, if it's a combinatorial problem, simple analysis is going to be a bugbear. Not only would GM not be a common factor, not every case where GM was used would show CCD. In the wild example I'm using, if even just 9 factors are present but not a 10th, you would see NOTHING. If you don't hit the threshold, then there would be no impact whatsoever.
You see this a lot in genetic illnesses -- people with genes that create a disposition to a disease never develop it because one gene out of N isn't enough to trigger the disease. You need all N of them - and a suitable epigenomic state - or nothing happens at all. The genes are still a factor, but the genes are not "the" cause. There is no "the cause". This is a major reason why research into genetic illnesses runs into so many problems. Joe Public cannot comprehend why, if you have such-and-such a gene that is linked to a disease, you don't have that disease right off. Well, to be fair, I think a fair few can understand recessive genes, but genetics is way more complicated than that, unfortunately.
Going back to GM, let's say it is a matter of a critical threshold, some number of factors have to be present before CCD occurs, where any number of factors below that threshold simply won't matter. Should that mean we should avoid GM? No, not really. If there are ways to ensure the threshold is never exceeded, then to whatever extent GM is involved it wouldn't matter. CCD would never arise because the critical limit is never reached.
I take the line with GM that it shouldn't be used in places it's not already in use, but that it shouldn't be stopped where it is in use. Patents should be, but not GM. The science of genetics has undergone major revisions of epic proportions this year alone, a process that has been manic for the past decade. But a lot of the groundwork for GM was done 15-20 years ago. It is time the geneticists reviewed the work, from a wholly modern perspective, with all that we now know that we did not know back then, and conduct new studies as needed. When a particular area is re-certified and cleared, restrictions can then be lifted. But it's absolute insanity to rely on archaic, obsolete theories that have long since been falsified. This is true of both GM advocated AND GM skeptics. We can't undo what we have done, but we can understand it better and we SHOULD understand it better. If our better understanding doesn't change the outcome, then the chances are that the outcome isn't particularly susceptible to change. If a complete rewrite of the entire field won't alter what is predicted, then what is predicted is likely to be solid.
(I take the same line in climate change, and thoroughly approve of the way the work is being done there. Models are constantly being revised, the predictions are constantly being checked and re-checked against those revisions, corner cases are constantly being scrutinized and folded into the models, etc. That is Good Science. You will also observe that the researchers do not finger-point at specifics, but talk of contributions, systems, dynamics and equilibria. That's what you should expect. The revisions can lead to minor, specific predictions shifting from year to year, even when the overarching prediction is relatively static. That, too, is what you expect from good science. The discussion in GM, however, has been a strict good/bad polarity, which is NOT good science and indicates a major breakdown somewhere along the line. Genetics, like the climate, is complex and the more we underst
Most content management systems I've examined embed the javascript and CSS into the page, they don't store the stuff in distinct files. Which is stupid. (This includes custom-written CMS systems, which makes it doubly stupid.)
Yes, when files are distinct, then they are cached distinctly. You are correct there. And if web programmers were as good as they could be, that would indeed be what happens.
An excellent suggestion, and a great teaching tool in one. (If a kid is allergic to pollen, they may well have been told to stay away from plants -- which is stupid, as you note. By showing that there are plants that they're not allergic to, you teach them to not be paranoid and believe every fearful whisper but to investigate claims.)
Well, depends on the method used. Some GM "pest resistance" causes the plant to produce pesticides. The total amount of pesticide around actually goes up. But because you can spray a crop very locally but genes spread, the pesticides end up in plants that are vital for insects that are NOT pests but are actually vital elements in the ecosystem.
Colony collapse disorder has many, many causes, not just one, but one of those causes is almost certainly the spread of pesticide-producing GM. The problem with multi-causal issues is that the general public loves pointing fingers at The Enemy. When "The Enemy" doesn't exist, the general public gets very confused. There simply isn't any notion in the public eye for situations where any N factors present out of a list of M potential factors will produce the same result, where GM -may- (not proven, it's merely very likely) be one of those potential factors. In science, ANY causative factor is a "cause". Searches for "The One True Cause" is left to religion. That is as it should be, but society is religious, not scientific.
That is indeed interesting. I'd be reluctant to ascribe it to GM (pesticides used in the US may well be involved, or it may be a specific strain of wheat -- there's 16 different botanical classes of wheat and there are likely thousands, if not tens of thousands, of genetically distinct strains). However, certainly GM is a very possible cause and it's good that you've looked into that as a possible factor.
