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No, no, this is new:
"But sharing is about more than just conversations. The experiences we have together are just as important to our relationships. We want to make playing games online just as fun, and just as meaningful, as playing in real life."

See? This was their idea. It's new, it's innovative. They came to this realization through trial and error, through experience. They employed a crack team of behavioral psychologists that independently came to the conclusion that "people want to play games online". Up until now, games online weren't fun. But they're going to change that. Look at this list of games they're going to launch right off the bat: Angry Birds, Bejeweled, Sudoku! Oh man, Google's gonna make games FUN again. I can't wait.

Thanks to people like you, alots are on the verge of extinction!

I think you need better examples. Women who bike, and then get pregnant, often continue to bike right up to their due date, or within a week.

I don't see too many young children driving cars, either, but I do see them riding in seats on bikes, in trailers, or on the backs or fronts of cargo bikes, or on tag-alongs, or on big bikes for carrying kids.

Friend of mine has congenital badness of the circulatory system, she thinks she'd be an invalid if not for regular bicycle commutes.

Another friend of mine has nerve pinches that don't let him ride a normal bike, so instead he uses an ElliptiGO. Lack of exercise was contributing to type 2 diabetes; his car was killing him, more or less. Now with some commutes by "bike", it's not.

In your case, perhaps a recumbent tricycle would work, but if not, there is such a thing as a wheelchair, and a car is just a sort of glorified wheelchair.

A company is a person by the way...This idea originated in the 19th century.

They could get these guys to try it. YT

There are a few xbox emulators. The most famous of which is Cxbx, which is still semi-actively maintained (in a fork after the original author abandoned it):

http://shogun3d-cxbx.blogspot.com/

It's not the only one. There was another one that came out early on that emulated Halo (and only Halo). Like Cxbx, it was also a high-level emulator. I don't remember the name of that one. Another is DxBx, which has a handful of playable games. There might be some others.

Overall, the reason why XBox emulation is so primitive compared to other consoles in the same generation is lack of interest and need. The XBox wasn't all that successful (It was Microsoft buying their way into the market, which *was* a smart move, but they knew going in that the first XBox would lose a ton of money), and most of the games that were popular on it were also available on other platforms that do have decent emulators (GameCube, PS2) or don't need emulators (PC). Even then, most of the popular games *are* supported by the XBox emulator that comes with the XBox 360, so even if the game isn't available on a different platform, and you can't emulate it on a PC, you can probably emulate it on a 360.

Just because the 360 ran x86 doesn't mean emulation is trivial. Even if you treat it like a PC to be virtualized rather than a console to be emulated, you've got the unenviable task of writing the simulation of an entire operating system (which, while not based on Windows, does use a similar API, plus DirectX), and since there's very little hardware abstraction going on, you *do* need to emulate (or at least translate for) all the other components like the GPU.

Look at projects that try to accomplish similar things, like WINE. WINE doesn't even have to do nearly as much, since it just has to simulate the API and not any of the hardware, but even WINE is still woefully incomplete after 18 years of development by a large team. Admittedly, part of that is because they're working towards a moving target, but it gives you an idea of how it's really not so simple. Another more specific example might be Direct3D virtualization in software like VMWare. They spent years working on it, and it's still not perfect, and it still has a bunch of limitations. Considering that VMWare has only become more popular on the consumer-level over the years (not least because MacOS switched to x86, leading to a whole lot of Mac users who want to run Windows apps without rebooting into bootcamp), I'm sure they'd had a perfect Direct3D virtualization subsystem years ago if it were that easy.

He's been supplying donated PCs running Linux for underprivileged kids down in Austin, Texas for several years. He has done follow up visits on a regular basis. He rarely finds any issues that the kids haven't figured out how to solve themselves. The ones he does find tend to be hardware related. Check out his blog for details.

