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In fact, the english phrase seems to date back from 1880:
http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=correlation+does+not+imply+causation&year_start=1600&year_end=1900&corpus=0&smoothing=3

But the concepts of correlation and causation started to become popular around 1860:
http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=correlation%2C+causation&year_start=1600&year_end=1900&corpus=0&smoothing=3

Users != uses. I doubt the NIST would consider the speed of HW implementations so carefully if it didn't matter much. Mainframes come with heavy-duty hardware crypto assists.

And one more thing from that poll was that only 11% of respondents selected "None".

Them be the lawyers. Why would anyone confess to violation of laws?

If the lane isn't wide enough for motor vehicles to safely pass the bicycle, the cyclist should "take the lane" for his own safety.

Please advise how a car driver can overtake a bicycle on this road. Note the width of the single lane and the solid double yellow line in the center. You can't see the depth of the ravine on the left, but trust me - it's deep enough. This road does not allow for legal passing for most of its length, and it is infested with bicycles on weekends. Since this is an uphill road, bicyclists are moving up like turtles, and if you want to go around them you have to break the law and cross the center divider. Since the road is twisting, these lines there are for a reason.

IE8 was the one designed for CSS 2.1; the newer versions are meant to be chasing full CSS3 compliance, so it's perfectly reasonable to complain when they don't.

I've tried to google up support for various features in this table in IE10. Apparently CSS3 flexbox, columns, animations, transforms (incl. 3D), transitions, shadows and gradients are all there now, as is text-shadow. On JS side of things you get IndexedDB, workers, sockets, and file API. On HTML side, progress (but not meter), and a good chunk of HTML5 forms. Here is the full list in case I missed anything.

Generally speaking, I'd expect this trend to continue, if only because a lot of that stuff is needed to write full-fledged web apps, and HTML5/JS is now advertised as a prime platform for Win8 app development. So all that stuff like file API or IndexedDB had to be done if only to enable that (and their general guideline is to use standardized APIs where they are available - to the point that they actually block you from accessing WinRT APIs that duplicate that functionality).

Also, with respect to codecs, that table is not entirely correct - IE doesn't support WebM out of the box, but it will use WebM codec if one is available (it's explicitly whitelisted, along with H.264) - so this works once installed. I suspect that this arrangement is a play-it-safe attempt to dodge any potential legal issues by not distributing the codec. That said, I haven't tried it with IE10.

First, one must take exception to the idea that source code is not creative. As examples, look at any IOCCC entries -- I like the flight simulator in the shape of an airplane. Secondly, you may examine the DeCSS Gallery and judge whether any of that may be considered a creative expression.

What you are perceiving as lack of creative expression, though, is the flaw in your arguments: software is not eligible for patent protection because it consists of mathematical operations.

Software is Math
To most students of Computer Science this is as inarguable as evolution in the biological sciences. At the fundamental level, modern computers only function is to carry out binary arithmetic. This ipso facto means that any function computers do is mathematical, but one might make the argument that things which are not inherently mathematical can nevertheless be modeled or represented using mathematics, and that software is something modeled in math rather being defined in it.

You would be very, very wrong. At the point in which Alan Turing laid out the foundations for all of computer science, no such calculating machines existed. Computers were designed as implementations of mathematical concepts. Programming languages grew out of a branch of mathematics called Lambda calculus, and Lisp in particular is fairly trivially convertible to mathematical statements. All concepts in computer science are defined in formal language which is inherently mathematical -- even the concept of a formal language itself. One consequence of this is that it is possible (though extremely difficult all but trivial programs) to construct a formal mathematical proof of any given program's correctness.

This is not to say that there can be no creativity involved in designing algorithms. However, there we may separate the concept from the expression of the concept, and say:

Math is Discovered, not Invented
This is admittedly a philosophical stance, but it has historically been the majority position. It is obvious that one may not "invent" the mathematical operations of arithmetic: they are a consequence of your choice of axioms. It is less obvious to prove Fermat's Last Theorem, but the separation of true statements from false ones is not "invention".

The contrary position leads to absurdities, e.g. if mathematical laws did not exist before their discovery, then gravity could not have existed before Isaac Newton.

Monopolies on Mathematics are Absurd
It is again, intuitively obvious that patenting "1+1 = 2" is as absurd as patenting the process of obtaining patents. No person can have any exclusive right to a mathematical concept: they exist solely in the mind, and by definition are arrived at from pre-existing axioms. You can no more separate a mathematical concept from its derivation than you may an individual from his: it is the ultimate prior art. If you wish to use a part of the mathematical birthright of every man, the fruit of human genius, as means to your private profit, you may feel free. However, enlisting public resources to that end by claiming monopoly right to a concept, is criminal and offensive.

