And, of course, you forgot a major reason that states support marriage, and that is to produce little people that will in the future pay taxes and support old people.
I don't really see the issue with "gay marriage", but some of the debates have be ludicrous. On at least one occasion, an "anti" activist states that they had no problem with legal civil partnerships between gay couples (ummmm, legally that IS marriage). The "pro" activist lost it. The label seems at least as important as any legal rights to these people.
The use of the petition to harass people who signed it is sinister and very anti-democratic, and whoever is doing it should be prosecuted.
I agree that the hypothesis is not disproven, which of course, means it is not proven. I also agree that to do nothing is dangerous.
In that case, an economist would seem to be one of the people you'd WANT to be looking at what we can afford to spend on the problem, but that is a digression. According to the summary, the report was quaushed because
[It] warned against making hasty 'decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data.'
Which is a not unreasonable position. The response was pretty disquieting:
In an e-mail message (pdf) to a staff researcher on March 17, the EPA official wrote: 'The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward...and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision.'
To put this in simple English, what was said is "we've made our decision, you don't get a say, you're not helping, so bugger off". This is not a particularly scientific approach, to my mind.
The employee was also ordered not to 'have any direct communication' with anyone outside his small group at EPA on the topic of climate change, and was informed his report would not be shared with the agency group working on the topic.
This qualifies as an attempt to cover this up, or at least keep it quiet, no?
In a statement, the EPA took aim at the credentials of the report's author, Alan Carlin (BS Physics-Caltech, PhD Econ-MIT), describing him as 'not a scientist.
Um, I believe CalTech and MIT have quite high prestige associated with them, correct me if I'm wrong? Why isn't he a scientist? Whatever your views on Economics, Physics is certainly a science..
Except, of course, that the models that predict the results of global warming have been likened to astrology by experts. I.E. may eventually lead to real world usefulness, but right now are closer to superstition.
It's a problem with testing though, and why beta-testing is so important. The "wow-factor" is a known problem in HCI, and will override usability concerns for a time.
So testing can be a problem. The solution? Bitter bastards, imo:)
There's nothing exceptionally wrong with Java as a starting language
Yes, there is. It insulates the student from some concepts that are important and because it's so aggressively object orientated even the standard "Hello World" program requires quite a bit of glossing over by the teacher.
As a result, it tends to get waved away as "magic" or "this will be explained later" but there's so much waved away that the students get disconnected. For instance, to simply output a line to a command line in Java you're looking at System.out.println("output"); whereas with c++ (for instance) you have cout << "output" << endl; As someone who's teaching this stuff, the second is easier to explain in detail and doesn't rely on saying "don't worry what System.out is".
The other prime example when teaching object orientation is garbage collecting. Students who learn in Java are significantly more difficult to teach about dynamic memory and the necessity of cleaning up after themselves than those who've learned in other languages that don't abstract this away. It's much easier to switch from C/C++ to Java than the other way around.
The standard way of teaching basic programming is procedural, then functional, then object orientated then onwards. Using Java to teach in that cycle is nuts. How useful that cycle IS is another question, of course:)
You are partially correct. That's why many institutions use "number of times cited (by authors that are not you, or in your research group)" as the primary metric now.
This at least gives an indication as to the quality of your publications - if people are citing them, they tend to be more relevant
Here's another version of that graph... with additional data. It shows something interesting, I feel.
Up to 94% of Arctic melt is due to dirty snow caused by soot changing it's albedo, rather than CO2 related warming, according the researchers at University of California and a certain Dr. Hansen[PDF warning].
The Antarctic and the Arctic are both up on last years ice, in the case of the Arctic by 10% (according to the NSIDC).
Is it possible that the melting in the Arctic is more to do with other emissions than CO2? After all, the majority of the worlds industry is in the northern hemisphere. I would think it is.
The Northern Passage, by the way, has been navigated at least 100 times since the start of the century, and in 1922 there was open sailing very close to the North Pole [PDF warning]. Submarines regularly surface there, too. 2007 had a shocking decrease in the amount of ice at the pole, definitely. But we cannot be certain WHY.
"idle.slashdot.org: an idea whose time still hasn't come" These post still aren't funny. They're just annoying, puerile and against the spirit of slashdot.
That's not entirely true. The first one made me laugh. I mean
Finally, I want a written promise that you will never do this to me or anyone else again. If you do not meet these demands in 10 business days, I will be forced to take drastic action, including but not limited to: emailing everyone I know to tell them of how you treat innocent users or reading my news else where. Your move asshole!