The next step would be to get tested for celiac, as others have suggested, but I'd go beyond that. Getting tested for unusual sensitivities to various pesticides might be useful, but that's not something most places would even think of offering and it would be hard to utilize any information you did get. Finding out if you're allergic to specific classes of wheat is more doable but not much more useful as many nations have gone to monocultures. Eliminating a country from your diet can be hard. Nonetheless, there is clearly a threat to your health and if you want to avoid getting paranoid you need to localize that threat. Once it has very specific bounds, it ceases to be an issue.
Regardless of safety issues, you are correct about the legal issues. GM should absolutely be barred from being patented, all patents so far issued should be revoked and all "damages awarded" to GM farmers or organizations due to contamination should be returned along with court costs and recompense for damage to the reputations of perfectly innocent farmers.
Anything which is within food (including pesticides that were not removed during cleaning and processing) should, IMHO, be listed. It's added and it is consumed, maybe not added for the purpose of being consumed but since when did biology and toxicology concern itself with intent?
Genetic modification is marginally more complex. We now know that 99% of everything that had been believed about genes (1 gene = 1 function, DNA is unchanging, there is no epigenome) is bullshit. We've found numerous genes that interact, we've found retrotransposons alter DNA in individual cells, we've shown that the epigenome is real and can alter what a codon codes to. In short, none of the assumptions underpinning the original safety studies of GM have held up. This does NOT make GM unsafe, though. GM may well be perfectly safe, it is the conclusions drawn from the studies that aren't. Those studies should be re-examined and re-evaluated in the light of what we know about genetics today. ALL of what we know about genetics today. No, I don't give a damn that this means people have to go out and read the literature. The literature wasn't published for the journals' amusement.
Safe or not, GM is nonetheless something added to food. It is an additive. Not for the intent of becoming food, but it becomes food nonetheless. The intent has no bearing on the issue whatsoever. Intent should be ripped out of the labeling rules, burned at the stake (or steak, your choice) and its ashes scattered to the four winds. Then blasted out the sky with those high-power lasers the military has been working on.
Radiation-treated foods are the only ones that pose any kind of conundrum. And, yes, infrared and microwave are forms of radiation. Cook-chilled foods are supposed to be listed as such (which is indisputably a form of radiation treatment, though not the form people usually think of) but cooking a food alters the molecular structure a fair bit. A quick blast from a cobolt or caesium source, provided chemical changes were minor, should not be enough to warrant special labeling. Anything below some safe dose should not be labeled, anything above should.
Plants are good. Not as I usually do (giant redwood cuttings) but something more appropriate. Real plants, though, not plastic. Because labs will vary in temperature more than most places, these'll need to be plants that can handle a decent range of conditions.
Light isn't a problem if monitors have anti-glare screens. Clip-on anti-glare covers for flatscreens are just fine and then you will only need them for a small number of monitors.
Ergonomics is absolutely vital, never mind important. I'd recommend getting reasonable-quality keyboards, too, because that impacts the user more than one might think.
Desk space should be comparable to the lab space you'd expect someone in a chemistry lab to have, or a quality library. Enough for the computer, lab book, text book and the student. In fact, a chemistry lab makes an ideal template for space requirements. Just as it would be Really Bad if a thrashing elbow could topple a Bunsen burner or a beaker of hydrofluoric acid, it would be Really Bad if computer students disrupted each other in the course of perfectly normal working.
Layout should depend on space available. There are definite advantages to a Greek Ampitheatre layout with the lecturer at the focal point. One is that this will eliminate the glare issue entirely, another is that the lecturer can be heard over large numbers of fans. The disadvantage is that it's space-hungry and schools often have to place a very high premium on space. (Inadequate funding being one major cause.) Curved workspaces look a bit more sci-fi and high-tech than boring rows.
A picture of the current Linux kernel as seen via the Linux Kernel Graphing project (modified as needed) would look great, especially if you could get some students to turn the ceiling into a massive plotter and vector-draw the entire thing. An even better hack would be to make the ceiling a white-board and have it updated with every release, bonus credit to the first to spot the biggest change since last lab session.
