Many of us only knew Rob from his "global announcements" on IRC, but still he will be sorely missed. I only hope his death does not discourage cyclists. The more people cycling, the safer it is for cyclists everywhere, and the fewer sad incidents like this one.
I will be supporting lilo and cyclists everywhere by attending Critical Mass [wikipedia.org] to make it safer for cyclists. I encourage all slashdotters and freenoders to seek out and attend their own local Critical Mass (organised by YOU).
The next Critical Mass is Friday 29th September near you. Google it. Support cyclists.
I'd say having cows or goats around during winter in Europe, and not much else to get sustainance from, would be a pretty clear driving evolution force.
It just says that other pressures have been greater than the pressure to (keep the ability to) regenerate. Or the costs of being able to regenerate are probably prohibitive.
The competing pressures might include (for example) a pressure to be smart or strong enough not to lose body parts in the first place, or a pressure to develop coping strategies when a limb is lost. Or the pressure to give food and resources to offspring, over attempting immortality. Or the pressure to have more complex tissues (even if they are more difficult to regenerate), although the article sheds a shadow of doubt on this last one. If these competing pressures are great enough, and more importantly, the pressure to keep the regeneration trait is low enough, the trait will simply drift away (randomly mutate) into nonfunctional genetic code. It doesn't mean it is completely undesirable.
More "complex" animals like humans don't lose a lot of body parts on a day to day basis. And those who do, have their (evolutionary) fitness determined by their ability to cope with the loss, rather than by their ability to regain those parts.
Kozmo.com was a venture-capital driven online company that promised free one-hour delivery of anything from DVDs to Starbucks coffee. It was founded by young investment bankers, Joseph Park and Yong Kang in March 1998 in New York City. The company is often referred to as an example of the dot-com excess.
Kozmo promoted an incredible business model; it promised to deliver small goods free of charge. The company raised about $280 million including $60 million from Amazon.com. The business model was heavily criticized by business analysts, who pointed out that one-hour point-to-point delivery of small objects is extremely expensive and there was no way Kozmo could make a profit as long as it refused to charge delivery fees. Not surprisingly, the company failed soon after the collapse of the dot-com bubble, laying off its staff of 1,100 employees and shutting down in April 2001.
3. Napster
Napster is an online music service which was originally a file sharing service created by Shawn Fanning. Napster was the first widely-used peer-to-peer music sharing service, and it made a major impact on how people, especially university students, used the Internet. Its technology allowed music fans to easily share MP3 format song files with each other, thus leading to the music industry's accusations of massive copyright violations. Although the original service was shut down by court order, it paved the way for decentralized P2P file-sharing programs, which have been much harder to control. The service was named Napster after Fanning's nickname.
4. The Concorde
The Aérospatiale-BAC Concorde supersonic transport (SST) was one of only two models of supersonic passenger airliners to have seen commercial service. Concorde had a cruise speed of Mach 2.04 and a cruise altitude of 60,000 feet (17,700 metres) with a delta wing configuration and an evolution of the afterburner-equipped engines originally developed for the Avro Vulcan strategic bomber. It is the first civil airliner to be equipped with an analogue fly-by-wire flight control system. Commercial flights, operated by British Airways and Air France, began on 21 January 1976 and ended on 24 October 2003, with the last "retirement" flight on 26 November that year.
5. GM's EV1
The EV1 was the first electric car produced by General Motors in the United States. The experimental cars were the only vehicles in the history of the company to bear the "General Motors" badge. GM leased about 800 EV1 cars with the proviso that after the three-year leases were up, the cars reverted to the company. They were only available in California and Arizona and could only be serviced at designated Saturn dealers. The first generation EV1s used lead-acid battery batteries in 1996 (as model year 1997) and a second generation batch with nickel metal hydride batteries in 1999. As cars came off lease, they were refurbished and upgraded to second generation. GM spent more than $1 billion developing and marketing the EV1, but the company decided that it could not sell the car in enough quantities to make the EV1 profitable. The program was stopped in 2003.
6. The original Palm Pilot
Pilot was the name given to the first generation of personal digital assistants manufactured by Palm Computing in 1996 (then a division of U.S. Robotics and later 3Com).
