"Conan Doyle might have had a bit more influence on Holmes's creativity than the violin playing."
True. And that's exactly what the article is about: that if Conan Doyle had had an ipad back in his day there probably wouldn't be any Sherlock Holmes.
"Backups are a solved problem, but lots of people get hung up on having something that backs up the data with little consideration as to why you might want that."
This and one thousand time this.
I think the root problem is a perception one: I always tell the juniors: backups are nothing, I don't give a damn about backups. The important thing is restoration.
It's marvellous how people improve with just that minor hint: that they think around the restoration process instead of the backup one.
I.e.: with regards to this issue: well, my dear PYF, what will happen when you try to restore from a corrupted ball of bits and it happens to be your single ball of bits? answer: uh! I certainly will need multiple balls of bits that once settled never go to be touched again so, now that I think about it, sync'ing over the same repo once and again doesn't cut the butter.
Re:A thousand times. (Unless online mirrors roll b
on
Too Perfect a Mirror
·
· Score: 1
"backup is _certainly_ a critical part of source control"
Well, no, it isn't. Backup and version control certainly share some attributes: a history line, the ability to extract snapshots along that history line... but they go appart on other things (or else there wouldn't be specialized version control software: we all would be using backups for that).
The most obvious thing needed for backups that is not needed for version control is -despite the fact that you yourself seem not to understand it, is that on backups the historical snapshots need to be disconnected one from another, while that's not the case for version control. And that's the case for backups because as soon as you have any link among history points you can't guarantee the integrity of any one of them and so you lose one of the most needed abilities of a proper backup system: the ability to get to that snapshot as it was in the past. Version control expects a properly running system and rightly so; that's called separation of concerns and it is a good thing.
That means, for instance, that no, hardlinking is not a proper backup policy (by itself only) nor is rsync, nor is filesystem-level snapshotting. Tapes, on the other hand, do allow for proper backups because the contents of one backup set are totally disconnected from the contents of another one so any failure, tamper, or disaster on one of them doesn't automatically affect others (but certainly tapes is not the only way to achieve that goal).
At the highest level is not hard to come up with a proper backup design, no, really: * At least two whole copy sets of the data to protect * At least one of them totally disconnected from the system to be protected. * At least one copy of the recover procedure documentation outside the system to be protected. * At least two persons in the know of the procedure and a third about where to find the documentation. Make them not to work together at the same place. * Finally, remeber that if you didn't try to recover data from it, you don't have a backup.
Now, go back that list and tell me if what the KDE people was doing fits the definition.
OK, I'll answer this for you: No, it doesn't. The mirroring script coupled all and every copy along there whole history path, so it isn't a backup.
"How about just after they get to work or just before they go home from work?"
Sorry again; find another argument.
On one hand, 8-5 works are less and less frecuent this days; on the other, what translates in my country to a "traditional" 8-5 work is 9-13+16-20. This means that you need to adapt you work-related conventions when you deal with me _anyway_,
"Lunch is at 1400 here, At the next stop lunch is at 1600. At the next stop it is at 2200."
Go from New York (lunch is at 12:00 local time) to Spain (lunch is at 14:00 local time) to India (more or less 15:00 local time).
"Sleepiness is called jet lag."
No. Sleepiness is the main symtom related to jet lag, but jet lag is the confussioness because of the desynchronization between the internal and the local clock cycle (its clinical name has in fact nothing to do with sleep but with confusioness -it's called desynchronosis).
"You still haven't explained why, to use your figures, 99% of the people need to scrap their solar referenced clock"
Because when dealing local, the relationship between the solar-referenced time frame and the time shown by the watch is a pure convention and, as such, irrelevant and easy to change. As shown in the lunch example, people doesn't do things at any given clock time, but at the time they are used to do them; if they are related to circadian cycles, then they still will do within the same sun reference they did, no matter what the clock says.
"The worst part of the confusion is that the date would change while one is awake."
This, I admit, is a real nuisance, but one a lot of people show not so dificult to deal with so the point would be "is this real nuisance enough to stop the other real nuisances that arise from the fact we are moving more and more to a global society and economy while maintaining local and varied time shifts?" My answer is that everyday that passes it makes less and less sense.
"The point is that humans work based on the sun and not an arbitrary clock."
The point is that more and more, due to globalisation, humans work is less and less based on their local sun and more and more in the arbitrary clock their customers happen to use, so let's make be at least the same arbitrary clock.
"Say one wanted to call people halfway around the world just after they had lunch; With time zones one would use the difference in timezones to translate their 1PM to local time."