The same mathematical function may have varying representations. To protect a particular expression of an idea, we have something called "copyright".

Empirical Studies
Finally, we may view the chaos that has resulted from the legal fiction of software patents: there can be no more useless expenditure than to dispute the ownership of mathematical concepts. A more thorough discussion of the practicalities is out of scope, but you may peruse more scholarly treatments at your leisure.

Wonder if they'll be using anything similar to this: http://www.google.com/patents?id=PdAuAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4#v=onepage&q&f=false

Apparently, it's a subterranean atomic drill. Quite interesting, and quite old. If it -- or similar technology -- ever was employed, I suspect it has evolved since.

I hear they're the experts on gun laws in the US.

Some useful links garnered from their FAQ:

• 27 CFR 478.41 is the ATF requirement for a license
• 18 U.S.C. 922(a) (i) is what says you're breaking the law if you don't get the license mentioned above.

p.s., I am not a lawyer. I'm just giving google advice, not legal advice.

I hear they're the experts on gun laws in the US.

Some useful links garnered from their FAQ:

• 27 CFR 478.41 is the ATF requirement for a license
• 18 U.S.C. 922(a) (i) is what says you're breaking the law if you don't get the license mentioned above.

p.s., I am not a lawyer. I'm just giving google advice, not legal advice.

Geophysicist David Stevenson of Cal Tech proposes we make a probe that rides a molten mass of iron, 10,000 cubic meters of it poured into a fissue 0.1 meter wide x 300 long x 300 meter deep, all the way to the center of the earth.

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CB8QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fcampanian.iodp.org%2FMantleFrontier%2F12_Ojovan%2520-%2520Self_Sinking_Capsules_-_Ojovan.pdf&ei=egNrUMiMKuOeywH48YFw&usg=AFQjCNF3htj3aVkXi4Ln7xttNgFiL4TW5A&sig2=-xgVnfbwNGwtVNN6w7s_ZQ

I predicted unemployment would rise sharply. 33% increase is pretty sharp.

Um, it peaked at 10% in 10/09 and has been steadily dropping since then. The curve was much more gradual after he took office than leading up to 1/09.

you have the issue with america's credit rating being dropped twice during his presidency

9/2011's cut was due to the repubs in congress stamping their feet, holding their breath, and going back on good-faith efforts. I'm struggling to find the 2nd cut though. i see Moody's threatening, but not actually cutting.

Surely you noticed the devaluation of the dollar?

No...actually, i didn't. We lost some value back in 2009 against CAD and GBP, but we've been more or less flat since the beginning of 2010. We did lose some value since then against JPY and CNY. We've been making some strides against EUR. Here's the data back to '99 if you're interested.

Ever heard of the British comedy show, The IT Crowd ?

Go watch the first season. Then you'll at least get the GP's bit about "people skills".

Your basic entry-level economics course is flat-out wrong. Deflation is entirely orthogonal to depression. Here, have a link.

This Keynesian nonsense should have died off in the 70s, when we had both massive inflation and a complete lack of economic growth, something which is impossible according to the foundational tenets of Keynesian economics -- i.e., that spending causes economic growth, and hoarding stifles it.
  The fact is, Keynes was wrong. The economy is not a thing you can "pump money into", it's just the agglomeration of people's wants and needs. The whole perspective of Keynesianism is ass-backwards, I'd almost say superstitious. If deflation worked that way, a Dutch auction would end without a sale every time, but it just doesn't.

  I get why this theory still hangs around, though. Politicians will always love a system which perennially tells them "The answer is spend money! Lots of it! Doesn't matter whose money, or what you spend it on, just spend! Spend! Spend!"

... but the battery on the device doesn't run down after three hours like it does with CM. There are trade-offs.

You might give SetCPU a try, for a couple of bucks it's great value. It gives me about triple the battery capacity. I am on an oldish phone, though (HTC Desire), newer Android versions might have this feature on stock FW. In any case it's a no-brainer to underclock when you don't use the phone.

The Powerpoint presentation:

Meteorological Aids Spectrum Issues

It comes down to this:

Radiosonde transmitters operate in a hostile environment, with strict limits on weight, power and so on.

Most will never be recovered or reused.

