The interesting component in this seems to be invasive species.
Cats took out the Dodo bird.

This invasive species component alone can account for a large percentage
as the small, medium and large invaders upset the local ecology.

Replacing one species with another reduces the resilience of the eco system
but the modern mobility and transportation of species is new.
Grasslands now grow grain... and feed billions, is this good or bad.

This invasion effect is new and will so dominate the data that important perhaps smaller changes
can be missed until too late.

You may be right.
Borrowed a spare tinfoil hat from a neighbor and got the
impression that there was a gentle PUSH from a TLA to
fix some or all of the security issues in WindowZ and also...

The subscriber model makes it easy to deliver targeted software
and it also makes it easy to squash the world wide explosion
of bot systems abused by criminals and foreign nationals.

The security flaws are seen as a power token by some small minded
departments but the net sum of the known bugs risks global chaos.

Banana boats can be differentiated from a boat load of pears
simply based on the K40 radiation signature. Same is true for
many of the "low sodium" salt replacements that replace NaCl with KCl.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
As for bananas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

K40 is very easy to measure. The Beta and Gamma radiation
is vastly easier to measure in a mass than alpha emissions of
other isotopes.

While a small percentage of K in the crust K40 is still a major component
of the natural radiation dose because there is so much of it (K) in the
crust of the earth.

The sensitivity of nuclear measurement tools is hard to comprehend.

One interesting application involves the abrasive qualities of tooth paste.
Irradiated dental material is "brushed" with a test toothpaste and
the trivial abrasion is measurable. Given that people brush their teeth
for a lifetime the measurement of abrasion is a real world application
of some interest to all.

Some cosmic rays have astounding energies... approaching the energy
of a thrown baseball.

I recall my HS teacher teaching us about the "hollow earth" theory.
He "taught" a longish list that included accepted and OMG foolish
old theories. He did not take sides to the point that I at the time
I wondered how the heck the hollow earth thing worked. Raquel Welch
sort of made me not care if it was real for a couple hours...

Ultimately he had us looking at the list and thinking about it
critically. Some were so silly as to be easy to dismiss but
he had us dismiss them.

Yes the notion of critical thinking was rather soft but he had
us do it.

The reality is science if full of historic ideas that have mostly
been replaced with new and improved ideas. The puffery
of some science guys on TV belies the reality that we only
think we know something that is true, today.

Well duh.... Someone at MS thinks this is a good idea.

Given the terrible terrible pile of bugs that MS has created, fixed and recreated
no individual is in a position to pass judgement on patches and fixes for
a closed source operating system. For the large numbers of home users
this is a darn good thing. For ISPs that suffer a lot of network and mail resource
load as a result of millions of badly managed, systems now operating
as bott farms for bad boys.

The recent federal data hack was apparently a failure to update to a vendor
supplied patch. Lazy??? Stupid??? Arrogant??? Foolish???

Another that might like this is the difficult to enumerate tupple of TLA's
that may wish to man in the middle update the system of one, two,
three,... many, all and insert then perhaps later remove a side door flaw to their
own end.

Cyber security is a pain to do right. Only fools think they have it solved.
Sadly MS has yet to design and deliver a consumer OS that has a chance of staying
secure. The NT kernel did have some nice security features... I see that
NT.mumble got booted on a recent Windows system.. Perhaps...

One real problem IMO with the NT security model is that it makes invisible security
modes and settings outside of your pay grade. Like VMS it placed a lot of power
behind opaque policy walls. If all is well this is good. If a breach happens it
is too easy to to hide. Given a well considered policy that includes an audit
system perhaps ...

The free update to Win-10 has interesting security footprint impacts
it could help a lot but the pessimist that I am doubts it.

OK this is important stuff.
It is so important that people across the globe must
make a point of informing their elected and appointed
officials that data insecurity is not acceptable.

There are agencies small, medium and large some well known
by a TLA that see power in keeping secret knowledge of
vendor system flaws.

This is false and fantastic logic and risks social stability
around the globe.

It is important for all responsible individuals and organizations
large and small to report these flaws to the vendor and then
the vendor has an obligation to address them.

Some agencies may wish to be anonymous... they might do
well to recruit individuals to act as their proxy and submit
the bug. Perhaps a retired individual in need of a house payment
and something to do (yes pay these agents a living wage).
Perhaps someone with a family history of Alzheimer's' so they
can honestly say they do not recall.