Basically, that's already done. NES-on-a-CHIP and SNES-on-a-chip solutions can be found at any anime convention; if you want a really cheap, crappy version you can go to your local shopping mall around christmas and find some really sleazy-skeezy looking Indian or Latino guy hawking the GameStation3D, which has "10,000 games in one" (actually probably about 50 NES and 50 SNES roms with the game numbers on a repeating loop) all crammed into a base station and badly fashioned Chinese-made "controller" where half the buttons don't work. He may also be selling something like this or something like this crappy-ass GBA ripoff called a 'PVP'.

3GHz for a SNES? Makes you wonder just how accurate MAME actually is.

Then again, when you go as for as photographing a rom chip under a microscope, I guess there's no doubting the level of dedication.

It might be worth taking a look at the Helios Project, (Website: http://www.heliosinitiative.org/ , Blog of bloke running it: http://linuxlock.blogspot.com/ ), as this is exactly what they do, collect together donated PCs and stuff, and provide refurbished PCs with Linux on to people on a charitable basis (predominantly disadvantaged kids I believe). (And they do some training etc as well I think).

Anyway, a lot of the postings on their have been quite interesting over the years, and I think they currently use either Ubuntu or Linux Mint.

That's because Google doesn't do "traditional" research like the other R&D shops...

Here:
http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2011/01/does-google-do-research.html

Basically every employee at Google is a Research Employee. If they publish a paper while working at Google it's considered by Google to be Google research. (After all, they are working for Google while doing that research...)

So you aren't going to see "Google Research publishes..." because they allow the people/person doing the research take credit.

Can you publish papers at Google? Sure. Google publishes hundreds of research papers a year. (Some more details here.)You can even sit on program committees, give talks, attend conferences, all that. But this is not your main job, so it's important to make sure that the research outreach isn't interfering with your ability to do get "real" work done. It's also true that Google teams are sometimes too busy to spend much time pushing out papers, even when the work is eminently publishable.

Matt Welsh said...
Anon re: "Research Scientist". Indeed, there is a "Research Scientist" job title, and it is reserved for those people in the "Google Research" arm of the company. My point is that Google Research is not like Microsoft Research (say), and you don't need to be a "research scientist" to do "research". The vast majority of PhDs at Google are "software engineers".

(Honestly I think Google has this title only to make it easier to hire certain kinds of people. I wish they would get rid of it, since it causes confusion.)

Here's what he looked like in the episode

Funny, but no, I meant the environmental damage from the likely coal-generated electricity needed to pump the water all that way, and the waste brine from the plant.

At least one blogger, who is somewhat less anonymous than Rockstar05, apparently agrees:

http://alleducationmatters.blogspot.com/2011/08/eric-grimms-take-on-cooley-what-used-to.html

I will be very eager to follow this one.

Look at the picture. It's a fingerbox. The student was clearly trying to troll the TSA.

the U.S. is hurtling at full speed towards a deficit meltdown

Your beloved market thinks otherwise. That number is the interest the US has to pay to borrow money. That number was very small, reflecting the opinion of the market on risk of default. It actually fell further after the downgrade.

S&P's reasoning is not at all sound. That wasn't a "small math error", btw.

From: http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/07/judge-orders-overhaul-of-oracles.html

One of the most interesting passages in today's order quotes from an October 2005 email by Google's Android boss Andy Rubin:

"If Sun doesn't want to work with us, we have two options:
1) Abandon our work and adopt MSFT CLR VM and C# language
- or -
2) Do Java anyway and defend our decision, perhaps making enemies along the way"

Verbatim, from a Google email. But yeah, there's no evidence that they've done anything untoward with other peoples' IP, it's all just a bunch of paid shills attacking the little bitty underdog Google, because they're afraid of how that scrappy, unconventional little indie company named Google pisses innovation and craps excellence.

It's really better to think of many (most?) of Google's "products" as research projects, and remember that in many cases those "failed products" end up as parts or foundations for future products...

Google appears to disagree: under Larry Page's leadership, they have begun pulling back on the "throw lots of things against the wall and see which ones stick" strategy.

They're like a startup, in that they willfully infringe patents?

http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/08/oracle-and-google-keep-wrangling-over.html

I guess they are willing to make mistakes.

Google is clearly on the right side of the java debacle. Java is licensed GPL2, which allows forks. The copyright license doesn't cover patents, true, but if you license your code to allow forks, and then sue for copyright infringement, I call estoppel.

