>> 300,000 Canadians in the Bay Area... This represents nearly 10% of the entire population of Canada.

Canada's population is ~33 million, so that would be about 1%, not 10%. Still a surprisingly big number, though.

D'oh. Brain fart. My bad :(

Thats a good point. What if, instead of shutting down completely, wikipedia shuts down for just one day every week (say, each Monday). That way, people will continue using the site most of the time, instead of adapting by switching to some other source (like a website of replicated content), and hence the periodic loss of access will continue to be noticed. Moreover, in the event that the bill passes, wikipedia can comfortably continue protesting, without permanently shutting down.

Hmm, I don't actually think chebyshev applies (in a meaningful way) in this context. 3.5 sigmas refers to the probability of the observation being significant, not the average mass of the higgs. Or did I misunderstand what you meant?

As an aside, there is a typo in the parent's link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chebyshev_inequality

3.5 sigmas refers to the probability of some statistic being as severe as they're observing under a model where the Higgs does not exist. Regardless of the distribution, Chebyshev applies solely by assumption that sigma is a meaningful unit. It may be overly conservative though.

Thanks for the correction. That link worked when I checked...

Well, Chebyshev inequality always applies. It just might not be the tightest bound possible. Unless we know the distribution better, this is the best estimate (tightest bound that's provably correct given the single assumption about standard deviation)

Whenever I read these types of speculative predictions from the past, I always get the urge to chuckle at the things they inevitably missed, or the sillier predictions - but tempered by the ways we have failed to live up to their dreams.

(As an aside: 'strawberries as large as apples' - but how would they taste?)

Do you think you could you link to that bug? I just upgraded to 11.10, I don't have a /run directory, and I did have some boot problems that I worked around. (A google search didn't turn anything up.)

Edit: My mistake, after rebooting, this folder popped right up :)

hmm I upgraded and yes do have it..

did you upgrade from 11.04 or lower ?

And Google news, docs, calendar. Not the Google search pages though, since key presses are intercepted by the search bar.

The new Google Groups also has it. The shortcuts are similar to Gmail's.

Babbage is the name of the blog: http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage

From the description: "The blog takes its name from Charles Babbage"

So I presume it refers to the author.

I second Diaspora; his vivid description of artificial intelligence is worth the read by itself.

Egan's stuff divides evenly into near-future and distant future science fiction; the distant future stuff tends to be very abstract. His latest novel, Zendegi, is a very near-future setting, and coincidentally is a more accessible read than most of his other stuff. I'd recommend it to start with.

I wasn't too keen on Zendegi. About a third of it is how a revolution could happy in Iran next year, and seemed a bit too influenced by the Iranian presidential election protests. I was also annoyed at how it wasn't as hard sf as his other books.

I don't think the claim was that the 'ripoff' icon was literally copied from the original, just that the concept for the site - right down to the concept for the favicon - were copied.

But I salute your sleuthing, none-the-less.

According to Wikipedia, he dropped out of graduate school at MIT.