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.

All paragons of financial solvency, for sure...

Not really. It's old news by now in fact.

Now, of course, people don't have additive printers using the laser sintred process at home just yet. But I don't see anything fundamentally difficult about getting those to market at a reasonable cost in the future. And neither does the experts aparently.

So, forget the plastic pop-gun crap. "Real" guns are just around the corner. The first are already here.

Yes. And since we live in a political world where technology always have to bend to political realities, they cannot and should not be ignored.

Great thinkers, like Stallman, recognise this, and hence does "over the top" things like starting writing a free compiler and invent the very concept of software freedom, i.e. they focus on the political, that which out nothing much can exist. Lesser thinkers, like Linus Torvalds, doesn't, instead thinking that technology and the development of complex technical systems can exist in a vacuum, and hence puts himself, and the whole kernel community in difficult situations, that, like we guessed at the time, ended in tears.

Only the technology that can garner political support, can succeed. Because politics is what results when many people have to work together towards a common goal. It is in fact the very definition of politics.

Apparently Linus learned from this though, as git has the same license as the kernel, and hence arbitrary (political) restrictions like "you can't reverse engineer the protocol" (illegal in Europe I might add), or "you can't work on mercurial while working with Bitkeeper" (questionable in Europe) will not, and can not become an issue. And re: bitkeepers arbitrary licensing, Talk about letting your politics get in the way of technology...

Especially as the gist of the theory is: anthropogenic global warming leading to climate change. (And the shift is sensible. If the global average temperature increase didn't lead to climate change, we wouldn't be that concerned with it).

That we don't use that mouthful all the time is no different than you lot calling para-acetylaminophenol, acetaminophen, and we calling it paracetamol. The full thing is just too much. It's just basically a name. The underlying "thing" is still the same. In both cases.