If so many other countries are banning GMO foods, why aren't we in the US seriously considering this?
Because they're wrong or their reasons are not appropriate to the US agricultural environment? Some are banning on the basis of absurd health-based reasons that are demonstrably untrue....
Actually, the primary fear isn't with health or cross-pollination or anything biological. If you investigate the various bans in importing GMO grains, you'll find that most of them actually ban only unmilled GMO grains. In particular, a number of countries have blocked the importing of unmilled grain in food aid shipments, while allowing milled grain.
This is a hint at the actual fear, which has been discussed openly in most of these countries: If they permit importing whole GMO seed, there is a serious prospect that some of the seed will be planted locally. This will be followed by the owners of the GMO patents (most notably Monsanto, but also several other international corporations) will respond with legal actions that bankrupt the local farmers. The worst-case scenario, which is widely considered the most likely scenario, is that the big international GMO corporations will end up owning most of the country's farmland.
Note again that this fear has nothing to do with biological or health problems. It is purely a legal/political problem, brought about by the current international patent system.
And yes, the US is considered a major source of this threat. But it isn't really the US alone; the US is merely the largest source of threats to local agriculture based on patents on DNA.
And grains are the major crop involved, for the simple reason that grains are wind pollinated, so it's not possible for farmers to prevent cross-pollination with their neighbors' farms. Traditionally, this was an advantage, since this tended to spread the genes of the most "successful" (by human standards) varieties. But in the advent of DNA patents, this advantage has turned into a serious threat to the livelihoods of grain farmers around the world.
But apparently the free market only means companies are free to sell us what they want, not for consumers to decide what we want.
Yeah; that's a good summary of the main "failure mode" of a free market system. This has been acknowledged by lots of economists, going back to Adam Smith. Sellers inherently want to maximize their markets, so if there's any chance that a specific bit of information about a product will harm sales to any small part of the population, a seller naturally hides that information. There's a natural imbalance between sellers and buyers, with the sellers knowing more about the product than prospective purchasers know.
About the only way that's been found effective at providing purchasers with information is legal punishments if sellers don't provide the information. Check ingredient labels where you live, and compare what they say with local government regulations. You'll generally find that the labels only tell you what the laws require; anything not explicitly required by law is usually omitted. In a true free market, you would have no information about ingredients at all, on the ground that such information would limit sales to people with "irrational" dislike of some ingredients. We've read variants of that argument here to explain why GMO ingredients shouldn't be (required to be) listed.
Funny; I'd think the conclusion would be that, since blind people are very good at instantaneously filtering out background noise, this test would show them as the smartest people.
What do you expect from a country that originally had a white population from only two different groups: Criminals, and jailers?
Reminds me of a quip from an Aussie acquaintance a few years ago: He said he was happy that Australia got the criminals and America got the religious groups.
Of course, that's not really relevant to this issue. Politicians anywhere should be assumed corrupt and on the take unless they can prove otherwise. And laws limiting the population's access to information about their government's inner workings are de-facto proof of the "otherwise".
I've often found that this describes me, because in the many code reviews I've sat through, I've yet to hear any point that I hadn't already thought of myself, and could provide the appropriate test code (if they'd accept it). So, in my experience, all code reviews have been a total waste of my time, and there was never any way to get past the trivial "newbie" stuff to the things that I thought were outstanding questions that needed answering.
And, unlike many developers, I've often found myself on very good terms with the QA people, because when I give them my stuff, I include a pile of test routines that they are welcome to use as they wish (thus saving them a lot of time).
So I consider at least one of the points here somewhat dubious. Yea, code reviews sound like a good idea. But if they don't produce any new questions that the developers haven't already dealt with, they're a big waste of everyone's time.
I wonder how many readers have similar reactions to the other points in the summary? For instance, concurrent code can be fun to develop, but in practice, all the interlocks required to make it work can reduce many tasks to near-serial performance. Sometimes, though, a better approach is to look for ways to split the task into subtasks that can run in separate processes that rarely interact. I've done this on occasion to produce huge increases in speed. Of course, this isn't really a question of programming, but rather a question of reanalyzing the task and finding a way to handle it with minimal coupling of a set of independent subtasks. But doing this could easily be interpreted as not understanding how to write concurrent code, rather than understanding when concurrency is an advantage and when it's not.;-)
Did you somehow skip this part? "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.[1]"
Ah, but you forgot the extension to all US laws that applies in this case: "... except when a computer is involved."