They're like a startup, in that they willfully infringe patents?

http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/08/oracle-and-google-keep-wrangling-over.html

I guess they are willing to make mistakes.

I seem to remember that the IE 7 fan's answer to that was along the lines of "why should I waste space on my PC's hard drive with two browsers?"

Firefox is around 80MB. I don't think you can still even buy a hard drive smaller than 80GB. Nobody actually cares about 0.1% of their disk space, it sounds like the guy was just looking for a reason to argue.

And besides, without some sort of MSI version of Firefox that can be administered with the Group Policy system, how will larger companies deploy Firefox alongside IE?

Such things exist.

You appear not to understand how the United States mobile phone market works. The carriers are completely in control of the whole process because smartphones are priced for subsidized sale through a carrier, not sale directly to end users.

The customers can still choose which make of phone they get. Moreover, the carriers might choose who gets OS updates, but they don't really choose what goes in the app stores. And if people start complaining that iOS Safari doesn't support DNSSEC, Apple could easily silence them by publishing a free version-agnostic DNSSEC plugin in the app store.

I have another question: I want to deploy DNSSEC on a web site once my hosting provider supports it. Is the format of a certificate record standardized yet?

There is an RFC.

And which plug-in should I recommend to users of Google Chrome?

It appears that they're working on making the Firefox plugin work for Chrome but it isn't ported yet as of April, see here. There is also this which appears to be related to the same.

I don't think you got the joke.

You'd be very popular in these places, all of which could produce more food on their own if government was not taxing and subsidizing and regulating food in the world:

Swaziland: HIV patients 'eat dung to make drugs work'

http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/out_of_food_zimbabweans_eating_cow_dung/

Food Prices Fuel Egypt Unrest

Egypt and Tunisia usher in the new era of global food revolutions

Spike in global food prices contributes to Tunisian violence

Food price jumps protested in Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco

Egypt and Tunisia: rocked by the global food crisis

Hunger in Syria, Libya and Yemen

Ukraine to control food prices

Rising food prices increase squeeze on poor - Oxfam

As Food Prices Spike, Azerbaijanis Endure Border Chaos To Shop In Iran

For dummies: The impact of the global food crisis on Azerbaijan - in pictures

Estonia Raises Inflation Forecast on Global Food and Fuel Prices

Nigeria: food price up as inflationary rate drop

High food prices 'caused Niger hunger'

Mexico: Food prices reach record high

China's food price inflation hits 14.4% in June

Lithuania and Latvia catching up with Estonia

Food prices rise, wages donâ(TM)t

China food prices spike as floods ruin farmland

Brazil: Food Prices Surge and Head Toward Dangerous Levels

Rise in food prices causing major concerns in Russia

Stockpiling as Russian food prices soar

Food prices have soared most in Venezuela, Bolivia and Argentina

Thousands protest against high food prices in Delhi

India: A spike in food prices is especially painful for the poor

I bet it would get pretty personal for you if you came to these places and started spouting your socialist views on how cheap food is that your government is subsidizing farmers and then paying farmers to destroy it

Swaziland: HIV patients 'eat dung to make drugs work'

http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/out_of_food_zimbabweans_eating_cow_dung/

Food Prices Fuel Egypt Unrest

Egypt and Tunisia usher in the new era of global food revolutions

Spike in global food prices contributes to Tunisian violence

Food price jumps protested in Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco

Egypt and Tunisia: rocked by the global food crisis

Hunger in Syria, Libya and Yemen

Ukraine to control food prices

Rising food prices increase squeeze on poor - Oxfam

As Food Prices Spike, Azerbaijanis Endure Border Chaos To Shop In Iran

For dummies: The impact of the global food crisis on Azerbaijan - in pictures

Estonia Raises Inflation Forecast on Global Food and Fuel Prices

Nigeria: food price up as inflationary rate drop

High food prices 'caused Niger hunger'

Mexico: Food prices reach record high

China's food price inflation hits 14.4% in June

Lithuania and Latvia catching up with Estonia

Food prices rise, wages donâ(TM)t

China food prices spike as floods ruin farmland

Brazil: Food Prices Surge and Head Toward Dangerous Levels

Rise in food prices causing major concerns in Russia

Stockpiling as Russian food prices soar

Food prices have soared most in Venezuela, Bolivia and Argentina

Thousands protest against high food prices in Delhi

India: A spike in food prices is especiall

The lost race of the Grammar People.

