Since I live in North Carolina I just have to comment. If anyone thinks the Democrats that controlled the legislature for over 90 of the last 100 years didn't try to gerrymander, they are fools. The fact that they lost the legislature anyway tells any person that actually thinks for themselves that the people aren't buying what they are selling. Even when the districts are drawn to influence the outcome, if the people get fed up, the seat will change anyway. One seat that stayed Democrat was NC 12. A look at the map shows why, this twisted like a run over snake district runs along I85 from Greensboro to Charlotte and has bits of 4 counties. A black Republican woman can't win there (DR Ada Fisher tried at least 4 times). Only a liberal Democrat can possibly win. I doubt if that will change in my lifetime since the courts won't allow it.

Even before that: have a business plan. Do your best to determine what you want to create, how expensive it will be to make it, how many people you'll need to manage, how much you expect to charge for it, and how big your likely market is. If you discover that there's no way to make your endeavor even close to profitable, you can save yourself months of heartache and mountains of lost money. Always have a plan, even if you don't stick to it in the end.

It was the right decision. systemd flies in the face of the Unix philosophy. I personally won't be upgrading to any distro which uses it.

I think the most important piece of news of this story is that Wikipedia is no better than Google or Facebook, and exploits/sells search data too.

They made the assumption that if a disease is spreading somewhere, there people start looking for information about the disease on wikipedia

Imagine the potential: if a lot of search logs contain "EBOL-AAAARGH", they'll know a particularly fast-acting variant of the virus has emerged.

I had TV from Time Warner for 7 years. During that time I never once received a bill for the same amount 2 months in a row. Always a few pennies more. Either it is corporate policy to steal a bit from each customer or they don't know how to count. They are really trying to rival AT&T as the most dishonest company in American history.

First thing is: Obama signed a treaty, until it is ratified by the Senate it has no meaning or force of law on anyone or anything in the U. S. A. Number two: The U. S. A. cripples it's economy while China does nothing but make things worse for 15 years, why would anyone think this helps cut pollution in any way? China today puts more pollution in the air in a week than the U. S. A. does in a year. How is this going to make any measurable difference?

Seems Mozilla has sold out. Which makes their choice of DuckDuckGo as default search engine interesting: have they sold out too?

The thing with DDG is, I'd be happy to believe their no-tracking pitch, but I can't quite understand how they're gonna make money out of a free search engine without it...

That was true in some societies, but for the most part not in the African slave trade. There slavers went out specifically in order to capture slaves. They weren't otherwise engaged in warfare.

This, folks, is a textbook example of "damning with faint praise".

I think that Disney may have shot themselves in the foot. A patent must by definition describe the method in sufficient detail that a person of ordinary expertise in the field can figure out how to implement it by reading the patent. Since the patent merel describes a ranking algorithm, it can be trivially inverted to select sites likely to contain pirated material.

A scripting language that I find much cleaner than Perl and without the unpleasant tabbing of Python is Tcl. A more recent language with more familiar syntax than Tcl is lua.

"Fitness", within the context of evolution, relates only to reproductive success rates within a population. If a "simple" structure is sufficient for reproductive success, then the "simple" structure will remain present over time.

Evolution is not driven by "purpose". Evolution is a consequence of imperfect replication; is not a movement toward a goal.

"Intelligent Design" is the conjecture that certain biological structures could not have emerged through the process of evolution and therefore (a non-sequitur reasoning method) an unspecified "designer" employed unspecified methods to implement the "design" of these structures. Not only is the conjecture completely untestable (as undefined mechanisms cannot be tested), but many of the supposed "irreducibly complex" structures are not actually irreducibly complex. A common failing of "design" advocates is an assumption that biological structures always emerge through purely additive processes, when in fact a process that removes redundant structures could leave behind structures that could not have existed in partial form on their own (but that could have existed in partial form along with the no-longer-present redundant structures).

...and as I recall, the guy who founded and ran NeXT was someone who not only was an Apple founder but came back to Apple later, as well. Ended up being pretty important at Apple, too, I think.

No, no, his name's right on the tip of my tongue...give me juuuuust a second...