It's basically a redux of Afghanistan with the Taliban, where a militant group takes over a failed state. Except my understanding is that they're being even more brutal.

The end result of de-emphasis on core education will result in their regressing even more, eventually leading to 'the caliphate' being seen as another North Korea type situation if they're 'lucky', and being invaded like Afghanistan if they're not extremely lucky.

Basically, AQ has been around for decades. ISIS might be mostly gone in a couple years.

Okay, I'm not a Muslim, nor am I an expert. I've been over in majority Islamic countries a few times though and had a few 'cultural appreciation' lessons.

Isis is violating a good amount of Islamic teachings with this ban.

Though I can't see how they're still allowed to teach chemistry(even if they have to say it's due to Allah's rules and law) if they're not allowed to teach math, so it might be an error in the article. Math may have been de-emphasized against teaching their propaganda.

Sorry for the delay, but I find angel to have a compelling argument - in order to grow cows need nutrients. It's not just 'grow fat' or 'heavier', if they simply weighed more because they had 100 pounds of feed stopped up in them, the meat packing industry would be pissed and start buying on the basis of gutted carcass weight or something. In order to get said nutrients they need their gut bacteria to break down their food, otherwise it'd inedible to them. In a sense Cows digest the bacteria, not the plant matter they consume.

If there are 'bucket loads' of scientific studies, it shouldn't be hard to give a reputable source. I'll admit that I haven't studied the issue. I know there's weight gain when growing animals are given antibiotics. I know they'll maintain weight/growth if given less food along with antibiotics. Why? That's trickier.

For example, this report shouldn't be taken to heart because it's by a student, not curated or peer reviewed, but it's at least simple and lists more references. It says that the growth isn't because food processing is being disrupted, but because the animal isn't spending resources developing immune responses it otherwise would and that most of the bacteria effected are in the large intestine, which provides minimal nutrition extraction as opposed to the bacteria in the stomach and small intestine.

Also, 16% more growth on 7% less feed is significant, which is why a lot of pig farmers today are perfectly willing to give up on routine antibiotic regimes for pigs in other stages where it's much less effective, but want to keep it during the starter/weanling stage.

'Seem' would be right, because your belief in my belief is false. ;)

When using antibiotics allows animals to grow faster or eat less food and you'd end up using them anyways when animals get REALLY sick, on the first order the low doses make sense.

Resistance is more problematic.

It not only prevents infections, it also increases growth. However it's far from the only source of antibiotic resistant bacteria because there's plenty of bacterias out there that are resistant to antibiotics that have NEVER been fed to animals.

We're willing to give expensive antibiotics to humans, if I remember right, there's only 3 major antibiotics given to cattle. If you're infected with a disease resistant to something not on that list, it probably didn't get that resistance from cattle.

They used to issue sugar pills instead, which might actually be tastier than the Pez, and more effective the way antibiotics are going.

As for the farmers - it's because giving animals antibiotics during specific periods of their growth cycle increases their growth significantly. I remember reading an article that they don't even use more antibiotics - the courses prevent enough sickness that farmers that ONLY give antibiotics to sick animals, at much higher doses, actually use just as many antibiotics.

Antibiotic use remaining stable
Increasing growth

I try to avoid getting too technical, and I'll admit that I'm not a biology major.

Well a 'command set' implies a set of functions, 1 command per function. So if you increase the command set, you've increased the number of functions, which means they added something new to the TRIM command.

What that might be, I don't know. Going by his description, it sounds like they managed to implement some detection of non-allocated cells, which would allow them to re-allocate said cells without actually copying junk data to the new location.

IE the system decides that block 105 is under-used and 657 is over-used. Normally this would involve copying what's in 657 to 105 and vice versa, but rather than blindly copy 105 to 657, it detects that block 105 isn't actually allocated(the file that was there has been deleted or something), so it just assigns the mapping from 105 to 657, saving a write.

Don't forget that they have to get a non-australian credit card as well, in most cases. It's one of Netflix's checks. I agree, I wouldn't be getting a VPN 'merely' for netflix unless 'quickflix' just sucks that horribly(and to be fair, it probably does). It's one of those things where VPN use might be very common in Australia because their internet laws are pretty screwed up.

