Back in 1981-1983 when I was local support team leader for Space Studies Institute in Miami, FL promoting the idea of space colonies among the locals, one of the slides we showed was of this artist's conception of a Single Stage to Orbit Vertical Takeoff Vertical Landing system proposed by Boeing to loft solar power satellites into LEO. This vehicle also appeared in Gerard O'Neill's original edition of "The High Frontier" that Jeff Bezos probably read while he was becoming the valedictorian of his high school class.

Looking at Bezos's New Shepherd Vertical Takeoff Vertical Landing vehicle you might think that somewhere along the line Jeff caught a glimpse of Boeing's old design.

Yes, it's the way most contries operate. The most benefit goes to the politically well connected.

Well, as a Californian I'm on the fence about that split. (Not that that's the one people were trying to get on the ballot. The North-South split actually makes *some* sense. And has ever since the Supreme court decided that the Californian Senate couldn't be elected based on geographic considerations rather than population considerations. (Even after the split, though, the agricultural areas would be underrepresented...for cetain definitions of underrepresented.)

In the current situation it feels as if the Southern counties are using their dominance in population (i.e. representation) to pillage the Northern counties...though that's a bit more extreme that what they are actually doing. But as the drought deepens, the folk in the North are forced into severe water control measures, and the folk of the South are still watering their lawns and letting the overflow flow down the gutter. And some farmers are being forced to cut down parts of their orchards because they can't afford enough water for all of the trees. (So even in the North, the city dwellers are less pressed than the farmers.)

That said, even were such an amendment to pass (in the state) it would need the concurrence of the feds. (I don't know the details, but such an agreement is unlikely.)

Charles Stoss seems to believe that Britain is extracting wealth from Scotland. Perhaps he's wrong, but an earlier post above voiced the same opinion...and also agreed that DevoMax was the better choice...but one which had been manuvered off the ballot by politicians.

I think that Stoss is hoping that the nationalist party will become a lot less radical once they get the vote for independence. I don't know them (I live in the US and don't have any close ties to Scotland), but I'm a bit dubious about that.

I thought most of the oil had already been pumped out...of course, that was before fracking...

Untrue. I've had the X server hang up and I've logged in via the network and killed it and restarted it. I can't restart systemd without restarting the whole system. Furthermore, I don't run the X server on our mission critical machines.

James Clerk Maxwell

The headline says farmers. The text says farm workers. Very much not the same thing. A farmer is the owner of the farm. A farm worker is generally a hired hand, often (though not always) a migrant, and if so typically from Mexico or farther south.

The story suggests that the multi-drug-resistant bacteria are the result of antibiotic treatment of the animals at the farm. This misses another possibility:

In Mexico, most antibiotics are over-the-counter, much like asprin here in the US. People who feel ill or have some infection often buy and take them. Typically they use them until they no longer show symptoms - then stop, rather than taking a full regimin and killing off all the bacteria. (Why take more of the non-free drug once the symptoms are gone? Waste of money, right?) This is a recipe for creating drug-resistant bacteria.

Of course if an infection is resistant to one antibiotic, a paitent is likely to try another, and another, and so on until they find one that works. THAT's a recipe for maintaining and improving the bug's resistance to the front line antibiotics while breeding resistance to others.

As a result, a substantial fraction of the workers arriving from south of the Mexican border are carriers of multi-drug-resistant baceria.

Meanwhile, a farming operation is likely to give a limited number of antibiotics continuously, so non-resistant infections are wiped out before they can develop resistance, and if they do develop resistance it will be to the particular drugs used, rather than the universe of antibiotics.

Of course, infected workers can infect livestock, just as livestock can infect workers. And infected workers can trade infections around, just as livestock can. (More so, since the livestock tends to be kept separated, to reduce both disease spread and breeding by unintended pairings, limitations that farmers can't impose on their workers - and would be unlikely to try even if they could.)

So it seems to me that responsible researchers would go a bit farther before reporting: Like by doing genetic testing on the strains of bug in the various workers and the livestock, and running models on the results to try to identfy whether the bugs are from the herd or the workers.

I don't see any such work alluded to in this popularized reporting. It seems to just assume that the bugs were developed on the farm and spread to the workers. I hope this is a disconnect between the actual research and the report, rather than an accurate characterization of the research.

Why do you think that would prevent them from being criticized as uncivilized after they had already lost? I'll agree that it's a silly reason, but political decisions are often based around something equally silly...

Were they criticized for it? Not that I know of. This doesn't mean it wasn't a part of the reason. (OTOH, there's no evidence that I know of that *does* indicate it was part of the reason.)

Bezos's Blue Origin Part of Boeing Team Bidding for Taxi to ISS

http://slashdot.org/submission...

Submitted by Baldrson on Tuesday September 16, 2014 @10:58AM
Baldrson (78598) writes
"The WSJ reports that: "The long-secretive space ambitions of Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive of Amazon.com Inc., suddenly are about to get a lot more public. Blue Origin LLC, the space-exploration startup Mr. Bezos has been quietly toiling over for years, is part of a team led by Boeing Co. that is expected to soon garner a NASA contract to ferry astronauts to and from the international space station, according to people familiar with the matter.""

The sooner SpaceX gets away from reliance on government-as-customer the better. They are within a hairs-breadth of a dramatic drop in launch cost and if the effect of this is what I expect it to be, there will be an explosion of business in space as new regimes of space activity open up with SpaceX the primary transport.

The point being that Apple didn't adopt Objective-C just to be weird. Next used Objective-C to build NextStep and there's certain things in Objective-C that made NextStep moderately cool.

I actually worked at Apple, on the operating systems team, around that time. Apple was in no position to be arrogant in 1997 and wasn't actively looking for ways to be incompatible. Today, that's a very different story.

I call it fraud, but the contract says "up to" some speed or other, so technically they're only breaking the contract if they provide you faster service than you paid for.

I still call it fraud. And a contract of adhesion.

That's why you use a "google glass" like thing. You don't use welding goggles, you use something totally opaque, and look at the world through a video camera.

But it only works after you're expecting it.