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The median household income of New York City is $60,879. In particular, Queens is $64,509, and the Bronx is $37,397, and Brooklyn is $56,942 (these two neighbor Queens). Median income is the income of the 50th percentile household. So nearly half the people in this area live in NYC on less than $50k.

Top earners use automation to increase per-worker productivity. The worker that becomes more productive does not reap any benefits from the heightened productivity; wages and hours remain the same while the company either pushes out more product on the same count of man-hours or jobs are eliminated. Historically this worked out okay because the automation required replacement jobs that the displaced workers would shift to. What we are currently living through is a form of automation unlike any in history, where there may be one new replacement job for every hundred workers displaced.

Technically, the top earners have not stolen anything. Ethically speaking, however, they have improved their ability to make money off of their workers while sharing none of the benefits with those workers. The corporate machine is oiled with the blood of the workers. Total capitalism is as bad as total socialism; there must be a balance or everything goes to pot.

Apple is a great example of where this ultimately goes. Apple Computer has an astonishing amount of cold hard cash at its disposal that is doing nothing other than sitting in a bunch of banks. That cash has effectively been removed from the economy. The richest people in the world have hoards of cash that they will never use. The wealth concentrates in the hands of what you call "the top earners" and is permanently removed from the economy. This process very literally shrinks the economy. They have plenty of cash to ride out decades-long recessions while the workers that actually do the real work that funnels the dollars up to "top earners" has no savings and becomes more destitute as a result of the economic conditions created by this cash hoarding.

But go on, continue to insist that the people at the very top hoarding their cash is a good thing and totally okay because "they've earned it." At some point your house of cards comes crashing down, and I can pretty much guarantee that you aren't one of these rich people that will escape a new automation-fueled recession unscathed...only further begging the question: why do you have a problem with taking money back from the wealth concentrators when you'll never EVER be one of them?

"Invest in and increase STEM education..."

Here's how the political emphasis on increasing STEM graduates is working out at my institution:

- Create a mickey-mouse "quantitative reasoning" class with no algebra content and give college credit for that.
- Remove basic algebra as a general-education requirement, since no more than about 25% of the students can pass it (no matter how many times they take it, how many different instructors teach it, or how easy they make the tests).
- Slash all the higher-level courses out of all the STEM associate's degrees (probably linear algebra, differential equations, calculus III, organic chemistry, etc.), because people should be given credit for math prerequisites like basic algebra, precalculus, trigonometry, etc. instead.

This being the culmination of the CUNY Decade of Science.

No, CUNY administration right now actually wants to get rid of even the most basic elementary algebra -- and even arithmetic! Check out the bottom of this page here for CUNY's current "List of Learning Objectives" required for all students: exponents, radicals, scientific notation, variables.... This is what they want to get rid of. Because only about 50% of open-admissions graduates from NYC high schools can pass a test on those subjects. See the sample tests on that page for the specific questions currently tested.

They couldn't cut the part where Han walks around behind him, because of the continuous dialog.

Why not? They could have cut away to Jabba's face to see his expression, even though Han was talking. This is called a reaction shot * and it's done all the time.

* I would have linked Wikipedia but for some reason the Wiki article on reaction shots claims that they rarely involve dialogue, which is bullshit.

You make a couple of interesting points wrt arming the populace. I'll mull over that an possibly respond later. Wrt the electoral college however: please note that every state except swing states such as Ohio and Florida are currently flyover country, electorally speaking. There is no point for any candidate to show up in any non-swing state, so all efforts go to those few that are. This holds for traditional flyover country (red) and metro areas (blue). The swing states get all the attention, and therefore all the promises. It's a lot smaller group of states than would be served otherwise. Without the electoral college, any state that has a significant minority of voters for the other side becomes a battleground. Currently, the red guy in DC is as irrelevant as the blue guy in Idaho.

In the US, the top 20 cities contain about 33 Million people, a mere 10% of the population. Why do you think they will get all the attention? Also note that the electoral college composition itself is based on population density, so there's not a lot of interest in those few votes in any case.

This is why the government "interference" is required in the first place, Libertarian fucktard.

