Parents absolutely should know what's important to their kids. The child is quite right to expect a level of attention that includes this knowledge. The hard part that some parents fail to do is that, having learned what's important to their kids, they should not necessarily proceed to just give whatever it is to them.
You should try NCSA Mosaic rather than lynx, it has a lot of nice features, like the embedding of images within text! I expect everyone will use Mosaic soon, as it's obviously better, so we can put this whole browser controversy to rest.{/1993}
Where would we be if it had been decided years ago that science was certain to already be correct in all aspects? Your mathematics analogy is flawed as well, consider Goedel's incompleteness theorems.
No knowledge and no intelligence is required to have certainty on matters of morality. Understanding the limits of your understanding is the first step in expanding those limits. If you're absolutely certain something is true, then your mind is closed on the issue. You cannot learn, and you have ceased to seek truth, and there's no point in further discussing the matter with you.
If you don't believe your own beliefs are the one absolute true way, why would anyone else believe your beliefs? For their merits. Why would a claim by someone that their beliefs are the one absolute true way be relevant for the purpose of convincing someone?
How could you convince anyone to believe as you do when even you are unsure of their truth? By discussion rather that some sort of appeal to authority, which appears to be what you are getting at. On the other hand, convincing people to believe as I do is not a priority for me.
The rest of your post appears to be angling that there is some set of morals that you believe are the one true way. I don't think such a thing is possible to prove, though I see in the world many different, conflicting sets of morality each with many adherants who are convinced that they are correct and all the others are wrong.
Merely lacking the intellectual honesty to acknowledge that you might be mistaken does not mean that your personal one true way is really the 'right' one. It certainly does not mean that you are justified in imposing it on others.
I expect that the vast majority today would agree that an abortion is bad, at least in the sense of being an unfavorable outcome if not in an absolute metaphysical sense. I expect that a majority would also think that in the abstract having an abortion is morally wrong.
Morally wrong is not an all or nothing question though. Some would think it's morally wrong on the level of killing a baby, others that it was morally wrong but of very minor importance, and some would be scattered everywhere between.
Many of those who see it as morally wrong (particularly if they see it as a relatively minor offense) nonetheless do not think that government should forbid it or punish those who obtain or perform it. I may have the opinion that billboards advertising cigarettes are morally wrong, or that certain forms of hate speech are morally wrong, or that extramarital sex is morally wrong, but that does not imply that I support a government ban on those things. Morality and legality are and should be separate concepts. I am not arrogant enough to believe that my set of morals is the one absolute true way, nor am I convinced that a government ban is always a productive and effective response even if something really is immoral.
I expect that you'd get vastly different responses to the question 'is abortion bad?' or the question 'should agents of the government imprison people who get or perform abortions?' Nuance, however, does not win votes or make for good sound bites.
Your logic that.com was so large to make.net pointless to create makes no sense considering they were created at the same time. (January 1985)
It took years for.com to take off, there are fewer than 100 currently registered.com domains that date back to the first two years of.com's existance. Both.com and.net were rare to see in the late 80s to early 90s anyhow-.edu was much more common on USENET, or IRC, or on internet games such as netrek. Hell,.mil seemed about as common as.com in the early days.
Please do all that you can to reign in the executive branch No, no, in the US the executive branch is NOT supposed to be a reigning monarchy. I realize that the current executive appears to think he should have the powers of a king (of the old style rather than the modern ceremonial kind), but you shouldn't encourage this.
A better analogy here would be that you're arguing that anyone can just go ahead and make prints of someone else's recently completed original painting, and proceed to compete with the original artist to market and sell those prints while claiming it was original work.
That is both illegal and immoral, and has been for quite a long time.
So "fanatical athiests" is your code for someone who occasionally gets annoyed with people advertising their religion- but who doesn't act on this annoyance, instead jokingly complaining about it on slashdot?
He expresses annoyance at those who advertise their religion... so you swear at him for advertising his lack of religion, while claiming that what you are doing doesn't happen. Hypocrite much?
You might want to actually read U.S. v. Miller. It doesn't say what you appear to believe. As to what the militia was, the Supreme court wrote:
"The signification attributed to the term Militia appears from the debates in the Convention, the history and legislation of Colonies and States, and the writings of approved commentators. These show plainly enough that the Militia comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense. "A body of citizens enrolled for military discipline." And further, that ordinarily, when called for service these men were expected to appear bearing arms supplied by themselves and of the kind in common use at the time."
