Why? you can have clean rivers in Urban areas if you try.
For example, we now have trout returning to two main rivers in Dublin, Ireland (the Liffey and the Tolka, I believe). Increasingly people are swimming (again?) in urban rivers in Europe. can be done.
Methane on its own doesn't have a smell. For safety, another gas like methanethiol is typically added, so that people can detect leaks. Perhaps these leaks are pure methane?
Guess who lobbied to ensure the US weather data was made "public" (ie. available to Accuweather, local TV networks, etc.)?
There is a nice little story in Ireland about the wren being the king of birds. All the birds got together and had a competition to see who was best. They decided the matter by a seeing who could fly the highest. The Eagle thought it would win easily, but when it got as high as it could, the little wren, which had been sitting on the eagles shoulder, jumped a foot higher and won.
Similarly with public and private weather services. The vast bulk of the work is done by the public services - building expensive satellites, observational networks, computer model development, etc. The results are then made public, and the private sector squeezes some added value out (by adding better graphics, presentation, etc.) and sells the product.
Now if you can do this and make money selling a product people want, fine. But don't kid anybody that the private sector is a drop-in replacement and better than the public sector one.
Estimates are it takes 1-5 M/ mile of coastline to evacuate before a hurricane.
Improved observations from the 1970s cut the estimates for where a hurricane will make landfall from ~300miles to ~50 miles radius, (24 hours out, I think; I'm not an American, but remembering numbers quoted from a US colleague in the business).
So, better forecasts cut the cost of evacuating from a hurricane by ~100 Million a time, easy to save 12 gigabucks a decade.
Yes, we do measure this. Every met service I know of (e.g. NOAA) has to explain its budget. I'm not sure of the US numbers, but in the UK the return on investment in meteorology is ~x11 fold, according to external auditors.
Most reliable? If you're talking about Fox News, I think you are referring to the 'fair and balanced' coverage Fox News frequently advertises. Fox isn't claiming to be any more 'reliable' for reporting news
If Fox News was reliably bad, you could simply take their headlines and invert them to find out the truth. In order to be completely useless it actually has to get things right occasionally.
Toleration of people and their rights to autonomy.
I'm intolerant of _actions_, because these impinge on other people, and hence need to be justified.
Ideas: no. The world is full of bad ideas, many of which I've had myself. We need to examine and criticize ideas, examine their consequences, etc. No ideas (such as religions) get a free ride. Having held many bad ideas in the past, I don't hold that against people. We're all seeking after truth and a better life.
As for "general intolerance of all things Southern", the key point you're looking for is prejudice: treat people as individuals, look for their humanity, rather than one of a class. Once you're willing to dismiss people for being racists/black/jew, that way lies the ovens.
I will use Google and get / give a degraded service in Privacy mode by giving them less information, possibly getting more ads from Google and a less-targeted response.
With Google, the idea (the implicit "contract") was that your data was available and used by Google for targetted advertising, but not passed to third parties. I don't mind Google knowing of my fondness for Twinkies, and my purchasing of them, but I _do_ mind if my health insurer knows, for example.
But Debian helps answer the original question: when Debian was first being developed, the pre-stable code was in a directory on an ftp site labelled "1.0". Unfortunately people didn't realise it wasn't ready yet, and got burned.
So after this, Debian came up with the naming system, with "Buzz" being the first. When it was ready for release, a symlink 1.1 -> buzz was added, and Debian 1.1 was born.
Yet people prefer the names.
Part of the reason names are preferable is that an OS consists of components that will be updated-in-time. Its not a static piece of software, but a "release" you "track". If you're OS is "Debian squeeze" then when Debian squeeze is updated with fixes, it remains "squeeze", (but a precise version number may be updated).
Look at why antibiotics and vaccines) aren't interesting to drug makers. They're short term usage, mostly used in the poorer parts of the world, subject to obsolescence from disease evolution, and simply not needed in the case of antibiotics (or even will be considered for use) unless current cheap antibiotics fail. Even though people do need them and would be willing to pay for good new antibiotics, the return to be had simply doesn't justify the cost of developing the drug.