I read up about this a while ago and I recall that the sort of voltage and current provided by a 9V batter would be sufficient for the technique. I just searched again and found this. They're using about 14V to 18V and 1.5mA. So it looks pretty safe to me.

Ok, what the hell. My father is Evangelos Gizis. He's an academic, who among other things has done stints as the President of Manhattan Community College, President of Hunter College, and Provost of Queens College. He still wishes I had taken school seriously and gotten a PhD.

> I didn't READ it, I EXPERIENCED it.

Oh, you experienced alcohol and glucose bonding together? Tell me more. Or just go back to school.

Of course not. I experienced the effects of same.

And, perhaps it is you that needs to go back to school.

Tip: They may not have taught this at the "school" you attended,, but there is often an abundance of acid in the stomach, where the Glucose (Gatorade) and the ethanol mixture ends up after ingesting same...

Obviously, your initial statement that alcohol and glucose do not combine was completely, utterly incorrect. Exactly how that makes you drunk faster may have more to do with the way Gatorade affects the absorbption of water than the formation of Glycosides, but It. Does Work. I have never gotten so profoundly intoxicated so fast before or since. Since I am not a chemist or a medical doctor, I freely admit I may be entirely wrong about the mechanism involved; but I am here to tell you that I am not wrong about the (admittedly subjective) results of the "experiment".

Try it if you don't believe me. But please be careful...

I'm with you brother! Can you spare dime? If you can I'll see if I can raise another 40 cents so I can call someone how might be able to explain the Unequal Protection afforded artificially incorporated business entities who now hold far greater sway over the U.S. so-called democratic republic than any feudal lord ever held over serfdom.

Since we don't teach European history very well, we may be doomed to reiterate it. Few people seem to remember that the Bill of Rights were the 1st 10 amendments to the Constitution which were the expressed limitations placed on the federal governmental power and authority or that they came out of legitimate concerns about the history of governmental abuse of power. Even fewer stop to realize that at the time, women, slaves and those that did not own 'property' weren't really considered citizen stakeholders.

I meant that relative to a poet's other options for communicating, like essays and dissertations and other prose, a poem is a puzzle because it doesn't go to the same lengths to set forth ideas clearly and avoid ambiguity

Ah, but ambiguity what makes both quantum computing and poetry work. An essay, ideally, means only one sharp well-defined thing, where a poem (or a literary work of prose) can simultaneously hold many meanings.

"The tao that can be told / is not the eternal Tao," says the ol' master in an famous Chinese poem, and "The facts are useful and real . . . . they are not my dwelling . . . . I enter by them to an area of the dwelling" says crazy Uncle Walt. These statements are ambiguous not because Lao Tzu or Whitman were careless, or because they were creating puzzles, or because they were not capable essayists (can't speak for Lao Tzu, but Whitman could write clear prose), but because ambiguity was part and parcel of their subject matter.

That's what they want you to believe, at least.

Actually, what they do is offer you a really fucking low "plea bargain" sentence, with a shit-ton of "extra added nastiness" if you force them to go to court. The Plea Bargain long ago stopped being a valid option and is now just a tool of coercion that leads to innocent people pleading guilty out of coercive fear.

And any judge, at any time, can decide you are "noncooperative" and simply throw the book at you. So your lawyer had really be damn good to get you out of that. IF you can afford a lawyer.

Let's hope that this time you're telling the truth when you say that.

By the way, here's some actual cites showing that you're wrong. Notice how you don't have to read every second letter of a Wikipedia cite on a Tuesday to understand what they're trying to say:

http://www.english-test.net/forum/ftopic14784.html - "To form the plural of a lowercase letter, place 's after the letter."

http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/communications/style-guide/editorial - "A's and B's: When referring to grades, use apostrophes"

http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/marks/apostrophe.htm - "An apostrophe is also used to form some plurals, especially the plural of letters and digits"

But let me guess, these cites are worse than your numerological reading of the citations to a Wikipedia article that explicitly contradicts you. Question: Is your inability to admit that you're wrong evidence of some sort of psychological issue?

It's possible some of my details are off - I was going on what I'd been told verbally by the head financial aid officer at a certain school.

