TFA:

...so it's a little less direct, but no great loss.

I was actually thinking of large platform developers such as Zynga. The fee and labour cost is potentially significantly higher, which makes it only attractive to a smaller number of companies prepared to do the work of scraping information itself, but the opportunity for information transfer still exists, doesn't it?

I believe you when you say the company's trying to improve its image in this regard, but, well, when you have a history of putting things like "Facebook does not screen or approve Platform Developers and cannot control how such Platform Developers use any personal information" in your privacy policy, that sours users' perception of your brand. It shouldn't really come as a surprise that people assume such things continue.

Over a period of eight years, lawn darts had sent 6,100 people to the emergency room. 81% of those cases involved children 15 or younger, and half of those were 10 or younger. The majority of injuries were to the head, face, eyes or ears, and many had led to permanent injury or disability.

http://mentalfloss.com/article...

And one was killed.

Just use plastic ones!

I've gotten quite a few random spam messages from Chinese industry, despite being a software engineer at an academic institution with absolutely nothing to do with any product development or manufacturing whatsoever. I've gotten offers for piping, ceramics, and a wide variety of plastics. At this very moment, I am reading a spam message from Kevin, who informs me he represents "one of the best digital images retouching/editing professionals located in China."

They seem like very good deals, and I'm almost saddened that I can't take them up on what appear to be very genuine, heartfelt attempts at mass mailing in an age where most unsolicited e-mail is about "your urgent Cooperation in transferring the sum of $11.3million immediately to your private account" and unauthorized activity notifications from Bl1zzard Entertanmnt on my several hundred Batt1e.net accounts.

If you ever figure out what kind of plastic it was, let me know, and I'll check to see if I got the same e-mail!

Facebook's position on providing large amounts of user data to its business partners has been the subject of scrutiny a few times. It remains unclear exactly how much stuff developers like Zynga have been able to access. There was also a series of events a couple of years ago where privacy controls were updated and set to overly permissive defaults—which is either spectacularly bad management (given how much bad PR it generated each and every time) or a bribed enablement of data-scraping.

As for sending email to a Gmail user, that's what I meant by "passive" use of Google's services, although I should note that if your e-mail never gets read, it cannot make Google money, just like a site with Google ads on it that never gets visited. You're really only an incidental bystander in that situation.

Well, there's at least one sentence that's essentially different: "even when you die, Facebook can still make money off you."

Google doesn't (as far as I know) sell user information to advertisers. They exclusively use their own analytics; all an advertiser can do is submit their target demographics and keywords, and let Google do the math. While they're both huge storehouses of personal information, the big G is monolithic and generally non-porous—unless you're a malignant security agency, at least. If you're not using their services (at least passively), you're definitely not making them money.

This doesn't make them Totally Cool Groovy Guys You Should Trust With Anything, but it does make them naive ideologues surfing along the edge of a slippery slope rather than the outright thuggery of Facebook and other traditional advertisers—FB is more like a spam subscription; once you get signed up, you can be certain that your private information will propagate across the cosmos for eternity.

"let" statements -- really?
And the selling feature is list comprehension? Looks like they are trying to go into Haskells direction.
Testimonials say it's better than C# for data analysis?
Well, that train has left the station, with R, Python (and Julia) being available. This can not be won by languages, but with high-quality statistics / visualisation / machine learning libraries.

License is Apache v2 by the way.

Google up on articles on the Lazarus Doctor (he works on patients who have nominally died of hypothermia) and on the new experimental saline blood substitute for potentially fatal injuries (the paramedics swap the patient's blood for the solution, deep-freeze the patient and reverse the process at hospital, eliminating all stress and trauma to the body in transit).

The theoretical duration you can perform suspended animation in real life is unknown, but is estimated to be many months.

The practical duration is only a few hours, so far.

The cost of improving on the practical duration (since the former method is really only limited by how long you can artificially keep O2 levels in the brain over 45%) is far, far less than the cost of a mission to Mars. Ergo, that is the logical solution. Fund medical research into the two methods. Put 100% of NASA funding for a manned Mars mission into those two techniques for at least the next couple of years.

That should accelerate development of the necessary technologies. By doing it this way, you need absolutely bugger all new rocketry technology. The N months food needed for the journey by live astronauts can be replaced with radiation shielding of the same total mass.

This leaves you with radiation on Mars. But only if you land on the surface. What you want to do is land in a deep narrow gorge or chasm. There are some, that is where the methane was reported. That increases the thickness of atmosphere, which is good for radiation. It is unexplored, which is even better. There is a chance of a cave network, absolutely ideal for looking for water, life and/or a good location for settlers.

Oh, and doing things this way improves life on Earth, the very thing all the anti-space people demand NASA prove they can do.

Everyone's happy, apart from, well, everyone. NASA doing a better job of health than the NIH will upset people. A workable mission will upset futurologists because the future will be done rather than talked about, putting them out of a job. Eliminating the radiation problem will infuriate the buggers who say the mission can't be done. Eliminating any issues with transit time mean you can launch the mission the day after the medical stuff is sorted, leaving those talking about a 2030-2050 timeframe looking as stupid as they really are.

So, yeah, it'll get the job done, but expect those involved in a mission to be lynched by a mob of respectable plutocrats.

