I think the point is: that has already happened. 97% concurrence among researches is about as close to objective truth as we can get in the postmodern world.

Sigh. I was about to use mod points. ^This is a problem. Postmodernism cannot mix with science (modernism), definitionally. It is no wonder this bullshit can be argued to infinity and nobody can agree. e.g. it doesn't seem to matter to those "pro" that the Roman period was multiple C's hotter globally than averages globally today, or that as another points-out it's nigh impossible to actually falsify this matter; and which people ignore is based largely on models which, even my buddies who occasionally take control of satellite networks as well as one who builds the models as a fundamental researcher, say "are shit"; compare the recent findings that just a few percent (like 1) of peer reviewers with bias can totally ruin the actual usefulness and scientific validity of supposedly validated (reviewed) papers...and a multi-billions-dollar industry of FUD to the politicians and nations and then think of all there is in this for researchers to make out like bandits...and you'll see that yes, this area is not only worth contending in, and criticizing everything...but probably start to suspect that many of the researchers really are full of shit. It's like biologists: if you want money you HAVE to tie it into evolution somehow, specifically a certain strain of the Darwinian theory resuscitated on the back of Mendelian genetics that Darwin himself would have called incompatible (and yes, professors of biology and other well-known researchers have spoken openly with me about this...and don't dare say so publicly: and they're not creationists either, just realistic about what the true believers whose god is science and science tells everything rather than being a transient body of material known barely and always under revision and so says nothing)...

There is not a lot of order in modern science, as it prides itself on being metaphysically incoherent...and it is therefore not science, at least not in the old sense. The best way to forcibly subvert and eviscerate all the bullshitting is to simply require tangible results and discovery of mechanisms...but that also isn't as exciting as theorizing existentially to construct meaning for the school of nihilists.

^And this sort of thing just pisses the scientific community off, which often engages in inconsistent ramblings where on the one time certainty is expressed, then on the other insists we can't know anything. Maybe because certain fundamental of science are theological principles of old, and on the other we wish to reject "mere philosophy" and its speculations in favor of having something tangible...but a "universe" requires unifying principles that...aren't compatible with many things cherished in modern scientifisdom.

Let the flaming commence (and perhaps other philosophically interested folks go on the attack). But speaking as a former formal student of biology...when you hear "evolution" you have to respond with, "define" and "define strictly, and don't apply to facts and processes and matters known or supposed that can be explained in other terms, e.g. selection mechanisms...and you'll quickly find much of the evolutionary community consists of bullshitters who are believers because mama and papa weren't religious nutjobs who burned them...but ingrained a deep seated pathological need to believe and have...a unifying principle.

Similarly, "climate science" (--another abuse of "science" usually preceding "says") is right now full of would-be saviors who truly believe in their mission...not actually in being gnostic-like searchers for what is the reality based on experimental analyses and proper metaphysical synethesis in order to produce a clear picture, and usually the only response to this^ is "the complexity is too great!!!" But of course so is all the crap Einstein summarized in his famous E= equation. The notion of elegance through abstraction is more lost on us all than most people, I think, realize.

Contact your consultate or embassy and make an international incident from it: the more shit my government takes--at every level--for its increasing corruption and corroding society and culture (and mores, and...) the better.

Maybe some Mayans ignorant of English insist on that, but "Mayan" like "Polynesian" or "Hawaiian" or "German" or "Anglican" et cetera is the proper way of adjectivializing "Maya". You can have "the Maya" or "the Mayan People" but not "Maya People", "Mayan language" but not "Maya language". You can even have "the language of the Maya", but note, not "Maya" as adjective. Sorry. Welcome to English. cf. https://www.google.com/search?q=mayan+language

Your science is dated. That old thought about DNA having a ton of junk was based on an absence of evidence: there was on the one hand "the central dogma" (that actual term used in science and, as my genetics professor put it, still about the best had) that DNA-->RNA-->protein, and thus it was assumed we could cause transcription in a tube and if no protein resulted, it was assumed "it must be junk; evolution demands it!!!" But then animals started dying when experimental gene therapies targeted "junk" for insertions. Then incredibly powerful detection techniques started finding that pretty much every region tested would produce some kind of useful RNA (though the tricky part is that we can't really understand the epigentics and regulation well enough to be sure of results or that we are actually finding everything that would/could be produced in vivo). Then new principles were discovered, such that DNA transcripts aren't location-bound of a parallel RNA corresponding to the codons of DNA, but that transcribed RNAs are edited; then more were found that transcribed RNAs can actually be edited in multiple ways to produced very different products; then it was discovered that DNA itself can be read from different frames to produce altogether different transcriptions just by starting at different points...the genome as we now understand it is ULTRA efficient and polysemic along any given length or approximate area, and what people don't seem to get about "evolution" is that it would not predict "that sequences good at replicating themselves would accumulate...": that's an abuse of "evolution", which is misplaced: the mechanical processes known to act on DNA would predict that is possible. What is observed is that in a given organism the DNA extant is usually useful for something and that changes may/not break some useful in favor of another, which may/not be be an advantage/disadvantage for the individual in a given environment (under certain conditions). Disclosure: I actually had to leave my biology studies (got very sick and haven't had the opportunity to return). I studied these kind of things under Karoline Luger at CSU, an amazing genetics mind (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karolin_Luger), among others.