What I'm coming up with for anchors of financial aid here are Federal Pell Grants and New York State TAP Grants.

It's possible some of my details are off - I was going on what I'd been told verbally by the head financial aid officer at a certain school.

What I'm coming up with for anchors of financial aid here are Federal Pell Grants and New York State TAP Grants.

I was amazed and delighted by this: http://www.sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~arnow/ED/correctnessproofs.html "Program correctness proofs have recently been successfully added to Brooklyn College's required course on mathematical and computer literacy for the general student". They are apparently teaching 'non-techie' students at least the rudiments of a skill that I would bet a majority of 'professional' programmers have not mastered.

It wasn't that they wanted to kill civilians- they wanted to kill bad guys.

And that's the problem: they wanted to kill "bad guys" so bad that they had the murderer's equivalent of blue balls. "Please be a bad guy please be a bad guy please be a bad guy -- bad guy! kill! kill! kill Whoops, wasn't a bad guy after all."

(We'll disregard the question of whether so puerile a label as "bad guy" applies to someone fighting an invading army.)

The only person you can trust is a weapon is someone who will regret using it even in a justified case. As Lao Tzu (or someone using his name) put it,

Weapons are the tools of fear;
a decent man will avoid them
except in the direst necessity
and, if compelled, will use them
only with the utmost restraint.
Peace is his highest value.
If the peace has been shattered,
how can he be content?
His enemies are not demons,
but human beings like himself.
He doesn't wish them personal harm.
Nor does he rejoice in victory.
How could he rejoice in victory
and delight in the slaughter of men?

He enters a battle gravely,
with sorrow and with great compassion,
as if he were attending a funeral.

using Nobel laureates as a proxy for all the other accomplished graduates

Invalid measure since virtually everyone is not in fields that have Nobel prizes.

When you have a model that works well, you expand it, not destroy it. But some people oppose public education for ideological reasons.

I don't recall saying anything to oppose expansion of CUNY. If New York City wants to make it bigger and "freer", then by all means they can do so. If you're saying that we should make all education "free", then I want to see a demonstration that this makes sense on the scale of the US. I don't consider CUNY large enough or for that matter "free" enough since they do charge significant tuition for a public school.

I use "scare quotes" around "free" because you don't actually make education free. You just make someone else pay for it.

Suppose a baby is born with a genetic defect and will die right away without resuscitation, and will die anyway after 6 months of painful, expensive treatment. Do you want a right-to-life nurse to impose her own religious beliefs on the couple and take it upon herself to perform resuciation? Or do you want a nurse who has taken a couple of philosophy courses and has had her ideas challenged by someone who believes differently?

The first nurse would make the hospital liable for the cost of treatment. Problem is solved without requiring philosophy.

That's a good example of the dangers of downgrading qualifications. If we replace well-educated nurses with 4-year degrees with poorly-educated nurses from 2-year technical schools, we'll have unqualified nurses making bad life-and death decisions. It's important to for a nurse to understand that a medical professional can't impose her own religious beliefs on her patients. I don't think you can teach that lesson in a stripped-down 2-year vocational course.

As I implied before, I'd rather have a 2 year religious nurse saving my life than a 4 year non-religious nurse not saving my life because she's spread out between too many patients. Further, you're very unrealistic about the morals that will stick to liberal arts graduates. I think it just as likely that they'll be more effective cheaters and bullshitters. That'd be a real help to my life expectancy.

Also, you employ a tricky little bit of rhetoric in discussing qualifications. Qualified people are qualified tautologically no matter the level at which the qualification exists.

If you took a good social science or economics class, you'd know that those are testable hypotheses and the way to answer them is with data. Social scientists (like Samuel Bowles) say that people who succeed tend to credit their own hard work, skill and virtue, but in reality when you look at a large pool of people, people seem to succeed because of their father's social status (eg George W. Bush).

So we don't need to dump money into education, we need to increase every fathers' status? Else, this observation seems irrelevant, even if it really is true. Maybe you should get some of this "data" before you speak further?

I'll go with the data. The data seem to show that, for those who want more education, the point of diminishing returns is more than 2 years of college, and not less than 4 years of college. If anyone has data to the contrary, I'll be happy to look at it.

