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>And the Washington Post also notes the researchers findings are suspiciously "out of step with a large body of research

As in, "the large body of research" where 79% of economists agree that "a minimum wage increases unemployment among young and unskilled workers"? This is undergrad economics at any college worth its salt.

That's it - the science is settled! 80% of economists agree - minimum wages are wrong. So it's time for all liberals to accept the truth. The science is settled!

>And the Washington Post also notes the researchers findings are suspiciously "out of step with a large body of research

As in, "the large body of research" where 79% of economists agree that "a minimum wage increases unemployment among young and unskilled workers"? This is undergrad economics at any college worth its salt.

Facts be damned, indeed. When about 3,200 of the plant species we consume today are created through mutagenic breeding (nuking seeds with radiation or chemicals, basically), but nobody complains about those, we have already passed the point for a sane discussion: Mutagenic breeding: why irradiating seeds is better than GMOs

Google's Nexus line is actually what I was referring to. I apologize for only stating that four times in my comment.

https://googleblog.blogspot.de...

So today we’re announcing that a founding team of industry leaders, including many from the Open Handset Alliance, are working together to adopt guidelines for how quickly devices are updated after a new platform release, and also for how long they will continue to be updated. The founding partners are Verizon, HTC, Samsung, Sprint, Sony Ericsson, LG, T-Mobile, Vodafone, Motorola and AT&T, and we welcome others to join us. To start, we're jointly announcing that new devices from participating partners will receive the latest Android platform upgrades for 18 months after the device is first released, as long as the hardware allows...and that's just the beginning. Stay tuned for more details.

So much for that promise.

learn a proper object oriented language before you write any serious programs

Although I agree with the general gist of your comment; I could not disagree more strongly about learning a "proper object oriented language". I would rather have you learn functional programming than object oriented; but optimally both. The problem is that allot of object oriented code is redundant and bloated, generally stemming from kingdom of the nouns type syndrome. Hybrid languages like C++ or JavaScript are genius in that you can mix functional and object oriented programming to form a concise solution to the problem.

The equilibrium CO2 concentration also depends on the level of CO2 in the atmosphere, and as that increases, so does the acidity of the ocean.

'm sorry, but the above is a very basic result from chemistry - typically something taught in high school. It's also something you experience in everyday live - a warm coke will go flat faster, but you also need some way to get the sparkle into the coke (by exposing it to CO2 at a very high partial pressure). This is not magic, it's basic physics and chemistry.

Hmmm... CO2 concentrations in liquid, sure. But what does that have to do with PH? You indicate that it's self-evident, but it's not to me. Maybe you can explain that relationship in high-school sciencey language. There are actually 3 different ways to measure PH, one of which is specific to ocean chemistry (the PH Seawater Scale - sws).

pH measures the concentration of H3O+, or, in simpler terms, the availability of free protons for reactions. Acids are substances that like losing a proton. The acid that causes acidification of our oceans (and sparkle in sodas and sparkling water) is carbonic acid, or CO2 dissolved in water. More CO2 in the atmosphere leads to more CO2 dissolved in the water, which equals more carbonic acid and a lower pH. How you measure pH is an independent question.

I'm very hard trying to avoid ad-hominem.

No, it's not, actually. Especially in science (not the scientific community that is awash in politic, but the work of science it certainly is).

I think you misread my comment. I'm trying hard to avoid an ad-hominem attack on you while pointing out that the level of understanding you exhibit does not give the impression that you understand the principles of the issue.

Above, you admit that you do not fully understand basic high-school level chemistry.

Nice try. See above.

See what above?

What makes you think that you can understand graduate-level climate science papers?

I can't understand everything, certainly, but much of it is accessible to me. Much of it because I'm good at maths. And language.

Your Junk Science link discusses and mentions only one paper. It takes the results out of context and misrepresents the paper by conflating temperature-driven processes (including e.g. seasonal changes) with CO2 driven processes (which increase the base level the pH varies around. Junk Science also take results from one inland lake in Japan and extrapolates that to the worlds ocean - talk about unjustified extrapolation.

