Americans don't have the guts for sushi. At least that's the implication of a new study, which finds that Japanese people harbor enzymes in their intestinal bacteria that help them digest seaweed--enzymes that North Americans lack. What's more, Japanese may have first acquired these enzymes by eating bacteria that thrive on seaweed in the open ocean.

The main module, Lingua::EN::MatchNames, exports one function by default: name_eq(). You can either feed it four parameters:

name_eq( $firstname0, $lastname0, $firstname1, $lastname1 ) or two (thanks to Lingua::EN::NameParse, which breaks full names into their constituent components):

name_eq( $name0, $name1 ) and it will return a certainty score between 0 and 100, or undef if the names cannot be matched via any method known to the module.

Humans are too stupid to prevent climate change from radically impacting on our lives over the coming decades. This is the stark conclusion of James Lovelock, the globally respected environmental thinker and independent scientist who developed the Gaia theory.

...

"I don't think we're yet evolved to the point where we're clever enough to handle a complex a situation as climate change," said Lovelock in his first in-depth interview since the theft of the UEA emails last November. "The inertia of humans is so huge that you can't really do anything meaningful."

One of the main obstructions to meaningful action is "modern democracy", he added. "Even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while."

Clause 15 of the draft Bill, as reported back from the Commerce Select Committee, lists a number of classes of invention which should not be patentable and includes the sub-clause “a computer program is not a patentable invention.”

It is common to argue that intellectual property in the form of copyright and patent is necessary for the innovation and creation of ideas and inventions such as machines, drugs, computer software, books, music, literature and movies. In fact intellectual property is a government grant of a costly and dangerous private monopoly over ideas. We show through theory and example that intellectual monopoly is not necessary for innovation and as a practical matter is damaging to growth, prosperity and liberty.

In today's brave New World, "the new economics of digital distribution mean that we no longer need to shape our copyright law in ways that disadvantage creators vis-à-vis distributors unless we want to," writes Litman.

So, how do you quadruple the size of your engineering team in one month and still keep everyone productive?

Nu släpper Sveriges Radio ett öppet api som gör det enklare för dig som vill använda vårt utbud i en egen applikation eller radiosajt. För oss innebär ett api att vi tillhandahåller xml-baserade tjänster som är lätta att programmera mot.

New information uncovered by Silicon Alley Insider suggests that some of the complaints against Mark Zuckerberg are valid.

It also suggests that, on at least one occasion in 2004, Mark used private login data taken from Facebook's servers to break into Facebook members' private email accounts and read their emails--at best, a gross misuse of private information. Lastly, it suggests that Mark hacked into the competing company's systems and changed some user information with the aim of making the site less useful.

No moment in technology history has ever been more exciting or dangerous than now. The Internet is like a new computer running a flashy, exciting demo. We have been entranced by this demo for fifteen years. But now it is time to get to work, and make the Internet do what we want it to.

-- DAVID GELERNTER is a professor of computer science at Yale and chief scientist at Mirror Worlds Technologies (New Haven). His research centers on information management, parallel programming, and artificial intelligence. The "tuple spaces" introduced in Nicholas Carriero and Gelernter's Linda system (1983) are the basis of many computer communication systems worldwide. He is the author of Mirror Worlds, and Drawing a Life: Surviving the Unabomber.