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.

Ding! Correct answer. Akami is a great example of where this is necessary. I could easily imagine a user suing Dropbox when they find out that their stuff was handed over to a third party (possibly even modified into another format in the process). In reality, of course, this might be done for the simple reason of getting it back to the same user that put it in Dropbox faster, but without these protections, there's no way for Dropbox to defend such an action.

Also, keep in mind that the TOS is broad so that when you want to use some additional feature to publish stuff you have in Dropbox later on, you don't have to sign up for a whole new service in order to do that.

It doesn't matter. Such an action would immediately result in at least half of their users abandoning the service. I know I would.

I think the Slashdot crowd is trying awfully hard to imagine scenarios where this TOS (which is the same as many other Web-based storage TOSes) will lead to total anarchy. Problem is, it's really fairly standard.

It's clear they have additional plans as well. My guess is that they're going to layer lots of content management and presentation services on top of Dropbox. For example, if you store lots of text on Dropbox, then you might want a way to catalog and organize it, and transform some of it into books for self-publishing while pushing other chunks out to the Web as a blog. They could easily offer this service with their "cloud hard drive" as the backing store. Amazon already gives you several ways to use their storage for various types of publication including streaming music, cloud server storage, etc.

I'd be shocked if Dropbox's business plan is "become the hard drive utility for the cloud," as that's a fairly limiting proposition.

That seems a foolish overreaction. Yes, this TOS is fairly broad, but it releases them to implement many new services down the line that require automatic transcoding, format conversions, creation of Web sites, etc.

The reality is that Dropbox has no interest in alienating their customers by selling off their stuff. However, consider one simple case: you have your music collection on Dropbox. They decide to offer a "share my photos" feature. You select that feature and they connect your photos to some N friends of yours who also use Dropbox via a browser-based client. They don't have to walk you through a pile of agreements just to sign up for that additional service, allowing them to do format conversion, store the resulting images on a separate server for their image service, or assign "performance rights." You've already done this, so they can just provide you with a service.

I wouldn't bother dropping Dropbox as a service just because you think their TOS is broad. You're not likely to come across a cloud storage service without a broad TOS. Instead, I would base my choice of cloud storage provider on how their treat their customers.

Not quite, I'll grant, but that's because popularity in music, like most aspects of human culture, is the result of many inputs and functions applied to them. However, it's true that mating-related lyrics and music that evokes sexual behavior both play extremely well, and together are responsible for a majority of our successful pop music.

Sure, of course. Except... well, Bohemian Rhapsody which is probably the best, but certainly not only counter-example. In fact, Bohemian Rhapsody is probably about as far as you can go from mainstream rock and still have a legitimate claim at being rock. So, no, rock isn't formulaic. The rock industry is heavily reliant on formulaic hits, but it's important to remember that artists occasionally do produce art ;-)

Just to remind people, those two examples (along with the old coffee maker example) are taken insanely out of context, and neither the hammer nor the toilet seat were as expensive as you're quoting.

If I recall correctly, the hammer was a copper alloy that was required in a condition where the small sparks that could be thrown by a standard iron hammer could have been catastrophic, but where a rubber mallet would not have been sufficiently hard. The toilet seat was for a destroyer, where combat conditions and weather could have resulted in the toilet water (and or results of active use) being sloshed all over the ship, so the seat cover had to lock down, water-tight. The coffee maker was for long-range bombers, and one of the requirements was that it needed to not spill any coffee at various negative G-forces.

This is all off the top of my head, but I recall looking over the specs long ago and thinking, "wow, that's actually a pretty economical solution."

The military buys a lot of generic stuff, but from time to time, they have requirements which make prices kind of crazy. I think it's generally worth it to outfit the military well, though obviously, it's a good thing to look for waste... just apply the right contexts.

I think you're confused.

This is a fairly typical fear reaction. Politicians and government bodies feel that they need to be seen to be acting in order to avoid a future event, resulting in questions about their inaction. It's not some kind of conspiracy. It's the same kind of fear response that results in laws that say that if you've been arrested for having sex in public, you have to register yourself as a threat to your neighbors' children.

There are a lot of problems with this, but they're surmountable with care. It's true that we definitely need to gather lots of raw data about the impact of these devices.