Here, the EU is throwing billions at a problem (ineffectually IMHO) that could be solved and solved better by lower thresholds to drug testing and use. This research is a kludge for patching over a problem from bad regulation of medical drugs (and also the risk adverse nature of modern medicine where drugs and treatments are prescribed which aren't needed, but which cover the doctor's ass).
I strongly disagree. Pharma is not interested in developing antibiotics because there is no profit. The problem is not thresholds for drug testing; its time. and antibiotics and vaccines are not needed "just in poorer countries". They are needed everywhere, now. (or antibiotics: on demand). We've only just dodged the bullet several times: we came extremely close to a global pandemic with SARS, but were lucky in how it spread. Tuberculosis, etc. threaten now.
It takes time to develop and produce the drugs. This isn't simply a matter of bureaucracy; even with flu vaccines, which we had for bird flu, would take 12-24 months of global production to get made and distributed if it hit tomorrow. But, short of customers, they will not be made. Hence getting them ready is a societal need that the profit motive won't directly solve.
Similarly with food: we don't have the strains of drought-resistant wheat, etc. to feed 12-15 billion people. Developing them involves known techniques that will simply take years to get sufficient seed stock, and work hasn't started yet. Again, time: we can't afford to wait until people are starving and willing to pay to start doing the necessary research.
That research has no guaranteed outcome is no just reason for not doing it. "It may fail" is an argument for a company or individual; on a societal or governmental level it translates to "We decided to let billions starve to death because we might not succeed". Thats not justifiable parsimony with tax money: its genocide.
So what evidence is there that the EU can do better? Obviously, they can spend more, but what makes you think the mere act of spending is going to generate results?
Let me put it this way. I foresee in about five to ten years, a series of serious, introspective articles talking about the problems of Horizon 2020 and how the EU didn't quite get any newsworthy science out of the effort. Defenders will speak of the difficulty of science and how while the program didn't actually generate anything of note, they did make a lot of progress. Maybe they'll dole out the pablum about how scientific progress doesn't bring immediate returns, ignoring that that wasn't a problem with scientific efforts before the modern era of public funding.
I'm arguing that govt (In this case, the EU, which I know the details of better) is funding research that society needs and the privately-funded research is not doing. The Horizon2020 project covers the period 2013-2020, and has set 7 goals, of which I listed 3 as examples, for which we (humanity) are simply not doing what we need to, to survive as civilisation: eg. avoid pandemics. We are coasting on the results of previous decades.
My argument is about the funding of research to make it happen. Note that it is not an argument over whether it is done in the public or private sector: private industry can bid in Europe for Horizon2020 funds (or its current equivalent, "Framework 7", the current funding project) as well as public sector scientists in academia, etc.
The evidence that private sector funding isn't sufficient is that nobody is doing it: the amount of research into antibiotics is pitiful. The work in vaccines for malaria, etc. too: the incentive for the private sector is insufficient. Anitibiotics pay cents, or a few dollars, for a dose. Anti-MS drugs or proposed anti-alzheimers pay 30-50 k$ per year. Big pharma is biased towards drugs that pay well, not the ones society needs.
What projects the government does (e.g. just law enforcement, build roads, healthcare, etc) are obviously a political choice. Different groups and people will have opinions on this. What I'm arguing is that there are tasks: defence (eg. of a town/ nation), building railroads, etc. that are beyond the scope of individuals or even corporations, and that these get done by government.
The projects I listed above are science projects targeted in the EU by the "Horizon 2020" funding: targets that the EU has chosen to concentrate on with an 80 billion Euro budget. They are R&D goals that effectively are not being done by private enterprise, but are societally necessary. Science in the US has taken a backstep in terms of funding recently, so I don't know the relative funding levels in the US, but from all i've seen funding of these goals in the private sector (e.g.non governmental funded) is negligible.
Really? Are you serious? There's an economic downturn. The government is having trouble funding programs. And the fact that they want to cut spending to a program that doesn't have immediate and clearly predictable economic benefit is because they're anti-intellectual?
It seems to me far more likely that the government just doesn't have the money. But then, I don't own a tinfoil hat, so I'm sure I'm just being brainwashed by their mind-control rays.