Priceless. Nerd stereotypes everywhere have been replaced by this shining example of what living in your mothers basement and never meeting a girl can do to you:)
I read the response from RealClimate.org, and I have to say that while the article itself was just ad hominem attacks, the postings below it contained useful information. I found it interesting that Monckton managed to assemble what at first glance is a list of plausible objections, these just doesn't stand up on investigation. I was especially interested that most of his references didn't support his assertions - without the time to peruse them in detail this had escaped me (and, I suspect, many others)
Again, duh. Pretty much every model in the world requires its parameters to be calibrated from data; you can pretty much never calculate anything from first principles, unless you're talking particle physics. That doesn't mean that models aren't predictive. The question is whether you can adjust the parameters to reproduce the observed climate without substantial input from anthropogenic forcings, and the answer is no.
Nevertheless, it is rarely reported that a lot of the forcings introduced are guesswork to fit the past climate data and that there is more than one forcing profile that can fit that data. Because this is skipped it's really easy to make the results look dodgy.
That's not a real journal, it's an un-peer reviewed newsletter, and the paper was written by a journalist, not a scientist.
So they've amended their disclaimer to note. When I read it, that disclaimer did NOT note that it was not the policy of APS to publish without peer review of some sort.
It's another weakness of the global warming side that any arguments against them tend to be ridiculed rather than rationally refuted. The response given at realclimate.org is a good example of this. Thankfully, some of the people responding to the article took the time to address the issues raised. To the non-expert, on casual reading, the paper looks convincing. Rather than say "Oh, but he's a journalist" a more detailed response might be appropriate. A high handed attitude only puts peoples backs up.
Which just goes to prove that having the job title "scientist" is no indication that you have the slightest clue about the climate. Point me to the research of a serious climatologist that believes this, and I'll read it with interest. Papers by people from outside that specific field - not interested! (hey, I'm a "computer scientist", would you like to read my paper about psychology?)
This might seem like a fair point but it isn't. Lets look at the scientists. I'm neutral on this, but I dislike the hysteria that seems to have gathered around each side. And that of the people predicting climate disaster now many are the same ones that predicted climate disaster back in the '70's, but the other way (ice-age).
My major problem with this is that "climatology" is a difficult field. It combines geology, meteorology, atmospheric research, marine research and a few others. But by and large, the doomsday predictions are coming from a group that are climate modellers. These people build up computer models of the climate and tune them using data from the past. The models are then used to attempt to predict the future of the climate.
And they're all dead wrong. The data is really spotty until 50 years or so ago so there's no idea how accurate they are. None of them are predictive. And none of them match the spotty historical data without what they call "forcing" and what everyone else calls "fiddling with parameters until it looks kinda right". Building scenarios based on them is like playing with lego, you tend to end up with what you were looking for.
Some highlights (emphasis mine although it's all interesting):
It is of no little significance that the IPCC's value for the coefficient in the CO2 forcing equation depends on only one paper in the literature; its values for the feedbacks that it believes account for two-thirds of humankind's effect on global temperatures are likewise taken from only one paper; and that its implicit value of the crucial parameter K depends upon only two papers, one of which had been written by a lead author of the chapter in question, and neither of which provides any theoretical or empirical justification for a value as high as that which the IPCC adopted.
He goes on - the portion on how the models are verified is interesting
The point of this post is: hysteria solves nothing. We need to calmly move forward with rational solutions to the pollution that is caused by people, not suggest incredibly radical measures that are simply not going to be accepted by any but the most lunatic fringe. Dismissing valid objections with supporting evidence just because it doesn't say "Climate Modeller" on a business card is foolish.
The truth is that the GP has a point - word processing tends to focus on presentation over content. It's very easy to get caught in a cycle of playing with layout and not worry about content. The same is true of layout web-style, (x)html+css because although it separates the content from the presentation to some extent it's still very easy to get caught up in minor changes (I find that image placement in either web-based or word processor based layout is an endless source of distraction)
For me, TeX (well, more specifically, LaTeX) does this separation in a more cognitively efficient manner, allowing me to actually focus on writing the content. The only breaks come with specific layouts like tables and lists, and you can always separate those tasks by writing them in text and coming back and using the commands later. Also, it produces very pretty output.
