td

Because up until now, it's working just fine without large cash prizes, I guess.

Just to remark that this seems to only apply to the state of Schleswig-Holstein, or, according to Wikipedia, 2.8 million of ~80 million Germans.

Probably the point was he didn't want to do business with them (at least not anymore after being asked outrageous 10,000$ for the domain).

So, am I the only one here who feels like this is an obvious (and funny) parody? Or are all the "serious" comments critiquing the video/website/C.V. just another level of irony?

Of course they would have the same genes as other humans, just distributed on less chromosomes. For all practical matters, they would be indistinguishable from 46-chromosome humans.

For a minute I thought they were referring to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, in which case this would have been really shocking news (or, more likely, false reporting). This 'Heisenberg limit' seems to be more of a technical issue in quantum measurements (the abstract of the original paper also mentions that previous theoretical work had already hinted at this possibility). Can anybody familiar enough with the subject tell us how impressive this is?

For a more gentle start for those less familiar with functional programming (like myself) I can recommend "Higher Order Perl" by Mark Jason Dominus (also available for free online). The book discusses functional programming techniques in Perl. It has some really practical examples, which make some of the advantages of functional programming very clear. I also find it nicely explains a lot of functional programming concepts, which helps when reading those Haskell texts.

low signal-to-noise ratio if you ask me... I don't understand why this gets upvotes.

I think it should be read as a parable, not a true story.

I think Max, who- or whatever he really is, once stated he's consciously creating some kind of online persona? No idea what he intends to achieve, though.

I don't think we're supposed to believe this is meant seriously. But it's a nice pun on what is probably an all-too common problem :)

On a tangent: I wonder why wikipedia doesn't list the articles on boats by their original Russian names, but uses their NATO calling instead. Now you have the article "Typhoon sub" which is actually about Akula class submarines, and the article "Akula class submarine", which is about a submarine the Russians call "Shchuka".

These discussions are really tiring. First it was "Canonical is not contributing to the kernel", now it's "Canonical is not contributing to GNOME", ... Isn't the point of free software that people can take the code and build whatever they want to build on top of it? The consequence: people can use the code it without owing you anything. Apart from the strictly legal side, there is of course the question of moral behaviour, but even there I don't see the point of the complainers, since

* AFAIK, canonical never claimed to be the driving force behind GNOME development.

* Even if they could be doing more for the upstream development, what is the net harm that canonical is doing to linux? What is keeping people who don't like ubuntu from ignoring it, and going on with their business the way they did back when ubuntu didn't exist?

Constructive criticism is ok, but the belligerent tone of the accusations gives the impression that this is ultimately about hurt egos.

I have a question about this blending effect. In the article, the author writes "If only I'd invented this trick 20 years ago when it really mattered!" But wouldn't this blending have cost a big performance hit, since, to do this with 256 color palettes, you would need to switch to different color palettes very fast, to render all the in-between colors?

Well, it's helpful to keep in mind the main goal here, which is providing young people with an education (and providing society with educated young people), not having the students produce brilliant original work (it's just a school assignment, after all). Being a little more pragmatic, rather than flunking half the students for a prolonged period, probably gets you further.

Of course students need to be thought that plagiarism is not ok, again the question is how to teach them best. The threat of big punishment is not necessarily an effective mean towards reducing "crime". The article also hints at the fact that the cause of the plagiarism is not so much malice, as difficult surcomstances, and a lack of knowledge/skill in students (though the main example around which the article centers, may not give a strong argument for this)

There is no doubt that, in large parts of Congo, people are worse off than they were ca. 1960. But do you seriously propose a return to colonialism as the solution? Because that is what your governor Pétillon remark seems to say... I don't believe such plan could get major support in Congo atm.

My objection is with the after the fact justification of colonialism. Charity was never an objective of colonial efforts, it would be very naive to think otherwise. The fact that the rapid decolonization (which was by no means the end of foreign intervention in Congolese affairs) did not lead to a stable and prosperous independant state, is no argument in favour of colonization either.

I'm honestly surprised of the upvotes these neo-colonial comments are getting.

Can anybody explain how they get the number of five Higgs particles?

If they count one doublet as 4 particles, two doublets would be 8 particles, right?

Sure, growing the pie, and then eating it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_Congo#Colonial_economic...

I don't quite understand how pg's essay applies to the Belgian Congo, is there some specific paragraph you are referring to?

One might say, the Belgians did very well for themselves in the Congo.

> Afghanistan has few mainstream Arabs and very few Africans.

I don't understand what this has to do with it. Do you mean that absence of Africans and Arabs helps in successfully building up a democracy and mining minerals?