Very badly written article. The bad writing is not in the summary, it is in the original. There are about 4500 bird species. There are 48 orders. Species -> genus -> family -> order. All extant bird orders, and they took one sample species from each. The article has mangled the reporting of the original research.

Birds have very poor oral hygiene. Eating worms and scratching the dirt and what not. And they never flossed. It was just a matter of time before they lost their teeth.

Forbes faithfully parroted every Gartner study fully bought for by Microsoft, like the Total Cost of Ownership. It claimed Microsoft has reached a "utility" status and it should be considered a "widows-and-orphans" stock. It actively contributed to the culture of lazy CIOs choosing Microsoft because no one got fired for choosing Microsoft. It turned a blind eye to every illegal maneuver by Microsoft. Now, suddenly, it is blasting Microsoft? I think Microsoft is a lesser evil than Forbes.

You organize the photos and folders any way you like. It does not modify any original photo or image file. Instead it scans the folders for new files, builds indexes such that you can view the photos either by folders, or by albums or by tagged faces etc. You can add captions to photos, and folders, search based on wild cards and then create an album out of search results. Has some other features like making collages out of selection, keeping a few albums synched with on line sharing, making slide show movies etc.

There is already a well established practice by which the Government can show public interest, take over private property (after compensating the current owners) and use it for public purpose. In fact courts have ruled govt can even turn over the properties taken under eminent domain to other private parties! Why should the eminent domain be restricted to real estate? It can easily be extended to intellectual properties.

So instead of making general law changes asking for broad restrictions to patented drugs, the government can make the case for specific patents, show the public interest, take it over turn to the generic manufacturers.

cygwin is not a linux emulator. It provides typical linux shells like csh or bash in windows. It also has a X11 server, most of unix utilities.

When they first broke into the music selling market, the entire music market was open, and the fastest way to make money is to sell music. A decade later most people who want to buy music, middle aged people nostalgic for their teenage music with money to burn, etc etc have been tapped out. They still have to show similar revenue, and revenue growth to satisfy the Wall St bean counters. When you have over 75% market share already, maintaining revenue and growth becomes increasingly difficult. At this point they want all new music to go into the rental model with continued revenue potential.

Take a look at the Microsoft MsOffice market. It was selling perpetual licenses, and to maintain revenue growth it kept raising the prices. After reaching impossible for software prices like 500$ for a full office suite, 150$ for Excel+Word they could not sustain it anymore. Google stepped in with a low end Cloud-Office suite at 50$ a pop per year and made serious inroads into MsOffice monopoly. The first serious challenge, the first challenge to MsOffice franchise that got traction was GoogleDocs. We might laugh at the mickey mouse features of GoogleDocs compared to MsOffice, we might see OpenOffice and LibreOffice are far more serious implementations. But, on the ground, GoogleDocs had just two things going for it. Extremely good collaboration features and a tempting "it is just 50$, let us try it for a while" price. Now Microsoft is pitching OfficeLive365 as 50$ a year all you can eat buffet. It used to sell the entire suite for 50$ in the 1990s, student version perpetual license were 30$ as recently 2009. Now?

Almost all the software companies want to go into subscription model, software as service, rent not own, model. All the media companies too. Price blue-ray disc at 25$, but stream HD rental at 5$. Rent, not own. That is the way all media and software companies are evolving into.

What are the chances something like you said has not already been discussed in the Infinite Loop? Apple does not want you to own and store your own music/media. It wants you to rent and stream all your media. It wants a cut from streaming service providers, and content providers.

Back in my days, every mysterious signal from every star system follows a well rehearsed routine. People get beamed down, they see even more mysterious things happen and finally they get everything resolved and are back in the Enterprise in 46 minutes, all set up and ready to boldly go where no man had gone before. Come on, resolve it already scientists. Whats the matter with you lazy bums?

If you double the length and the width of the rectangle you will get four times the area. There is nothing odd about it. Quadratic (and cubic ) relationships are very common. Typically the height of human beings and their mass follows a cubic relationship. The urban sprawl distance and the area of the city follows a quadratic relationship. It is not odd. It is just math.

Richard Dawkins' book the Selfish Gene is probably one of the most misunderstood book titles ever. Dawkins was too clever for his own good, and you need to read his entire book to get to what he means by that term. He most definitely does not mean "there is a gene that makes people/organisms selfish".

He goes after the chicken and egg problem. Most people think of the egg as chicken's way of making a new chicken. But it is equally plausible, the chicken is merely the egg's way of making a new egg. We think we use genes to more copies of ourselves. Can we consider the genes are making more copies of themselves using us, the humans as a species, as mere replicating machine or incubator?

The question he poses is, "Are genes our selfish way of making more copies of ourselves? Or we are merely replicating machines under the control of the selfish genes?". He takes half the book to make people understand the question. Then the other half to prove, indeed the genes are in control and we are mere replicators. Some of the genes we have in our bodies have copies living in other species, other genera. Some of them are 100 million years old. The genes as a whole are the selfish ones vis a vis the organisms as a whole. They survive. We don't. We as individuals, we as species, we as genus are dispensable. The genes, as a whole, are selfish compared to the animal bodies they live in. The Selfish Gene. Not gene for selfishness.

It is not just the slashdot articles alone. Anything can be an opportunity to bash Obama. And you don;t have to twist anything. Just anything under the sun is an opportunity to bash Obama.

Sun just came up in the East. Damn, have to get out of bed and go to work now. Thanks, Obama.

Sun just came up in the East. Damn, I still don't have a job to go to. Thanks, Obama.

See? it is easy.

I did not know it is called oronyms till I read about it today. But the pronunciation of a string of words differently to mean different things is part of grammar lessons in Tamil. The famous example I studied on eighth grade has the word "aarudhal" repeating throughout the poem, taking the meaning "six heads", "river on the head", "exchanged head" and "salvation" at different places.

Most Indian languages are written exactly as they are spoken, no silent letters. They also have very strict rules about how the pronunciation changes when say, a "n" follows a "ga" or "cha" or "ta" or "tha" or "pa". In fact Hindi would reduce "N" to a dot, because the preceding consonant would unambiguously define the pronunciation of the n, even though n has three different glyphs representing the labial, palatal and the dental versions of it.

Steven Pinker mentions some African languages using seven tenses instead of the usual present, past and future. Jared Diamond mentions some Pacific Island language that has words for "towards the sea" and "away from the sea", as in "there is a speck of dirt on your seawards cheek"

The richness of the languages and constructs are astounding. And most of the 6000 languages of the world are moribund and are expected to go extinct soon.

Is this "algorithm" manage the lines of people waiting to get ice in desert better? Would it cure world hunger too?

So the arms race between Jesus Fish vs Darwin Fish goes up by one notch now?