Mapp Biopharmaceutical have been publishing articles about their ebola research in scientific journals since 2011. They seem to be a very secretive at all.

Maybe CNN thinks it's a secret because it hasn't been covered in the mainstream press - TMZ and Entertainment Weekly have completely ignored the company.

That's not what I remember. There were no small format hard drives in 1976. Hard disks were the size of a refrigerator or larger. The first hard disk that was not designed for a large mainframe wasn't available until 1980, and that was only 5MB. I begged my boss to buy one but he refused because of the cost (roughly one month of my salary at that time).

By the time CP/M 3 came out in 1983 there were several small format hard disks, but there was no standard interface. Each disk manufacturer created their own interface and drivers. There was no certainty that a hard disk that ran on an IBM PC-AT would run on a Commodore 128 - it depended on what systems and OSes the manufacturer was willing to support. Many manufacturers would only support IBM PCs with MS-DOS. Others emulated multiple floppies and used the CP/M USER command to switch between up to 16 separate emulated floppies on the disk, so the effective maximum size of a hard disk was 16 times the maximum floppy size supported by a manufacturer.

Blame the IBM PC sales explosion. The original IBM PC in 1981 used the 8-bit ISA bus designed by IBM. The S-100 bus was dead by the time that IBM introduced the 16-bit ISA-AT bus in 1984.

8 MegaBytes in 1976? Utter rubbish.

The 8080 had a 16-bit address bus and an 8-bit data bus. It couldn't handle more than than 64 kbytes of RAM. Yes, there were ways of getting more than 64 KB on a system but that involved very expensive memory bank switching. I remember lusting after a 1 megabyte S-100 bus board that was only $3,000, until I found that the memory bank switching made it almost impossible to run CP/M programs that needed more than 32 KB memory.

But 8 megabytes? Absolutely no way. Heck, the large mainframe system I used in my day job had less than 2 MB.

Pulling a family off a flight and threatening to summon the police seems pretty intense. They must have done something very bad. What? One of them tweeted about poor customer service before entering the aircraft? That's it?

Did the SWA agent seriously think that threatening the family with not being able to fly and reporting the man to the police (for what?) unless he deleted the tweet would be the end of it? Did the agent think the whole thing would be erased from everyone's memory and it would be as if nobody complained? That's not the way it works. Now everyone in her management chain knows who she is, and not in a good way. Creating a PR incident like this will not go without notice. It's a variant of the Streisand effect.

It's not important to the story, but at least one airline I've flown has figured out that it's good customer service to allow people who spend a lot of money travelling on their airline have their children treated to the same boarding privilege - especially as it costs the airline nothing to do so.

I agree. Most of the time it's trivially easy to adapt to new procedural languages. And the more often you do it, the easier it becomes.

However, a primary problem is that although the syntactical differences are comparatively minor, the libraries may be structured very differently. You may well spend a great deal more time adapting to the gross differences in philosophy as well as the discovering the idiomatic nuances of the libraries.

I would hesitate to call GE Healthcare a small company. I doubt that Lawrence Livermore National Labs would be considered small as it's part of the government. Joyent is the company that supports node.js.

Anyone can sue anybody about anything, but winning is different matter. ZFS is considered safe from a legal point of view.

No they would not be sued by anyone.

Sun open sourced ZFS under a permissive license. Oracle close sourced it again. However, a number of companies are supporting derivatives of the open source version.

ZFS is available for a number of operating systems today. A non-inclusive list:
FreeBSD from iXsystems
Linux from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and also Pogo Linux
SmartOS from Joyent
OmniOS from Omniti
Osv from CloudOS

In addition a number of companies are using ZFS in their products:
CloudScaling
DDRdrive
datto
Delphix
GE Healthcare
Great Lakes SAN
Losytec
High-Availability
HybridCluster
Nexenta Systems
OSNEXUS
RackTop
Spectra Logic
Storiant
Syneto
WHEEL Systems
Zetavault

ZFS can detect and correct silent corruption when configured to do so. I have a NAS that has 24 TB of raw storage, 16 TB of useable storage, running under OmniOS. I have well over 10 million files on the NAS (it is used as a backup for 8 systems) - I haven't lost a file in 4 years and I don't expect to lose any.

The GOP has made it very, very clear that anything that Obama favors will automatically receive a negative from the House of Representatives that they control. They have done this multiple times. They have openly stated that their primary objective is to oppose Obama on everything.

Now I'm supposed to believe that Obama pressured the GOP to weaken the bill? That seems... laughable. The GOP would never bow to Obama's requests - they have their image to consider. It seems more likely that the GOP revised the bill because Obama said he supported it in its original form.

It's also strange that the mainstream press doesn't seem to have picked up on such a monumental achievement by Obama. I'd have expected that any such successful pressure from the White House on the GOP would be a major headline in most newspapers that cover US national politics. But the best we get is a press release from the Center for Democracy and Technology. The EFF also had a press release about the amendments to the bill but they don't suggest that the White House or Obama was generating any pressure for the changes.

I work from home often. However, I installed solar energy about 11 years ago. I have to rent the meter (around $6 a month) but other than that I haven't paid for electricity since that event. I have natural gas heating, and the cost of that has been reduced substantially over the past few years.

My point is that I leave the thermostat set to a low of 72 degrees and a high of 76 degrees and let the system figure how to keep the house in that range. Works well, all year around. Very comfortable.

The items you mention are all extremely useful when using a computer and should be taught in schools.

Speaking generally, programmers need to be proficient users but it is a separate skill that requires a substantially greater amount of energy to acquire.

Understanding computers in one thing. Understanding how to program them is something else entirely.

My 17 month old understands my iPad, sort of, and has done for a few months. She can unlock the device, page through it to find the couple of apps she likes, fire them up and interact with them. On my laptop she knows ho to use the trackpad and left-click on buttons. I have no idea where she will be computer-wise by the time she's in first grade, but one thing seems sure, she will know how to use one.

But programming is not necessary to understand how to use a computer, no more than being able to repair your car's brakes is necessary to use a car. In some fairly rare circumstances extremely useful, but not something that NEEDS to be learned to be a good driver - mostly it's sufficient to know how to use the brakes.

By all means, offer programming classes, but don't require people to take them to graduate. Attempting to learn programming if your mind doesn't work the right way (detail oriented, highly logical) would be torture indeed. Understanding how to use them should be sufficient for most people.