I can't think of a single day in my whole life that you can call me -or anybody I know, at 1PM and find I already had lunch by then.
Sorry, you'll need to find a different argument.
"he other issue is that over 90% of the world's population deal with people who are within plus or minus one time zone of them."
Don't think so. For the most part I said that 99% of the people have to deal 99% of the time with people in their very same time zone. But the other 1% has basically the same probability to deal with people in any other time zone. In my case, it's either my local time or +4:30 or -6.
"It would be very confusing for me if noon was 0400hrs"
Yes, of course. That's how conventions affect people. I'd bet you'd find very confusing start driving by your left side too, but ask to an English to see what he thinks.
But the point of conventions being conventional is that you can change them for something better and after a while it'll be the old fashion the one you'll find weird.
"Travelers would also be confused as, depending on where they are in the world, solar noon could be any hour."
Travelers *are* confused anyway. It's called jet lag, you know... but at least they shouldn't need to adjust their wristwatches to avoid missing tomorrow's important meeting.
"But in exchange, you give up the ability to effectively communicate what time of day 3:00 really means, because specific times would become location-dependent and therefore culturally dependent"
You mean, exactly as they already are but without the hassle of having to deal with different times? I find it a nice solution, thanks.
"Right now, 3:00 means the middle of the afternoon no matter where in the world you are."
Well, except that's not true, of course. In your country 15:00 means you are dutifully on your desk because you had lunch some two/three hours ago. In my country 15:00 means you won't find me in my desk because I'm still finishing my lunch.
But words are words and they don't relate to whatever the clock says, anyway. Noon is not 12:00; noon is when the sun is high in the sky. If I'm having a nice walk by the sunset you don't need to know what time my wristwatch was showing to understand its meaning and if "John was driving east at dawn" you won't have any problem to understand why he "was blinded by the morning sun".
Now, tell us the truth: you work for a wall clocks company, don't you?
I know that the day we go UTC the half a dozen clocks on my office's wall will go to the trash can on the spot.
"How do you tell them this version of "normal workday"?"
I do work in such an environment.
Around these dates, I have to know when summer time saving starts in the other country.
Then I have to know the national and local holidays.
Then I have to know which shift the one I want to talk to is he working this week.
And then, I have to plan the meeting.
At the very least, if we both were using UTC I wouldn't have to calculte -again, my local time and his' and I wouldn't have always to look twice before accept a meeting to see if I'm looking at its UTC, my local or his local time.
Wrong. 9 to 18 or 9 to 19 or even 20 with a two to three hours lunch stop is my local standard.
"we know that people eat lunch around noon"
Wrong again. Never before 13:30 where I live, usually more like 14:30
"we know that we eat dinner around 6pm"
Even more wrong. 21 to 22.
"and go to bed around 10pm"
And then the wrongest. 23:30 to 00:30, usually.
You can't talk about your partners in the four corners of the world and then spout all over the place your local petty conventions for a "common frame of reference".
"it's not like everyone will go to have a 09:00UTC - 17:00UTC workday, they'll work based on the local solar time"
Yes, so what?
"So without timezones you'd have to remember "Let's see... it's 14:00 UTC here now and I just got to work"
Do you *really* think you need to remember when do you have to go to work tomorrow?
"so is my west coast colleague awake yet?"
Oh, I see.
"Oh yes, here it is, his local sunrise is at 14:30UTC so he's probably still in bed"
Instead of, "Oh yes, here it is, his local time zone is four hours from here, so he's still probably in bed".
The truth is that for local enterprises you already know the local conventions OK (here everybody starts working at 15:00, or whatever) and for global enterprises you still need to know which geographical area you are talking about.
And that's now. We are going to a global society and, while there always be tasks strongly coupled to local time, they usually are only of local impact, and for the modern activities, getting free of the psicological barrier of "time to work is 9 to 5", will make easier to accept round the clock activities with other beneficial side effects (like geting rid of rushing hours for instance).
"Traditional units are based around everyday items"
And because of that, they tend to be differently measured in different places. Now there's only USA and UK pints in common use, but it used to be about half a dozen... only to measure bier!
"but most people in his day DID have a good grasp of functional math"
The most common "functional math" for laymen is that which deals with money. It's not so long that UK passed away their imperial monetary units and due to this, managing his pocket money took a child up to their ten to twelve years instead of six or seven as of now. Think about the why for a moment and you probably find it's not because the older way was simpler or more powerful.