No, it isn't. In the UK the ratio of national debt to GNP is a fraction of what it used to be in the 1950s and 1960s. The major infrastructure investments were made then, science bloomed. In the US, US bond rates are negative: people are paying the government to take their money.
Austerity right now is an ideological choice: they are deliberately starving the public sector. In the UK at least the Tories have the belief that this will lead to all these workers being hired by the newly-freed private sector. It simply isn't happening.
We do a bunch of research of societal importance that needs to be done, but does not get done by private enterprise as it does not benefit anyone in particular enough.
e.g. Antibiotics. No research in antibiotics by big pharma. Not cost-effective. But we're living on borrowed time as we have no more antibiotics in the arsenal that haven't been adapted to _somewhere_. Food. The "green revolution" of the 1960s-1970s delivered cheap, abundant food. Now development of new breeds is miniscule. Why should Cargill, etc. pay to lower the price of their products? but if we don't do the research now, there will be not enough to feed people in the 2030s onwards. Anti-senescence / arthrtitis / dementia, etc: with extending life expectancy, we can't afford to have our generation retiring at 65 and living to 100. So I'll have to work when I'm 70 or 80. Ok, but will I be able to? Who's funding the research?
Practically the whole _point_ of government is to do things on a larger level than we (as individuals) can do, or as (profit-making) corporations care to do. Right now, the Right relies on the future security of the world being funded out of the charity of a few billionaires (the Gates foundation, etc), so that they can avoid paying tax...
The funny thing is, even if the US cut 100% of that spending overnight, it still wouldn't make up the deficit. Military spending, while it certainly doesn't help, is not the biggest problem with US spending. Not even close.
Right now, yields on government bonds are negative out to 20 years. People are paying to lend the US government money.
Given high unemployment, decaying infrastructure and free money, the most sensible thing to do right now is borrow and build. The deficit is not the problem. Paying the interest on government debt is what matters.
Note: Earth has about 0.1 - 0.01 % water by mass (depending on how much water you think there is in the mantle). Compared to the outer solar system (typically 50%) it's not _that_ massive.
My reply had been to the GP, about union problems.
Anyway, if they insist on stack ranking, then hire (or transfer) someone in to be the bottom of the pile. Game theory is the only way to play silly games.
A previous boss of mine (in IT, an American employer) did something like this. Played internal politics and "transferred" someone from another group in the company (we shared our building with multiple groups from the same multinational). It was understood that the company would play silly games like this, and the person in question kept working for group B, but technically belonged to our cost centre, and was there as ballast to be made redundant when the 10% chop came around. He knew it, and was already working on his plan B (planning his own company, I believe, which would be ready the moment he got his redundancy money).
Seriously. Any powerbase will be abused. Unions are democratic (or at least are supposed to be) representatives of their members. You don't get to stand back and do nothing, and pretend the unions doing silly things aren't you're fault or you're problem.
All those condoms make banana sex unproductive, so they've been selected for a means of reproduction that is productive under the conditions imposed on them by their human predators.
All commercially-grown bananas (and the overwhelming majority worldwide) are clones from a single tree, so yes, those bananas are already sexually unproductive...
It depends on the state. The North Carolina legislature, for example, has just thrown out any climate models that don't solely rely on historical data.
Not quite: they are ignoring all evidence of acceleration of sea-level climate rise. The sea-level rise has been accelerating, and expected by nearly all researchers to continue to do so (and models). The legislature has decided it would be more convenient if it didn't, and is dismissing all research that gives more than 15 inches of sea-level rise in 100 years (current consensus is 1 meter). All the models are validated by historical data, and hence "rely" on it (and physics).
NASA is still doing outstanding science with amazing teams. Just because the shuttles and ISS are a bit of a debacle hardly means NASA is in 'decay'. Please stop spreading this nonsense.
Only 4 missions currently planned for the future... (Interestingly, where is JWST?)
The current missions looks impressive, until you discount "Hurricanes" and "Ice Bridge", etc. which aren't space missions in themselves, and Juno, which I believe is gone...
The KAL-007 tragedy is unlikely to have been pilot error.
Pilots are in many countries rewarded for saving the airline money: prinicipally by picking good routes and saving fuel (about the only performance incentive available to pilots). This was true of JAL at the time. A practice had developed of "accidentally" traversing USSR, etc. airspace, taking a shortcut to save fuel. JAL 747 pilots had developed a reputation for doing this.