Their reason for not overturning on appeal was that,
"In the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a "shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length" at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument. Certainly it is not within judicial notice that this weapon is any part of the ordinary military equipment, or that its use could contribute to the common defense. Aymette v. State, 2 Humphreys (Tenn.) 154, 158."
With the clear implication that if a weapon WERE demonstrated to the court to be part of ordinary military equipment or that it was able to contribute to the common defense then it WOULD be protected by the second amendment.
(a) The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied
males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section
313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a
declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States
and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the
National Guard.
That's the current law of the land, folks. Even with a tortuous reading of the second amendment to parse it to mean that it the right only applies to the militia, the militia is still a very large percentage of the populace. I don't think you'd get much support for restricting only women, only the older, or only the non-able-bodied from firearm ownership either...
Back in the day, I was using FORTRAN77 at work (chemical modeling) and there was a problem for which I really, really needed to use recursion. Avoiding recursion would have been horribly awkward and inefficient. I had a long discussion with my boss and finally got him to agree to lose compatability with FORTRAN77 standards and use Fortran90 style recursion. (Fortran90 was backward compatable enough that the tweaks required for compiling all the rest of the code were minimal.)
When did I drag my former boss, kicking and screaming, all the way from the 1977 version of Fortran to the 1990 version? That's right, it was way way back in the year 2003. Scientific computing fears change, I guess. At the same job I worked with a molecular mechanics code that, I kid you not, had blocks of code in some subroutines from the 1970s still in use, line numbers in columns 73-80 and all.
If all you want to do is math, and enough of it that you're processor speed limited, Fortran is still a fine language. It's fast.
Let's imagine a young man (in the United States in this example) in the year 1950. The law of the land at the time states that if he creates such a work he will be entitled to certain rights for a period of 28 years, renewable once for an additional 28. This right is not considered inalienable, but rather stated by the Constitution, "Congress may promote the progress of science and useful arts by granting copyrights and patents of limited duration."
This young man in 1950 looks at his career options, and decides to become an artist based on the terms society offers him for copyright- or chooses instead to become a accountant or schoolteacher or some other profession. He should pursue other options if the terms society offers him for producing art (given his chances of success) are not good enough. Rationally, society should have chosen a length of time sufficient to induce talented individuals to artistic careers- but no more.
This man in 2008 should have absolutely no right to a work that he copyrighted in 1950, as the agreement he entered into with society at large when he created the work (which had a maximum limit of 56 years in 1950) has expired. Morally, this should be true either for his heirs or for himself if he's still alive.
To retroactively give longer terms to copyright and patent holders does not encourage creativity- the creation process has already occurred, the creators have already accepted the existing terms.
Copyrights should be considered like a contract. Older creations should fall out of copyright according to the rules that were in effect when the work was made - including copyrights for anthropomorphic mice. Contrariwise, the current rules of copyright should apply with full force to works being created now. To give extra time to older works is just giving money away for no reason (and is unconstitutional in my opinion), but to deny copyrights the full extent of their applicability at the time they were created would be like a breach of contract.
Well, there was a research project they funded in the area of parallel computing back in 1998 that provided Intel with some useful information, and led to more efficient parallel computers.
I think I read an article about that somewhere, but you might not have heard of it.
That's not QUITE true. The small number of artists who have been popular for a long time, with consistent sales, actually do make quite a bit of money from album sales. This is because they were in a position to renegotiate favorably with recording studios after the lengthy initial contract.
Which is why long established bands like Metallica and U2 are the only musicians who care enough about piracy to speak out on it- they are the rare exceptions of musicians who actually are getting paid for album sales.
See this Courney Love essay. (Yes, Courtney Love wrote an informative essay on the topic. Who knew?)
Let me the first to say- Huh? The fact that it's referred to here as the "Caltech Cannon" seems to be some sort of deceptive self-hype on the part of those who did this. Not that stealing that cannon isn't amusing and a nice feat, but at least they should label the thing correctly.
