I recall an article about a aquarium that had a big tank of cuttlefish installed. Then every night one cuttlefish would disappear and no-one could figure out who'd come and steal cuttllefish, so they stuck some night-vision camera in and waited.

An octopus in a tank across the walkway would pop out the top of its tank, shimmy across the floor, up the side of the cuttlefish tank, grab one, eat it and then retreat back to its tank. I figure anything that figure out that its human keepers had put a fresh source of food for it across the hall is intelligent enough to not be eaten. Incidentally octopi are intelligent enough to take the trapped crabs and lobster from traps.

but hey, human eat fucking everything, destroying the environment it lives in as we all know nothing is more important than our bellies, and the profits made from selling it for other people's bellies.

Generally speaking, us in the west eat herbivores only. We don't tend to eat horses (knowingly, you never know what is in that cheap burger you bought) simply because they were more important as assets than food, and we seem to still have that cultural aversion to them.

rabbits are cute as anything, and yet they are a very popular source of meat for many rural peoples (urban ones, tend to eat those cheap burgers already mentioned). Cuteness doesn't factor into it, mainly because the meat in your supermarket is as divorced from the source as the marketing people can make it.

If you think eating thing that aren't cute, then I have some blobfish that you'll tuck into without problem.

so just another chicken burger then?

with extra fatty sauce, of course.

Not all of them, Google only uses its patents when someone sue it.

Microsoft not only sues anyone they see as a competitor, but also is part of several patent-collective companies that sue left, right and centre.

In any case, it seems the company's "IP strategy" is to register as many patents as possible, regardless of validity or ingenuity involved in creating the concepts behind them, and then sue away. Fortunately since the Supreme Court ruled on Alice, these are being taken apart when they get to court.

Hopefully, Samsung and Microsoft will see each other in court and half the patents involved will be struck down as being fucking pointless.

and yes the ABI is a serious thing. I asked Bjarne about it in the recent slashdot Q&A, and he basically said "meh, its not important and the vendors wouldn't like it, next question".

An ABI wouldn't be difficult to implement - all the vendors could add a compatibility switch to emit the bespoke mangling if they liked. But the rest of us (who compile the entire software suite every time anyway, or use C bindings because of C++ mangling incompatibilities between different versions of a vendor's compiler) would love it. I think one of the reasons C# and co do so well is because they have the ability to generate a binary and then it just works in other people's programs.

An ABI might mean more binary objects being released for Linux, so you wouldn't get the source, but that's more an idealogical issue than technical.

I'm not so sure of that, the NT kernel is C. Look at the low-level APIs used in win32, these are all C based, with handles and whatnot.

Microsoft is perfectly happy to put a C++ wrapper around a lot of things, but I think the Windows kernel team are basically C coders.(which is not a bad thing).

One interesting example is Windows Web Services - a kernel equivalent of the shitty .NET WCF. Its completely compatible, but is much, much, much faster. The APIs for that are C, not C++ as you'd probably expect.

I don't really understand why Britain is still in the EU

The people hate the EU but the business leaders and political elite love it. That's why we're still in it.

No, I don't understand why either, nobody has bothered to tell me. Maybe the aliens who are threatening to destroy the world have demanded a single planetary government and our leaders are trying to slowly bring such a thing about... but that's all I can come up with for the existence of the EU at all.

no, I was just having a go at the poster who appeared to see the world in very divisive and ignorant ways.

Racism isn't just white oppressing blacks, its anyone with a stupid prejudiced view against others not of their preferred racial type. I think its important to remember that, to stop the "politically correct" from hijacking the problem for their own ends (again).

British impewrialism shook off slavery quite quickly, you'rte thinking of the Americans, and the Africans who used to do akll that nasty capturing and selling the slaves of rival tribes (or is that concept that the poor Africans weren't such victims as bleeding heart liberals want you to think not politically correct enough for you?)

Anyay, the old imperial currecy worked just fine for all old people who were used to it, and it had the big advantage of being more divisible than just 2 and 5.

Personally, I'm sure that making everything base 10 simplifies it so much our brains have withered. The mental effort required to understand complex numbering systems meant we had to be better than we are today. I know guys in the 50s who made nuclear bomb designs with little more than a slide rule, and yet today we need supercomputers to do all our thinking for us.

As for me... I can;t find my way anywhere anymore, not since I bought a satnav, yet once I could go anywhere with a big paper map, some notes and my memory!

They tried to call it Windows One, but someone noticed they'd already released that version, so it got changed to "Windows One Nothing", or Windows 10 as written in the short form.

Take away the start menu, and then be surprised that start menu usage dropped.

This from the guys who look at Office usage data and figured out that Paste was used twice as often as Cut and Copy, and therefore was the most important function, deserving of a huge icon on the ribbon while cut and copy were relegated to tiny icons because they were not used as much.

Its possible they could be, but certainly they'll be carrier based - a big ship that sits very far away and sends smaller craft out, but even them I figure the smaller craft will be small command and control ships that help guide semi (or fully) autonomous munitions at targets. Weapons are very simple in space, a lump of metal can be devastating when given enough velocity, explosives not needed. The problem comes from targetting and hitting it, but if you can detect the enemy, you can get a distant ship to send off a missile with as much propulsion as you can manage and by the time the target notices they've been noticed, that missile coming in with huge velocity rips straight through them. Not so much "incoming, take cover" but "inco...."

Even "close in" is a matter of relativity - close battles in space are still likely to be hundreds of km apart.

Or consider the battle in Larry Niven's protector. 1 space craft chasing another, pursued craft drops bomb, 3 days later they detect a flash :-)

All websites use Javascript now, having an option to turn it off is meaningless.

What you need is either a fine-grained javascript blocker (NoScript addon for Firefox) or a web browser that's more suited for you (Lynx).

Well, you could read the article, or you could read the summary.

So I guess it'd be a different style 'private mode' where you open a new 'secure' or 'anonymous' window and surf using that, and whilst its open, it serves as a Tor node.

Still, we don;t know if it is Firefox or not, so it could be anything. This is a very speculative article.

real offices.... 1 real office block with 100,000 post office boxes and a lawyer. that's how they roll in the Cayman Isles at least, I figured Luxembourg did the same.

Either way, are you getting "Google Luxembourg" confused with Google? A bit like Google UK that is staffed by salesmen... oh no, wait, they don't actually have any salesmen, oh no, because all sales are made by a member of staff from Google Ireland, I forgot. Or at least, that's what they told the taxman.

All countries have a subsidiary office for the company, if only to be a front to pass the "IP licencing money" back to the real HQ in the Bahamas (via the other subsidiaries in Holland and Ireland of course)