Human (and similar) bodies work by the continuing controlled boil of of n-billion chain-reactions among n-billion complex molecules. These reactions, though unbelievably complex, have been channelled into very narrow auto-catalytic reaction pathways by evolution. As well as the reactions that do happen in successful organism continuance, there are a vast combinatoric possible range of alternate, and ultimately counter-productive reaction chains that could take place with the same molecule combinations that are present. Luckily, almost all of these destructive alternative reaction chains are energetically infeasible, again, because evolution produces more and more precisely regulated catalyzed reaction chains, equivalent to fine-grained control of living structure formation and process, including metabolism, cell reproduction, and programmed cell death.

However, the combinatoric possibilities for alternate reactions, and alternate metastable structure and process formations, are huge, due to both the number of redundant instances of each type of structure and each type of (chemical) process, and the complexity of the number of different interacting structures and (chemical) processes.

Again luckily, most alternative structure and process that arises is self-lethal. Self-continuing reaction chains (in any given chemical/structural/thermodynamic context) are exceedingly rare, relative to the number of alternatives that might start out.

More fortunately, the viable chains of structure and process have become so sophisticated due to evolution that they actively work to destroy many altered forms. (The immune system.)

However, again, given the vast combinatoric opportunities for even just slightly alternative structure and process to begin as a slight error in a routine living structure and process, not every alternative is non-viable, and not every alternative can be overcome by the immune system.

Some alternative auto-catalyzing structures/processes, starting as minor variants of normal structures/processes, can be viable in their own right, and form a simpler-than-their-host-organism replicating system within the host organism's body, and using its material and energy, and, it must be said, using many of the host body's still perfectly functional structures/structure types/ and processes (e.g. blood vessel recruitment by tumours.)

In summary, viable life as any single type of organism is a matter of a self-reinforcing chain/cycle of viable structure formation and chemical process/reaction continuation within and with that structure. There are virtually unlimited kinds of minor variations in structure or process that could accidentally occur in such a complex physical/chemical/thermodynamic context.Most of those alternatives are self-lethal (not programmed chemically and structurally to continue to reproduce and grow their alternative form). Many other alternatives that might be successful at alternate-form growth and reproduction are killed off by a healthy immune system.
But some forms get through.
The biggest predictor of cancer formation is lifespan. As an organism ages, a) There have simply been more opportunities for structure/process accidental variation experiment within the body, and b) Probably the regulation of process by the body itself becomes weaker as subsystems reduce from their early-life capability levels, due no doubt to a whole range of entropic breakdown of the uniformity of structure and process.

Organism bodies (and their vast self-supporting network of constraining structures and autocatalytic reactions) have a design-life (by evolution, not a designer), and that design life is "enough to reproduce, and care for the offspring if applicable to the species".

A tough story to hear, but that's the story of life and cancer. It is not a hopeless story. Both immune function improvement and novel artificial interventions stand good chances of beating back these alternative lifeforms within us in particular cases. In general though, it is just part of our life process.

Most, but not all, actual engineers were trained in general engineering, and in a specialty that was not software or computer science.

Most specialists tend to have a blind spot to the complexities, subtleties, lay of the landscape in other areas than their specialty (thinking that the problems over there are trivial and not worth much effort or expertise.) Come to think about it, this is very similar to bad managers' perceptions of software people or engineers and their work.

I recently worked on a multi-disciplinary project, and without fail, the power engineers thought the controls engineers' work (and need for testing) was trivial, and vice versa, and the mechanicals didn't understand any of the fuss over there at all, and all of them just furrowed their eyebrows quizzically at any mention of software development, testing, or communications networking protocol or security issues.

Get the properly trained people to work on each aspect of your system, and only get the ones that are wise enough to recognize that the other specialty's work is probably as deep, complex, important, and fraught as theirs is.

The worst thing that has happened is that the republicans put partisan political games ahead of working to solve verified global crises.

A politician trying to show leadership and drive the necessary change is a great thing to happen.

I'm waiting for the criminal charges to be drawn up for obstruction of (climate) justice.

Or not appreciably so, even compared to coal. That they do so is a myth being promoted for short-term economic gain.

A major problem with natural gas infrastructure is the leakage of methane (unburned) in the extraction and transport process. If that leakage rate reaches 3%, natural gas energy is about equivalent to coal on greenhouse gas effects on the atmosphere.

So increased natural gas energy is not an effective solution for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and slowing the global warming process.