While it's been a few years since I was a student at caltech, I can't imagine that the situation has changed much. The Fleming cannon is one of a handful of items on campus that was declared un-RFable(non-prankable), mostly because Fleming house is utterly unable to take a joke.
I expect that 6/7ths of the caltech undergraduates are happy to be rid of the stupid thing and to laugh at the jackasses in Fleming house. The 1/7 of the undergraduates from Fleming house, carefully selected by douchebags to carry on their humorless traditions, will proceed to act pathetic and whiny. That's what happened when Harvey Mudd took Fleming's cannon.
But I may be slightly biased on the topic. They're All Fine Houses.
Though... techers may actually care about the perception of them at MIT a bit more, and thus this mislabeling of it as the "Caltech Cannon" may provoke a response from the majority who care not at all about the actual cannon.
Iodine is strictly solid at STP (which stands for Standard Temperature and Pressure.)
It does sublime at standard (one atmosphere) pressure and elevated temperature, though.
Here's a map of the continental US The red squares(and triangles) represent successful visits, white represent documented unsuccessful attempts, and grey is the default for no documented attempts.
As you can see, almost all of the area has been covered, in fact most of the points which haven't are in ocean or the Great Lakes (which was once not considered targets, then the parameters were redefined to be within sight of land.)
I think there are five spots on land which have not been visited- out of approximately a thousand. Of these:
One has been visited, but is listed as incomplete, possibly because the visit may not have been done legally; One is in an Indian reservation which now has permission granted for visit planned within a month One is in a large private ranch for which permission to go has not been granted and
and Twoare on federal government land used for nuclear-related purposes.
Somewhat higher of a proportion of government land than I'd've expected, and no confluence which hasn't been visited because of terrain, which was quite surprising to me.
This has gone on long enough that some places which are legally difficult to get to have been visited, such as this one on a federally protected watershed which was visited by a local water quality official who'd read about the site.
Surprisingly few confluences are actually in cites. My personal favorite confluence is this one, which is in the middle of Washington State but happens to be in the middle of the Columbia River, more than 100m from either shore! (100m is the maximum distance for a visit to be considered successful.) The first attempt failed for lack of a boat, in the middle of a very dry region. I've most likely visited that confluence unknowingly- as a teenager I used to go waterskiing in that area.
As to specifics: Java Man was found with some other bones nearby, but the modern human bones also found by Dubois which are claimed to be in the 'same stratum' (the Wadjak skulls) were found 65 miles away in mountainous caves deposit, while Java man was found in river deposits. You also might want to consider Sangrian17, which was found on Java years later.
Piltdown man was indeed a hoax. This does not mean all such skeletons are, however.
The find of a tooth in Nebraska stimulated some art, but no one at the time claimed that the tooth made a complete Nebraska man. The picture which ran in the Illustrated London News had the following caption:
"Mr. Forestier has made a remarkable sketch to convey some idea of the possibilities suggested by this discovery. As we know nothing of the creature's form, his reconstruction is merely the expression of an artist's brilliant imaginative genius. But if, as the peculiarities of the tooth suggest, Hesperopithecus was a primitive forerunner of Pithecanthropus, he may have been a creature such as Mr. Forestier has depicted." (Smith 1922)
It was an artist's imagination and clearly labelled as such in a pop culture magazine.
The discussion of Peking Man misses the point entirely. Even if they were killed in order to eat their brains(for which the evidence is sketchy) it does not rule out them being human ancestors... there have been human cannibals and there may have been hominid cannibals. It entirely ignores the physical characteristics of the skeletons, which is the interesting part- they aren't ape or monkey skeletons.
The bit about Lucy seems to have been invented out of whole cloth. There was no dramatic unveiling in 1982- I'm sure what event this might be a distorted account of. The actual bones are kept in the Paleoanthropology Laboratories of the National Museum of Ethiopia in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Casts of them have been available for some time, and they're definately bipedal... and certainly not those of a chimpanzee.
Your definition of 'shown false' does not agree with mine.
I'm not sure about "whom", but I do know that Bob the Angry Flower dislikes the practice of putting apostrophes in plural nouns for no apparent reason.
That's only true for an ideal gas at STP (Standard temperature and pressure). Admittedly, this is where a lot of courses emphasize moles to learn the Ideal Gas Rule. In the real world things aren't quite so simple (and no real gas is truly ideal, that's just a first-order approximation.)
