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The guys were *NOT* kicked out. None of the three were kicked out. According to the official statement and my personal conversations with other conference organizers:

"Both parties were met with, in private. The comments that were made were in poor taste, and individuals involved agreed, apologized and no further actions were taken by the staff of PyCon 2013. No individuals were removed from the conference, no sanctions were levied."

http://pycon.blogspot.com/2013/03/pycon-response-to-inappropriate.html

This is done solely because louder music sells more copies

One correction: it is done because idiots in the industry BELIEVE that louder music sells more copies. It's not true.

When even Metallica fans are saying the music is too loud, you have a problem. "When there are no quiet parts, nothing is loud anyway."

http://mastering-media.blogspot.com/2008/09/metallica-death-magnetic-sounds-better.html

Looks like Google has got you covered

Assad the butcher

Really?

Hitler, the butcher. Yes. Stalin, the butcher, sure. Bosco Ntaganda, the butcher, yes. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-21835345) You could even call Saddam Hussein a butcher for chemical attacks on Kurds and 1,000,000 deaths in US-backed war with Iran.

Assad? The "great freedom fighters" like some religions nutjobs are not exactly using Gandhiâ(TM)s tactics now. If Assad is "the butcher" then sure as hell the so called "opposition" is no better. Syria is now a nation of butchers butchering each other.

The only thing Assad as sure is is not a religious nutjob calling for sharia and ethnic cleansing (genocide) in syria.

http://republicaninthearts.blogspot.com/2013/03/sharia-and-no-infidels-in-syria-says.html

http://rt.com/news/syria-usa-rebel-drone-356/

So please, a little respect. Syria has a war, mostly thanks to opposition. They thought it would be "easy" to just to kill Assad and his supporters - you know, home for christmas (or haj) or whatever everyone always says... but what war does is solidify positions.

A soldier that would support kicking out Assad from office if opposition used peaceful tactics (see Gandhi, again), will definitely fight for Assad when bullets starts flying his way.

I'm just a 3rd party observer and I blame opposition 100% for the shit that Syria has become. The moment they picked up a gun is when they lost all of my respect.

James Bond is a poser. I've wanted one since Dick Tracy.

Now get off my lawn, kid!

but having to swap forbidden books using flash drives dwarfs whatever first-world problem crawled up your posterior and made you feel like you could ever possibly understand what it is like to live in a mind-controlling, life-or-death, blighted country like Cuba.

forbidden books, mind-controlling, life-or-death, blighted...

whatever first-world problem crawled up your posterior

I rest my case, your honor.

http://googledesktop.blogspot.com/ - I know you can still find it and install, but still, I wish that it was still living on......

"As of September 14 (2011), Google Desktop will no longer be available for download, and existing installations will not be updated to include new features or fixes.

Thanks again to all of our users. It’s been a fun journey.

Posted by the Google Desktop Team"

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Seem that it will be doing a comeback, integrated with Google Drive.

Maybe Reader will reappear in a new shape/name, there is still time till July. After all, A LOT of what is shared in g+ are links to things that come originally from some rss.

Are you talking about my law firm web site or my blog post on blogger.com?

It's a system where by bringing a lawsuit, the plaintiff self-insures that they are not bringing a frivolous or unlikely-to-win lawsuit: http://ankoj.blogspot.com/

The most prominent cases of SWATing I'm aware of have been carried out against conservative bloggers:

• Aaron Worthing.
• Patterico
• Erik Erickson

Several cases seen to involve people criticizing convicted Speedway Bomber felon (and left-wing activist) Brett Kimberlin.

Was this you?

Weight loss is a function of calories, you are almost never going to be able to run off calories you eat very easily.

So eat less if you want to lose weight.

If you want to be strong, exercise several times a week.

If you exercise to lose weight, and you were gaining weight before you started exercising, your probably just going to lose your water weight initially (OMG MOM I LOST 10lbs!) then you are going to stall, because you are really just exercising off the excess (if you can even do that).

I have lost 130lbs, and kept it off for several years now, I have track everything. Anyone coming on asking for quick tips on losing weight is having a losing game already.

