There was a time when project names were chosen to be cute acronyms. I work with digital signal processing where there are algorithms named MUSIC, for "MUltiple SIgnal Classification", and ESPRIT, for "Estimation of Signal Parameters via Rotational Invariance Techniques".

That hasn't really changed, how about: Antarctic Muon And Neutrino Detector Array - AMANDA?

That's what IceCube was formely known as, or rather, the IceCube array is an extension of the original AMANDA detector array.

"Hurry up Fnuggi! I can feel you're about to thaw!"

At the bottom: "Icicle time..!"

The AP is also reporting that China is creating a Confucius Peace Prize to be given out the day before the Nobel Prize.

Well, they're in good company:
"The German National Prize for Art and Science (German: Deutscher Nationalpreis für Kunst und Wissenschaft) was an award created by Adolf Hitler in 1937 as a replacement for the Nobel Prize (he had forbidden Germans to accept the latter award in 1936 after an anti-Nazi German writer, Carl von Ossietzky, was awarded the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize)."

And of course the Soviets also banned (a bit on-and-off though) their citizens from recieving the Nobel, and Stalin created the Stalin Prize in his own honor.

Actually there appears to be no less than three follow-up commentaries to that article in the same issue.

Apart from the one you mentioned there's R Bender, "Determination of the area under a curve." and T M Wolever, "Comments on Tai's mathematic model.".
In my experience, an article has to be pretty damn bad to get any kind of commentary against it, but three? That basically means it's just as crazy as we think it is.

And sure, numerical integration is a rich field, but real advances in numerical integration aren't published in "Diabetes Care".
Doesn't have to be a math journal, physics or comp sci could be just as plausible, but a medical journal? Not really.

"no support for bitmap fonts" should of course have read "no support for vector fonts".

Wayland has no drawing api, and it's scope is extremely limited compared to x, x will still be needed on top of it for the forseeable future.

X has no drawing API!
Do you even know what Xlib provides in the way of drawing? 1980's-style graphics primitives, pixel-based, non-anti-aliased polylines, circles and arcs.
Nobody is seriously using X for drawing anything anymore. You say in another post that "the fundamentals of drawing haven't changed" - Yes, they have.
X was designed entirely around raster graphics. It had no support for bitmap fonts, and no support for device-independent graphics. That hasn't been the right way to do things since at least the early 90's, and with PostScript debuting in 1983, it was arguably an obsolete device model even when X was created. Nobody uses X for "drawing", all they use it for is pushing pixels out to the screen.

Today, either you're doing explicitly raster graphics (read: 3D stuff, which is device-dependent), or you should be doing device-independent rendering. Bitmap fonts are the exception, not the rule. It's insane to expect people to write separate drawing routines for printing, or generating a PDF or whatever. (And X of course never had any kind of real printing support to begin with)
If you think we need X for drawing, then you simply have no clue.

The problem is that they're "among, not "are". More people in the US/UK get what those countries reserve for the few and well connected. In the US, we don't need Potemkin Villages, but those countries sure do.

WTF? Are you seriously lumping together North and South Korea in terms of living standards?
Did I miss something? When did South Korea cease to be a first-world democracy?
You don't need to be 'well-connected' to buy something in South Korea. You go to the store, and you buy it. It's a friggin market-economy.

Making 1/3 of a US wage does not mean you're a developing nation. People in Portugal make 1/3 of the average US salary,
if you make a raw dollar comparsion, and they aren't starving. They have homes, cars, computers, phones, etc. Same in South Korea.
Maybe not two cars, and maybe not the latest computer, and maybe a smaller home, etc. But they're by no means poor.

By all means, speak up on behalf of the North Koreans, who have no say in their government or situation, but talking that way about South Korea is just condescending.
They're one of the richest nations in the world, and the second-richest nation in Asia.

Is it "swastica-waving", though, or are they "just" racist?

Nobody who isn't retarded would wave a swastika and still believe they had a shot at getting elected. But you be the judge:
But they were born out of the first wave of neo-Nazism in Sweden in the 1980's. Their original program consisted of (among other things):
A ban on all immigration except for people from 'ethnically related nations'
Government-sponsored repatriation of people of non-Nordic ethnicity.
Banning all international adoptions, and abortion, as well as increased government support, tax breaks and such for families of the 'right' ethnicity.

