this is really really important: anyone wishing to make a difference in the world really REALLY needs to read the book written by Professor Yunus, the joint winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Price, "Creating a World Without Poverty".

in his book, Professor Yunus describes how he naively studied Economics because he believed that he would be able to change his country's financial situation through studying first world economies. after graduation he set out just after one of the worst natural disasters his country had experienced and realised how completely pointless his studies had been. however he did not give up, and set out to work out what the problem actually was.

he learned that the poor are first and foremost incredibly resourceful... mostly because they have to. he also learned that many of them are, because there are no enforceable usury laws, permanently kept in debt to money-lenders. this shocked him so badly that once he freed an entire village from debt just from the small change in his wallet: something like $USD 15 was all it took to pay off a decade of usury.

what he discovered is that the gratitude of these people when freed from their former situation is immeasurable. the Grameen Bank doesn't have lawyers or debt collectors. the people that they lend money to are so GRATEFUL that they work non-stop to turn their lives around and pay off their loan. in fact, the repayment success rate is around NINETY EIGHT percent. it's so high that the *GRAMEEN BANK* considers it to be THEIR FAULT if one of their customers is ever in default. by contrast in the western world the default rate is 88%. i'll repeat that again in case it's not clear: only TWELVE PERCENT of creditors in the western world pay their debts on time, every time, and in full.

but the main reason why anyone wishing to help the emerging markets and the third world should read his book is because he patiently, with all the knowledge from his economics background, outlines why NGOs, Charity and the "Corporate Social Responsibility" clauses of standard profit-maximising Capitalist Corporations are all worse than doomed but are guaranteed to be ineffective at best and invariably seriously damaging and counter-productive.

right at the start of his book he outlines a surprising offer by Danone to work with him (follow his advice) to actually be effective. it was Professor Yunus's first experience of having been "under the microscope" of people with both big resources and heart. in other words the team at Danone were huge fans of what Yunus was trying to achieve: when he explained to them the financial structure that was needed, they listened, and they did it. they did not go in with a charity, or with donations: they set up a "non-loss, non-dividend" business, selling *locally-produced* yoghurt that happened to have the nutritients that the local population happened (by a not-coincidence) to be chronically deficient in.

the yohurt was sold not at a loss but at an affordable financially sustainable price because the focus was on remaining *stable*, not on exploitation through maximisation of profits: the focus was on allowing people to feel proud of what they achieved, and to take responsibility for their own wealth. they were EMPOWERED through the enormous generous resources of Danone's, but it was a successful venture because they LISTENED to what Professor Yunus had to say.

this is a completely wrong analysis. if (2) was true those people would have been dead centuries or millenia ago. the fact that they are still alive tells you that they get by, and that, honestly, is good enough.

there was an attempt a few decades ago to do exactly what DuPont is doing [again]. i do not understand why 1st world countries do not leave the 3rd world alone to grow their own food. 1st world conditions are NOT THE SAME as 3rd world conditions.

the study that i heard about was exactly the same situation. a 3rd world country which had extremely poor yields was interfered with by a 1st world country providing donations of high-yield maize. for three to four years the success of the trials resulted in bumper crops and the surrounding farmers clambered onto the 1st world genetic variety maize.

then there was a drought.

the high-yield 1st world maize died, and the entire area went into famine. next year, because nothing had grown, nobody had any food the year after, either.

basically it turned out that the low-yield maize had a MASSIVE genetic diversity. some variants thrived in good conditions, some grew successfully *EVEN IN DROUGHT CONDITIONS*. no matter what happened, those people always got some food. not necessarily a lot, but enough so that they didn't die.

now the problem was with this stupid, stupid interference by a 1st world country was that because everyone in the area had converted over to this wonderful high-yield maize, NOBODY HAD ANY OF THE OLD GENETIC VARIETY LEFT.

it was a decade before the country properly recovered, and that was just from one drought.

so the conclusion is, unescapably, that DuPont is intent on killing people just to make a profit, as this isn't the first time that providing 1st world maize to 3rd world countries has gone very very wrong.

just leave them alone. we *DON'T* know better.

this is pure speculation here, but my guess is that the people (politicians) protesting this research are quite likely to be the ones in charge of classified funding efforts for military, espionage and CIA equivalent research... and deployment of those same tools. if you've ever read Neal Stephenson's book "Cobweb" you'll know exactly what is most likely to be going on.