A well-established principle in US (and most other) law is that if there's a computer involved, all precedent is forgotten, and the lessons of centuries of legal progress must be learned all over again.
That clause in the US constitution was there because so many previous governments had done exactly what the US government is now doing with "computerized" communication. The folks who wrote that constitution wanted to prevent the abuses that governments had always foisted on their citizens. But modern people seem to accept the "except when there's a computer involved" qualification, so all those old abuses are being re-implemented online, and we'll have to fight all those old battles again before such safeguards are extended to the digital parts of our modern world.
If it is at all political, historical or religious,... people are highly biased one way or the other about it and anything read has to be read with a grain of salt.
Ow. Mind screw. By your interpretation of the copyright definition, any HOWTO for an app or walkthrough of a video game is itself a computer program.
Heh. One of my favorite programming experiences is the numerous times that people have noticed the entries in some of my Makefiles that run various "man..." commands, pipe the results to various little perl programs, and drop the output into various.c and/or.h files. "WTF; your code reads the online manuals to generate the code?" "Yeah; you got a problem with that?"
So we'd also conclude that the online man pages are in fact programs. Or actually, they're subroutines that just need a bit of preprocessing to convert them to the language in use on your project. Any competent perl (or python) programmer should be able to write such preprocessors. Extracting machine-readable information from human-readable documents was one of the original design goals of perl, and the python crowd also sees that as a significant niche for their favorite language.
Do you think some people here might have a problem with that?;-)
[L]et's not forget at the moment that 'HTML5' is still in development (it's still not finalized), yet it's used in production now which ofcourse is actually a fubar thing to do..
Well, maybe, but not as fubar as trying to be compliant with all the various HTML "standards", including XHTML and MSHTML and iHTML and XML and...;-)
Anyway, I'd expect that HTML5 is following google's lead, and will be in Beta until all of us have shuffled off this mortal plane. It worked for google; it'll probably work for HTML5.
And so far, I've found that switching to HTML5 produces better compatibility than any other HTML version that various organizations and corporations have declared "standard". There are the usual insanities of trying to make pages work on MS browsers, of course, but if you're reasonable about dragging your feet WRT the newer HTML5 features, you tend to find that your pages work reasonably well with all the common browsers except IE6. (Well, OK -- and except for Safari on the iPhone.;-)
Basically, the HTML5 gang has done a fairly good job of figuring out ways to thumb our noses at the corporate powers who are constantly trying to throw monkey wrenches into the Web's inner workings. Going with the HTML5 approach, and encouraging them to keep up the good work, is a feasible strategy to make things work about as well as we can expect in an environment of government and corporate sabotage attempts.
If by " completely unreliable" you mean "accurately predicting experimental and observational data" then yes.
Actually, in my experience "completely reliable" withing the software industry means "delivering within the deadline imposed by technically-ignorant managers or customers". The developers rarely have any say on the schedule; they are just judged on whether they meet whatever random schedule someone else decided based on little or no knowledge of the roadblocks standing in the way of delivering what was wanted.
As someone else put it a while back: Most software schedules are decided by trimming the estimates until the developers respond by giggling. At that point, the managers making the schedule know that it's totally unachievable, so they stop decreasing their time estimates.
The wisdom of a committee/meeting/etc is inversely proportional to the number of participants.
Well, I've read/heard a number of discussions of this (though usually measuring intelligence rather than "wisdom", whatever that is;-); the
general conclusion seems to be that the IQ of a group of humans is an inverse function of the number of people in the group. The actual function isn't really known, and there's evidence that it may be different for different groups (or different subject areas). I've seen numerous that "sum of IQs divided by the square root of the number of people" is roughly right in most cases. Others have argued for "max IQ divided by the number of people", but that usually seems to decay a bit too fast with increasing number. Still others have argued for an inverse log function rather than inverse square root, but it's not clear we have any data that can distinguish those.
It'd be interesting if we could actually find an accurate way to quantize this "group-think effect". Of course, if you're using IQ, it would help if you could find a good way to quantize that (in contrast with how our schools do it now;-).