Of interest -- the new Microsoft 10 business model of giving away
free updates seems to be a darn interesting strategy. They will
be able to walk away from W7 and W8.n quicker and will be able
so load up the W10 engineering staff and minimize the expense
of maintaining the old stuff. Time will tell -- if they embrace systemd
I will take that as a disappointing signal.

Sigh... some of modern science is so astoundingly expensive
that this may be the only way to play the game for the vast
majority of talent.

However as a man with knowledge of Greek said he has
little issue with the language.

Yet, one man published a paper that caused harm.
The Wakefield Lancet paper was presented as science yet was
just a well crafted fiction. It is this Wakefield like cruft that
must be squashed.

A neighbor mentioned in passing that it can be more difficult
to write fiction than fact because fiction must be consistent.
He referred me to to M Twain.

“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.”
      Mark Twain

OK how does science update observations without a time machine?

Observations are observed facts and by their nature do not
change unless a calibration was found to be incorrect and
then it is not the observation that changes it is the computed
result after application of calibration data.

I am a believer in global warming and global climate change.
I am not a believer in much of the "science".
I balk at consensus science.

My personal bias has many origins but the one the gets me
was a "customer" complaining that his new supercomputer
was giving him an incorrect 19th digit in the resulting output.
I cracked open the deck (old FORTRAN) and noted on the
first screen "PI = 3.14". This tells me that NOTHING in
the output that involved PI had any validity beyond three digits.
Yet this guy was concerned with the 19th.

I asked why he did not substitute a value of PI from math.h
and he explained that the code was unstable if given more
digits to PI. OMG I said to myself.

Then I looked at his published research and yes he was worried
about CO2 in the ocean but in specific he wanted to eliminate
natural regions of the sea floor low enough in O2 to sequester
organic matter. i.e. he was worried about a natural process that
reduced CO2 in the air and wanted to eliminate it.

I happen to live down wind of "El Niño" and am astounded by the inability
of the global weather services to model and measure this. I see
headlines like: ""El Niño might “push the needle on global temperature” toward unprecedented warmth""
This is a conjecture for the 2015-2016 rainy season in Calif less than a year away
and others are telling me that the sky is falling in 100 years.

Like I said I am a believer that man is altering the planet weather.
I do believe that the ostriches in government need to fund quality
research and fund better data gathering efforts.

The United nations needs to mandate that all commercial aircraft, trains and all ships at
sea carry an instrument package to assist in data collecting efforts.
And that that data be delivered to the UN for use by all UN members.
This does leave big data voids but it would be a start.

OK I happen to like polls to look like brass.

Ya know the ones in those fancy-girl dance places.
Not the monster ones at a firehouse.

The best ones make the crystal structure visible
as perspiration etches the surface just so.

Chrome -- absolutely not. Chrome belongs on a
tricked out auto not on a poll.

It is interesting that the set of agencies commonly made reference to as the TLAs
at this point have near total control over most of the routing infrastructure and could
change routes such that the data passes through an international resource.

I find it amusing that my "location services" often get my location wrong by three time zones.
One time my location was N. Virginia another time some place in MD and I believe
I have been triangulated west and south of the Golden Trumpet just west of one
of the largest holes in the earth known to exist in N. America.

These routing anomalies mostly appeared to be the phone and ISP folk shaping traffic
in ways to give "data" truth to their position that internet transparency and net neutrality
now I wonder... wonder should I click PA or not...

Errr... No.
The math shows that as immortals migrate the growing demands inside the bubble
are never met. Starvation and worse....
Like a swarm of cannibalistic locusts we might invade the galaxy...
but the wreckage we leave behind... oh my.

OMG time to click on the Apple and check for an update.

Not good the sky is falling.... I must remember to shutdown and NEVER sleep.
Who do I send my new coffee bill to?

Look moderately hard at:
Patent No. 6,266,674
  Filed... Mar 16, 1992
  Issued Jul. 24, 2001

Did they patent the original adventure game (created c. 1975-76)? ....http://rickadams.org/adventure/a_history.html
Dropping a gold coin or more is clearly a user
defined label for navigating a data structure.
Game after game would play a tune...
Recall the interface for Marble Madness Atari Games c.1984.
http://www.aes.org/aeshc/pdf/f...

Well San Mateo... that puts you in harms way of water department fines
and fee abuses.

If it does not rain up on the hills the SF bay area will have a handy dandy
excuse to reset the entire water delivery fee structure.
Almond growers are being vilified yet the domestic water delivery system
and the agriculture water systems are parted off way way upstream and
little is going to fix this issue and not kill a couple oddball fish in the delta.