I actually attended a talk about this, and here's what I got out of it. So, even if you had perfect Mammoth DNA, you don't have a Mammoth uterus. And the mammoth DNA isn't that different from an elephant's DNA. And whether genes are expressed has a lot to do with epigenetics, which in turn relies on the environment, which would be, for lack of anything else being available, an elephant's uterus. So, what you end up getting, after all this time and treasure, is probably going to pretty much be an elephant, with a couple of unexpressed Mammoth genes mixed in there.

Also, the talk went into the ethics of creating a mammoth. They were social creatures. Is there really any ethical justification, to bring one mammoth into the world, who will then be forever alone, and probably a little fucked up, from the weird circumstances of birth, and huge amount of guesswork involved in getting the genetics right? Do we actually gain knowledge from doing this, or do we just get bragging rights, from creating potentially the loneliest, most isolated, and genetically unreliable, animal on the planet?

exercism.io is a good starting point. The site has a lot of languages to choose from, and it presents you with a bunch of exercises you can complete for each language. Once you complete an exercise and submit it, you can visit the site, and see your code there. You can also see how others solved the same problem, and comment on their solutions, as well as read comments from other people.

sounds like they are good for paying my kids' allowance, so they have a barrier from buying junk food from snack machines.

Essentially, the iPad is an extension of the iPod, and iPhone, where a market for apps that work across all of them is well established. What Microsoft could do is extend their own hardware platform, perhaps from the Xbox 360 to the Zune, where they take whatever success they have had there, and capture the same consumers with multiple gadgets, much like Apple has done.

The problem that arises is, what do the Jews and Catholics do when a Protestant guy shows up to teach Creationism? Or a Buddhist, or any of the 2400 other choices for a religion we have out there. Which story do we want, the legends passed down in the Bible, or the best guesses of people who study the planet, observing the scientific method?

What this really is, is teaching Christianity in schools. When you label it like that, the reasons not to do it become clear.

The knowledge it takes to get you up and running in a VIM editor can easily fit on a post-it note. After that, you can learn at whatever pace you want. In my opinion, the learning curve is whatever you choose it to be; also, who would buy a book on VIM, have we not heard of google?

My son never seems to finish his jolly rancher, or his sucker, I find it stuck to the wall, or the carpet, or the dog. He ruined it for all the kids out there that savor every last tasty morsel of their hard candy. My deepest apologies to kids with a sweet tooth; if it weren't for my son's sticky-candy ways, you could all be sucking down Jolly Ranchers every single day, until the dentist shouts 'Oh joy, now my kids can go to Yale!'

If people have 500 bucks to spend on the Ipad, this is definitely a sign that the recession is over. Thank you Ipad, for serving as our bellwether. No matter what its features are, the interface is too clumsy to be useful for much, other than flipping through photos. Lets face it, mouse and keyboard are far superior to touchscreen, for almost any task. Plus there is a great advantage to a traditional laptop that folds shut, in that the screen is protected quite wonderfully in transit. The average Ipad is going to get scratched up rather quickly, much like the Ipods do, which will ruin watching movies on them for a lot of people. If people are willing to actually spend money on something that is way less user friendly than a laptop, but also will look like a scratched up piece of junk in a month's time, the economy is doing just fine.

Let's face it, a good number of people who buy Apple products do it because of a religious fervor, or for gadget cred; in other words the technology/openness/usefulness of the device isn't really in question.

iPad users will spend the next couple of years unable to access certain content on the internet; Apple has a proven record of not caring about such trivial matters. It may actually be for the best that some company is willing to essentially kill their own market share to do what they believe is 'right', from a technology perspective. They are in a position of trend setting; occasionally spending their 'geek cred' to get rid of something like Flash isn't really that bad.

This article prompted me to download Chrome OS, I just started it on a VM. I'm currently bemused by the fact that it doesn't recognize the https certificate for mail.google.com (wow! Either I'm hacked in a seriously bad way, or it really doesn't recognize a cert issued by the company that wrote it. Suddenly I'm feeling paranoid). I'm typing this on my native OS, as the vm appears to be frozen. I'm debating logging into mail.google.com, and unchecking 'always use https', to give it a more fair test, but my interest is waning.

Comparing lesson plans to coding is an excellent idea.

IP laws are fairly specific when it comes to code, and I imagine there would be a similar application to a lesson plan. For example, if I write a script that checks how many people are logged in to a computer, that script can't be protected by Intellectual property laws, because it isn't necessary to run the core business, and it is easily duplicable by nearly anyone with a bare modicum of programming knowledge. Therefore, I can take that script to my next job. On the other hand, if I were to write a payroll system for my company, which gives them a competitive edge in the marketplace, I COULDN'T take that with me to my next job.

I imagine schools would be the same way. As long as lesson plans are piecemeal, doing well-known tasks like M&M math, there is no way to claim Intellectual Property violations. If the teacher decides that 2-3 hours of their time spent developing the same lesson plan is more valuable than the $3.50 or whatever to purchase the lesson plan, more power to them. On the other hand, if the school has treated lesson plans as a global resource, and has collectively planned them out, and really built a lasting teaching system that makes kids successful, a teacher can't go selling these lesson plans, and the teacher doesn't really own their contributions to them, any more than I would own my contributions to a payroll system I might help write.

The best plan is for all of us to talk about it, until some enterprising geek makes a 'schoolforge' website, where we can download lesson plans for free, and then we will end up with an 'open source' lesson plan library, and a 'paid' lesson plan library. People can chose to monetize, or not, and everyone is happy.