I think you are misreading it. They are using the data from the lake in Japan to demonstrate specific relationships. For 280,000 years. It's no more an extrapolation than "More CO2 increases the greenhouse effect." Physical properties are physical properties.

Who is "they"? The authors of the original paper or the operators of Junk Science? The original paper is here, and looking at the abstract, you can see that the interpretation at Hockeyschtick parroted at Junk Science is completely misleading, and basically has nothing to do with the paper.

At your second link, Sustainable Oregon , I fail to find a single link to a peer-reviewed paper. There may well be one, but if so it's carefully hidden among links to so-called think tank publications, denier blogs, and self-published (as opposed to scientific) opinion pieces.

Most of that is a review of the ONE study on ocean acidification that keeps getting quoted. And those reviews are

I agree that Apache web server support is vital if HTTP/2 is to get much use. That said, the mod_spdy plug-in for Apache supports SPDY, and has been accepted into Apache trunk. See: http://googledevelopers.blogsp... https://svn.apache.org/viewvc/...

Since HTTP/2 is based on SPDY, it seems likely that this plug-in will be tweaked to support HTTP/2. That said, I suspect the Apache Foundation would say something like, "patches welcome".

How do you tell God and Devil apart? http://dwindlinginunbelief.blo...

Simple - God wants his followers ignorant (do not eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil), the Devil wants you to know everything - because then you'll *know* that God wants his followers ignorant. It's true - the Devil is in the details :-)

How do you tell God and Devil apart?
http://dwindlinginunbelief.blo...

Well, they came in second...

http://gmailblog.blogspot.de/2...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...

This guy is playing all CRPGs in chronological order and writes about it.
http://crpgaddict.blogspot.de/

Or is it the greens that can actually afford all this stuff are rich and are living in a McMansion like Al Gore?

Al Gore doesn't live in a McMansion, he leaves in real, full-blown mansions.

He was never a valuable source for anything [...]

You're entitled to your opinion on this, but it is not shared by some very credible people in the intellectual property universe:

- Managing Intellectual Property (ManagingIP) magazine has put me on its annual list of the top 50 most influential people in IP five times so far (2005, 2006, 2012, 2013, 2014).

- IAM (Intellectual Asset Management) magazine named me one of the IP personalities of 2011 (and had me on some other ranking that I can't find at the moment).

- Canadian IP lawyer Barry Sookman conducted some research on the leading IP and tech law blogs. According to his analysis (published in early 2013), my FOSS Patents blog was the #3 U.S. patent law blog at the time.

- I have received invitations to speak at conferences organized by universities and around the globe (in the U.S., literally from California to New York) and at commercial conferences in the U.S., different European countries, different Asian countries, and New Zealand. Only for logistical reasons I have had to politely decline except for invitations in my home region. I have spoken at the renowned Max Planck Institute for IP and Competition Law in Munich, at the Munich University of Technology (three times already), and the University of Bayreuth, where I shared a panel with a judge from the patent-specialized division of Germany's equivalent of the U.S. Supreme Court (see page 2 of the conference program), who is also widely expected to become one of the top-ranking judges of Europe's future Unified Patent Court. This incredibly well-respected patent judge and I both addressed the same topic, from our different vantage points, and had a panel discussion with questions from the audience and our moderator, a Switzerland-based patent law professor.

- Professor Thomas Cotter (University of Minnesota), an expert in comparative patent remedies (he travels the world to research differences between national patent laws), wrote this post about the significance of FOSS Patents earlier this year. Professor Cotter's independence is underscored by the fact that he has in recent years signed amicus curiae briefs supporting a core Apple position (on FRAND) and opposing a core Apple position (on design patent remedies).

- I could give more examples, but suffice it to say that any of the above references easily outweighs whatever a blog like Groklaw may have written about me over the years.

Still no Klingon?

At least the Vulcan salute.

Wow, you must be the perfect example of how a low Slashdot ID an insightful comment don't make.

If you even bothered to parse the headline, you'd have noticed that the talk is about scientists using Fortran, not OS kernel hackers, not Web programmers. Fortran is totally NOT the tool for any of the tasks you mention, just like most of the other languages just suck for parallel floating-point operation intensive applications.