Keep it simple.

Keep it affordable.

I would have posted it myself but I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac for about 20 minutes...

Plenty of slashdot posters keep copy/pasting talks like this... and get +5 Funny for it.

http://www.google.com/search?q="I+don't+know+about+you+but+that+sounds+damn+secure+to+me"+site%3Aslashdot.org

Woosh.

You are either really dumb or not thinking hard enough if you think that's hard to "shoehorn" on the established app model. Or you listened to what other people told you when they said it was hard and can't be done. This is very different from it not being possible or elegant.

In fact in the "established Win32 app model" an app spends most of its time blocked in GetMessage, WaitForMultipleObjects etc. and there is not even anything to suspend or resume! If there is an ill-behaved app not being polite that could be a bug on their part, so you can (1) reject that app from the store or (2) lower the process's priority when it's not in the foreground or other tricks with scheduling. But don't punish normal apps doing useful work on the user's behalf just because someone down the hall in building 86 said "it would be bad" to let them get their work done, because, like, Apple totally restricts this too.

Please learn something about how an operating system works under normal conditions. Or even look more into how Android does things, instead of listening to other people when they tell you, then citing that third-hand "knowledge". Lazy thinkers like you are the reason WinRT sucks.

Triple pane really doesn't do that much for sound deadening according to the Canadian Building Digest.
Tripple panes with dissimilar glass thickness works better,

But having a different type of glass on the inside works much better.

Typically they use laminated glass for the soundproufing inner pane, with glas laminated to plastic pane which dampens transmitted vibration.
There are commercial windows available for this. These solutions seldom work where you intend to open the window to let in a breeze.

If you don't want to buy entirely new windows there are simple and less costly interior add-on panes. This preserves the ability to open the window.

Emacs is included, as is the build script. From my experience, the build scripts often work with higher versions, so upgrading to the bleeding edge is straightforward: get the source and run the script.

Thanks to sbopkg, slackbuilds.org, and the collections of build queue files, installing almost everything else is extremely painless and can be achieved in a simple menu-driven interface.

As for dependencies, no one tracks them except for the slackbuild maintainers. This may sound insane to people who tasted apt, but this turns out to be an incredible blessing. You can install or uninstall any individual package with surgical precision, without wrecking the rest of the system. With a bit of fiddling, you can have multiple versions of the same package co-existing peacefully, but that of course is package-dependent. For a personal computer this boils down to not caring about dependencies ever: you make a full install, then build the extra apps with sbopkg, make sure everything works, and then sit back and relax. For a more structured deployment, like in a corporate setting, you do need to get into the dependency resolution, but then you get paid for it, right?

I used to live in a townhouse about 50ft from a 6-lane highway, with no protective soundwall. The noise from the highway was a constant buzz coming into the house, with occasional spikes (big rig trucks and straight-pipe Harleys).

Installing dual-pane windows solved the general problem of the constant higher noise level. Only the truck/Harley noise came through. Note that after a rain, car tires make more noise, and THAT still came through the windows a bit.

In your case, you need more help. Maximize your dead air space. Dual-pane windows will have have a smaller air gap than your walls, so start with the windows. If you need further noise abatement, hit the exterior walls, next.

For windows, something like this:
http://www.soundproofwindows.com/

For walls:
http://www.google.com/search?q=sound+absorbing+insulation/

I later bought a 60-year-old house (which already had dual-pane windows), and during a subsequent remodel we replaced all the half-inch drywall with 5/8th-inch, and added better insulation in the walls.It did a great job of reducing the "garage noise" (power tools, racing engines, etc.) from my neighbor's house.

We did the same for the interior walls, and replaced all the hollow-core interior doors with solid-core doors. Now any teen-chatter or stereo noise from the kids' rooms is effectively muffled into oblivion.

Google gets data from automated analysis of Street View photos. Road markings, building numbers and the location of entrances, street signs, barriers that prevent you walking a certain way, areas lacking pavements (side walks in US English), parking spaces etc.

Google doesn't just map the world, it understands it. It can provide walking directions that include navigation within buildings, telling which escalator to take or where the toilets are. It knows where the entrance to a building is rather than just where the post code says it approximately is. The latest version of Maps for Android includes navigation aids for blind people based on this data, which while still beta shows just how powerful it is.

Since no other company has sent cars round to gather that data no-one else has it, and at best it will take Apple years to duplicate the effort.

So why is Google Maps so bad? It certainly isn't as perfect as you pretend it is; considering its age, it should be.

