DISQUS

It's also affecting physical stores. A local Apple shop I was at this morning could not take plastic. My wife encountered this too. The guy at the Mac shop said that Authorize.net had one of its data centers taken out by flooding a few weeks ago. Now this.

The bassist's name is Todd Smallie, who I think should be renamed to Todd Smiley, 'cause every time I've seen him he's had this huge grin on his face.

The problem is that Opera Unite doesn't solve an existing problem: http://www.browserinsider.com/1/opera-unviels-u...

Perché non provi tu stesso? Non sembra particolarmente complesso.

Sarà... però perché nessuno ha commentato la notizia tempo fa (le parole de La Repubblica sono cambiate poco) quando la legge era in discussione? Tutti bravi a commentare ora che "tanto non c'è nulla da fare" e "che cattivoni che hanno fatto così"...

Must have smelled terrific!

What, no comment about how Jedi Barbie got her lunch mixed up with Jabba's? Or that she's really Jedi Mom?

Come on! Your readers are here for the misogyny and fat hatred! How dare fat people and especially fat women have fun and cosplay. You must stop them!

Gezien de download beperkingen is dit concept in België vrij lachwekkend.

Virgin are surprisingly good at that sort of thing - whenever I've had a problem with any Virgin-branded or owned company in the past that customer services hasn't resolved, I've emailed Branson and the group marketing director directly, and it's always been cleared up within a couple of days...

Spontaneous planning for future stone throwing by a male chimpanzee
Mathias Osvath

Planning for a future, rather than a current, mental state is a cognitive process generally viewed as uniquely human. Here, however, I shall report on a decade of observations of spontaneous planning by a male chimpanzee in a zoo. The planning actions, which took place in a calm state, included stone caching and the manufacture of discs from concrete, objects later used as missiles against zoo visitors during agitated chimpanzee dominance displays. Such planning implies advanced consciousness and cognition traditionally not associated with nonhuman animals [1]. Spontaneous and unambiguous planning behaviours for future states by non-humans have not previously been reported, and anecdotal reports, describing single occasions, are exceptionally scarce [2-4]. This dearth of observations is arguably the main reason for not ascribing cognitive foresight to nonhuman animals [1]. To date, the surprisingly few controlled demonstrations of planning for future states by animals are experimentally induced behaviours in great apes [5-7] and corvids [8,9]. The observational findings in this report suggest that these laboratory results are not experimental artefacts, at least in the case of great apes.

Stone throwing toward a crowd of people has an instant and dramatic effect, and was a way to evoke reactions across the water moat that enclosed the chimpanzee. During the first three years during which this male chimpanzee held the dominant position, stone hurling was infrequent. This was probably because the outdoor island compound rarely contained stones immediately attainable in a display. In early June 1997, however, stone throwing increased dramatically, including several throws per display. This prompted zoo personnel to take precautionary measures.

One morning the chimpanzee island was swept, revealing five stone caches containing three to eight stones each, as well as individual stones between the caches, located along the shore facing the public area. Algae coating indicated that the stones originated from the adjacent waterbed (Figure 1). On subsequent days a caretaker placed herself in a blind to systematically observe the chimpanzee's behaviour. On five consecutive days, before the zoo opened, the chimpanzee gathered stones from the water and placed them in caches. Later on each of these days, the stones were used as ammunition during displays (see Supplemental data available on-line for details).

In June 1998, the chimpanzee began to add pieces of concrete to the ammunition (Figure 1). Instead of restricting the stone gathering to the waterbed, he exploited the concrete rocks located at the centre of the island. In a sub-arctic zoo, concrete structures can be vulnerable to water entering and freezing in micro-cracks, partially detaching the surface layer. This is mostly invisible, but may be detected from a hollow sound when knocking on damaged areas. The chimpanzee was observed to gently knock on the concrete rocks, from time to time delivering harder blows to break off the detached surface section in discoidal pieces, and sometimes breaking these into further smaller fragments. These manufactured missiles were often transported to the caches at the shoreline.