But since you're an old hat, I'll take a stroll on your lawn and point out the following:

Do these scientists develop friendly graphical user interfaces for their Fortran programs?

Define "friendly". I have actually seen Fortran programs that print ASCII-art-like diagrams. Sure beats having to look at GB-long tables of numerical data at runtime.

Do these programs have robust and secure handling of all input?

In all my years of experience (>10, so I guess I'm quite the novice in Fortran-years) I have not seen a single security exploit implemented in Fortran. It's just not the tool for the job. BTW if anyone can point out such a thing, please let me know so that I can raise my hat in the right direction. Now, as far as robustness goes, Fortran lets us input data in many creative ways, it would be a shame to take away such a... ahem... feature.

How about configuration: are there dialogs for setting up preferences, which are persisted somewhere?

They are called ASCII files. They are pretty persistent, and they will remember settings that, more often than not, should have been long forgotten.

Do they package up user-friendly installers?

No need. All you need to do is unzip the folder.

How much of their stuff runs on new platforms like tablets and smartphones?

This has actually been done! Check it out here:
http://specificimpulses.blogsp...

What non-Fortran-stuff do these programs integrate with? Anything over a network?

The modern Fortran versions can talk to C. Python uses Fortran libraries for math-intensive stuff. Fortran programs can number crunch across hundreds or thousands of nodes connected with InfiniBand. Network-y enough for you?

Where can I download a scientific Fortran program to evaluate its quality?

Start here: http://www.netlib.org/

And remember kids: If the old man scares you, just kick him in the nuts and run away!

This is a nice hack, but in the end, he just build a receiver for the 2.4Ghz band. Big deal.

There has been a much nicer hack to convert a nRF24L01 into a promiscuous listening device:

http://travisgoodspeed.blogspo...

This achieves a very similar goal, but much cheaper.

This may have been by accident, but using the rover to flip a rock can also be done on purpose:

"Randy Lindemann knows all kinds of crazy stuff the rover can do. He describes using the rover to flip over a rock. You drive it over the rock so that the rock is between the two back wheels on one side. Then you drive all of the wheels backward except for that middle wheel, and as the middle wheel drags backward, its cleats catch the underside of the rock and flip it. If little Martian bugs crawl out, you win unlimited funding. "

Obligatory xkcd-sucks

I don't think I know any US ambassadors that speak Danish, but as a very cushy position of an unimporant but close ally, the post of US ambassedar to Denmark fetches a quite high price.

You remember the case where a governor tried to sell a senate seat? His excuse afterwards was that, he thought it was acceptable because that is how diplomatic positions are traditionally "awarded".

Here are some guesses on the price:
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-12-13/the-economics-of-being-a-u-dot-s-dot-ambassador
http://taxpol.blogspot.de/2013/09/how-to-buy-us-ambassadorship-and-how.html

You mean like SSL is broken and nobody talks about it?

First there was BEAST in 2011, which was fixed. But the situation in 2013 is not better!
https://www.globalsign.com/blog/is-ssl-broken.html (and links therein, especially the last two)
https://www.imperialviolet.org/2013/02/04/luckythirteen.html
http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/02/attack-of-week-tls-timing-oracles.html
List of all attacks: http://armoredbarista.blogspot.de/2013/01/a-brief-chronology-of-ssltls-attacks.html

Without the subsidized bread (sold for about 0.08 cents) several million people will starve to death.

You are stating that people in Egypt can buy 100/0.08=1250 loaves of bread for one dollar. No wonder their cash reserves are dwindling. Is there any chance that it's actually 8 cents and that you work for Verizon?

losing weight

Actually yes it is illegal and unreasonable. You can't set contract terms that prevent your competition from undercutting you with a better deal or from them being willing to make less money than you. You are in effect by establishing such a contract engaging in price fixing as you are setting a minimum price.

http://feldmanfile.blogspot.de/2012/04/most-favored-nation-landmine.html

It's very important to understand that Apple isn't the only eBook retailer with a "Most Favored Nation" clause; both Amazon and Barnes & Noble have them as well. In fact, Amazon is far more aggressive at exercising its clause than the other two retailers. Amazon regularly scans the prices for eBooks at competitive websites and will automatically drop the price of any title that it finds lower at another site, without giving notice to the publisher (or, for a self-published eBook, the author.)