Wall art should not include boring or "motivational" phrases. A fresco of some major event in technology would be cool (and would help with inter-departmental politics since it would make a neat art project). Traditional adventure gaming maps of MUD1 and Dungeon, a mobile made of relic computer parts, maybe an old teletype in the corner (with a dunce's hat on it), something to show that technology is always in flux and that the rigid line between serious use and entertainment never existed at any time in the history of computing.
Java applets could take parameters from the applet tag, but could not "update" the page in any way, read data from an HTML form, communicate with the Javascript, etc, etc, etc. Java applets could ONLY talk to the server that posted them (unless they were signed). They could deliver content via AWT or (in later versions) Swing, but that's it.
The benefit of Java is that once the browser got a JAR file, it was cached by the client. Let's say you had a dozen pages that all made use of one common JAR file. That JAR file would be delivered with the first applet that used it. It would then be local and would never be sent again whilst it lived in the browser's cache. This compares with Javascript, where if you include a library, that library is part of the web page. It's sent with every single web page it is in.
With Javascript, you're wanting to do things like validate forms. That's your basic AJAX. The libraries involved don't change -- JQuery is JQuery is JQuery, no matter what parameters you are validating against. Being able to deliver the validation once and be done with it would clearly reduce the weight of the page -- it's shared content, not statically linked content. Javascript makes that hard.
Logically, a small Java library would be the solution. But Java's sandbox design means you cannot see the page from an applet (so you can't read current form values or post values). The ONLY way to use Java applets in a validated form is to do everything in Java........And Java's GUI uses its own widget set, NOT the browser's, so you can't make Java forms look like HTML forms. Sorry, no can do. The only way to truly mimic AJAX' full range of features in Java is to write a full browser as an applet. Which is moronic, if you're already using one.
The same applies to CSS. You shouldn't NEED to send the same style sheet with every page. If the CSS were available as a bunch of variables in a Java object, once it's there it's there.
Why go to these lengths? Well, like I said, write once, deliver once, run many times. Let's say one page has a megabyte of code, but only 4K of actual content. Doing this the way I'm saying you should be able to, it will take you 256 distinct web pages to take 2 megabytes of cache. Which is a lot on a phone. Doing the very same thing the way people ARE writing pages means that you've taken 2 megabytes after a mere two pages and a whopping quarter of a gigabyte after 256.
With ISPs - especially on phones - wanting to charge by the K and slow your connections through network partisanship, slashing the size of a page to 4K will save you a tonne of money and a tonne of time. THAT what I'm talkin' about.
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno. I was there for a year and there wasn't one.
William Hill, in the UK, will take a bet on anything. So will most other bookies in the UK. If they can calculate the odds, they'll wager on it. However, I suspect that you'd need to make an astronomical bet before your winnings would even cover the commission.
There have been such sects throughout history, but the extreme religious radicalization and right-wing shifts globally make this a particularly dangerous apocalyptic prediction. I don't think that any will succeed in causing global mayhem, but I don't recommend hanging out with any fundamentalists that particular day - regardless of religion. (Mind you, I don't recommend hanging out with fundamentalists at all, but if there's a day they're likely to be dangerous on then that will be it.)
More realistically, I would expect Mexican archaeological sites to suffer widespread damage and looting as the date approaches, with fanatics determined to find "proof" of a reference that actually states there will be anything happening then at all. The only two references so far officially discovered say nothing of the sort*, so believers are likely to want something more tangible.
*What the two references DO say is that a god is supposed to return on that day. Not to pick up or drop off, seems more of a social visit.
Sell Mayan calendar countdown apps for phones, offer an end-of-the-world insurance policy to those escaping to that village in France, produce a filter that kills links to any web page with references to the Mayan calendar -- lots of ways.
They will have it again, but as the Mayans added an extra digit every time the clock reset, it won't be for a very long time.
Who is the post supposed to be a shill for? How is pointing out that Microsoft's support for rival OS' is more likely to be for regulatory purposes than interest in users in any way dubious? Most here know the history of MS Office on the Mac, of MS support within OS/2 being deliberately broken by changes in Windows 3.11? Of sabotage against DR-DOS and other rival systems? Why should we believe Microsoft supports Mac OS/X for anything but blatantly self-serving reasons, when the customers have been trodden on time and again?
