There is an interesting study where they gave a bunch of monkeys some dolls and diggers. The female monkeys went to play with the dolls, the male monkeys went to play with the diggers [citation needed, maybe someone into developmental psychology has it]... just one of those things...

Oh, I didn't realise they had been here already http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Founder. Oh what, you don't mean some ancient race of star travelling shape shifters, you mean a bunch of guys right. Okay, just checking.

I used to have an application that would let me use the keyboard to find and launch applications. I had to remember quite long key combinations, which was a pain, but I could do a manual search for them if I needed to. But then windows 3.1 came along and ever since then it never seemed to work quite so well...

Posted from my Linux Mint laptop... it just works tx. It's an OS, its job is to "just work". If you notice it, that's a problem.

Googling around - looks like proprietary bs to me

Should also look at test framework/test coverage. Gives a good idea of how many bugs you will hit...

Been reading Le Carre?

Slashdot: A mix between a peer review journal and "bum fights"

Peer review journal: a mix between science and "bum fights"

And relative to Fukushima - how many conventional chemical/oil plants got destroyed by the tsunami? How much junk did that spew into the environment, and how many people will die of poisoning from that stuff? Heck, why are they discussing investing many billions in improving nuclear plant safety, which might save few people rather than improving flood defences and emergency response which might save thousands? This whole discussion is just crazy.

Reads like the sort of bland non-specific but ambitious-sounding balls that research councils push all the time. Great sound bites for the politicians, but what does it really mean?

Stupid slashdot formatting.

> Where exactly is that 'storm' quoting from? You are clearly not British. > We very much hope not to get this point, but if you cannot resolve the issue of Mr. Assange's presence on your premises, this route is open to us. That translates from British English to American English as 'storm' cf Yes Minister series 4 episode 3

This is just wrong.

There are many thousands of physicists who study neutrino flux from the sun every day. They typically use several 1000 tonnes detectors looking for interaction such as inverse beta decay and they see ~ 1 neutrino interaction per day. Try googling for Super Kamiokande, Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, ...

The solar neutrino flux is generated from nuclear reactions in the core of the sun. Solar flares are generated by magnetic effects at the sun's surface. These two phenomena are almost completely unrelated.

For most uses, just a printed URL would surely be better? Data compression is higher using QR codes, but transparency is lower - with all the associated security/privacy/openness issues.