Since the initial findings, caretakers have removed hundreds of caches. The gathering of stones has been observed on at least 50 distinct occasions, and the manufacturing of the concrete discs has been directly observed at least 18 times. However, concrete pieces were regularly present in the caches or individually along the shore.

In order for a behaviour to signal planning for a future state, the predominant mental state during the planning must deviate from the one experienced in the situation that is planned for. The above-described behaviour is clearly identifiable as planning for a future state. The chimpanzee has without exception been calm during gathering or manufacturing of the ammunition, in contrast to the typically aroused state during displays (Figure 2). The gathering and manufacturing has only been observed during the hours before the zoo opened, excluding potential triggering from the presence of zoo visitors. The delay between the gathering and the throwing of the stones is typically several hours. The chimpanzee has not been observed using stones or concrete in contexts other than throwing, and the behaviours have not been exhibited off-season when the zoo is closed and visitors are absent (50% of the yearly outdoor period is off-season). The purpose of the behaviours is further demonstrated by the fact that the discovered caches were always located at the shoreline facing the visitors' area; representing less than 25% of the island's circumference.

Planning, involving toolmaking, reveals a cognitive complexity not apparent in laboratory experiments. The production and use of concrete discs have been discovered or invented by the chimpanzee, as it had never been shown to him. The inferential chain, stretching from the detection of concrete hollowness to the offended visitors, comprises a noteworthy range of sequentially ordered advanced cognitive operations. This type of planning with tool making indicates a flexibility associated with mental pre-experience of an upcoming event [1]. The behaviours also hint at a parallel to human evolution, where similar forms of stone manipulation constitute the most ancient signs of culture. Finds as old as 2.6 million years suggest that hominins carried and accumulated stone artefacts on certain sites, presumably a case of future need planning [10].

Supplemental Data

Supplemental data are available at http://www.current-biology.com/supplemental/S09....

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank the three senior chimpanzee caretakers for their time and devotion in the making of this report. I am grateful to Furuvik zoo that allowed research on such an unfavourable issue as stone-throwing animals. Thanks also to Tomas Persson for helpful comments on the manuscript.

References

1. Suddendorf, T., and Corballis, M. (2007). The evolution of foresight: what is mental time travel and is it unique to humans? Behav. Brain Sci. 30, 299-351.

2. de Waal, F.B.M. (1982). Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes (London: Jonathan Cape).

3. Byrne, R. (1995). The Thinking Ape: Evolutionary Origins of Intelligence (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

4. Boesch, C., and Boesch-Acherman, H. (2000). The Chimpanzees of the Taï Forest: Behavioural Ecology and Evolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

5. Mulcahy, N., and Call, J. (2006). Apes save tool for future use. Science 312, 1038-1040.

6. Osvath, M., and Osvath, H. (2008). Chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) and orangutan (Pongo abelii) forethought: self-control and pre-experience in the face of future tool use. Anim. Cogn. 11, 661-674.

7. Dufour, V., and Sterck, E.H.M. (2008). Chimpanzees fail to plan in an exchange task but succeed in a tool-using procedure. Behav. Proc. doi:10.1016/j.beproc.2008.04.002.

8. Raby, C.R., Alexis, D.M., Dickinson, A., and Clayton, N.S. (2007). Planning for the future by western scrub-jays. Nature 445, 919-921.

9. Correia, S.P.C., Dickinson, A., and Clayton, N.S. (2007). Western scrub-jays anticipate future needs independently of their current motivational state. Curr. Biol. 17, 856-861.

10. Osvath, M., and Gärdenfors, P. (2005). Oldowan culture and the evolution of anticipatory cognition. Lund Univ. Cognit. Stud. 122, 1-16.