I agree entirely with this, if you want to be anal about exact positions of images and the like, then use something else. Otherwise, make sure the image is good quality and tell it what size you want it to be. If you're upset about typesetting, my mind boggles!
On windows, I use TeXnicCentre as an environment for working with LaTeX (MiKTeX). It automates things like getting packages that you don't already have from CTAN and has menu options for symbols that you don't remember the codes for. It also gives support when you're typing, like suggestions for autocompletion which is dead handy.
For precise typesetting I've never found anything better. For working with large documents, in my opinion you'd want to be insane using anything else. I'll keep reading though, I'd be interested in any alternatives that come up!
I laughed at the above, but the post referred to makes a serious point.
The Nicene convention was basically a bullying by the Roman Emperor of the existing hierarchy into accepting those books into the bible that supported his government - only four books were retained out of what were a LOT of books in the bible.
People were less amenable to control (apparently) following the original teachings of Jesus so the books that were left tended to focus more on punishment for sinners and hell. Depressing, but predictable, I guess.
The guy does state that he'd like to but he has to clean the source a little first. No doubt it was beaten together a little:) The wonders of postgraduate work!
Second of all, most banana plants are grown from cuttings - without the reproduction mutations resistant to these fungal infections are simply not happening on any kind of scale. "The problem is that the banana we eat is a seedless, sterile article which could slip the way of its predecessor which was wiped out by blight half a century ago."
They're sequencing the genome of the bananas eaten in africa (which HAVE seeds) but there are problems because people aren't interested in the GM varieties, saying they taste more like apple (no bad thing to me)
No, 5 years tops, 4 years preferably. Patents came around a long, long time ago, when things where much, much slower. If you cant ship a product and make it worth your while in 4 years, your product sucks or your bussines skills are lacking. Or you're working in an industry (like pharmaceutical) where getting a new drug to market can, and often does, take 10 years (or more) of regulation and clinical trials. And you have to patent it before the trials begin.
Or you could have serious mass production issues with fine tolerances and the like, although you were able to build a working prototype (see the A380 or the Dreamliner for good examples of this).
So maybe there shouldn't be a blanket expiration time.
IP should be limited by category - pharmaceuticals should be "from the end of regulatory intervention", for instance.
Does the meat inside suddenly lose its decision making capabilities if it is, let us say, a few hundred meters away? Of course not, but the heightened survival reflexes that are conditioned by training would probably be very badly affected. Reaction time in a dangerous situation is generally lower.
Also, no matter how many cameras are on a ROV you don't get the same effect as you do from eyes - they've evolved to act as excellent detectors with wide field of vision and massive processing capacity.
In short, a remotely piloted anything is nowhere near as effective as a person in a ground combat situation.
And so far as the human body's flexibility is concerned, that argument goes out the window once you encase that body in what is to all purposes a ROV, except that the operator is tucked into it like spam in a can. If the suit does not protect the wearer, I can only imagine it makes him less mobile and more vulnerable. Dunno why I bother responding to people who obviously have not RTFA. It's not encasing anything. It's a set of supports with the power to augment what the wearer is doing. The processing power is used to figure out very quickly what its wearer is doing and to add extra power to that. While I'm sure the first versions will be a little clunky, and the manufacturers have admitted that there is a power problem, it's already good enough to be worth a further look.
Because the meat inside gives it decision making capabilities that cannot be matched by AI either now or in the foreseeable future.
Also because the human body is remarkably flexible in its movement and our brains are evolved to be quite good at this type of movement. An augmentation system doesn't have to necessarily PROTECT the wearer - that's what armour is for. It's about enhancing the natural strength of the soldier, who is still one of the most effective weapons in nearly all combat situations. The ability to lift heavier objects (weapons, for instance), and presumably to throw things like grenades further will be useful.
I did find it amusing that the first uses are hoped to cause "fewer injuries when soldiers need to lift heavy weights or move objects around repeatedly". Not much of a combat objective!
Was interesting - apparently it turns out that it's been there since the Sparse Memory Model was implemented but had never tripped before.
There was no range check on memory_present() so if you called it with a start/end range outside outside the scope of MAX_PHYSMEM_BITS it would overwrite areas of memory causing very weird and random effects during boot. Tracking it down was apparently a major effort by a good few people because the effects were so random.
Slashdot Mirror
And, of course, you forgot a major reason that states support marriage, and that is to produce little people that will in the future pay taxes and support old people.