If you are a software dev, make a spreadsheet, and do a workup on yourself. It takes time, but you can find out what your body burns every day, and you can find out how many calories you need to eat to lose weight, and you can even track when you start getting thinner how many fewer calories you burn

Here is how I do it.

http://themobilefieldbasehealth.blogspot.com/2013/02/how-do-i-manage-weight-loss.html

If you don't want to use the self guided programmer method, and keep track of calories in calories out using a spreadsheet....

Download MyFitness Pal to track your calories and estimate your calorie needs, and do fitocracy to motivate you and read their guides on health.

Of course the government is likely to be "bigger and better armed than any individual" but I guess you missed where I said "heavily armed military" and the military "used biological and chemical weapons". An AK47 is nothing compared to a chemical weapon dropped on a village. If lucky the shooter may cripple or down an aircraft otherwise people are not going to stop the aircraft from dropping said chemical bomb. An armed populace both protects and has to use free speech, they have to work together. Without arms free speech isn't good enough, Syria practically shut down the press opposed to the regime. A few brave reporters sneaked into Syria, putting their lives in jeopardy.

My point was that free speech alone is not enough against a regime that will do whatever it takes to win. Peace loving Gandhi advocated violence for self-defense. Between Cowardice And Violence he said " I WOULD risk violence a thousand times rather than risk the emasculation of a whole race." Speech alone is unlikely to stop violence. Between speech and being armed, I'd rather be armed as speech may be neutralized, but an armed populace can not be stopped without massive interventions, such as the chemical weapons Saddam dropped on Iraqi villages.

Falcon

You can turn the automatic reboot off. Its easy. On my blog:

http://tidbitsfortechs.blogspot.com/2011/06/turning-off-automatic-reboot-when.html

It is deeply suspicious that the USHCN Time of observation adjustments in particular are nearly a perfect fit for a quadratic curve, whose low point was right around the time that temperatures in the US were spiking in the early 20th century. The Menne-Williams paper (linked from your link) which describes one type adjustments says it's an automatic adjustment. I'm suspicious that any signal present in the data is getting magnified by their algorithm. If I get truly ambitions, I'll see if I can duplicate their alogrithm using fake data that is half cyclic values with no trend and half data with a small trend, to see if the adjustments ALSO have the trend. I wouldn't hold your breath, since I do have some life.

In general, I think the concept of homogenization of the data is flawed, since the weather being measured is easily chaotic enough to produce unusual local values. Adjustments based on known changes are perfectly justifiable (station moved, explicitly changed the 24 hour period being measure for high/low). Adjustment based on "other nearby stations behaved differently" are only weakly justifiable at best. Opinion subject to change given convincing evidence. I'm still processing an argument for TOBS adjustments but I think I would have to process the raw data myself to understand it well.

what if the camera loses its calibration? how do you fight that without knowing?

Some speed cams shoot pictures of you in certain positions, taggged with time hacks.
It is fairly simple math to show position 1 @ sec 2 vs. position 2 @ sec 4 and calculate speed.

With radar cams you can subpoena calibration records.

Do you have any proof or is this just speculation like most people who were caught speeding?

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_1ysODn_1Nr4/TNLUdWSK8AI/AAAAAAAAEHs/S2Sms335Uxk/s1600/photo+evidence+dismissed.jpg

see also: Google

It's too bad Google won't let you block an arbitrary number of websites from your search results permanently

Here ya go.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/new-chrome-extension-block-sites-from.html

The people already doing this would qualify as prior art, and it is obvious to anyone educated in the field:

Transfer data over audio (download the code) (2009)

Sound for mobile communication ala NFC (2011)

Transferring data using audio in android.(2012)

He probably got the idea by reading about what Bitcoiners are already doing.

Rules seem to be "staff email can be read, faculty email cannot be read". The administration is now pretending professor that becomes dean are no longer faculty but staff.