Whoops, goalposts got moved! We're no longer in the "everyone should get an education" argument and moved to "everyone who 'wants' an education should get one". As I see it, the people who want more education can get it in the current environment just fine.

In all, I still see very sloppy reasoning here. Sure I'm not lifting any serious intellectual weight either, but all you've done is cite a couple of examples of free

Just so you are clear...

Dropping two nuclear bombs on Japanese civilians saved the lives of an estimated 300,000 to 1,000,000 japanese soldiers and 250,000 to 750,000 japanese civilians.

(http://socyberty.com/history/did-we-have-to-nuke-japan/)
"In the South Pacific, our combatant kill rate, Japanese to Allies was about ten to one. We killed about ten of their soldiers for each one of ours. Had we lost 100,000 men in the landings, not an impossible number, and continued that kill ratio, we would have killed nearly one million Japanese soldiers. More realistic numbers based on Normandy would have been 30,000 American deaths mapping to over 300,000 Japanese Soldiers killed. Notice I am careful to use the word soldiers. I remind you we would have killed a significant number of Japanese civilians, easily more than one quarter of a million had they not resisted the Americans, based on the losses of French and Dutch civilians in the taking of Europe from the Nazis. Had they resisted, the toll would have easily tripled based on the civilian casualties at Stalingrad. The pre-invasion air assault and shore bombardment would also have taken its toll. Even if those numbers are halved, the losses at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still much lower!"

---

http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/MED/med_chp10.shtml
  Hiroshima Nagasaki
Total Casualties
  135,000 64,000

Hiroshima was chosen because of its large size, its being "an important army depot" and the potential that the bomb would cause greater destruction because the city was surrounded by hills which would have a "focusing effect". Nagasaki was the backup target when Kokura (and it's arsenal) was clouded in.

---

Dresden alone (by comparison) is currently estimated at about 25,000 casualties (so half of Nagasaki but still a lot of civilians).

---

Japan got off extremely light with regard to civilian deaths.
http://web.jjay.cuny.edu/~jobrien/reference/ob62.html

Germany 2million (ten times the civilian casualties resulting from a clean, non nuclear defeat)
Japan 350,000 (--- when you consider 200,000 of those were the two nuclear bombs...)
Rumania 400,000 (1/3rd the population of Japan, higher civilian casualty rates)

---

We have done a lot of scummy crap. And you know what- most of it seems like it turned out badly. So it makes you wonder why they keep doing it?

My theory is that we want to keep a lot of the world balkanized to prevent more superpowers from arising.

>>>>> WW2 was a horror not a success

>>And yet the United States of America emerged as the most wealthy and dominant power in the world AFTER WW1 and WW2.

In other words we grew wealthy-and-powerful on the back of Europe, China, and Japan's ruin (aka "the lost generation"). I think this cartoonist expresses it quite well - http://newman.baruch.cuny.edu/digital/redscare/IMAGES_LG/Ghosts_of_War.gif - Ironically it appears China is now doing the same thing - loaning tons of money which we must now payback. Do you view the Chinese takeover of your government and your marketplace as a "success"?

I suppose from Beijing's viewpoint the answer is yes. But from OUR viewpoint it sucks, and I bet from the European/Japanese viewpoint the post-WW2 American takeover also sucked. I stick with my original comment about WW2 being a "horror" not a success.

The Picture Coding Symposium (where Hosaka presented and published his 1986 paper) still exists, perhaps you can get it from them.

Here's a paper which shows some Hosaka plots and discusses them, and apparently has some more recent info, since it was written 10 years after Hosaka's - still more than 10 year ago.

http://www.sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~eskicioglu/papers/IEEETransCom95.pdf

I assume that if you google for Hosaka and Eskicioglu you can follow the bibliography trail to more recent work, if you like.

If you can come up with a better way to get a thousand people from point a to point b without vehicles, I'd love to hear it. And why can't we sing? Are you some kind of fascist?

