"Christ, there goes one of those lepers..."

And in other news, MakerBot CEO Jonathan Jaglom will receive a bazillion dollar bonus, and another ten bazillion dollars in stock options. It's predicted he will end his term as CEO by urinating and defecating and the smoldering corpse of MakerBot before seeking greener pastures to assrape and pillage.

When asked for comment, Mr. Jaglom replied "I'd just like to say fuck you all very much!"

That was a pretty interesting study, and does show that the underlying behaviors of canids and humans have some degree of compatibility and overlap, and it does not require a large amount of breeding to produce domesticated canids. The fox experiments (I think they were done in Russia) demonstrate that the domestication of wolf progenitor populations into dogs was probably fairly rapid, which also raises the likelihood (strongly hinted it in the molecular data) that there were multiple wolf domestication events. And even for all of that, dogs still remain simply a number of subgroups of C. lupis, and still enjoy interfertility with other members of genus Canus.

But everyone already knew that Android could run without the base apps. Most of the people I know that run Cyanogen do so to free themselves from data sieves that are the Google Android app suite. You don't get very good apps to view common office-format files, to be sure, and Microsoft will certainly fill that void. But in the grand scheme of things, Cyanogen simply does not matter that much.

What will matter in the medium term is that Microsoft works on a Google Apps replacement suite that it ready to go when (not if, when) the EU forces some degree of unbundling on Google.

But the lesson of Microsoft's experience, of course, is that the EU's unbundling requirement ultimately meant very little, and it was Microsoft's own decade of stagnation with Internet Explorer 6 that gave competitors the edge. The unbundling did nothing to help the actual victim of Microsoft's predatory bundling; Netscape.

Frankly if the OpenOffice/LibreOffice groups wanted to do something important right now, they'd put development of an Android version of the suite at the top of the priority list, because I think in the next couple of years a major opportunity will appear.

Companies like IBM and Red Hat has poured millions into Linux. Red Hat is hardly a passive repackager. You're not "A. Capitalist", you're just "A. Confused and Stupid"

BlackBerry is dead. Chen turned down the best deal he was likely ever going to get, and now it will fade away completely. Nobody cares about BB, heck they barely care about mobile Windows now. Microsoft's best hope is to hitch its wagon to an "open" Android variant with the hopes that it is a short hop to when the EU forces Google to open the branded version of Android on all those mid-range and high end mobile devices.

Mark my words. In two to three years, BB will have folded up, probably after Chen and his fellow executives have pocketed large amounts of hte company's cash reserve.

Microsoft has decided to have a serious fight with Google... on Google's platform. When the shoe was so often on the other foot in the 80s, 90s and 00s, and it was competitors trying to beat Microsoft whilst using Microsoft's platform, it usually didn't go so well.

Cyanogen is great and all, but really, the overwhelming majority of Android devices are using some variant of Google's branded version, which means they will come with Google's apps installed. I think Google has absolutely nothing to fear from Microsoft, whose fortunes are quickly being reversed as far as platform dominance and the synergy of developing the dominant software on that platform.

Google's real worries right now are the EU, which is not only going after the search business, but appears to be "analyzing" Android, which is going to mean what it did Microsoft; an unbundling of certain default applications, and a forced choice of which replacements to use. That is ultimately what I expect Microsoft is looking forward to, that the EU will do to Google what it did to Microsoft a decade ago, and that the guy who has just bought his Samsung Galaxy or Nexus-branded device is going to get a screen that asks "Do you want to use Google Docs or Microsoft Office?"

I doubt his job description includes "Flying small aircraft to personally deliver letters."

Because having his nuts groped by the Secret Service will be a far superior experience.

Exactly. That's long been my view. You can either get your tax exemption, or you can run a publishing company, but you can't do both.

How is it that mental retards get mod points?

One of the great films.

People of Celtic origins are still the backbone of the British Isles, and yet culturally the vast majority of that region are West Germanic. Or take the Turks and Syrian and Palestinian "Arabs" as another example. Genetically, these people are simply the descendants of the East Mediterranean populations that have lived there for thousands of years. For instance, the Palestinians and Jews are closely related, simply because they're both descendants of the Canaanite peoples that had been hanging out there since before the Bronze Age). But linguistically, culturally and ethnically these are all seen today as independent and in some ways quite distinct populations, much as the Scots and English are seen as distinct despite the fact that genetically they are closely related.

I hope all entertainment giants do this, because when people start discovering they can't get at the latest episodes of their favorite series, the sooner the political pressure will mount on governments to modify these archaic copyright laws.

Why in the name of fuck would any fucking company want to fuck over its customers? What a sick and malignant industry the media giants have become.

Of course morality is relative. Three hundred years ago it was perfectly moral to purchase slaves. One hundred and fifty years ago depriving over half the population of most English speaking areas of political and even full property rights because they were born with a vagina and instead of a penis. The Spartans thought it perfectly moral 2,400 years ago to leave weak infants exposed to the elements to die. For centuries Christianity promoted ideas like anti-Semitism and the Divine Right of nobility to have political and economic rights that no one else could enjoy. If you go back to the Old Testament, it was perfectly moral, if not a legal and moral requirement, to execute witches and adulterers.