An added qualification is that sometimes you get a group "leader" that most group members follow, and in such cases, the leader's decisions are usually the group's, so the function is only slightly less that constant despite group size. And there's the special case when most of the group realizes that the leader is an idiot, so the group quickly becomes incapable of making decisions.
Copley Square in Boston is a "hop skip and a jump" from MIT.
Hmmm... A quick check shows that it's actually on the order of a kilosmoot, if you take the obvious route of going south on Mass Ave, hanging a left on Comm Ave, and a right at Dahtmouth. That's quite a lot of hops, skips and jumps, at least for a normal-size human.
Someone oughta try it, though, and report the actual number of hop+skip+jump units it takes them to make the trip. Or maybe organize a team of people of different sizes, and report the mean of their counts.
The Wikipedia article (first link) explains that they have no natural predators,...
It wouldn't be surprising if the Everglade kite learns to eat them. This is a local subspecies listed as "endangered", and its favorite food is Florida's largest native snail, the apple snail. If so, this may help the kite survive.
If we wanted to read about ALL news, we would go to news.google.com or something.
Actually, I was reading about it at google news just a few minutes ago, and slashdot tends to be a bit late to the party in reporting stories like this. I'd agree that it's a bit of a waste of bandwidth, disk space, etc. for/. to bother with it. Unless, of course, it turns out eventually that there's an interesting tech component to the story. It's likely that anyone interested in such "public interest" stories has a window open to one or more of the general news sources. So/. shouldn't bother.
OT prediction: If it turns out that the act was committed by an American nutjob, as with the Oklahoma City bombing the media and political system will quickly forget about it. If it turns out that it was done by a "furriner", we'll hear lots about those awful "terrists" for some time, everyone will make vicious pronouncements, and they won't forget about it. In either case, little if anything will be done that's relevant to preventing future such acts.
(But this is just based on history. I could be wrong, so stay tuned.;-)
As a USian, I'm more concerned about US corporations and US government agencies being after me, they are the ones that can do and are most likely to do me some harm.
This is probably the most important thing to get across. The US population has been far more damaged by the likes of HUAC and the various secretive "intelligence" agencies than by any foreign bogeymen.
This isn't just a US problem, either. I've read a few comments from historians on the topic, saying that the data shows that during the last century, far more people (in the world as a whole) died due to their own government's actions than from any foreign soldiers or other attackers.
The data isn't nearly as good for previous centuries, but what data there is supports the claim for the rest of our history. The biggest danger everywhere comes from our own rulers, who rarely have our interests at heart.
In the on-topic case of network security, it's fairly clear that the primary interest of the US and all other governments is in controlling the communication of their own citizens.
[H]ow long would it take for the first backhoe to come along?
Funny, perhaps, but there's a serious problem hidden in the phrasing "all of the world's internet traffic could be transmitted via a single fiber." Most people would naturally consider this a major achievement, but in fact it would be a major mistake.
Back in 1986 (12 Dec, I googled it;-) all of New England (the one in the US, not Australia;-) was cut off from the rest of the network for half a day. This was thought unlikely, because there were seven different cables connecting the northeast to the rest of the country, and what was the probability that they'd all be down at once? But the comm company that supplied the "cables" (AT&T) had implemented "virtual cables". They had cleverly routed all the traffic through a single cable, and a worker in New Jersey cut it.
This has become a textbook example for a lot of design issues. The main one is that the software has to be able to see down into the lower "levels", to make sure this hasn't been done. If the high-level software can't see down into the physical layer, as the "design" folks often insist is the only correct design, then there is no way to write code that detects such problems and throws out warnings that a failure is likely.
Another lesson is that you can't trust the hardware. The people responsible for the hardware will do this sort of thing whenever they can get away with it. It saves them money, and they don't even have to lower prices for customers who can't detect what's been done.
The Internet was designed from the start with multiple routes everywhere. The commercial world hasn't implemented this part of it very widely. As a result, there are often only a single path between two sites, and the network is constantly plagued by outages that wouldn't happen if the software could just "route around the damage", and the saying goes. But hardware is expensive, and companies install the minimum that they can get away with.