7. Good keyboards
The IBM Model M keyboard was manufactured by IBM, Lexmark and finally Unicomp, starting in the 1980s. Built solidly, with a heavy steel backplate and fully swappable keycaps, its sturdiness and versatility allows it to outlive virtually any other computer component, and its buckling spring key
Well I have moderator points that are about to expire so I thought here's an easy discussion to mod a few people up for. Unfortuntely the best reply so far compared the whole thing to Romper Room and I really hate funny replies.
Our Host: Hey, kids! I'm Open Source Bob! Today we're going to have informative fun with the wonder of open source.
Children: (dead silence)
Now first off you're asking the wrong crowd. You already know about open source, and therefore you are, what they call in the field of education, a Subject Matter Expert (SME). Yes, educators have lots of stupid acroynms just like geeks do. Now who do you ask for advice on giving a presentation? more SMEs! no. you should be asking trained educator and facilitators. But no matter. I've dipped my toe in the training field so I'll lend a hand (or attempt a crappy reply like everyone else at least).
Secondly, don't give them this: WikiReader on Free Software unless you want to confuse and bore them with a Stallmanesque view of open sour--, er, --Free Software. [sorry, obligatory wikipedia link, even if it is really bad]
Briefly talk about some open source projects and licensing (e.g. Firefox, Knoppix, GPL).
Come up with a stupid focus question like "What would it take for this company to open source its in-house accounts program if you were X" where X is a different role assigned to each person. Get them to break up into groups and discuss it. Bring them back together after 5 minutes to talk about it. Field some questions because no one understood what they were meant to be doing. Now find out what they're actually interested in about it and try to answer. Then play the omlette game that someone else suggested but make sure no one's vegan, and make sure you use free range eggs--think about those poor little chickens in cages. Hand out free copies of Knoppix "for when your home computer/laptop stops working, just stick this in and use it instead of Windows" and force migrate everyone to use Firefox at work. Voila. Great presentation, John.
But seriously,
Try checking out some actual activism/training sites, such as the change agency (some people who do know how to facilitate a training session) or TFC or this one.
1) Haven't we been around for more than 100,000 years?
Humans, in their current anatomical form, have been around about 100,000 years. I meant it would take "another" 100,000 years.
I have to admit the 100,000 year figure for becoming a new species was plucked from the air, and on second thought is a very low estimate.
Homo erectus lived 2 MYA and Homo habilis 2.4 MYA. So maybe 500,000 to 2 million years would be a better guess. That time frame implies evolutionary pressure to speciate or seperation of human groups for all that time, which seems very unlikely what with transport what it is today and (to go back to the thread) institutionalised racist segregration being unsuccessful, to say the least, at forming seperate gene pools even for a short amount of time.
2) sorry. my maths is bad, and the post was hurried (slow posts seem to be ignored on slashdot). i probably meant 2.5k generations, which isn't very much at all in evolutionary terms, so i'd rather change the years to 1 million instead and keep 25k generations:)
anyway, if the past is the key to the future then have a look at Human evolution and see how us monkeys have speciated in the past.
They have markings because humans like them to look like that, so we select for animals with markings.
For example, dalmations are often deaf because the same gene for a white coat leads to deafness, but we (humans) keep breeding dalmations anyway. Why? Go ask a human. It's humans doing it.
From an evolutionary perspective: domestic animals with attractive (to humans) markings are better adapted to being allowed to breed by their human overlords, whereas less interesting looking domesticated animals are less adapted to pleasing their human overlords, and therefore being allowed to breed.
Firstly, sexuality and racism are different subjects. These butterflies are more sexually attracted to certain markings or patterns, which indicate the partner is of the same species. They aren't hiring other butterflies for jobs, nor pulling them up for minor driving offenses.
There is no racism in finding yourself sexually attracted to certain racial characteristics such as skin colour.
You ask, "Isn't racism a social form of speciation". No. Racism is racism. There are many reasons why this racist segregration would not lead to speciation, even if it were not a morally repulsive proposition:
1) No reinforcement, i.e. segregration is not selected for. As far as evolution of humans is concerned, offspring of people of different races are not "weedy and less likely to thrive" as in the butterfly example, but quite the contrary. So from a biological point of view, we should not expect to find ourselves splitting into seperate species as there is no "reinforcement" (as mentioned in the article), but instead the opposite. Of course humans are still very much the same species, and are currently showing no signs of speciation, and comparing human races to butterfly species is stretching it.
