Pope Benedict XVI said the debate raging in some countries -- particularly the United States and his native Germany -- between creationism and evolution was an "absurdity," saying that evolution can coexist with faith.

-- http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19956961/ns/world_news-europe/t/pope-creation-vs-evolution-clash-absurdity/ (article from 4 years ago)

Another interesting point about Florida's lottery is that you are 4 times more likely to be struck by lightning in Florida than to win the Lotto jackpot. ;)
I based that on the per year numbers ages ago so obviously not very accurate, but not completely made up. :) hrm, ok, I'll find numbers.

Oh, wow, the Lotto has changed a lot in the last 20 years: bi-weekly drawings, additional numbers. It looks like the odds are about even now!:

• "Lightning has injured at least 2,000 people in Florida since 1959." -- http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/05/0522_030522_lightning.html
  2000/(2003-1959)=45.45/year
• As of September 8, 2009 a total of 963 tickets had matched 6-of-6 in Florida Lotto to win or share a jackpot. Of these, 27 expired, never being claimed by ticketholders." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_lotto
  (963-27)/( 2009-1988 )=44.57/year

I wonder how many of those 27 unclaimed tickets belonged to people struck by lightning. ;)

I'm surprised a large chunk of the obfuscation attempts didn't involve replacing letters with numbers. termin8, passw0rd, etc.
I used a password cracker once as a sysadmin many years ago and I recall that that was one of the higher priority alternates the password cracker tried after dictionary words. I also remember there were plenty of adjunct dictionaries for password crackers with things such as anime/book/movie/tv names and character names and places which might cover a lot of that "other" category.

Ford Motor Company certainly seems like a business to me. I'm sure they'll refer to Ford's google+ page as something other than a "profile" to lawyer their way out of that one. :)

It's quite obnoxious of google to claim that the version of firefox which was released with debian stable a year ago and is well-supplied with security updates is not a "modern browser". A googler I know says this alert is just because they haven't done any testing on these versions, but the red inline, scrolling pop-up is still quite obnoxious. I recommend they make it an ugly rectangular image file that says "Best viewed in Chrome at 800x600 resolution!" a la the mid 1990s. :)

Speaking of that annoying red pop-up, if they are going to confusingly subsume the use of red(well almost-red) for the currently active google feature in the top menu and the active Circles and the like, they really shouldn't also use red for the more conventional meaning of an alert/warning message like this. User interfaces should be consistent.

Does this answer your question?

The city official who was the project's point person, Joel Bondy, resigned in December and had close ties to the suspected mastermind of the scheme.

Gerard Denault, a former executive with Science Applications International Corporation, the company overseeing CityTime, was charged with receiving over $5 million in kickbacks for his work as the project's senior manager.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/28/nyregion/criticism-for-citytime-project-grows-as-a-manager-is-arrested.html?_r=1

I see lots of comments exasperated about the cost overruns and folks pointing out that these types of systems are more complicated than it seems. But I couldn't find any comments to moderate up that point out the criminal aspects of this project - so here you go. :)

That's the idea behind Diaspora. Distributed, privately run nodes communicating with each other. You can run your own, or your university can run one, or your favorite website can run one, or your ISP can run it like NNTP or SMTP servers.

Diaspora reminds me slightly of Openmoko, though, which was just getting out of infancy when it was crushed by Android. :(

Ha! If you click the "classic" link on that page it takes you to the new dark gray bar version.

I must admit that "circles" is a much nicer term than "aspects" which diaspora uses.
"Huddle", however - as a term for a group chat - is a bit silly. Perhaps it will appeal to football fans, though. ;)

They aren't likely to change their invite-only tactic. It has been quite successful in the past due to the false demand it creates without having to spend much money on traditional advertising. But the larger factor is likely that they want to be able to very accurately compare the adoption rates (and the rate of changes in the adoptions rates) to their other advertising platforms when they were new.
uh-oh, we've got a delta eyeballs resembling answers.google here!

The most annoying thing to me are web forms or applications with bizarre tab orders. (Even the "helpful" ones that move your focus after you fill the field are annoying since you might type your area code, hit tab for the next field, but end up at the field for last 4 digits.)

I won't even delve into the horror that is non-standard gui/keyboard implementations in flash interfaces.

I used to think I was clever for being aware of how often an argument can be seen as instinctive urges of people to position themselves higher in the primate dominance hierarchy. e.g. I am better than you; the software I use is better than what you use; ad hominem attacks; speaking louder and longer.
Then I noticed that by pointing out these dominance hierarchy games that I was really just playing the same instinctual game to show that I am more clever than those people "just" following their instincts. This paper seems to back up my theory that I'm just as much a slave to those instincts as the "me > *" flamebait types. :)