Harry Lewis thoughts

Here is Harry Lewis thoughts on the matter...

http://harry-lewis.blogspot.com/2013/03/email-privacy-at-harvard.html

For those not familiar, Harry Lewis was not only the Dean of Harvard College for a number of years, he is also a Professor of Computer Science.

The interesting part of the search is over -- what follows is a couple of decades of shrinking the error bars. As it stands right now, all the data is converging to a bog-stock standard model particle. There is an anomaly in some of the ATLAS data, but the discrepancy is shrinking. According to the LHC data presented at the Moriond Conference on March 6, the anomaly isn't getting worse when more data is included, which means that it probably can be explained by something other than new physics. Add in the 2.5GeV difference between the Higgs masses in the ATLAS data, and it looks more like there is some kind of systemic error with ATLAS, not a glimpse of new physics. All other data are tightly consistent with the SM. And for what it is worth, the idea that a spin determination needs to be made is a bit of wishful thinking. It's probably Director Bertolucci trying to keep the media interest going. A 126 GeV particle can have only spin zero -- there isn't even a model for a spin 2 resonance that is simultaneously mathematically rigorous and not eliminated by experimental evidence that already exists. According to this excellent blog by a particle physicist based in Paris, the best chance of finding new physics is observing the Higgs making non-SM interactions in some hitherto unexpected decay channel, something that is possible, but very, very unlikely. Given the fierce competition for shrinking scientific research funding, getting funding for that kind of research is not going to happen, and the grumbling coming from particle physicists is because they realize that the Higgs is not going to be a meal ticket for them anymore. .

If there's a consensus in the medical field that such behavior is professional and normal, than a lawyer won't get anywhere with it, and should get slapped down by the courts for trying.

They should, but don't. The courts don't have a way to determine "consensus". Rather, one doctor comes up and says his view, and another doctor comes up and says whatever he's paid to. No comment on which doctor is the hospital's and which is the patient's.

Full access to medical records is necessary, but not sufficient, for that understanding. Perhaps such records should be accompanied by explanations of why the more "interesting" bits are there.

That'd be nice, but that takes time and money to prepare, and won't really help cut back the complaints from belligerent patients. Personally, I think it'd be great if insurance companies did exactly this (providing a review of how unusual your case is) since they already have full access to all records, trained medical staff, and statistics to determine a reasonable amount of "consensus", but it'd be too expensive to set up. They'd rather cut costs by denying everything until they're forced to pay.

If there's a consensus in the medical field that such behavior is professional and normal, than a lawyer won't get anywhere with it, and should get slapped down by the courts for trying.

They should, but don't. The courts don't have a way to determine "consensus". Rather, one doctor comes up and says his view, and another doctor comes up and says whatever he's paid to. No comment on which doctor is the hospital's and which is the patient's.

Full access to medical records is necessary, but not sufficient, for that understanding. Perhaps such records should be accompanied by explanations of why the more "interesting" bits are there.

That'd be nice, but that takes time and money to prepare, and won't really help cut back the complaints from belligerent patients. Personally, I think it'd be great if insurance companies did exactly this (providing a review of how unusual your case is) since they already have full access to all records, trained medical staff, and statistics to determine a reasonable amount of "consensus", but it'd be too expensive to set up. They'd rather cut costs by denying everything until they're forced to pay.

Who the hell cares whether the bad doctor is identified and dealt with after he screws up a statistically significant number of times? What is important is whether he has screwed up in MY case.

No, that's what's important to you.

For classifying a doctor as "bad" (which was the point in question), a statistically-significant number of bad cases must occur. Visiting a doctor is not a guarantee that you'll live healthy forever. It's a consultation of the doctor's skill and expertise. As you said, doctors are just people, who can and do make mistakes. I'm terribly sorry if your particular case got screwed up, but that doesn't give you a right to go chasing after an honest mistake.

There are plenty of laws on the books to protect doctors and other health care professionals from the consequences of their honest mistakes--- that's what "best practice" training and following standard of care protocols are all about.

Sadly, that's simply not true. The laws do not protect doctors from honest mistakes, because ther's always other doctors who will say that everything's obvious.

