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Even Google doesn't guarantee there won't be trouble with patents.

As others have mentioned, neither does MPEG-LA. And after you've paid MPEG-LA for an H.264 patent license, you can pay AT&T for an additional patent license. And after that, you can pay Philips/Sisvel for an additional patent license. And who knows who will be the next one to come knocking at your door...

We were doing this in the US in the 50's and 60's http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_rKvAmdl5y-8/S7H4Q7hQ3vI/AAAAAAAACu8/mWciGP9Xw3w/s1600/Tapeworms.jpg 20 years from now the Chinese will be taking green tea extract pills and wondering why Americans only drink loose leaf organic tea from mexico.

So, I guess Napoleon Dynamite was a terrorist

You are exactly Correct.
This article specifies what Andorid keeps and why these are kept.

Last 50 cell towers, and last 200 wifi routers seen (not necessarily connected to). It does not keep a running computation of your exact position, and it truncates what it does keep. And it does not transfer this data to google in any identifiable way. (Google does crowd source traffic data from cell phones using Google Maps)

In a big city/urban area, you might truncate you cell towers seen list in a couple hours, as you commute past dozens of towers each day.

Of course once you fire up search (either on Android or IOS) you are transmitting that info to the search engine, (google or bing) if you enable local searching capability.

How would the change in the fragmentation pattern be glaringly obvious? I don't think they're going to create a complete image of every hard driver entering or leaving the country. Or the carrier might just bring a drive bought inside the country, etc etc.

I agree that it's largely artificial, though; with capacities in the sub-gigabyte range, transmitting the data via the internet or a cellular link is going to be much easier than physically carrying around drives. Most places that have tourists going in also have internet access that, while it might be censored, is easily "free enough" to anonymously get dozens of megabytes outside the country. There are notable exceptions, though; North Korea has no public internet access, and only a handful of tourists who get their cell phones confiscated upon entry. Some people did manage to get a digital camera into (and back out of) the country, though. Hiding stuff on a suitably large SD card in plain sight among a couple thousand jpegs could be useful, mostly because that means you probably will get easily out of the country even if you're caught (sans camera+sd card).

Response to sig: any sports fan should be capable of building and installing an HD antenna in about an hour. http://uhfhdtvantenna.blogspot.com/ So unless they really like the feel of Comcast's fist up their ass, there's no reason to stick with cable.

yeah, like that chicago squad that murdered the peace-broker Fred Hampton in his sleep, and then smugly smiled about it, evidenced in this photo.

I'm down to start my own police force to police the outta control police forces. Anybody with me? Haha... and we'll all be dead before we know it.

Yup, further analysis is needed to confirm it is the Higgs or something completely new. The Resonaances blog has good speculation cover as usual.

This is the default galaxy S i9000 homescreen vs the apple home screen. Absolutely identical, aren't they.

They used icons! Unfair! That's our Thing!

I doubt you have more then a passing interest in Canadian politics and Canadian/US relations. The liberals have been chipping away at Canadian social programs after Trudeau. The privatized national debt to foreign bond holders was the whole reason Bob Rae could not keep his promises regarding social spending (this is documented in the ohcanadamovie by elizabeth may on record but there are also other official sources besies may that also say the same thing).

A good place to keep up on the bs of the right.

http://pushedleft.blogspot.com/

Here is a history of the right in Canada and it's a long read...

http://harpercrusade.blogspot.com/

Another good book for you would be George Grant's lament of a nation.

http://www.amazon.com/Lament-Nation-Canadian-Nationalism-Anniversary/dp/0773530029/

I doubt you have more then a passing interest in Canadian politics and Canadian/US relations. The liberals have been chipping away at Canadian social programs after Trudeau. The privatized national debt to foreign bond holders was the whole reason Bob Rae could not keep his promises regarding social spending (this is documented in the ohcanadamovie by elizabeth may on record but there are also other official sources besies may that also say the same thing).