The formal definition of a mole is that it's the number of atoms in 12 grams of the isotope Carbon-12. The molecular weight of atoms as listed on a periodic table represent the average mass of a mole of the element in naturally occurring proportions. In the case of Carbon, small amounts of the 13C and 14C isotopes result in an average mass slightly above 12.
Yup, by Mayor and Queloz, see the abstract of the paper. There has been some argument as to whether it's a planet or not, but as far as I can tell it's now mostly agreed that it is- in fact, the site tmacd himself referenced lists it as entry #10 in its (non-chronologically ordered) list.
Slashdot Mirror
Parents absolutely should know what's important to their kids. The child is quite right to expect a level of attention that includes this knowledge. The hard part that some parents fail to do is that, having learned what's important to their kids, they should not necessarily proceed to just give whatever it is to them.
You should try NCSA Mosaic rather than lynx, it has a lot of nice features, like the embedding of images within text! I expect everyone will use Mosaic soon, as it's obviously better, so we can put this whole browser controversy to rest.{/1993}
Where would we be if it had been decided years ago that science was certain to already be correct in all aspects? Your mathematics analogy is flawed as well, consider Goedel's incompleteness theorems.
No knowledge and no intelligence is required to have certainty on matters of morality. Understanding the limits of your understanding is the first step in expanding those limits. If you're absolutely certain something is true, then your mind is closed on the issue. You cannot learn, and you have ceased to seek truth, and there's no point in further discussing the matter with you.
The rest of your post appears to be angling that there is some set of morals that you believe are the one true way. I don't think such a thing is possible to prove, though I see in the world many different, conflicting sets of morality each with many adherants who are convinced that they are correct and all the others are wrong.
Merely lacking the intellectual honesty to acknowledge that you might be mistaken does not mean that your personal one true way is really the 'right' one. It certainly does not mean that you are justified in imposing it on others.
I expect that the vast majority today would agree that an abortion is bad, at least in the sense of being an unfavorable outcome if not in an absolute metaphysical sense. I expect that a majority would also think that in the abstract having an abortion is morally wrong.
Morally wrong is not an all or nothing question though. Some would think it's morally wrong on the level of killing a baby, others that it was morally wrong but of very minor importance, and some would be scattered everywhere between.
Many of those who see it as morally wrong (particularly if they see it as a relatively minor offense) nonetheless do not think that government should forbid it or punish those who obtain or perform it. I may have the opinion that billboards advertising cigarettes are morally wrong, or that certain forms of hate speech are morally wrong, or that extramarital sex is morally wrong, but that does not imply that I support a government ban on those things. Morality and legality are and should be separate concepts. I am not arrogant enough to believe that my set of morals is the one absolute true way, nor am I convinced that a government ban is always a productive and effective response even if something really is immoral.
I expect that you'd get vastly different responses to the question 'is abortion bad?' or the question 'should agents of the government imprison people who get or perform abortions?' Nuance, however, does not win votes or make for good sound bites.
Your logic that .com was so large to make .net pointless to create makes no sense considering they were created at the same time. (January 1985)
.com to take off, there are fewer than 100 currently registered .com domains that date back to the first two years of .com's existance. Both .com and .net were rare to see in the late 80s to early 90s anyhow- .edu was much more common on USENET, or IRC, or on internet games such as netrek. Hell, .mil seemed about as common as .com in the early days.
It took years for
When Juffo-Wup is complete, when at last there is no Void or Non, when the Creators return, then we can finally rest.
Long term, we should move all our population out into space and keep Earth as a park.
A better analogy here would be that you're arguing that anyone can just go ahead and make prints of someone else's recently completed original painting, and proceed to compete with the original artist to market and sell those prints while claiming it was original work.
That is both illegal and immoral, and has been for quite a long time.
He expresses annoyance at those who advertise their religion... so you swear at him for advertising his lack of religion, while claiming that what you are doing doesn't happen. Hypocrite much?
Who modded this flamebait insightful?
