I agree wholeheartedly! Currently, I use ancestry.com for my main family tree, but regularly download a GEDCOM file and import it into GeneWeb (locally hosted) for offline access. I've tried several other programs, both open source and proprietary, but GeneWeb is my favorite by far. It doesn't make the prettiest family tree website, but it's easy to use and its functionality is great.

Even though the primary developer, Daniel de Rauglaudre, isn't developing it further right now, it has more features than I use regularly, and it's highly customizable. I'm somewhat tempted to learn OCaml, just to be able to modify this software.

Exactly! If I want to make my information available only to some people and not to others, that's MY right. And if a "large social-networking site" helps me do that, good for them, and I am more likely to use them than I would a system that says: "you MUST make ALL information public, or not share it with anybody at all."

I agree with Berners-Lee on his other points, but not that one. And I don't know why he would lead with that one.

I can't tell if you're being pedantic or stupid. I'm leaning toward pedantic asshole at the moment, as you are hyper-technically correct but not actually answering the question which anybody over the age of 5 understood was being asked.

Yes, CDs are "digital" and they are being sold "online." That's not what UnknowingFool was asking, of course. He is correct that this is the first time the Beatles' catalog will be offered online for downloading, legally.

Very easy. You sign up to buy their insurance on-line. They grab your useragent string when you make the purchase, and they stick that in their database of information about you, nice and associated with your customer number.

Then they run a query on claims made. They filter the result to show only claims made by people who bought insurance on-line. Then they average the claims amount by browser type.

Or, they do a random query to pick 10,000 people who bought their insurance on-line last year. Then they count number of claims by browser type.

Insurance is a game of statistics. Yes, some browsers lie in their user agent string. Yes, sometimes people use other people's browsers. But MOST browsers are what they say they are, MOST people use their own machine pretty regularly, and if the insurance company is really doing this (which I take no position on), then you can bet they have statistics to back up their belief that there's a difference in insurance risk, ON AVERAGE, between users of different browsers.

The insurance company couldn't care less if the correlation holds true for every single instance. They know that it doesn't, in fact. But if it holds true often enough, then they can use that data to offer some people a better price on the insurance, because they're statistically less likely to file a claim.

Exactly. I rather tire of seeing the self-proclaimed geek elite decrying these users as "stupid" and "ignorant." No, they just have different value systems then the uber-security-conscious. Lots of people in rural areas regularly leave their doors unlocked. Just because a hacker COULD get access to their account at a Starbucks doesn't mean that the odds of it happening at any particular Starbucks at any given time is terribly high.

Was it idiocy for the folks at this Starbucks to stay online on Facebook even after being warned by this hacker? Clearly from the warning he provided, he wasn't intending to do harm to them. You're a nice rural family sitting around the coffee table, and a nice man sticks his head in your door and says "just wanted to let you know, your door is unlocked." Do you expect the folks to get up and run around and lock every door in the house?

God, I'm old. This was 5 months after I graduated high school.

I know it's /., but please at least RTFS (read the f'ing SUMMARY), which explains that this is a NEW Facebook feature, which works DIFFERENTLY from the OLD Facebook feature. You've just described the OLD Facebook group feature. This one works differently.

Well, no. I'm FB friends with my younger brothers. The youngest is in high school, and has the sense of humor one expects to find in bright, 16 year old boys... rather juvenile. I'm not going to de-friend my brother. I work at helping to teach him what's appropriate and what's inappropriate, but of course that's not always successful. If he were to add me to some group because of some childish whim of his, that doesn't mean he's not my friend... just that he's exercised some bad judgment.

Do you immediately ditch all your friends the instant they do something against your wishes? If so, I doubt you have many left. Most of us have at least a few friends who on occasion act a bit like an asshole, but are our friends nevertheless.

The REAL problem here is Facebook failing to let its users have control over what other users do to an aspect of our account. I can un-tag myself from pictures. I can turn off the ability of others to tag me in photos. Why can't I turn off the ability of other users to tag me in (i.e., make me a "member" of) groups? I should have complete control over all aspects of where my FB identity is linked in FB.

Fair question. How do you know they're suffering? Have YOU spoken to them?

The green color for asteroids does NOT indicate that the orbit has been "confirmed." It indicates that the orbit never crosses or approaches the Earth's orbit. And the green color for the planets as well as some of the asteroids hardly causes real confusion in watching, as the planets have their orbits permanently displayed with circles.

I think you need to watch the video again, in 1080p resolution. It DOES show plenty of Jupiter trojans, but they don't stand out as much because not as many of those individual objects have been formally observed and catalogued (a requirement to be displayed in this particular video).

If you were reviewing this for publications, I hope you would read (and understand) the caption provided with it a bit more thoroughly, and watch the highest resolution version, before making your evaluation.

Thanks for the tip, AsciiDoc looks really good, too.

I don't need all the features of DocBook, as my writing is internal documentation of software operation, api docs and various processes, and usually viewed onscreen. Not books or anything significantly complex.

How does reStructuredText stack up against DocBook? It's on my "look into later" list for technical documentation. My first impression of it was pretty good, especially combined with the Sphinx document generator.

Yes, but.... as the (by far) oldest of a family of 7 kids (12 years between me and my closest sibling, 29 years between me and the youngest one), I have some experience in this area myself. The thing with your insight about the anxiety of the new parent being useless is that there are also a fair number of studies which show that birth order DOES make a difference in the personality of children. I think there is plenty of room to wonder whether the lessening anxiety you describe (like the old joke... first kid, the pacifier falls on the floor, you sterilize it before giving it back; 2nd kid, you rinse it off then stick it back in his mouth; 3rd kid's lucky if you wipe it off before you give it back) does have a significant impact in how the child develops.