I know everyone wants an electronic everything, but it sounds like in your situation paper records may actually be optimal. If you have to have a paper system in place anyway, why do the added expense of going digital as well? Sometimes, what is really needed is to optimize the paper system, rather than replace it with an electronic one.
Evi has been my closest contact at CU over the years. She was always a good friend and administered the scholarship I set up there. I am very sad but hoping to hear good news from my NZ friends. Evi was a very important person when it comes to Unix and Internet routing.
iCloud is a useless service. It intended to compete with DropBox, I think, and failed miserably. I think iOS developers should all individually opt to develop for DropBox rather than iCloud.
AWS has actually been pretty good if you actually do a proper deployment. I can only think of one time when they had multiple availability zones down at the same time. If you don't deploy across multiple availability zones, then it is just like any other hosted service. I often use it that way, too, it just isn't the magic fix-it-all system if you don't use it like it is intended.
It will be interesting to see how effective this is. DNA is not the sole source of information for an organism's morphology. Nuclear transfer has shown some traits which are not dependent on DNA. It will be very interesting to compare the morphology of the final organism to the original, extinct species.
By "creating a LotR visualization tool", does that mean they have cloned Peter Jackson?
The ability to sense when my children are misbehaving? That would be more helpful than infrared, I think.
But the seeds naturally produce other seeds. That is what seeds do. Did the farmer sign an agreement stating that they would not re-gather the seeds? If not, I don't see how Monsanto has a case. They sell seeds. The natural result of a seed is to produce more seeds. That would be like selling someone a printer and then coming back and claiming copyright on everything it prints.
If, however, the farmer signed an agreement, then I think the stupid person is just the farmer, and Monsanto is just taking advantage of fools.
This is a cool piece of history, though I wonder how much real functionality was in the original 1.0 version. Were they doing CMYK back then? Anyway, I want to check it out, but I don't anticipate seeing many technical marvels.
The real problem with COBOL is that, as Larry Wall has pointed out, you can't write poetry with it. There just isn't any good poetry that starts out with IDENTIFICATION SECTION.
The one thing I do miss about COBOL is easy access to fixed-point numeric processing. This seems like a no-brainer, but it is still missing from nearly every language.
Time to think about college choices...
We moved from subversion to git and I would not look back. I liked subversion, but there is nothing in subversion that I can't also do in git, plus I can do a lot more in git. Branches and branch merging is much cleaner in git than subversion. In addition, the fact that everyone has a copy of the repository means that (a) all operations can be done offline (yay!), and (b) you have automatic backup copies of everything. I can look through all commits (using gitk) straight off of my machine whether I'm connected or disconnected. It's wonderful.
"Yes, those documents have been securely destroyed". It's good to know that it isn't just IT that does security theater.
"And remember: Evil will always prevail, because Good is dumb." -- Spaceballs