I don't really see the issue with "gay marriage", but some of the debates have be ludicrous. On at least one occasion, an "anti" activist states that they had no problem with legal civil partnerships between gay couples (ummmm, legally that IS marriage). The "pro" activist lost it. The label seems at least as important as any legal rights to these people.
The use of the petition to harass people who signed it is sinister and very anti-democratic, and whoever is doing it should be prosecuted.
iSpeed, obviously, or Hyperdrive 2.0
I agree that the hypothesis is not disproven, which of course, means it is not proven. I also agree that to do nothing is dangerous.
In that case, an economist would seem to be one of the people you'd WANT to be looking at what we can afford to spend on the problem, but that is a digression. According to the summary, the report was quaushed because
[It] warned against making hasty 'decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data.'
Which is a not unreasonable position. The response was pretty disquieting:
In an e-mail message (pdf) to a staff researcher on March 17, the EPA official wrote: 'The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward...and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision.'
To put this in simple English, what was said is "we've made our decision, you don't get a say, you're not helping, so bugger off". This is not a particularly scientific approach, to my mind.
The employee was also ordered not to 'have any direct communication' with anyone outside his small group at EPA on the topic of climate change, and was informed his report would not be shared with the agency group working on the topic.
This qualifies as an attempt to cover this up, or at least keep it quiet, no?
In a statement, the EPA took aim at the credentials of the report's author, Alan Carlin (BS Physics-Caltech, PhD Econ-MIT), describing him as 'not a scientist.
Um, I believe CalTech and MIT have quite high prestige associated with them, correct me if I'm wrong? Why isn't he a scientist? Whatever your views on Economics, Physics is certainly a science..
Except, of course, that the models that predict the results of global warming have been likened to astrology by experts. I.E. may eventually lead to real world usefulness, but right now are closer to superstition.
It's a problem with testing though, and why beta-testing is so important. The "wow-factor" is a known problem in HCI, and will override usability concerns for a time.
So testing can be a problem. The solution? Bitter bastards, imo :)
There's nothing exceptionally wrong with Java as a starting language
Yes, there is. It insulates the student from some concepts that are important and because it's so aggressively object orientated even the standard "Hello World" program requires quite a bit of glossing over by the teacher.
As a result, it tends to get waved away as "magic" or "this will be explained later" but there's so much waved away that the students get disconnected. For instance, to simply output a line to a command line in Java you're looking at
System.out.println("output");
whereas with c++ (for instance) you have
cout << "output" << endl;
As someone who's teaching this stuff, the second is easier to explain in detail and doesn't rely on saying "don't worry what System.out is".
The other prime example when teaching object orientation is garbage collecting. Students who learn in Java are significantly more difficult to teach about dynamic memory and the necessity of cleaning up after themselves than those who've learned in other languages that don't abstract this away. It's much easier to switch from C/C++ to Java than the other way around.
The standard way of teaching basic programming is procedural, then functional, then object orientated then onwards. Using Java to teach in that cycle is nuts. How useful that cycle IS is another question, of course :)
I do.
I found Quicksilver occasionally hard going, but the Confusion and System of the World were both good.
Then I read them again, and enjoyed them even more. They are a genuinely fanstastic second read. I think Quicksilver is now my favourite of them.
You are partially correct. That's why many institutions use "number of times cited (by authors that are not you, or in your research group)" as the primary metric now.
This at least gives an indication as to the quality of your publications - if people are citing them, they tend to be more relevant
"And when the ice-age comes, all the CO2 emitting creatures will die!"
Hey, absolutely everything causes cancer (according to the Sun. This is just one of my favourite ridiculous headlines).
You want him free? Done and Done.
No, now you have to pay for him
Here's another version of that graph... with additional data. It shows something interesting, I feel.
Up to 94% of Arctic melt is due to dirty snow caused by soot changing it's albedo, rather than CO2 related warming, according the researchers at University of California and a certain Dr. Hansen[PDF warning].
The Antarctic and the Arctic are both up on last years ice, in the case of the Arctic by 10% (according to the NSIDC).
Is it possible that the melting in the Arctic is more to do with other emissions than CO2? After all, the majority of the worlds industry is in the northern hemisphere. I would think it is.
The Northern Passage, by the way, has been navigated at least 100 times since the start of the century, and in 1922 there was open sailing very close to the North Pole [PDF warning]. Submarines regularly surface there, too. 2007 had a shocking decrease in the amount of ice at the pole, definitely. But we cannot be certain WHY.
