The portability of GTK+ is, to put it politely, utter rubbish.
There's nothing polite about derogatory hyperbole. The portability of the Windows and OSX UI frameworks could properly be called "utter rubbish", because they're not intended to be portable at all. In contrast, GTK+ apps can and do run on both Windows and OSX, and many applications work quite well on both platforms. I don't think that can reasonably be described as "utter rubbish".
I haven't been able to ever get it working properly under OS X. It didn't even get to the point where it showed a UI, the last time I tried it.
Developing GTK+ apps on OSX is not as easy as it should be, but in my experience, at least, it's not all that difficult, either. It would be great to see this improved, though.
Can Students Have Too Much Tech?
Betteridge's law of headlines says the answer is... wait a minute. TFA says the answer is "yes"?!?
Does this researcher know she has disproved one of the most oft-cited Slashdot axioms?
The central part of the EFF's plan is: encryption, encryption, encryption.
Encryption everywhere is great. But as long as the majority of us remain willing to hand over everything about our personal lives to Facebook, Google, etc., then mass surveillance by either private entities or governments will remain ridiculously easy. To me, that seems like the really hard problem to solve. There is no way those companies will deny themselves access to their users' unencrypted data.
Both of the linked articles present this as if it is a major problem requiring federal congressional action. Several other posters here have pointed out, though, that actually pulling something back out of public domain via this copyright "loophole" might actually be extremely difficult or even (practically) impossible.
It is perhaps telling that neither article presents a single example of a piece of work that was initially donated to the public domain by its author(s) and then removed from the public domain via this mechanism. So, does anyone know if this has ever actually happened? Given that neither article gives even one such example, I suspect this is not really a problem at all from a pragmatic point of view. Attempting to "fix" it by asking Congress to pass new copyright legislation could even backfire, because the additional provisions and changes that would inevitably get added to any such bill might end up creating new, real problems.
While Wikipedia proved that collective intelligence could provide quality contents able to compete with the major encyclopedias...
Wikipedia proved that "no cost and good enough most of the time" outcompetes "expensive and authoratative/reliable". I think this has a lot more to do with Wikipedia's success than the supposed quality of the contents.
Wikipedia also wins on its huge breadth. If what you want from your encyclopedia is plot summaries of television shows and extensive biographies of those shows' fictional characters, Wikipedia is really your only choice.
I bet the students that could speak would succed more at any of the following tasks;
Planning/carrying out a hunt.
Sending people to good food gathering areas
Warning of danger
Etc
Exactly. One could use the exact same study design to "test" the hypothesis that any or all of the things you mentioned are why we evolved language, and the results would undoubtedly be the same. The only general conclusion one might draw is that humans evolved language to more effectively communicate with each other, which is practically self-evident.
All this study shows is that language is a good way of exchanging information.
That, and also that humans who spend their entire lives depending on language to communicate with one another can't communicate as effectively when they suddenly aren't allowed to use language for a few minutes. Who'd have thunk?
It must be fun to work in a field where experiments like this can get you published in a Nature-affiliated journal.
From what I can tell from TFA, this study purports to test the hypothesis that language evolved as a means to transmit the knowledge of how to make tools. The researchers found that present-day humans (college students, to be exact) can best teach other how to make a stone tool if they are allowed to talk to each other. The authors interpret this as evidence in support of their hypothesis.
The obvious problem, though, is that they ran the experiment on a bunch of subjects that have spent their entire lives (minus the first year or so) using language as their primary means of communication. So what result would you expect with this study population? The experiment is hardly a test of the conditions under which early language might have evolved.
Democrats have fucked Kansas every time they accidentally get elected. No miracles here. This is a red state and going to stay that way, because of that.
You think that's why Brownback got re-elected as governor? If your analysis were even remotely correct, he would have had absolutely no chance at winning on Tuesday: he's led your state to huge upcoming budget deficits, an increased poverty rate, much lower economic growth than all four neighboring states, and a downgraded state credit rating.
Yet, despite all of the above, Brownback still kept his job, because, you know... "liberals and taxes are bad." Never mind if the alternative is flushing your state down the toilet.
From TFA:
Before that, Airbus proposed eschewing windows and building its cabins out of transparent polymers.
What that really means is that Airbus wants to turn the entire cabin into a window.
Also from TFA:
Hope you're not too attached to looking out the windows when you fly — the designers of tomorrow's airplanes seem intent on getting rid of them.
Well, I guess that technically, Airbus would be "getting rid of the windows", but if the end result is that everyone on the plane has a better view, I don't think it supports TFA's argument at all.
That's correct -- natural selection can only act on heritable traits. The post I was replying to, though, was certainly not making that argument. Instead, it seemed to suggest that the mixing of alleles during sexual reproduction somehow made it impossible to distinguish between "evolution via genes" and "purely environmental factors winnowing a population", and that truly makes no sense.
I am also curious -- can you give us any biologically relevant example of differential reproductive fitness in a population due to entirely non-heritable traits?
Simply deciding to go up the tree higher, or being forced to in order to find more leaves won't change the foot pads of the animal.
Of course not. Nobody said that individual lizards who decided to spend more time above ground would magically grow larger foot pads. If you read TFA, you will see that the authors observed two phenomena. First, they saw an almost immediate shift in the behavior of the native lizards following the arrival of the invasive anoles -- the native anoles spent more time on higher perches. The second change they observed was the increase in foot pad size that occurred over multiple generations. The first change was most likely a rapid modification of individual lizard's foraging behaviors; the second change was due to natural selection causing the population to shift toward larger foot pads.
There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.