You can find those graphs here:

http://helpthe99ers.blogspot.com/2010/10/debt-congress-or-president.html

And I don't really trust an organization like Mozilla to be able to create something that meets the needs of most people. Their staunch opposition to H.264 is a prime example of this. H.264 is an non-negotiable requirement for me. If you won't support it, I can't use your product. Period.

Then the Web is not for you. It isn't some kind of Mozilla standard that Mozilla is worried about, it's Web standards. Most Web software developers disagree with the idea that closed, royalty bearing formats are an acceptable choice for the Web. Mozilla, as we know, disagrees with you. The W3C disagrees with you. Opera disagrees with you. Google disagrees with you. And Tim Berners-Lee, of course, disagrees with you.

you can't keep spending more than you take in without it coming back to bite you

Your post has committed the cardinal sin of economics ignorance, the fallacy of composition: http://neweconomicperspectives.blogspot.com/2009/08/teaching-fallacy-of-composition-federal.html
 
Plus, why would a country worry about debt enumerated in a currency of which it is the monopoly issuer? This is not a country in the unfortunate situation of not being its own sovereign currency issuer, such as those poor bastards that have accepted the Euro as their currency and thus given up one of the most powerful tools of macroeconomic control. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Monetary_Theory
The concept of debt on a macroeconomic scale has nothing to do with debt as applied to non-sovereign entities, and trying to make analogies is quaint and logically invalid. It just shows you have not the slightest idea of the things you speak of, and is the sort of antiquated perception and thinking on the side of politicians that has contributed to the policy failures leading to the current mess.

This was marked "insightful?"

Look, all this boils down to the multiplier effect: when an entity (such as the government or a local municipality or a company factory) takes in money (either through taxes or through selling a product), they then spend that money on goods and services in a particular area, which then is taken in by others, spent by others, etc., etc., etc. This creates a form of multiplier effect, whereby a dollar of activity by an entity causes a ripple effect in the overall economy that is greater than that dollar spent. It's why an entire town with millions in economic activity can evolve around a factory which only employs a fraction of the people in that town; the rest provides goods and services to the factory and to the workers there, and to those who support the factory and so forth.

(As an aside, your example about cutting taxes saving someone $200 but then they don't get $800 from the government--(a) government wealth redistribution is macro-economically neutral: as long as someone has $800 to spend, that will create $800 worth of activity--and it doesn't matter if that $800 is spent on food or as a down payment on a luxury yacht. And (b) your statement "Because for most Americans, cutting taxes means less money in their pockets. Not more." assumes a zero-sum game, which wealth creation certainly is not.)

So the real question is not "how can we spread the wealth around." This may matter if we assume wealth is a zero-sum game (but if it were we'd all still be living in caves), and it may matter if we want to help the destitute and the hungry, but from a macro-economic perspective it just doesn't matter. No, the real question is "what is the government's multiplier effect verses private industry?"

Meaning if we take a dollar from a corporation and gave it to the government, will that dollar turn into more dollars or less than if we had left it with the corporation?

Now if we left it with the corporation, the corporation could spend that dollar on investing in new hardware for their plant, or in paying salaries to their workers, or paying dividends, or saving the dollar, or giving that dollar to some rich CEO who could then spend it buying a bigger Mercedes Benz. WIth the exception of saving that dollar, the dollars kept by a corporation generally will go out on goods and services--even if that good is the rich guy's big ass car. But then, even if that dollar is spent on a car, it will then eventually go to buying more factory equipment or spending it on the guy who hand-tooled the leather seats, employing his leather-making craft long after the market for horse saddles has disappeared.

