Drones are just souped-up model airplanes piloted by remote control. By leaving the pilot on the ground, they can stay in the air a lot longer. By using smart bombs, they can drop them one at a time, instead of a whole bomb load at once, like the B-52 and B-2, et cetera. By using stealth tech, they are less vulnerable.

There is still a pilot with responsibility and authority, and they can be relieved in the middle of combat by another. So fewer mistakes. Drones can be piloted by a group, kind of like pair programming. And no captured pilots to be held as hostages.

The latest technological advance is to use smaller explosives because the bombs are more accurate.

I recently spent far too much time in a hospital and they poked me a lot. A whole lot. Each time they needed to find a vein. I've been asking for technology like this for a long time.

Finding a vein is now a very personalized skill. One doctor who was a real genius at this, has poor sight and hearing, and told me he does it by feel. Others use very bright lights. One nurse, who was the backup when everybody else couldn't find a vein, said she doesn't know how she does it.

For people who need intravenous meds all the time, there are permanent installations they attach to the patients arm or neck. They go into the big vein leading into the top of the heart, the superior vena cava.

This could be a great boon to patients.

Syntax is important. Can't communicate without it.
Languages usually imply runtimes, which have important semantics, slowdowns, conventions, environments.

Try to code in whitespace sometime...

The single most useful idea in software development is the subroutine. It's what enables every thing else.

There are programming languages that get this wrong, although not recently.

What with oil possibly on the way out or on the way down, employment long-term might be narrowing in geology, over the decades.

But one computer-intensive area seems to be on the way up: Bioinformatics. More data, more processing, more algorithms to be invented, an endless supply of medical and biological research problems. Also, more different languages in use. Even Google has a bioinformatics research program.

Either way, though, you'd be better off with a masters degree of some kind.

There's a reason that several universities offer a masters in bioinformatics. There are offerings in geomatics, but they don't seem to be targeted directly at geology. At least on the first Google page.

Water vapor is more complex than CO2 alone. Water vapor creates clouds both high and low, water clouds and ice clouds, day clouds and night clouds. Without the water vapor effects, the CO2 wouldn't be causing much warming. But water vapor effects vary much more than CO2 effects.

Water vapor effects also include thunderstorms and hurricanes, which move around hot tropical air and have a net cooling effect on the earth, by moving hot air to a higher altitude. Or so it seems.

So climate is in chaos, limited by the laws of thermodynamics.

Speaking of water, it appears that some significant fraction of the heat is going into the deeper oceans. We're not sure how much, not sure how it gets there, and not sure how long it will stay. These are all open research questions.

So while sensitivity shows no sign of being negative, it isn't very predictable. And, in fact, estimates of sensitivity have been wandering up and down for some time now. We need to know the sensitivity of the temperature of air at the earth's surface to CO2, water vapor, methane, and so on. But the total energy added can distribute to the deep sea as well, so surface temps aren't simply dependent on energy added.

The amount of energy that would raise the air temperature by two degrees, would only raise the deep sea temp by a tiny fraction of that, due to the difference in the heat capacity of water vs air. So temperature-change is not related to the energy added in a simple way.

Whatever the answer, it ain't simple.

Actually, if you look up the Second Congo War , you'll see we've entirely skipped a genocide of at least 3 million in Africa. Maybe 5 million.

Syria must be seriously broke by now. In comparison to Syria, Israel's economy is doing fantastically well. I think the only payment Syria could make would be to let the Russians have military bases on Syrian soil, and expand Russian naval presence on the Mediterranean.

On Deep Background:

A Russian ship is currently visiting Israel, which has many ex-Russian citizens.

Russia has also received title to a large tract of land in downtown Jerusalem, purchased in previous centuries by the Russian Orthodox Church.

The most effective way for Obama to help the Syrian rebels might be to persuade Netanyahu to announce support for the Assad regime, and that the Assads are actually (but secretly) a Jewish family.

Let's say two different programs, A and B, do the same thing, and they each have 6 bugs. If program A has twice as many LoC (Lines of Code) as program B, then program A gets the higher score! Program A has half the error density of program B; But program A is clearly inferior, as it uses more memory, uses more disk space, probably runs more slowly, and is harder to debug.