Obviously they would never get elected on that program, so in the past 20 years they've successively toned it down to try to gain an air of respectability. But it's the same party and the same people, many of whom once were unabashed swastika-wearers. (And like all good fascists, they're really into 'law and order', which means cracking down on 'immigrant crime', yet have a very disproportionate number of criminally-convicted members.

I wrote that the Commission withdrew the proposed directive. Seems I misremembered. What happened was that they changed the directive to a 'compromise' version that basically threw out all the amendment, and it ended up getting rejected.
Point still stands anyway, the Council dumped all over parliament on the SW patent thing, and I've no reason to believe they'll do differently now.

Officially, negotiations are ongoing. In reality, the majority of those that would vote on it have pledged to vote no, if true, ACTA will never go though and become law. So the issue is 'all but dropped' in that the negotiations are still open, but no one on either side expects them to go anywhere.

Well, they haven't pledged to vote 'no' just made a vague list of demands and expressed quite a lot of reservations.

Sadly, I don't think it means that much. The EU Parliaments has expressed skepticism of ACTA earlier, without any reaction. It would not be the first time the Commission tried to goad the Parliament into accepting draconian IP laws, if you remember their attempt at legalizing software patents. They withdrew the proposed directive after the Parliament amended it to something most of the anti-SW-patent crowd could live with (In other words: A reasonable deal). Total disrespect for the directly-elected representatives.

And then he suddenly decides to become a rapist

That's a totally bogus argument. Nobody decides to become a rapist, or murderer, etc. Not in the sense of having made some rational, well-thought out decision. If that were the case, there would hardly be any murders or rapes to begin with. But if you want to play that game, you can equally well make the opposite argument: Since he was in the media recently over the leaks, he saw his chance to rape someone and get away with it, because people like you would surely believe he must be innocent. (And no, I don't believe that, because I'm not a moron who thinks rapists are acting rationally)

If he's guilty, then the timing means nothing. In fact, the better timing would be before the documents had been leaked. Afterwards, what is the point of discrediting him?
The leaks do not depend on his crediblity, he's not the source. (which is the big hole in this conspiracy theory) Everyone knows smearing him won't stop Wikileaks, including the CIA. So what would the point even be? They can apparently manipulate foreign prosecutors and citizens, but are also too dumb to realize that it wouldn't achieve their goal?
No it's not a coincidence, in the sense that he was in the media, and was being asked around to give talks and whatnot and meet with possible allies (i.e. the Pirate Party in Sweden) and during that, he met these women. One of whom is (allegedly) a member of the Swedish Social Democratic party. So what's her motive then? We're talking about the party of Olof Palme, here, the party who spent most of the last 50 years being a giant pain in the USA's ass over foreign policy. Hell, when Assange was born in 1971, the US had broken off diplomatic relations with Sweden over their harsh criticism of the Vietnam War.

Out of all the countries he's going around visiting, you think Sweden is the one most likely to collaborate with the CIA? And their 'socialist' party, at that? This is typical conspiracy theory thinking. You have zero evidence that the CIA or whoever did this. All you have is a coincidence. And coincidences do happen. Just because a set of events may or may not benefit someone, doesn't mean the were behind it. Shit happens.

To take an example from Norway, we have 29 letters including æøå. The last looks like a+circle but it's a separate letter, while say à is considered simply a variant of a.

It's a bit arguable whether 'w' is a unique letter in the Scandinavian alphabets though; it's essentially a fancy variant of 'v', seldom used in actual words. (And they occupy the same place in alphabetical ordering)

Random trivia: In Finnish "Å" is called a "Swedish O".

Below Å.

Finland hasn't been a part of Sweden since 1809.

Language evolves.. but it still evolves along the same lines and 'rules' as before.
For instance, we now have "to google" in English, but if you turn that into a French verb, it needs a French verb ending, thus "googler".
In German you'd need an -n but "googlen" doesn't work, but by transposing the letters you can use the -eln verb ending and so you have "googeln".
In Swedish, verbs need an -a ending, requiring the 'e' be dropped, so "googla".