It was believed that the US had spotted this trend, and was using it to sneak reconnaissance flights over the area by piggy-backing them on commercial "flight routes" and timetables: flying ELINT aircraft with commercial tags.
The Russians now believed that JAL-007 was really a US elint aircraft. They screamed blue murder over the airwaves, warning the flight that they would shoot. JAL-007 had its radio turned off, so that it could claim it was "accidentally" in Russian airspace, and so missed the warnings.
Hence the tragedy.
A lot of this kind of subterfuge happened during the cold war.
The GP referred to Fortran and C as well as python.
Increasingly we're seeing lots of legacy code (C / C++ / Fortran) wrapped in Python. People using Python for simplicity and expressiveness, dropping to C , etc. for the heavy lifting. This is especially true in the sciences (in HPC, for example).
Trying to avoid the language flamewar, there are distinct advantages in a small number of interoperable languages like this. If I'm to try a new language, I want to avoid having to rewrite the world in it. I might convince my colleagues to use my code if they can interop. from the language they are already using, like C/C++ or Python.
No; theories are never proven, they can only be disproven (in science. Theorems in math are a different matter).
In science we divide things into theories and facts: we observe and measure the facts, and derive theories to explain them. Theories never become fact.
E.g We have the fact of gravity, the observations that the Earth is round(ish). We have theories to explain these. We have Einsteins theory of general relativity to explain gravity.
For evolution, we have the observed facts of evolution (you can see evolution in front of your eyes in a hospital pathology lab. Look at generations of bacteria in a day... ). We have the Darwinian Theory of Natural Selection to explain it.
Slashdot Mirror
Why? you can have clean rivers in Urban areas if you try.
For example, we now have trout returning to two main rivers in Dublin, Ireland (the Liffey and the Tolka, I believe).
Increasingly people are swimming (again?) in urban rivers in Europe. can be done.
Maybe not?
Methane on its own doesn't have a smell. For safety, another gas like methanethiol is typically added, so that people can detect leaks.
Perhaps these leaks are pure methane?
Wrong way round, folks.
Guess who lobbied to ensure the US weather data was made "public" (ie. available to Accuweather, local TV networks, etc.)?
There is a nice little story in Ireland about the wren being the king of birds. All the birds got together and had a competition to see who was best.
They decided the matter by a seeing who could fly the highest. The Eagle thought it would win easily, but when it got as high as it could, the little wren, which had been sitting on the eagles shoulder, jumped a foot higher and won.
Similarly with public and private weather services. The vast bulk of the work is done by the public services - building expensive
satellites, observational networks, computer model development, etc. The results are then made public, and the private sector squeezes
some added value out (by adding better graphics, presentation, etc.) and sells the product.
Now if you can do this and make money selling a product people want, fine. But don't kid anybody that the private sector
is a drop-in replacement and better than the public sector one.
Estimates are it takes 1-5 M/ mile of coastline to evacuate before a hurricane.
Improved observations from the 1970s cut the estimates for where a hurricane will make landfall from ~300miles to ~50 miles radius,
(24 hours out, I think; I'm not an American, but remembering numbers quoted from a US colleague in the business).
So, better forecasts cut the cost of evacuating from a hurricane by ~100 Million a time, easy to save 12 gigabucks a decade.
Yes, we do measure this. Every met service I know of (e.g. NOAA) has to explain its budget.
I'm not sure of the US numbers, but in the UK the return on investment in meteorology is ~x11 fold, according to external auditors.
Most reliable? If you're talking about Fox News, I think you are referring to the 'fair and balanced' coverage Fox News frequently advertises. Fox isn't claiming to be any more 'reliable' for reporting news
If Fox News was reliably bad, you could simply take their headlines and invert them to find out the truth. In order to be completely useless it actually has to get things right occasionally.
Toleration of people and their rights to autonomy.
I'm intolerant of _actions_, because these impinge on other people, and hence need to be justified.
Ideas: no. The world is full of bad ideas, many of which I've had myself. We need to examine and criticize ideas, examine their consequences, etc. No ideas (such as religions) get a free ride. Having held many bad ideas in the past, I don't hold that against people. We're all seeking after truth and a better life.