Weapons are the tools of fear;
a decent man will avoid them
except in the direst necessity
and, if compelled, will use them
only with the utmost restraint.
Peace is his highest value.
If the peace has been shattered,
how can he be content?
His enemies are not demons,
but human beings like himself.
He doesn't wish them personal harm.
Nor does he rejoice in victory.
How could he rejoice in victory
and delight in the slaughter of men?

He enters a battle gravely,
with sorrow and with great compassion,
as if he were attending a funeral.

--Lao Tzu

It is fascists who sing joyful songs as they march off to war. If a free man of any decency must kill to defend his community - and this hasn't applied in the U.S. since the Battle of Baltimore in 1814[*] - he does so with a heavy heart.

([*]Hawaii was not part of the U.S. at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, and the islands are stolen property anyway. 9/11 was an act of mass murder, not a military attack by another nation that desires to invade or annex the U.S.)

Literate programming might be more popular if it had support for interactive debugging, with the standard features common in contemporary interactive development environments.

Sounds like a nut job? To me, he sounds like a teen following the directions of the assignment and trying to determine where the limits lie. While not as well executed, Lee's essay has elements that are similar to sections of T.S. Elliot's The Wasteland, the drug advocacy of Alan Ginsberg, the poetry of Sylvia Plath. Literature is filled with dead people we now refer to as artists and legends who became thus because they explored the dark edges of humanity. Oedipus Rex is all about incest and patricide, the works of Shakespeare are filled with violence, sex, and death. So, take this background, a bright student, and an assignment that instructs the students not to censor themselves, and just what did you expect to come out? No poets get recognized for writing about happy puppies and cute kittens.

Add to that, the only text from the essay I've seen has been excerpted out of context. If I just give you this text "And ate the fellow, raw.", what would you think the poem was about? Perhaps a bit from Silence of the Lambs? A quote from Penthouse Letters? A story about eating octopus? Nope. That's from Emily Dickinson's "In the garden". Context is key to meaning.

Should the teacher have done something? Probably. Should someone have talked with Lee to find out if he really had violent tendencies? Sure. Should they have charged the kid with a crime for following, perhaps to the logical extreme, the explicit instructions on the assignment? Definitely not.

Wasn't that road crossed back in 1998, with far less justification than there is now? Is it your opinion that impeachment ought never be used under any circumstances? If not, when should it be used?

We need a 3rd party...

Agreed... in fact, we ought to have several. Unfortunately, until a few procedural issues (like the spoiler problem and the media lockout of 3rd party candidates from Presidential debates) are solved, it isn't going to happen, no matter how much we need it.

Even scientists brought up in the evolutionary tradition have been surprised to learn in recent years just how closely the genes of different species are related. During evolution, genes have been conserved to such an extent that some human genes will function in a yeast cell and quite a few will function in a fly cell. Clearly, one feature of evolution is the maintenance unchanged of many aspects of cellular life even while great changes in external form and capability are occurring. Recent progress in determining the sequences of all the genes in a variety of organisms is revealing the subtle changes that have fueled evolution.

Not wanting to be nasty or anything, but America is going through a bit of a religious experience at the moment, with people rejecting science by the million.

Really? Got any facts to back that up?

According to the American Religious Identification Survey "The proportion of the [American] population that can be classified as Christian has declined from 86% in 1990 to 77% in 2001" and the number of people who believe in no religion AT ALL doubled from 1990 to 2001.

Sorry, homeboy. You're wrong.

The big (obvious) flaw here is that this is a survey of Americans only. It's well known that the US is one of the most religious countries on the face of the earth. The number of "true believers" in the US has always been astronomical, the number of people who self-identify as "born again" Christians or fundamentalists is off the charts relative to almost any other western country you want to name. The level of education in the US is also corespondingly low relative to other western countries.

Anyone want some actual FACTS?

According to the American Religious Identification Survey "The proportion of the [American] population that can be classified as Christian has declined from 86% in 1990 to 77% in 2001" and the number of people who believe in no religion AT ALL doubled from 1990 to 2001. And when you say "the face of the Earth" just be honest and say "some countries in Europe, such as England, but not Italy, and not anywhere in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa or just about everywhere else, because those countries just don't count."

Also, this research indicates that the average American citizen has more years of schooling, on average, than anywhere else in the world.

