"When a guest logs on to Target.com and searches for a particular word, that search includes Amazon.com's millions of books, music and (movie) titles," Target said in its statement. "Target.com is currently working with Amazon.com to suppress certain titles from the Amazon.com catalog from appearing on the Target.com web site."

For a while, Target appeared to be selling marijuana, MDMA, crack, blowjobs, etc. Those have since been removed from Target.com, but Google is apparently still indexing those product searches.

At one point, Target had mirrored Amazon's product pages, which resulted in Target appearing to sell marijuana and an anus constricting book. However, that was FIVE YEARS ago. You'd think that Google would eventually figure out that these products are long-dead, and purge them from their index.

Or does Google keep things around forever? Psychologists have discovered that forgetting old memories is actually useful. Maybe Google should follow suit.

I've used onelook.com for a while, which is another aggregator that (for now) seems to have more links than Google Dictionary does.

But Google Dictionary isn't just an aggregator, they provide their own pronunciations for some words (a really important feature IMHO), and a list of synonyms for some words.

I actually hope that onelook links to Google Dictionary, as strange as an aggregator-linking-to-aggregator might be.

My guess is that Google has been working on computational linguistics for such a long time (stemming has been important for search for a while, and Google lately has started throwing in synonyms to the search results) that it's natural for Google to start exposing some of their internal dataset to the world more directly.

"The Internet is not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it generates more heat and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of boiling water, enormous amounts of boiling water."

From the article:

the counterattack would be controlled by so-called command missiles. ... These missiles would launch first and then radio down coded orders to whatever Soviet weapons had survived the first strike. At that point, the machines will have taken over the war.

From Wikipedia:

these rockets in turn would broadcast attack orders to missiles, bombers and, via radio relays, submarines at sea. Contrary to some Western beliefs, Dr. Blair says, many of Russia's nuclear-armed missiles in underground silos and on mobile launchers can be fired automatically."

That is, it's clear that there's a human in the loop who decides whether to launch the command missiles. But it's not clear that there has to be a human in the loop to fire individual weapons, if those weapons systems were to erroneously conclude that a command missile has remotely ordered it to attack. The US never did this — nuclear weapons always require a person on-site to make the final decision whether to fire.

Good handwriting went away a while ago. Modern doctors can't write either. Having very nice handwriting probably makes your purported doctor's note less credible now.

If fast cursive isn't very legible, then it's not worth keeping as an option. Slow script is much more legible than slow cursive — practically no machine-printed documents use cursive. The only time someone really needs to "write fast" is when they're recording real-time spoken words, and that's what shorthand was invented for.

They'll solve the problem of "how do you download a browser without first having a browser installed?" by providing a minimal front-end whose only purpose is to download a browser:

That screen would allow users to choose from a number of competing browsers, which would then be downloaded and installed on the machine.

To allow this, each browser will need to provide a stable, standard URL that will download the latest version of its browser. Hopefully this can be standardized enough that other OS's can use these stable URLs as well.

View the HTML source, the quotes are actually <i> elements — that is, it's a bug in Slashcode's CSS. The problem is that this bug doesn't occur on every Slashdot page, only some pages. So, likely, when the author composed their message, it was on a page that the bug didn't occur on, so they couldn't have known that it would have rendered so differently on another page.

The buggy part of the CSS page reads:

div.body i{display:block;padding-left:1em;margin:.5em;border-left:3px #ddd solid;font-style:normal;}

Of course there is no reason this is still not fixed (by being able to disable a:visited style)

If the issue were so simple, why has no major browser implemented a proper fix for this yet, despite the fact that we've known about the issue for nine years ?

A:visited is very useful to the user in some circumstances, so it's unacceptable to turn it off for every user in every circumstance. Firefox 3.5 added a hidden preference in case some users want to turn it on sometimes, but that solution doesn't work for 80% of the people out there. Personally, I think applying the "same origin" policy to a:visited is a better solution, but that hasn't been integrated into any mainline either.

Verbing weirds language.

For extra credit: Why can't you "arrow someone"? Or "missile a building"? Or "garage a car"?

What are the alternatives? Carbon-sulfur might be a reasonable option. Silicon-oxygen is a little further out. There are only so many atoms available, and their prevalence is dictated by stars, so that puts a limit on what variations could be possible, and, well, there aren't that many.

They either tend to be dead on arrival or fail at some point many years or months down the line.

The data that Google released from their server farms indicates that the "bathtub curve" isn't shaped anything like what people used to think — infant mortality isn't very significant, and drive failure is more or less random between 2 - 5 years old, during that time, drives don't fail at higher rate the older they get.

The most information I could find is here (the full-size images are pretty large) and here.

It's hard to pick through the information, but is this scientifically viable? Or is this the random musings of an architecture student focusing only on the architecture side, and ignoring the biology side?

This is more like a journalist asking a street bum for information. Sure, you put the blame on the bum for lying, but most people would blame the reporter for asking a bum in the first place, because street bums aren't known for being reliable sources of information.

Also, circular reporting is easier in today's environment. What likely happened is that The Guardian decided to run the story based only on Wikipedia, and after that happened, all the other papers just assumed that The Guardian had done proper fact-checking, and so just copied what The Guardian said. Back then, there were printing press delays, and a newspaper on one side of the globe couldn't just instantly copy-n-paste what a newspaper on the other side of the globe said.