2) Very little gene flow is needed to prevent speciation. One "mixed marriage" out of one hundred is plenty to keep genes flowing between subgroups within a species. This coupled with the above (the offspring being strong and healthy) makes it nearly inevitiable
3) Most people's concept of race is misguided. For example: Humans were originally black. So it's not surprising that there are people within all (eight?) major branches of our collective tree with black skin. Human movement and migration has lead to us all being much more related than you'd probably guess.
4) Timeframe: butterflies may have several generations each year. Even so, the researchers in the article don't appear to even witness speciation in action, but takes a snapshot and explains how it has occured. Speciation takes a long time. It's likely to take 100,000 years for humans to start showing signs of speciation, that is, if there was an evolutionary push towards it. Justifying racism on the basis that your great great great great great [25,000 "great"s removed to prevent this comment from violating the "postercomment" compression filter] great great great great great great great great great grandson or daughter may belong to a different species as the person next to you, is pretty fucking stupid.
The mining, milling, and enrichment of uranium all produce significant greenhouse gases. In fact every stage of the nuclear fuel cycle produces green house gases. Let's not even consider CO2 produced in the building and decomissioning of the plant and facilities. Well we can't. No significant nuclear power plant has ever been attempted to be decomissioned.
Further problems with nuclear include the unsolved problem of waste disposal, the high cost of producing nuclear power (it's actually much more expensive than many renewables), nuclear weapons proliferation, and of course apart from the Three Mile Island meltdown (26 years ago) and the criticality accident at the uranium reprocessing facility in Tokai-mura (just 6 years ago), there have been plenty of other nuclear accidents.
Did I see say nuclear wasn't renewable? that's right. High grade uranium will run out in 20 to 50 years (pick your estimate). Leaving us with low grade stuff, which is even more CO2 intensive to mine, mill and enrich, and will also eventually run out (150 years perhaps).
I'll make sure the next 100 customers trying to buy an LV bag get to your site instead, where possibly no LV bags are sold
No. The point that everyone seems to have missed, is the reason they were suing is not because simply because competitors were buying their precious trademark on AdSense, but that they were using it to sell counterfeits. i.e. selling fake versions of their stuff which did infringe on their trademark.
It wasn't Gucci/Prada/Armani ads as one poster said.
Nor is it compariable to a JC Penny's employee standing outside Boston Store and telling people on their way in to go to Penny's instead
Nor is it like the other day when a friend asked me about Ford trucks, and I told him he should buy a Dodge instead
Nor is it like if I call Home Depot and ask for a Price Pfister and the sales person responds that he likes American Standard better
Nor is it like in the yellow pages when (for example) Acura can put an 800 number in all the phone books printed by SBC (or on their behalf) in the cars section
Nor is it like if I'm at a restaurant in France and I ask for a Coke, and the waitress says "Is Pepsi ok?
Nor is it like if you were running a telephone directory service, and every time I asked you to connect me with DELL customer support you'd connect me with HP
Nor is it like Microsoft ads showing up all the time on Slashdot
Google is selling Louis Vuitton's brand names to promote companies selling counterfeit copies of Louis Vuiton's products.
The key word here is counterfeit, not competing brand.
Whether you agree with the ruling or not, at least get the facts right.
Regular compression (like gzip) helps the file size issue, but it does not allow for random access of the XML.
Wait a minute, XML is text and you cannot randomly access it anyway. Well that's the point of binary XML. The focus on XML compression seems to be missing the key advantage of binary XML. That is, a binary XML format could allow indexes of elements and attributes for fast access of complex pointer-rich data structures.
Random access of a text format simply cannot be done in a sensible way. gzipping XML doesn't help give XML random access.
It's easier to talk about evolution in an anthropomorphic way, although it risks some misunderstanding from those who think you mean it literally.
Compare:
"And evolution has purposely kept them"
to
"the process of selection has not lead to the elimination of left-handed phenotypes. The remaining left-handed phenotypes is due to natural selection, and not due to chance or drift."
The first example is much easier to say, although it is technically less accurate, as obviously (to people who understand evolution) evolution does not "purposely" do anything.