A good place to keep up on the bs of the right.

http://pushedleft.blogspot.com/

Here is a history of the right in Canada and it's a long read...

http://harpercrusade.blogspot.com/

Another good book for you would be George Grant's lament of a nation.

http://www.amazon.com/Lament-Nation-Canadian-Nationalism-Anniversary/dp/0773530029/

Well, they're arguing that
a) samsung galaxy hardware look too much like the iphone/ipad. Cos, it's rectangular with rounded corners. And black, both high original apple features that only they did first.
b) samsung's 'touchwiz' user interface (as opposed to the standard android one) looks too much like iOS. Cos the 'app drawer' shows all installed apps in a rectangular grid. Which no-one would ever have thought of until apple did it.

Given samsung supplies apple with their screens and cpu's, it seems they want to stop their supplier well, using their own stuff and stay just as a parts supplier, not a competitor. That they have to use laughably generic look-n-feel patents to do it shows how baseless the accusation is.

This is the default galaxy S i9000 homescreen vs the apple home screen. Absolutely identical, aren't they. If you picked one up, you'd never be able to tell them apart, they're *that* similar.

I hear they're going to sue nokia next because they sell 'phones', which is a trademark infringement of apple's unique name, iPhone.

From http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/2011/04/april-20-2011-fukushima-review-of-ines.html:

On April 17th the same site had the following radiation levels recorded for units 1-3:

        Reactor 1
        Dry Well: 121.4 Sv/hr
        Suppression chamber: 97.5 Sv/hr

        Reactor 2
        Dry Well: N/A
        Suppression Chamber: 131 Sv/hr

        Reactor 3
        Dry Well: 253.2 Sv/hr
        Suppression Chamber: 103.9 Sv/hr
So that's going to take a while to cool off.

I'm trying to take your comment as genuine Arterion, although it is difficult.

We kill some 56 Billion* other humans each and every year, for our pleasure and/or profit? I don't think so. I'm not thrilled on "sweatshops", however that is in no way similar to what we do to other animals, who have no choice whatsoever, who are indeed locked inside their confinements, be it by a gate, a wall, a cage or what have you, to await their miserable deaths.

Who decides where we are classified? Did Chickens invent some "food chain", and put us at the top of it? Do they justify "the way the world is" by this image they've concocted? Or do we tell ourselves this, with a design of our own invention, "conveniently" placing ourselves at its pinnacle? :-)

Sociologist Roger Yates has an interesting podcast and blog on this issue, http://human-nonhuman.blogspot.com/

Yes, other animals do indeed kill and eat the remains of further more animals. They also do *many* other things you and I would consider unethical, yet we do not use "all the other kids were doing it!" as an excuse for polygamy, incest, murder etc. If we are indeed capable of caring for others, does that not become an obligation? Is an adult not obligated to care for a child? Lets say, you're driving your car past a school, and some idiot child runs in front of your vehicle, oblivious. Are you obligated to *attempt* to stop, to avoid them? Or, is it "shit happens", with no course correction ethically obligated on your part? Are we to instead ACCELERATE, knocking them into the back of our "ute" (in American, "pickup truck")? I dont think so, I dont think you would either.

I do not believe in a "mother nature".

I would again suggest Professor Gary Franciones "Abolitionist Approach" website, http://www.abolitionistapproach.com/ , his podcasts and articles are fantastic, his work is often published in American media, such as his "We're All Michael Vick" piece from a few years ago, why are we so concerned about a rich African American who made dogs hurt one another, when we believe in harming and killing many billions of *other* animals each year? Why do we hold a moral worth on the life of dogs, yet not pigs?

http://articles.philly.com/2009-08-14/news/24986151_1_atlanta-falcons-quarterback-vick-illegal-dog-dog-fights

If its not crass, can I shamelessly plug my own podcast? My last episode was about American tv shows coming to New Zealand to record, tying this into perceptions given by television, using clips from many episodes of King of the Hill, as related to Animal Rights. Finally, I wrap up the episode with Barbara DeGrande, the founder of Animal Rights and Rescue North Texas, to ask about Texas stereotypes portrayed via TV, aware to those living at the bottom of the world, and of promoting Veganism in Texas.

http://www.invsoc.org.nz/2011/04/episode-52-new-zealand-diet-where-you.html

Best wishes Arterion! *56 Billion land animals killed each year, 2007 FAO figures, PDF here http://bit.ly/56billion

If you bought any of those for students, you should be fired.