The world is slowly coming to rely on the Internet. If we want it as reliable as its designers (the US DoD) intended, we should object to every suggestion that any traffic be handled by a "single fiber". Yeah, it might sound impressive, but it's actually dangerous. Instead, we need to find ways of forcing the hardware companies at the bottom to build the needed physical redundancy, so that when that single fiber fails, the software will reroute the traffic in a millisecond or so, and only the company's workmen will have to know that someone cut it with the proverbial backhoe.
US is already on metric. 1 inch equals exactly 25.4 mm according to the International Yard and Pound agreement of 1959,...
Well, I was wondering if someone would point that out. Actually, the US's "conversion" to metric happened earlier than that. Back in the 1980s, there was a fun NPR (National Public Radio) article about the non-celebration of the 100th anniversary of the US "going metric".
They explained what they meant, of course. It was based on the observation that, like most governments, the US rarely decrees that any particular units be used by the general public. What the Standards Bureau (whatever it's called in any particular decade, NIST right now) does is decree that anyone who uses the unit X must use the definition decreed by the Standards Bureau. Using some other unit and calling it X is then legally "consumer fraud", and can lead to prosecution and fines.
So the actual role of the Standards Bureau is to define all the units in common use, as precisely as they can. What happened in the 1880s was that the scientists and engineers at the Bureau decided that the most precise standards in the world were those maintained by that French bureau in Paris. So they published new definitions of all the common American units in terms of the "metric" standard units. At this point, the American units became technically just "extended" metric units. You could use the actual metric units, and scientists did that, but the general public kept using their traditional units, which were now legally defined as extensions of the official metric system.
Actually, there was followup to this article, pointing out that the US government officially approved the metric system back in the 1840s, in the form of a law stating that no contract could be declared void due to one party's use of metric units. This is typically how the "metric system" sneaks into a country, by simply being made legal for all commercial purposes. People learn to convert when they have commercial dealings with foreigners, and if a country's commerce develops strong ties to other countries, the metric units slowly become easier to use than the local units. The US is far from the only country where the "traditional" units are still in use, legally defined in metric terms as in the US.
Maybe a few people can contribute local non-metric units that are still in use in your country...
Heh. Some years back, I saw a video of a person "riding a dinosaur". It wasn't faked. The person was riding a (tame) ostrich, and since the birds were (finally) reclassified as a branch of the dinosaurs back in the 1980s, it qualifies.
Actually, I have a dinosaur sitting on my chest, trying to get my attention, as I type this. Her name is Lydia, and she's a blue-crowned conure. She's a really cute little flying dinosaur, of the parrot branch. I have a nice picture of her after she took a bath, and had a spiky "punk" look to her wet feathers, which I use as my avatar on various online forums. She's a bit small for a human to ride, though, weighing in at 185g.
It's too bad that the large dinosaurs were all wiped out 65 million years ago. But that did open the path for our ancestors to develop intelligence, and for the avians to occupy most of the flying niches. Now we can keep members of the few remaining dinosaurs as pets, but only a few are big enough that humans can ride them. Some of the others can make very charming pets for us upstart primates.
It's probably worth noting here that the idea that birds are dinosaurs was suggested by none other than Charles Darwin, along with various of his colleagues. The problem was that birds don't fossilize well, so biologists just said "That's interesting; can you find some good evidence?" It wasn't until the late 1970s that we found pre-KT-disaster bird fossils that verified the connection. So now it's sorta fun to read all the ignorant media comments about the "extinction of the dinosaurs", showing ignorance of the fact that there are roughly 8,000 dinosaur species alive today, about twice the number of mammal species.
(Hmmm... Maybe I should wait until April 2 to post this. Nah...;-)
At least the public can DO something about the government, given enough motivation to do so.... There are millions of people vehemently protesting Monsanto, and the government keeps giving them free passes to force GMO food onto us without us knowing. Without the government there, we can be 100% certain there would be no non-GMO food left in the entire world.
Actually, all you'd really know is that you have no idea what might be in your food, because there would be no evil government regulators to force the food sellers to document and label what's in their various food "products".
Slashdot Mirror
If so many other countries are banning GMO foods, why aren't we in the US seriously considering this?
Because they're wrong or their reasons are not appropriate to the US agricultural environment? Some are banning on the basis of absurd health-based reasons that are demonstrably untrue. ...
