Yes I have used Python, actually. and I've found the same thing ESR discovered about it years ago. Python promotes rapid development with fewer errors than many other languages. And it's generally clean and extremely easy to read. Python has its warts of course. And gotchas. PHP has its good points and bad points as well. But to try to disparage Python just to make your point that PHP is great is pretty silly. If PHP is great it should stand on its own regardless of your personal language preferences. And I think it can. That's not to say, of course, that PHP does not have many problems as a language; it does.

Umm yeah that's what the OP was suggesting. The flaps cause drag and increase downforce. So of course you might want that... while slowing.

The problem with metric is that some of the arbitrary base units are more difficult for humans to estimate and use. For example, let us take some common units of measure: centimetres are too small, decimetres are too large. Both are inferior for human estimation compared to inches. An inch can be approximated more easily using say a segment of a finger. Even feet are easier for a lot of people to estimate than metres (or yards). Especially for in-between distances that are neither small nor large. In general the idea of using orders of magnitude prefixes is a great idea, but the base unit, metres, leaves something to be desired. And lets not kid ourselves. All units of measure are arbitrary. A metre is an arbitrary length. It's currently based on some reference bar somewhere. It may have originated by dividing latitudinal distance by some factor or something, but the standard metre is completely and utterly arbitrary. We could have selected some other unit like an inch to be the base and everything would be fine, though a kilometre would be very small.

I agree with your overall sentiment. In many cases it is beyond a joke and misguided attempts to help the environment often hurt it, as is the case with banning the disturbance of brush around homes and communities.

While you are correct that the banning of DDT was at the time unfounded scientifically--the egg shells seemed to be thinning that year generally and may not have had anything to do with DDT, but alas it was never really researched. However, had DDT continued to be used on the scale that it was, modern research has showed that mosquitoes would have adapted and become resistant in just a couple of years, ending the use of DDT anyway. Put in another way, banning DDT did *not* directly lead to the deaths of millions of people. Perhaps banning DDT was even a benefit, because now it is used by some countries, on a much smaller scale, to a good effect in controlling malaria.

You're completely misunderstanding what I'm saying. I'm not saying Africa is going to be a bread basket exporter of food. I'm simply talking about principles of self-sufficiency. Growing one's own food internally is one thing that can break the poverty cycle (if only the attitude part). Look, many people in Africa are completely dependent on western handouts, which wouldn't be so bad but for the strings attached to the food which western nations do pull on a regular basis. That's what I'm getting at.

Perhaps my sarcastic remark about cheap goods from China misled you, but I never said anything about export-related jobs and Africa. You are correct about that of course. But it simply wasn't a part of my comment.

Either way we both seem to agree that handing out USB sticks to work with garbage computers we dump on them isn't going to do a thing to help with poverty.

If we in the west really want to help Africa, there are a few things we can do right here that will make a difference. Eliminate agricultural subsidies, stop buying African diamonds, and stop using cheap African-sourced conflict minerals. Right now food prices are so artificially low that African farmers can't afford to grow food for their own countries. It's quite literally cheaper to buy food from abroad than to grow it locally. And the US is happy to give Africa food. In exchange for favors. Food quite literally has become a weapon and it's certainly part of what keeps Africa in a cycle of poverty and abuse. Meanwhile China has been buying up farm land in China to raise food that will be exported from Africa without really benefiting Africans themselves, except for a few that directly benefit.

Conflict minerals, including diamonds, also concentrate a tremendous amount of African wealth in the hands of just a very few who are quite happy to use this wealth to buy whole governments. Most times they *are* the governments. But hey, as long as we can get cheap goods made in China with cheap African resources, life is good, right?

But I guess my idea to not buy diamonds and kill the farm bill has about as much merit as handing out usb sticks after all. I doubt western policies that hurt Africa are going to change any time soon. Good luck to these folk. I'm personally quite skeptical.

Yeah Lucas always sucked at writing dialog, especially romance scenes. I remember reading that his wife at the time rewrote a lot of the romance scenes because they were even worse in early drafts.

Well I did have a choice, true. I could have bought an OEM version of Windows 7 that was more than twice the cost of Windows 8, and cannot ever be moved to new hardware when this computer dies or requires a major upgrade. Or I could buy Windows 8.1 direct from Microsoft for about $100. I knew it had the ridiculous metro start screen, but I knew that Classic Shell could make it close enough to Windows 7 to be workable. And it is. Also Windows 8.1 can be transferred to brand new hardware and reactivated. They loosened up the restrictions some. So faced with this, it wasn't a hard choice to put on Windows 8.1.

