it was indeed a feckless attempt at satire by someone who is very grateful to have TeX to write and manage his technical publications (and is also 54, and so now old and useless) i do apologize for its lack of "funny".

nothing that old can possibly be relevant anymore (cf "trust no one over 30"). it should be replaced with something more responsive to a one-hand touch interface abbrev friendly imho. math, a central theme in TeX, no longer has any relevance to the modern world (just ask any millionaire agile scrum extreme php programmer). any remaining bits of math are done entirely by app; the vestigial remnants of the usefulness of "math" can only be found in the interjections of animated characters. only a tiny ancient dying breed of tenured academics (and i suspect *europeans*) would ever seek typography beyond the standards of MSWord. page layout was forever perfected by expensive per seat layout software around 1996 and requires no more changes. markup languages are <b>too</b> hard to learn. anything that requires a compiling phase has gone the way of C++. the world is better now as everything old and outmoded quickly recedes. sine-die.

my thoughts nearly exactly! "Open that email, and... ZAP!" what sort of lame mis-managed system is that true of?

i've been sitting in seattle, well, since forever... and this is at least the third try at this. comcast the evil monopoly that holds seattle in its death-grip will try everything that was successful at shutting this down and then-some before letting this through. they will start with "incentives" (building computer labs in the schools for example), then move to bribes (there's a hot mayor race coming up. watch if one candidate suddenly gets a zillion in outside funding. "but that's illegal!!" yeah... right), then legal threats like suing for restraint of trade (which have turned the trick before). they may also get federal, using a bribed federal regulatory agency to shut down the endeavor. so as much as i'd love to see this, and might even directly benefit, this ain't going to go down smoothly. this is a fairly fidgety "David" against an massively monetized Goliath.

...of 25 some years, i've thought long and hard about this. A tech workers union could well be a positive thing in the lives of folks who get laid-off the second that some CEO decides to off-shore, or, (and this always struck me as the saddest short-sighted of all), fire folks because the discovery they labored for has been made. (actual overheard paraphrasing by a CFO: "who needs an R&D department after the discovery is done and patented? they're just a waste of wages at that point")

yet here's my sad overly generalized conclusion: Those with an Engineering degree tend to be too conservative and have swallowed a bunch of malarkey about unions being Communist (see comments on this very page); whereas those with a PhD are somehow too elitist to think they need this sort of low-prole protection. I hope i'm wrong, and it'll just take a new generation to see the long-range benefits of getting organized, but i certainly have my doubts.

...that a fat (based) battery could store 9/4ths of the energy than a "sugar battery" does. (fat: 9kcal/mol sugar: 4kcal/mol)

>units '1 au' smoot
* 8.7905671e+10
/ 1.137583e-11

...yet perhaps good ol' "units" has yet to update to this shiny new definition of an AU.

Thank you for being such a good watchman. We really don't need another "gif" situation. Can you provide a dumbed-down explanation of what "RAND terms" are? (i'm -guessing- they aren't intrinsically random ;)

Did Qualcomm Inc and Huawei Technologies Co.,Ltd (the putative patent holders) sign off on that statement?

none other than Bruce Perens (Open Source champion) points us to these: https://datatracker.ietf.org/ipr/1520/ https://datatracker.ietf.org/ipr/1741/ wherein we learn that Opus is "possible royalty/fee". this is not consistent with "Fully Free" to any patent troll waiting for broad adoption before jumping.

It's renown among serious pollsters as a paid-for propaganda site.

the slippery slope of having big-pharma pay for the FDA's testing (as a "cost cutting" maneuver), which then became having the industry itself doing the testing of its own trial products, and by now the FDA is a watch-dog for the industries secrets and guarding their IP, the FDA has become essentially just contract research for the private sector. add that there are good indicators that big-pharma is behind pulling in "campaign contributions" to continue the war on drugs (there's proprietary money in xanax there's none in marijuana) and it's time to just tear down the remains and start a new agency. ...has that ever occurred? i don't think so.

in all my too many years [hack spittoo] of biochemistry bioinformatics bio-whathaveyou this is the first i've heard of the term "biocurators". and i gotta say, i don't like it. no-sir, not a bit.

"curator mid-14c., from L. curator "overseer, manager, guardian," agent noun from curatus, pp. of curare (see cure). Originally of minors, lunatics, etc.; meaning "officer in charge of a museum, library, etc." is from 1660s." so, "life + manager" or "life + officer in charge of a library" ...nah.

'geneannonator' ....maybe