While that is a laudable sentiment, and one that I can get behind, don't be surprised if you end up with approximately no women in your battalions.

We've seen the exact same thing happen in Sweden. Female fire fighters (well, not necessarily them per se, but other's speaking for them) complained about the macho culture that prevented women from being fire fighters. The had the numbers to support their arguments, there were very few females that were deemed to pass muster.

So, instead of the somewhat arbitrary previous hiring process, that did contain standards but also left room for judgement, quite a lot of work was put into defining what the actual requirements that had to be met to be a passable fire fighter were researched, tested and put into practice in the major fire departments in the larger cities.

The results were quite telling. At the smaller departments that kept the old process in the interim, the same abysmally small number of female applicants were hired, but in the cities, with their brand spanking new, objective, doesn't-leave-anything-to-subjective-judgement, not a single female fire fighter was hired after. Not one. *)

And if you look at the statistics that's not really that surprising. When you have strength, endurance, and psychological requirements that only a relatively small portion of the male population can pass, the number of females who could pass it in the general population becomes close to zero to begin with. And when you combine that with the small number of women who could see themselves in that line of work and even apply, it becomes a once-in-a-blue-moon even that the stars have aligned so that you will get a woman who both can pass the requirements, and would be interested and willing to do so.

*) A few years after two women actually managed to pass the physical requirements test by having been coached specifically. So out of 1000 fire fighters in my city there are now two women that are qualified for actual fire fighting (including "smoke diving"). The first time they tried coaching four women from neighbouring cities that already worked as fire fighters, but none of them passed... And just for reference, the physical requirements aren't completely over the top: Being able to run 3000 meters below 13:15, 30 kg bench press 35 times in under one minute, or lifting a 15 kg bar to the chin 40 times, etc. etc. These are requirements I myself would have had a shot at 25 years ago before I got old, slow, weak and fat, and I was no prime specimen of the male gender, far from it.

The physical differences between the sexes, at least in modern societies, are just that large. And if you say that "Women are OK, but you know, given the requirements there won't actually be any women," have you then actually opened up the position to women?

It gets even better. In project management terms we also actually try and quantify the "unknown unknowns", not just the "known unknowns". Rather, at the outset we try to get a feel for the risk that things will crop up that we didn't or couldn't foresee or plan for. This is based on things like; Have we done something similar in the past? (i.e. our degree of experience) What is the state of knowledge in the world about this task? What's the state of science? How good have we been at dealing with unforeseen consequences in the past? Can we limit the impact of any unknown unknown to a part of the system/project? (i.e. were are the risks the largest, can we do without those parts in a pinch?) etc. etc.

Any project manager that doesn't deal with the unknown and unknowable unknowns isn't doing their job. Its called risk management...

And neither do you. And that's my main point.

You then go on about avoiding a well known danger and how GM might be safer in that respect.

But that's not the point. It's the unknown unknown, that's the danger.

And with GM you open up whole vistas of unknown, unknown. The computer analogy is very apt. Even in the "deliberately designed world of computer programming" we can't foresee the consequences, and our experience is quite clearly on the side of outright manipulation being more dangerous than random chance change. The risks from the known unknown is readily dealt with in both situations, you have to check for known dangerous compounds using both methods, so your "you can be certain since you didn't fiddle with that" (paraphrase) doesn't fly in that case either. (Also a well known result from the complex systems that are computer programmes, "But that couldn't possibly affect that..." Famous last words.

But in either case, your characterisation of mine in particular, and our in general, concerns aren't about "unsafe" GMO's in the sense of knowingly "directly harmful to humans", it's "letting known psychopath organisations play with fire". We, well I specifically, don't distrust science and technology, we distrust you (in the "ya'll" sense of "you"). We didn't trust Dow Chemical when they said "trust us, our chemicals are completely safe", and we don't trust Monsanto now, when they're doing and saying the exact same thing. And the risk isn't really that we're afraid that they'll poison us outright (not that we hold them above such behaviour, just witness the British when they realised that scrapie had jumped the species boundary to cows and decided against saying anything lest they harm the British beef industry), we believe them to be smarter than that, no, its basically everything else, including the rest of the ecosystem, economy, and laying their grubby hands on a strategic resource...

Note that here in Sweden we don't just ban GMO, we also ban Belgian Blue, because we don't believe in the concept of breeding for what is a genetic disorder in animals just to make beef $0.10 cheaper by the pound. Banning the use of artificial growth hormones in animal husbandry, and the use of antibiotics to promote growth in same, is just plain common sense (esp. the latter).

We note that you don't care one way or the other about any of these. So that you don't care about GMO, and the risks with said, isn't surprising in the least, but also not very much of an endorsement... Especially since our farmers, even though we've "hamstrung" them instead of letting red blooded american capitalism be our guiding star, still manage to overproduce themselves into an unsustainable market situation, almost just as bad as yours. We don't actually need them to be more efficient, and we can't afford them to be anyway...

