It was a German idea originally from immediately after WW2 (1949 or so). USA conservatives copied it after it was adopted by all of Western Europe sans UK. In any case, that is how the medical system in all of Europe except UK works nowdays.

I have lived in the US, in a country with a regulated mandatory medical insurance (Bulgaria - it reformed to medical insurance from "socialist health for all") and in the UK which is the last remaining developed country worldwide with "pure socialist" style health system. Trust me, mandatory regulated insurance with regulated costings is exactly what you want and what you need if you want a working health system. We have yet to invent anything better.

The pre-Obama US system is broken - in the absense of regulatory oversight it is guaranteed to inflate costs while using doctors which are kept awake only by drugs at the end of a 30+ hour shift (I have friends who work in US A&E/ER so I know this first hand). So is the "socialist" UK one. You end up waiting 12+ months for treatment and receiving letters asking if you are still alive (I keep one of these as an example on why it is broken). What Obama did is the step in the right direction.

In any case - on article main subject:

1. I am not surprised.
2. That is why I run my mail server (with my mail dating back to 1999) till this day and it physically located where 3rd parties cannot access it.
3. That is why any data of any significance that leaves my systems (offsite backups,etc) is always encrypted AES256. I still keep a couple of Via C7s operational in my house for this exact reason - they can encrypt at up to 100Mbit/s "free of charge".

Kind'a. It prevents Apple using the software commercially within its business methods and business strategy.

Apple is a known "patents at dawn" company. That does not fit the GPLv3 mutual assured destruction patent clauses.

So while other companies can use GPLv3 commercially, Apple cannot do so. It will be in violation of the license the next time it tries to lob a patent nuke which is something it does on a regular basis.

Unfortunately, Apple is not alone here. Nearly all big companies are in the same position and they will follow suit. While I understand RMS aims and ideas here, that is really not the way. GPL should not be a replacement for court, legislation and enforcement.

Quoting an old Russian joke (from one of their best stand-up comedians):

An American University is a strange entity where Russian professors teach Chinese students a technical discipline in English language.

I would not say so.

That is what is the key factor in determining how much funding you get. The chart gives a good initial estimate of the likelihood for a site to produce a cited paper.

One comment however - the method used is skewed slightly against Russian and Chinese. These two countries still have a significant amount of stuff published in their native language journals and those tend to get less than average citations from abroad.

It is also surprising that places crippled by war and sanctions around ex Ugoslavia still deliver top science while cough cough some of their well off neighbours do not. It also shows the _REAL_ amount of innovation going on the Indian subcontinent. Good graph for slapping anyone talking about exporting research there.

US T-Mobile is very different from T-Mob elsewhere. They use their own architecture and do things differently from the rest of the T-Mob franchises. This does not mean better - just different.

This means that the LPG tank in my car and the extra set of injectors on the inlet manifold is a _VERY_ prudent investment.

However, if any enforcement of this resolution is to happen I am going to think 10 times before flying UK-US or any other route between security council countries. Nothing personal, just business....

First, it is not. French law is Napoleonic law and it is extremely strict on the concept of "innocent until proven guilty". The Blair style playing fast and lose with it and declaring all management guilty until proven innocent in an H&S case as per UK H&S legislation is impossible there. No comment who exactly sponsored Blair to push that one.

Second, for the time being the charge is mostly a formality. This allows resources to continue to be allocated to the case. Otherwise it would have had to go on the cold case shelf. This way the French government can subsidize the search for the black boxes without getting into the usual Boeing vs Airbus or Air France vs the rest of the world subsidies debate. Granted the money in this case is 20-30M so it is a fraction of the usual sums discussed in the context of Airbus or Air France subsidies, but it is money none the less. Additionally, there are resources you cannot buy officially with money like military vessel involvement. This allows these resources to continue being allocated to the case.

Hollywood has shown no interest in marketing it when it is done right for both Sci Fi and Fantasy. So while sometimes someone gets something right, it does not get even a fraction of the credit it deserves.

Two examples:

1. StarDust. An excellent movie that did not get even a fraction of the marketing and any of the awards Hollywood hands out to all kinds of cr*p.
2. GATTACA. Same, with the difference that it at least got some nominations. No Hollywood award though and once again a laughable marketing budget.

The list of course can be continued...

This means that you do not know how to shop with a kid.

I used to do all of the shopping with the older kid from the age of 2.5 to around 5-ish and I do it sometimes with his sister (now 2y 7m). None of them ever needed an electronic pacifier at the checkout because by that time they were totally knackered from _HELPING_ me to shop. The only screaming toddler cases I have ever had was the older one disagreeing what fish we are going to buy this time. None of them was ever restrained in a shop. They are always totally selfpropelled. And we are not talking compliant "ragdoll cat" style kids. We are talking kids one of which has been officially declared "out of control, suspected ADHD" and his headmaster wanted him psychiatrically evaluated.

It is difficult, more exhausting on the parent, you cannot stop in front of any counter for more than 1 minute, there is no browsing whatsover and you shop like a realtime OS: hard cut-off if a task does not complete in time before the kid gets bored. However the overall result is that you have _NO_ problem in a shop with a kid and by the end they are so knackered that they will stand still or sit for 10 minutes at the checkout.

No, general lack of computer hygiene which is not limited to parenting. EVERY user should have his own account and for mobile devices whoever has to have one should have his own.

I would never hand off junior a device where I am logged in. No WAY. Neither will he hand me back a device on which he is logged in without logging out first.

That is also one of the reasons why none of the iPhone/Pad/PodTouch devices or Android tablets are going to make my "media toy" shopping list any time soon. On their own most of them are too expensive to hand to a kid or to use occasionally on the sofa or table instead of a netbook (unless you are sh***ing money). As a shared device they totally suck rocks because they have no per-user settings.

No they will not.

They will simply peer closer to the edge and agree with the ISP that their traffic does not count towards any quotas. They already do it in places.

The ISPs will similarly move their service closer to the edge. A secondary effect will be that "magic box" traffic solutions that require all traffic to be dragged across them will become less and less popular. Ditto for any all-encompassing traffic management superframeworks native to specific network technologies.

IMO that is actually quite good for the Internet in general because it will go back to its pre-telco-bought-the-ISP age highly distributed form where a natural (or man-caused) disaster will have very little consequences.

5W average, so let's assume up to 10W per CPU according to the article.

Not bad. In fact good enough to replace completely a commercial non-metered hosted VM offering of the kind memset (http://www.memset.co.uk/) offers at present.

The interesting question here is what is the interconnect between them. After all, who cares that you have 480 cores in 2U if 90% of the time they are twiddling their thumbs waiting for data to be delivered to them.

Standard mol biol procedures nowdays. Rats and mice can be manufactured with nearly any deffect you like as long as you know which gene you want "knocked out".

No. We are reaching a point where casual software starts relying on 3d accel and hardware video accel. Even browsers and flash (yuck) hook up into accelerated APIs. All of these need the "serious business apps" api, not the "games" api. So regardless of what microsoft thows at DirectX in terms of resources the amount of resources thrown at opengl and opencl in the next five years is likely to grow significantly year on year. Probably even in excess of resources thrown at DirectX.

So from this perspective, using OpenGL is not such a bad idea for a game manufacturer especially one that is in it for the long run. Add to that mobile gaming that is GL based and has nothing to do with DirectX and the balance of things does not quite look in favour of DirectX if you want to chose today and be in business in 5 years.

It is the datacenter's fault.

It is producing enough hot water to heat half of the town and is dumping that in the nearby river instead of establishing good "neighbourly relations".