Actually, the primary fear isn't with health or cross-pollination or anything biological. If you investigate the various bans in importing GMO grains, you'll find that most of them actually ban only unmilled GMO grains. In particular, a number of countries have blocked the importing of unmilled grain in food aid shipments, while allowing milled grain.
This is a hint at the actual fear, which has been discussed openly in most of these countries: If they permit importing whole GMO seed, there is a serious prospect that some of the seed will be planted locally. This will be followed by the owners of the GMO patents (most notably Monsanto, but also several other international corporations) will respond with legal actions that bankrupt the local farmers. The worst-case scenario, which is widely considered the most likely scenario, is that the big international GMO corporations will end up owning most of the country's farmland.
Note again that this fear has nothing to do with biological or health problems. It is purely a legal/political problem, brought about by the current international patent system.
And yes, the US is considered a major source of this threat. But it isn't really the US alone; the US is merely the largest source of threats to local agriculture based on patents on DNA.
And grains are the major crop involved, for the simple reason that grains are wind pollinated, so it's not possible for farmers to prevent cross-pollination with their neighbors' farms. Traditionally, this was an advantage, since this tended to spread the genes of the most "successful" (by human standards) varieties. But in the advent of DNA patents, this advantage has turned into a serious threat to the livelihoods of grain farmers around the world.
But apparently the free market only means companies are free to sell us what they want, not for consumers to decide what we want.
Yeah; that's a good summary of the main "failure mode" of a free market system. This has been acknowledged by lots of economists, going back to Adam Smith. Sellers inherently want to maximize their markets, so if there's any chance that a specific bit of information about a product will harm sales to any small part of the population, a seller naturally hides that information. There's a natural imbalance between sellers and buyers, with the sellers knowing more about the product than prospective purchasers know.
About the only way that's been found effective at providing purchasers with information is legal punishments if sellers don't provide the information. Check ingredient labels where you live, and compare what they say with local government regulations. You'll generally find that the labels only tell you what the laws require; anything not explicitly required by law is usually omitted. In a true free market, you would have no information about ingredients at all, on the ground that such information would limit sales to people with "irrational" dislike of some ingredients. We've read variants of that argument here to explain why GMO ingredients shouldn't be (required to be) listed.
Then there was Stephen Wright's famous study showing that 82.7% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
Funny; I'd think the conclusion would be that, since blind people are very good at instantaneously filtering out background noise, this test would show them as the smartest people.
What do you expect from a country that originally had a white population from only two different groups: Criminals, and jailers?
Reminds me of a quip from an Aussie acquaintance a few years ago: He said he was happy that Australia got the criminals and America got the religious groups.
Of course, that's not really relevant to this issue. Politicians anywhere should be assumed corrupt and on the take unless they can prove otherwise. And laws limiting the population's access to information about their government's inner workings are de-facto proof of the "otherwise".
I've often found that this describes me, because in the many code reviews I've sat through, I've yet to hear any point that I hadn't already thought of myself, and could provide the appropriate test code (if they'd accept it). So, in my experience, all code reviews have been a total waste of my time, and there was never any way to get past the trivial "newbie" stuff to the things that I thought were outstanding questions that needed answering.
And, unlike many developers, I've often found myself on very good terms with the QA people, because when I give them my stuff, I include a pile of test routines that they are welcome to use as they wish (thus saving them a lot of time).
So I consider at least one of the points here somewhat dubious. Yea, code reviews sound like a good idea. But if they don't produce any new questions that the developers haven't already dealt with, they're a big waste of everyone's time.
I wonder how many readers have similar reactions to the other points in the summary? For instance, concurrent code can be fun to develop, but in practice, all the interlocks required to make it work can reduce many tasks to near-serial performance. Sometimes, though, a better approach is to look for ways to split the task into subtasks that can run in separate processes that rarely interact. I've done this on occasion to produce huge increases in speed. Of course, this isn't really a question of programming, but rather a question of reanalyzing the task and finding a way to handle it with minimal coupling of a set of independent subtasks. But doing this could easily be interpreted as not understanding how to write concurrent code, rather than understanding when concurrency is an advantage and when it's not. ;-)
Did you somehow skip this part? "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.[1]"
Ah, but you forgot the extension to all US laws that applies in this case: "... except when a computer is involved."
A well-established principle in US (and most other) law is that if there's a computer involved, all precedent is forgotten, and the lessons of centuries of legal progress must be learned all over again.
