my biggest concern is that they start creating what can only be described as "generation time-bomb crops", in a pathologically-insane effort to further save money. "time-bomb crops" would be those which you plant once, they grow, seed, plant twice, they grow, place a third time and they FAIL.

now imagine such insanely-dangerous crops pollenating and cross-pollenating world-wide and it's not so hard to imagine a scenario in which world famine occurs within a five to eight year period in which all food crops world-wide completely fail.

i was actually pretty shocked when i first heard of sterile seeds that even have a *single* generation planting. there's no guarantee that nature will not, through its own process of DNA evolution, *accidentally* come up with generation time-bomb crops.

i've said it once and i'll say it again: genetic modifications to crops are so insanely dangerous that i'm beyond understanding why people do not understand this. if there was even the *slightest* risk of killing 7 billion people *why would you even contemplate it*?

ls -altr /usr/local/lib/*lite*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root staff 16 Dec 7 2010 /usr/local/lib/liblite.so.3 -> liblite.so.3.0.5
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root staff 16 Dec 7 2010 /usr/local/lib/liblite.so -> liblite.so.3.0.5
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root staff 928 Dec 7 2010 /usr/local/lib/liblite.la
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root staff 48848 May 3 2011 /usr/local/lib/liblite.so.3.0.5

i'm sorry - that's 48k not 86k!! liblite is *tiny*.

it was qt4.3 or thereabouts. the problem is that qt does far too much. when you think that lite 1.2 is around an 86k binary and qt4 and qt5 are several tens of *megabytes* you start to understand the extent of the problem. libQtCore is 3mbytes. libQtGui is 11mbytes.

now bear in mind that when you're doing something like a web browser, all you really need is a font and pixel drawing system (cairo, pango), an input box (liblite), a way to read the keyboard and mouse, and err... it really ain't that complicated, then you start to understand why GTK and QT are complete overkill. only when you need to do things like open a new popup window or open a new browser window that you need something more complex, and heck, those can be done with a bit of X11 or Win32/GDI message handling for goodness sake. in cases where you're doing direct framebuffer writes (such as in chrome os, android, b2g, DirectFB applications and more) then you don't even need _that_, in many cases.

so in effect it doesn't matter how good Qt4, Qt5 or GTK2 or GTK3 are, the fact remains that even the initialisation of the sub-systems that aren't going to be used are all simply too much. the only reason for maintaining those ports (of webkit) is to make it easy for people who wish to integrate webkit into *their* applications that are written in those frameworks.

so the difference is: under the circumstances where you don't need the infrastructure of those frameworks, because you're doing a stand-alone web browser, these heavy-weight frameworks like Qt and Gtk are an exceptionally bad idea.

i've worked with webkit a *lot*. for example, i helped denis with the port of webkit to directfb. in doing the python-webkit (direct) bindings http://www.gnu.org/software/py... i covered a *lot* of different ports of webkit. here's the summary:

* when compiling the standard webkit to run on a 400mhz ARM9, the gtk port started up in around... i think it was somewhere around 8 seconds. this was tolerable. it used about 130mb of memory to load a single basic page.

* when compiling the DirectFB port to run on the same system, it started up in about 3 to 4 seconds, and used about 1 or 2mb less memory. this was great!

* when compiling the Qt4 port to run on the same system, it took NINETY SECONDS to start up, consumed DOUBLE the amount of memory, and was basically completely intolerable.

the directfb port basically used an older (revision 1.2) version of the lite toolkit. to say it's light-weight would be an understatement: it's absolutely awesome. qt4 has unfortunately turned into a bit of a monster. gtk by comparison has remained reasonably level-headed, and when it (finally!) has the equivalence of COM's co-classes added to the gobject introspection layer gtk will become highly significant, strategically.

the only thing that the directfb-lite port lacked (at the time i was involved) was a window manager. this basically meant that you could only have one browser window open, and you had a callback for dealing with console alerts, which you had to then deal with yourself. i _thought_ about doing the same trick that mozilla does (which is most clearly demonstrated in b2g) - namely to implement the windowing system *in* webkit itself, in a high-level language: that would be cool. not many people are aware that firefox's menus including the toolbars and tabs are actually implemented *in javascript* (!), and the main browser "window" is merely a (secure) frame. b2g is an extension of that.

so anyway, the point is: there are lots of ways this can be achieved. you can implement the window manager externally and treat the browser as an isolated "component". you can go the other route and implement the window manager *using* the browser engine. but the main point is that either way, gtk and qt4 are to be honest complete overkill. it's only when you have things like co-classes built-in to the underlying infrastructure (like COM has) that you get any _real_ flexible benefit from the widget set, and as neither gtk nor qt4 have those, there's honestly really no point having them around.

i had to be woken up at around 9:20am for a 3 hour A-Level Maths exam that had started at 9am and was to end at 12. starting at around 9:25 on the first question, after around 25 minutes i gave up and went onto the 2nd question. this one i did in around 15 minutes. from there i accelerated, completed *every* question, returned to the first and completed it in a few minutes. i then sat back for a while, then got some coloured pens and coloured in one of the graphs. i might even have been bold enough to have left 10 or 15 minute early.

when the results were in i learned i'd got an A. on an exam that was supposed to be 3 hours and i'd completed every question in a little over 2. that was 1987 and i've never forgotten what happened. the point is: i know that once you get started, and get into the mindset, anything is possible: questions you couldn't answer suddenly become easy.

yeah if it's a windows computer, the only piece of software i need is the one which was formerly available under the domain name goodbyemicrosoft.com. now it's available directly from the debian.org web site.