Not really. You see, random mutation from radiation is a fact of nature, and it's been going on for a long time. It's a sledge hammer approach and most mutations will result in a non-viable seed. It's a method that's limited in power and hence risk.

The chances of being accidentally clever on purpose is essentially zero with a random mutation approach. You're basically just speeding up nature. Can that result in dangerous crops? Sure, but experience tells us that to really screw up you need to add intelligence into the mix. The risk of tomatoes all of a sudden sprouting fish genes that might code for a fish protein that could kill those allergic to fish is as near to zero as damn it, with the random approach to "genetic engieering". With GMO the chances of success are several orders of magnitude higher.

I think of a car analogy off the top of my head, but in my own field, computer security/safety the examples abound. Even though the safety/reliability field is a difficult one, we can at least reason about it, because the insults to those systems follows the laws of nature and are amenable to statistical analysis. Not so with security. There we have an intelligent attacker that can change things, not at random, but at will. That means that a small software or hardware flaw that, statistically speaking, could never hurt us, can become our undoing each and every time. Those completely improbable circumstances that need to arise by chance for the danger to be realised, can be put in place by the intelligent attacker at will.

So, you can't really even begin to compare the power of random genetic mutation as a tool for changing DNA to (more or less, well "less" but still) being able to edit that DNA as you please. They're not in the same league, and hence while restricting Monsanto to the former is a cause for concern, giving them access to the later is a cause for abject terror. It's the difference between them having access to a hand grenade and a nuke...

P.S. And they know it. If they were of equal power and utility, they would just abandon GM as not being worth the bother and press on with random mutation. But they are different, and that's why they're not happy being restricted to the much less powerful of the techniques.

I don't know about "much harder". It was a help that's certain and they provided a few insights, but if Turing's biography is anything to go by, it wasn't crucial. Turing and his ilk did most of the work esp. when it came to automating the process. And it's the automation that made the process quick enough to be of practical value.

At the onset of serious illness often the answer to that is "yes". And that's a good thing. Because the "symptoms" can kill you. A common fever from an infection can kill you, even in cases where the actual infection can be cleared by the body itself is short order. The same with anaphylaxis. The allergic reaction as such won't kill you, it's the lack of breath from your throat swelling shut, or precipitous drop in blood pressure, (with heart failure) that kills you. Treating those symptoms is 99% of "curing" the underlying cause. The body will take care of that in short order as well if it survives that long, that is.

And yes. Seizures aren't exactly healthy either, with many serious complications, including death, so even if you don't do anything else to the patient, you damn well try and control the seizures first. Everything else comes second.

The diseases are after all divided into two major groups, the self healing and the incurable. HOWEVER, that's not to say that there aren't a few very important cases in the middle. Scraping away a melanoma before it's gone too far definitely "cures" you and isn't "treating the symptoms". Even so, and in all cases first you treat the (serious) symptoms, then you see if you can stop them from recurring.

Many serious diseases, including but not limited to, having no kidney function at all, can now be managed, by "treating the symptoms" of having no kidney function. Even if we "fix" that condition by transplanting a new kidney; guess what, we then have to treat the rejection symptoms by suppressing them. And people get to live long and productive lives that they wouldn't have been able to, just a few short years ago.

By always treating the symptoms.

That goes beyond my knowledge of the subject, but it makes sense. That said, the British did have the know how, with Turing and company building computers just after the war, but Britain was just too deep in the hole financially and otherwise to devote much energy, effort, determination to the task. So that the Americans pulled ahead was probably due to a number of (other) factors as well.

And those vacuum tubes ran hot as well as silent. Several kW:s total if if memory serves. At the aforementioned tour we told the story of having asking the "girls" that ran the computer how they managed cooling in the summer, when it was already very hot in the hut. "We just opened the window, silly!" was the answer. :-)

All of which I said? ... Or didn't voice an opinion on. (Of course the war time secrecy was to prevent the enemy from knowing you're knowing. Anything else would have been daft beyond belief, and I didn't say anything else.)

Yes, there is much truth in that. (Though you discount the rapid advances in computational power just after the war. Even though the computational effort is "massive" that only spurred the various signals intelligence organisations to buy more computers).

However, as no-one thought the Enigma had been broken to the extent that it had, no-one put that much effort in to perfect crypto hygiene, not reusing or reordering rotors (the Germans famously got that completely wrong, thinking that the strength was increased by changing rotor order), etc.

So while a properly configured and expanded Enigma could have been the basis of a sound and secure means of communication, that wasn't how it was typically used.

I mean, even the Germans had somewhat proper cryptographic procedures, but since they didn't believe that their crypto could be broken, they developed a very lackadaisical attitude in practice. Not so the allies, where their own knowledge of the fallibility of such systems made them stress proper procedure at all times to a much greater degree.

