"Despite a government plan to cut pesticide use in half by 2020, sales in France have climbed steadily, reaching more than 75,000 tonnes of active ingredient in 2014, according to European Union figures."
That's an incredibly large amount of pesticides - over two pounds of active ingredient per French citizen per year.
Considering the amount of food, by weight, a human consumes over a year only two pounds of pesticides is an incredibly efficient use as far as my experience. I’m impressed. I probably have to use a half pound per year for my small vegetable garden which might feed me for a month if I had a really good season.
That was interesting, but I think their conclusion about the linux kernel being comparatively top-heavy with relatively few "work horses" was probably greatly influenced by the fact that they only analyzed the linux kernel, not linux kernel + device drivers. IMO, device drivers should be considered part of the OS - really, the work horses of the OS, not called by any other code.
Interesting subject matter and story, but terrible writing. I'm having difficulty believing that it was really written by an associate professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign:
Tezos - Participate in the governance of your cryptocurrency. Read the source code of any smart-contract on the blockchain.
As I understand it, the source code of tezos itself is stored on its own blockchain. Any modifications to the source are proposed by and voted on by owners of the tezos currency (weighted by how much they own). Also, unlike Ethereum, smart contracts are stored as source code on the blockchain, rather than as compiled bytecode.
No. XT and Classic were code forks, not blockchain forks. If certain runtime conditions had been met, they would have become blockchain forks, but those conditions were never met.
You're (understandably) confusing a code fork with a chain fork:
Code fork: taking the source code from one project, modifying it, then offering the result as a new project. This is what the overwhelming majority of altcoins are. For example Litecoin is a five-year-old code fork of Bitcoin. Even though Litecoin's code is nearly identical to Bitcoin's, Litecoin from the beginning created its own blockchain, which shares no data with Bitcoin's blockchain.
Chain fork: taking the blockchain from one project, and adding new blocks to that chain that are not compatible with the chain's original style. Variations of this are soft forks (the block-adding rules are made more strict), and hard forks (the block-adding rules are made less strict). Both this week's BTC-BCH fork and last year's ETH-ETC fork were hard forks.
Complications: obviously, a chain fork requires changes to the relevant code to be able to work, so a chain fork usually comes with a code fork, but not necessarily. For example, theoretically, a completely new code base could be created from scratch in a clean-room kind of environment to add new kinds of blocks to an old blockchain.