Viewsonic gTablet?

http://www.laptopmag.com/review/tablets/viewsonic-g-tablet.aspx

Velocity Cruz?

http://tabletconnect.blogspot.com/2010/11/velocity-micro-cruz-tablet-t104-review.html

Superpad?

Couldn't find a review....

Archos 7?

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2364818,00.asp

Here's a thought: AT&T should upgrade their network.

Jebus, does nobody around here actually research anything before they post on it?

It turns out that AT&T has spent and is spending many billions of dollars on spectrum and equipment and backhaul for upgrading their network. So is Verizon. So is Sprint.

All the big cellular carriers in the US spend tens of billions of dollars every year on their network. I know everybody on Slashdot prefers to imagine them as Uncle Scrooge McDuck on his money lake or something, and but for whatever reason you choose to hate them (there are many) lack of network upgrade investments is not one.

These types of problems seem, as far as I know, to be typical of "reports" and "studies" from Greenpeace. They translated and edited a 'study' a year or two ago, which they somehow got the New York Academy of Sciences to publish, about the long-term Effects of Chernobyl.

There's been lots of research done on the long term health effects caused by Chernobyl, most of them finding relatively few deaths and cancers after 25 years. The U.N. Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation reviewed and summarized all the best science they could find, coming to the conclusion that there were and continue to be very few deaths and additional cancers as a result of the Chernobyl accident.

Since that doesn't give the results that Greenpeace wanted, they *commissioned* this report which comes to the conclusion that Chernobyl is responsible for 1,000,000 deaths and counting. While I've not read it (it's pretty expensive - like $250 or something ridiculous, to get access to it, and I refuse to give Greenpeace that kind of funding), a number of scientists have reviewed it, and found that the report itself *specifically* repudiates standard scientific procedures because they don't give the results that the authors wanted to find.

For examples, see this article, in particular, the section "Ignoring Science", which details some of the ways in which the "NYAS Study" (which Greenpeace folks cite all over the place in online discussions - I've seen no less than 10 citations in all sort of online discussions at well known News sites, etc, and, which, by the way, the NYAS has said they have not reviewed and make no endorsement of the "study", but they just publish it for reasons that nobody seems to be clear about - I haven't been able to find an explanation/justification for how the decision was made).

So, I think it should be standard policy to ignore 'studies' and 'reports' from Greenpeace, because they try to make scientific claims, while simultaneously ignoring standard scientific process in coming to conclusions, so their results are therefore unscientific snake oil.

Hopefully this will finally get the big companies to realize the current absurdity in the patent system

Google already knows: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/patents-and-innovation.html

As what I would consider a medium-weight AWS user (our account is about 4 grand a month) I am still quite happy with AWS. We built our system across multiple availability zones, all in us-east and had zero downtime today as a result. We had a couple of issues where we tried to scale up to meet load levels and couldn't spin up anything in us-east-1a (or if we could, we couldn't attach it successfully to a load balance because of internal connectivity issues), but we spun up a new instance in us-east-1b and attached it completely fine and were able to handle the load just fine. The load balancers worked as expected (and hoped for) and the segregation of issues between availability zones was fairly successful.

I think that fixing these issues are just as high an issue with Amazon as they would be with any internal IT infrastructure, so I don't give much credence to the arguments that having your own servers and your own internal IT team would truly solve the problem any more effectively: I think it just gives you more the illusion of control because you can see that you're working on it, as opposed to trusting to the fact that Amazon is working on it.

If there is any AWS lesson to be taken away from this it is that:

1) EBS may not be ready for prime time - most of our servers are instance-store anyway, both for performance reasons and for other reliability problems we have had in the past.