You might want to actually read U.S. v. Miller. It doesn't say what you appear to believe. As to what the militia was, the Supreme court wrote:
"The signification attributed to the term Militia appears from the debates in the Convention, the history and legislation of Colonies and States, and the writings of approved commentators. These show plainly enough that the Militia comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense. "A body of citizens enrolled for military discipline." And further, that ordinarily, when called for service these men were expected to appear bearing arms supplied by themselves and of the kind in common use at the time."
Their reason for not overturning on appeal was that,
"In the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a "shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length" at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument. Certainly it is not within judicial notice that this weapon is any part of the ordinary military equipment, or that its use could contribute to the common defense. Aymette v. State, 2 Humphreys (Tenn.) 154, 158."
With the clear implication that if a weapon WERE demonstrated to the court to be part of ordinary military equipment or that it was able to contribute to the common defense then it WOULD be protected by the second amendment.
The definition of the US militia is still a part of US law, though it's been modified a few times over the years.
According to current federal law, U.S. Code : Title 10 : Section 311a:
(a) The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard.
That's the current law of the land, folks. Even with a tortuous reading of the second amendment to parse it to mean that it the right only applies to the militia, the militia is still a very large percentage of the populace. I don't think you'd get much support for restricting only women, only the older, or only the non-able-bodied from firearm ownership either...
Back in the day, I was using FORTRAN77 at work (chemical modeling) and there was a problem for which I really, really needed to use recursion. Avoiding recursion would have been horribly awkward and inefficient. I had a long discussion with my boss and finally got him to agree to lose compatability with FORTRAN77 standards and use Fortran90 style recursion. (Fortran90 was backward compatable enough that the tweaks required for compiling all the rest of the code were minimal.)
When did I drag my former boss, kicking and screaming, all the way from the 1977 version of Fortran to the 1990 version? That's right, it was way way back in the year 2003. Scientific computing fears change, I guess. At the same job I worked with a molecular mechanics code that, I kid you not, had blocks of code in some subroutines from the 1970s still in use, line numbers in columns 73-80 and all.
If all you want to do is math, and enough of it that you're processor speed limited, Fortran is still a fine language. It's fast.
I think both extremes are incorrect.
Let's imagine a young man (in the United States in this example) in the year 1950. The law of the land at the time states that if he creates such a work he will be entitled to certain rights for a period of 28 years, renewable once for an additional 28. This right is not considered inalienable, but rather stated by the Constitution, "Congress may promote the progress of science and useful arts by granting copyrights and patents of limited duration."
This young man in 1950 looks at his career options, and decides to become an artist based on the terms society offers him for copyright- or chooses instead to become a accountant or schoolteacher or some other profession. He should pursue other options if the terms society offers him for producing art (given his chances of success) are not good enough. Rationally, society should have chosen a length of time sufficient to induce talented individuals to artistic careers- but no more.
This man in 2008 should have absolutely no right to a work that he copyrighted in 1950, as the agreement he entered into with society at large when he created the work (which had a maximum limit of 56 years in 1950) has expired. Morally, this should be true either for his heirs or for himself if he's still alive.
To retroactively give longer terms to copyright and patent holders does not encourage creativity- the creation process has already occurred, the creators have already accepted the existing terms.
Copyrights should be considered like a contract. Older creations should fall out of copyright according to the rules that were in effect when the work was made - including copyrights for anthropomorphic mice. Contrariwise, the current rules of copyright should apply with full force to works being created now. To give extra time to older works is just giving money away for no reason (and is unconstitutional in my opinion), but to deny copyrights the full extent of their applicability at the time they were created would be like a breach of contract.
Well, there was a research project they funded in the area of parallel computing back in 1998 that provided Intel with some useful information, and led to more efficient parallel computers. I think I read an article about that somewhere, but you might not have heard of it.
That's not QUITE true. The small number of artists who have been popular for a long time, with consistent sales, actually do make quite a bit of money from album sales. This is because they were in a position to renegotiate favorably with recording studios after the lengthy initial contract.
Which is why long established bands like Metallica and U2 are the only musicians who care enough about piracy to speak out on it- they are the rare exceptions of musicians who actually are getting paid for album sales.
See this Courney Love essay. (Yes, Courtney Love wrote an informative essay on the topic. Who knew?)
