I'm going to nitpick here and point out that the Ottomans were able to attack Vienna in 1683. A battle they lost and marked the end of the Ottoman Empire's ability to threaten a major European power, but still 200 years after the 1400's.

The Japanese love to come up with abbreviation with double meanings.

Even more so if you can work some English into it.

So, as newcastlejon mentions above, DoCoMo was picked because it was an abbreviation of an English phrase *and* when pronounced became the Japanese word for 'everywhere.'

What's wrong with being able to recognize both sides of the man?

I can recognize Gates as a person who used nasty business tactics and questionable technical decisions.

I can also recognize him as the man who really did play a big part in putting 'a computer on every desktop.'

And I can recognize him as the world's greatest philanthropist who has done more to help the health of the poorest people in the world than anyone else in history.

One point does not erase the others. Why can't we recognize him for his full character?

Trying to put a positive spin on things, if I were to meet Bill Gates as I walked down the street tomorrow (a highly unlikely scenario to say the least) I would be far more likely to praise his recent philanthropic work then to damn him for how he ran Microsoft. The man does deserve some congratulations for his recent work. But I might also mutter under my breath a little about the whole MS thing as I walked away.

Just to nitpick, but most historians of ancient Egypt now believe that the pyramids were built by farmers paying their taxes in the form of a few weeks of labour every year. There is plenty of archeological evidence that they were in fact very well treated during that time. Including evidence of very advanced (for the time) medical care.

The Wright brothers 'fought' a major 'patent war' over the issue of 'who invented the airplane.'

There was a long-running lawsuit over who owned the rights to the patent on the telephone.

Tesla and Edison fought a long battle against each other for AC vs. DC current based electrical generation. Part of this was fought in courts over patents.

Patents have been around for a few hundred years now. (The first patents were granted in Italy during the renaissance.) And they have been bitter contested in courts for the past 200 years. This is not a new issue we are facing.

I hate to nitpick ... wait, no I don't. I love to nitpick. But it's good social graces to claim that you don't ...

The BNA Act didn't 'establish Canadian independence'. It united a few British colonies in North America into one 'super colony'. The new Canadian confederation remained a British colony.

Canada achieved independence not in any one act or by any single action. It slowly evolved over time. (Some would argue that since we still retain the Queen as our head of state that we're still not completely independent. I'm not sure I agree with that, but it's a point worth considering.)

Some steps along that road to independence:

Starting in 1848 the Canadian colonies were granted 'responsible government', meaning that they elected their own local legislative assemblies that could propose and vote on bills but those bills only became law once signed by the governor general which was still appointed by the Queen. (This was in response to the failed rebellions of 1836.)

In 1867 the BNA Act unified the two Canadas and New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. The new confederation meant there were now local provincial governments and a single federal government. Britain delegated responsibility for almost all local issues to these governments. But foreign affairs remained in the hands of Britain.

Over time Canada was given some ability to manage its own affairs with America. But only as long as that didn't go counter to general British policy. And slowly other areas of foreign policy for Canada also transfered to the Canadian federal government. By 1918 Canada has 'independent enough' to be given its own seat at the Paris conference that ended WWI.

In 1931 the Statue of Westminister finally formally transfered all foreign policy (and various other areas that had previously be reserved in Britain) powers for the 'developed colonies'/dominions from Britain to their respective local governments. So this is what gave Canada (and Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Ireland, and Newfoundland (which later joined Canada)) [almost] full control over it's own fate. This statute is the one most commonly pointed to as 'establishing Canadian independence' if you must point at just one thing.

In 1982 the Canadian constitution was finally 'brought home'. This required an act of the British parliament but after this point Canada was free to modify its own constitution without having to go to Britain and ask for approval. (This is because there was no amending formula prior to 1982.) This is also sometimes pointed to as the point which 'established Canadian Independence'.

The point is to unify the TV/DVD/blu-ray firmware ecosystem.

Google doesn't want to sell you a box. Although GoogleTV is available to Logitech and Roku and others to make boxes the real long term goal is to get GoogleTV to run *on the TVs themselves*. (And on DVD and blu-ray players.)

Right now each tv manufacturer writes its own firmware. My parents recently got an LG tv & home theater system which runs it's own special LG firmware which has it's own special UI and connects to it's own special LG app store. If you got a Samsung system it would have it's own Samsung firmware with a slightly different UI and a totally different app store. Similarly with Panasonic and Sony (Sony already sells a GoogleTV tv but most of their tvs run special Sony firmware) and so on. Even worse if you have a TV from one manufacturer and a blu-ray player from another. Then you have two different types of firmware with two different ui's and two different app stores.