"As for the fractionalizing versus decimalizing, there is only cognitive dissonance there if you're looking at it rationally. Nobody does it that way in either system [...] you don't actually resolve it down to numbers under normal operating conditions"
Absolutly wrong!
People in countries using the metric system do use the numbers every time. What you don't grasp is that the "how many congress libraries" or "that makes X football fields" joke makes sense *only* in USA; everywhere else it requires a concious effort to understand that the case is not that USA is people are so utterly imbezile but that because their mindblowing measure system they have to restort to such kind of stupid comparations to make sense out of them.
A hundredth of a quart is.32 ounces [...] Certainly less cumbersome than the 7.8125 in my example"
It's only, of course, that your example is wrong. Per your own metrics, your example gives 7.8, not 7.8125. Now, tell me how.32 is any more convenient than 7.8.
"I already did baking and cooking are two examples."
No, you mentioned baking and cooking as two really stupid examples.
I know is an enormous effort for you but, please, can you think a bit and tell me how cooking and baking are easier in the slightest by using imperial units, except for the fact that you are already using imperial units?
"The same patch for my desktop CentOS5 here will patch my SGI O2 running IRIS 6.5 [...] The potential for code changes does not mean that the effort is "literally zero" to make those changes"
What you seem to forget is that the current system ALREADY incur exactly the same effort. I.e. your CentOS5 system has been patched its time shift databases no less than four times that I can remember from top of my head, and the same probably runs for all the other systems you mention.
With the slight difference that this time would be the last one, of course.
"Except for changes to every computer, embedded or otherwise, that would normally "fall back" and thus have the wrong time for half the year"
Except that basically every computer, embedded or otherwise, already "know" that saving time standards are a political issue bound to change almost yearly, as it is already the case, so they already allow for updates to their daylight time databases.
So while is not a zero effort solution is not more effort than current one (currently the big company I work for is on its planning stage for this next time saving change, so current statu quo is not non zero effort either, not to talk about all the meetings with our international partners that will be missed in the first week, as it happens every year -twice) and this time would be for a good end: having to deal with that nightmare no more
"it turns out there are people who work outside who really need the daylight to do their job"
Then, they should start working "at down", whatever the clock hour happens to be instead of crazily moving the clock so "down" happens always at the same clock time (which is a lost battle to begin with).
As a side benefit, it would mean more dispersion about when different people start their working day, so less rush hour effect to deal with.
No, it isn't. That's the case when two private parties litigate each other.
"The prosecution tries to prove guilt, the defense tries, if not to prove innocence, then at least to show that guilt cannot be proven."
No, that's not the way it's supposed to work. Defense tries within the legal boundaries to get the best possible outcome for their defendent no matter what.
BUT (a very big and very important but), prosecution is not a kind of specular antagonist of the defense; prosecution is there to search for the truth of the case, not to chase for the worse possible outcome.
If defense knows their defendant being guilty, they still have the oath to get the best legal outcome. If prosecutor knows to be non guilty, it is not their job to find a legal position to get a punishment nevertheless, but to resign on the spot.
Forgetting that is possibly the worst damage it can be done to the Republic.
"There is nothing new about battlefield robots - we've had tomahawk missiles since the early 80s."
And since when tomahawks decided what their targets should be based on general autonomous and situational considerations?
A tomahawk is not a robot, it is a tool.
Well, there are still no robots in the battlefield and it'll be long before there are, so this is more sci-fi than anything but, answering the question "who gets to decide on the ethics", I thought that one was obvious: Isaac Asimov, of course!
"The problem is... it predates the Plato-described Atlantis by... oh, I'd say 88 million years and change. The destruction of this thing predates modern humans, thus civilization"
The Old Ones are oooooold.
C'mon, aeons old and in the middle of the Pacific Ocean? That's obviously neither Atlantis nor Lemuria: It is R'lyeh!
Don't go to that deep land, for you will awake the horrors of the past... PhÂnglui mglwÂnafh Cthulhu RÂlyeh wgahÂnagl fhtagn
Slashdot Mirror
"Conan Doyle might have had a bit more influence on Holmes's creativity than the violin playing."
True. And that's exactly what the article is about: that if Conan Doyle had had an ipad back in his day there probably wouldn't be any Sherlock Holmes.
Never get into a nuclear war in Asia (or something like that).
"Not when the trees die and release virtually all of that carbon back into the atmosphere as they decompose."
Bury them. And you gain the nice side effect that it'll replenish our oil reserves in mere hundreds millions years.