so, in essence, those people (politicians) know damn well that the espionage, domestic and political manipulation tools that they funded are quite likely to show up as anomalous activity should there ever be any tools (such as Truthy) provided to the general public, or any kind of research done to ascertain which "memes" *should* spread and which should not. for if there is anything that is detected which is *different* from normal expectations (a meme spread when it shouldn't have, and oh incidentally what was the source of that disruptive influence again?) it's really not going to go down too well with the people who *already* manipulate us from the shadows.

so i think you'll find that the people (politicians) protesting most loudly are the ones who are using media manipulation tools, and they're afraid that this research will be used to identify them, basically.

yes, i definitely have a question. i heard the statistic that the concentration of heavy and rare earth metals is now *higher* in landfill sites than it is in the original mines that they came from, which, if true, is a global disgrace for which all of us are responsible. firstly, is this actually true, and secondly, is anyone doing anything about the extraction of rare earth metals from the electronics in which they were originally embedded?

systemd violates the principles of unix, adding massive amounts of completely unnecessary complexity. there is absolutely nothing good to say about it.

wasn't NT 3.5 available for ARM, DEC Alpha, Power PC *and* x86? wasn t the core of the NT kernel based on the Mach kernel, and written almost exclusively in c? so what the hell went wrong??

i think at some point some scientists somewhere will work out that the statistical evidence is growing to show, more and more, that dark matter *doesn't* exist...

:) i'd love to but sadly it's one of the [few] contracts where i was in a proprietary environment. if i meet a software libre project some time in the future that needs that kind of stuff i'll certainly attempt to recreate it but it would need to be at least a year before i consider that.

oo, thank you very much for that tip, i'll try to pass it on and will definitely remember it for the next projects i work on. thank you.

the mistake you've made has been raised a number of times in the slashdot comments (3 so far). the wikipedia page that was deleted was about LMDB, not python-lmdb. python-lmdb is just bindings to LMDB and that is not notable in any significant way.

it's an interpreter which was [originally] based on a FORTH engine.

there is a compiler which does that, yes.

it interprets it.

*sigh* it does. the effect that this has on threading is to reduce threads to the role of a mutually-exclusive task-switching mechanism.

yes. you are one of the people who will appreciate, given that the codebase could not be written in (or converted to) any other language, due to time-constraints, that using processes and custom-written IPC because threads (which you'd think would be perfect to get high-performance on event processing because there would be no overhead on passing data between threads) couldn't be used, means that the end-result is going to be... complicated.

not a snowball in hell's chance of that happening :) not in a milllion years. not on this project, and not on any project i will actively and happily be involved in. and *especially* i cannot ever endorse the use of java for high performance reliable applications. i'm familiar with python's advantages and disadvantages, the way that the garbage collector works, and am familiar with the size of the actual python interpreter and am happy that it is implemented in c.

java on the other hand i just... i don't even want to begin describing why i don't want to be involved in its deployment - i'm sure there are many here on slashdot happy to explain why java is unsuitable.

there are many other ways in which the limitation of threads in python imposed by the GIL may be avoided. i chose to work around the problem by using processes and custom-writing an IPC infrastructure using edge-triggered epoll. it was... hard. others may choose to use stackless python. others may agree with the idea to use jython, but honestly if the application was required to be reasonably reliable as well as high-performance there would be absolutely no way that i could ever endorse such an idea. sorry :)

don't jest... please :) jokes about "you should just have a big LED on the box with a switch and a battery" _not_ appreciated :)

but, seriously: the complete lack of need in this application for joins (as well as any other features of SQL or NOSQL databases) was what led me to research key-value stores in the first place.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R... .... yes, i think so. now imagine that all the copying is done by the OS using the OS's virtual memory page-table granularity (so does not have any very very very significant overhead). and also imagine that the library is intelligent enough to move the older page into its record of free pages during a cleanup phase that doesn't cost very much either. and also remember that on accessing B+ trees to find a record you only need to know the "top" (root) node... so you can update (or create) using those COW semantics as many B+ tree nodes as you like, knowing that it's *only* the root node that you need (after the fact) to tell (new) readers about... ... and now it's no longer expensive to do those RCU style operations, and the performance is streets ahead of any other key-value store.

but i am not an expert on these things. i'm sure that if howard chipped in here (and he _is_ an expert on the linux kernel and on high-performance efficient algorithm implementation) he'd be able to tell you more and probably a lot more accurately than i can.