It's good to see you questioning basic assuptions made by the article. However, evolution is generally accepted by biologists and other scientists, and it would probably be beyond the scope of the article to justify evolution to the few who don't accept it.
As for evolution being only a theory, the word "theory" has slightly different meanings in science and in every day speech. To quote an Evolution FAQ:
In science, a theory is a rigorously tested statement of general principles that explains observable and recorded aspects of the world. A scientific theory therefore describes a higher level of understanding that ties "facts" together. A scientific theory stands until proven wrong -- it is never proven correct. The Darwinian theory of evolution has withstood the test of time and thousands of scientific experiments; nothing has disproved it since Darwin first proposed it more than 150 years ago. Indeed, many scientific advances, in a range of scientific disciplines including physics, geology, chemistry, and molecular biology, have supported, refined, and expanded evolutionary theory far beyond anything Darwin could have imagined.
To have a disclaimer that evolution is only a theory, you'd be asking for a disclaimer also on articles about space travel to say newtonian physics and einstein's relativity are also just theories.
Keep on questioning assumptions, but remember to question your own beliefs too.
Not at all. Previous studies compared chimps (those without language) to humans (those with language) and considering the impact of language on handedness. This does not contradict Chompsky, as it does not suppose chimps have language.
This particular study doesn't even go that far, and ignores language all together. It considers only motor areas of as they relate handnedness.
This model of allowing groups of cars through is the same as what naturally happens where there are no traffic lights, and cars and bicycles share the road. It is termed critical mass.
The term "critical mass" in this sense, was adopted from an observation made by American George Bliss while visiting China. He noted that traffic in China, both motorists and bicyclists, had an understood method of negotiating unsignalled intersections. Traffic would "bunch up" at these intersections until the back log reached a "critical mass" at which point that mass would move through the intersection. This description was related in the Ted White documentary Return of the Scorcher (1992) and subsequently adopted by the Critical Mass movement.
Perhaps the only difference with this traffic light system is it tries to preempt the "bunching up".
Slashdot Mirror
Many of us only knew Rob from his "global announcements" on IRC, but still he will be sorely missed. I only hope his death does not discourage cyclists. The more people cycling, the safer it is for cyclists everywhere, and the fewer sad incidents like this one.
I will be supporting lilo and cyclists everywhere by attending Critical Mass [wikipedia.org] to make it safer for cyclists. I encourage all slashdotters and freenoders to seek out and attend their own local Critical Mass (organised by YOU).
The next Critical Mass is Friday 29th September near you. Google it. Support cyclists.
Linux is already widely adopted, except on the desktop.
If you want proper surveys, instead of one guy's opinion, have a look at OSDL Desktop Linux Client Survey (pdf) which will tell you:
Top inhibitors of Linux desktop adoption:
*Application support
*Peripheral support
*End user training
See also:
Linux adoption
Peter Galaxy.
I've got one. And yes it is.
I'd say having cows or goats around during winter in Europe, and not much else to get sustainance from, would be a pretty clear driving evolution force.
You can read (and write) all about Lactase persistence at Wikipedia.
It just says that other pressures have been greater than the pressure to (keep the ability to) regenerate. Or the costs of being able to regenerate are probably prohibitive.
The competing pressures might include (for example) a pressure to be smart or strong enough not to lose body parts in the first place, or a pressure to develop coping strategies when a limb is lost. Or the pressure to give food and resources to offspring, over attempting immortality. Or the pressure to have more complex tissues (even if they are more difficult to regenerate), although the article sheds a shadow of doubt on this last one. If these competing pressures are great enough, and more importantly, the pressure to keep the regeneration trait is low enough, the trait will simply drift away (randomly mutate) into nonfunctional genetic code. It doesn't mean it is completely undesirable.
More "complex" animals like humans don't lose a lot of body parts on a day to day basis. And those who do, have their (evolutionary) fitness determined by their ability to cope with the loss, rather than by their ability to regain those parts.
The article made boring by Wikipedia!
1. Manned space exploration
see List of human spaceflights by program
2. Kozmo.com
Kozmo.com was a venture-capital driven online company that promised free one-hour delivery of anything from DVDs to Starbucks coffee. It was founded by young investment bankers, Joseph Park and Yong Kang in March 1998 in New York City. The company is often referred to as an example of the dot-com excess.
