Excellent point. What they seem to have is a high capacity centralized permissioned ledger. The challenge is to get a high capacity decentralized permissionless ledger. Shameless plug: I really like Radix in this space. Even has the right suffix :-).

KDE 4 supported different wallpapers on virtual desktops but so far I've been unable to achieve this in Plasma 5. You can have a different wallpaper for each Activity but that's not the same as having this for a virtual desktop.

Yes, this seems to be problematic. The developers are aware of these (see this as well) but it'll take some time to fix the problems.

AFAICT it's not possible to assign a wallpaper per virtual desktop using activities. What activities give you is a wallpaper per activity. I like virtual desktops.

Still can't (won't?) do this. And as for Activities, "We don't need no stinking Activities."

What kind of results will falsify the standard model Higgs - indicating that different theoretical approaches must be considered.

Here's a good introduction to the Higgs boson and why it matters.

Thought this already happened. In any case, Tomi Ahonen has a long, detailed, analysis. Too long for me to read, sorry.

If your real field is machine learning, it won't matter if the dept. is Biology or CS as long as you publish in machine learning conferences and journals (NIPS, ICML, Neural Computation, JMLR). When you're done, you should be able to get a postdoc/faculty/research lab position strictly based on your machine learning credentials because this is a hot area right now. OTOH, if you didn't actually work in machine learning but instead applied machine learning ideas in biology, then it is possible that you'll only get a job within biology. If this is the case and you want to switch to more standard CS/CE, do a postdoc for a year or two in the field of your choice.

I wouldn't be surprised if Nokia maintains legacy dumbphone support (on Symbian) for a while until the developing nations can be switched to smartphones (or when low end smartphones can run Windows Mobile 7 which should happen in a few years). On the other hand, I think MeeGo on smartphones is cooked since Microsoft is no Amigo (when it comes to linux + Qt). As others have speculated, this is very bad news for the Trolls since they will probably be turned into zombies. I would not be surprised to see Intel buy the Qt division and pursue MeeGo for in vehicle infotainment which is where MeeGo got its first win (via the GenIVI alliance).

This ex-Nokia executive's blog makes for interesting reading.

I have an Indian background and have long given up trying to argue against astrology with Indian friends and family who are into it. This got me thinking about culture wars and whether or not the modernity versus tradition battle manifests itself as a different culture war in each culture. I wonder if a list could be worked out for different cultures. Came up with three examples so far.

US: science versus ID/creationism
Turkey: secular people versus Islamists locked in a battle for power
India: science versus astrology/homeopathy/
The rest?

Western Europe seems to be an exception.

"I'm curious: is that teacher still working?"

Yes. This is because she's considered a good teacher in everything else and it's very, very difficult to get good school teachers these days.

When I discussed this issue with some of the other teachers, the general sense is that they feel intimidated/threatened. There's a weird combination of victimhood and strident aggression that's very hard to confront. My sense is that most teachers back away and try and defuse the issue. For instance, one school teacher now has every student submit ten arguments for and against evolution.

My wife is a middle/high school teacher and is teaching evolution in 8th grade as we speak. The other day, a student confronted her in class and said, "You may have come from a monkey but I certainly didn't." This is a charter school here in Gainesville, FL (where we also try burning Qurans every once in a while).

You would think that the situation is better in a magnet school. Nope. In one of the magnet schools here, the teacher flat out refused to teach evolution claiming that it went against her beliefs.