Actually, after getting out in (very rough shape) in 4.7, KMail got a new maintainer, and he's been fixing bugs and improving things like crazy (look at the commits by "montel").

Also other people have been working on other parts of the infrastructure and there are more fixes on the way.

Lastly, you're putting together two things unrelated to each other: Akonadi is a local cache for PIM data (contacts, mails, calendars...), while Nepomuk is a framework used to organize data semantically (and used a lot in other bits of the KDE platform), which is used in Akonadi to store mail and contact data for searching.

Don't forget Freespace 2 and the massive mod community that's backing it nowadays.

Compared to Romney, Obama is likely to be somewhat less friendly to hedge funds and private equity companies

Disclaimer: I'm not a US citizen and I found the presidential election to be a fight between two pygmies.

However, did the "less friendly" included giving a massive bailout that basically socialized the losses made by the people who created the subprime bubble?

INAIL - Istituto Nazionale per l'Assicurazione contro gli Infortuni sul Lavoro, that is "National institute for work accidents insurance".

It handles (mandatory) insurance for any type of work contract, IIRC.

it's a success of science

Sadly, even scientific journals frown upon "negative results" nowadays (at least in my field, the life sciences). And few if any bother to publish them.

I am not taking sides in this, as I haven't read the paper. But I question the fact that often extreme skepticism (cynism) isn't backed by facts, but by suspects, especially once a result is not "wanted".

Going after the funding without looking and (possibly questioning) the results scientifically smells of straw man.

and that is assuming this study is telling the truth, for example, Stanford has ties to Monsanto

If that's the case, debunk the science of the article, and not question the results merely basing on "ties": if it were published due to a "push" it would have flaws, wouldn't it?.

Surely peer review has faults, but do you think this paper didn't go through it?

I also recommend "Derelict", a very long and involving campaign that's IMO very much in the spirit of Freespace 2.

To be honest, developing a drug is really expensive. And the most expensive part is not the actual R&D, but the testing (the phase I-II-III clinical trials). In particular, phase III clinical trials are one of the largest money sink in the whole operation.

And you have consider that only a fraction of the developed drugs make it to the market for a number of reason (efficacy not larger than existing alternatives, side effects, etc.).

As far as I can remember, these studies on Neanderthal used mitochondrial DNA (i.e., the DNA stored in the mitochondria, which is separate from the one in the nucleus) rather than genomic (i.e. the DNA in the nucleus of the cell).

After all that, *if* you can find a job, you get paid for a year's work about what a Wall Street broker makes during the time he's sitting on the toilet taking a dump

Sorry for the bluntness, but so what? I'm only worried about my pay if it doesn't give me enough to have a reasonable standard of life. Why should I be envious of my other peers?

It's been there since ages: right click on the notification icon (the "i") and uncheck to show transfers.

Even if "who to collaborate with" is your boss, or the head of the department, or whatever (yes, they want to be the final name, but they may "suggest" names to get other collaborators happy)? It happens. I'm not saying it the norm, but the competition is too fierce and some people will go the extra mile to get that. And that is indeed a problem of the publishing papers hysteria. The whole debacle is IMO highglighted well by this book (notice it covers also a lot of unrelated topics to publish or perish).

The problem is in the degree of such evaluations. Also, the "expected results" section in grants are sometimes difficult to write down, after all you're doing the experiments in the first place to actually see anything. And then there's the matter of authorship in papers, since you can easily lose the first author position out of politics (I had to fight for one of mine quite strongly).

However, in the current academic climate (at least for life sciences) publish or perish is not a way to communicate your ideas or to advance knowledge. It's a way to get funded so you can continue working.