Take this for example: https://maps.google.com/maps?q=from:Helvetiastra%C3%9Fe++to:Neuweg&saddr=Helvetiastra%C3%9Fe&daddr=Neuweg&hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll=49.911426,8.495736&spn=0.007724,0.016587&sll=49.91143,8.49611&sspn=0.007724,0.016587&geocode=FXST-QIdJ6uBAClJx22sf529RzFg_u0nZPFRuA%3BFVyT-QIdTY6BACn9jIaseZ29RzFhgnF51UlmHA&t=m&z=16. In this tiny area, the routing first takes a long needless detour, then through a short stretch that can only be used by busses, and has been since it was finished. If I tell it to not go there, it sends me over factory property, with the far end usually closed by a gate. Google should know that. I can accept that it still doesn't know the underpass on the railroad station has been going through to the other side for almost a year. The placing of the stores is wildly off. And local transit information is non-existant.

I love clicking on a link that purports to be informative, when I did nothing wrong myself, and be presented with a page that tells me to run javascript.

How about an actual link?

https://www.google.com/search?q=great+comit+of+1680
or even better
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Comet_of_1680

by the very nature of the final word, this time around none of the account holders will get a chance to complain... posthumously.

So is the next move after "Would you please rat out your friend for using a nickname?" possibly going to be a particularly considerate pop-up like "Has this friend of yours gone belly-up?"

"eroding American freedoms".

Somehow, that triggered these images in my head: google images search.

There's no known attacks against WPA other than dictionary and brute-force which will work on anything

You mean, apart from known attacks on WPS, which is commonly enabled on access points using WPA.

Your concept of being in control would be being able to stop yourself from acting badly. Their concept of being in control would be the same, but their concept of acting badly would be to NOT murder people. [... ] If someone were to say "Hey, maybe we shouldn't kill these people..", suddenly they are the blasphemer, suddenly it's their head on the block.

If anyone doubts parent, read about what happened to Mahmoud Mohamed Taha.

Anyone who is unfamiliar with what is going on needs to read Revolutionary Sudan, by Burr and Collins, and Sayyid Qutb's Milestones, particularly the chapter on "Jihad in the cause of Allah". Anyone who mistakenly thinks it is about US imperialism or colonialism needs to read Roberta Goren's The Soviet Union and Terrorism, if they can find a copy.

If you're in broadcast, check out ffmbc a broadcast-oriented ffmpeg fork. My dabbling has been with producing IMX (SMTPE D10) as an archival format for video and film archive digitiziation and although you can cook it up with ffmpeg, ffmbc makes it a doddle. The hard work has been done by the ffmpeg folks, and it's a wonderful tool.

I used ffmpeg for producing a side-by-side video of a reference uncompressed YUV vs samples of MJPEG2000 & MPEG2 at various compression ratios for a double-blind subjective quality assessment together with overlaid captions - took me a day or so going from never having used it before. Think of it as ImageMagick for video, rather than just a transcoding library.

Whilst I'm here, can I give a shout out for mediainfo(Hi Jerome!) as a technical metadata extraction tool for Video (if you're using it in an archival repository, use the mpeg7 or pbcore xml output - almost hidden features). Don't be fooled by the home page screenshot - the linux command line version is where it's at.

"So I guess MS wouldn't have problems doing exactly what they do if everybody wasn't buying their product."

This is somewhat besides the point since your point is a red herring, but as a matter of fact everybody is buying their product regardless of if they want it or not. I have paid the M$ tax time and again on hardware that I purchased and then immediately installed Linux on. Repeat this 100 times. Microsft doesn't sell hardware. Microsoft doesn't sell hardware. Microsoft doesn't sell hardware ...

"if they simply produced expensive hardware and locked down their operating system to only run on their hardware so you had to buy both from them, again it wouldn't be a problem. "

Perhaps you have heard of the XBox? And yes, a million times yes. You are starting to get it. If Microsoft actually produced a computer that was worth owning they could ship their OS with whatever applications they want pre-installed. What they couldn't do is make their applications exclusive, thereby locking out competing applications. You still don't seem to understand the difference between an Application and an OS, or between hardware and software for that matter. Also, Apple doesn't force you to use Safari for anything, nor do they have a search engine that they are jamming down peoples throats. You can just use this, for example.

"would the Fanbois be able to look so popular "

When you call people who are willing to pay extra for an excellent computer that comes with an OS that anyone but a moron would agree is a far, far superior product, you just sound like said moron.