As for "general intolerance of all things Southern", the key point you're looking for is prejudice: treat people as individuals, look for their humanity, rather than one of a class. Once you're willing to dismiss people for being racists/black/jew, that way lies the ovens.
Because, as stated by Google, it isn't.
I will use Google and get / give a degraded service in Privacy mode by giving them less information, possibly getting more ads from Google and a less-targeted response.
With Google, the idea (the implicit "contract") was that your data was available and used by Google for targetted advertising, but not passed to third parties. I don't mind Google knowing of my fondness for Twinkies, and my purchasing of them, but I _do_ mind if my health insurer knows, for example.
Easy, Potato came before Sarge :-)
But Debian helps answer the original question: when Debian was first being developed, the pre-stable code was in a directory on an ftp site labelled "1.0". Unfortunately people didn't realise it wasn't ready yet, and got burned.
So after this, Debian came up with the naming system, with "Buzz" being the first. When it was ready for release, a symlink
1.1 -> buzz was added, and Debian 1.1 was born.
Yet people prefer the names.
Part of the reason names are preferable is that an OS consists of components that will be updated-in-time. Its not a static piece of software, but a "release" you "track". If you're OS is "Debian squeeze" then when Debian squeeze is updated with fixes, it remains "squeeze", (but a precise version number may be updated).
Mommy, what did they do in Sodom that was sinful?
They taxed the job creators.
No, of course everybody remembers it was greed:
New International Version (©1984)
"'Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.
Exekiel 16:49.
Look at why antibiotics and vaccines) aren't interesting to drug makers. They're short term usage, mostly used in the poorer parts of the world, subject to obsolescence from disease evolution, and simply not needed in the case of antibiotics (or even will be considered for use) unless current cheap antibiotics fail. Even though people do need them and would be willing to pay for good new antibiotics, the return to be had simply doesn't justify the cost of developing the drug.
Here, the EU is throwing billions at a problem (ineffectually IMHO) that could be solved and solved better by lower thresholds to drug testing and use. This research is a kludge for patching over a problem from bad regulation of medical drugs (and also the risk adverse nature of modern medicine where drugs and treatments are prescribed which aren't needed, but which cover the doctor's ass).
I strongly disagree. Pharma is not interested in developing antibiotics because there is no profit. The problem is not thresholds for drug testing; its time. and antibiotics and vaccines are not needed "just in poorer countries". They are needed everywhere, now. (or antibiotics: on demand). We've only just dodged the bullet several times: we came extremely close to a global pandemic with SARS, but were lucky in how it spread. Tuberculosis, etc. threaten now.
It takes time to develop and produce the drugs. This isn't simply a matter of bureaucracy; even with flu vaccines, which we had for bird flu, would take 12-24 months of global production to get made and distributed if it hit tomorrow. But, short of customers, they will not be made. Hence getting them ready is a societal need that the profit motive won't directly solve.
Similarly with food: we don't have the strains of drought-resistant wheat, etc. to feed 12-15 billion people. Developing them involves known techniques that will simply take years to get sufficient seed stock, and work hasn't started yet. Again, time: we can't afford to wait until people are starving and willing to pay to start doing the necessary research.
That research has no guaranteed outcome is no just reason for not doing it. "It may fail" is an argument for a company or individual; on a societal or governmental level it translates to "We decided to let billions starve to death because we might not succeed". Thats not justifiable parsimony with tax money: its genocide.
So what evidence is there that the EU can do better? Obviously, they can spend more, but what makes you think the mere act of spending is going to generate results?
Let me put it this way. I foresee in about five to ten years, a series of serious, introspective articles talking about the problems of Horizon 2020 and how the EU didn't quite get any newsworthy science out of the effort. Defenders will speak of the difficulty of science and how while the program didn't actually generate anything of note, they did make a lot of progress. Maybe they'll dole out the pablum about how scientific progress doesn't bring immediate returns, ignoring that that wasn't a problem with scientific efforts before the modern era of public funding.