Let me the first to say- Huh? The fact that it's referred to here as the "Caltech Cannon" seems to be some sort of deceptive self-hype on the part of those who did this. Not that stealing that cannon isn't amusing and a nice feat, but at least they should label the thing correctly. While it's been a few years since I was a student at caltech, I can't imagine that the situation has changed much. The Fleming cannon is one of a handful of items on campus that was declared un-RFable(non-prankable), mostly because Fleming house is utterly unable to take a joke. I expect that 6/7ths of the caltech undergraduates are happy to be rid of the stupid thing and to laugh at the jackasses in Fleming house. The 1/7 of the undergraduates from Fleming house, carefully selected by douchebags to carry on their humorless traditions, will proceed to act pathetic and whiny. That's what happened when Harvey Mudd took Fleming's cannon. But I may be slightly biased on the topic. They're All Fine Houses. Though... techers may actually care about the perception of them at MIT a bit more, and thus this mislabeling of it as the "Caltech Cannon" may provoke a response from the majority who care not at all about the actual cannon.
I'm glad to hear you're open to new evidence. I'd recommend you read this description of the fossil record of morphological intermediates.
Iodine is strictly solid at STP (which stands for Standard Temperature and Pressure.)
It does sublime at standard (one atmosphere) pressure and elevated temperature, though.
As you can see, almost all of the area has been covered, in fact most of the points which haven't are in ocean or the Great Lakes (which was once not considered targets, then the parameters were redefined to be within sight of land.)
I think there are five spots on land which have not been visited- out of approximately a thousand. Of these:
One has been visited, but is listed as incomplete, possibly because the visit may not have been done legally;
One is in an Indian reservation which now has permission granted for visit planned within a month
One is in a large private ranch for which permission to go has not been granted and
and Two are on federal government land used for nuclear-related purposes.
Somewhat higher of a proportion of government land than I'd've expected, and no confluence which hasn't been visited because of terrain, which was quite surprising to me.
This has gone on long enough that some places which are legally difficult to get to have been visited, such as this one on a federally protected watershed which was visited by a local water quality official who'd read about the site.
Surprisingly few confluences are actually in cites. My personal favorite confluence is this one, which is in the middle of Washington State but happens to be in the middle of the Columbia River, more than 100m from either shore! (100m is the maximum distance for a visit to be considered successful.) The first attempt failed for lack of a boat, in the middle of a very dry region. I've most likely visited that confluence unknowingly- as a teenager I used to go waterskiing in that area.
As to specifics: Java Man was found with some other bones nearby, but the modern human bones also found by Dubois which are claimed to be in the 'same stratum' (the Wadjak skulls) were found 65 miles away in mountainous caves deposit, while Java man was found in river deposits. You also might want to consider Sangrian17, which was found on Java years later.
Piltdown man was indeed a hoax. This does not mean all such skeletons are, however.
The find of a tooth in Nebraska stimulated some art, but no one at the time claimed that the tooth made a complete Nebraska man. The picture which ran in the Illustrated London News had the following caption:
It was an artist's imagination and clearly labelled as such in a pop culture magazine.The discussion of Peking Man misses the point entirely. Even if they were killed in order to eat their brains(for which the evidence is sketchy) it does not rule out them being human ancestors... there have been human cannibals and there may have been hominid cannibals. It entirely ignores the physical characteristics of the skeletons, which is the interesting part- they aren't ape or monkey skeletons.
The bit about Lucy seems to have been invented out of whole cloth. There was no dramatic unveiling in 1982- I'm sure what event this might be a distorted account of. The actual bones are kept in the Paleoanthropology Laboratories of the National Museum of Ethiopia in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Casts of them have been available for some time, and they're definately bipedal... and certainly not those of a chimpanzee.
Your definition of 'shown false' does not agree with mine.
The formal definition of a mole is that it's the number of atoms in 12 grams of the isotope Carbon-12. The molecular weight of atoms as listed on a periodic table represent the average mass of a mole of the element in naturally occurring proportions. In the case of Carbon, small amounts of the 13C and 14C isotopes result in an average mass slightly above 12.
Yup, by Mayor and Queloz, see the abstract of the paper. There has been some argument as to whether it's a planet or not, but as far as I can tell it's now mostly agreed that it is- in fact, the site tmacd himself referenced lists it as entry #10 in its (non-chronologically ordered) list.