Point is, don't discount the idea that leaving the dollar with some corporation wouldn't have a net positive public good.

The fundamental argument over taxes between the right and the left basically boils down to who, right now, has the larger multiplier effect. President Obama is on record claiming the government has a net multiplier for government purchases of 1.57 (that is, for every dollar the government spends, $1.57 is added to the GDP), and the tax multiplier is 0.99 (that is, for every dollar the government taxes, the GDP is lowered by $0.99.) There are those who believe that these multipliers are wrong; otherwise, the right thing for the government to do right now is to raise your taxes 30% and spend it on whatever.

Other researchers suggest that the real tax multiplier is much larger: for every $1 in taxes, GDP is actually lowered by $3. That's because when the corporation doesn't have $1, that's $1 less net profits they have. That's $1 less they can spend on equipment or on salaries or on that Mercedes, which is $1 less their suppliers have; even the guy making leather seats by employing his ancient craft of horse saddle making has $1 less due to fewer Mercedes being sold to fat cats.

(source), follow the links t

http://thelegalwatchdog.blogspot.com/2011/01/capacious-crimes-and-creative.html
http://www.scn.org/ccapa/pa-article.html
http://grep.law.harvard.edu/articles/02/12/08/2244247.shtml
http://www.indypressny.org/nycma/voices/486/news/news_2/
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110716/01290815117/vague-law-vindictive-law-enforcement-hide-your-veggies.shtml
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/the-unbearable-vagueness-of-%E2%80%9Chonest-services-fraud%E2%80%9D/

What is damned is alot of equipment

I did not realize that there was an Alot that was made of equipment.

They were warned about this years ago. Former wikipedia administrator Kelly Martin wrote whole treatises on it. in her blog. A former admin under the pseudonym of "Parker Peters" wrote up apt descriptions of why it happened - power-mad individuals abusing their "buttons", individuals who gamed the system, gangs who formed to "control" articles - on his blog too.

I've found this discussion to be particularly apt, a discussion of precisely how Wikipedia fails to retain newcomers because most newcomers who actually make an edit are quickly shooed out the door by either the POV pushing gangs or the edit-count-aholic "recent changes patrol"; adding in to this is the fact that the trigger-happy admins remaining no longer stay remotely within policy, as the average "visitor vandalism" punishment is not a block of one day, but one month or sometimes more directed at DHCP addresses, and generally these power-mad fools compound the problem by instantly locking down the talkpage so that if someone else were to get that address, they can't even ask for an unblock... not that the unblock process ever actually works any more, since the same trigger-happy gestapo types patrol the Unblock Requests page.

The underlying problem, the thing that drives people away from Wikipedia, is that it's impossible to get started in. The admins are, just about uniformly, complete dickholes. The "regulars" who remain are either edit-count-itis freaks who will play revert-war with automated tools just to get their edit count up, or are shameless sycophants who play hanger-on to those admins deemed "in power" - the goal of both groups being to boost their chances of someday getting the "extra buttons."

To paraphrase Douglas Adams, the first problem of Wikipedia admins is that nobody should be allowed to do it who ever actually WANTS the job.

The secondary problem is that those sections that really need fixing, are the domain of power-mad admins or control-freak groups who maintain them and drive people away as quickly as they come in order to WP:OWN the content.

The third part is that you can't even talk about Wikipedia without having to reference byzantine, contradictory, fucked-up rules. You can't participate in Wikipedia without memorizing most of them, and the moment you cross one of the power-mad fools they call admins or some of the POV groups, you're going to get hammered over the head with those same "rules", and before you know it you're going to be on the end of a longstanding block with a talkpage lock if you dare try to file an unblock request that says, in essence, "please unzip so I can suck your cock o powerful sir."

If you think I'm joking, try reading their own guide. Explaining why you believe the block was out of policy? ZZZTTT! WRONG! Pointing out that you're being targeted by people with WP:OWN issues or that you're responding to a major problem involving some other Wikipedia policy violation? ZZZTTT! WRONG! The only way you get an unblock requested is to (a) know a corrupt admin who happens to be your friend or (b) play the "mea culpa mea culpa" game.