2) You should keep your server templates set up as up-to-date AMIs so you can deploy across any availability zone you want at any time you want. Right now, we have our load balancer attachment configuration all scripted as well, so spinning up new instances to feed a cluster is a single CLI execution with us specifying the availability zones.

Check out http://perfcap.blogspot.com/2011/03/understanding-and-using-amazon-ebs.html for a nice explanation of some of the issues you may come across with EBS and the internals of why.

Overall, I still give Amazon a good rating. This was a major outage and we felt barely a hiccup.

Finally cut the cord at the end of December last year and rely exclusively on AT&T U-verse (12 down, 2 up). We were early adopters in the neighborhood; most of the problems we had were around billing. Full story is here: http://alternate-u-verse.blogspot.com/

People may know, but Verizon certainly does not. http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/2006/12/verizon-doesnt-know-dollars-from-cents.html

As long as you're rooted, you can chroot into any armel distro. See here http://nerd65536.blogspot.com/2011/01/how-to-instal-debian-or-ubuntu-in.html

Conversions are, relatively speaking, rare and unimportant. Just choose the right unit scaled to the task at hand. For example, D&D encumbrance is much easier when measured in stone (rather than tenths-of-a-pound, for example).

Your statement was "the middle class is diminishing". Increases in income or wealth to the top 1% is another issue altogether. With increasing productivity due to automation, information systems, expansions in markets due to a world becoming richer overall, it is not surprising that those with the right technical or business skills would be achieving higher income, while those with almost no skills are facing enhanced competition from automation and low-skilled foreign workers.

I will concur that US real median household income has been steady for quite a while, however this does not count non-wage benefits that are part of employer total compensation.

I'm not sure we have a good way of measuring median real compensation. But we do know that overall real compensation per hour has been tracking well with productivity increases for 30 years graph here.

There also is a confounder on looking at median household income - household size has decreased from 3.14 in 1970 to 2.6 today, but some argue this has been approximately balanced by the larger number of women with children entering the workforce.

Also regarding "diminishing", these examinations of median household incomes ignore the fact that individual incomes change over time, generally rising over lifetime. I myself have been through every household income quintile over my lifetime.

A study found that from 1996-2005 more than half of taxpayers moved to a different income quintile. Half of the lowest quintile moved up, and overall real median incomes of all taxpayers increased by 24% over that period.

The top 1% is not static either. Less of half the top 1% of income earners in 1996 were still in the top 1% in 2005.

We should also not forget that extremely poor immigrants have come into this country (legally or not), and are now making far more than they could have in their home countries, although many end up in the bottom US income quintile. Their US-educated children are likely to do even better than they did.

Your statement was "the middle class is diminishing". Increases in income or wealth to the top 1% is another issue altogether. With increasing productivity due to automation, information systems, expansions in markets due to a world becoming richer overall, it is not surprising that those with the right technical or business skills would be achieving higher income, while those with almost no skills are facing enhanced competition from automation and low-skilled foreign workers.

I will concur that US real median household income has been steady for quite a while, however this does not count non-wage benefits that are part of employer total compensation.

I'm not sure we have a good way of measuring median real compensation. But we do know that overall real compensation per hour has been tracking well with productivity increases for 30 years graph here.

There also is a confounder on looking at median household income - household size has decreased from 3.14 in 1970 to 2.6 today, but some argue this has been approximately balanced by the larger number of women with children entering the workforce.

Also regarding "diminishing", these examinations of median household incomes ignore the fact that individual incomes change over time, generally rising over lifetime. I myself have been through every household income quintile over my lifetime.

A study found that from 1996-2005 more than half of taxpayers moved to a different income quintile. Half of the lowest quintile moved up, and overall real median incomes of all taxpayers increased by 24% over that period.

The top 1% is not static either. Less of half the top 1% of income earners in 1996 were still in the top 1% in 2005.

