It moderately pisses me off, as I use it as my main RSS/News feeder for both my home and work profiles but whatever. I am also an unashamed Google fanboy/apologist so try to keep it Google as much as possible (yes, I'm that bad!)... I really can't see it taking up huge resources on their side though so this definitely goes on the "annoyed they didn't keep it" pile.

And I was also awarded the VUW Linguistics prize.

First class honours from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.

Linguistics grad here too, and he didn't invent or re-invent anything. He did ruin several generations of thought on language and communication, and his theories have been directly responsible for the wasting of tens, if not hundreds of millions of wasted dollars/euros/pounds/pesos/etc. on thinking and theorising about such preposterous notions as a "LAD". Think of all the trees wasted on his books! The carbon footprint of this guy! FINALLY people are beginning to realise that his theories, if true, mean that it would be relatively easy to mimic in computers. Nothing of the sort has been shown to be true and people are starting to say enough time and money has been thrown away and it's time to start doing some actual science. This dude went beyond what most intelligent people could stomach if faced with the truth of the matter "No, all these obvious examples that clearly invalidate my hypothesis are not a problem for my very scientific theory. In fact, it's fine to have rules that are more suggestions-that-work-some-of-the-time as fundamental rules of nature". WTF!?! I finally started seeing through the rubbish that everyone was spouting after reading some of the work of David R Olson and, of course, the great hole-finder Roy Harris (if you dislike Chomsky's linguistics in the slighest you will have great fun reading this guy tear him a new one!). After reading Olson's "The history of writing" I came to the conclusion (certainly others have come to the same) that the key problem with Chomsky is that he is unable to understand that his theories describe nothing more than the decidedly "unnatural" behaviours and reactions of people who have been taught to read. And not only taught to read but taught to read a language written with an alphabet. He has described nothing more than the way (almost always Western) literate people react to linguistic stimuli when brought up in a profoundly writing-based society. The problem is that even children's and illiterates' views on language are heavily coloured by the omnipresent written word in modern literate cultures. I put this to Olson in person when he was over in my neck of the woods (NZ) and while he wasn't completely convinced, he wasn't unconvinced either :-). I can point to some very interesting literature if anyone's interested. What the generativists have done is turn the greco-roman grammatical tradition into a pseudo-science. And yes after 4 years of linguistics I gave up in disgust and started another degree in IT!

And the cool thing about this is that Arabic has a completely different way of writing numerals and they indeed call this system "Indian" (though they, like the Chinese who also have their own system, very often use the 123 system)! Or the French press which the French know as an Italian coffee maker (cafetière) and the Italians call English (details might be wrong on this one, idea is not).

This is very similar to what was happening in France with mobile network charges. You LITERALLY had a spokesman from one of the three "historical operators" (incumbents, those who actually own physical networks as opposed to virtual operators) say when challenged by a journalist on the margins they were getting - "it's not how much it costs us to provide the service but what the consumer is prepared to pay". Needless to say, the three have been fined many hundreds of millions of euros for price collusion over the years. The result? They paid the fines - it was still far more profitable to pay the fines and continue to charge extortive prices. Then earlier this year the famous "fourth operator" arrived (mobile.free.fr). Overnight they revolutionised the market. People routinely have had their bills halved, or at least have a significant reduction in cost and significant increase in services provided/included (like free tethering, 3x data, unlimited voice, etc. thrown in,). The business model is different - you buy your phone outright (though they do offer rent-to-own which makes the difference pretty small) and there are no minimum contract lengths. There is basically no customer service but the difference here in France between "full customer service" and "no customer service" is pretty small anyway (don't get me started!). All the others have followed suit. The comment made by the CEO of the 4th operator "even at these prices we are still making a very healthy margin". The ONLY thing that matters is proper competition. Whether that happens naturally by a company being prepared to make only reasonable profits (as opposed to ridiculous) or by the government making sure it happens is probably pretty irrelevant. Software is a hard one though - most people are zombies and just use what is fashionable (Windows anyone?)...

Sounds a lot like the Jérôme Kerviel fiasco... "Oh no, we had no idea what the person was doing. He may well have talked about it at length during meetings - our jobs are very complicated and we couldn't possible know what all 4 of the people we manage are doing. That would entail us taking an interest in our jobs when there are clearly far more important things to do like playing golf!".