Oh, and as for using CheckUser to show that you are NOT a sockpuppet after the favorite tactic of dickhole admins and POV warrior alike, the false sockpuppetry accusation? Sorry. CheckUser is Sooper Sekrit Kangaroo Court Data that can ONLY get you sent to the gulag.

They were warned about this years ago. Former wikipedia administrator Kelly Martin wrote whole treatises on it. in her blog. A former admin under the pseudonym of "Parker Peters" wrote up apt descriptions of why it happened - power-mad individuals abusing their "buttons", individuals who gamed the system, gangs who formed to "control" articles - on his blog too.

I've found this discussion to be particularly apt, a discussion of precisely how Wikipedia fails to retain newcomers because most newcomers who actually make an edit are quickly shooed out the door by either the POV pushing gangs or the edit-count-aholic "recent changes patrol"; adding in to this is the fact that the trigger-happy admins remaining no longer stay remotely within policy, as the average "visitor vandalism" punishment is not a block of one day, but one month or sometimes more directed at DHCP addresses, and generally these power-mad fools compound the problem by instantly locking down the talkpage so that if someone else were to get that address, they can't even ask for an unblock... not that the unblock process ever actually works any more, since the same trigger-happy gestapo types patrol the Unblock Requests page.

The underlying problem, the thing that drives people away from Wikipedia, is that it's impossible to get started in. The admins are, just about uniformly, complete dickholes. The "regulars" who remain are either edit-count-itis freaks who will play revert-war with automated tools just to get their edit count up, or are shameless sycophants who play hanger-on to those admins deemed "in power" - the goal of both groups being to boost their chances of someday getting the "extra buttons."

To paraphrase Douglas Adams, the first problem of Wikipedia admins is that nobody should be allowed to do it who ever actually WANTS the job.

The secondary problem is that those sections that really need fixing, are the domain of power-mad admins or control-freak groups who maintain them and drive people away as quickly as they come in order to WP:OWN the content.

The third part is that you can't even talk about Wikipedia without having to reference byzantine, contradictory, fucked-up rules. You can't participate in Wikipedia without memorizing most of them, and the moment you cross one of the power-mad fools they call admins or some of the POV groups, you're going to get hammered over the head with those same "rules", and before you know it you're going to be on the end of a longstanding block with a talkpage lock if you dare try to file an unblock request that says, in essence, "please unzip so I can suck your cock o powerful sir."

If you think I'm joking, try reading their own guide. Explaining why you believe the block was out of policy? ZZZTTT! WRONG! Pointing out that you're being targeted by people with WP:OWN issues or that you're responding to a major problem involving some other Wikipedia policy violation? ZZZTTT! WRONG! The only way you get an unblock requested is to (a) know a corrupt admin who happens to be your friend or (b) play the "mea culpa mea culpa" game.

Oh, and as for using CheckUser to show that you are NOT a sockpuppet after the favorite tactic of dickhole admins and POV warrior alike, the false sockpuppetry accusation? Sorry. CheckUser is Sooper Sekrit Kangaroo Court Data that can ONLY get you sent to the gulag.

For everyone who pointed out the _real_ reason why editors are leaving Wikipedia:

Tom Smith - WikiPirates

Some lust for gold and silver, and some for gems and jewels
But some want greater treasures, and they use their software tools
For some of us quest for knowledge, and we wants it undefiled,
But now and then you get a troll who thinks he's Oscar Wilde.

Beware the Wiki Pirates, who sail the server seas.
They flaunt their fake credentials and their advanced degrees.
They control the information with bullying moderation,
'Cause arrogance and online swagger trump your expertise.

No matter what your sources, no matter whom you cite,
He doesn't want to hear it, 'cause he knows for sure he's right
There is no compromising, no bargain or accord,
He's never heard of you, or doesn't like you, or he's bored.

Beware the Wiki Pirates, they love to wield their clout
All day they'll argue details that no one cares about
They don't see as overreachin' their demands for page deletion
Web pages are in short supply, and what if we run out?