We should also not forget that extremely poor immigrants have come into this country (legally or not), and are now making far more than they could have in their home countries, although many end up in the bottom US income quintile. Their US-educated children are likely to do even better than they did.

http://technicalmusings.blogspot.com/2011/04/ios-consolidateddb-workaround-for.html

Furniture nice post

Instead of linking to the Official Google Blog homepage, it would be better to link to the relevant blog post: Official Google Blog: Add your local knowledge to the map with Google Map Maker for the United States

The jury's still out on aspartame, however it does give me an enormous headache if I consume any at all.

Well, okay. Some people have phenylketonuria, too, which is an inability to break down phenylalanine - a component of aspartame (among other things).

It's also a substance which does not exist in any significant quantity in food provided by nature, so your body may or may not be able to handle it.

To be fair, almost nothing we eat is actually natural. Bananas don't exist in nature. Almonds have toxic levels of cyanide in nature. Corn is basically inedible in nature. Tomatoes are unrecognizable. http://deforestationanditseffects.blogspot.com/2010/03/artificial-selection-in-plants-and.html Nature was never interested in creating safe, edible foods for us to eat. It's only through thousands of years of selective breeding that we can eat "natural" food. The main difference, of course, is that we have a longer track-record with "natural" foods, so they're obviously not super-toxic. If any of those natural foods had a mild toxicity, I'm pretty sure we couldn't figure it out without a big study to discover those effects.

Google has reiterated that they do plan to publish Honeycomb source code. And when they say that it's not ready for the prime time, they actually mean that Honeycomb was rushed to please Motorola and was supposed only to be run on Xoom. That both Xoom and Honeycomb are beta-quality at best is another matter. I believe that it's quite smart of Google to keep Honeycomb source closed: this way, we only have one crappy device with an unfinished OS; if they published the source code right now, we would have hundreds of them.

Previous Slashdot discussion:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/03/11/1711252/Google-Introduces-Domain-Blocking-To-Search

Article discussing how:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/hide-sites-to-find-more-of-what-you.html

If you like aspartame, olestra, or extacy, that's cool - put whatever you want in your body and enjoy the effects.

Just don't spout off that it's "perfectly safe for everyone" and slip it into foods without clear labeling.

This conservation of energy argument is on the same scientific level as the ridiculous "drink cold water to lose weight" idiocy. A human organism is:

* Not in thermal equilibrium with their environment. Last time I checked I have a body temperature around 38 C and spend most of my time in 21 C rooms.
* Capable of significant mass flows (e.g. respiration).
* Capable of sequestering entropy (e.g. protein synthesis).

...

According Bray's thermodynamics argument, wearing sweaters makes you fat. This illustrates the greatest fallacy of trying to apply the 1st Law to a human: it makes the implication that living organisms consume kilocalories for the purpose of generating heat rather than perform useful work (i.e. breathing, contracting cardio and skeletal muscle, generating nervous action pulses, etc.). In reality heat is the waste product of basal metabolism. The first law does not distinguish between different types of energy. Heat, work are all equal under the First Law of Thermodynamics.

Applying the 1st Law to living organisms is Proof by Tautology. Yes, 1 + 1 = 2, but this tells us absolutely nothing about the underlying mechanics. The 1st Law does not (I repeat N-O-T) tell us whether you store excess energy in the form of fat, or bleed it off into the atmosphere by dilating blood vessels next to the skin, sweating, etc. To do so would require an accounting of entropy."

Source: Robert McLeod

You're missing it too. Property rights aren't going to help them when there's not enough land to own for everybody. The average family in Ethiopia has 5.6 children the highest in the world. You say they aren't stupid, but it takes some serious ignorance to not realize that if you can barely afford to feed yourself, you can't afford 6 children. Heck, I live in a reasonably prosperous US state and know I can't afford 6 children! And then there are the idiots who say the poor there "can't afford" to have smaller families, rationalizing the idea by being bad at math.