They looked at multiple studies of men who had been circumcised over the world and those who had not. Not just one study. I note that the article states
""The new policy statement will be published in the September issue of Pediatrics. It is also endorsed by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.""

So the gynecologists are looking out for their trade members when commenting on the health benefits of male circumcision?

Or, like the global warming denialists, you are objecting to the science without evidence?

And YES, I want my parents to decide for me, when I am unable to decide for myself, whether or not a painless operation is good for me. That is what parents are for.

Should we bar parents from removing a mole or separating conjoined twins because they might want that mole or want to live at conjoined twins at a later date? If course not. This is idiocy.

In the United States, obstetricians are primarily responsible for mutilating boys so of course they'd back the AAP on this.

Infants don't have sex so they aren't at risk of contracting HIV via their penis. If you feel the need to have penile reduction surgery as an adult as a result of pseudoscience, that's your business. Keep in mind you'll still need to wear a condom to be protected. However, cutting up the private bits of healthy boys is no less barbaric than doing the same to girls. Where the cutting happens and how much pain accompanies it is a moot point.

By the way, you should check out these articles if your head isn't too firmly buried in the sand:
Where Circumcision Doesn't Prevent HIV
Where Circumcision Doesn't Prevent HIV II

They looked at multiple studies of men who had been circumcised over the world and those who had not. Not just one study. I note that the article states
""The new policy statement will be published in the September issue of Pediatrics. It is also endorsed by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.""

So the gynecologists are looking out for their trade members when commenting on the health benefits of male circumcision?

Or, like the global warming denialists, you are objecting to the science without evidence?

And YES, I want my parents to decide for me, when I am unable to decide for myself, whether or not a painless operation is good for me. That is what parents are for.

Should we bar parents from removing a mole or separating conjoined twins because they might want that mole or want to live at conjoined twins at a later date? If course not. This is idiocy.

In the United States, obstetricians are primarily responsible for mutilating boys so of course they'd back the AAP on this.

Infants don't have sex so they aren't at risk of contracting HIV via their penis. If you feel the need to have penile reduction surgery as an adult as a result of pseudoscience, that's your business. Keep in mind you'll still need to wear a condom to be protected. However, cutting up the private bits of healthy boys is no less barbaric than doing the same to girls. Where the cutting happens and how much pain accompanies it is a moot point.

By the way, you should check out these articles if your head isn't too firmly buried in the sand:
Where Circumcision Doesn't Prevent HIV
Where Circumcision Doesn't Prevent HIV II

Second that.

I recommend the following site for those who are entering or those who are thinking of quitting.

http://100rsns.blogspot.com/

Not to mention their entire company is based on a STUPID IDEA that has NEVER worked. i've been building and selling PCs to SMB and home users for 25+ fricking years and I can tell you that EDUCATION WILL NEVER WORK when it comes to stopping threats, why? Because like real life viruses they mutate and common sense is not teachable, either you have it or you don't.

Here is a perfect example...smartphones. think Android is well on its way to a million infections because Google didn't make a good OS? Nope its the simple fact that because its a different medium you have to start from square one just like in Black Sept when we were drowning in noobs because people simply can't or won't equate a link between one medium and another. I've seen emails that have not worked IN YEARS that work like crazy as a smartphone because to Joe and Jane average the smartphone is NOT a general purpose computer, its a toaster and they treat it as such. The thought that it can get viruses and spam never enters their minds, the phone is a magical device that hooks up to cell towers and that's totally different from the net, don't you see?

Believe me, I know of which I speak. I've educated until I'm hoarse but the one thing you can't change is that for the education to actually work you have to have enough common sense to go "Well this is similar enough to what I was educated about so erring on the side of caution would probably be wise" and the simple fact is non geeks? They may as well be Martians, they just don't think like that for the most part. I'd love to see the unbiased results as five would get you ten that their "education" lasts only until new mutations arise and then the users go "Hey this isn't what we were told to watch out for, this prince is from Somalia so he must be legit!"

You try to solve the problem of malware and spear fishing with education and you had better get used to looking like this because the users will make that your natural look.