Yo ho, yo ho, no one ever thought,
Yo ho, yo ho, in this web we'd be caught,
The Wiki's meant to document the stuff the mainstream missed,
Instead we've got a pompous sot who's building up his wrist.

So if ye've got a subject that really interests you,
Beware the Wikipirates, they've got nothing else to do.
Someday we'll have a knowledge base with all you want and need,
Till then we'll take cold comfort that they're likely not to breed.

Beware the Wiki Pirates, who whine at our attacks.
They're only trying to help us, never mind the rules and facts.
They're just honest, not unpleasant, it's not their fault that we're peasants,
If we'd only see their brilliance, everybody could relax.

Beware the Wiki Pirates, that basement-dwellin' band.
They regulate and obfuscate what they don't understand.
The grief they give ya will reduce ya to trivia and minutiae,
And prayin' that you really do get banned,
Only "public noteriety" will get you in their library,
Be grateful they're all lost at sea... they'd try to delete the land.

These LEGO figurines look awesome! My hat's off to the JUNO team!

We sent (flattened) LEGO figurines aboard the MER landers, too (not on the rovers proper). Their names were Biff Starling and Sandy Moondust, if I recall correctly. See my blog for a terrific color picture of Spirit's LEGO figurine before she drove away.

We're down to the theory of indiscernables now, which is pure philosophy, and multiverse theory is close to that at the best of times! Can two identical things be different?

I'd argue that the types 1, 2 and 4 are different. Even if there's a whole different and identical Milky Way somewhere, the matter distribution between here and there is asymmetric (and the asymmetry grows with distance), so you can easily define that version x of me is somewhere in relation to version y of me. So they can be shown to be different.

Even if the whole surrounding Hubble volume was identical to ours, the two versions of "me" can be differentiated through reference to fluctuations in their respective cosmic microwave backgrounds. That's exactly what this experiment is doing, except they're not looking for signs of an identical me, they're just looking for "anything".

Type 3, the Many Worlds approach (and Hugh Everett III gets some belated respect for that idea) is different. The two universes overlap until a crucial point where a single quantum level interaction causes them to split end evolve differently. So there are other versions of me, but we all share the same, identical past me. A huge number in fact, with my universe splitting every time a quantum level event occurs. Well, any quantum level event which can affect me, which given relativity is pretty much every event in the observable universe. Or multiverse. I haven't decided which yet. There's a good book on it, Universe Or Multiverse, Carr. My review here.

The question you should be asking is, why are Americans still so much better off than almost all of the nations you listed when they stomp us on every standardized test imaginable? You listed the surprising example of Japan, which peaked over 20 years ago! They're an intelligent, well-organized nation that seemed to have a miraculous economy for a decade or two until all the other Asian tigers started to catch up with them, because there was nothing about their industry that couldn't be replicated elsewhere. You think the US feels threatened by China, just consider Japan, and their similar-but-far-larger neighbor next door! Look at US exports to China, and what a large - and growing - proportion of that is "crude materials." If we were a resource-poor nation that wedge would be gone. Now look at our huge agricultural exports, and how many of the nations you listed aren't even self-sufficient in basic foodstuffs! Sure, high-tech farming helps, but you still need land and water. Now consider US law and politics, which were founded on egalitarian, agrarian society. This was possible because there was enough land for everybody to be a landowner, in contrast with Europe where everything was already owned by somebody and wealth (and thus political power) had concentrated on land owners over the centuries. At the very least, you must concede that the height of US power - post WWII - was facilitated by not being destroyed in the war while our main economic competitors were, thanks largely to geography.

