A lot of us older guys learned to code on first and second generation microcomputers, generally running BASIC variants. I suppose I learned plenty of bad habits in those old days, and the bit of 680x 8-bit assembly I dabbled in definitely did not help. But I remember the first proper computer science class I took in high school, and was introduced to TurboPascal. It was literally like I was basked in heavenly light and the harps, strings and voices of the Choir Eternal rained down upon me. I'm in my mid-40s now, and remember John Lennon being shot, saw the USSR fall and saw Hubble's first images of our incredible universe, but I tell you that that is the only paradigm shift I've experienced first hand, and quite frankly in that instant I dropped standard BASIC like a hot potato; switching to a structured BASIC dialect on my home computer (BASIC-09, which was essentially Pascal with BASIC-like syntax), and I never looked back. When I started working in OOP languages like Java, I found the transition much less hard, mainly I think because I had broken free of the chains of my first programming experiences. It's not that OOP doesn't have its own paradigms, it's just that once you learn a second language, particularly one so different from your first, you already are becoming a bit language agnostic.

That's my impression as well. I'm just a layman, but to my untrained eye this looks like word salad. I'm seeing phrases I have never read in a microbiology paper, book or article. My Spidey senses start tingling as soon as I see the word "quantum" outside of a physics article. It's not always true, but as a general rule of thumb that some throwing "quantum" into a biology discussion is usually talking crap. Add in words like "fractal" and the stinkometer just starts reading off the scale.

Anybody look up the researchers? Is it a prank or have the kooks snuck through the gate again.

I'm going to to be terribly pedantic here, but GST, like all VATs, does not work like that. It is not an expense (as in it does not effect profit and loss). Like all VATs, GST collected on sales is subtracted from GST spent on purchases, and if the remainder is positive, then you pay that to the government, and if it is negative the government sends you the difference. The point is to make a fairer sales tax, where goods and services are not taxed at multiple points. All these financial operations happen on the balance sheet as changes to assets and liabilities, and have nothing to do with expenses at all.

I guess the point has to be, what has VMWare bought to the game. They've essentially grabbed the Linux kernel, stacked their own kernel extensions on top of it and called it their own. I've never heard of them as major contributors to the Linux kernel itself.

We've seen enough corporate sociopathy to accurately answer that question.

Why didn't they just go with BSD?

He didn't. This is a standard bit of Blackberry astroturfing. Instead of innovating, this is what BB does now.

Larry Niven as well. Was it the third or fourth Ringworld book that went on at great length about various humanoid species fucking?

What choice does Microsoft have at this point? If they simple cede the mobile market, they risk Google marching right up the middle with a series of devices that come to resemble a full computing platform. And that most certainly is Google's intent. That's why they're putting considerable resources into Google Docs; they want it to be good enough, and once it is good enough, then suddenly that Chromebook looks like a pretty decent competitor to a more expensive Windows laptop.

At the end of the day, Microsoft has to at least gain some market share or it will begin to see its most valuable market; Exchange-Office, begin to leak away.

Neither does saying "it is the greatest next thing", apparently.

As much as I need to access such documents on my phone, I can. I can't conceive of actually wanting to work on such documents on a smartphone, but to view them, Google Docs seems to a reasonably good job, and when I had an iPhone, Apple's ability to view Office files was good enough in most cases.

That's always been MS's problem, they bring nothing to the table that isn't delivered by Google or Apple, and the things that they could bring to the table, like AD integration, they don't. Coupled with an absolutely miserable app store that is a laughably stunted entity compared to the major Android and Apple markets, it's little wonder they've had such a problem.

So we need the Dr. Pepper of cell phones?

Heinlein wasn't the only one. Some of Philip Jose Farmer's later work had a pretty sexually bizarre bent

They can join BlackBerry in the "any day now, we'll be on top!" movement.

His later books got more than a little bizarre and disturbing. Strange things seem to happen to aging SF writers.

I'm sure it's true to a point, but considering the fauna that has lived there long before humans came along, I'd say the jungle predates human activity by a very long period of time.