You're correct. America is essentially a christian fundamentalist country, or well on its way to become one, and that almost strictly has to do with parents spreading their beliefs to their offsprings from the earliest age.

Time to check your facts, bub. According to the American Religious Identification Survey "76.5% (159 million) of Americans identify themselves as Christian. This is a major slide from 86.2% in 1990. Identification with Christianity has suffered a loss of 9.7 percentage points in 11 years -- about 0.9 percentage points per year."

Other research shows that the number of Americans not affiliated with any religion AT ALL has doubled since 1990.

I understand that people want to bash America, Bush, the religious right, etc., but if you're going to do so, at least get your story straight. (And though I shouldn't have to do so, let me just point out that I'm an Atheist Democrat)

Umm you do realize that what you just described is empathy, yes? The people who can't empathize are called psychopaths, it's an evolutionary mutation. My opinion on religion is that it's just people being people... gullible and ignorant. Thankfully religion is on a rapidly declining trend[1]:

* 23% of 18-34 year olds label them self's as "Secular" or "Somewhat Secular", compared to 10% of people 65 years old and up.
* 43% of 18-34 year olds label them self's as "Somewhat Religious", compared to 34% of people 65 years old and up.
* 27% of 18-34 year olds label them self's as "Rligious", compared to 47% of people 65 years old and up.

Also interesting to note:
* Women are more likely, than men, to describe themselves as religious.
* Black Americans are least likely to describe themselves as secular.
* Asian Americans are most likely describe themselves as secular.

[1] http://www.gc.cuny.edu/faculty/research_studies/ar is.pdf

Fair enough.

Same data is available in the original ARIS report that they cite:

http://www.gc.cuny.edu/faculty/research_studies/ar is.pdf

That's nothing - here are the real Robots of Mass Destruction: Robot Dance Competition http://web.gc.cuny.edu/sciart/.

Maybe the submitter wouldn't have put an apostrophe in "As" if his teacher had an incentive to teach him some grammar?

A good jab at the submitter, but this usage of the apostrophe is actually correct in this situation, as it may not be clear from the headline itself that "As" is referring to multiple letter grades of "A."

Female AND good at math? What else could a /.er ask for?

Given this picture I'd ask for the lights to be turned off...

...
I have just three things to teach:
simplicity, patience, compassion.
These three are your greatest treasures.
Simple in actions and in thoughts,
you return to the source of being.
Patient with both friends and enemies,
you accord with the way things are.
Compassionate toward yourself,
you reconcile all beings in the world.

Tao Te Ching, 67

Slightly different turn :)

CC.

The last refuge of modern sexists is the claim that even if men and women have the same average scores, men have a greater variance and therefore are more likely to produce the very top level mathematicians and scientists. For an example of the debate see Pinker vs. Spelke, or one could also read Dr. Elizabeth Spelke's papers including Sex differences in intrinsic aptitude for mathematics and science: A critical review.

Christina Sormani has a web page explaining why Penny Smith is likely to have solved the Millenium Problem on the Navier-Stokes equation. Smith's paper is the culmination of a lifetime of research similar to how Wiles' proof of Fermat's Last Theorem was a logical outcome of his previous research. This is not someone coming from out of nowhere providing a proof that has nothing to do with his or her prior specialty.

The debate is now over. Penny Smith has shown that there is in fact no variance between men and women that predisposes men to have the very top mathematicians. In fact the proof that environment trumps genetics has been demonstrated in the United States over the past decades: males born in the United States have been judged by government and industry to not be good enough in top-level mathematics which is why so much talent has to be imported from other countries. The United States is probably going to follow the path of the United Kingdom where cultural factors are causing boys mathematical achievement in school to collapse relative to that of girls.

But with its military potential doubled, Germany, Austria, Italy and now Czechoslovakia under their control the nazis had compact land and the natural next stop was the Blitzkrieg and invasion of Poland starting the 7 year long war which devastated the whole continent. Letting Israel devastate Lebannon with US help and US destroy Iraq is just par for the course for UK and France. Business as usual.

3. If this made general Internet access suck it could (here's to hoping) force deregulation of transmission lines.

Let's hope not.