If you think cost and access are problems in poor and rural parts of the US, consider the plight of people in developing nations. The potential for online education is great: http://cis471.blogspot.com/2012/05/online-education-market-is-global.html but sufficiently cheap, fast access typically non-existent: http://cis471.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-access-and-bandwidth-divide-in.html

If you think cost and access are problems in poor and rural parts of the US, consider the plight of people in developing nations. The potential for online education is great: http://cis471.blogspot.com/2012/05/online-education-market-is-global.html but sufficiently cheap, fast access typically non-existent: http://cis471.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-access-and-bandwidth-divide-in.html

Yep.

Examples of his attitude:

http://groups.google.com/group/gnu.gnustep.discuss/msg/a11ebc20417db2c2
http://iamleeg.blogspot.com/2007/02/apres-ca-le-fosdem.html

Its really simple. You can f around with linux endlessly or you can get tired of it and move on to something more interesting. Obviously, Miguel is getting older and just doesn't want to f around with linux anymore. The Mac (for now) just gets things done. Thats not to say that nobody should f around with linux, obviously we need those people to do that, and eventually they'll get it more and more solid. Bless their little hearts. But in the mean time, other people want to f around with other things and not have to constantly be f'ing with linux.

Its like cars (or motorcycles)...

When your younger, you don't mind the beater car that you have to repair all the time. You dream of the day when its perfectly restored, but you never get there. One day you just realize, you have other things you want to do, so you buy a new car that just works. If you're lucky you can now afford one because you stopped f'ing with linux and started f'ing with something else that you can make a good living at. And if you're really lucky, you pick up some pile of junk to work on solely as a hobby and without the stress of wondering if the f'ing thing is going to get you to work on time.

Trees used for paper are grown in farms, and are selectively bred for that purpose (the resulting product is of higher quality and cheaper than from wild trees.)

While I don't disagree that tree farms exist, I'm calling bullshit on this one. In many (most) cases, trees used in paper production are sourced from sustainable forests (meaning that they log off ~70% of a natural forest and then replant so they can come back in 20-30 years).

Other sources: 20 years living in a logging town

If nobody reads the damn thing, how can it be profitable? And if it isn't profitable, why are they distributing it?

Unless people actually *are* reading it. If so, then how is this a waste?

And we're not going to run out of trees any faster than we'll run out of potatoes. Trees used for paper are grown in farms, and are selectively bred for that purpose (the resulting product is of higher quality and cheaper than from wild trees.) Paper production isn't the reason for decreasing numbers of trees, and recycling paper is a huge waste of time and resources.

The only reason there are fewer trees in the world (and not in the US btw, the number of trees we have in the US has been steadily growing for decades now) is because jungle territory is being cut down to make way for real-estate.

That said, I'm not sure why the politicians would make an issue of trying to reduce the number of phone books. Just treat it like any other junk mail: send it right to the trash. And you only have to do it once a year.

They make money by advertising. People pay for advertisements, listings and such in those things.

The problem is it wasnt long ago that yellow pages were useful to most americans so most companies are still in the mindset that if they pay for advertising it will be seen by a huge audience. It will take another 6 or 7 years before realize that advertising in the yellow pages is a waste of their money and they stop doing it gradually.

If nobody reads the damn thing, how can it be profitable? And if it isn't profitable, why are they distributing it?

Unless people actually *are* reading it. If so, then how is this a waste?

And we're not going to run out of trees any faster than we'll run out of potatoes. Trees used for paper are grown in farms, and are selectively bred for that purpose (the resulting product is of higher quality and cheaper than from wild trees.) Paper production isn't the reason for decreasing numbers of trees, and recycling paper is a huge waste of time and resources.

The only reason there are fewer trees in the world (and not in the US btw, the number of trees we have in the US has been steadily growing for decades now) is because jungle territory is being cut down to make way for real-estate.

That said, I'm not sure why the politicians would make an issue of trying to reduce the number of phone books. Just treat it like any other junk mail: send it right to the trash. And you only have to do it once a year.