... Just getting Apple to get rid of its "Most Favored Nation" clause without doing something about Amazon and Barnes & Noble isn't going to fix the problem.

The price was fixed because Apple had a deal that NOBODY could sell to the public at a price lower than they could. The collusion was between Apple and the individual publishers.

And Amazon had and still has almost the same clause - just worse, because in their case the price will stick at the lowest price for ever, making promos for non-Amazon stores impossible. http://feldmanfile.blogspot.de/2012/04/most-favored-nation-landmine.html http://paidcontent.org/2011/11/03/419-amazon-wont-pay-self-published-author-for-books-it-mistakenly-gave-away/ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/30/business/media/byliner-takes-buzz-bissingers-e-book-off-amazon.html?_r=2&smid=tw-nytimes&seid=auto&

I don't entirely agree with this. I think the reason major development houses don't put resources into procedural content generation is lack of imagination, and fear of taking risks. Several independent software researchers have solo developed demonstration projects recently that hint at what can be achieved and how much work it takes, and in terms of programmer hours vs. artist hours it actually looks very promising, as well as in terms of actual product quality. I think the big studios just have a winning formula that is making them millions and they are afraid to step out of their comfort zone and risk trying something new.

> I was clear in my post that I was asking a question
If that is your idea of a question, then I'm happy I don't have to deal with your questions more often. For the record, a question would have been:
"I can't imagine the rainbow color highlighting will be useful. Could someone explain how it works exactly?"
That's just the basics of respectful communication.

I have put the highlighting explanation into the manual: http://userbase.kde.org/KDevelop4/Manual/Working_with_source_code#Rainbow_color_highlighting_explained

I also wrote an article about other myths which are being spread here ("kdev3 was far better", "it's not 'framework neutral'", "it's slow/hogging memory"...): http://scummos.blogspot.de/2013/04/for-every-kdevelop-release.html

http://scummos.blogspot.de/ I guess its not released as stable yet, my understanding from reading about the release was that it was. I have been using kdevelop as my python editor for a while. Haven't tried the new release yet. I tend to stick to the versions my distro provides updates for.

I would assume that exponential fits best where you have a feedback system. Since less ice leads to possibly more methane, less albedo, and more mixing, those trends will lead to a temperature increase that again will lead to less ice and so on.

This is counteracted by the depletion of ice, the depletion of stored methane, and the reduction of currents due to ocean stratification.

This my naive understanding, ask climatologists and you get more feedbacks and interactions. Here is a link:
http://arctic-news.blogspot.de/2012/08/diagram-of-doom.html

Nobody within the core KDE development community ever confirmed that there will ever be a Software Compilation 5. http://aseigo.blogspot.de/2013/03/the-case-brand.html suggests that maybe it won't.

The scary part is I don't know what my parents could have done to prevent that. I have no idea how to keep my son from doing stupid shit like this.

- but I think I know what can be done (I don't know that it will guarantee success, but I think it would limit the probability of this type of behaviour).

Something to do. Something to do that is rewarding, something to do that is useful in some way, that teaches the kid, that gives him the satisfaction of seeing the results of his work.

Something productive to do that would channel the kid's energy.

I think the society went in the wrong direction in many ways, from the way the kids are treated with 'kid gloves' (really, everybody should be allowed to take a chance and dive into the Hudson river and swim in raw sewage, or maybe something less extreme but productive, like working at an earlier age) to the way the education system seems to inspire confidence instead of knowledge.

Basically I think you have to help the kid to find a productive way to occupy himself, maybe learning about tech stuff, building computers and robots from scratch, maybe it is sports, after all that's what Americans value most it seems. Maybe it is starting his or her own little business from early on and learning about the real world that way.