Google's policy of "Do No Evil" is, at best, dubious. I like Google a lot but I would never claim that they are above reproach. Nor should anyone. They have grown at a fantastic rate, to the point where their share price has been known to dip whenever they exceed official revenue expectations by a smaller factor than usual. I'm willing to accept that their initial growth was merely through cost-effective engineering, but their applications have a high degree of tie-in and Google certainly leverages one to get traction with another. The chances of there being anti-trust potential should not be ignored and the chances that they're covering themselves (rather than their users) are not insignificant. We should take the possibility seriously.
Don't know who marked you as overrated - your points seem entirely valid and interesting.
I suspect you'd have seen much of the same cult leader tactics employed by Edison and Tesla in their fights with each other, ending in the pointless and stupid destruction of one protagonist and the adoption of a highly inefficient technology for the sole purpose of denouncing a rival's. When feuds are settled amicably, you tend to get best-of-breed hybrids and an incentive to move forwards. When feuds are settled at gunpoint (real or metaphorical), politics and Not Invented Here take over, leading to regression and an irrational desire to not move forwards lest the "other side" win.
HTTP-over-Torrent is hell. (It's basically what the whole Freenet concept works on. And Freenet makes molasses look high-speed.) Nonetheless, you are correct that this can be done. However, the ports can be blocked or degraded. That's what the whole deal is with biased traffic shaping*.
It would be faster, more reliable and less of a bandwidth hog if the physical topology was meshed. I'm sure you've heard the adage that the Internet could survive a nuclear bomb. Once upon a time, perhaps it might have. If it were mesh-based, it still could be. I'm also sure you've read stories where single fibres being cut have disconnected vast regions - be it an undersea cable, roadside cables, or some such. If a backhoe can destroy connectivity, then anyone controlling either end of that fibre can be just as destructive.
To use a cyberwarfare example, if a pipe carries all the traffic from a region you want to disconnect, you can DDoS the endpoint. Create a hot-spot where that switch/router is no longer able to cope with the traffic. There's nothing that Torrent or Web 2.0 can do to deal with that. That is a design flaw in the infrastructure and that flaw has to be fixed before you can do anything useful.
*Unbiased traffic shaping is certainly possible and is the correct form of it. Basically, dropping packets that would have collided anyway is a form of unbiased traffic shaping, as is dividing available upstream bandwidth according to the fraction of the downstream bandwidth a given pipe has. And so on. Nobody has any serious objection to unbiased traffic shaping.
The problem is that spell-checkers aren't grammar-checkers. There hasn't been a decent grammar checker since the days of Grammatik. The ones out there now are, frankly, pathetic.
I can't say I've seen that on all articles on Wikipedia, but certainly I have seen it on some. I've seen articles dumbed down to suit the majority of the readers, rather than split and refined to allow the majority a summary and those wanting more information access to that. This certainly discourages those who are subject matter experts - what's the point in being an expert in something if all that's wanted is pub quiz grade?
However, I emphasize that this is NOT what I've seen for the majority of articles. Some articles have been abandoned (occasionally in mid-edit, from the looks of it), some are constantly being updated with updates in conflict with each other, yet others are updated and are of extraordinarily high quality. It runs the full gamut.
I would far prefer a layered approach, so that you could get access to whatever level of detail you wanted, but the contributors just aren't there to get that. It's a pity, and the net result is uneven quality, but Wikipedia is a case where it's better to have an imperfect something than a perfect nothing.
The only access to the ISS is via the Russian Soyuz, right now, and this will remain the case for at least 20 years - the time it'll take for a functional Shuttle replacement to be designed, built, tested and launched given the current available funding (or lack thereof), the very limited number of rocket designers in the US (rockets are updated regularly, but when was the last time the US actually invented one from scratch through to completion?) and the extreme age of all existing launch facilities.
If a Soyuz carrying US astronauts reaches orbit but cannot dock with the ISS, the astronauts will be stranded. There's no rescue service possible. (Even with the Shuttle, there was a case where Russia almost did lose a Soyuz capsule with astronaut in space - it would have taken far too long for a Shuttle to have been readied and the altitude would have made it extremely difficult if not impossible.) More likely, if a stage failed, the rocket would be remotely destroyed along with the crew. Or it would smear itself over the landscape with much the same effect. We're increasingly aware that space is unsafe, but nobody is willing to stump up the cash to make it safe enough. It would also require total trust and cooperation between the US and Russia - and that would be political suicide for anyone in either country to suggest, let alone try.