There have been no less than 70 riots based on the content of this film. Here is a list of all of them:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AonYZs4MzlZbdGRkWVp3MmhhREM1ZE13Uk4wWEdoYUE#gid=0

Quite a number involved violent conflict, often between police and protestors. No less than 25 had to be disbursed with teargas and in at least 5, the violence came close enough to the US Embassy that US soldiers had to help in defending the perimeter of the embassy.

The president of Egypt (head of the Muslim brotherhood) continues to pursue his strong support of the protests, while at the same time, deploying the police forces to defend the US Embassy. It seems he wants it both ways...

And Apple is shipping 3D maps on mobile while Google is not.

Android has had 3D maps for ages.

They work really well, you can actually see what is inside buildings and it will navigate you (on foot) up escalators in shops to the right department or around a big train station.

They have had this for a while, it's not the same, but it's better than you make it sound. http://www.google.com/mobile/maps/3d/

Or at least until you "friend" someone at the office.

The problem is, today employment is a high-risk business. You employ the wrong person, fire them and they come back and shoot up the office. Or they may sue for some misunderstanding. Remember, the US is a society where people get ahead by suing and getting a big settlement.

There is also the simple fact that choosing the wrong person to hire results in a lot of costs with just job related things. It costs time and money to train someone and if they do not work out and leave after six months that time and money were wasted, possibly affecting scheduled and having a real impact on revenue.

All this makes employers want as much information as they possibly can gather about prospective employees and make no mistake about it, you aren't going to change that desire with some laws about social media. If employer's can't get this directly there will soon be services to deliver the information indirectly just as now you can get a complete background check of someone from the Internet. When there is a need that people are willing to pay for, someone is going to fill that need.

Why is social media relevent? Because the expectation is that you may post things in an unguarded manner that reflect more of your true personality than at a job interview. If the employer can avoid hiring someone that is going to be a problem, they just saved a bunch of money and possibly saved a project from being delayed. You can consider this to be the new sort of "personality test" that was all the rage back in the 1970s.

Oh, and face reality. The prospective employer probably doesn't care that you got drunk once and someone took some stupid pictures. Now, if you have people publicly commenting about what a drunk you are and how you can barely drag yourself into the office that becomes relevant. Having a comment about how much of a jerk you were to someone isn't all that interesting, but again if you have a bunch of stuff that indicates you're an intolerant child that has to have everything your way... well, you get the picture. It is the same thing as a background check that shows a speeding ticket - not all that relevant. But if you are driving on a restricted license because of a license suspension that might be interesting. Having recently been released from shooting up your former employer's business might just be relevant as well.

Is all this relevant to being able to do the job? Probably. If you come across as a nice, easy going person in an interview but are in fact quite different on the job it could be a big problem and how is an employer supposed to know? And because of all the problems the employer really wants to know as much as they can. And the information is out there for someone to gather for them.

Privacy? Once you start exposing yourself online, you have none so you may as well just get over it.

Even Google doesn't understand stricterprertationalism -- its only hit on that word is your comment. Is that a typo, or did you deliberately make the word up for purposes of obfuscation?

• Main Politics & Elections Page
• Registration Information for Voters
• Google Consumer Surveys (This has the potential to be shady)
• Trends (This has the potential to be shady... at what point does the reported trend start to affect the actual trend in a kind of feedback loop?)
• Primary Results Data

As an aside, years ago I worked with Kiwanis (a community service organization) on an initiative to promote political awareness among high school kids. At first I was concerned that they were going to try to push a particular viewpoint or agenda, but they made it clear that as an organization, for the purposes of this initiative, they were completely agnostic about it. Their mandate was to get people involved, and informed, so they could make their own decisions, because that's how the system works best. The system fails when you have a few informed people and masses of uninformed people who just vote for the candidate they think is the most attractive. So if that is Google's intent (which is the impression I get), it's an honorable goal. And making the API available seems to be an effort to give more people the tools to pursue that goal.

As long as Google doesn't start skewing the information (or, through a security hole, allows someone else to skew it), this is a good thing. There should be some sort of oversight to ensure that.

