Charlie Crist for Governor

Former (Republican) Governor Charlie Crist has come over from "the dark side" and is running to be our next (Democratic) Governor. Want to help him out?

With the massive unlimited money that the Koch Brothers and other Republicans are already throwing behind incumbent Rick Scott, "the odds are against us, and the situation is grim."

But times have changed dramatically. My generation still gets most of their info from TV, and so will be saturated with millions of dollars of highly polish and cleverly deceptive anti-Crist propaganda. And there's a lot of us in Florida.

But younger generations (and a smattering of us old farts) recognize that there's a lot more truth on the Internet... and we've learned how to find it. We've learned to distinguish truth from the Internet's abundance of unsubstantiated opinion and undeclared fiction. That gives us an edge.

Koch and company are trying to buy votes, as they just did in the 13th District defeat of Democrat Alex Sink. Their base is made up of diligent voters. Our base is not. So they have the advantage of money and participation.

What we have truth, honesty, compassion, thoughtfulness, empathy for all and...

... we still believe we can make a difference

... we still believe that tomorrow can be better than today

... we still believe that WE can be better tomorrow than we are today.

The history of our country is replete with dramatically outspent candidates that won. Money does not necessarily buy votes. We must remember that...

WE, together, are the government.

WE, together, own this country.

WE, together, decide what is right and wrong.

But WE have let our representatives become our masters.

And WE have the authority and the responsibility to set things right.

We must try. For even if we fail, our efforts inspire others to try again.

Sound like fun?

... help elect Charlie Crist

I'm not affiliated with the Crist campaign in any way. I can't help in person they way they need but will keep writing in support of Charlie Crist for Governor -- robert "docsalvage" watson

An Ounce of Prevention

re...
Microsoft misjudges customer loyalty with kill-XP plea

This is what happens when your business model is built on continued dependency, not to mention planned obsolescence.

The Linux community is not immune to this either. The most popular distros like Ubuntu are becoming more Microsoft-like in their O/S design every day.

Any software that depends on continuous upgrades just to maintain existing functionality will always be "extortion-able."

How many of us would own a car that had to be upgraded every year or two just to keep running?

The solution is to stop designing software that allows only one version to be installed on a system at a time. Almost all software is like this today even though multiple copies of the executable itself would usually run just fine together. The problem is that the executables are designed to expect one and one one copy of the config files and other resources.

Wildlife Ambassadors

Instead of banning Orca captivity entirely as a California Congressman's bill does, I actually think there should be laws requiring much more humane living conditions for them. SeaWorld has done more for Orcas that anyone else by bringing them into our world. If not for SeaWorld and other major aquariums, the public wouldn't care any more about "Killer Whales" than they do about sharks, rattlesnakes, scorpions... get my drift?

Yesterday, my daughter finally dragged me to the Tallahassee Museum of History and Natural Science (nee The Junior Museum)

If you haven't been there, TMHNS is much more a natural habitat zoo than a museum. Like virtually all zoos in the U.S., they do as much as they can within their meager budget to provide natural habitat space for wildlife. Only a few dangerous animals like poisonous snakes live in "cages" (aquariums). Most live in well fenced areas of native Florida habitat of several thousand square feet or more. Visitors are kept high above these enclosures of palmetto bushes, huge oak trees and cypress swamp on a well maintained wooden walkway. The animals ignore us most of the time.

Courage

A note to conservatives...

We know you're scared s***less of any kind of human progress. If it hasn't been done before, it must be "... lies straight from the pit of hell."

We try to explain that things will be better with improvements in the human condition. But your fears just won't let you go there. We understand.

The survival of the human race depends on overcoming our fears of the unknown... "to boldly go where no one has gone before."

That famous line was a metaphor by-the-way. While fictionally "exploring strange new worlds," the story-tellers were really exploring the human condition. How we treat each other. How we react to change. How we overcome our beliefs in what is possible on encountering the "impossible". And how we embrace it a grow as a result.

We know your fears for they are ours too. We've chosen to let our rational minds hold our fears at bay, for there is no way out of fear but through change.

The only way to remove a threat is to learn. We either learn to understand that it is not really a threat, or we learn how to mitigate or overcome it. We'll keep trying.

The Evolution Of Cancer

Labelled diagram of a cell undergoing
apoptosis.  18 Dec 2006 by Emma Farmer 

... updated 2014-03-07

This is speculation. Pure speculation. I am not a doctor, researcher, academic or politician. I just read a lot.

Is cancer piecemeal evolution?

We know that cancer is uncontrolled cell growth. The process that causes cells to die naturally gets turned off. This natural process is called apoptosis. From Wikipedia: Apoptosis...

Excessive apoptosis causes atrophy, whereas an insufficient amount results in uncontrolled cell proliferation, such as cancer.

As we eat better (verses starvation), have fewer predators and accidents and cure diseases, we live longer than our ancestors. But that evolution is never uniform. Parts of us live longer with little or no change to other parts. The more uniform and advantageous the changes though, the longer we live and thus the more we reproduce and pass on the traits to our offspring. The longer we live, the more knowledge and perspective we accumulate that can be passed on to others.

Docker Software

Docker open source software packages applications and all their dependencies into LXC virtual containers that run on any Linux distribution.

The Docker command line interface (CLI) makes it a building-block tool that can virtually eliminate "dependency hell." Docker may do for application packaging what Git has done for source code management.