Kozmo promoted an incredible business model; it promised to deliver small goods free of charge. The company raised about $280 million including $60 million from Amazon.com. The business model was heavily criticized by business analysts, who pointed out that one-hour point-to-point delivery of small objects is extremely expensive and there was no way Kozmo could make a profit as long as it refused to charge delivery fees. Not surprisingly, the company failed soon after the collapse of the dot-com bubble, laying off its staff of 1,100 employees and shutting down in April 2001.
3. Napster
Napster is an online music service which was originally a file sharing service created by Shawn Fanning. Napster was the first widely-used peer-to-peer music sharing service, and it made a major impact on how people, especially university students, used the Internet. Its technology allowed music fans to easily share MP3 format song files with each other, thus leading to the music industry's accusations of massive copyright violations. Although the original service was shut down by court order, it paved the way for decentralized P2P file-sharing programs, which have been much harder to control. The service was named Napster after Fanning's nickname.
4. The Concorde
The Aérospatiale-BAC Concorde supersonic transport (SST) was one of only two models of supersonic passenger airliners to have seen commercial service. Concorde had a cruise speed of Mach 2.04 and a cruise altitude of 60,000 feet (17,700 metres) with a delta wing configuration and an evolution of the afterburner-equipped engines originally developed for the Avro Vulcan strategic bomber. It is the first civil airliner to be equipped with an analogue fly-by-wire flight control system. Commercial flights, operated by British Airways and Air France, began on 21 January 1976 and ended on 24 October 2003, with the last "retirement" flight on 26 November that year.
5. GM's EV1
The EV1 was the first electric car produced by General Motors in the United States. The experimental cars were the only vehicles in the history of the company to bear the "General Motors" badge. GM leased about 800 EV1 cars with the proviso that after the three-year leases were up, the cars reverted to the company. They were only available in California and Arizona and could only be serviced at designated Saturn dealers. The first generation EV1s used lead-acid battery batteries in 1996 (as model year 1997) and a second generation batch with nickel metal hydride batteries in 1999. As cars came off lease, they were refurbished and upgraded to second generation. GM spent more than $1 billion developing and marketing the EV1, but the company decided that it could not sell the car in enough quantities to make the EV1 profitable. The program was stopped in 2003.
6. The original Palm Pilot
Pilot was the name given to the first generation of personal digital assistants manufactured by Palm Computing in 1996 (then a division of U.S. Robotics and later 3Com).
7. Good keyboards
The IBM Model M keyboard was manufactured by IBM, Lexmark and finally Unicomp, starting in the 1980s. Built solidly, with a heavy steel backplate and fully swappable keycaps, its sturdiness and versatility allows it to outlive virtually any other computer component, and its buckling spring key
Now first off you're asking the wrong crowd. You already know about open source, and therefore you are, what they call in the field of education, a Subject Matter Expert (SME). Yes, educators have lots of stupid acroynms just like geeks do. Now who do you ask for advice on giving a presentation? more SMEs! no. you should be asking trained educator and facilitators. But no matter. I've dipped my toe in the training field so I'll lend a hand (or attempt a crappy reply like everyone else at least).
Secondly, don't give them this: WikiReader on Free Software unless you want to confuse and bore them with a Stallmanesque view of open sour--, er, --Free Software. [sorry, obligatory wikipedia link, even if it is really bad]
Briefly talk about some open source projects and licensing (e.g. Firefox, Knoppix, GPL).
Come up with a stupid focus question like "What would it take for this company to open source its in-house accounts program if you were X" where X is a different role assigned to each person. Get them to break up into groups and discuss it. Bring them back together after 5 minutes to talk about it. Field some questions because no one understood what they were meant to be doing. Now find out what they're actually interested in about it and try to answer. Then play the omlette game that someone else suggested but make sure no one's vegan, and make sure you use free range eggs--think about those poor little chickens in cages. Hand out free copies of Knoppix "for when your home computer/laptop stops working, just stick this in and use it instead of Windows" and force migrate everyone to use Firefox at work. Voila. Great presentation, John.