In the last 70 years, Ethiopia's population has increased fivefold, and is expected to double again in the next 30. You can send them all the food in the world, give them all the advanced machinery and farming technology, and even provide them with a few trillion dollars of foreign aid; but no matter what you do, they will outbreed all your efforts. Until they learn to not breed like rabbits, they have no one to blame for their poverty but their penises.

I think it is more likely that this is retaliation from Israel:

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/136924

        The United States has begun denying visas to Israel's nuclear scientists, according to the Hebrew-language daily Maariv. Workers at the reactor in Dimona told the paper that they had been treated poorly by US representatives, and had been told they could not travel to the States.

Israel is telling the US that in can get into itz nukular plantz any timez it wantz, lol!11!!1

Such lovely, loyal allies the US has in the ME.

Looks like chess is already being taught in the Phillipines too?

Perhaps THIS CHART will help give you a real perspective on just how much record companies "produce", compared to an open market that doesn't use their services, which many musicians are moving to.

It's sad to see someone who once mobilized communities and got people to take responsibility for their own future (Operation PUSH) revert to nothing but finger-pointing and blame.

That, and he kind of looks like a Zando Zan.

http://www.flixster.com/photos/the-last-starfighter-zando-zan-10902903 http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_cz6Pmg2hABQ/TDtWESsMtQI/AAAAAAAAAJM/J7eBwLB4iuQ/s1600/jesse+jackson5.jpg

...from all those instructional videos from 1950s about living on Mars - weren't there supposed to be domes over human habitations for first couple of generations anyway?
You know, radiation or no radiation, Mars ain't exactly t-shirt and shorts climate.

You can get the same thing with Gecko, it is called Kmeleon CCF ME and it uses native APIs and only runs on windows.

That said, is there anybody besides corps using IE anymore? I honestly can't remember the last time I saw a consumer box in my shop running IE. For the past couple of years it has been Firefox everywhere, and now I'm seeing a LOT of Chrome icons on folk's desktops. Personally after having to clean up after IE 6 for a couple of years they could come out with IE "dancing hooker edition" and I wouldn't use it, but before it actually took effort to get folks off IE and now frankly I just don't see anybody not in corporate using it.

One thing I WILL give them credit for though is low rights mode, which is what got me off of FF for Comodo (Chromium based). Running the browser in the lowest rights mode simply is good security policy, especially with so many zero days coming out lately.

That said I think MSFT may have finally fatally shot themselves in the foot by keeping IE9 off of XP and IE10 off of Vista. They could get away with that shit when there weren't any competition, but now there are browsers galore and there are WAY too many users still on XP/Vista to just abandon them when the competitors haven't. It is just a stupid move that will make IE even more fractured, and give that many more people a reason to try the competition.

But frankly bragging about "being native" when Chrome is already as fast as most folks connections will go is just dumb. People aren't gonna give a crap about "native" they care about what they can see! And right now the Chromium based are so fast it is scary, and the amount of plugins are quickly coming close to equaling FF, one thing that IE has never been great at(unless you count an assload of toolbars as great). whats next, "IE has electrolytes"?

Fascism? You're an idiot.

Pot? Kettle? Black?

I don't know about G.P.P., but I have yet to attack or bully a TSO. However, I most definitely speak out about TSA policies to anyone who will listen, on-line on my blog (warning -- shameless plug for my own blog), in comments to other articles (like here) or in person.

...schmucks like you who think you're entitled to do whatever you want the constitution (sic) to say.

Yeah, at least it's only us "bullies" interpreting the Constitution so that it says what we want, and not someone with real power like, say, the Executive Branch doing so. Can you say, "warrantless wiretapping", "habeas corpus", "1st Amendment rights", "2nd Amendment rights", "4th Amendment rights" just as off-the-top-of-my-head examples?

If you choose to act out, be disruptive and incite a riot at the airport, you open yourself to being detained just like any other crazy person.

:rolleyes: How, exactly, do you think we got the freedoms you so readily throw away? Civil disobedience has a long and distinguished reputation in this country. You might say the U.S. kinda even got it's start that way. Do you think Washington, Revere, Adams, Jefferson, Henry, et al were model citizens and the British just handed over sovereignty to them because they asked nicely? How about MLK, Jr.? Rosa Parks? I don't know about you, but personally, I'd feel more than just a little honored to be a "crazy person" like them.