That clause in the US constitution was there because so many previous governments had done exactly what the US government is now doing with "computerized" communication. The folks who wrote that constitution wanted to prevent the abuses that governments had always foisted on their citizens. But modern people seem to accept the "except when there's a computer involved" qualification, so all those old abuses are being re-implemented online, and we'll have to fight all those old battles again before such safeguards are extended to the digital parts of our modern world.
If it is at all political, historical or religious, ... people are highly biased one way or the other about it and anything read has to be read with a grain of salt.
There; FTFY. ;-)
Ow. Mind screw. By your interpretation of the copyright definition, any HOWTO for an app or walkthrough of a video game is itself a computer program.
Heh. One of my favorite programming experiences is the numerous times that people have noticed the entries in some of my Makefiles that run various "man ..." commands, pipe the results to various little perl programs, and drop the output into various .c and/or .h files. "WTF; your code reads the online manuals to generate the code?" "Yeah; you got a problem with that?"
So we'd also conclude that the online man pages are in fact programs. Or actually, they're subroutines that just need a bit of preprocessing to convert them to the language in use on your project. Any competent perl (or python) programmer should be able to write such preprocessors. Extracting machine-readable information from human-readable documents was one of the original design goals of perl, and the python crowd also sees that as a significant niche for their favorite language.
Do you think some people here might have a problem with that? ;-)
[L]et's not forget at the moment that 'HTML5' is still in development (it's still not finalized), yet it's used in production now which ofcourse is actually a fubar thing to do..
Well, maybe, but not as fubar as trying to be compliant with all the various HTML "standards", including XHTML and MSHTML and iHTML and XML and ... ;-)
Anyway, I'd expect that HTML5 is following google's lead, and will be in Beta until all of us have shuffled off this mortal plane. It worked for google; it'll probably work for HTML5.
And so far, I've found that switching to HTML5 produces better compatibility than any other HTML version that various organizations and corporations have declared "standard". There are the usual insanities of trying to make pages work on MS browsers, of course, but if you're reasonable about dragging your feet WRT the newer HTML5 features, you tend to find that your pages work reasonably well with all the common browsers except IE6. (Well, OK -- and except for Safari on the iPhone. ;-)
Basically, the HTML5 gang has done a fairly good job of figuring out ways to thumb our noses at the corporate powers who are constantly trying to throw monkey wrenches into the Web's inner workings. Going with the HTML5 approach, and encouraging them to keep up the good work, is a feasible strategy to make things work about as well as we can expect in an environment of government and corporate sabotage attempts.
If by " completely unreliable" you mean "accurately predicting experimental and observational data" then yes.
Actually, in my experience "completely reliable" withing the software industry means "delivering within the deadline imposed by technically-ignorant managers or customers". The developers rarely have any say on the schedule; they are just judged on whether they meet whatever random schedule someone else decided based on little or no knowledge of the roadblocks standing in the way of delivering what was wanted.
As someone else put it a while back: Most software schedules are decided by trimming the estimates until the developers respond by giggling. At that point, the managers making the schedule know that it's totally unachievable, so they stop decreasing their time estimates.
The wisdom of a committee/meeting/etc is inversely proportional to the number of participants.
Well, I've read/heard a number of discussions of this (though usually measuring intelligence rather than "wisdom", whatever that is ;-); the
general conclusion seems to be that the IQ of a group of humans is an inverse function of the number of people in the group. The actual function isn't really known, and there's evidence that it may be different for different groups (or different subject areas). I've seen numerous that "sum of IQs divided by the square root of the number of people" is roughly right in most cases. Others have argued for "max IQ divided by the number of people", but that usually seems to decay a bit too fast with increasing number. Still others have argued for an inverse log function rather than inverse square root, but it's not clear we have any data that can distinguish those.
It'd be interesting if we could actually find an accurate way to quantize this "group-think effect". Of course, if you're using IQ, it would help if you could find a good way to quantize that (in contrast with how our schools do it now ;-).
An added qualification is that sometimes you get a group "leader" that most group members follow, and in such cases, the leader's decisions are usually the group's, so the function is only slightly less that constant despite group size. And there's the special case when most of the group realizes that the leader is an idiot, so the group quickly becomes incapable of making decisions.