Mind you this situation I was in was precisely engineered by Microsoft to push me in the direction they want me to go. But surely you would do the same, no? Or would you really drop nearly $250 on an operating system?

Subject is appropriate. We're talking here about proposals to drill for oil in Alaska.

But yes Russia and Canada would also face similar problems with disasters in the arctic.

No it's not that simple. Plants require nutrients from the soil, which have to be replenished each year[1] partly by natural in-soil processes that break down residue from previous crops, but mostly from the application of synthetic fertilizer, which is synthesized using a process that burn natural gas. See the wikipedia article on the Haber Process.

Also there are fossil fuels used in the planting, cultivation, harvest, and irrigation of the crop.

If corn could fix its own nitrogen like legumes do, it might be a lot closer to carbon neutral.

[1] In many parts of the world, including the Brazillian rainforest, farmers are actively "mining" nutrients from the soil. The soil left from burning the rainforest is extremely rich in nutrients, allowing intensive farming for a few years. After a while, though, the soil is depleted of nutrients and organic matter and yields drop. Sadly many farms just burn down more forest. Some methods of farming, including zero-till, try to foster natural soil processes to produce more nitrogen in natural ways, reducing synthetic inputs.

Do you actually have experience or are you just making things up? Are are you willing to both write a driver and port the software for me that controls a chemistry instrument that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, uses some proprietary PCI card (or worse yet, ISA)? The instrument runs absolutely fine now, and will for years (I managed one instrument controlled by a Mac from the mid 80s), but would either cost a lot to upgrade to Windows 7, or require a new instrument. Instrumentation companies are like this. They do operate stupidly, are stuck in the 80s, and I'd love to smack them, but like it or not, in vertical industries, the choices are few and far between, and *very* expensive.

So what do you do? The hard part is some of these instruments generate a lot of data and require access to network servers. Dedicated, firewalled LANs will suffice here. Windows XP is going to be running for another ten years or more.

The whole problem revolves around the fact that in many industries computers are treated as "hardware" not "software." I mean you only replace a pump's pressure switch when it fails. We in the computer industry have been successful in pushing our technology into all kinds of places where it's invisible and just seen as a "controller" or a "switch" and treated as such. And it's not entirely the fault of the users of these devices either. The thought of securing and updating the firmware on these devices has really only been something anyone worried about recently. When was the last time you did a firmware update to your lawn sprinkler controller? Add internet capabilities to it, and suddenly it's a security hole requiring weekly software updates. How does this relate to XP? Well for a lot of people and industries, their instruments and devices are in their mind much like the sprinkler controller in your garage. They are just tools and they don't think about the software security, updates, EOL, etc. They've never had to before. It's a brave new world we've started, and this Windows XP EOL issue is just the beginning of our problems with this new "internet of things" idea. Which is brilliant, but fraught with all kinds of danger.

Doing a bit of research, the official Ubuntu firewalling utility is ufw, and there is a default GUI for it called gufw. Probably the OP should direct his attention here first.

Many of the posts so far direct the original poster to dedicated firewall appliances or distributions. If I read the summary correctly, the OP is simply looking for a good GUI to manipulate the firewall rules built into the kernel of all modern Linux distributions.

I can't vouch for any of them, but GUI frontends include guardog, lokkit, firestarter, and probably others. They are all in various states of development and maintenance.

Part of what the user wants to do (firewall per app) wasn't possible in the past with iptables (per-gid blocking was easy), but I believe it's now possible. A primitive daemon, called Leopard Flower, seems to offer this functionality: http://leopardflower.sourcefor...

From what I can see, the most promising, integrated, easy-to-use firewalling GUI software going forward is Fedora's firewalld and it's accompanying GUI. I know firewalld is available on Ubuntu (and its command-line interface). I'm not sure about the GUI part. Perhaps someone familiar wit Ubuntu can comment. Here's an article on installing it in Mint, so I assume it's similar in Ubuntu: http://www.linuxbsdos.com/2013...

From what I can see, firewalld and firewall-config hit the sweet spot for most desktop users. I'd never use it on my router, but for a desktop, it works pretty well and is under active development. I imagine it will sport per-application feature soon, if it doesn't already.

Never said it was. The implication being that other airliners besides airbus have them too on occasion. Sorry I didn't spell it out!

Many Airbus planes do have some cameras that the pilots can use. Usually in the tail. I was on a 777 recently that had at least 3 cameras that you could view via the inflight entertainment system. Was very cool.