I thought we mocked Microsoft for the crap it pumped out that didn't make any sense and wasn't creative in the least, like Bob. I never mocked most of the cool things that came out of Microsoft Research.

Nope, this is simply not true. First off, reports are mixed. There was a widely publicized report of someone who claimed he got accounts blocked be reporting them, but then no one I know of who has tried to repeat this has had any success.

Further, the whole ID thing is blown out of proportion. IDs are one of several inputs that they'll accept, including links to competing social networking services and blogs where the name you're using (which must have a "first" and "last name") must have been in use prior to the establishment of your Google profile. In other words, you can't use your Google profile to establish a new pseudonym, but as the many authors and performers that use the service can attest, existing pseudonyms are just fine. In fact, some Google execs have pointed out that they use pseudonyms themselves, and have no problem with others doing so.

It will make zero difference. The 2 or three small hurricanes that I witnessed when I lived at my grandfather's cottage on the ocean, people were out sailboarding in the height of them. Media attention wasn't going to happen there, and yet there they were.

I had a similar experience in Boston one year. I was on the 40th floor of One Boston Place, near city hall, and there was a pretty bad wind storm moving through. We get those from time to time... just a freak burst of 60 mph winds with little or no storm associated. It's rare, but it happens.

Anyway, the building was swaying and during the course of the day two things happened which I found amusing. First, we had one of those big green LED signs with news tickers scrolling over it. It was suspended from the ceiling by two cables and it was swinging back and forth dramatically. A co-worker had been looking at it somewhat queasily, and asked, "why is it moving so much?" In retrospect, she was looking for a comforting answer. I just thought about it for a second and gave her the most logical answer I could think of: "It's not." That took her a second to process and then she looked very unhappy.

The other thing that happened was kind of unnerving to me. I was sitting in my chair, working on some code, and I stood up to get something. Next thing I knew, I was on the floor. I tried to get up again, and bang, I was on the floor again. My inner ear had just given up, but I had no idea until I tried to stand. It was odd because I'd spent years around the ocean, and never got sea sick or even a touch nauseous, but in this building I was incapacitated for a short time... no other symptoms, just the complete lack of balance.

And keep in mind that (and I'm speaking as someone who grew up in a house that was literally 5 feet from the ocean in southeastern Mass) the impact of any hurricane or tropical whatnot on the Northeast is almost entirely determined by the state of the tide when it hits. If they're predicting it will make landfall during high tide, then that could be serious even if it were a tropical depression by the time it arrived.

Have you met any humans? There's plenty of need for redemption.

That's because it doesn't need to be updated. No one with half a brain thinks that a 2,000 year old book that's been translated into the ground has a whole lot of literal truth in it. On the other hand, it represents a philosophy and a mythology which are quite real, and which should not be cast aside because we sequenced the human genome.

I think it really started when scientific thought in the late 17th century and into the 18th started to challenge the Church. That lead to a series of entrenchments from the Church where they felt that they had to defend the religion from these new questions. No longer were people asking, "why does the Sun rise," but, "why didn't religion tell us that the Sun rose because the Earth is rotating?"

Frankly, I think it was a mistake. Religion should never be in the business of trying to tell us what is. Rather it should seek to answer, why. That's a job that science is poorly suited to, and which religion is quite adept at.

Why is that something that you would have to be told? Does it matter?

You're looking at the Bible as a history text. It's not. It's a guide book for a religious mythology, and as such it does not need to clarify metaphor and historical fact.

What you come away from the Bible with is the same thing you should come away from poetry with: a sense of what the text was meant to convey.

Actually, that process has been underway for a long time now. The Catholics declared that evolution wasn't in conflict with Church doctrine years ago, and that debate was one that the Church had been having, internally, for decades.

Keep in mind that Christianity is an institution that is 2,000 years old, and has been roughly in at least one of its current forms for around 1,500 years. When you talk about "20 or 30 years" being a long time, you're working on a scale that Christianity simply doesn't work on.

It does no such thing. It gives a good case against Biblical literalisim, but that's a fairly new beast, and one could argue that it's really only a reaction to the scientific challenges of a mostly church-framed world view circa 1650 to now.

Even a thin layer of metaphor on top of Christian doctrine, such as the idea that the "clay" that Adam and Eve were molded out of was an ancestor species, would resolve the conflict. I'm not religious, but I'm enough of a fan of logic that I have to defend religion against such an absurd premise as the idea that it could be "disproved" by sequencing the human genome.

Evolution (or science in general) vs. religion is a false dichotomy. Evolution is a natural process like the Earth going around the Sun. The debate between Galileo and the Church didn't end Christianity and neither will the genome because, and this is a crucial point, the Christian creation myth pre-dates the Church (a Church, by the way, which has agreed a few years ago that there is no contradiction between Evolution and Christianity).

Actually, I'd say the police should review the output of the model and patrol the areas least likely to produce crime. On the assumption that smart criminals will use the same modeling to predict where police coverage will be decreased, this allows you to determine where to find the smart criminals. An excellent tool!

I think the take-away from this is that a new and heretofore unseen form of matter is one way to explain the phenomenon we call dark matter. There are probably many others, most of which are going to be based on the problem of scaling up the physics we can test to the size of the observable universe.

Dark matter is by no means dead, but phenomenon that take this long to explain typically turn out to have solutions which are complex enough to render most of the early assumptions moot.

It's a mix of investor-provided cash from bond and stock offerings and liquid assets, I would imagine.

That's fairly substantial. Just because you don't want to hear about it, doesn't mean it's not important.

That's all been covered previously on Slashdot. This was a key strategic buy that was aimed at growing their patent warchest in order to survive patent challenges against technologies like Android (e.g. the Oracle/Java suit).

Uh... smartphones were the sole domain of 2 primary players and one "yeah, right," contender until Android came along. HTC and LG specifically had very little hope of producing a viable smartphone without Android. The problem is that the licensing for all of the non-OS technologies is crazy, so only the largest companies have any hope of surviving in the market, right now. This is not something Google has any control over.

These are Google accountants. After they finished determining that the quarter's numbers all lined up with Benford's law they would have complained that the complex number violated type safety constraints and thrown an exception.