*Extremely* old news.

Also, "Mac OS X" has ALWAYS been proprietary. It's sensationalistic and shoddy journalism to say that "Mac OS X is now closed". Mac OS X has ALWAYS been closed. It's Darwin that has been open. And "Darwin" is more than a bootable OS: Darwin is Apple's open source strategy AND an OS; but the usefulness has always come from the open source components of the OS, not the usefulness of Darwin as an OS itself. Darwin's usefulness as an OS is, shall we say, "limited" at best, and always has been.

This has been beaten to death on the darwin-dev list, and there is no new information. Apple has taken no new recent action whatsoever, and in fact, the most recent action is that it has opened up more source code in the x86 tree, not less. Indeed, all of the traditional Darwin source with the notable exception of the kernel itself:

The thing that's not open in the x86 tree is xnu (the kernel), and it's not possible to create a fully bootable binary x86 Darwin OS, as it is for PPC. In the Darwin/OpenDarwin community, this has been discussed for months.

In fact, this article by Rob Braun (formerly of Apple, and a member of the OpenDarwin core team) was published in February 2006: http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200602/apple.html. This was then covered on slashdot, to which Rob issued this response: http://www.opendarwin.org/~bbraun/slashdot_respons e.html. These two discussions cover the issues very well.

I predict, however, that this Macworld UK article will be seen as "new news", and will be picked up by the tech outlets, and trumpeted, exactly as the headline hopes, as "Apple closes down OS X", even though the source for pretty much everything (except the kernel and drivers) is still available. In other words, everything that a normal person needs Darwin sources for is available. In 5 years, I can think of ONE instance where I looked to the kernel source for confirmation of something, and that was only for *confirmation*, and only because it was convenient - not because I needed to rebuild the kernel. I know of no other non-developer/programmer Mac OS X adminisrators/system engineers/enterprise users who have ever had any reason to rebuild the kernel or any drivers.

If the kernel and driver source were available, it would, however, be used for one purpose: to churn out hacks to get OS X to run on non-Apple hardware in a much faster and higher-quality way than has been possible to date. Will OS X be hacked anyway to run on non-Apple hardware, and will it continue to be, regardless? Yes. If people are willing to replace enough of the OS with the ugliness they're using to get it to work, absolutely. But it will continue to be ugly. Releasing kernel and driver source for the current iterations of OS X on x86 will only make their jobs infinitely easier, while brining little to no benefit to conventional users, power users, and administrators of OS X.

I'm sure people will find a way to make a huge deal about this, though, even though a huge deal has already been made about it in various forums, including slashdot and other tech news outlets, and on several of Apple's mailing lists.

I'd like to point out that this was my initial reaction: http://listserv.cuny.edu/Scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind0602 &L=macenterprise&T=0&P=58970

Since then, Apple has posted all of the APSL sources, and it was just a legitimate, honest delay. The PPC and x86 trees are at virtual parity with the sole exception of the kernel and drivers. So I'd submit that "Apple closes down OS X" is highly inaccurate for two reasons:

- Most of OS X was never "open" to begin with; if he wants to say "Darwin", great, but I suppose "Apple closes down Darwin" wouldn't be as sensationalistic and guaranteed to get as many page v

Hear hear.

I'm as big a fan of free markets as the next guy, but telecom is _not_ a free market. There is necessary management of public assets (rights to utility poles and municipal infrastructure) that will always require regulation of some sort or another (and thus provide an opportunity for corru^H^H^H^H^Hlobbying). So until the day comes when it's all unregulated wireless, the legitimate fairness concerns of the public deserve primacy.

BTW, for a look at the early days of unregulated wiring, check this out.. or this.. Downtown NY was covered in all these lines at first, which would of course break in winter and cause safety issues...

Indeed. That didn't stop them from trying, though - prior to the introduction of computers, Chinese typewriters for a long time had more than 2,000 individual characters on their keyboards. Take a look here:[http://www.msm.cam.ac.uk/phase-trans/2004/HI T4/HIT4-Images/25.jpg%5D and here: [http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~phalsall/texts /chinlng2.html%5D (at the bottom of the page).