The "Phobia" guy could have been using his 'mad skills' for something productive, maybe building tools and websites for some small amounts of money for people who'd pay or audit security, etc., instead he does this. Of-course he was probably never really properly taught a lesson* in his life, but that's about to change.

(* - what can you tell a guy with 2 black eyes? Nothing. He's been told twice already.)

doing it as a "solution" would make the USA look like they are playing silly lawyer-ball games

- what it would do is make it crystal clear to the world that USA cannot and will not pay its debts.

be even worse -- having the US government default on its debts. It's one thing to cut spending, but it's quite another for the US Congress to decide it's simply going to refuse pay the bills for money it has already spent.

- it's the same exact thing.

There is no difference between defaulting on the debts (and USA is a deadbeat debtor, don't act all surprised, USA does not pay debts) and printing an arbitrary bill with whatever number of zeros on it to "pay" the debts.

Here - that's the equivalent. 100 Trillion Zimbabwe dollars. Do you think that by printing a bill like that you PAY your debts? :))))))

Really? :)))))

Then you have bought this nonsense idea hook line and sinker, you don't understand value of money, you don't understand money and that's exactly what the system wants you to be - somebody who doesn't understand value, somebody who doesn't understand money. That's why charlat..... "economists" like Krugman are touted by the system, while people who actually know what they are talking about, predicted all of these issues for decades, made serious money by taking their own advice, those people are shunned and laughed at by the establishment whenever possible.

disruption of vital services

- the difference between pretending to pay with fake money (inflation) and defaulting honestly (paying cents on a dollar) is actually huge. If USA defaults honestly (and it won't), it will recover much faster than if it takes the low route and prints (mints bazillion dollar coins, whatever).

Either of these is a default, printing money and paying with new cash is a default, but it's more insidious, it's worse than an honest bankruptcy and restructuring.

precipitous drop in their credit rating - do you realise that printing fake money (and all US dollars created by gov't or the Fed are fake, counterfeit) is what causes real rating agencies to drop US credit rating (and now SEC is suing that agency)? Do you realise that the 'fiscal cliff' was a deal by the gov't to try and balance the budget in the future in exchange for the S&P and Moody's not dropping the US rating back in 2012?

endless legal red tape

- yeah, restraining the gov't spending, that's 'terrible'.

higher interest rates for the foreseeable future

- imagine where USA interest rates will be once the country has its own 'Greek moment' (and there is no Germany big enough in the world to bail out USA).

Even the threat of that happening last year was enough to drop the nation's credit rating.

- USA credit rating was dropped not because of a possibility that USA will not borrow more to shift its debt from one credit card to another, the credit rating was dropped because USA is seen as high risk of default but it is also seen as high risk of attempting to print its troubles away.

There is no difference how you default, I don't want to hold US debt (not even s

doing it as a "solution" would make the USA look like they are playing silly lawyer-ball games

- what it would do is make it crystal clear to the world that USA cannot and will not pay its debts.

be even worse -- having the US government default on its debts. It's one thing to cut spending, but it's quite another for the US Congress to decide it's simply going to refuse pay the bills for money it has already spent.

- it's the same exact thing.

There is no difference between defaulting on the debts (and USA is a deadbeat debtor, don't act all surprised, USA does not pay debts) and printing an arbitrary bill with whatever number of zeros on it to "pay" the debts.

Here - that's the equivalent. 100 Trillion Zimbabwe dollars. Do you think that by printing a bill like that you PAY your debts? :))))))

Really? :)))))

Then you have bought this nonsense idea hook line and sinker, you don't understand value of money, you don't understand money and that's exactly what the system wants you to be - somebody who doesn't understand value, somebody who doesn't understand money. That's why charlat..... "economists" like Krugman are touted by the system, while people who actually know what they are talking about, predicted all of these issues for decades, made serious money by taking their own advice, those people are shunned and laughed at by the establishment whenever possible.

disruption of vital services

- the difference between pretending to pay with fake money (inflation) and defaulting honestly (paying cents on a dollar) is actually huge. If USA defaults honestly (and it won't), it will recover much faster than if it takes the low route and prints (mints bazillion dollar coins, whatever).