what's the material that's used in batteries? lithium. how much lithium is there on the planet? not enough. this is the problem that's being swept under the carpet. we already have high prices on copper, as it's already in short supply due to its prevalence in electronics. the quantities required of neodymium (for the magnets in the motors), copper (for the moving coils in the motors) and lithium (for the batteries) to push around 2 tonnes of metal is basically... insane. there's not enough available on the planet. something has to give.

ok, for what it's worth, my take on what the higgs is, is that it's a [virtual] ultra-heavy proton, made up of the same [previously undiscovered] ultra-heavy quarks that make up the [virtual] W and Z Bosons. it takes a bit of explaining, but i've been looking into this... a lot.... and i surmise that the W and Z Bosons are just flavours of pions (2-quark particles) whilst the Higgs is just a flavour of the proton (3 quark particles). they don't appear "in the wild" so to speak because a) they're incredibly large b) they're hugely unstable, *but* in "virtual" form they're actually very easy to create (universe-speaking)

what's interesting is that there _should_ also be a "neutral" Higgs as well - based on an ultra-heavy neutron. hey look! there's two mass figures for the Higgs, and one of them was gamma ray decay particles only! and what's the difference between the 126.0 / 125.3 and mass of neutron divided by mass of proton? exactly the same to within 0.05%. funny that. .... the only problem is: i now need about 10 years worth of full-time maths training in order to catch up with the level of mathematics that's gone into QED in order to *prove* the above to the satisfaction of the rest of the particle physics community.... and that, essentially, is the whole problem with particle physics. the direction it's taken is so immensely complex that the number of people who can contribute successfully is vastly limited: thus, progress in this field isn't limited by computers or people's enthusiasm for the subject but by the direction that it's taken.

from a software engineering and reverse-engineering perspective, pure maths like this simply doesn't have the kind of "rapid prototyping" loop that allows progress to be efficiently made. each mathematical construct is an "ivory tower", where the smallest theoretical modification or tweak can require the entire edifice to be redesigned from the ground up (taking man-decades of intense thought in the process).

so - think of this: considered as a computer program, how could anyone "debug" the process by which particle physics has evolved?

well. that would explain why maharishi mahesh yogi was accused of all sorts of things. and why various scientists get "discredited". it would be interesting to consider how best to counteract these measures, although Mr Maharishi Bounces-on-the-Mattress Mahesh Yogi had a tactic that seemed to work: ignore them....

it will be interesting to see and learn what the long-term economic and social effects of these censorship attempts are. the effect of censorship is not just going to cut off the "pruhtesters", it'll cut off researchers from access to papers and equipment, businesses from the customers and suppliers, and, additionally, cut off government departments within venezuela from effective communication with each other in the day-to-day operations. looking further ahead i look forward to seeing whether other governments find this lesson useful or not.

... you know... i worked for pi technology in milton, cambridge, in 1993. they're a good company. they write automotive control systems, engine control management software, vehicle monitoring software and diagnosis systems and so on. one of the things i learned was that coding standards for mission-critical systems such as engine control have to be very very specific and very very strict. the core rules were simple:

1) absolutely no recursion. it could lead to stack overflows.
2) absolutely no local variables. it could lead to stack overflows.
3) absolutely no use of of malloc or free. it could lead to stack overflows.

now you're telling me that there are actually car manufacturers that cannot be bothered to follow even the simplest and most obvious of safety rules for development of mission-critical software, on which peoples' lives depend? that's so basic that to not adhere to those blindingly-obvious rules sounds very much like criminal negligence.

well... this is puzzling. i tried converting the value reported to MeV and accidentally divided by the atomic units constant 9.109 382 91 x 10-31 instead. what i got shocked the hell out of me: 1000x avogadro's constant. according to reports here http://phys.org/news/2014-02-p... the value is 0.000548579909067 atomic mass units. if however you divide that by the atomic unit of mass reported here http://physics.nist.gov/cgi-bi...|search_for=atomic+mass+unit you get, to 6 decimal places, avogadro's constant times 1,000.

i am... very very startled! the implications are that there is some sort of link between the mass of the electron and (if you look up the definition of 1 mole on wikipedia) the number of atoms in 12 kg of carbon. which is.... incredibly odd.

i don't think it's a systemic error, because the original experiment's value agrees with that of other measurements that have been made of the electron's mass. what it would mean is that there appears to genuinely be a link between the mass of the electron and avogadro's constant.

i heard that taxation on electronic "luxury" goods is at an insane level in indonesia, resulting in grey imports and smuggling. building a factory in indonesia would be a simple way to get round the problem.

The European Union's accounts have not been signed off for over 14 years. no chartered accountancy firm will touch them. what that makes the European Union is an "Organised Crime Syndicate". this is not a hoax or a joke: it is a fact. any organisation that operates outside the law and siphons money from people in an organised fashion is a criminal syndicate. it happens to be illegal to fund Organised Crime. therefore, following the logic through, all the Sovereign States that give the E.U. their citizens' taxes are also breaking the law. it therefore also follows that any citizen of an E.U. Sovereign State is, if they pay taxes, funding Organised Crime and is therefore also breaking the law.

as a citizen of a Sovereign State in the E.U the way to ensure that the law is not broken is therefore to contact a solicitor and arrange for any taxes being paid to be witheld - paid into an escrow account - pending resolution of the criminal activities of the European Union.

the article is mis-reported... or at the very least confusing. if you read the article carefully it describes failures of some of the researchers, followed by reporting the successful analysis and conclusions, possibly by a completely different team. the time-lines are not made clear, either. this sounds like a reporter decided to mis-represent the facts.