Look, I'm not disagreeing that the OS called Windows Phone 8 works well on a phone. The problem is it has no real relationship to the Windows operating system that users relate to. It doesn't use 'windows' and they nailed the phone/tablet UI onto desktop which is kind of the reverse of what they did with previous phone attempts and why I specifically mentioned the Compaq iPaq which really looked like a little Windows desktop with the start button and everything. Rather like the tablets running Windows that MS was pushing in the early 2000's. MS was always going to run afoul of having names that were so descriptive. You can see why they did it initially because when Windows was a GUI shell that ran on top of DOS it made sense to call it as such. But taking such a commodity word also makes them have to keep adding 'Microsoft' in front in order to maintain trademarks. As a trademark using such a common name is dumb. More to the point, tainting the brand as they keep doing by slapping it all over everything they do makes it difficult for users to understand why their Windows apps don't run on Windows Phone or their shiny new Windows tablet. Apple didn't make this senseless mistake and while the underpinnings of OS X and iOS are very similar in the same way that Windows Phone and Windows 8 are they realised that the GUI is what people see. MS tried to force their dominance in the desktop into the phone space by using the Windows name on something that didn't look like Windows, and then to just rub salt in the wound, drag that non-Windows UI across to desktop Windows and piss everybody off. I'm sure they could have paid someone with sufficient skill to come up with an attractive name for the tablet/phone OS they developed. Anything but Windows. Then again, even when they try it stinks up the room (Zune squirting?) but seriously hasn't the Windows brand suffered enough? Or should I say the Microsoft Windows brand since they can't have a trademark on such a common word, especially when it was already in use to describe the GUI windows before MS even developed Windows 1.0.

"And Macintoshes don't have waterproof coats. And it doesn't matter - it's the power of the brand that matters."

Apple is at least a brand people aspire to. MS' problem is seeing Windows on something isn't the easy route to market share it may have been in the past. They've diluted the brand, made it a shitty brand especially with what they've done with Windows 8. Brands only have positive power when people feel good about it but Windows as a brand is something people are shying away from. Even the Microsoft brand itself doesn't have the power it once had. You can't stay on top forever.

"You do realize you are comparing completely different operating systems with different core and UI and completely different hardware with over a decade between them and different input mechanisms don't you?"

Of course I do - that's why I was pointing out that there are no windows in windows phone 8. Earlier attempts at putting Windows such as CE/Mobile or whatever on a phone such as the Compaq iPaq tried to reproduce the Windows UI with the start menu, task bar and so on. It was awful. I think the tiles on Windows Phone 8 actually work pretty well but there are no windows. It doesn't look like Windows. On the other hand, it does in that they totally broke Windows itself to nail this UI onto their desktop platform which does have Windows. I can see Windows RT being called Windows because it does at least have the traditional desktop although in a limited form, but on a phone it has none of that.

The other point I made was that MS has this stupid habit of calling its applications by names that describe it (Word for uh, word processing, Windows for GUI based on windowing and many many more) but when the tool no longer does that thing such as Windows Phone which doesn't have Windows then the name makes no sense. They should have come up with a different name like they did for Xbox which while technically also the Windows kernel, isn't called Windows. Then again, they stuffed that up too by nailing the tiled UI onto the 360 as well. Crazy times.

"Windows on a phone works pretty well"

Windows on a phone is crap - did you ever try the Compaq iPaq? That basically had the same UI as desktop Windows and it was shocking. Windows on a phone is a disaster. The thing they call Windows Phone 8 doesn't have windows. The name is non-sense. Branding gone mad. MS has problems all over the shop - calling their software by simplistic idiot names, then using the branding all over a range of incompatible systems. Worse, was the attempt to pull it all together again by using the same UI on different form factors and buggered up their entire market. The tile interface does indeed work well on a phone or tablet. But tiles are not windows, so why the heck call it Windows? Maddening, and by association with the desktop OS that actually does have Windows and which people only bought to run software they liked but then to find that software doesn't run on this Windows but does on that Windows the confusion is legendary.

MS has confused their entire market. They've bullied their partners, abused their customers, crapped on the history of lessons learned from other platforms and produced multiple generations of OS that still feel deeply embedded in old world thinking while desperately trying to retain their controlling position. And thank goodness for that. All the missteps, crap products that alienated customers and the general dislike they garnered they have lost control. They have to play by the wider set of rules now or die. Anyone who ties themselves to being an all MS shop today is nuts, you have to be cross platform and support a wide range of tools and especially mobile. The poor slaves tied to a desk tapping away at Word documents are a dying breed and MS doesn't really know what to do about it. The desktop is not the location for real work and what they've tried to do to redefine real work to fit their vision hasn't worked. Real work moved away from them and we're not coming back.

Oh, don't worry, I double-checked Wikipedia too. :) If those were truly multicellular (and the evidence is inconclusive as to whether or not some of them were even cells) then it's very likely they developed it independently. Continuing to quote Wikipedia:

...and that's without discussing pluripotency, which is the ability to differentiate various kinds of cells. It's very unlikely that Metazoa separated from Protozoa more than a billion years ago.

(Better luck next round, hero.)

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