Either of these is a default, printing money and paying with new cash is a default, but it's more insidious, it's worse than an honest bankruptcy and restructuring.

precipitous drop in their credit rating - do you realise that printing fake money (and all US dollars created by gov't or the Fed are fake, counterfeit) is what causes real rating agencies to drop US credit rating (and now SEC is suing that agency)? Do you realise that the 'fiscal cliff' was a deal by the gov't to try and balance the budget in the future in exchange for the S&P and Moody's not dropping the US rating back in 2012?

endless legal red tape

- yeah, restraining the gov't spending, that's 'terrible'.

higher interest rates for the foreseeable future

- imagine where USA interest rates will be once the country has its own 'Greek moment' (and there is no Germany big enough in the world to bail out USA).

Even the threat of that happening last year was enough to drop the nation's credit rating.

- USA credit rating was dropped not because of a possibility that USA will not borrow more to shift its debt from one credit card to another, the credit rating was dropped because USA is seen as high risk of default but it is also seen as high risk of attempting to print its troubles away.

There is no difference how you default, I don't want to hold US debt (not even s

Looks like this for those interested ...

Why not use something like Qubes: run each browser session inside its own throw-away, cleanly insulated VM?

Actually, the softies are pretty OK people. Unlike us, users, they see the screw-ups developing literally in slow motion, resulting in sub par end products and services delivered. (What requires rather high pain tolerance threshold on their part. Few manage to survive there.)

It's the career management and sales who are total [censored], killing all the good from the inside.

Because of the laws of thermodynamics.

The laws of thermodynamics don't hold for the universe as a whole. Not even energy conservation. Gravitating systems don't even reach a thermal equilibrium if they are too large and/or to cold (the current universe is certainly dominated by gravitation, and quite large and cold). Note also that black holes get hotter as they radiate energy away!

The basket of prices does not include many important things, that are excluded supposedly because they are too volatile.

However when reporting on inflation not on a weekly or monthly basis, but instead reporting on inflation per year or even decade, those supposedly 'volatile' goods MUST be included in the numbers.

Instead the calculations always exclude things that people truly use and buy every day. Food, energy, rent, housing, such things. These MUST be included into calculation of price inflation (and I say 'price inflation', I really mean just rising prices. Inflation is money printing, the change in dictionary definition came around 10 years ago, but it doesn't matter, their trying every Orwellian trick in the book, but people shouldn't fall for it.

Beyond that, the real inflation should be counted against the relative value to gold, which is the real money, it's what people use as real money and it's what governments fight against, they hate real money, that's because real money prevents long terms deficit and debt financing of all that government spending and thus prevents growth of gov't, prevents destruction of individual liberties.

AFAIC gold = freedom and fiat = slavery.

Your old friend may not even realize it, but he is part of the propaganda machine.

Another way to detect earthquakes nearly in realtime:

http://thebloeg.blogspot.de/2009/10/watching-watchers.html

Even if the infrastructure at the epicenter of an earthquake is destroyed, in the surrounding areas people seem to rush to their computers, not outside.

Poor chickens! I would've eaten them!
Torben

I guess it goes to show that you lack the outside perspective. Your inability to see the problem does not necessarily mean that there is no problem - it could mean you are part of the problem.

In this case, the problem is the unapologetic approach of the US to the nuking of two cities. Germany has spent 50 years apologizing for their Nazi parents, and by now grandparents. The US hasn't even spent 5 minutes saying sorry for melting civilians into the sidewalk.

And that, together with your continue aggressive politics and wars (if I recall correctly, since WW2 there has not been a single year during which the US did not engage in military conflict in some foreign country) makes the point very, very relevant. Because here we have a wolf crying wolf. When is the last time Iran started a war? One source says the year was 1739.

Compare the military history of the USA and of Iran and you'll notice something odd. It is 4 paragraphs for Iran since 1945, and about four pages for the USA.