"Backups are a solved problem, but lots of people get hung up on having something that backs up the data with little consideration as to why you might want that."
This and one thousand time this.
I think the root problem is a perception one: I always tell the juniors: backups are nothing, I don't give a damn about backups. The important thing is restoration.
It's marvellous how people improve with just that minor hint: that they think around the restoration process instead of the backup one.
I.e.: with regards to this issue: well, my dear PYF, what will happen when you try to restore from a corrupted ball of bits and it happens to be your single ball of bits? answer: uh! I certainly will need multiple balls of bits that once settled never go to be touched again so, now that I think about it, sync'ing over the same repo once and again doesn't cut the butter.
"backup is _certainly_ a critical part of source control"
Well, no, it isn't. Backup and version control certainly share some attributes: a history line, the ability to extract snapshots along that history line... but they go appart on other things (or else there wouldn't be specialized version control software: we all would be using backups for that).
The most obvious thing needed for backups that is not needed for version control is -despite the fact that you yourself seem not to understand it, is that on backups the historical snapshots need to be disconnected one from another, while that's not the case for version control. And that's the case for backups because as soon as you have any link among history points you can't guarantee the integrity of any one of them and so you lose one of the most needed abilities of a proper backup system: the ability to get to that snapshot as it was in the past. Version control expects a properly running system and rightly so; that's called separation of concerns and it is a good thing.
That means, for instance, that no, hardlinking is not a proper backup policy (by itself only) nor is rsync, nor is filesystem-level snapshotting. Tapes, on the other hand, do allow for proper backups because the contents of one backup set are totally disconnected from the contents of another one so any failure, tamper, or disaster on one of them doesn't automatically affect others (but certainly tapes is not the only way to achieve that goal).
At the highest level is not hard to come up with a proper backup design, no, really:
* At least two whole copy sets of the data to protect
* At least one of them totally disconnected from the system to be protected.
* At least one copy of the recover procedure documentation outside the system to be protected.
* At least two persons in the know of the procedure and a third about where to find the documentation. Make them not to work together at the same place.
* Finally, remeber that if you didn't try to recover data from it, you don't have a backup.
Now, go back that list and tell me if what the KDE people was doing fits the definition.
OK, I'll answer this for you: No, it doesn't. The mirroring script coupled all and every copy along there whole history path, so it isn't a backup.
See? Not so difficult.
"he human race as presently constituted is dependent on two pieces of technology: sharp edges and fire. Without those we are not going anywhere."
I'd say the case is the exact opposite: it is without sharp edges that you go anywhere... the wheel, you know...
"How about just after they get to work or just before they go home from work?"
Sorry again; find another argument.
On one hand, 8-5 works are less and less frecuent this days; on the other, what translates in my country to a "traditional" 8-5 work is 9-13+16-20. This means that you need to adapt you work-related conventions when you deal with me _anyway_,
"Lunch is at 1400 here, At the next stop lunch is at 1600. At the next stop it is at 2200."
Go from New York (lunch is at 12:00 local time) to Spain (lunch is at 14:00 local time) to India (more or less 15:00 local time).
"Sleepiness is called jet lag."
No. Sleepiness is the main symtom related to jet lag, but jet lag is the confussioness because of the desynchronization between the internal and the local clock cycle (its clinical name has in fact nothing to do with sleep but with confusioness -it's called desynchronosis).
"You still haven't explained why, to use your figures, 99% of the people need to scrap their solar referenced clock"
Because when dealing local, the relationship between the solar-referenced time frame and the time shown by the watch is a pure convention and, as such, irrelevant and easy to change. As shown in the lunch example, people doesn't do things at any given clock time, but at the time they are used to do them; if they are related to circadian cycles, then they still will do within the same sun reference they did, no matter what the clock says.
"The worst part of the confusion is that the date would change while one is awake."
This, I admit, is a real nuisance, but one a lot of people show not so dificult to deal with so the point would be "is this real nuisance enough to stop the other real nuisances that arise from the fact we are moving more and more to a global society and economy while maintaining local and varied time shifts?" My answer is that everyday that passes it makes less and less sense.
"The point is that humans work based on the sun and not an arbitrary clock."
The point is that more and more, due to globalisation, humans work is less and less based on their local sun and more and more in the arbitrary clock their customers happen to use, so let's make be at least the same arbitrary clock.
"Say one wanted to call people halfway around the world just after they had lunch;
With time zones one would use the difference in timezones to translate their 1PM to local time."
