That's why 0 was skipped and they went straight from 1BC to 1.

Damnit! Messed up the tag.

[b]I think a much better way would be for companies to bid based on the value they bring to the end consumer public, with the company that promises the best value winning.[/b]

I believe Russia did something like this with their last spectrum auction. Companies received the spectrum for free (20 year lease or something) and made promises of certain quality of service and network capabilities in exchange.

So how exactly do we know this? I haven't read of any studies on the topic. Could you give us a link to a study showing what ant nests actually contemplate?

Yeah, as an American teenager who was repeatedly voted "smartest" in his class, I realized all that decades ago. That's why I've mostly lived in close proximity to academia for most of my life since then, and have associated mostly with a crowd that has a high proportion of "furriners". It also has a lot to do with my migration into the Internet-development field, where my professional connections tend to be the same sort of furriners.

Generalizations about the citizens of a country are generally nonsense. I have lots of friends in other countries that I've never met, and I personally don't consider that at all odd. It's one of the things that this Internet thing was more-or-less designed to encourage. The practice of categorizing people by the accident of where they were born is ultimately doomed, though I expect it to live on long after it has become nonsense. Sorta like categorizing people by their sex or age or race or religion or ... ;-)

Nah; it was Venus.

Probably not. Consider the thoroughly-documented example of the evolutionary process at work in the modern world. This doesn't affect the belief systems of the religious folks, who still insist that evolution is bogus, and has nothing to do with our modern world. One of the major cases is with the over-use of antibiotics, especially in agriculture. This is forcing the evolution of resistance in most of our disease organisms, destroying the value of many of our medicines. The evidence of all this has no effect at all on the religious believers. They also put pressure on the school systems (especially here in the US) to eliminate evolution from the textbooks, so the people responsible for this evolutionary pressure (mostly in agriculture, but also in medicine) don't understand the issues, and continue to make frivolous or incorrect use of the antibiotics.

Historians have documented many such cases in which our ancestors had knowledge that their actions were leading to disasters, but they continued anyway. These are typically cases where short-term actions were profitable to the people doing them, but bad for society in the long run. History says that we humans don't respond logically to such situations. We continue to act for short-term profit, and ignore the long-term results. Our "leaders" also tend to take actions that encourage this, by hiding the information or denying the validity of knowledge that can't be hidden.

There's no reason to expect that we can organize on a global scale to fix such problems. Our political systems tend to be controlled by the wealthier people, who are the ones ultimately profiting from the short-term results of the problems. About all we can do is prepare for the predictable long-term results, when possible.

Right up until you want a way to define API changes and continue to maintain back branches.

A rockstar programmer doesn't bang out a lot of code.

They pick the right algorithm which scales well (doesn't need to be rewritten), considers and handles most error cases cleanly (few bug reports), and often leaves easily maintainable code (another person can take over, doesn't require a support team).

Like others I found the headline confusing. I read it as "Researchers are predicting the use of Wikipedia as a vector for the spread of disease". This may mean that:

• Disinformation and ignorance are diseases.
• Memes and computer viruses are diseases.
• Wilipedia contains information that leads to depression.
• Instructions on Wikipedia lead to substance abuse.
• This is getting entertaining, fill in your own reason here.

Heh.

Anyway, thanx for posting.

OK, i misunderstood what expat meant. I thought it had to do with revoking citizenship. There i go not looking up words again.

Who knows, maybe i'll take a peek at reddit again someday.

expat? I don't remember that.

reddit is a cesspool, so i rarely bother with it, even when it shows up from a search.

I (like to) think i would pay for a service where someone filtered slashdot & reddit comments to what is actually informational, interesting, and truly funny. IOW, what comment moderation was intended for.

Nah; today the term is "terrist". ;-) And them terrists can live nearly anywhere. There are lots of them in China, India, Malaysia, Nigeria, Brazil, and all those Muslim countries that are our current Enemies of Choice. And you can even find them in Canada.

In Russia, "cyberwarfare" (aka "hacking" to the MSM) is becoming a public, respectable industry. They're into it as a way to systematically make a lot of money, putting them in essentially the same class as most of management in the corporate world. But in other parts of the world, it's more often a case of causing trouble for your victim, rather than just making money off them.