Yes, it is relevant to point out that the one constantly warning you about some danger has a much, much worse track record on that same danger than the guy he's warning you about. It does impact the believability of the claim. It matters because it put the question of hidden agendas on the table. It matters because it provides context. Lastly, it matters because the US has not exactly been hiding its geo-strategical interests, and Iran lies smack in the middle of them. It is no stretch to say that no matter what they do or don't do, Iran will not be able to satisfy the US demands, because the US isn't really looking for the best interest of the world, it is looking for its own interests and that is in containing and isolating Iran in order to expand its own influence in the region.

And that is why all this matters, because US claims about Iran, its atomic program and all that crap are equally likely to be lies and misdirection than true. Plus, after claiming similar things about the neighbour country and being found out, there isn't exactly much credibility you have left.

Is there a tablet for hobbyist developers? In the sense that one can install a compiler (e.g. GCC) and experiment with own applications? I have found stuff like this but it seems like a major hassle to get things running. Is there any hope to begin with, that the big players will relax their policies enough so that such things can be easier? I would expect a Win7 tablet to be able to do the things I want, but another post above mentions the problem with the battery life. I do not own a tablet or a smartphone, so I don't really know how things stand beyond the app-store-land, but it seems that even Python in Android is not working as one would expect. So, any suggestions?

No ads so far, but why would they suddenly release an update after doing nothing for years? ...

Because the whole skype business model (selling skype-in/-out minutes) relies on having a controlled market locked-in through a proprietary protocol.
But recent advances in reverse engineering the skype protocole might represent a menace to the business model. Time to shift to a newer (not yet reversed) protocol, which the old 2.x generation of skype software might not have supported.

Might also something to do to some obscure wire tapping legislation which microsoft or skype has to comply to and which wouldn't have been possible with the older 2.x generation of software.

I would personally wait until AppArmor settings are updated for Skype 4.x before upgrading.

Or even better, hope that Eion Robb finds a solution to have the Pidgin/Adium plugin interfacing with (an AppArmored) SkypeKit instead of skype. Or that the reverse engineering efforts finally produce an opensource skype55-compatible re-implementation. (Not holding my breath, though)

No ads so far, but why would they suddenly release an update after doing nothing for years? ...

Because the whole skype business model (selling skype-in/-out minutes) relies on having a controlled market locked-in through a proprietary protocol.
But recent advances in reverse engineering the skype protocole might represent a menace to the business model. Time to shift to a newer (not yet reversed) protocol, which the old 2.x generation of skype software might not have supported.

Might also something to do to some obscure wire tapping legislation which microsoft or skype has to comply to and which wouldn't have been possible with the older 2.x generation of software.

I would personally wait until AppArmor settings are updated for Skype 4.x before upgrading.

Or even better, hope that Eion Robb finds a solution to have the Pidgin/Adium plugin interfacing with (an AppArmored) SkypeKit instead of skype. Or that the reverse engineering efforts finally produce an opensource skype55-compatible re-implementation. (Not holding my breath, though)

Oh dear, I smell an attitude on this blog.

Wow, I really didn't know that. I found this site showing an image with a nice size.

It's quite amazing to think about how huge and close it is, to occupy such a relatively large portion of the sky. Too bad we can't appreciate it's splendor. I wonder if the view will improve as it gets closer. A poster above mentioned that it will get diffuser the closer it gets, but I wonder why.

I have never doubted the fervor of your beliefs or principles, but I drank the Ayn Rand Kool Aid for 15 years. Then I decided to get over it.

- yeah, well I just read her books this year, I even put my take on them on this very site. Yet I have had my principles for my entire life, pretty much never was a socialist at all, maybe that's because I was born in a former 'communist' country many decades ago.

My principles do not come out of somebody else's thinking, I could have written those books she wrote all on my own (not the same stories, but the same principles).

I've just decided that it's completely soulless and without any form of empathy.

- yeah, well you have never lived in a really soulless country and I have, and that was it.

AFAIC it is soulless and without empathy and without principles to believe in government and government domination over individuals for the 'good of the collective'. There is no such thing AFAIC as the 'good of the collective'. It's a bunch of nonsense to control the simple-minded while robbing the economy.

. And I just don't see pure capitalism providing the solutions that

- I don't know what 'pure capitalism' is, but I understand free market.

