I'm sure Larry Page would love for Google to be strong enough to shrug off such pettiness. In many areas it is. But against Microsoft/Skype on videoconferencing, no, it isn't.

In today's world economy, you could be doing business with a French speaker today, a Spanish speaker tomorrow, a Hindii speaker next week and a Russian speaker the week after.

Have you actually tried that? Even if there are no language problems, cultural differences are going to be a wellspring of headaches for a long time to come. The world isn't nearly as small as some people believe.

2010 called, they want their post back. Google+ is second only to Facebook in active users, it's not moribound by any stretch of the imagination. Though you could be forgiven for thinking that if you're not using it (as unlike e.g. Twitter and YouTube, it's not so visible from the outside, by design).

They don't want to force people to Google+. They want to prevent skype from using the google talk address book without offering its own in return.

Hangouts. And yes, it would be forgotten pretty quickly if you could call your hangouts contacts on skype, but not your skype contacts on hangouts. Which is exactly how Microsoft used Google's XMPP support.

This was it. I remember from the I/O keynote, complaints about Microsoft exploiting some open standard to establish one-way compatibility, but I couldn't remember the details. Thanks. This comment ought to be at the top, it's most likely the reason XMPP support was dropped.

Makes you think... if they have all the data, and they seem out of touch with reality, maybe it's really us who are out of touch with reality?

Did you watch the keynote? Page made a big point out of how lucky he was - how a parent was an early computer scientist, how they convinced arrangers to let him attend a robotics conference even though he was underage etc. and how he wants kids to get the chances he got.

He may come across as a bit naive, yes. But I'm sure he knows that, and it's probably somewhat deliberate (I mean, a QA session? When you've just admitted on Google+ that you're pathologically soft-spoken?)

No risk of Larry Page sounding harsh, with those partially paralyzed vocal cords of his.

It's a quantum computer all right, just not a universal quantum computer.

As I understand it, there is a procedure (although an impractical one) to transform any problem into an adiabatic one. So, it's a universal computer, at least.

To use the GPS satellites to determine the poles, presumably there are other ways than actually standing on the pole and getting GPS signals.

Also, we lump it together and call it GPS, but in fact there are several systems, and as I recall GLONASS (the Soviet/Russian one) is a lot more accurate in polar areas.

I'm afraid your sarcasm is going to go straight over the heads of slashdot's resident climate denialists.

It may have been reasonable to believe that if you had no information whatsoever about e.g temperature and rainfall or solar output.

It's unlikely that your meat is grazed at all, let alone that it came from a wild population in an overgrazed area.

"Health issues vegan" doesn't really exist. If it was for health reasons, why avoid even a drop of honey, or leather in your boots? Yet if you don't avoid that, you're by definition not vegan.

The entire term vegan was invented specifically to distinguish ethical vegetarians from people who merely didn't eat animals or animal products. It means ethical vegetarian, basically.

All crop development prior to Mendel or Darwin, for example, was essentially cargo cult

No, that's not cargo cult. Cargo cult is when you imitate the actions of someone for whom those actions have meaning, without understanding their meaning yourself (or totally misunderstanding their meaning). Crop development was haphazardly experimental, not cargo cult.