(There's a famous example from Beurlings Gehimschreiber break in Sweden. We can surmise that there was an order that all messages should start with a random word, to avoid stereotypical cribs at the start of a message. All good and well so far. But then the order probably continued "for example Sonnenschein".

You guessed it. All of a sudden more than 95% or so of all messages started with the word "Sonnenschein". The odd bright young spark managed "Mondschein" and a jester put "Donaudampfschiffsfhartskapitaensmuetze". So, while the intention was good, in actual practice messages got easier to break after that...)

All joking aside, historically that's exactly what happened! The crack of the Enigma in particular and German/Axis crypto in general, was kept very secret just to foist broken encryption onto the world. Winston Churchill himself actually ordered the plans for the Colossus electronic computer (built to crack the Geheimschreiber) was to be destroyed and the machines (there were several at that time) to be broken up, no piece to be bigger than a man's fist.

It was kept secret with the expressed intent of luring, in particular, South American countries to adopt German, esp. Enigma technology, so that all the work that had gone into the break could be reused. And it worked. Many countries adopted variations of the Enigma after the war and the break was kept a closely guarded secret. These machines were then used for diplomatic and other communication for years. It wasn't until 1967 that it was mentioned in one off hand sentence, and that was it. The full(er) story didn't come out until much later, with the publication of David Kahn's seminal "The Code Breakers" if memory serves, where it's all documented.

Winston Churchill even kept up the farce when writing his master work on the history of the English speaking peoples. He "retconned" many important events and facts to look like they weren't informed of what the allies knew of German plans from actual intercepted communications, instead keeping up the faÃade that their decisions had been governed by other factors, and other information than the true one. Of course, one shouldn't exaggerate the impact of the breaks on higher level decision making, but it's of course a fabrication to discount it. After all it was considered so valuable that they allies went to great lengths to deceive the Germans as to where they allies got their information from. Sending out "fake" reconnaissance missions to "happen upon" German convoys to North Africa to take just one example.

The secrecy of course, however relevant at the time, make problems for the historians. I remember when the curator of the Bletchely park museum held a talk about the reconstruction of the Colossus, and quipped, that "Well, of course all the plans weren't destroyed, engineers always squirrel away what they consider their best work. So bits and pieces ended up at the bottom of drawers and in attics everwhere." (Paraphrase). He then went around to all the old-timers and collected bits and bobs here and there, bread borded what he thought a particular piece would look like and came back and presented it to the original designers (the ones that were still alive). That was often sufficient to further jog their memory: "No, now that you mention it, that wasn't quite how it worked."

Does it have good Linux drivers? I.e. that have the same performance, memory requirements etc. that the windows counterpart? Doesn't have to be free, only good.

No? Then I'm not interested...

That doesn't really cover local politics, the "taking place outside of parts of town where they're expected", i.e. city hall, so you probably want to add that.

Local politics, e.g. major building projects etc., often have a greater direct effect on you than state-wide politics, so local's actually more important to keep track of. (But its even more boring, for the most part, so people don't bother, unfortunately.)

Yes. It's happened at least three times on a major scale. All attempts ended the same way. The principal difficulty of invading Russia are the vast distances over a largely featureless landscape with little of value to sustain the advance. The vast steppes are like the ocean, only you can't sail ships on them, and the roads and rail roads (depending time period) were and are bad or incompatible on purpose.

Hitler in particular had the problem that since he promised a short and quick campaign, he couldn't send proper supplies (e.g. winter gear) with the units at the start, and when it became necessary he could get it to the large rail way depots in Russia (the German army's corps of engineers re-laid the rail roads to standard gauge, a herculean task), but he couldn't get it to the troops. He had a major "last mile" problem. :-) (Well, several miles, but still.)

So, it's an interesting military problem in that fighting in Russia is easy. It's like the place was made for mobile warfare. But it's so bloody big, with infrastructure that's either poor on purpose, or easily destroyed by the retreating forces, that it's a logisticians nightmare. The faster you advance the further away from your (long and vulnerable) supply train you get. All three that tried were lucky to get out of there alive, and of course, in all three cases, most of their troops actually didn't.

Well, I don't really have a dog in this race, and I don't want to get into a semantic quibble about the meaning of "junk," but according to Wikipedia, these countries do rate as "junk" investments.

The "junk" rating is surprisingly (to me at least) high considering the name of the rating. S&P for example considers BB+ and below to be "junk" rated, and all the rest seem to concur.

Not even close. Sweden doesn't have one drop of oil, we have industry. And adding to that, the social programmes of Sweden are more expansive than our Norwegian brethren, who have oil. You see the Norwegians fund almost all their oil income into the world's largest and most well managed oil fund that is set up to last "indefinitely". They're most certainly not burning it. (The money. The majority of the oil most certainly burns).

Also, the oil is a recent thing, barely thirty years old. (I am old enough to remember when Norway was "poor" and we used to go shopping for cheaper staples there), and guess what, Sweden's social programmes were even further ahead than the rest of Europe in particular, and the world in general.