I can't think of a single day in my whole life that you can call me -or anybody I know, at 1PM and find I already had lunch by then.
Sorry, you'll need to find a different argument.
"he other issue is that over 90% of the world's population deal with people who are within plus or minus one time zone of them."
Don't think so. For the most part I said that 99% of the people have to deal 99% of the time with people in their very same time zone. But the other 1% has basically the same probability to deal with people in any other time zone. In my case, it's either my local time or +4:30 or -6.
"It would be very confusing for me if noon was 0400hrs"
Yes, of course. That's how conventions affect people. I'd bet you'd find very confusing start driving by your left side too, but ask to an English to see what he thinks.
But the point of conventions being conventional is that you can change them for something better and after a while it'll be the old fashion the one you'll find weird.
"Travelers would also be confused as, depending on where they are in the world, solar noon could be any hour."
Travelers *are* confused anyway. It's called jet lag, you know... but at least they shouldn't need to adjust their wristwatches to avoid missing tomorrow's important meeting.
"But in exchange, you give up the ability to effectively communicate what time of day 3:00 really means, because specific times would become location-dependent and therefore culturally dependent"
You mean, exactly as they already are but without the hassle of having to deal with different times? I find it a nice solution, thanks.
"Right now, 3:00 means the middle of the afternoon no matter where in the world you are."
Well, except that's not true, of course. In your country 15:00 means you are dutifully on your desk because you had lunch some two/three hours ago. In my country 15:00 means you won't find me in my desk because I'm still finishing my lunch.
But words are words and they don't relate to whatever the clock says, anyway. Noon is not 12:00; noon is when the sun is high in the sky. If I'm having a nice walk by the sunset you don't need to know what time my wristwatch was showing to understand its meaning and if "John was driving east at dawn" you won't have any problem to understand why he "was blinded by the morning sun".
Now, tell us the truth: you work for a wall clocks company, don't you?
I know that the day we go UTC the half a dozen clocks on my office's wall will go to the trash can on the spot.
"How do you tell them this version of "normal workday"?"
I do work in such an environment.
Around these dates, I have to know when summer time saving starts in the other country.
Then I have to know the national and local holidays.
Then I have to know which shift the one I want to talk to is he working this week.
And then, I have to plan the meeting.
At the very least, if we both were using UTC I wouldn't have to calculte -again, my local time and his' and I wouldn't have always to look twice before accept a meeting to see if I'm looking at its UTC, my local or his local time.
"we know people work around 8am-5pm"
Wrong. 9 to 18 or 9 to 19 or even 20 with a two to three hours lunch stop is my local standard.
"we know that people eat lunch around noon"
Wrong again. Never before 13:30 where I live, usually more like 14:30
"we know that we eat dinner around 6pm"
Even more wrong. 21 to 22.
"and go to bed around 10pm"
And then the wrongest. 23:30 to 00:30, usually.
You can't talk about your partners in the four corners of the world and then spout all over the place your local petty conventions for a "common frame of reference".
"Things would be worse without timezones"
Do you think so?
"it's not like everyone will go to have a 09:00UTC - 17:00UTC workday, they'll work based on the local solar time"
Yes, so what?
"So without timezones you'd have to remember "Let's see... it's 14:00 UTC here now and I just got to work"
Do you *really* think you need to remember when do you have to go to work tomorrow?
"so is my west coast colleague awake yet?"
Oh, I see.
"Oh yes, here it is, his local sunrise is at 14:30UTC so he's probably still in bed"
Instead of, "Oh yes, here it is, his local time zone is four hours from here, so he's still probably in bed".
The truth is that for local enterprises you already know the local conventions OK (here everybody starts working at 15:00, or whatever) and for global enterprises you still need to know which geographical area you are talking about.
And that's now. We are going to a global society and, while there always be tasks strongly coupled to local time, they usually are only of local impact, and for the modern activities, getting free of the psicological barrier of "time to work is 9 to 5", will make easier to accept round the clock activities with other beneficial side effects (like geting rid of rushing hours for instance).
"Traditional units are based around everyday items"
And because of that, they tend to be differently measured in different places. Now there's only USA and UK pints in common use, but it used to be about half a dozen... only to measure bier!
"but most people in his day DID have a good grasp of functional math"
The most common "functional math" for laymen is that which deals with money. It's not so long that UK passed away their imperial monetary units and due to this, managing his pocket money took a child up to their ten to twelve years instead of six or seven as of now. Think about the why for a moment and you probably find it's not because the older way was simpler or more powerful.