Even NASA acknowledge that "not all the large changes in the Arctic climate in recent years are a result of long-term trends associated with global warming".
We should still be tackling pollution, though.
"idle.slashdot.org: an idea whose time still hasn't come"
These post still aren't funny. They're just annoying, puerile and against the spirit of slashdot.
That's not entirely true. The first one made me laugh. I mean
Finally, I want a written promise that you will never do this to me or anyone else again. If you do not meet these demands in 10 business days, I will be forced to take drastic action, including but not limited to: emailing everyone I know to tell them of how you treat innocent users or reading my news else where. Your move asshole!
Priceless. Nerd stereotypes everywhere have been replaced by this shining example of what living in your mothers basement and never meeting a girl can do to you :)
(ps. Problem with the quote tags?)
I read the response from RealClimate.org, and I have to say that while the article itself was just ad hominem attacks, the postings below it contained useful information. I found it interesting that Monckton managed to assemble what at first glance is a list of plausible objections, these just doesn't stand up on investigation. I was especially interested that most of his references didn't support his assertions - without the time to peruse them in detail this had escaped me (and, I suspect, many others)
Again, duh. Pretty much every model in the world requires its parameters to be calibrated from data; you can pretty much never calculate anything from first principles, unless you're talking particle physics. That doesn't mean that models aren't predictive. The question is whether you can adjust the parameters to reproduce the observed climate without substantial input from anthropogenic forcings, and the answer is no.
Nevertheless, it is rarely reported that a lot of the forcings introduced are guesswork to fit the past climate data and that there is more than one forcing profile that can fit that data. Because this is skipped it's really easy to make the results look dodgy.
That's not a real journal, it's an un-peer reviewed newsletter, and the paper was written by a journalist, not a scientist.
So they've amended their disclaimer to note. When I read it, that disclaimer did NOT note that it was not the policy of APS to publish without peer review of some sort.
It's another weakness of the global warming side that any arguments against them tend to be ridiculed rather than rationally refuted. The response given at realclimate.org is a good example of this. Thankfully, some of the people responding to the article took the time to address the issues raised. To the non-expert, on casual reading, the paper looks convincing. Rather than say "Oh, but he's a journalist" a more detailed response might be appropriate. A high handed attitude only puts peoples backs up.
Which just goes to prove that having the job title "scientist" is no indication that you have the slightest clue about the climate. Point me to the research of a serious climatologist that believes this, and I'll read it with interest. Papers by people from outside that specific field - not interested! (hey, I'm a "computer scientist", would you like to read my paper about psychology?)
This might seem like a fair point but it isn't. Lets look at the scientists. I'm neutral on this, but I dislike the hysteria that seems to have gathered around each side. And that of the people predicting climate disaster now many are the same ones that predicted climate disaster back in the '70's, but the other way (ice-age).
My major problem with this is that "climatology" is a difficult field. It combines geology, meteorology, atmospheric research, marine research and a few others. But by and large, the doomsday predictions are coming from a group that are climate modellers. These people build up computer models of the climate and tune them using data from the past. The models are then used to attempt to predict the future of the climate.
And they're all dead wrong. The data is really spotty until 50 years or so ago so there's no idea how accurate they are. None of them are predictive. And none of them match the spotty historical data without what they call "forcing" and what everyone else calls "fiddling with parameters until it looks kinda right". Building scenarios based on them is like playing with lego, you tend to end up with what you were looking for.
Here's an interesting paper (from a real journal).
Some highlights (emphasis mine although it's all interesting):
It is of no little significance that the IPCC's value for the coefficient in the CO2 forcing equation depends on only one paper in the literature; its values for the feedbacks that it believes account for two-thirds of humankind's effect on global temperatures are likewise taken from only one paper; and that its implicit value of the crucial parameter K depends upon only two papers, one of which had been written by a lead author of the chapter in question, and neither of which provides any theoretical or empirical justification for a value as high as that which the IPCC adopted.
He goes on - the portion on how the models are verified is interesting
The point of this post is: hysteria solves nothing. We need to calmly move forward with rational solutions to the pollution that is caused by people, not suggest incredibly radical measures that are simply not going to be accepted by any but the most lunatic fringe. Dismissing valid objections with supporting evidence just because it doesn't say "Climate Modeller" on a business card is foolish.
