No, this is not a coincidence, it means that fennel is sufficiently rare in english speaking countries, that at least a certain number of people will try to figure out, what vegetable is it, exactly as the author did. So his situation was not unique. I have encountered many situations where many people where asking the same questions as I did and looking for it in the web.

More precisely it's a Semantic network : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_network

The problems is that all those patents are "functional patents", that means that they patent a function not a mean or a method to do it; those are in fact just ideas. As long as the patent office continue to accept such kind of patents without asking for the mean or the algorithm to do it, very obvious and broard patents will continue to split thorough the system. Some people are pushing to halt this but as long as the situation continues this way the software industry is in big trouble.

The Wintel duopoly is completly finished, the future is a clear highway towards HTML 5, Tablets and smartphones, it's just a matter of time, everything will move to the web and the cloud.

I am glad there are still posts like that on Slashdot, that's why I have been lurking here for so long :). I believe that epistemology : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology is the most important field in philosophy (or science) and needs to be more activly tought in colleges and universities.

Alternative ARE being developed and very fast, have you heard of Alternative DNS : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenNIC wich completly bypass ICANN ? or Freenet : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet a a decentralized, censorship-resistant distributed data store, you can not take down. Other people are also developing distributed DNS using Distributed hash table : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_table, which is already used by emule, and trackerless bittorent clients, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YaCy is a distributed p2p search engine, just to name a few alternatives and there many many other. If censorship continue to develop, these alternatives will probably soar.

The Rallyfighter : http://www.rallyfighter.com/ has already been in production

Riversimple Urban Car : http://www.40fires.org/ is an electric fuel cell based open hardware car

Not quite true, manufacturing is becoming more commonplace nowdays especially for commodity and standard products, thanks to globalisation, heck you can even buy turnkeys factories to build anything nowdays and many african countries are industrializing very quickly now : Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Nigeria, Ghana, Mauricius and many others are on their way, globalization is reaching Africa too, what has happened in China and in many industrialised countries can and will happen in Africa too, there is no reason this can't happen too.

Now I understand why I always had this strange feeling or air beeing heated just "seconds" before earthquakes (relatively common here in Morocco) until today I was convinced it was a psychological effect, well maybe it is ! as this probably needs more scientific analysis !

Have a look at this, it gives another perspective on Content farms : http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2010/07/dont-blame-the-content-farms207.html

Here in France the mathematics are used only for selection, the entrance exams to top schools have a lot of maths, the best minds are suposed to excel in mathematics, but the alumini end up doing management anyway.

We dont't really care, the US are already an all Microsoft land !

I believe the reason is that OpenOffice was already trademarked by someone else, but Indeed OpenOffice.org or OOo as some call it is really stupid namee !

It's called Domain Specific Language (DSL), and it's a a growing trend, you have for instance many tools on Eclipse to write your own DSL

have you heard of solipsism ? (See Wikipedia), there is no evidence to proof in a "rational" way that I am not the only person living in the universe, as I can only be aware of the outside world through my "sens" : sight, hearing, etc. Who can be misleading (see the "Evil daemon" hypothesis of Descartes in WP). Surprisingly this problem is related to the problems of decidability and computability and also the idea we have of "god ": someone who is omniscient, omnipotent, thus it's very easy to imagine a superior force which contradicts this description using Cantor's diagonal argument.