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