Apparently Telus' deal to buy Mobilicity got blocked by the government yesterday. When Mobilicity won their spectrum block in 2009, it was on the condition that it not be sold to any of the existing wireless providers for at least five years. As you said, the intention was to bring in some competition for the big three. Mobilicity had been warned the sale would be blocked on that reason alone, but they went ahead and got approval from everyone else first (shareholders, regulatory approval, etc.) I guess they were hoping that the government would just rubber-stamp the sale if all other parties had approved it.

I expect Rogers will get the same response.

Agreed on both points. I think the free Oracle offering is designed to encourage adoption and ease upgrade. So you start with the free Express edition, and build up a nice little business, but then performance or space becomes an issue and so the easiest course is to upgrade to Standard Edition for $$. And the developers working for you are all now familiar with Oracle and PL/SQL, so big business and government that run Enterprise edition for $$$$$ have plenty of developers to choose from.

I'm not sure what datatypes you're referring to. Enum and Set are kind of neat, but other than that both MySQL and Oracle seem to stick to the datatypes defined in the SQL standards.

Funny you should mention Java - were you aware that Oracle databases provide Java integration? It's kind of like MS SQL Server's dotNet integration. So you can do stuff like add your own Java libraries, or store Java objects directly in the database. I've never used it, but I suppose that would qualify as a "rich data type", right?

I am a DBA, and FYI there are multiple editions of Oracle. I'm not sure what use cases you were thinking of, but if you're looking for a free edition there's always Oracle Express Edition. Free to download, use and distribute, and allows databases up to 11GB. I've worked at companies that run bigger MySQL installations, but I would venture that they are less than 1% of the MySQL user base. The majority of MySQL installations are small ones to back websites, such as Wordpress installations. You could easily replace them with Oracle Express. For other use cases, there's Oracle's NoSQL database, or Oracle's In Memory database (called TimesTen for some obscure reason), and they used to market Oracle Database Lite for mobile apps.

So in summary, Oracle has a bunch of products that would compete with MySQL, and we can't understand why they don't just give MySQL away to Apache or some other foundation. Maybe they have support contracts that actually bring in some money.

All I could think of was Value Added Reseller. I agree, the asker should have spelled it out at least once.

Not sure why the link goes to the second page of the article, but on the first page they explain that blue crabs grow their shells faster in water with more carbon. (They note that bigger shells doesn't translate to more meat.) On the second page, they talk about the fact that mud crabs seem confused in water polluted with carbon, and that some mud crabs only ate half as much as in water with less carbon. Relevant quotes from the article:

versus

You're forgetting drag. Just like flying through air, flying through parts of the solar system results in drag from dust. The dust density is expected to increase when the probe reaches the inner Oort cloud, unless Voyager 1's path has angled enough above the ecliptic that it manages to miss it (I thought 35 degrees was high enough, my colleague disagrees.) If dust density increases, the drag will provide a small but continuous slowing effect. Once past the inner Oort cloud dust density will likely decrease, though no one I've worked with has a great guess of the dust density in the outer Oort cloud. It will still be non-zero though, and Voyager can't avoid the outer Oort. Added to the small but still present force of gravity from the sun (which is what keeps the Oort objects from drifting away), you have continuous drag on the craft.

We can't calculate the effect of that drag without knowing the dust density, and our estimates of the size of the Oort clouds are still rough (on the order of +-100AU last paper I read), which is why that NASA paper estimated crossing the outer edge of the Oort cloud in a range from 14K to 28K years. 14K if the Oort cloud is small and fairly dust-free, twice that long if our worst-case estimates of the density and size are correct.

Yes they did, from TFA:

and also

No, according to NASA's Voyager project page, Voyager 1 won't escape the Oort cloud (really the outer Oort cloud) for another 14,000 - 28,000 years. (Probably due to running out of power in the next 10 to 15 years.)

Along the same theme:

• * Ankle weights. Since you're at a standing desk, put weights on your ankles. It added a surprising amount of extra work for my legs, moving that weight when I shifted my feet around.
• * Sit on a fitness/yoga ball. I got tired standing so long, and my feet got sore. So I followed my co-workers' advice and alternated standing with sitting on a yoga ball. It takes the stress off your feet and legs for a bit, and really works your core (abs). Plus, it improved my posture (until I figured out a bizarre way to slouch while on a yoga ball.
• * Electronic muscle stimulator. It's basically isometric exercises, but you don't have to think about doing them - turn on the device and it forces your muscles to flex at specific rates. I hated the feeling of being out of control, but my brother has been talking up his for years.

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Do search engines count? Two of my sites are only linked from Google - a Google search for "link:sitename.com" yields no results, but Googling "sitename", "sitename.com" or some of the other variations returns all the pages. So they are reachable by people who know about them, and also to people who don't know the URL or IP address but know what to search for, but the site fail the "19 clicks" test unless someone has linked to a Google search that returns this site in the results. (Hasn't happened as far as I can tell.)

Replacing the comment score filter slider with "All", "Outstanding" and "Funny" buttons is a serious loss of functionality. I'm pretty happy browsing at +1 or +2 usually, please let me continue!

According to the BBC article, they simply guessed the age. The sub-brown dwarf or rogue planet seems to be travelling with a group of stars, and they've estimated the age of the stars to be 50 - 120 million years. It's a form of extra-solar profiling: That thing over there isn't a star, but it's hanging out with those other stars, so it must the same age as them. (Which is apparently OK to do for stars, but not people?)