Linguistics, and socio-linguistics in particular, is one of those fields where "researchers" almost NEVER do true science. I studied it for 4 years and ended up so disgusted that I switched to computing. You can do almost anything with statistics and when one of the basic premises of the discipline is that "exceptions are a normal and expected situation", it's party time. So you can invent a "scientific generalisation", which you will codify with formulae and everything, and then when presented with obvious and repeated examples disproving the "scientific theory" being proposed, you simply say "the exception that confirms the rule". I LITERALLY had a full university professor bust that one out in my presence... It is anti-science. "Linguists" are charlatans. The only truly great linguist is Roy Harris - former chair of Linguistics at Oxford. He was the first chair, and know what he wanted to do at the end of his tenure? Abolish it!

Really you people! US government "enforcement" agencies have never cared a hoot about borders, rights or the law. They have, like a small group of other countries (supported by the US), never respected territorial integrity or international law. The CIA and other organisations have committed extra-judicial arrests, even executions, for decades. Sometimes we find out about it, sometimes we don't. No one inside the US cares - when you get terrorist attacks no one in the US ever mentions this sort of behaviour as a contributing factor. Let's get real - NOBODY hates freedom - it's just that when you insist people behave one way and then do whatever you want, people get fed up very quickly... LulzSec members would all be in Guantanamo (or the bottom of a lake) in a week if there was any real desire for it. They aren't actually causing any real trouble for the moment, so why do anything?

I remember reading something like this as well. I even mentioned it to my Chinese mate once on the phone and he replied "What? Don't be stupid, high speed train is so cheap here it costs almost nothing". He even claimed that often it was cheaper than the intercity buses (or "coaches" if you prefer). Now it's been several years since I've been to China, and my friend (like many) can have a tendency to exaggerate... but I think that the reality is not so bleak for highspeed rail in China. It's very expensive to build and run but apart from that is an absolute godsend. I live here in France, and they have only really made highspeed rail viable by making car/bus travel almost the same price. Massive taxes on fuel and obscenely high road tolls make the far quicker trains attractive. Trains are far less of a hassle in terms of security (less, not none...), generally less stressful, and for anything less than about 700kms are simply quicker than air travel. Sometimes that gets extended to more depending on how easy your airport is to get to. I live in Bordeaux, and even with less than half of the ride to Paris on high-speed rails (so max speed on those bits around 160km/h if memory serves) it only takes 3-3.5hrs (for ~550kms). They are about to start construction on upgrading the rails to high-speed rails all the way, and when that happens I can assure you air travel will drop to pretty much zero. Most people never fly to Paris from Bordeaux - when it takes only 2hrs from the centre of Bordeaux to the centre of Paris, the extra hassle of flying makes it simply non-sensical. What is my point? High-speed rail TODAY suffers many, mainly financial, hurdles in China. Who cares? It is a fabulous investment for the future - it's far, far less carbon intensive and can move large numbers of people safely and quickly. In 15-20 yrs when China's population has enough money to make expensive tickets less of a problem - when they start making road users pay the full cost to the environment and economy of road travel (some say they aren't even there yet in France...), then everything will make sense. Just like US government invested massive money in roads a few generations ago, so the Chinese government is investing now, or will be if rail companies go broke! In the long run we will look back and say "they did the right thing, it looked expensive but look at the advantages now". You'll see...

I'm not sure /. gets anything just for impressions (rather than clicks) but the ads don't really bother me, and as I don't donate and spend lots of time here, I haven't disabled them. My way of saying thanks...

Yes and no... Our company is in the very unenviable position of having only two digits inverted from the support desk of a MAJOR online retailer (not in the US). The worst part? The company in question is one of OUR oldest and dearest customers! People ring up, and are told, "sorry we can't help you". "So you have nothing to do with X". "Well, yes, but...". Then they go on for several minutes insisting that OUR service desk should help them get a replacement Y. And we can't even be rude to them!

http://www.pranavmistry.com/projects/sixthsense/. Note that he says the tech will be open sourced - never did appear though...

Wow, you are being really fair there. MS is 36 yrs old, Apple is 35. Google is... 13. Pretty successful 13 yr old in my view. They also have a MUCH more reasonable business model than Facebook, at least in my view, at least for the meantime.

I bet there won't be many that get that one, cuzzy bro...