Actually, there's quite a lot of history in various parts of the world when parts of a political entity split off. Sometimes this is done peacefully, sometimes it involves serious fighting and wars. An interesting recent case was in Switzerland, where in 1978 the Canton of Bern split, with the northern part forming the new Canton of Jura. You can read a lot about it online, including a couple of wikipedia articles. It's fairly well encoded in Swiss law, where similar votes happen every few years, typically involving a municipality with a large population that wants to secede from its canton and join another. The typical reason for such splits is as in Scotland, where the people in an area feel poorly served by the government, and think they can do better as part of a different county/state/whatever, or perhaps as an independent unit as Jura did.

Here in the US, we had a similar vote in 1863, which resulted in the new state of West Virginia being formed. This is often presented as part of the Civil War split off of the Confederacy. Historians tend to interpret it as more of a case of the western population feeling poorly treated by the remote state government in Richmond, which collect taxes in the mountains, but provided few government services in return. West Virginia did apply to the federal government for statehood, which was ratified after a few years. Unlike the Southern secession, this was done without (further) warfare. A funny aspect of the story is that now, several counties in the northeast of West Virginia have openly discussed seceding and joining either Virginia or Maryland, for pretty much the same reasons. Unlike Switzerland, though, the US doesn't have much in the way of official laws that deal with such political reorganization and redrawing of political boundaries.

The story in Scotland may work out as it often does in Switzerland, where many of the votes for secession fail. The reason is that the referendum functions as a "wake-up call" to the government. It's typical for a lot of public discussion to happen, and the government(s) make promises to fix the problems that triggered the referendum. Sometimes, as people have suggested here, the government reneges on its promises. This will be followed by another vote a few years later, which will often succeed. Or the government may fix many of the problems, which will satisfy the voters and repeated votes will fail.

The Scots would probably do well to continue discussing the issues publicly, and keep the London government aware that they can't continue to get away with everything without repercussions.

More accurately, I've seen it stated as "closer to Bergen than Edinburgh". Or course, some people might not know where Bergen is. In any case, Shetland historically has always been rather remote from either "mainland", and they've pretty much been on their own all along. If they have problems in the middle of their winter, they can't much rely on help from anyone in the rest of the world.

Well, I've always sorta liked the Scottish historians' observation that, strictly speaking, it was Scotland that took over England, not the other way around. That was after the first Queen Liz died, back in 1703. The new king was the fellow who was already King James VI of Scotland, and became King James I of the United Kingdom of Scotland and England; uh, I mean of England and Scotland.

Of course, a more accurate description wouldn't interpret this as either country taking over the other. It was really more a case of the inbred population of royalty, who were really neither Scottish nor English, agreeing among themselves who should be the next monarch over both of those populations, and giving both jobs to the same fellow. He then spent much of the rest of his life trying to merge them into a single "nation" -- and not succeeding all that well. But this wasn't any real benefit to the majority of either the Scottish or English populations. Or the Welsh or Irish or Manx or Cornish or Shetlanders or ..., for that matter. Or those Colonials over across the Pond.

It's not an all-or-nothing situation. There are statistical genetic differences between various groups of people (though superficial features like skin color are often not closely related to ancestral groupings). One of my favorite such statistics was the calculation that some time in the late 1980s, the US population passed the mixing point where more than 50% of Americans now have sub-Saharan African ancestors. Most such people look "white", of course, since they have only a small fraction of African genes.

I recently read that the accumulated DNA data shows that between 20% and 25% of the US population has "Native American" genes, though again in most of that population is primarily "white". I'm part of that population, with an Ojibwa great-grandmother, though nobody would ever guess by looking at me that I'm not of pure European ancestry.

One thing I've found difficult to discover is what fraction of the US is purely European. If you try googling the topic, it mostly teaches you one thing: Most people don't understand even such simple statistics. You find lots of matches for the part of the population that's "white" or "of European ancestry", but the phrasing implies that they're talking about people who are predominantly European. There's data on the small populations that are purely African or purely Asian or whatever, but it's hard to find any information on the (probably small) population that's purely European.

Of course, for most purposes this all qualifies as idle curiosity. But there are at least a few medical reasons for studying it, in addition to general curiosity about where we all came from.

Yeah; if you look back a couple of million years, we're all related to chimpanzees.

While working on a linguistics minor for my CS degree, I heard a number of versions of the quip that a linguist is someone who knows 100 words in each of 100 different languages. Of course, this should be followed with the observation that the main focus of linguistics is understanding the structures of languages, and vocabulary is interesting only in that it shows relations between languages. This doesn't generally require having a large enough vocabulary to be fluent. Most of the actual linguists I've met are fluent in only a few languages. These are often languages that are radically different from each other, though, since radical differences in how to express something would be interesting to a linguist.