I can easily fatten up any program to use more LoC, and not just with newlines, with real code, that might even be executed now and then. Coverity could, I suppose, counter my sabotage with a code-coverage tool to find the bloat, but there are sneaky ways to fool that, too.

It's entirely possible that some event happened around 6000 years ago that changed (all or some) of humanity. Perhaps there was a genetic change that made human minds more sensitive, or possibly even a Divine Intervention altering the souls of the then-existing naked apes. This event could have made people "More human".

I am not aware that any physical evidence has turned up to support this hypothesis. Yet.

A while back I had several full-body CT scans on an emergency basis. They found what they were looking for in my liver and it was treated. But I was forbidden to have any X-Rays of any kind for two years after that. So when I came down with bronchitis and pneumonia, the doctor had to play it by ear (literally, he just listened to my chest). All is well, now. But lowering the X-Ray dosage of CT scans is very worthwhile.

============== Mon Mar 5, 2012 10:45 ==============
Iran's concrete is defensive. It's their ballistic missiles that are offensive. Look up the Shahab and Sajil ballistic missiles.
It's lying to the IAEA that raises suspicions. It's Iran's claim to have the right to dominate the entire Middle East that frightens the Sunni Arab states. And Iran's constant cries of "Death to America" and "Death to Israel" tell us a great deal.

The phrase that was translated by Iran's official English website as "Wiping Israel off the map" was made clearer when they put it on a banner attached to a ballistic missile in a military parade.

If Israel or the US wanted to attack Iran, they've had 31 years to do it. Iran's nuclear weapons program is not defensive.

1. Read everything Douglas Crockford has on his JavaScript website. Use his jslint program. Down the road, read the code of his jslint program, I suppose. Buy and read his book. It's also available for the Kindle. Read the whole book twice. Basically, the lesson is don't make JS try to be Java, it only causes headaches.

2. Get a good JavaScript book for the language itself, this listing of JavaScript book reviews recommends the Wrox book, but I haven't read it, I use the 6th edition of the Flanagan book. See the link.

3. It's a language that, along with HTML and CSS, needs you to have a great memory or a good IDE that will prompt you for the allowable names. You can get a version of Eclipse pre-built for JavaScript, and you can get the Active State Komodo Edit program, both free. They say the Komodo IDE is even better, but it's expensive and probably not as complete as the (free) Eclipse.

4. You can get a version that runs on your desktop like a shell or perl/ruby/python will, but it isn't necessary. I know you can easily get a version of Mozilla SpiderMonkey that will do that.

5. Don't use the double-equals comparison operator, it's too confusing. Use the triple-equals operator ( "===" ), it's a pain to type but it's more straightforward.

6. Be wary form whence you copy. There's a lot of terrible code out there.

7. Use jQuery after your first two or three practice web pages, and after you've got CSS under control. This means also get a good CSS book. I guess start with the 'Lie and Boss' book, even though it's old.

The report says the data were not faked.

Was he ever accused of faking the data? The main accusation that should have been investigated is whether Mann (and the other climate scientists in his group) deleted emails to frustrate a legal Freedom of Information Request.

The scientific criticisms are different from the procedural questions.

Procedural
Is it okay to delete emails to frustrate an FOI request?
Is it okay to suppress the raw data that went into the analysis in a scientific paper?

Scientific
Is the "Hockey Stick" valid?
Do galactic cosmic rays influence global temperature by stimulating cloud formation?
Do climate models violate the laws of Thermodynamics?

.NET was written in anticipation of Itanium. Instead, the growth area is mobiles, pads, pdas and such, which use an eclectic mix of chips. The .NET option of generate-code-on-install doesn't apply to mobile apps, where the app store only has what the platform can use. And the big CLR doesn't always fit.

Apple is making a mint on hand-helds, and now has about 70 billion dollars in cash for a rainy day. Apple is huge. The comeback of the integrated hardware-software combination (Apple) changed the marketplace.

Now the Nokia-Microsoft deal is all about putting .NET on phones, so
1) That story is bogus or
2) .NET is making a comeback there, or
3) .NET will bankrupt Nokia.