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.

http://xkcd.com/793/

Or can you explain why "gift" means poison in German?

According to the etymological sources I've found, euphemism is the most common explanation for the shift in meaning. In Protogermanic the word most like gift does mean gift.

Any statistical model is going to have trouble with semantic changes like that.

How could manufacturing a battery and solar cell possibly compete with growing a self replicating plant.

Growing plants isn't always trivial. Especially a plant that you've messed with, so that it fools itself into acting as if it's day because it glows.

Wait... So, God allegedly says "Let there be light", and it's Satan that makes the Sun?

No, before you launch into a long post... to late I guess.

"Lucifer" is an old name for the morning star (Venus). When Isaiah speaks of how Lucifer has fallen from heaven, he referred to a Babylonian king who was nicknamed or identified with the morning star. Although it etymologically can be read as light-bringer, the conflation with the myth of Prometheus is a much, much later invention.

Just because people will criticize you no matter what you do, still it may be the case that the criticism is valid. In the article, Shuttleworth does nothing to defend Mir - he calls it convenient and effective for them, but that wasn't the issue. The issue was why Wayland would NOT be convenient and effective for them.

Wayland isn't primarily a library, it's a protocol, and the big challenge for a protocol is getting people and companies (like NVidia!) on board, not that work has to be duplicated. Realistically, some will choose to go with one and not the other, and that means more wasted effort, whoever "wins" in the end.