It doesn't matter to me how the free market structures its economy, the only thing that matters is the freedom of the individual to decide how to live his life, and as long as he is not hurting other people, he must have his freedom, especially freedom not to be dragged in by the 'collective' and to be forced to work as a slave of the collective.

The more I've watched economics since I gave up on believing the 'libertarian-capitalist' stuff, I'm convinced that a lot of the assumptions of these models is completely wrong. It's like when physicist assume a perfectly spherical cow. It makes the math easy, but it's not accurate.

- the only economics that exists is free market economics, everything else is not actually economics, everything else is tyranny and dictatorship and destruction of economics.

You can watch the video in my sig, it's a good start.

So when you could see some train wrecks coming (like Greenspan telling people to borrow against their homes because it's "free money") it's hard to believe people who so fervently believe the Free Market Will Fix.

- and your argument that the free market is not working is the chairman of the federal reserve system saying: here is free money?

There you go, you have no clue what economics is, you have no clue what free market is, you have no clue what the federal reserve is, you don't know what money is.

Bernanke denied that the Fed was inflating the housing bubble even while he was actively doing so and declaring that his goal is to maintain house and stock values. The Fed even had a fake commission to "study" the reasons for the housing bubble, which came out with the conclusion that more government is needed.

Why was it fake? Because it never asked for participation of the people who actually actively predicted the bubble and have placed their bets against it and made a ton of money. How did they do it, are they much smarter than the Fed? Well, maybe they are, maybe the Fed is just lying, but that commission was fake and took 20 million to conduct, while all they had to do was buy a 20 dollar

I have never doubted the fervor of your beliefs or principles, but I drank the Ayn Rand Kool Aid for 15 years. Then I decided to get over it.

- yeah, well I just read her books this year, I even put my take on them on this very site. Yet I have had my principles for my entire life, pretty much never was a socialist at all, maybe that's because I was born in a former 'communist' country many decades ago.

My principles do not come out of somebody else's thinking, I could have written those books she wrote all on my own (not the same stories, but the same principles).

I've just decided that it's completely soulless and without any form of empathy.

- yeah, well you have never lived in a really soulless country and I have, and that was it.

AFAIC it is soulless and without empathy and without principles to believe in government and government domination over individuals for the 'good of the collective'. There is no such thing AFAIC as the 'good of the collective'. It's a bunch of nonsense to control the simple-minded while robbing the economy.

. And I just don't see pure capitalism providing the solutions that

- I don't know what 'pure capitalism' is, but I understand free market.

It doesn't matter to me how the free market structures its economy, the only thing that matters is the freedom of the individual to decide how to live his life, and as long as he is not hurting other people, he must have his freedom, especially freedom not to be dragged in by the 'collective' and to be forced to work as a slave of the collective.

The more I've watched economics since I gave up on believing the 'libertarian-capitalist' stuff, I'm convinced that a lot of the assumptions of these models is completely wrong. It's like when physicist assume a perfectly spherical cow. It makes the math easy, but it's not accurate.

- the only economics that exists is free market economics, everything else is not actually economics, everything else is tyranny and dictatorship and destruction of economics.

You can watch the video in my sig, it's a good start.

So when you could see some train wrecks coming (like Greenspan telling people to borrow against their homes because it's "free money") it's hard to believe people who so fervently believe the Free Market Will Fix.

- and your argument that the free market is not working is the chairman of the federal reserve system saying: here is free money?

There you go, you have no clue what economics is, you have no clue what free market is, you have no clue what the federal reserve is, you don't know what money is.

Bernanke denied that the Fed was inflating the housing bubble even while he was actively doing so and declaring that his goal is to maintain house and stock values. The Fed even had a fake commission to "study" the reasons for the housing bubble, which came out with the conclusion that more government is needed.

Why was it fake? Because it never asked for participation of the people who actually actively predicted the bubble and have placed their bets against it and made a ton of money. How did they do it, are they much smarter than the Fed? Well, maybe they are, maybe the Fed is just lying, but that commission was fake and took 20 million to conduct, while all they had to do was buy a 20 dollar