I'm guessing you'd be one of the first in line to complain about the TSA being "too stupid to fall for a simple SE trick."

That sentence doesn't even make logical sense -- how would it even be possible to be "too stupid to fall for a...SE trick"?!?! I think you were trying to say that if someone were to bluster their way through a checkpoint by "arrogant complaining", G.P.P. (and, I presume, anyone who agrees with him, like myself) would be first in line to complain about it, no? No, if TSA were actually taking reasonable and intelligent steps to provide for-real security (rather than security theater) and weren't trampling our liberties to do so, I'd actually be rushing to their defense if something slipped through the cracks. Excrement occurs. There's no way to provide 100% security, and it's unrealistic to expect it. However, since TSA has become so far removed from the ideals this country is supposed to stand for, I'd have to say, yes, I would be first in line to complain about -- to the extent that it serves to dismantle this abomination.

Agreed. Big Media has gone from a helpful body for content to the main cause of restriction - limiting content rather than enabling it.

Not to plug, but I blogged about this yesterday: http://zombieomg.blogspot.com/2011/04/sharing-through-recent-ages.html

Indeed. Bruce Charlton got it right:

It was around the 1970s that the human spirit began to be overwhelmed by bureaucracy (although the trend had been growing for many decades).

Since the mid-1970s the rate of progress has declined in physics, biology and the medical sciences – and some of these have arguably gone into reverse, so that the practice of science in some areas has overall gone backwards, valid knowledge has been lost and replaced with phony fashionable triviality and dishonest hype. Some of the biggest areas of science – medical research, molecular biology, neuroscience, epidemiology, climate research – are almost wholly trivial or bogus. This is not compensated by a few islands of progress, eg in computerization and the invention of the internet. Capability must cover all the bases, and depends not on a single advanced area but all-round advancement.

The fact is that human no longer do - *can* no longer do many things we used to be able to do: land on the moon, swiftly win wars against weak opposition and then control the defeated nation, secure national borders, discover ‘breakthrough’ medical treatments, prevent crime, design and build to a tight deadline, educate people so they are ready to work before the age of 22, block an undersea oil leak...

50 years ago we would have the smartest, best trained, most experienced and most creative people we could find (given human imperfections) in position to take responsibility, make decisions and act upon them in pursuit of a positive goal.

Now we have dull and docile committee members chosen partly with an eye to affirmative action and to generate positive media coverage, whose major priority is not to do the job but to avoid personal responsibility and prevent side-effects; pestered at every turn by an irresponsible and aggressive media and grandstanding politicians out to score popularity points; all of whom are hemmed-about by regulations such that – whatever they do do, or do not do – they will be in breach of some rule or another.

It's the whole "broken windows" economic fallacy.

The anti-Mueller campaign started on slashdot when he tried to BS a bunch of us on the weekend over TurboHercules, got caught in a bunch of misrepresentations, and tried to weasel out of them. There were more than a dozen of us who jumped in, because what he was saying was a huge distortion of history, as well as misrepresenting the instant situation.

I remember it because before then I didn't know the guy from a hole in the ground - I figured he was just one more idiot spouting nonsense. Then I find out that people think he's some sort of "authority", a lawyer (that I trashed immediately by pointing out that even the stupidest lawyer in the world wouldn't be making some of the statements he made since they had zero basis in law anywhere on THIS planet (I can't speak about Mars, or whatever :-), and if he's really a lawyer he should be disbarred, etc. - sure enough, he wasn't a lawyer, he just encouraged people to think he was, and never corrected the mistake when he had an opportunity.

The only "coincidence" was that he tried to continue elsewhere (as well as to some extent here), but people were now willing to challenge him head-on, and had the links to prove he was just spouting nonsense.