I'm arguing that govt (In this case, the EU, which I know the details of better) is funding research that society needs and the privately-funded research is not doing. The Horizon2020 project covers the period 2013-2020, and has set 7 goals, of which I listed 3 as examples, for which we (humanity) are simply not doing what we need to, to survive as civilisation: eg. avoid pandemics. We are coasting on the results of previous decades.
My argument is about the funding of research to make it happen. Note that it is not an argument over whether it is done in the public or private sector: private industry can bid in Europe for Horizon2020 funds (or its current equivalent, "Framework 7", the current funding project) as well as public sector scientists in academia, etc.
The evidence that private sector funding isn't sufficient is that nobody is doing it: the amount of research into antibiotics is pitiful. The work in vaccines for malaria, etc. too: the incentive for the private sector is insufficient. Anitibiotics pay cents, or a few dollars, for a dose. Anti-MS drugs or proposed anti-alzheimers pay 30-50 k$ per year. Big pharma is biased towards drugs that pay well, not the ones society needs.
What projects the government does (e.g. just law enforcement, build roads, healthcare, etc) are obviously a political choice. Different groups and people will have opinions on this. What I'm arguing is that there are tasks: defence (eg. of a town/ nation), building railroads, etc. that are beyond the scope of individuals or even corporations, and that these get done by government.
The projects I listed above are science projects targeted in the EU by the "Horizon 2020" funding: targets that the EU has chosen to concentrate on with an 80 billion Euro budget. They are R&D goals that effectively are not being done by private enterprise, but are societally necessary. Science in the US has taken a backstep in terms of funding recently, so I don't know the relative funding levels in the US, but from all i've seen funding of these goals in the private sector (e.g.non governmental funded) is negligible.
Really? Are you serious? There's an economic downturn. The government is having trouble funding programs. And the fact that they want to cut spending to a program that doesn't have immediate and clearly predictable economic benefit is because they're anti-intellectual?
It seems to me far more likely that the government just doesn't have the money. But then, I don't own a tinfoil hat, so I'm sure I'm just being brainwashed by their mind-control rays.
No, it isn't. In the UK the ratio of national debt to GNP is a fraction of what it used to be in the 1950s and 1960s. The major infrastructure investments were made then, science bloomed. In the US, US bond rates are negative: people are paying the government to take their money.
Austerity right now is an ideological choice: they are deliberately starving the public sector.
In the UK at least the Tories have the belief that this will lead to all these workers being hired by the newly-freed private sector. It simply isn't happening.
We do a bunch of research of societal importance that needs to be done, but does not get done by private enterprise as it does not benefit anyone in particular enough.
e.g. Antibiotics. No research in antibiotics by big pharma. Not cost-effective. But we're living on borrowed time as we have no more antibiotics in the arsenal that haven't been adapted to _somewhere_.
Food. The "green revolution" of the 1960s-1970s delivered cheap, abundant food. Now development of new breeds is miniscule. Why should Cargill, etc. pay to lower the price of their products? but if we don't do the research now, there will be not enough to feed people in the 2030s onwards.
Anti-senescence / arthrtitis / dementia, etc: with extending life expectancy, we can't afford to have our generation retiring at 65 and living to 100. So I'll have to work when I'm 70 or 80. Ok, but will I be able to? Who's funding the research?
Practically the whole _point_ of government is to do things on a larger level than we (as individuals) can do, or as (profit-making) corporations care to do. Right now, the Right relies on the future security of the world being funded out of the charity of a few billionaires (the Gates foundation, etc), so that they can avoid paying tax ...
Nope, they'll get well paid jobs doing this for $BIG_CORP or $GOVT.
The funny thing is, even if the US cut 100% of that spending overnight, it still wouldn't make up the deficit. Military spending, while it certainly doesn't help, is not the biggest problem with US spending. Not even close.
Right now, yields on government bonds are negative out to 20 years. People are paying to lend the US government money.
Given high unemployment, decaying infrastructure and free money, the most sensible thing to do right now is borrow and build.
The deficit is not the problem. Paying the interest on government debt is what matters.
Some people call it gravity.
Note: Earth has about 0.1 - 0.01 % water by mass (depending on how much water you think there is in the mantle). Compared to the outer solar system (typically 50%) it's not _that_ massive.