Decommissioning a nuclear plant site (not counting proper long-term fuel-waste disposal) has estimated costs of $7 Billion per nuclear plant.

My experience with engineering projects tells me that "double it and add 30 (%)" ;=) is a good heuristic for determining how much it will really cost, since everything is usually low-balled to win contracts. So we could guess $15 billion per plant.

No one has really implemented a proper long-term high-grade nuclear waste storage facility yet, so capital and ongoing costs for that are unknown.

If you are seriously comparing the environmental impacts of producing wind turbines and solar panels to the environmental impact of our current scale of fossil fuel extraction and consumption, you need to learn how to think quantitatively, not to mention qualitatively.

I mean, as far as I know, no one has properly, fully decommissioned a nuclear power plant and effectively long-term-stored its waste yet, have they? Why shouldn't the cost of doing that, completely and adequately, be built into the cost assumptions for nuclear?

Why shouldn't there have to be an extremely large security bond put up when building one of these things that covers:
a) Full cost of full decommissioning and million-year safe storage
b) Fukushima/Chernobyl scale disaster insurance coverage, covering full remediation costs and damage payments for all surrounding economic losses and health costs caused by a major nuclear plant disaster.

my grammar can beat up your grammar

where we still have some freedom, Putin is a hacked up, soggy, cheese-curd potato.

But the JEE framework went against some of the Java founders' quest for simplicity, and byzantine configuration-based frameworks were not brought out at dawn and shot soon enough, so they took over. And the language has some annoying verbosity and stuttering.

20 years later we need to move on. Less is more.

My site uses regular http for the "brochure" like main page and info pages (e.g. FAQs, how-tos), and uses https for the login pages and software-as-a-service web-app pages.

Is there something wrong, conceptually, with doing it that way?

Is that hybrid approach going to lower my ranking?

Not sure why one would go to https (and more intensive server-side processing) on the brochure and FAQ type pages.

Wouldn't they realize that humanity would do better if we could "all just get along", that is, govern certain aspects of our global-impacting activity at the global level, based on rationally arrived-at policies, and also define and enforce human and ecosystem rights at the global human level.

That kind of enlightened, future-projecting realization and viewpoint would not be consistent with working for a US intelligence agency.

Object? What's an object?

Hmmm. As a CS who often works with engineers (and scientists) from various disciplines (or managers who come from those backgrounds), I can say that many of them have a blind spot regarding software. Some see the surface and not the ocean. Their questions amount to "how long will it take to implement a user interface that is like this, using software", and that reflects their lack of grasp of the depth of issues that may be dealt with in software specification, design, and construction.

Symptoms of this are:
- "Let's build this critical system (which should be network-centric and reliable-server-based) using a Windows PC glommed onto my techie hardware (because windows PCs, that's what computers are, aren't they?)"

- "The demo/prototype worked, what more work could there be to do? Aren't we done?"

- "Let's use circa 1970/80s serial communications protocols for this distributed monitoring and control system, because they're fast!" (What do you mean that security, and future-proof, scalable, standard TCPIP-based architecture is more important than latency and bandwidth in this supervisory control application?)

- "What's an interface and design by contract? Here's the signal list. There couldn't possibly be any disagreement about it."

- "You asked for an interface with 3 monitored value communications one on/off control, and one setpoint setting method. We gave you this 100 signal signal list. Why would you be complaining when we gave you so much more features and flexibility. You can toggle them in any sequence. Of course turning it on is a 20-step flow chart of signals list monitoring and toggling. See how flexible that is?"

- "I haven't seen a software problem for which visual basic, matlab, Fortran, or C was not the answer."

I remember learning a couple of assembly languages, 3 procedural languages, sql, lisp, and prolog during my undergrad CS degree, while learning three more languages including Forth, Basic, and SmallTalk in summer jobs around that time.

But in my recollection, particular programming language (details of) was not the main point of the majority of my CS (or EE elective) courses, especially not after first year. Quickly learning any programming language was just the price of admission to learning and practicing other CS knowledge. Computing general concepts, algorithm and database general concepts, intro to and practice with different styles of programming such as functional, declarative, procedural, particular types of applications as examples, cool AI'ish stuff, and a few things about software engineering practice, were much of the point.

So if your degree program is "about Java" and "experience with Java and an N-tier JEE stack", then RUN and take some MIT or Stanford online courses in more interesting and useful stuff!