What's with the "junk" theorizing about "junk" being "not necessarily junk" for evolution? And the "junk" assumption that the "junk" need be explained in terms of evolutionary dependence on "junk"? The "junk" in the human genome has been mentioned, http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3745175&cid=43712851, to contain segments with products for transcription etc., e.g. the ribosome is a ton of RNA (plus proteins), (and the other molecular factory machinery/parts aren't all proteins, but include a bunch of RNA), but RNAs are also products in and of themselves for purposes beyond protein synthesis. RNAs are known, for instance, to be produced and refined, self-assemble into structures with enzymatic, then be transported to locations where they can be put to such work. Heresy as it may be for a biology guy to say so, I am much opposed to "tie everything amphorously to evolution and use some correlational research to show how this or that contributes/detracts from fitness during selection then profit!!!" (grant money) when the much harder, i.e. real, science of finding what actual mechanisms and material functions this crap is involved it of far more interest, practicality, is more revealing, and more honest science. In a word, it's testable with results leading to reproducible, testable experimentation and knowledge that humanity can then put to good use for other ends. "Evolution" becomes this useful catch-all word/concept/thing for lazy science and scientists looking for money, an explain-all rather than the philosophical concept that it is which seeks to describe things in rather...metaphysical terms. Avoiding that laziness requires, I don't know, actually discovering real functions and processes rather than all the statistical-correlational crap that we're inundated with today, which used to be a means not for inferring material to concoct historical science, but to pour over large sets of data to find indications as to where we should research next to discover the next new mind-blowing/understanding-shifting/world-altering thing. The theorizing is nice, but it's still not hard science, even though by piggy-backing on hard things known it may be presented as such.

To all those naively posting that this is evidence of "legitimization" of bitcoin, it should be considered that most governments also tax illegal transactions (when they can't prove it illegal by the standards of court, though they know such activity is going on, so they just prove income): it's not what is being sold or traded, but what they can define as incomes and then demand, on that basis, a cut. Never mind that they're insolvent, control that money supply, print it with interest and add it to "public" (your) debt, and so on.

It's "capital" gains. ; )

So it crushes any kind of hope for new start-ups that don't sell all to the VCs and established players...but that's just an ancillary benefit/distraction to the real point: of necessary consequence this would mean the sellers would have to be compelled to become involuntary informants (unpaid and, in fact, burdened in the process monetarily and otherwise) to the States (at the least). But of course http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3671075&cid=43511821 nails it.

Some years ago I remember reading reports from the research projects which seek to create scanning and interpretation tools which those who are paralyzed, seemingly catatonic (or "vegetables"), and others with severe restrictions in mobility and ability to communicate, can use to communicate with the outside world by manipulating existing computer interfaces and tools. This kind of work was growing magnitudinally and then one day (in any given project) they hit a wall while those used to test the work (who are happy to gain the ability to engage the outside world) mysteriously begin to make the tool do things it is not programmed to do. Apparently, without realizing it they start exploiting bugs to trick the algorithms in use to perform new behaviors, and this means that the researchers attempting to learn more and implement new functions and features have no way of discovering many of the yet-unknowns necessary, which is really bad because the users can't do anything imaginable with bugs, and neither does every user discover the same exploits.

There is no reason to suspect that a project attempting to map a dynamic system as complicated as this will not also hit some seemingly insurmountable walls, as the brain itself perhaps begin exploiting whatever tools are used to probe it: it's an interactive system, after all, which means we need something more like a meta-analysis probe to observe the system in play, rather than ways to interact with it directly. At least, that is, if we're seeking to understand rather than just manipulate it, but even then it manipulates back...We should get more specifics about what projects, exactly, are to be funded; how closely allied they are to this politician and his other cronies vs. how eminent and meritorious they are, and how they intend to deal with problems like the aforementioned, before doling out anything to them.