My reply had been to the GP, about union problems.
Anyway, if they insist on stack ranking, then hire (or transfer) someone in to be the bottom of the pile. Game theory is the only way to play silly games.
A previous boss of mine (in IT, an American employer) did something like this. Played internal politics and "transferred" someone from another group in the company (we shared our building with multiple groups from the same multinational). It was understood that the company would play silly games like this, and the person in question kept working for group B, but technically belonged to our cost centre, and was there as ballast to be made redundant when the 10% chop came around. He knew it, and was already working on his plan B (planning his own company, I believe, which would be ready the moment he got his redundancy money).
Get involved in the Union.
Seriously. Any powerbase will be abused.
Unions are democratic (or at least are supposed to be) representatives of their members. You don't get to stand back and do nothing, and pretend the unions doing silly things aren't you're fault or you're problem.
All those condoms make banana sex unproductive, so they've been selected for a means of reproduction that is productive under the conditions imposed on them by their human predators.
All commercially-grown bananas (and the overwhelming majority worldwide) are clones from a single tree, so yes, those bananas are already sexually unproductive ...
It depends on the state. The North Carolina legislature, for example, has just thrown out any climate models that don't solely rely on historical data.
Not quite: they are ignoring all evidence of acceleration of sea-level climate rise. The sea-level rise has been accelerating, and expected by nearly all researchers to continue to do so (and models). The legislature has decided it would be more convenient if it didn't, and is dismissing all research that gives more than 15 inches of sea-level rise in 100 years (current consensus is 1 meter).
All the models are validated by historical data, and hence "rely" on it (and physics).
NASA is still doing outstanding science with amazing teams. Just because the shuttles and ISS are a bit of a debacle hardly means NASA is in 'decay'. Please stop spreading this nonsense.
Current missions:
http://www.nasa.gov/missions/current/index.html
Future missions:
http://www.nasa.gov/missions/future/index.html
Look at all that political decay.
Is this satire? I can't be sure.
Only 4 missions currently planned for the future ...
(Interestingly, where is JWST?)
The current missions looks impressive, until you discount "Hurricanes" and "Ice Bridge", etc. which aren't space missions in themselves, and Juno, which I believe is gone ...
The KAL-007 tragedy is unlikely to have been pilot error.
Pilots are in many countries rewarded for saving the airline money: prinicipally by picking good routes and saving fuel (about the only performance incentive available to pilots). This was true of JAL at the time.
A practice had developed of "accidentally" traversing USSR, etc. airspace, taking a shortcut to save fuel.
JAL 747 pilots had developed a reputation for doing this.
It was believed that the US had spotted this trend, and was using it to sneak reconnaissance flights over the area by piggy-backing them on commercial "flight routes" and timetables: flying ELINT aircraft with commercial tags.
The Russians now believed that JAL-007 was really a US elint aircraft. They screamed blue murder over the airwaves, warning the flight that they would shoot. JAL-007 had its radio turned off, so that it could claim it was "accidentally" in Russian airspace, and so missed the warnings.
Hence the tragedy.
A lot of this kind of subterfuge happened during the cold war.
The GP referred to Fortran and C as well as python.
Increasingly we're seeing lots of legacy code (C / C++ / Fortran) wrapped in Python. People using Python for simplicity and expressiveness, dropping to C , etc. for the heavy lifting. This is especially true in the sciences (in HPC, for example).
Trying to avoid the language flamewar, there are distinct advantages in a small number of interoperable languages like this.
If I'm to try a new language, I want to avoid having to rewrite the world in it. I might convince my colleagues to use my code if they can interop. from the language they are already using, like C/C++ or Python.
No; theories are never proven, they can only be disproven (in science. Theorems in math are a different matter).
In science we divide things into theories and facts: we observe and measure the facts, and derive theories to explain them.
Theories never become fact.
E.g We have the fact of gravity, the observations that the Earth is round(ish). We have theories to explain these.
We have Einsteins theory of general relativity to explain gravity.
For evolution, we have the observed facts of evolution (you can see evolution in front of your eyes in a hospital pathology lab. Look at generations of bacteria in a day ... ). We have the Darwinian Theory of Natural Selection to explain it.