I think you need an "s" on the end of "replacement". NASA has shut down a staggering number of Shuttle replacement projects over the years. Politicians also caused many of the problems that eventually killed the Shuttle (such as causing the boosters to be chopped up for long-distance transport, removing the escape mechanisms that the original Shuttle design was supposed to have, slashing the budget to the point where the Shuttle was too small to carry the payloads intended and/or needed, etc).
There was an effort to keep the Shuttle program going for a couple of years, but by the time it was in a position to do anything, all the factories had been shut down, all the expertise had been dissipated and all the infrastructure had been repurposed. So the effort came to nothing.
It would have been good if NASA and Russia had been free to work together to get the Russian Shuttle fully operational, but US law prohibited any such international project at the time and still interferes horribly with collaboration with other nations today. You don't do space solo. You especially don't do space solo on a shoestring budget, a packet of airline peanuts and a promise by Government appointees to not blow you up next time.
The moment nations - any nations, US included - decided that the Internet was territory that could be owned rather than a virtual complex of ideas where data merely happened to reside in certain machines at certain times and where wiring merely happened to be the transport of choice for now, cyberwarfare was inevitable. That the Internet has adopted a spanning tree topology in many places, rather than a mesh topology, has worsened things. It's very easy to set up roadblocks on a spanning tree, it's much much harder to shut down a mesh.
(If you can't own it and can't prevent others using it, then you have nothing you can fight over. Ownership and conflict are only possible where resource denial is possible. Which is fine for end-points, I've no problem with end-points being owned and governed, but it should never have become fine for the backbone.)
You've got to be extremely careful on your second point, precisely because there's an M:N relationship between causes and effects, not a 1:1. Just as a wild example, let's say there are 50 different factors involved, of which any 10 - any 10 at all - is required to cause CCD, of which only one factor out of the 50 is GM, then there will be a staggeringly large number of cases where GM is not involved. GM would not be a common factor and, indeed, there would be no common factors. GM would still be a factor, though.
However, if it's a combinatorial problem, simple analysis is going to be a bugbear. Not only would GM not be a common factor, not every case where GM was used would show CCD. In the wild example I'm using, if even just 9 factors are present but not a 10th, you would see NOTHING. If you don't hit the threshold, then there would be no impact whatsoever.
You see this a lot in genetic illnesses -- people with genes that create a disposition to a disease never develop it because one gene out of N isn't enough to trigger the disease. You need all N of them - and a suitable epigenomic state - or nothing happens at all. The genes are still a factor, but the genes are not "the" cause. There is no "the cause". This is a major reason why research into genetic illnesses runs into so many problems. Joe Public cannot comprehend why, if you have such-and-such a gene that is linked to a disease, you don't have that disease right off. Well, to be fair, I think a fair few can understand recessive genes, but genetics is way more complicated than that, unfortunately.
Going back to GM, let's say it is a matter of a critical threshold, some number of factors have to be present before CCD occurs, where any number of factors below that threshold simply won't matter. Should that mean we should avoid GM? No, not really. If there are ways to ensure the threshold is never exceeded, then to whatever extent GM is involved it wouldn't matter. CCD would never arise because the critical limit is never reached.
I take the line with GM that it shouldn't be used in places it's not already in use, but that it shouldn't be stopped where it is in use. Patents should be, but not GM. The science of genetics has undergone major revisions of epic proportions this year alone, a process that has been manic for the past decade. But a lot of the groundwork for GM was done 15-20 years ago. It is time the geneticists reviewed the work, from a wholly modern perspective, with all that we now know that we did not know back then, and conduct new studies as needed. When a particular area is re-certified and cleared, restrictions can then be lifted. But it's absolute insanity to rely on archaic, obsolete theories that have long since been falsified. This is true of both GM advocated AND GM skeptics. We can't undo what we have done, but we can understand it better and we SHOULD understand it better. If our better understanding doesn't change the outcome, then the chances are that the outcome isn't particularly susceptible to change. If a complete rewrite of the entire field won't alter what is predicted, then what is predicted is likely to be solid.
(I take the same line in climate change, and thoroughly approve of the way the work is being done there. Models are constantly being revised, the predictions are constantly being checked and re-checked against those revisions, corner cases are constantly being scrutinized and folded into the models, etc. That is Good Science. You will also observe that the researchers do not finger-point at specifics, but talk of contributions, systems, dynamics and equilibria. That's what you should expect. The revisions can lead to minor, specific predictions shifting from year to year, even when the overarching prediction is relatively static. That, too, is what you expect from good science. The discussion in GM, however, has been a strict good/bad polarity, which is NOT good science and indicates a major breakdown somewhere along the line. Genetics, like the climate, is complex and the more we underst
"I can has renewal money" should be GoDaddy's new motto. Never nom the hand that pets you.