"As for the fractionalizing versus decimalizing, there is only cognitive dissonance there if you're looking at it rationally. Nobody does it that way in either system [...] you don't actually resolve it down to numbers under normal operating conditions"
Absolutly wrong!
People in countries using the metric system do use the numbers every time. What you don't grasp is that the "how many congress libraries" or "that makes X football fields" joke makes sense *only* in USA; everywhere else it requires a concious effort to understand that the case is not that USA is people are so utterly imbezile but that because their mindblowing measure system they have to restort to such kind of stupid comparations to make sense out of them.
A hundredth of a quart is .32 ounces [...] Certainly less cumbersome than the 7.8125 in my example"
It's only, of course, that your example is wrong. Per your own metrics, your example gives 7.8, not 7.8125. Now, tell me how .32 is any more convenient than 7.8.
"I already did baking and cooking are two examples."
No, you mentioned baking and cooking as two really stupid examples.
I know is an enormous effort for you but, please, can you think a bit and tell me how cooking and baking are easier in the slightest by using imperial units, except for the fact that you are already using imperial units?
"The same patch for my desktop CentOS5 here will patch my SGI O2 running IRIS 6.5 [...] The potential for code changes does not mean that the effort is "literally zero" to make those changes"
What you seem to forget is that the current system ALREADY incur exactly the same effort. I.e. your CentOS5 system has been patched its time shift databases no less than four times that I can remember from top of my head, and the same probably runs for all the other systems you mention.
With the slight difference that this time would be the last one, of course.
"Except for changes to every computer, embedded or otherwise, that would normally "fall back" and thus have the wrong time for half the year"
Except that basically every computer, embedded or otherwise, already "know" that saving time standards are a political issue bound to change almost yearly, as it is already the case, so they already allow for updates to their daylight time databases.
So while is not a zero effort solution is not more effort than current one (currently the big company I work for is on its planning stage for this next time saving change, so current statu quo is not non zero effort either, not to talk about all the meetings with our international partners that will be missed in the first week, as it happens every year -twice) and this time would be for a good end: having to deal with that nightmare no more
"it turns out there are people who work outside who really need the daylight to do their job"
Then, they should start working "at down", whatever the clock hour happens to be instead of crazily moving the clock so "down" happens always at the same clock time (which is a lost battle to begin with).
As a side benefit, it would mean more dispersion about when different people start their working day, so less rush hour effect to deal with.
"It's supposed to be an adversarial system"
No, it isn't. That's the case when two private parties litigate each other.
"The prosecution tries to prove guilt, the defense tries, if not to prove innocence, then at least to show that guilt cannot be proven."
No, that's not the way it's supposed to work. Defense tries within the legal boundaries to get the best possible outcome for their defendent no matter what.
BUT (a very big and very important but), prosecution is not a kind of specular antagonist of the defense; prosecution is there to search for the truth of the case, not to chase for the worse possible outcome.
If defense knows their defendant being guilty, they still have the oath to get the best legal outcome. If prosecutor knows to be non guilty, it is not their job to find a legal position to get a punishment nevertheless, but to resign on the spot.
Forgetting that is possibly the worst damage it can be done to the Republic.
"There is nothing new about battlefield robots - we've had tomahawk missiles since the early 80s."
And since when tomahawks decided what their targets should be based on general autonomous and situational considerations?
A tomahawk is not a robot, it is a tool.
Well, there are still no robots in the battlefield and it'll be long before there are, so this is more sci-fi than anything but, answering the question "who gets to decide on the ethics", I thought that one was obvious: Isaac Asimov, of course!
"I think, and sadly, it is true because much like Communism it works fine on paper but almost never in practice"
Quite an interesting comparation because then, how is it that the vast majority of companies are governed by Communism, just the Soviet Russia style?
"This also further confirms our knowledge on biogeography, plate tectonics and other areas."
But, but, but... this could have not happened in only 6000 years!
"The problem is... it predates the Plato-described Atlantis by... oh, I'd say 88 million years and change. The destruction of this thing predates modern humans, thus civilization"
The Old Ones are oooooold.
C'mon, aeons old and in the middle of the Pacific Ocean? That's obviously neither Atlantis nor Lemuria: It is R'lyeh!
Don't go to that deep land, for you will awake the horrors of the past... PhÂnglui mglwÂnafh Cthulhu RÂlyeh wgahÂnagl fhtagn
You mean African or European... snakes?
But then, a coconut is round, while a snake is not. Maybe two avian carriers can load a snake between the two of them after all.