The problem probably just finally got escalated inside Groupon. Before it was some stupid desk clerk thinking: Oh, some hobbyists I've never heard of are mad that their little programming club has the same name as our new terminal. No big deal.
Then it was "Sue them into next wednesday!" "Burn Groupon to the ground!" "Hang them higher!" and their response being "OMFG! It's a project that's FOSS and Linux and they are all friends with IBM, Oracle and Google. And they've got lawyers!"

Probably some exec with a clue got wind of the situation and concluded that "... yeah, they do have a case and this Gnome Project acutally isn't that small of a deal as one might think. And we have enough bad press as it is. Back down.".

Smart move I'd say.
And they even get a little neat publicity for playing nice.

The whole premise of the Foundation series is obsolete. The premise was that it was possible to predict the future to a moderate level of detail by calculation. Now that vast efforts have been expended in that direction by the weather and financial communities, we have a reasonably clear understanding of what can and cannot be accomplished in the prediction department. We know now that little changes grow into big ones (the "butterfly effect") rather than being filtered out. The future is driven by unpredictable noise.

The first paragraph of your comment makes a bit of sense. The second one is out there in la-la land. Your "SJW type" sounds like a straw man. Do you honestly think that people who receive rape and death threats, then publicize these threats, are doing it for the "attention, money, or political power"?

I love it. Hipster-hate, in all it's forms, is the latest new thing! It's the latest trend.

What's wrong with hippster? ... I love hippster. Nerdyness becoming the über-chique. That's awesome. For once, fashion has caught up with nerd-culture and not the other way around. In the 80ies it was Grundge and oversized, today it's hippster. Different name, same thing, basically. I can get huge and stable plastic frame glasses that are sturdy, cheap and let me see everything and I'm right ahead with the avantgarde.

The best thing about it is, that if you want to dress extra classy, a *normal* suit and tie will do just fine, becaue everybody else is wearing chucks and NBs anyway. And, to be honest, girls all dressed up like chicas in high-heels and tons of makeup all day never was my thing. I thing they look really cute with their baggy smurf-woolen caps, doc martens and oversized parkas. ... It's all been there in the 60ies and 80ies already and I love it whenever it comes around.

Yay for Hippster!

Sorry to be raining on your parade, folks, but seriously, no one really cares.

If Windows 8 has become a utility OS for Steam and Valve is OK with that and is dropping Linux as a foundation - so effing what? Valve would've built yet another dodgy distro of Linux (a shabby Debian fork I'd guess) and I think we all can agree that we have enough of those. And if you think that Valve would've put effort into the community - think again. Their a business.

With Android and Chrome OS we already have to large Linux distros comparatively tightly controlled by a MegaCorp. And from what I can tell, Android is going to be the next gen gaming OS. Convergence is upon us and once that's through, no one will give a damn about the "Desktop" - it was a crappy metaphor anyway - or PC gaming. Aside from a few enthusiasts and development professionals perhaps.
You'll plug your phone into your TV/Monitor grab your favorite independantly manufactured gaming controller and play Assasins Creed 12 you've just downloaded and bought a 32-hour gaming ticket for.

NVidia Shield anyone? Did you see the gaming demo in the iPhone 6 presentation? Gaming on smartphones and tablets is just taking of and there are enough experts in gaming who've expressed their feeling that the current gen of consoles will be the last. XBone is bombing, Wii has significantly slowed and the PS4 is one step away from becoming Sonys all-in media and home computing center - if they don't screw this one up that is.

No one want the Linux desktop, because the Desktop is on the way out.
Utility OSes like iOS, Chrome and Anroid is where the parties at now. End of Story.

I believe he's referring to displays that cost less than the Pi... from thrift stores. Spending $200 on a screen for a $25 computer is a bit silly. (I know that some folks use the Pi as a $25 computer for the $200 display they already have, but...)

My Dad was 68 when he died. My Mom was 75. I'm 53 now. If I significantly outlive either of them I will be surprised.

...laura

This is achieved by having a really big aperture. In this case, the array is spread out over 15 km, so the aperture is effectively that size. Try putting a 15 km array of telescopes in space! The information processing is necessary to combine the signals, as a 15 km single-dish antenna would be a bit tricky to set up.

One number that's woefully missing from the news stories is the wavelength (frequency) at which the observation was made. NRAO has made two sets of receivers, at 3 mm and 1.3 mm wavelengths, for this array. Other countries have made different receivers, but I don't know if any of those are being used right now. Ned more information!

This image is the result of a 25 year project to build a big interferometric array of millimeter-wave radio telescopes in Chile. The ALMA array is a mind-bogglingly complex system of 60+ telescopes, a correlator to combine all the signals, some bleeding-edge technology to maintain phase coherence of gigahertz signals traveling over many kilometers of optical fibers, and a bunch of other feats of engineering. I am awed by the results, and amazed that it was possible to get the whole thing to work.

I'm privileged to get to work on a prototype antenna for this project, which was just installed on Kitt Peak and commissioned today.

I met one of the guys who did this work at JPL, Jim Blinn, 30 years ago. He was quite a knowledgeable astronomy guy in addition to being a first-rate computer animator.

How are they gonna get him out again? Cut the snake open?

How about giving the beast some real food and/or just leave it alone?

Or film it from a distance and watch it eat some of its natural prey.
Isn't that what discovery channel usually does?

And, btw, AFAIK boa constrictors - which include anacondas - prefer their prey not breathing anymore. And they don't really care if it's bottled air you're breathing or not. They constrict you 'till you stop breathing. Hence the name. Duh.

To be honest, I kinda hope this snake teaches the guy a lesson and get's away with it. Now *that* would be some news. :-)

That's not anything like a Mies van der Rohe building. Rohe was a form-follows-function glass box architect. He did some of the best glass boxes of the 20th century, notably the IIT campus in Chicago. His work is very rectangular.

Wright did more unusual forms. In his later years, he designed the Marin Civic Center which Lucas, being from Marin, would have seen. It's been called the Martian Embassy. It's so alien it's been used in several science fiction movies. Like most Wright buildings, it's nicely integrated with the terrain.

Here's the park that must be destroyed to build to satisify Lucas' ego.

If all they need is $1 million to study how something goes "viral", they could probably get that much funding from Twitter, or Facebook, or Google, or any of the major ad-supported companies. Those companies probably have better data to analyze, too.

No, that's not a man-in-the-middle detector. It's a MITM attacker for test purposes.

Does it have a man-in-the-middle detector? Those are rare, but useful.