What the article fails to mention is what exactly the difference is between the arcs created by (smaller) tesla coils now and natural lightning. Is it that natural lightning needs lower voltage to travel longer distances through air than teslas? This would explain, why they need to built giant tesla coils in the first place.

not a physicist here, but i think it is a pretty big difference, whether you treat something as a real physical object, whose existence and relationship with everything else you can and must explore or simply as a mathematical convenience to label it as an object without really believing it is one for the sake of simplifying calculations.

i think this has happend with electro-magnetic fields.

This will only lead to better impersonations skills

This would be a reason to drop Skype. I know many people, who don't use Skype because their protocol isn't open, they are not opensource or not SIP based. No reasons for me not to use it, it just works very well, even on Linux. But being forced to open a FB account? Do not want... I abhorr FB and it's poor privacy policies and conduct.

There are some theories out there, which explain things like the galaxy rotation problem, but none is so prominent as Modified Newtonian Dynamics. They do so without the need for Dark Matter. DM is still not a proven thing after all.

What did YOU think, again?

The problem with Dell is, that they were never big into R&D. Dells business consisted always of providing quality PCs with reasonable prices through direct (online) distribution. Not much invention here. It doesn't surprise me, that they lack the vision to invent something (r)evolutionary to differentiate them from competitors. IBM (Lenovo), HP, Apple, Asus, they all tried to diversify lately.

"Football is a simple game; 22 men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans always win."

Gary Lineker

I cannot search for text with the Firefox' find dialog. But they say, that their documents are now fully part of the HTML infrastructure, so they should be searchable, no? Try their self-introduction for HTML 5 and see, whether you can search for "Highlight me!", which is in the middle of the document.

Or I'm doing something wrong here?

I guess, I'm not very social, I kept my MySpace site for only some month. I'm in keeping my mostly inactive LinkedIn account alive strictly for business networking.

But even I have to chat, when email is overhead or not possible! I knew instant messaging back at univeristy since 1994 by virtue of IRC and the chat facility of ICS (internet chess, does it still exist btw?). I think joined ICQ somewhere in 1998 or 1999 because "everyone did it", but had not much use for it. The ICQ client then was quite decent.

In 2000 I found work at a software company as a consultant. Two years later, a colleague suggested using IM for fast communication within the company and our development partners. I installed IM again and was shocked that it had turned into an unusable mess of bloatware so quickly. It rivalled the Realplayer, which was quite a feat! My colleague said, I should install Miranda. I realized, that IM clients can be substituted as long as the protocol is implemented and the network allows it (AIM vs Trillian, anyone?).

I later used Miranda to also connect to AIM, Yahoo!Messenger and - urgh! - MSN Messenger. Nowadays I use Skype to chat, never used GTalk despite being an early user of GMail, so no experience with XMPP protocol and clients.

As the article says, you can be a valuable developer without being exposed to or needing much math but you will be confined to certain areas. Normal developer work is mostly applied mathematical logic, but advanced math is normally not needed.

I think I belong to this group. I'm a chemist turned programmer/consultant and I now mostly work as a consultant for a company providing UML tools. I had my fair share of advanced math in school and during my chemistry studies, but those courses don't compare in any way to the math lectures provided in computer science. This were (introductory) courses in linear algebra and analysis and they were "pure math". Hard proofs and all instead of calculating or solving equations.

I'm nevertheless thankful for these lessons. They taught me consistent and recursive thinking as much or more so as real programming did.

I used to print out HUGE amounts of paper for reference manuals, emails, technical documentation, meeting notes and proceedings etc., etc. Not so anyymore. I do not exactly know why, but somehow I'm now totally content with reading things on the screen. Probably has to do with wider screens or better tools for annotation and sharing. Or my job has somewhat changed and the need of having several pages side by side has dimished. I honestly do not know.

Did not read TFA, but some years ago there was astory about the smallest possible ELF program, which sounded very similar or the same as the summary of TFA: a tiny program, that doesn't output anything, but doesn't need any libraries either nor does make any sxstem calls. So, it's probably a dupe!

OK, so they introduced contextual knowledge (or "world knowledge" or "semantics" if you will) when they saw, that page rank and keyword based search didn't cut it for many search queries? Shouldn't that have come not as an afterthought but long before? I mean, how can anyone expect, that search would never involve some contextual knowledge to be succesful?

My guess is, that Google of course knows this. What they do is to build up contextual knowledge through their own search engine, how people relate words to each other and not by imposing a predefined rule set or ontolgy beforehand like cyc

.

Sorry, but that means exactly the opposite to me: Google Translation very well understood, that one sentence on every page is in a different language and "reversed" that sentence as well. Wouldn't have been possible, if Google Translate would "understand" exactly nothing about language.