Typical Americans, claiming that their volcano is "Super"
Heh, that's great trolling :)
The truth is that the GP has a point - word processing tends to focus on presentation over content. It's very easy to get caught in a cycle of playing with layout and not worry about content. The same is true of layout web-style, (x)html+css because although it separates the content from the presentation to some extent it's still very easy to get caught up in minor changes (I find that image placement in either web-based or word processor based layout is an endless source of distraction)
For me, TeX (well, more specifically, LaTeX) does this separation in a more cognitively efficient manner, allowing me to actually focus on writing the content. The only breaks come with specific layouts like tables and lists, and you can always separate those tasks by writing them in text and coming back and using the commands later. Also, it produces very pretty output.
I agree entirely with this, if you want to be anal about exact positions of images and the like, then use something else. Otherwise, make sure the image is good quality and tell it what size you want it to be. If you're upset about typesetting, my mind boggles!
On windows, I use TeXnicCentre as an environment for working with LaTeX (MiKTeX). It automates things like getting packages that you don't already have from CTAN and has menu options for symbols that you don't remember the codes for. It also gives support when you're typing, like suggestions for autocompletion which is dead handy.
For precise typesetting I've never found anything better. For working with large documents, in my opinion you'd want to be insane using anything else. I'll keep reading though, I'd be interested in any alternatives that come up!
I laughed at the above, but the post referred to makes a serious point.
The Nicene convention was basically a bullying by the Roman Emperor of the existing hierarchy into accepting those books into the bible that supported his government - only four books were retained out of what were a LOT of books in the bible.
People were less amenable to control (apparently) following the original teachings of Jesus so the books that were left tended to focus more on punishment for sinners and hell. Depressing, but predictable, I guess.
The guy does state that he'd like to but he has to clean the source a little first. No doubt it was beaten together a little :) The wonders of postgraduate work!
Well, first of all, here's an article from 2003 that looks like it might have been on the money
Second of all, most banana plants are grown from cuttings - without the reproduction mutations resistant to these fungal infections are simply not happening on any kind of scale. "The problem is that the banana we eat is a seedless, sterile article which could slip the way of its predecessor which was wiped out by blight half a century ago."
They're sequencing the genome of the bananas eaten in africa (which HAVE seeds) but there are problems because people aren't interested in the GM varieties, saying they taste more like apple (no bad thing to me)
Or you could have serious mass production issues with fine tolerances and the like, although you were able to build a working prototype (see the A380 or the Dreamliner for good examples of this).
So maybe there shouldn't be a blanket expiration time.
IP should be limited by category - pharmaceuticals should be "from the end of regulatory intervention", for instance.
Also, no matter how many cameras are on a ROV you don't get the same effect as you do from eyes - they've evolved to act as excellent detectors with wide field of vision and massive processing capacity.
In short, a remotely piloted anything is nowhere near as effective as a person in a ground combat situation. And so far as the human body's flexibility is concerned, that argument goes out the window once you encase that body in what is to all purposes a ROV, except that the operator is tucked into it like spam in a can. If the suit does not protect the wearer, I can only imagine it makes him less mobile and more vulnerable. Dunno why I bother responding to people who obviously have not RTFA. It's not encasing anything. It's a set of supports with the power to augment what the wearer is doing. The processing power is used to figure out very quickly what its wearer is doing and to add extra power to that. While I'm sure the first versions will be a little clunky, and the manufacturers have admitted that there is a power problem, it's already good enough to be worth a further look.
Because the meat inside gives it decision making capabilities that cannot be matched by AI either now or in the foreseeable future.
Also because the human body is remarkably flexible in its movement and our brains are evolved to be quite good at this type of movement. An augmentation system doesn't have to necessarily PROTECT the wearer - that's what armour is for. It's about enhancing the natural strength of the soldier, who is still one of the most effective weapons in nearly all combat situations. The ability to lift heavier objects (weapons, for instance), and presumably to throw things like grenades further will be useful.
I did find it amusing that the first uses are hoped to cause "fewer injuries when soldiers need to lift heavy weights or move objects around repeatedly". Not much of a combat objective!
Was interesting - apparently it turns out that it's been there since the Sparse Memory Model was implemented but had never tripped before.
There was no range check on memory_present() so if you called it with a start/end range outside outside the scope of MAX_PHYSMEM_BITS it would overwrite areas of memory causing very weird and random effects during boot. Tracking it down was apparently a major effort by a good few people because the effects were so random.
Good that it's been found and cleaned up!