Physics
Economics
Nah; physics is much, much simpler than economics. Just ask any physicist. ;-)
Copley Square in Boston is a "hop skip and a jump" from MIT.
Hmmm ... A quick check shows that it's actually on the order of a kilosmoot, if you take the obvious route of going south on Mass Ave, hanging a left on Comm Ave, and a right at Dahtmouth. That's quite a lot of hops, skips and jumps, at least for a normal-size human.
Someone oughta try it, though, and report the actual number of hop+skip+jump units it takes them to make the trip. Or maybe organize a team of people of different sizes, and report the mean of their counts.
The Wikipedia article (first link) explains that they have no natural predators, ...
It wouldn't be surprising if the Everglade kite learns to eat them. This is a local subspecies listed as "endangered", and its favorite food is Florida's largest native snail, the apple snail. If so, this may help the kite survive.
If we wanted to read about ALL news, we would go to news.google.com or something.
Actually, I was reading about it at google news just a few minutes ago, and slashdot tends to be a bit late to the party in reporting stories like this. I'd agree that it's a bit of a waste of bandwidth, disk space, etc. for /. to bother with it. Unless, of course, it turns out eventually that there's an interesting tech component to the story. It's likely that anyone interested in such "public interest" stories has a window open to one or more of the general news sources. So /. shouldn't bother.
OT prediction: If it turns out that the act was committed by an American nutjob, as with the Oklahoma City bombing the media and political system will quickly forget about it. If it turns out that it was done by a "furriner", we'll hear lots about those awful "terrists" for some time, everyone will make vicious pronouncements, and they won't forget about it. In either case, little if anything will be done that's relevant to preventing future such acts.
(But this is just based on history. I could be wrong, so stay tuned. ;-)
Myself, I've always sorta like "All generalities are false."
As a USian, I'm more concerned about US corporations and US government agencies being after me, they are the ones that can do and are most likely to do me some harm.
This is probably the most important thing to get across. The US population has been far more damaged by the likes of HUAC and the various secretive "intelligence" agencies than by any foreign bogeymen.
This isn't just a US problem, either. I've read a few comments from historians on the topic, saying that the data shows that during the last century, far more people (in the world as a whole) died due to their own government's actions than from any foreign soldiers or other attackers.
The data isn't nearly as good for previous centuries, but what data there is supports the claim for the rest of our history. The biggest danger everywhere comes from our own rulers, who rarely have our interests at heart.
In the on-topic case of network security, it's fairly clear that the primary interest of the US and all other governments is in controlling the communication of their own citizens.
[H]ow long would it take for the first backhoe to come along?
Funny, perhaps, but there's a serious problem hidden in the phrasing "all of the world's internet traffic could be transmitted via a single fiber." Most people would naturally consider this a major achievement, but in fact it would be a major mistake.
Back in 1986 (12 Dec, I googled it ;-) all of New England (the one in the US, not Australia ;-) was cut off from the rest of the network for half a day. This was thought unlikely, because there were seven different cables connecting the northeast to the rest of the country, and what was the probability that they'd all be down at once? But the comm company that supplied the "cables" (AT&T) had implemented "virtual cables". They had cleverly routed all the traffic through a single cable, and a worker in New Jersey cut it.
This has become a textbook example for a lot of design issues. The main one is that the software has to be able to see down into the lower "levels", to make sure this hasn't been done. If the high-level software can't see down into the physical layer, as the "design" folks often insist is the only correct design, then there is no way to write code that detects such problems and throws out warnings that a failure is likely.
Another lesson is that you can't trust the hardware. The people responsible for the hardware will do this sort of thing whenever they can get away with it. It saves them money, and they don't even have to lower prices for customers who can't detect what's been done.
The Internet was designed from the start with multiple routes everywhere. The commercial world hasn't implemented this part of it very widely. As a result, there are often only a single path between two sites, and the network is constantly plagued by outages that wouldn't happen if the software could just "route around the damage", and the saying goes. But hardware is expensive, and companies install the minimum that they can get away with.