Lund University Cognitive Science, Kungshuset Lundagård, 222 22 Lund, Sweden.
E-mail: mathias.osvath@lucs.lu.se

"We are planning (me and Jim ) to build the biggest cloud computing project man has ever seen and use it for scientific reasons (something like seti@home but BIGGER), that will fully utilize Erlang’s power and let it run on Clouds (Amazon / Mosso /…) and we are even thinking about trying to squeeze Erlang inside GPU and try a GPU cloud."

Apparently when you were planning "the biggest cloud project man has ever seen - bigger than seti" you didn't think to read yet alone use Reia at all. Reia is interpreted. LFE and Erlang are compiled.

It's obvious you are just day-dreaming and blogging and not doing actual work.

You needed to email Joe about whether it was smart to build your "biggest cloud project man has ever seen" on toy languages? LOL

155-095-728

Thanks for this, been bothering me for ages too.

Actually, if she knew ahead of time and did knowingly infect him then there are legal repercussions. Rihanna might be looking at jail time, or a minimum a VERY steep lawsuit, if Chris Brown decides to pursue it. “Willful exposure” laws typically apply only to persons who have intentionally affected others through unprotected sexual activity. These laws exist in around 27 states. In many states its not just a civil penalty but often a criminal penalty as well. Though they were originally designed to cover STDs that can be lethal, due to the diminished quality of life after infection they can often be broadly applied to all STDs. So he didn't really need to beat her up. He should have just destroyed her career and taken all of her money by pressing filing to press both criminal and civil charges against her. If she did what this article claims, she deserves to be a broke homeless loser, and serve jail time. Beating her was wrong, but she has knowingly destroyed part of his life for no reason other than she is a lying selfish bitch.

I thought the point about Olympic baseball was that the (amateur) Cubans humiliated the (few who remain amateur before selling out) Americans?

And no, of course we don't care about either rounders variant in the UK. I accept that it's misogynistic to a degree that we don't rate women's sports, but ultimately over here 'baseball' (rounders) and 'basketball' (netball) are both definitely for girls. Rugby, on the other hand, is a proper game.

Talk to your advisor, now.

You may be able to drop German and still pick it back up again if the Russian thing doesn't work out, or you may find that withdrawing from German doesn't have as much effect on your transcript as you fear (i.e. you'd stick with German while you petition, and then if Russian works out you withdraw from German at that point rather than fail it)

Thanks. According to their site 7z doesn't handle winzip's PPMd, however Stuffit Expander did the trick for me in this case.

http://sharebrain.info/brainpicks/inspiration/x...

Happy birthday Captain. Hope your glass is full and your cares gone.

Ever since you did that China trip you sometimes come across like a 50 year old virgin who had intercourse for the first time in his life and is now telling everybody how great sex is. Really, have you never been outside the US before? What is so mind bending about China apart from their constant denial of basic human rights which in their opinion don't necessarily apply to Chinese people?

es war einmal.... in der Holzstraße. War ne tolle Zeit!
U

As it was, so it is, and so shall it be. Marriage is the union of a man and a woman. Same-sex unions aren't marriages. Never should have been, and now, shan't be.
So convincingly the petitioners argue that "the state constitution's equal protection clause cannot be set aside so capriciously." So convincingly, if fact, that I began to wonder if they had a point.
Then I ask myself, "Why should what 'marriage' is, 'be set aside so capriciously.'?"

http://www.kth.se/aktuellt/1.20512?l=en_uk

"Paper grocery bags that don´t tear? That may not be too far off thanks to the new nano paper, developed at KTH Royal Institute of Technology and STFI-Packforsk (A Swedish R&D company in the fields of pulp, paper, the graphics media, packaging and logistics). The material, which is tougher than cast iron, is made from nanosized whiskers of cellulose. Furthermore, it is lighter than conventional paper and could provide sturdy scaffolds for growing replacement tissues and organs. The new material recently got a news flash at Science´s online news section ScienceNOW, and has also got attention in The New York Times and New Scientist."

I didn't understand... Is this supposed to be a joke?
This is for douchebags, LOL...