by zbledl zavisti!

Maybe somebody can invent something that will make slashdot finally support unicode?

If the sampling was done by phone, it is quite possible that it was biased with respect to this particular question, since it is quite possible that people who are more privacy conscious refuse to participate in phone surveys. I did not RTFA, is there an information on how many people were they unable to reach and how many they refused to participate? Did they try to compensate for such possible bias?

I guess that makes sense if your data is so complicated that it actually needs XML, but I would still say that for simple data that can be stored in a simple to parse format like csv or tsv, it is better to keep it separate.

No! Fail! You don't get it!

1) Code is data
2) Code is data that is especially hard to interpret
3) One of the main reasons of all this mess ia that in all those proprietary formats, data is intermixed with code, and the whole mess is very hard to parse.

Data should be kept completely isolated, as far away from code as possible. That way, if you cannot interpret the code any more, you will still be able to analyze and parse the data. You know, it is not that hard to construct a record player.

That is complete bullshit, and you know it! There are many people who manage to eat, feed their families and send their kids to school, an in general make their living while helping what you call the less fortunate. It is hard work, it is often frustrating because it may often seem like it does not make any difference, but it is entirely possible. Of course, you may not be able to afford your huge house, new car, the newest TV and cable, but it is entirely possible to "make a living" that way.

IT is a lot about creativity, abstract analysis, linguistics, and logic. Any applicant with a modicum of these fields of training is significantly more valuable than the Math Guru.

You do not know much about mathematics, do you. Because actual mathematics (the "higher level" math classes that the OP is talking about) is all about creativity, abstract analysis, linguistics, and logic.

The unfortunate paradox of current math education is that the lower level math classes seem to be often specifically designed to kill all creativity, abstract analysis and logic, but that's something I could rant about for pages and pages.

Email, when used right, is a perfect way to have a meaningful conversation. When following proper quoting rules, and when using a decent mail reader that will keep messages in threads, and keep track of quoting, email conversation are very clear, and you can come to them years later, and they still make perfect sense. In fact, you can pick up where you ended, and continue the conversation.

The problem is that for decades, majority of people were using idiotic mail readers that 1) broke headers so that proper threading was impossible, and 2) provided braindead composing interface that could not deal with proper quoting, so majority of people started simply top-posting, instead of carying on a conversation, and email eventually degenerated into the mess that it is today. But with decent mail readers, and with message filtering and multiple, possibly virtual, mailboxes, email can still be one of the best ways to have a conversation on the internet, especially if you want to have the conversation archived for later. And if not, there is nothing easier than to delete the entire thread, or make it so that it gets saved in some mailbox dedicated to unimportant garbage.

What Google is doing now has been around for a very long time: message filtering, sorting, virtual mailboxes, those are all features Unix mailreaders had 15 or 20 years ago. Google is now putting a new user friendly interface, and finally bringing them to the masses.

Actually, what google is doing now is how email was always ment to be read. It is how we read and organized email 20 years ago with procmail and a decent reader like mutt or gnus. Google is just creating more firendly interface on top of it.

It seems lighting isn't the issue, so much as the accusation of image splicing.

Yes, but the image splicing accusation is largely based on the three conversions from raw. If he made a hdr image from a single raw, as he claims, he would obviously have to do several conversions of the same raw file. That would also explain different ELA brightness in different parts of the picture: they came from different conversions of the same raw file, so they were processed differently. Notice that there are several slight halos, for example on top of the building in the background, that would indicate a hdr from raw techique that the author claims he used. In fact, a single raw hdr was my first reaction when I saw the picture.

The only thing left that would support possible splicing is then the lighting itself: the light on the faces is not consistent with the location of the sun. That can easily be explained by an additional (weaker) light source on the left (most likely a reflective surface on the left wall). The hdr processing emphasizes this light in the otherwise dark areas of the picture, which makes it look strange and unnatural, but is still does not prove splicing of several images.

I don't know whether the single raw hdr techique "conforms to the currently accepted standards in the industry", but I am pretty sure I have seen it used in news images before. After all, it does not alter the actual scene in any way, it just emphasizes some parts of it differently.

She made an IED from completely legal components that she bought at a drug store or supermarket. How is that different from your legal BB gun? Besides, there is nothing wrong about IED's. IED's don't kill people, people kill people.

I hoped for a moment that chat applications are finally getting Romany localization.

Anyway, that's similar to what happened to usenet.

I was never questioning the premise that we are very unlikely to meet another species. I was just disagreeing with your assertion that no civilization will ever engage in interstelar travel. I agree that it would be rare, but I am still not convinced that it could not happen.

We are both talking about stuff that we have no idea about. And we both seem to be projecting our own respective cultural biases onto alien civilizations that, as far as we can tell, probably not even exist. I therefore do not see the necessity for presenting a theory how some specific technological advancement would work. After all, a person from 1000 years ago, if confronted with out current tiny technological advancements, would most likely be convinced that "fairies did it".

Energy, or rather work, is the ultimate 'currency'. That's what you always pay for things in, or that is that's what their cost is, which you never pay less than.

Sure, but if you have plenty of it, and nothing to spend it on, it becomes very cheap.

Every civilization, in order to advance, will have to discover new ways of harnessing energy that is available to them. Almost all energy at any planetary system comes from the star. Ultimately, at least some civilizations will concentrate their attention at harvesting energy from the star itself. It could be done in a slow way, so that the energy will last for very long time, or the star can be quickly destroyed and the energy used to get the hell out of there. It seems to me that controlled long time harvesting would be harder. I don't see any reason why some civilization would not choose the other way. And once you have that kind of technology, there is no reason to stop and settle. You can just base your whole existence on going from star to star, using each star to get to the next one. There are only two risks: one that you will accidentally end up at a star that does not have enough energy to take you to another one, and get stuck. Another, that you will run into another civilization, that will attempt to defend their system. Even there, though, the advantage is on your side: they will want to defeat you in such a way that they can keep living on their planets, and will therefore want to preserve the system as completely as possible. You don't care, since you only want to use the systems energy to continue your travel.

Cost in what? Labor? Energy? Time?

What exactly do you hope to buy with this currency? Anyway, you still did not tell me the need to stay. You say you don't see the need to go, I don't see the need to stay.

Finally, there could be very good need to go, if, for example, your star, or some other star nearby, is about to go kaboom.

But why is staying in one place, extracting resources so one can improve his ways of extracting more resources and so on, any more rational than simply moving to where there are some resources, staying for a little, and then move on? You could also ask what reason is there to stay put? Since universe is indeed pretty homogenous, it does not really matter where you are. Once you figure out a way to travel, what reason is there not to do it?