With the market divided like that people have to learn different ways to control different tvs. Sure, technical people can switch between it fine, but it does confuse some such as my elderly parents. A unified system would be better. But even more relevantly with 50 different app stores an app developer needs to write 50 different versions of their tv app to get on all tvs. Or more likely they'll just give up and go develop cellphone apps for iOS or Android instead.

And speaking of cellphones, this is roughly where the cellphone market was 5 or so years ago. Before Android (and now WP7) offered a third-party alternative that almost all manufacturers could [eventually] agree upon using. This made life easier for end users and for app developers and eventually even the hardware manufacturers themselves. Google, as an 'app developer' wants to do the same thing to the tv market. Plus extra bonuses for them if they get a Google OS of some sort adopted as that standard because then searches go to Google, so Google gets to push out more ads. But even without that latter bonus just having a unified platform to target for development really benefits Google - and everyone else at the same time as well.

This is not what you think it does. In this context 'like' is being used as a 'filler'. The 'filler like' itself has no meaning, but in a place holder for a pause. Similar to other 'words' such as 'uh' or 'hmm' or 'er'. It does not mean necessarily 'nearly' or 'almost' - although it could mean that too, it depends on context.

At least in universities, yes.

I've read a lot on the internet (especially when a science kook is claiming some big discovery) about people being afraid to share ideas or work with others because 'they'll steal it!'

But the reality is that professors almost always give primary credit to their assistants and students - even undergrads - (in the form of listing them first in the authors list of a paper submission). Now, of course there are the odd exceptions to this - unscrupulous researchers who take primary credit for everything they touch. But they are very much the exception, not the rule. And you can avoid these type of people simply by first previewing their own publication history. Typically one gets primary or secondary author status early in their careers and slide down the authors list as time goes on.

There is often good reason for this. A tenured professor may have half a dozen or more grad students at any one time. Plus a post-doc or two, and maybe a couple of undergrads serious about doing research too. The professor can't possibly be heavily involved in all of the projects under their supervision. Instead they are there to provide initial ideas, high level guidance (their experience can be especially valuable - they know the field better than you do and so can point you at previous research, other people that can help, important variables to consider, etc.), and name recognition which helps students' work to stand out more. Professors also provide access to resources and shield assistants and students from university bureaucracy (getting ethics clearances and such). Plus professors are drafted into that very bureaucracy to help run their department or school government or whatever. And constantly chasing grant money. Oh, and some of them also teach. ::P

Since they're so busy students often *are* the primary workforce on their own research projects.

In this case I wouldn't be surprised if the core of the idea ('hey, maybe we could use a nano-particle to ...') came from the supervisor but that the 17 year old student actually did do a lot of work (with some sage advice from others) to actually develop that idea into it's current forms.

You don't want to burn classified stuff because the government can read what was on the paper from the smoke patterns rising from the incinerator. . (Yes, the above was a joke. And not an original one either. I heard it a few years ago when an ex-government spook was being interviewed on the radio and he was talking about how paranoid he'd become about destroying personal information. Referring to how much he learned over his career about the tools available to recover stuff (from paper, or from harddrives, or whatever else. I'm sure he didn't actually believe the smoke thing either ...)

I could be wrong, but the impression I got from the video was that the artist wasn't trying to produce a [realistic] model of traffic flow (future, present, or past) at all. I think people get confused when he makes the comment about the cars' going 230 miles per hour and how that gives him 'hope for the future.' I don't think that's equivalent to saying 'this is (my idea of) the traffic flow of the future.'

A couple of quotes from the artist in the video I think show otherwise:

So he's making a 'model' of a car-centric city on the idea that soon that will be an anachronism.

In other words this is art for art's sake. Something I personally am often rather ambivilant about but I still think this is cool for the sake of the amount of time and effort put into this. It's a giant working mechanism. If he called himself a 'geek' instead of an 'artist' would the comments here have been less hostile?

And who doesn't remember playing with Hot Wheels and the like as a kid. Wouldn't you have loved to have a setup like this back then?

No, they're moving their high-end phones to running MeeGo.

MeeGo is the product of the merger of Maemo (Nokia in-house developed Debian (and thus linux) based OS) and Moblin (Intel in-house developed OS (based on Fedora?)). Unlike Android MeeGo won't use just the linux kernel but rather the entire standard linux tool-chain and user-space right up to and including X.

Everyone that's used Maemo agrees it has a lot of potential but requires a lot more 'polish' on Nokia's part before it'll really be able to compete with Android, et. al. Maybe co-operating with Intel will help them there.

Although on the other hand a lot of 'smartphone' buzz is around app stores, and MeeGo is pretty much destined to be a 3rd-place runner (after Apple's iPhoneOS and Google's Android) in that space. (Although since Android is a modified JVM on top of linux I wonder if there's any reason why someone couldn't just port the Android JVM to run ontop of MeeGo ...)