I don't like ANY company data mining my emails or searches or documents and then using that to bombard me with ads. In this particular case, I'm not sure what's worse: being Scroogled, or using the alternative -- Bing. From the ad, it seems like using google will lead you to end up with a kitchen fire. But if Bing's results are scraped from google (see link below), then I don't see how the alternative is any better. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses-google-search.html

This will go nowhere. Cananonical has "completion" issues. Look at their past track record on linux. The focus on a feature for a release or two and then either declare it done or stop talking about it. They were going to make everything easy, printing, wifi, audio. Pulse Auido is still far from perfect and network manaeger still has issues. Then we have 10 second boot times, better looking that Mac, Desktop notifications, Wayland and 200 million users by October 2013.

Back in October of 2011 I predict the death of Wayland on my blog which I almost never post to. http://elder-geek.blogspot.com/2011/10/ubuntu-is-failure.html

Unity is still here, but instead of fixing it for the desktop, more work will go into making it run on other platforms. I love Linux with all of my heart. But Ubuntu is so preditible on how they are going to fail. They never complete anything that they start. Linux will be safe in the long run from the Distro that strives to remove the word "Linux" from their users minds.

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...it was a great idea to start building homes on swamp land?

They have to build them someplace. Where would you suggest?

You can build in wetlands IF you drive LOTS of friction pilings for each structure deeply enough. You might need to replace soil, even put in a raft foundation to evenly distribute the home's weight.

"Raft foundation is a thick concrete slab reinforced with steel which covers the entire contact area of the structure like a thick floor. Sometimes area covered by raft may be greater than the contact area depending on the bearing capacity of the soil underneath. The reinforcing bars runs normal to each other in both top and bottom layers of steel reinforcement. Sometimes inverted main beams and secondary beams are used to carry column loads that require thicker foundation slab considering economy of the structure. Both beams cast monolithically with raft slab."

http://civil-engg-world.blogspot.com/2012/06/what-is-raft-foundation-difference.html?m=1

http://menbuy.net/home-improvement-2/preparations-for-building-in-a-swamp/

With luck there will eventually be a push for a standardized tablet platform that is open enough to permit users to select their own OS.

That standard platform is the Android kernel.

Meanwhile Plasma Active, Salifish, and Tizen are based on a traditional Linux platform, and the Mer project hopes to be the common core distribution for them.

For the tiny fraction of users who "select their own OS", device popularity and an unlocked bootloader matter far more than standardization. If you buy an unsuccessful phone, it won't have a community providing images for it and jailbreaking its bootloader if necessary.

The standardized platform is vital for all these also-ran OSes to get lots of apps. Aaron Seigo's post about standardizing the QML compontents across KDE Plasma, Jolla Sailfish, BlackBerry 10 and Ubuntu is a good sign, but they still suffer from inconsistent device APIs and different packaging requirements. That's where Firefox OS has a theoretical edge: apps for it are just web pages with a manifest. The number of web developers (incuding "app" developers who just put a wrapper around an HTML app) is orders of magnitude more than QML developers.

Most likely this will come from the second tier Chinese manufacturers who would benefit most from a common reference standard.

They don't push for anything. They ship Android.

That would be the optimal parse approach. Of course, the well-known problem with optimal parsing is that sometimes a sub-optimal parse turns out to be better once you take into account the Huffman step. It could be that they're focussing on the feedback between those two steps.

It's something of a hobby of mine.

I wrote a guide on the subject: http://birds-are-nice.me/publications/Optimising%20x264%20encodes.htm

x264 is easy at this point (CRF and --preset slower FTW).

Right now, I'm trying to figure out how to isolate indivdual hues using AviSynth so that my color correction will only target very specific problem areas. I've done a decent job getting worst of the teal and orange look from some of the worst examples (The Terminator remaster, where there was nothing white in the entire movie..it was all blue tinted), as well as getting the green out of Fellowship of the Ring, but those are global changes to get known reference colors to look right.

After that, I want to essentially color grade the movie again to fix the problems that are still left, but do it somewhat automatically, based on the existing color.