The whole groklaw thing was really pitiful - the guy who was the actual maintainer of the Hercules hardware emulator (istr his name was Jay Maynard) got stuck in the middle, made the mistake of assuming that the claim that IBM was threatening to sue the Hercules project was true (it wasn't), and really, REALLY put his foot into it.

TurboHercules (not the Hercules project) wanted to have IBM customers make unlicensed copies of IBM's mainframe OS to run on other machines, atop the Hercules hardware emulator. When that didn't fly, TurboHercules (again NOT the Hercules project) tried to claim it would be only "transferring" the OS to a second machine, for "recovery purposes."

But even under that scenario (again, not permitted under the license, since you'd still have 2 copies of the OS floating around, even if you weren't using both at the same time, and the OS is licensed to a specific machine because the fee is based on work units), at some point you'd have to have 2 copies running, to transfer updated data back to the mainframe.

TurboHercules then tried to pick a fight with IBM by asking what patents might be infringed by Hercules, and IBM sent them a list. All of a sudden, TurboHercules and Mueller are claiming that IBM is going to to sue the Hercules project for patent infringement, based on IBM's response to their request.

See the problem here? Then ask yourself if it's a coincidence that TurboHercules took money from Microsoft.

Pile on the FUD he pushed over supposed Android violations of the linux kernel, etc., and you have a clear agenda: The guy did what he could to worm his way into FLOSS territory so he could attack from inside, like a wolf in sheeps clothing, and it almost worked.

The problem is, when it comes to trolling on sites like slashdot, he's a rank amateur :-)

race has no scientific basis

That is incorrect. In fact, I don't get why it still gets tossed around. Here is a blog post which goes more in-depth, but it really shouldn't be too obvious that it is false. After all, different races/ethnic groups have different rates of genetic diseases, and there are most certainly other genetic variations which between groups groups (which must be accounted for in GWAS studies). The papers I've seen saying there are no races have usually made their on small population sizes and unrealistic hurdles as to what qualifies a population as a race.

I assumed Sandy was a person, not a description. Sandy may or not be fictional, though.

Kill off interfaces (even James Gosling admits that they were probably a mistake), add multiple inheritance.

*citation needed*
Everything I've seen from Gosling says that pure interfaces are the way to go- even to the extent of getting rid of regular inheritance; see these quips. I don't think anybody who's seriously looking at language design thinks C++- style multiple inheritance is a good idea. Nor does anyone want to resurrect the braindead C preprocessor way of dealing with things.

And what's so bad about :=? The fact that some outmoded languages used it doesn't make it a bad idea. Most of us are familiar with its use as a definition or assignment, and avoiding confusions between = and == could be a plus, especially if (as he seems to propose) the latter is extended to replace use of .equals().

Geohot can't talk much about why he settled, but his replies on his blog suggests a plausible reason: he realized he was unlikely to win the case (suggesting that the judge was biased) and chose to settle to avoid setting a legal precedent.

About 46% of US generation can be replaced by rooftop solar given available residential roof space. But, net metering policy which confiscates excess power generation without compensation probably limits this source to 22%. http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/08/roof-pitch.html Feed in tariffs would remove the artificial barrier. The price for panels now is about $2/Watt and will fall below $0.5/Watt before half of that capacity is installed. Installation may get down to $1/Watt as panels get lighter and more efficient. Inverters are about $0.5/Watt now and will go lower. So, a typical price for the bulk of installations will be below $2/Watt. Nuclear power plant construction costs $12/Watt and the cost is increasing. Not considering fuel costs and operating expenses for nuclear, and factoring in availability assuming similar life times, rooftop solar costs about 60% of the cost of nuclear. Desert solar likely costs less than half of nuclear.

This is not true at all. I had a terrible time trying to use the Android Scripting Environment before I had vim installed. Instead of constantly trying to reposition the cursor with your fingers, you just tap the hjkl keys. Not only that but you get everything that using vi implies. Code completion, instant shell access, advanced regexp find and replace, line numbering, and so on. Please, don't knock it until you've tried it.