I disagree. Calculating age and dealing with dates is well within the slashdot remit of news for nerds! Someone is going to have to alter government databases and write some code to get this done... And some poor developer is going to have to debug it at some point...

I'd settle for TVs that don't have the infuriating "feature" of automatically dimming during dark scenes as the default. I don't know why anyone thought that was a good idea, especially if there is no way of turning it off.

...with a grain of salt!

Koha is the Maori word for a gift or offering. Usually reciprocal in nature.

So you're basically saying, like Obi-Wan, that it depends on "your point of view"?

Is there really anything sinister about this? So they blocked him from running ads. They didn't remove his account. One could argue Facebook could have managed this thing better. But is Facebook obligated to run ads for a directly competing service?

I was hoping for a cowboyneal option myself...

Try lite.facebook.com

This move to add a ribbon doesn't actually matter. Last time I checked, Firefox was written with a free software license. So if everyone hates the new ribbon, there's always the forking option. We can just modify the program to not have a ribbon. Problem solved.

Probably still more dangerous than granite, but fortunately alpha radiation can be stopped by a sheet of paper. Or if you're a bit more paranoid, tin foil would probably do the trick.

Ross Ihaka was my supervisor for my honours dissertation last year. Reading this article was a bit amusing for me. If you asked him for his opinion about R, let me say he wouldn't have written such glowing words about it! He doesn't like being in the limelight all that much either, from what I have been able to tell.

I may have some idea what is meant by the "wanting to create more advanced software" at the end of the article. At the moment he is tinkering away rebuilding the guts of R in Lisp. He reckons if "things were done properly", R would be orders of magnitude faster and more efficient. For example, when fitting a linear model, several copies of the data matrix are made when performing the matrix operations required to find all the coefficients, working out diagnostic matrices, et cetera.

So if anyone out there wants to contribute to R, now would be a good time to volunteer.

This idea would work most of the time...until you tried to check your email from an internet café in Paris...