I am sure I read this same (or similar) post ... on Slashdot and elsewhere .... .... in the 1990s.......... 2000s ............ 2010s..........

Desktop Linux has always been fine .. but it will never be a Mac, nor should it try to be.

... nothing is.

99.9999% of phone purchasers just want a phone that works (phone and camera) and that can run the apps they want to / already use. They don't care about the OS - unless they are already wedded to it hrough a related app store, cloud storage services / etc. So really, what's the point in this???

This analysis is common knowledge for those who work in machine learning and AI. But given all the money flowing into businesses built around these technologies, the whole topic, and in particular words and phrases like "deep learning" and "cognition" get heavily overloaded / misused to exaggerate what is possible and to confuse discussion around those that are unlikely / difficult / impossible.

Yes you can train ML machines to do amazing pattern recognition. But it is still just pattern recognition: there is no cognition or understanding. None at all.

To know a technology well you really need to know what it is AND what it isn't. Otherwise it's easy to be fooled.

Seaweed is a key component of the ocean ecosystem, providing a safe environment - and indeed a source of food - for other sea life. Mass harvesting seaweed would impact this broader ecosystem, and in unknown ways. At the least it could hurt fisheries. It might be nice to understand this impact before 'seaweed farmers' go out and clear cut huge swaths of seaweed forests!

If you have a publisher already lined up, ask them what they want. Most publishers already have copy editing / print production processes in place, and are very specific about what they want from authors (e.g. what formats for images and graphics, templates for your chapters (often Word), and a style guide for writing, how figures should be referenced, etc. You can then use whatever tools you want, provided they deliver what the publisher wants.

If you don't have a publisher lined up, try and keep your materials in generic and easy-to-changes formats, so you can pour them into whatever format your publisher wants.

Remember, production is all about the publisher - it is not about you.

If you are self publishing, there are lots of web-based self-publishing companies - and they too describe what you need to feed them.

It's really not that hard: read your employment contract, and if you don't understand it, talk with a lawyer. Or better yet, post your employment contract here, and get the benefits of the slashdot community's deep knowledge of contract law :)

This seems very odd.

I can't see Thunderbird 3 coming out before next year, so how can Mozilla put the current official product (TB 2) 'out of support' before release of the next version? Not to mention that customers will need a reasonable transition time to test 3.x in their own environments, before they migrate from 2.x to 3.0, which would call for TB 2 'support' for several months after the launch of TB 3.

Just like with Firefox, for example.

Or is the TB team going to maintain gecko 1.8 solely to support TB 2.0.x until 3.0 is out (and, hopefully, somewhat beyond that)?

That would make sense, but is a big drain on TB resources.

Or is this tantamount to saying that TB is a dead-end product, not worth Mozilla's time and effort??