I maded you a reply, but I ated it.
Most content management systems I've examined embed the javascript and CSS into the page, they don't store the stuff in distinct files. Which is stupid. (This includes custom-written CMS systems, which makes it doubly stupid.)
Yes, when files are distinct, then they are cached distinctly. You are correct there. And if web programmers were as good as they could be, that would indeed be what happens.
An excellent suggestion, and a great teaching tool in one. (If a kid is allergic to pollen, they may well have been told to stay away from plants -- which is stupid, as you note. By showing that there are plants that they're not allergic to, you teach them to not be paranoid and believe every fearful whisper but to investigate claims.)
Well, depends on the method used. Some GM "pest resistance" causes the plant to produce pesticides. The total amount of pesticide around actually goes up. But because you can spray a crop very locally but genes spread, the pesticides end up in plants that are vital for insects that are NOT pests but are actually vital elements in the ecosystem.
Colony collapse disorder has many, many causes, not just one, but one of those causes is almost certainly the spread of pesticide-producing GM. The problem with multi-causal issues is that the general public loves pointing fingers at The Enemy. When "The Enemy" doesn't exist, the general public gets very confused. There simply isn't any notion in the public eye for situations where any N factors present out of a list of M potential factors will produce the same result, where GM -may- (not proven, it's merely very likely) be one of those potential factors. In science, ANY causative factor is a "cause". Searches for "The One True Cause" is left to religion. That is as it should be, but society is religious, not scientific.
That is indeed interesting. I'd be reluctant to ascribe it to GM (pesticides used in the US may well be involved, or it may be a specific strain of wheat -- there's 16 different botanical classes of wheat and there are likely thousands, if not tens of thousands, of genetically distinct strains). However, certainly GM is a very possible cause and it's good that you've looked into that as a possible factor.
The next step would be to get tested for celiac, as others have suggested, but I'd go beyond that. Getting tested for unusual sensitivities to various pesticides might be useful, but that's not something most places would even think of offering and it would be hard to utilize any information you did get. Finding out if you're allergic to specific classes of wheat is more doable but not much more useful as many nations have gone to monocultures. Eliminating a country from your diet can be hard. Nonetheless, there is clearly a threat to your health and if you want to avoid getting paranoid you need to localize that threat. Once it has very specific bounds, it ceases to be an issue.
Regardless of safety issues, you are correct about the legal issues. GM should absolutely be barred from being patented, all patents so far issued should be revoked and all "damages awarded" to GM farmers or organizations due to contamination should be returned along with court costs and recompense for damage to the reputations of perfectly innocent farmers.
Anything which is within food (including pesticides that were not removed during cleaning and processing) should, IMHO, be listed. It's added and it is consumed, maybe not added for the purpose of being consumed but since when did biology and toxicology concern itself with intent?
Genetic modification is marginally more complex. We now know that 99% of everything that had been believed about genes (1 gene = 1 function, DNA is unchanging, there is no epigenome) is bullshit. We've found numerous genes that interact, we've found retrotransposons alter DNA in individual cells, we've shown that the epigenome is real and can alter what a codon codes to. In short, none of the assumptions underpinning the original safety studies of GM have held up. This does NOT make GM unsafe, though. GM may well be perfectly safe, it is the conclusions drawn from the studies that aren't. Those studies should be re-examined and re-evaluated in the light of what we know about genetics today. ALL of what we know about genetics today. No, I don't give a damn that this means people have to go out and read the literature. The literature wasn't published for the journals' amusement.
Safe or not, GM is nonetheless something added to food. It is an additive. Not for the intent of becoming food, but it becomes food nonetheless. The intent has no bearing on the issue whatsoever. Intent should be ripped out of the labeling rules, burned at the stake (or steak, your choice) and its ashes scattered to the four winds. Then blasted out the sky with those high-power lasers the military has been working on.