But seriously,
Try checking out some actual activism/training sites, such as the change agency (some people who do know how to facilitate a training session) or TFC or this one.
1) Haven't we been around for more than 100,000 years?
:)
Humans, in their current anatomical form, have been around about 100,000 years. I meant it would take "another" 100,000 years.
I have to admit the 100,000 year figure for becoming a new species was plucked from the air, and on second thought is a very low estimate.
Homo erectus lived 2 MYA and Homo habilis 2.4 MYA. So maybe 500,000 to 2 million years would be a better guess. That time frame implies evolutionary pressure to speciate or seperation of human groups for all that time, which seems very unlikely what with transport what it is today and (to go back to the thread) institutionalised racist segregration being unsuccessful, to say the least, at forming seperate gene pools even for a short amount of time.
2) sorry. my maths is bad, and the post was hurried (slow posts seem to be ignored on slashdot). i probably meant 2.5k generations, which isn't very much at all in evolutionary terms, so i'd rather change the years to 1 million instead and keep 25k generations
anyway, if the past is the key to the future then have a look at Human evolution and see how us monkeys have speciated in the past.
That's a very accurate answer.
The catapillar stage is considered an extended larval stage. Basically a caterpiller is larva that can walk around and eat leaves.
See larva.
They have markings because humans like them to look like that, so we select for animals with markings.
For example, dalmations are often deaf because the same gene for a white coat leads to deafness, but we (humans) keep breeding dalmations anyway. Why? Go ask a human. It's humans doing it.
From an evolutionary perspective: domestic animals with attractive (to humans) markings are better adapted to being allowed to breed by their human overlords, whereas less interesting looking domesticated animals are less adapted to pleasing their human overlords, and therefore being allowed to breed.
Firstly, sexuality and racism are different subjects. These butterflies are more sexually attracted to certain markings or patterns, which indicate the partner is of the same species. They aren't hiring other butterflies for jobs, nor pulling them up for minor driving offenses.
There is no racism in finding yourself sexually attracted to certain racial characteristics such as skin colour.
You ask, "Isn't racism a social form of speciation". No. Racism is racism. There are many reasons why this racist segregration would not lead to speciation, even if it were not a morally repulsive proposition:
1) No reinforcement, i.e. segregration is not selected for. As far as evolution of humans is concerned, offspring of people of different races are not "weedy and less likely to thrive" as in the butterfly example, but quite the contrary. So from a biological point of view, we should not expect to find ourselves splitting into seperate species as there is no "reinforcement" (as mentioned in the article), but instead the opposite. Of course humans are still very much the same species, and are currently showing no signs of speciation, and comparing human races to butterfly species is stretching it.
2) Very little gene flow is needed to prevent speciation. One "mixed marriage" out of one hundred is plenty to keep genes flowing between subgroups within a species. This coupled with the above (the offspring being strong and healthy) makes it nearly inevitiable
3) Most people's concept of race is misguided. For example: Humans were originally black. So it's not surprising that there are people within all (eight?) major branches of our collective tree with black skin. Human movement and migration has lead to us all being much more related than you'd probably guess.
4) Timeframe: butterflies may have several generations each year. Even so, the researchers in the article don't appear to even witness speciation in action, but takes a snapshot and explains how it has occured. Speciation takes a long time. It's likely to take 100,000 years for humans to start showing signs of speciation, that is, if there was an evolutionary push towards it. Justifying racism on the basis that your great great great great great [25,000 "great"s removed to prevent this comment from violating the "postercomment" compression filter] great great great great great great great great great grandson or daughter may belong to a different species as the person next to you, is pretty fucking stupid.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_phenomenon
...without addressing the actual cause or reason for the protest.
which is, of course, the fundamental flaw to this sort of "solution". It only goes skin deep in more sense than one.
The mining, milling, and enrichment of uranium all produce significant greenhouse gases. In fact every stage of the nuclear fuel cycle produces green house gases. Let's not even consider CO2 produced in the building and decomissioning of the plant and facilities. Well we can't. No significant nuclear power plant has ever been attempted to be decomissioned.
Further problems with nuclear include the unsolved problem of waste disposal, the high cost of producing nuclear power (it's actually much more expensive than many renewables), nuclear weapons proliferation, and of course apart from the Three Mile Island meltdown (26 years ago) and the criticality accident at the uranium reprocessing facility in Tokai-mura (just 6 years ago), there have been plenty of other nuclear accidents.
