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*?

It seems to be an increasingly common tactic for games developers to put out an advert-free game, wait for it to gain market share, then force an 'upgrade' that has no improvements at all, but is crammed with so many adverts that the game is barely playable. I deleted "4 words 1 picture" when it turned into "4 words, 1 picture, 1 full screen advert", but I would rather have kept the old, playable version on my phone.

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 dunno, I always get a big belly laugh whenever I log into something and see that horrible 1980s B&W X11 desktop, complete with ugly 'X' cursor.

Try flying on a Virgin America plane with the LCD screen inflight entertainment systems in the seat-backs. They'll often mass-reboot the things before or after a flight, briefly revealing that retro-fantastic, monochrome stippled background with 'X' cursor...

Nope nope nope. Marriage isn't a right

It isn't the marriage which is the human right. It is the right not to be discriminated against on the basis of your sexuality or gender (or, in the case of mixed-race marriages in the US, race). Without same-sex marriage you have a situation where the state is saying "this couple can get married, but this couple can't because they are of the same sex."

Which is partly why same-sex marriage wasn't an issue in much of the Western world 40 years ago; discrimination on the basis of sexuality wasn't considered to be a thing - in some places same-sex relationships were still illegal. But that's progress for you.

I walk up to a pregnant woman, stab her in the gut, kill the 'foetus'. I should only be charged with assault (or possibly attempted murder).

I can't speak for most jurisdictions, but in England you couldn't be convicted of murder (or manslaughter etc.) unless the woman died. English law does not consider a foetus to be a "person", therefore it cannot be murdered.

However, if you were to cause damage to the foetus but it was still able to be born alive, then it becomes a person. If it subsequently dies as a result of your actions, that could be murder.

There is no universal definition of when life begins; there are something like 7 different points used across science and law, and ultimately someone has to make a judgement as to which definition will be used in each context.

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.

The data centers in Quincy are quite large. Microsoft has a major facility, which is undergoing expansion. So does Yahoo, Intuit, Dell, and Sabey. These are major components of the tax base for the town of Quincy and elsewhere in Grant County. The data centers are highly resilient to power loss, with on-site diesel generators, 24x7 staffing, and all the other protections you'd expect. But prolonged use of the generators, if it becomes necessary, could exceed the permitted run time and accompanying pollution the facilities are allowed. Most likely, power from the other dams the Grant County PUD operates (or elsewhere on the regional power grid) could be routed to the data centers.

There are some other huge electricity consumers in the county. It's the world headquarters of a company that makes photovoltaic components, and also several food processors (all those potatoes from eastern Washington gotta be processed and cooked!). Industrial users might be able to turn down their power usage if there is a regional shortage, but data centers tend to operate at fairly stable 24x7 consumption levels. Major companies like those listed above have redundant facilities, and can shunt processing to other centers if required.

Site selection for major electricity consumers, including data centers, is a fascinating topic. The State of Washington has had various tax incentives to help businesses to choose to build facilities there. Electricity costs are among the lowest in the nation (under 3 cents/kWh for industrial customers). Plus, it makes extensive use of renewable sources, particularly hydroelectric (i.e., dams) and wind energy. Oregon has a similar story to tell, with their own rivers, dams, tax breaks, etc., and is part of why Amazon elected to put a huge facility there.

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.