Interestingly, the typists still had to stop and manually write in about every 10th character.

Gotta give them points for tenacity, if nothing else.

So, what percent of US Citizens are part of these groups? There's a chart on page 13 of this pdf for reference.

...

The fix should have been to disable the "Open safe files after downloading" option by default a year ago - Apple's failure to do this is fairly typical of a large software company trying to balance security & ease of use.

Yes, that I agree with. Even though I wasn't talking about this in my initial post, I think the discussion around this assumes that Apple will still try to maintain the "safe" files paradigm, though there is arguably no such thing as a "safe" file.

And as we all know, that can happen on any platform.

I am not aware of any way you can execute something under Ubuntu without explicitly setting the execute bit.

Please link to examples.

Context. I said:

Once fixed (or, in the interim, a single box unchecked) every other aspect of this just becomes tricking the user to click something. And as we all know, that can happen on any platform.

This means "as we all know, that can happen on any platform" is in direct reference to "every other aspect of this just becomes tricking the user to click something". NOT in reference to the auto-execution of malformed shell scripts because of Safari and LaunchServices' bogus handling, to which the "Once fixed (or, in the interim, a single box unchecked)" part of the statement refers.

Nice attempt to try to paint me as ignorant, but since everything I said is perfectly valid, and since my initial post was clearly describing an ADDITIONAL exposure via this method, I'm sure everyone will be able to see that.

However, I doubt you'll admit you were wrong and that you totally misread my post.

I hate to break it to you, but Roman insulae are a pretty bad example to use in this case, since they were more similar to college dorm rooms than modern apartments. For example, they tended to consist of only one or two small rooms -- a bedroom and (maybe) a sitting room. Residents used communal toilets and baths, and bought food from vendors rather than cooking for themselves (especially since cooking in their room was likely to burn down the whole building!). Also, since windows were just opened or curtained (since they didn't have glass), the neighbors could hear everything said.

Really, in an insula there was no privacy at all.

(Sources: 1, 2)

Now, who was it that put their foot in their mouth, again?

The man in question was the Emperor Qinglong, in reply to an embassy from King George III, who was trying to open up trade with China. His reply is... amazing. The sheer arrogance and, so it seems, total ignorance on the part of the Celestial Emperor of what he was dealing with, is quite astounding. To say to the ruler of the rising British Empire, "Tremblingly obey and show no negligence!"... wow. Not really surprising things ended badly there. The whole letter is just one long spectacular insult.

If a country is governed wisely, its inhabitants will be content. They enjoy the labor of their hands and don't waste time inventing labor-saving machines. Since they dearly love their homes, they aren't interested in travel. There may be a few wagons and boats, but these don't go anywhere. There may be an arsenal of weapons, but nobody ever uses them. People enjoy their food, take pleasure in being with their families, spend weekends working in their gardens, delight in the doings of the neighborhood. And even though the next country is so close that people can hear its roosters crowing and its dogs barking, they are content to die of old age without ever having gone to see it. http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/core9/phalsall/t exts/taote-v3.html Tao Te Ching

"A mutation occurs when a DNA gene is damaged or changed in such a way as to alter the genetic message carried by that gene. A Mutagen is an agent of substance that can bring about a permanent alteration to the physical composition of a DNA gene such that the genetic message is changed. Once the gene has been damaged or changed the mRNA transcribed from that gene will now carry an altered message."

It is this type of 'traditional' logic that I'm disputing. I say we are not in any postition to outline what defines 'mutation'. How do we know that the DNA didn't 'damage' itself as part of a prescribed routine?

"English" (the language) is a proper noun, and should be capitalized. The intarwebs told me so.

Let's say you wrote a novel. After your friend reads the draft, you decide that the ending sucked and changed it, which you like MUCH better. However, then your friend comes back and says the old ending was better and you should produce that novel instead of the new version that YOU, the author, like better.

What business is of your friend to dictate what your novel should be? It is not a collaborative effort (unless YOU wanted it to be). Most artist would demand the same.

If the public likes the new version, great. If they don't, that's fine too. At least you published what YOU, the artist, wanted.