You're not going to entice a kid to do anything with the promise of "math in motion".

"Boobs in motion," on the other hand, may do the trick!

Everything is better with chainsaws

Boobs aren't. Well, then again, maybe they are.

Sometimes I don't mind microtransactions, but they have power to ruin otherwise perfectly good game, and that's my major problem with them.

It's frequently harder to get more people to buy your product, than it is to get people already buying it to spend more. So soap companies put a little less detergent in the bottle and whiskey makers water the whiskey down a little more.

Closing the laptop can be for several reasons:
Want the laptop in sleep mode.
Want the laptop in hibernate.
Want the laptop to power off.

They're not reasons. They are marginally different technical states that the computer can be in whilst you're not using it. Not only that but 99.9% of the users of a computer don't know what the difference between "sleep" and "hibernate". You're not even beginning to think about the user, let alone his reasoning.

The reason a user closes a laptop lid is because he's finished interacting with it. There's the odd edge case where that's not the case, such as possibly doing a presentation on a projector, or using a docking station. And in both cases, the Macbook can be operated with the lid closed.

Want the laptop to stay on with the screen off, say because I'm downloading/rendering something overnight.

That's a reason. But one that is easily accomplished by pressing the screen brightness down button on the keyboard.

Different people may have different default desires.

Sure, and there's a couple of desktop OSs who's designers think that where ever you could have a different desire, extra options UI should be added to give you a choice. Even if the choice is irrelevant, or even a bad choice. Mac OS isn't one of those, it's one of the reasons why it's easier and more pleasant to use than the other two desktop OSs.

What happens when you have an option for everything? This:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-E2rnnlp7qqI/T65rBxDThwI/AAAAAAAAB1I/5zK-VscMU-I/s1600/power+setting3.jpg

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8oJxidXG9As/T65teya0SnI/AAAAAAAAB1Y/EK6MAfkoPjc/s576/power%2520setting2.JPG

Power plans? 5 tabbed pages of what to do about power when I'm not using the computer? Some of them so long they have scroll bars. Scroll bars on a tabbed page of a power options contol panel section. I kid you not.

WTF? This is not better. It's far, far worse.

Good design. It's as much about what you leave out as what you leave in.

Closing the laptop can be for several reasons:
Want the laptop in sleep mode.
Want the laptop in hibernate.
Want the laptop to power off.

They're not reasons. They are marginally different technical states that the computer can be in whilst you're not using it. Not only that but 99.9% of the users of a computer don't know what the difference between "sleep" and "hibernate". You're not even beginning to think about the user, let alone his reasoning.

The reason a user closes a laptop lid is because he's finished interacting with it. There's the odd edge case where that's not the case, such as possibly doing a presentation on a projector, or using a docking station. And in both cases, the Macbook can be operated with the lid closed.

Want the laptop to stay on with the screen off, say because I'm downloading/rendering something overnight.

That's a reason. But one that is easily accomplished by pressing the screen brightness down button on the keyboard.

Different people may have different default desires.

Sure, and there's a couple of desktop OSs who's designers think that where ever you could have a different desire, extra options UI should be added to give you a choice. Even if the choice is irrelevant, or even a bad choice. Mac OS isn't one of those, it's one of the reasons why it's easier and more pleasant to use than the other two desktop OSs.

What happens when you have an option for everything? This:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-E2rnnlp7qqI/T65rBxDThwI/AAAAAAAAB1I/5zK-VscMU-I/s1600/power+setting3.jpg

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8oJxidXG9As/T65teya0SnI/AAAAAAAAB1Y/EK6MAfkoPjc/s576/power%2520setting2.JPG

Power plans? 5 tabbed pages of what to do about power when I'm not using the computer? Some of them so long they have scroll bars. Scroll bars on a tabbed page of a power options contol panel section. I kid you not.

WTF? This is not better. It's far, far worse.

Good design. It's as much about what you leave out as what you leave in.

http://havenbastionlaw.blogspot.com/2013/02/hbl-a0067-right-to-memory.html