Oh, and there's another reason for getting a VPN and US credit card - Steam. Australia is one of the more strict nanny-states when it comes to game violence regulations, so there's quite a few popular games that it's citizens either can't get at all, or have to pay 50% more for a 'toned down' version that's missing content and has had the blood turned green or something.

So since once you have a VPN, the marginal expense for more bandwidth is typically quite low, it provides an incentive to use it even more. You get it for Steam where it can pay for itself with a 'one A list game a month' habit and because you already have it you might as well use it for porn, Netflix, etc...

Of course, I'm even tougher than most to detect - I have a VPN set up on my own VPS. Sure, it's a few bucks more but I can run a server doing whatever I want.

Which is part of the 'problem' Australians experience - their local companies have enough influence to pass standards at least somewhat unique to Australia, as well as have some of the tougher media controls, yet they're not big enough for most companies to put forth the effort to comply with them, which leaves them lagging.

They can normally license with the holder of the exclusive rights, but in many cases said holder sees netflix as competition and thus wants to charge huge rates for said licenses. That's where time to conduct negotiations comes in. It doesn't make sense for netflix to sign a licensing agreement where the cost is $12/month per netflix customer, after all. Even $1 a customer per year gets quite dear.

Just remember, your own experience is anecdotal. When I was in school 'Xeroxing' was used more often than 'copying' by the government worker types I was exposed to.

Darn near everything today is 'copied' using a form of laser printer technology, but back when I was a kid 'photocopies' were xerox machines, but you also had 'ditto' machines that the schools would use when they needed 60+ copies of something - it'd produce slightly funny looking blue ink copies that were normally not quite centered/straight on the paper. From what I remember, it used photographic technology to make a sort of screen, which would then be mounted on a drum that rotated the paper through. More expensive by far than a Xerox for a single copy, but it gave you a negative good for hundreds of prints, after which the only cost was the paper and ink that was probably a couple bucks per gallon. It was called a 'ditto machine', which wiki also calls a 'spirit duplicator'.

In short, back then a 'copy machine' back then could refer to any of a number of devices depending on your needs - a photocopier/Xerox for a copy or two. A ditto machine for a moderate number of low quality copies(like giving kids a test), a mimeograph for larger numbers of copies, all the way up to full up printing presses for stuff like government forms.

In trying to make sense of it, I wonder if the author meant to say that when a virus infected cell dies it tends to release it's virus load, mashed together with the idea that with some bacterial diseases the bacteria don't release their toxins until death. As a result, you can have the problem that when you administer antibiotics you have a massive die-off of toxin harboring bacteria, which can even kill a weak enough patient from the sudden release. Or make people think that the antibiotics are making things worse(to be fair, it actually IS in the short run).

The magnet part actually makes a little sense - introduce the magnetic nano-particles with the appropriate protein to adhere to the target(viral, bacterial toxin, etc...), then collect with magnet before returning the blood to the body.

I took it as Robert would be teaching and having his kids cleaning the rifles before they ever shoot anything. Exposing them to it is fine, so they know it needs to be done.

I'm also fine with having them start on air rifles, though depending on your backyard(neighbors in range?) it may still not be practical, but you can shoot even inside. The important thing is that they don't get to handle the gun - powder or air driven, without adult supervision at all times.

I'm hesitant about your course of action. One needs to remember that you need fun in there as well for it to really stick, you're both taking too long and inadvertantly teaching the kid that the firearm isn't dangerous.

Cleaning the rifle can wait, depending on parents and selected cleaning chemicals you might not want to expose the sprog to that anyways.

I'd start immediately with full up fire with live ammo(blanks are somewhat hard to get anyways), but with the parent holding the gun. I'll note that the cases of injuries where a child is shooting at a range involved fully automatic weapons - if the gun's single shot, there's nothing else coming out of the firearm if the kid looses control of it, no matter what. Especially if the parent has control of the additional rounds(in a pocket or something).

Gradually ramp up the child's ammo budget as he or she progresses - another dozen rounds for cleaning the rifle, for example.