Yeah, it's pretty horrible. The only way to write (presentation) MathML is to generate it automatically from a sane input format, either a GUI or something like LaTeX.

We'd still deal with the inconvenience if it were universally supported by browsers -- but 15 years after MathML was conceived, it still isn't.

We've been waiting for math rendering support in HTML for slightly over 15 years (MathML came out in 1998, and there was HTML 3 math before that).

We've given up. Both the scientific and the higher education communities are using PDF almost exclusively, and our respective userbases (fellow scientists and students) have accepted PDF as the format of choice. At the same time, PDF support in browsers and on tablets has become good enough to make that a reasonable proposition.

But yeah, let's write blog postings about why MathML is not dead, it only smells funny.

This is an individual submission, not an IETF working group draft, and does not appear to either be proposed for an IETF wg draft or to be in the RFC Editor's queue. In short, it has nothing to do with the IETF.

Becker is actually a laureate of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, which is not the Nobel Prize.

While registering to the conference, have attendees fill in a form with the two questions "Are you a government employee, and if so in what quality" and "Are you a journalist, and if so, in what newspaper(s) do you publish?" The people that you want to attend will be happy to have a name tag saying "Government employee, University of so and so". The people who feel the need to hide their affiliation are probably the ones you want to be escorted by security.

Wikipedia has been known to be wrong before, but it appears to confirm what I've always been told:

The Government Ministers are all members of Parliament, and are accountable to it.
[...]
For most senior Ministers this is usually the elected House of Commons rather than the House of Lords. There have been some recent exceptions to this [...]

I'd love to hear otherwise from a reliable source.

So you say that only professional politicians should be able to hold government positions?

For anyone who's lost -- the United Kingdom has this strange political system where you need to be a member of the legislative branch in order to serve on the national executive: only members of parliament can be ministers of Her Majesty's government. This would appear to imply that it is impossible to appoint a specialist as minister, since only professional politicians have a chance to be elected to parliament; in practice, appointment to the Lords is used as a workaround.

SMBC

Has anyone checked how correctly OpenSMTPd implements the SMTP protocol? The OpenBSD project has an unfortunate history of caring more about simplicity of implementation than correctness (see also this discussion).

What is there to pay for?

• the authors are academics that are being paid from a grant or by their employer -- they're not being paid by the journal;
• the authors typeset their paper themselves, using TeX or a word processor;
• the reviewers are fellow academics, who are not paid by the journal (they're usually anonymous, so they don't even receive kudos for their work);
• discussion happens mostly over e-mail, which is already paid for.

So what remains is the salary of the editor and some administrative overhead, which should not be too onerous for even a minor institution.

By European standards, France is a large country (roughly 1000km across), with some rather sparsely populated areas (the Northern Alps and the Massif Central). France also has a strong tradition of massive, nation-wide infrastructure projects (we've had a comprehensive high-speed train network since the 1980s), so a nation-wide broadband infrastructure is a natural thing to do.

That thing is continent-sized, not country-sized.

You are aware that the CIA put the Iranian dictator into power in 1953, toppling Iran's democratically-elected government in the process? The 1979 "Islamic Revolution" merely replaced a dictatorship controlled by the USA with one that wasn't.

Could you please explain?

According to the network administrators I've spoken to (admittedly a biased sample), almost all the malware traffic they're seeing is over IPv4. They say they'll deal with IPv6 malware when it appears.

The closest thing to a NAT specification is RFC 2663, an informational RFC that was published a good four years after NAT got deployed. It explicitly speaks about deep packet inspection:

One of the most popular internet applications "FTP" would not work with the definition of NAT as described. The following sub-section is devoted to describing how FTP is supported on NAT devices. FTP ALG is an integral part of most NAT implementations. Some vendors may choose to include additional ALGs to custom support other applications on the NAT device.

(ALG means "Application Layer Gateway".)