Pigeons are a delicacy in certain parts of the world.

If you ever visit Egypt's country side, you will find that it is dotted by tower like structures, which are actually nests for domestic pigeons. The chicks are "harvested" and eaten all over Egypt, before they fly and the muscles harden.

The same principle holds in Egypt: if you discover anything interesting while digging, you have to report it to the Department of Antiquities. They may take over the site and do a dig, or whatever they see fit.

This is why I know people, from Alexandria, who found Roman era amphorae while digging the foundation of their apartment building just take them home and never tell the authorities.

I myself have seen Roman earthenware come out on a government owned building when digging for a data center power cable. The managers just said keep quiet, otherwise it will delay our own project.

The stuff is not even sold or goes on the black market, it sits in storage at someone's balcony or dumped as rubbish.

The best product of Summer of Code is new contributors to open source projects.

An example from the Drupal community. The current maintainer for Drupal 8 Core, Angela Byron, was a student back in Summer of Code 2005, the very first year it was done.

Another example is the code for installing modules in Drupal 7 Core, which started as a Summer of Code project for Drupal 6.

There are other examples within this community of people who came and contributed and continued to contribute, or established their own consultancies, hence expanding the ecosystem.

Not every project goes to be a big thing, but the as a whole it is termendously useful.

Another benefit is that open source projects get some cash too from Google, in addition to cash going to the student.

Disclosure: I mentored for Summer of Code for several years. I got a T-shirt every year for the years I participated.

Maybe it was breezy in 2005 even ...

Mod the parent up.

Been using Kubuntu on the desktop, and in all servers I managed, be they in house or for clients, since 2006. Never had a dependency problem, nor a daemon problem.

Sent from a Kubuntu 12.04 laptop ...

Herbivore with tusks? That is unheard of!

They definitely do not exist.

This is just more and more balkanization of the North American mobile market.

Why don't we see this "different network, different frequencies" problem elsewhere in Europe and Asia?

We don't have most of these here in Upper Canada.

But being stalked by a cougar is cool. If you survived to tell about it that is. Did you blog it somewhere?

Climate: granted.
Beaches: everywhere, just fresh water. Lookup Wasaga, Grand Bend and Sauble Beach for example.
Multicultural food: everywhere, from Sushi to Vietnamese/Thai, to whatever.
Nice population: I will dispute this one. The beach fights against the Lebanese is not something that happens around here.
Wildlife: not much dangerous stuff here. Only rattlesnake that keeps to itself.
Politics: equally messed up.

That was not his reply to the previous thread. Will wait to see what he says.

Why have you taken steps to immigrate to Australia, rather than Canada?

The largest Egyptian state owned newspaper, Al Ahram, published a spoof Kissinger quote as genuine.

Of course, it plays to the sentiments of some about the revolutions of the Arab Spring are really a foreign conspiracy for chaos and wars, yadda yadda.

They did not even apologize for it ...

If Putin was in the Middle East, he would be a hybrid of Libya's Gaddafi and Iraq's Saddam.

Oracle is not that big a of concern.

There is MariaDB which is data-compatible with MySQL, and has some nice additions (like microsecond performance data), and there is also Percona Server.

If Oracle messes up, like they did with OpenOffice, there will be another version that they cannot touch, like LibreOffice.

Last session I saved had 356 tabs in 5 windows.

Firefox worked fine with that number of tabs as soon as disabled Firebug. Before that, it chewed up so much CPU and memory as Firebug tried to debug every request made by all those AJAX calls.

Oh, and I have NoScript too, and disable javascript and flash except for a few sites.