Our ability to change our environment is limited and was even more limited in the past.

• Look at infectious diseases killing those without inborne resistance and you see humans evolving just fine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle-cell_disease

• Also changing your environment, e.g. by starting to herd animals can jumpstart evolution https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactase_persistence

I didn't get the hype about their soup, yet can recommend the whale steak.

Ha! Funnily enough, I thought the whale was awful. I'm guessing you and I should never split a meal in a restaurant.

I wonder if they use some kind of (neural) language model for their translations. Using only a dictionary (as in the text) would be about 60 years behind the state of the art...

With no ill intent: I'm a bit skeptical about software quality / test coverage after finding a bug in the linear algebra implementation - I would not use it for production right now.

I thought it was more fear because control...

It's from 2014 and the launch was supposed to happen 'later this year'.

And it's from March 31.

What do you mean by "pure"? Lack of loanwoards? Lack of any linguistic changes (e.g., sound, meaning) for existing words? Lack of any innovation, i.e. no new words for new concepts/objects? You could try to find some of these things in languages spoken by rather isolated groups. Yet I don't think one should call such a language "pure", implying some kind or (moral) superiority.

Compared to Classical Latin for instance, I can sort of intuitively see how a "purity" comparison might make some sense. The grammar is more rich and precise, suffixes and prefixes attached to primitive roots are more regular in terms of meaning. Meaning is very decoupled from word order, which allows much richer possibilities for rhyme and prose. If the restored pronunciation is anything to go by, then the pronunciation is very regular. Then again I'm not a linguist.

I would say it's like arguing whether Python is more "pure" than Perl. They're both Turing complete, they express very similar concepts but I'd wager most people would concede that Python feels "purer".

Isn't the 'purity' of Latin due more to the fact that we just don't have much data on the languages that informed it? I'm sure Latin borrowed heaps of words and grammar from other languages, but those languages are mostly lost to history now, since the people who spoke them didn't conquer and hold the Mediterranean for one thousand years.

Language purity isn't related to moral superiority; it's a matter of the degree to which a language follows it's own rules and patterns, mostly how much of the vocabulary is native, i.e. how much of the vocabulary is "borrowed" from other languages. Since English is the result of a "forced merger" between a Germanic language (Old English) and a Latin one (Middle French) we are already screwed in that respect.

You forgot your irony tags...

Wanting to force someone to advertise your product and charge him for it sounds so backwards, especially from a right-wing company. I'm happy this terrible excuse for a publisher couldn't get through with it. Will be interesting to see the Bild headlines about it, at the moment they are still busy rallying against unions (e.g. by printing the phone numbers of union leaders).

I've been following this Leistungsschutzrecht development for a long time now and I still can't believe how ridiculous it is or that the law actual passed.

Now, after taking a step back, failing to force Google to pay for providing a service that is much more beneficial to Springer than it is to Google, Bild and Springer try to paint a picture that displays them as the victims in this issue, being bullied by big old Google. It gets more absurd by the day.

Also, this right only applies to Google - if you're DuckDuckGo or any other search engine you're still not allowed to show snippets from Springer media. So they are complaining about Google's market dominating position by strengthening it? Utterly absurd.

Springer and especially Bild are famous for hounding everybody who is not nice to them. Lets see what they do with Google now :o).

Will be fun to watch Google presenting those headlines in the search results.

And I agree, it is a ridiculous fight and Springer is more to blame than Google in this case. But, that's what happens in saturated markets. Its business.

To play the devil's advocate:

- Bild makes money from the online visits.

- Google makes money form the online visits as well.

- Bild actually provides content for Google to generate that revenue.

Why should not Google pay for the content (a percentage of ad revenue generated by the news.google.com would do nicely)?

They don't want Google to be able to buy it. They want Google to be forced to buy it.

If you took ice cream for free that doesn't give anyone the right to force you to buy it.

You’re forgetting Google is a global company. If they get a specific tax on content their simply going to drop the market to avoid such taxes spreading. They might even simply decide to avoid doing business in Germany entirely. Net result a worse compeditor shows up discuraging users and Bild loses even more money.

Does Google News generate revenue? I

In recent Groovy versions you can have type checking or even static compilation by annotating your code.