The question you should be asking is, why are Americans still so much better off than almost all of the nations you listed when they stomp us on every standardized test imaginable? You listed the surprising example of Japan, which peaked over 20 years ago! They're an intelligent, well-organized nation that seemed to have a miraculous economy for a decade or two until all the other Asian tigers started to catch up with them, because there was nothing about their industry that couldn't be replicated elsewhere. You think the US feels threatened by China, just consider Japan, and their similar-but-far-larger neighbor next door! Look at US exports to China, and what a large - and growing - proportion of that is "crude materials." If we were a resource-poor nation that wedge would be gone. Now look at our huge agricultural exports, and how many of the nations you listed aren't even self-sufficient in basic foodstuffs! Sure, high-tech farming helps, but you still need land and water. Now consider US law and politics, which were founded on egalitarian, agrarian society. This was possible because there was enough land for everybody to be a landowner, in contrast with Europe where everything was already owned by somebody and wealth (and thus political power) had concentrated on land owners over the centuries. At the very least, you must concede that the height of US power - post WWII - was facilitated by not being destroyed in the war while our main economic competitors were, thanks largely to geography.

They’re doing this by banding together to acquire Novell’s old patents (the “CPTN” group including Microsoft and Apple) and Nortel’s old patents (the “Rockstar” group including Microsoft and Apple), to make sure Google didn’t get them; seeking $15 licensing fees for every Android device;

The original post was clearly referring to a) Microsoft trying to acquire Novell's patents as a threat and b) trying to acquire Nortel's patents to stop Google getting them. The thing is, though, the Novell deal would have been a waste of time for Google; firstly those patents weren't a threat since Google's OIN membership protected them from the patents and secondly (as has been added to the end of the original Google blog) it would be impossible for Google to assert the patents against Microsoft, which would have been the whole value of them.

What's astounding is how stupid Microsoft must think people are to think we can't spot this by just following the postings. Probably more so judging by how many people seem to have been taken in, how much they are right.

There have been/are lego space sets. One had Moon tiles (two L shaped tile craters, a yellow line runway and landing pad) along with spaceships, roving vehicles and a few astronauts.

The fun thing I remember from those days was having those battery packs, wires and little lighting bricks and the transparent coloured bricks. It was fun to modify a standard lego model and add motors/lights everywhere, then switch the room lights off.

They’re doing this by banding together to acquire Novell’s old patents (the “CPTN” group including Microsoft and Apple) and Nortel’s old patents (the “Rockstar” group including Microsoft and Apple), to make sure Google didn’t get them.

Source: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/08/when-patents-attack-android.html

TFS might have mixed up Novell and Nortel, but Google complained about other companies banding together for both deals.

They'd blog about it.

Microsoft has responded, saying they offered to bid jointly with Google on the Nortel patents, but Google refused.

Hey Microsoft, could you please throw some light as to how Google's joint purchase of these patents with you would help Google fend off patent lawsuits from the likes of yourself, Apple and the rest?

Google wanted these patents for defensive purposes . Therefore Google's teaming up with folks like Apple and Microsoft, who would like to see Android fail would be plain stupid in my opinion.

Wow. You read it on the intertubes, so it MUST be true!

Credulous. Look it up. It fits you.

Microsoft has responded, saying they offered to bid jointly with Google on the Nortel patents, but Google refused.

Hey Microsoft, could you please throw some light as to how Google's joint purchase of these patents with you would help Google fend off patent lawsuits from the likes of yourself, Apple and the rest?

Google wanted these patents for defensive purposes. Therefore Google's teaming up with folks like Apple and Microsoft, who would like to see Android fail would be plain stupid in my opinion.

What happened to the USA that WE don't seem to have many people like this anymore?

We do.

True, it's not giving away wifi to a major metro area like New York, but the Google guys don't count as entrepreneurs that kick the establishment's ass and, er, have testicles? Because while Virgin is giving away free internet, and that's nice, Google is giving me free maps and free* e-mail that's much better than the e-mail service I had before.

Actually Torvalds was a KDE user for a long time, and regularly criticized the GNOME developers for their UI decisions. However he hated KDE 4 so much when it came out that he switched over to GNOME.

I personally use very nice styled buttons and all it takes is to say Style="{StaticResource OrangeButton}" in XAML.

Which is being discontinued, so you may want to start looking at other options

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/update-on-google-health-and-google.html

... which will no longer be available after September 16, 2011:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/update-on-google-health-and-google.html

No, it's not.

It is not clear to me whether you are referring to Gmail being out of beta or G+ being the "only product to reach 25M users while still in beta", but here's the source on Gmail being out of beta.