It should be. But history (e.g. the "only sell through registered dealers" laws) says it won't be. It'll be in favor of whoever pays the most bribes to the right officials.

That's already the case in the US (and as I recall, we discussed it here a few years back). US law for some time has required that new auto tires contain an RFID tag. Granted, those can't be read at a distance, but they can be read by sensors under the roadway or in poles next to the street.

It's hard to believe that the purpose of this can be anything but tracking. Yeah, such tags might have other uses, but would any of those uses have resulted in laws mandating the tags?

Well, maybe, and maybe not.

I recall a couple years ago, when I was traveling south on a street in a nearby town, but when I glanced at the GPS gadget, it showed me about a block north of where I was -- and headed north. Traffic was light, so I looked at it frequently, to see what it did, and it showed me continuing north, until my actual location was nearly a mile south of what it showed. Then it decided I'd made a U-turn, and was proceeding south at a rather high speed. Finally, the little You-Are-Here icon reached my actual position, and slowed down to match me. A bit later, I checked its records of that trip, and it showed a max speed somewhat over 250 mph.

So if the police had access to that data, I'd have got a ticket for going about 8 times the legal speed limit. I sorta suspect that most judges would laugh and toss it out. But if it'd been only twice the speed limit, I'd probably have had a large fine to pay.

And note that the position was credible, though it was roughly a mile off. A couple of months ago, however, I noticed that, while my bearing and speed seemed accurate, my GPS position was roughly 100 miles SE of my actual position, which put me maybe 10 or 20 miles east of Cape Cod, driving along in the ocean. It stayed that way for at least 15 minutes, and then suddenly popped over to a local street a few blocks from my actual position.

I've also seen it showing my position as being in north-central Canada, and somewhere in Nevada, when I was actually in the Boston metro area.

So if the police are tracking our GPS position and speed, we have no defense. Yes, maybe the judges will dismiss the tickets that are obviously so badly wrong. But if they're only off by a few miles or mph, we'll all be getting completely bogus tickets that we'll have to pay.

Of course, they may still dismiss them for people who "look right" and "talk right", as they do with claimed drug offenses. ;-)

How does GPL being viral help? If it was BSD licensed, even after a Microsoft purchase, they couldn't un-BSD the BSD version, so it would still be available...

In my experience, it is still a problem. Some years back, I signed up to run some google ads on a few web sites that I was responsible for, added their code to my pages, and got a few hundred dollars a month for the orgs that I was helping run the sites. After a while, I got a notice from google that the sites were violating some unspecified terms in their TOS, and the money stopped. I sent a good number of emails to various google support addresses, asking for details of the claimed violation. I never heard back from anyone at google. So I removed the ads from the sites.

Presumably the small amount they paid these orgs to run their ads was a small portion of what google got from the advertisers. But this apparently didn't justify wasting their people's time explaining to us what we were doing wrong. The wording in their TOS docs were ambiguous enough that, as a programmer, I couldn't figure out what might be wrong, and I couldn't see any way of testing changes to the code to see if I could turn the contract on and off by changing a site's behavior. If their response time has a quantum of a month, it's difficult to test the effect of changes.

We suspected that their problem with us was that we had a rather low click-through rate. The ads I saw were remarkably irrelevant to the topics of the sites, and no amount of playing with keywords changed this by much. Our keywords did work well with google search to direct people to the sites, but this apparently wasn't good enough to also direct the right ads to the sites. Mostly, I just shrugged, and said "So much for google's vaunted targeting of ads".

But our inability to get any response at all from their support people didn't do much to fix whatever they thought the problems might have been.

Really? Do you have a reference for the research?

If it's true that T.rex is closer to chickens than to pheasants, peafowl, and other Phasianinae, it would mean that the Phasianinae family dates back to before the K-T disaster. This would sorta imply a major reorg of the Therapsids, as well as the entire Aves class.

So it's be interesting to read about the research on this discovery.

Yeah, perhaps in a hidden way maybe this is some of the motivation for Wolfe to do this. In that case, I fully support the DMCA take down notice if it lights a fire under Mojang to finally get serious about the modding API.

Wrong; I noticed the mispelling in the summary, and I noticed the misspeling in the article. And I noticed the comment about it in the short "discussion" below the article. So when I came here, I did a scan for "spell" to see how many people noticed. What, no matches? So I slid the little sliders that control the level of comments visible, all the way to the right -- and I found your comment. Of course, with with a score of 0, it might be missed by a lot of readers. But I didn't have mod points, so I replied instead, to tell you that you were wrong to say "Every single one of you" missed it.

There are probably others, too, but they just shrugged, mumbled something about the poor knowledge of geography in the kids these days, and read on.

(And I do have a general policy of mispeling the word "misspell" during spelling flames, but so far hardly anyone has ever called me on it, so I conclude that it's a futile exercise in meta-humor. ;-)