Actually fairly ironic considering the Republican mantra that private industry always does better than government....

He might be remembering the propaganda of Carl Sagan who was always talking about Nuclear Winter on his science programs. It was a pretty popular theme to talk about the coming ice age, even into the late eighties. Indirectly it lead to many nuclear test band treaties. In any case much hype about something that didn't come about, in some part because of the hype.

Maybe not that difficult, but painful nonetheless. Like transcribing from one key to another in music and still trying to play live. It can be done, but really not my cup of tea. To bad slashdot doesn't do unicode, or I would give some examples. In any case, hats off to you if you can debug APL without difficulty !

APL is write-only because you need a special keyboard to write APL. What a pain trying to correct a bug from a terminal without those characters! Perl at least sticks to ASCII characters, so you can debug and write perl from almost anywhere. Yet there is something about the information density of APL that is attractive - it is a piece of art, so like a sculptor you sort of chisel away at it. Perl is more of a painters language.

Fibonacci thinks so, and I think he is on to something.

Well that is the crux of it. They actually can't offload their responsibilities, no more than the Government can give birth to their children. But how to have parents act like parents? There is the real problem. If there was a solution I'm sure we would have heard about it by now.

With this I would agree with you entirely. My only point is that most newspapers are not doing what you describe - they are simply cut and paste from Reuters. The people you mentioned I haven't even heard of before to be honest, and the signal to noise ratio in modern news is so great that most people just turn it off. The fact is that real journalism does not imply a profit margin, and in fact usually works against it (no dangerous occupation is cheap). Since news is now a business, real journalism becomes rare and rare and it becomes rather entertainment instead as that is easier to sell. I would gladly be proven wrong, as information on what is going on is very important.

What you say would be true, but the fact is that newspapers don't really do any reporting now. Most news is actually just another way to advertise a new product or editorialize on some topic. Outlets like FoxNews are really just entertainment masquerading as news. The same could be said of all the major 24-hour news stations and weekly papers. I would gladly pay for a magazine, even online, if they actually did some reporting and not simply copy the Reuters feeds. Even look at the newspapers on any given day, they are reporting the exact same events, even with the same clichés.

Ok, maybe not a sign of the end of civilization, but certainly society is not doing well when a game company has to act like a parent. Shouldn't this stuff be the job of the parents, not the game company?

Most of the time they elected to some minor political function where they make a lot of noise but do less damage. Or they become managers.

Javascript profiling will identify your browser even with user agent switcher. You can find out what browser they are using even with a simple DOM tree check. Heck even CSS can be used to find out what Browser you are really using. The agent string is only for convenience.
Javascript example: http://www.corephp.com/blog/hardcore-javascript-browser-and-computer-fingerprinting/
Paper on different method: http://w2spconf.com/2011/papers/jspriv.pdf
Old CSS history method, now mitigated : http://ha.ckers.org/weird/CSS-history.cgi
tl;dr version: the internet is a public network, you are never really private in a public space.

So many volunteers and so many packages - just thanks everyone for another release !

By the way, for those who don't remember Cray computer and their engineers, I very much recommend this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9kobkqAicU Seymour Cray was a brilliant man and he attracted many brilliant engineers to work on his machines. The video gives some history from some actual workers at Cray and the first users of the Cray 1.

Thank you for the informative post. I only meant that St. Maurice was close, but as you say it was probably not touched by the actual tsunami it certainly felt the effects in so far as such an event has large social implications as well.

Swiss geography and geology is very interesting.

The name of the place is disputed precisely on etymological grounds. If you look at the other ancient names of cities in the valley of the Rhone: Acaune, Tarnade, Octans, Ocotdurum, Sedunum, the origin of the name actually is celtic or gaulois rather than Roman. *Taur, *Tur, or *Tor is actually a synonym for *Alp or *Penn which designates a peak or high place. *Dun or *Dunum means an elevated place next to water according to some. Thus the name means a peak or castle which is elevated near water. Others say that *Taur rather means passage or entrance (Thor or Thüre in German), or gorge, in Latin clusa. Some then say that it is equivalent to Porte du Scex or Fort de la Cluse.

In any case the area was quite strategic for the Romans, and the passage of St. Maurice was not very far away. It must have been a disaster of untold scale in a very critical region of the Roman empire - most of the traffic out of Italy would have passed through these regions (Martigny is not far away, once a fort city of the Emperor, the Theban legion was massacred not far from there). In a certain way this disaster probably spelled the end of an already weakened Roman civilization north of Italy by the fact that it destroyed most of the service towns along the way to the two major pathways into and out of Italy.

In any case it was a big deal. The Swiss are still talking about it.