I keep seeing this solution trotted out from time to time on Slashdot, but the reality is closer to the South Park episode, where we a given the choice between voting for a Giant Douch or Shit Sandwich. It's not that we are unwilling to vote for different politicians, it's that there are no different politicians presented to us to vote for.

Too bad it still doesn't work in Seamonkey :-(

If companies actually cared about data privacy, then they would know how to protect it. If they don't know how to protect it, then they only care about *appearing* to care about data privacy.

Actually, Bing-taught kids are learning that there are 13 ;P A search for "number of planets" returns the following quote from universetoday.com:

"For those of us who believe dwarf planets should be counted as a subclass of planets, the latest status is that our solar system now has 13 planets: four terrestrial planets, four jovian planets, and five dwarf planets."

Well, of course you can't make it any darker, there are lights and lens flares everywhere! ;P

Clearly, we just need to do what Eric Cartman did this past season of South Park -- turn the food pyramid upside down :)

Snowpiercer was a lot better than Highlander 2, though. The first of the movie was lame in both movies. The end of Snowpiercer was lame, too, but the middle part of the movie was full of good action and some intrigue, and at least the plot was reasonably internally consistent. I enjoyed the middle of Snowpiercer. Highlander 2, on the other hand, was lame throughout. Highlander 2 was indeed a "really terrible movie", but I don't think I'd use quite that term for Snowpiercer. Only the beginning and end of Snowpiercer were "really terrible" :) Overall, if you like action movies, then I think Snowpiercer averages out to a "mediocre".

Remembering back to some long ago slashdot stories, John Carmack had some interesting comments regarding driver quality in his 2002-02-11 .plan entry:

"My judgment was colored by the experience of bringing up Doom on the original Radeon card a year earlier, which involved chasing a lot of driver bugs. Note that ATI was very responsive, working closely with me on it, and we were able to get everything resolved, but I still had no expectation that things would work correctly the first time.

When I have a problem on an Nvidia, I assume that it is my fault. With anyone else's drivers, I assume it is their fault. This has turned out correct almost all the time."

Sounds like things haven't changed all that much in this respect...

Maybe Woz did at some point write a rant somewhere against OSX, I don't know, but this isn't it. The link you provided is to a rant by a Geoff Wozniak, not Woz (Steve Wozniak).

"There are some who call me... Tim"

Google Maps isn't a good example in this case, due to Google's ever-increasingly bad UI design (sort of like slashdot beta...). With the latest round of changes to make google more smart phone friendly, google maps became more difficult to get to (scan for non-text icon, click, search for another icon in the drop-down, click), rather than just clicking the word Maps that used to be on the top bar. I now find it faster to simply type "maps", hit return, and click the first link, than to try to navigate their more difficult to use UI. For other things, such as Google Scholar, I gave up on trying to find it in the pulldown menus entirely, and have to use google to find its own service in order to use it. So, yes, if I'm using google, and I search for one of their services, then I definitely want the google service as the first link. But this is more due to my working around poor UI design than my desire to determine which Maps site is the most popular.

Along similar lines, I have to use google to search for old slashdot stories, since slashdot search does, and always has, sucked. Same for many other forums. Also many other websites in general, where it can be difficult to figure out how to navigate/find the content that you want. I use google as a workaround to the failings of many other websites poor UI/search design. Google Maps is another example of this, so, at least from my perspective, it's not the best example to use to make your point :)

Sorry, I just felt like ranting against increasingly poor website design, and this post brought that to the surface. Not like anyone besides maybe the original author is going to read this when I'm only getting around to reading the article 2 weeks after if was posted anyways....

A quick google search turned up the following paper

I wouldn't go so far as to say that chicken is the closest living relative to the T-Rex, just that it is the closest in sequence similarity to this particular collagen protein, out of all of the protein sequences known in 2007 (chicken could have been the only bird represented in the database at the time, but I am not going to take the time to look into this).

I just searched the GVQGPPGPQGPR T-rex collagen sequence given in the text against the NCBI nr database, which is pretty comprehensive. It yielded the following Collagen alpha-1(I) chain perfect matches:

Brachylophosaurus canadensis [dinosaur]
Tyrannosaurus rex [dinosaur]

Sarcophilus harrisii [Tasmanian devil]
Monodelphis domestica [Gray short-tailed opossum]

Corvus brachyrhynchos [American crow]
Gallus gallus [Chicken]
Manacus vitellinus [Golden-collared manakin]
Pseudopodoces humilis [Ground tit]
Anas platyrhynchos [Mallard duck]
Geospiza fortis [Medium ground finch]
Acanthisitta chloris [Rifleman]
Columba livia [Rock dove]
Melopsittacus undulatus [Parakeet]
Falco peregrinus [Peregrine falcon]
Falco cherrug [Saker falcon]

So, that's 11 birds, 1 other dinosaur, and 2 mammals (one placental, one marsupial). The list gets bigger if we relax the sequence similarity cutoff. Based on this single fragment of a sequence, we can infer that T-rex is generally more closely related to birds than to mammals or lizards (and no lizards made the top-hit list), since there were a lot more bird matches than mammals (and the lack of mammal hits is likely not due to lack of sampling relative to birds). This is a big inference to make from a single fragment of a single protein, but I'm reasonably confident that further analysis of additional T-rex sequences would strengthen this finding.

If more sequences have been published since 2007, then perhaps we could get a better idea of which modern bird T-rex is most closely related to, but there is no way to determine this from just the single example sequence above. We cannot say with any confidence that T-rex is more related to chicken than to any other bird, unless a much more thorough analysis is performed using a lot more data. Perhaps this has already been done, but I haven't taken the time to hunt for additional literature.

Autonews needs to work on their figure coloring skills. In a related article linked from the one previously mentioned, GA is colored medium orange, which indicates "Uncertain -- No formal legal or legislative challenges are known", when it should instead be colored light orange ("Legally allowed with restrictions on number of cars sold or number of stores"). From the article, it is clear that GA is legally allowed with restrictions on numbers of cars sold or number of stores, and there have clearly been formal legal or legislative challenges. Sad that they can't get their figures to match their own reporting....

If the Debian maintainers / committees are anything like Ubuntu, then I'm not at all surprised. For many years, grep -P didn't work in Ubuntu. It took them *FOUR YEARS* to fix it, with a rather bizarre discussion in the mean time. A core UNIX utility is broken and it takes four years to fix it? The earliest discussed solution, which remained the preferred solution for quite some time, was to retcon the documentation to cover it up! After 7 months, it was somehow demoted back down to "unconfirmed", and it took another 1.5 years after that re-acknowledge it was broken, after many voices of sanity finally prevailed.

After experiencing this level of cluelessness and severe disconnect with reality, I swore off Ubuntu forever. If other Linux distros are anything like the Ubuntu maintainers, I can only imagine what poor reasoning and justifications have been put forward regarding switching to systemd....

In the very early 80's, most channels did indeed not have ads. This did not last long, but I do remember that time. Greedy bastards....