What I find truly interesting, however, is that given the servers are on U.S. soil (right?), and we have an extraterritorial law protecting first amendment rights (the Bill of Rights is written to apply to human beings btw, not citizens only--key), I wonder if this means that the action constituted an official attack on an American organization? If I was Wikipedia I'd lawyer up (with really good lawyers who can beat politicians' or judges' equivocations to try and dismiss such a case as an international embarrassment) and drag the Frenchies' asses into American court to score one for liberty against governments gagging people stupidly (and set a nice precedent to apply against our own here). I actually know some realy good frickin' lawyers (one with no losses), so I'm off to write a letter asking about this...

Problem with the scenario: the patents themselves are meant to benefit society through "advancement of the useful arts and sciences" (--quoted from memory so check), and they aren't property (though the legal priesthood likes to assert more and more that ideas can be rented) but limited monopolies on production authorized by the Constitution and subject to the dictates of Congress: I doubt therefore that they would count as property, they're tyrannies: I would say that Congress could probably just amend legislation and revoke the patents, given the language of the Constitution, but maybe not so easily or so simply due to that same language. --B

If Canonical is successful at duping (IMHO) a bunch of companies to buy into their (increasingly crappier, unstable, unreliable, less productive--IMHO) technology, I mean "vision", and Canonical is using Mir, then I hope KDE would start working to support it. There have already been statements, however, that a single-distribution, reduced-functionality package like Mir, will not be supported

Third question: Will KWin support Mir? No! Mir is currently a one distribution only solution and any adjustments would be distro specific. We do not accept patches to support one downstream. If there are downstream specific patches they should be applied downstream. This means at the current time there is no way to add support and even if someone would implement support for KWin on Ubuntu I would veto the patches as we donâ(TM)t accept distro-specific code. If Mir becomes available on more distributions one can consider the second question. Given the extreme success of Unity on non-Ubuntu distributions Iâ(TM)m positively optimistic that we will never have to do the evaluation of the second question.--http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2013/03/war-is-peace/ (other statements and restatements on this blog)

As an aside, given that the general consensus let's-all-pretend-to-get-along ego-fest that is FOSS, I can't blame Canonical for increasingly going its own way, given it wants to succeed on the consumer desktop (not business/corporation like the other guys), so I give them props for at least being (if arrogantly) gutsy about hoping to develop all this hyper-complex stuff on their own. In other news, I just discovered arch-for-newbs, or "manjaro" (http://manjaro.org/); though it's dual-monitor support is troubled, it's so light, quick, and customizable, that I'm definitely putting the tech-retarded folks I support on it the next time they kill a computer or get a new one. A few years ago I found Xubuntu to be excellent for the general end-user, and with the right tweaking this could be too. : D I love (and hate) FOSS!

We have a right to cheap CLEAN energy, not just cheap energy.

Bullshit. Why were you given any modpoints? There is no such right, and Energy has never been "clean'--even those damn solar panels require a ton of waste and dirty stuff before they go into production. Your own friggin' body produces a ton of shit (literally!) to make and then use energy. Put another way: you have a relative right not to be unduly harmed out of negligence or willful knowledge of harmful consequences of actions taken anyways, without serious efforts to mitigate them.

They let people get away with amazingly evil misdeeds before they take action.

Like breathing out a pollutant (CO2). Let's put it another way: the EPA is just one among a number of tools used by the politicians to beat at oponents and score points with the dickheads who vote them in (left or right), even if it means (logically implying if not explicitly saying) that you shouldn't have a right to exist, the politicians and their tools will do it, when it becomes convenient. I am all for forcing these companies to come clean, upgrade the plants, patent (and disclose) the chemicals and even--dare I say--be checked every time they're pumping these down into the ground, whether the compositions reported matched what's actually going in there, and then...extracting it all back out, washing the damn caverns and, I would hope, replacing the extraction with SOMETHING to stabilize the geology which (1) would be opposed to hell (2) cost a lot more for them (3) be passed along to consumers, but...would mean less crap seeping into the water for everyone, for subsequent generations...but let's not pretend the EPA is benign. No government agency is--the administrative branch, in fact, is actively hostile, and I say that despite living with a Fed.

I don't know about that: PC Gamers are some of the most dedicated, high-spending enthusiasts around. Even as a niche, they're a big chunk of change, and I wouldn't want to get constrained by the consoles either. The Tegra stuff is also very interesting, and given that Smartphones and Tablets are expected to simply continue growing in computing marketshare--perhaps not altogether where PCS and laptops have been the traditional workhorse, but emerging markets where that expense can't be justified--it is not necessarily a bad way to go. Others here mentioned that this "big deal" could be a real ring around their kneck, so I don't know that this is petulance as much as "oh gee, everyone who has cared to keep an eye on trends in business history knows not to over-dedicate themselves to one or another project; we can also be assured of decreasing margins and of our fabs being locked-up in old technology, we'll pass."