Radiation-treated foods are the only ones that pose any kind of conundrum. And, yes, infrared and microwave are forms of radiation. Cook-chilled foods are supposed to be listed as such (which is indisputably a form of radiation treatment, though not the form people usually think of) but cooking a food alters the molecular structure a fair bit. A quick blast from a cobolt or caesium source, provided chemical changes were minor, should not be enough to warrant special labeling. Anything below some safe dose should not be labeled, anything above should.
Plants are good. Not as I usually do (giant redwood cuttings) but something more appropriate. Real plants, though, not plastic. Because labs will vary in temperature more than most places, these'll need to be plants that can handle a decent range of conditions.
Light isn't a problem if monitors have anti-glare screens. Clip-on anti-glare covers for flatscreens are just fine and then you will only need them for a small number of monitors.
Ergonomics is absolutely vital, never mind important. I'd recommend getting reasonable-quality keyboards, too, because that impacts the user more than one might think.
Desk space should be comparable to the lab space you'd expect someone in a chemistry lab to have, or a quality library. Enough for the computer, lab book, text book and the student. In fact, a chemistry lab makes an ideal template for space requirements. Just as it would be Really Bad if a thrashing elbow could topple a Bunsen burner or a beaker of hydrofluoric acid, it would be Really Bad if computer students disrupted each other in the course of perfectly normal working.
Layout should depend on space available. There are definite advantages to a Greek Ampitheatre layout with the lecturer at the focal point. One is that this will eliminate the glare issue entirely, another is that the lecturer can be heard over large numbers of fans. The disadvantage is that it's space-hungry and schools often have to place a very high premium on space. (Inadequate funding being one major cause.) Curved workspaces look a bit more sci-fi and high-tech than boring rows.
A picture of the current Linux kernel as seen via the Linux Kernel Graphing project (modified as needed) would look great, especially if you could get some students to turn the ceiling into a massive plotter and vector-draw the entire thing. An even better hack would be to make the ceiling a white-board and have it updated with every release, bonus credit to the first to spot the biggest change since last lab session.
Wall art should not include boring or "motivational" phrases. A fresco of some major event in technology would be cool (and would help with inter-departmental politics since it would make a neat art project). Traditional adventure gaming maps of MUD1 and Dungeon, a mobile made of relic computer parts, maybe an old teletype in the corner (with a dunce's hat on it), something to show that technology is always in flux and that the rigid line between serious use and entertainment never existed at any time in the history of computing.
Java applets could take parameters from the applet tag, but could not "update" the page in any way, read data from an HTML form, communicate with the Javascript, etc, etc, etc. Java applets could ONLY talk to the server that posted them (unless they were signed). They could deliver content via AWT or (in later versions) Swing, but that's it.
The benefit of Java is that once the browser got a JAR file, it was cached by the client. Let's say you had a dozen pages that all made use of one common JAR file. That JAR file would be delivered with the first applet that used it. It would then be local and would never be sent again whilst it lived in the browser's cache. This compares with Javascript, where if you include a library, that library is part of the web page. It's sent with every single web page it is in.
With Javascript, you're wanting to do things like validate forms. That's your basic AJAX. The libraries involved don't change -- JQuery is JQuery is JQuery, no matter what parameters you are validating against. Being able to deliver the validation once and be done with it would clearly reduce the weight of the page -- it's shared content, not statically linked content. Javascript makes that hard.
Logically, a small Java library would be the solution. But Java's sandbox design means you cannot see the page from an applet (so you can't read current form values or post values). The ONLY way to use Java applets in a validated form is to do everything in Java.... ....And Java's GUI uses its own widget set, NOT the browser's, so you can't make Java forms look like HTML forms. Sorry, no can do. The only way to truly mimic AJAX' full range of features in Java is to write a full browser as an applet. Which is moronic, if you're already using one.
The same applies to CSS. You shouldn't NEED to send the same style sheet with every page. If the CSS were available as a bunch of variables in a Java object, once it's there it's there.
Why go to these lengths? Well, like I said, write once, deliver once, run many times. Let's say one page has a megabyte of code, but only 4K of actual content. Doing this the way I'm saying you should be able to, it will take you 256 distinct web pages to take 2 megabytes of cache. Which is a lot on a phone. Doing the very same thing the way people ARE writing pages means that you've taken 2 megabytes after a mere two pages and a whopping quarter of a gigabyte after 256.
With ISPs - especially on phones - wanting to charge by the K and slow your connections through network partisanship, slashing the size of a page to 4K will save you a tonne of money and a tonne of time. THAT what I'm talkin' about.