Did I see say nuclear wasn't renewable? that's right. High grade uranium will run out in 20 to 50 years (pick your estimate). Leaving us with low grade stuff, which is even more CO2 intensive to mine, mill and enrich, and will also eventually run out (150 years perhaps).
It will not happen. Sun's license (CDDL) may be OSI approved, but it is not GPL compatible. Sun's code cannot be directly ported into Linux.
No. The point that everyone seems to have missed, is the reason they were suing is not because simply because competitors were buying their precious trademark on AdSense, but that they were using it to sell counterfeits. i.e. selling fake versions of their stuff which did infringe on their trademark.
It wasn't Gucci/Prada/Armani ads as one poster said.
Nor is it compariable to a JC Penny's employee standing outside Boston Store and telling people on their way in to go to Penny's instead
Nor is it like the other day when a friend asked me about Ford trucks, and I told him he should buy a Dodge instead
Nor is it like if I call Home Depot and ask for a Price Pfister and the sales person responds that he likes American Standard better
Nor is it like in the yellow pages when (for example) Acura can put an 800 number in all the phone books printed by SBC (or on their behalf) in the cars section
Nor is it like if I'm at a restaurant in France and I ask for a Coke, and the waitress says "Is Pepsi ok?
Nor is it like if you were running a telephone directory service, and every time I asked you to connect me with DELL customer support you'd connect me with HP
Nor is it like Microsoft ads showing up all the time on Slashdot
Google is selling Louis Vuitton's brand names to promote companies selling counterfeit copies of Louis Vuiton's products.
The key word here is counterfeit, not competing brand.
Whether you agree with the ruling or not, at least get the facts right.
Firefox have a deal with Google such that they are the default search and on the default home page in Mozilla Firefox.
Except now people think you're talking in octal.
010 is eight.
The "Fast Infoset Project" for creating Binary XML as mentioned in the article is using ASN.1. See this blog entry by Rick Jelliffe for details.
Fast Infoset is to ASN.1 what XML is to SGML. At least if it becomes the standard anyway.
Regular compression (like gzip) helps the file size issue, but it does not allow for random access of the XML.
Wait a minute, XML is text and you cannot randomly access it anyway. Well that's the point of binary XML. The focus on XML compression seems to be missing the key advantage of binary XML. That is, a binary XML format could allow indexes of elements and attributes for fast access of complex pointer-rich data structures.
Random access of a text format simply cannot be done in a sensible way. gzipping XML doesn't help give XML random access.
Compare:
to
The first example is much easier to say, although it is technically less accurate, as obviously (to people who understand evolution) evolution does not "purposely" do anything.
As for evolution being only a theory, the word "theory" has slightly different meanings in science and in every day speech. To quote an Evolution FAQ:
(From Frequently Asked Questions About Evolution.)
To have a disclaimer that evolution is only a theory, you'd be asking for a disclaimer also on articles about space travel to say newtonian physics and einstein's relativity are also just theories.
Keep on questioning assumptions, but remember to question your own beliefs too.
Not at all. Previous studies compared chimps (those without language) to humans (those with language) and considering the impact of language on handedness. This does not contradict Chompsky, as it does not suppose chimps have language.
This particular study doesn't even go that far, and ignores language all together. It considers only motor areas of as they relate handnedness.
This model of allowing groups of cars through is the same as what naturally happens where there are no traffic lights, and cars and bicycles share the road. It is termed critical mass.
The term "critical mass" in this sense, was adopted from an observation made by American George Bliss while visiting China. He noted that traffic in China, both motorists and bicyclists, had an understood method of negotiating unsignalled intersections. Traffic would "bunch up" at these intersections until the back log reached a "critical mass" at which point that mass would move through the intersection. This description was related in the Ted White documentary Return of the Scorcher (1992) and subsequently adopted by the Critical Mass movement.
Perhaps the only difference with this traffic light system is it tries to preempt the "bunching up".
The desktop machine at Centrelink run Windows. They access records through a combination of web (Internet Explorer) and a text-based database system.
Strangely, though, the article only mentions the desktop in the headline [shrugs]