The world is slowly coming to rely on the Internet. If we want it as reliable as its designers (the US DoD) intended, we should object to every suggestion that any traffic be handled by a "single fiber". Yeah, it might sound impressive, but it's actually dangerous. Instead, we need to find ways of forcing the hardware companies at the bottom to build the needed physical redundancy, so that when that single fiber fails, the software will reroute the traffic in a millisecond or so, and only the company's workmen will have to know that someone cut it with the proverbial backhoe.
all of the world's internet traffic could be transmitted via a single fiber.
Um, sure, that's easy.... but how long will it take?
And how long would it take for the first backhoe to come along?
Nobody can spell Lundun properly, not even us Brits!
Except for those with a bit of historical knowledge, who know that the correct spelling is "Londinium". ;-)
US is already on metric. 1 inch equals exactly 25.4 mm according to the International Yard and Pound agreement of 1959, ...
Well, I was wondering if someone would point that out. Actually, the US's "conversion" to metric happened earlier than that. Back in the 1980s, there was a fun NPR (National Public Radio) article about the non-celebration of the 100th anniversary of the US "going metric".
They explained what they meant, of course. It was based on the observation that, like most governments, the US rarely decrees that any particular units be used by the general public. What the Standards Bureau (whatever it's called in any particular decade, NIST right now) does is decree that anyone who uses the unit X must use the definition decreed by the Standards Bureau. Using some other unit and calling it X is then legally "consumer fraud", and can lead to prosecution and fines.
So the actual role of the Standards Bureau is to define all the units in common use, as precisely as they can. What happened in the 1880s was that the scientists and engineers at the Bureau decided that the most precise standards in the world were those maintained by that French bureau in Paris. So they published new definitions of all the common American units in terms of the "metric" standard units. At this point, the American units became technically just "extended" metric units. You could use the actual metric units, and scientists did that, but the general public kept using their traditional units, which were now legally defined as extensions of the official metric system.
Actually, there was followup to this article, pointing out that the US government officially approved the metric system back in the 1840s, in the form of a law stating that no contract could be declared void due to one party's use of metric units. This is typically how the "metric system" sneaks into a country, by simply being made legal for all commercial purposes. People learn to convert when they have commercial dealings with foreigners, and if a country's commerce develops strong ties to other countries, the metric units slowly become easier to use than the local units. The US is far from the only country where the "traditional" units are still in use, legally defined in metric terms as in the US.
Maybe a few people can contribute local non-metric units that are still in use in your country ...
What is "Fpunqraserhqr" supposed to mean?
It's an alternate spelling of "Schadenfreude". ;-)
Heh. Some years back, I saw a video of a person "riding a dinosaur". It wasn't faked. The person was riding a (tame) ostrich, and since the birds were (finally) reclassified as a branch of the dinosaurs back in the 1980s, it qualifies.
Actually, I have a dinosaur sitting on my chest, trying to get my attention, as I type this. Her name is Lydia, and she's a blue-crowned conure. She's a really cute little flying dinosaur, of the parrot branch. I have a nice picture of her after she took a bath, and had a spiky "punk" look to her wet feathers, which I use as my avatar on various online forums. She's a bit small for a human to ride, though, weighing in at 185g.
It's too bad that the large dinosaurs were all wiped out 65 million years ago. But that did open the path for our ancestors to develop intelligence, and for the avians to occupy most of the flying niches. Now we can keep members of the few remaining dinosaurs as pets, but only a few are big enough that humans can ride them. Some of the others can make very charming pets for us upstart primates.
It's probably worth noting here that the idea that birds are dinosaurs was suggested by none other than Charles Darwin, along with various of his colleagues. The problem was that birds don't fossilize well, so biologists just said "That's interesting; can you find some good evidence?" It wasn't until the late 1970s that we found pre-KT-disaster bird fossils that verified the connection. So now it's sorta fun to read all the ignorant media comments about the "extinction of the dinosaurs", showing ignorance of the fact that there are roughly 8,000 dinosaur species alive today, about twice the number of mammal species.
(Hmmm ... Maybe I should wait until April 2 to post this. Nah ... ;-)
At least the public can DO something about the government, given enough motivation to do so.... There are millions of people vehemently protesting Monsanto, and the government keeps giving them free passes to force GMO food onto us without us knowing. Without the government there, we can be 100% certain there would be no non-GMO food left in the entire world.
Actually, all you'd really know is that you have no idea what might be in your food, because there would be no evil government regulators to force the food sellers to document and label what's in their various food "products".