• Main Politics & Elections Page
• Registration Information for Voters
• Google Consumer Surveys (This has the potential to be shady)
• Trends (This has the potential to be shady... at what point does the reported trend start to affect the actual trend in a kind of feedback loop?)
• Primary Results Data

As an aside, years ago I worked with Kiwanis (a community service organization) on an initiative to promote political awareness among high school kids. At first I was concerned that they were going to try to push a particular viewpoint or agenda, but they made it clear that as an organization, for the purposes of this initiative, they were completely agnostic about it. Their mandate was to get people involved, and informed, so they could make their own decisions, because that's how the system works best. The system fails when you have a few informed people and masses of uninformed people who just vote for the candidate they think is the most attractive. So if that is Google's intent (which is the impression I get), it's an honorable goal. And making the API available seems to be an effort to give more people the tools to pursue that goal.

As long as Google doesn't start skewing the information (or, through a security hole, allows someone else to skew it), this is a good thing. There should be some sort of oversight to ensure that.

• Main Politics & Elections Page
• Registration Information for Voters
• Google Consumer Surveys (This has the potential to be shady)
• Trends (This has the potential to be shady... at what point does the reported trend start to affect the actual trend in a kind of feedback loop?)
• Primary Results Data

As an aside, years ago I worked with Kiwanis (a community service organization) on an initiative to promote political awareness among high school kids. At first I was concerned that they were going to try to push a particular viewpoint or agenda, but they made it clear that as an organization, for the purposes of this initiative, they were completely agnostic about it. Their mandate was to get people involved, and informed, so they could make their own decisions, because that's how the system works best. The system fails when you have a few informed people and masses of uninformed people who just vote for the candidate they think is the most attractive. So if that is Google's intent (which is the impression I get), it's an honorable goal. And making the API available seems to be an effort to give more people the tools to pursue that goal.

As long as Google doesn't start skewing the information (or, through a security hole, allows someone else to skew it), this is a good thing. There should be some sort of oversight to ensure that.

• Main Politics & Elections Page
• Registration Information for Voters
• Google Consumer Surveys (This has the potential to be shady)
• Trends (This has the potential to be shady... at what point does the reported trend start to affect the actual trend in a kind of feedback loop?)
• Primary Results Data

As an aside, years ago I worked with Kiwanis (a community service organization) on an initiative to promote political awareness among high school kids. At first I was concerned that they were going to try to push a particular viewpoint or agenda, but they made it clear that as an organization, for the purposes of this initiative, they were completely agnostic about it. Their mandate was to get people involved, and informed, so they could make their own decisions, because that's how the system works best. The system fails when you have a few informed people and masses of uninformed people who just vote for the candidate they think is the most attractive. So if that is Google's intent (which is the impression I get), it's an honorable goal. And making the API available seems to be an effort to give more people the tools to pursue that goal.

As long as Google doesn't start skewing the information (or, through a security hole, allows someone else to skew it), this is a good thing. There should be some sort of oversight to ensure that.

• Main Politics & Elections Page
• Registration Information for Voters
• Google Consumer Surveys (This has the potential to be shady)
• Trends (This has the potential to be shady... at what point does the reported trend start to affect the actual trend in a kind of feedback loop?)
• Primary Results Data

As an aside, years ago I worked with Kiwanis (a community service organization) on an initiative to promote political awareness among high school kids. At first I was concerned that they were going to try to push a particular viewpoint or agenda, but they made it clear that as an organization, for the purposes of this initiative, they were completely agnostic about it. Their mandate was to get people involved, and informed, so they could make their own decisions, because that's how the system works best. The system fails when you have a few informed people and masses of uninformed people who just vote for the candidate they think is the most attractive. So if that is Google's intent (which is the impression I get), it's an honorable goal. And making the API available seems to be an effort to give more people the tools to pursue that goal.

As long as Google doesn't start skewing the information (or, through a security hole, allows someone else to skew it), this is a good thing. There should be some sort of oversight to ensure that.

Capitalism was a means towards an end, not a driving factor wrt industrialization.

- capitalism was the catalyst necessary to achieve efficiencies, because capitalism provided the necessary savings that were used as investment to acquire tools necessary to automate production, investment necessary to hire and train skilled employees, etc.

Most people weren't food producers prior to industrialization, you have a very romanticized view of pre-industrial society. Most people were tradesmen or laborers. Specialization has existed far longer than industrialization.

- most people were producing food around the world, I said that industrialization allowed the economy to gain efficiencies necessary to shift most people from food production to something else, I didn't talk about any specific locality. Today farming is 1.2% of the reported GDP of USA and 6.1% of the reported world GDP.

OTOH 300 years ago most of workforce was occupied in farming and farming related activities. (open that link and scroll a page down for actual statistics).

--

Of-course specialization existed longer than industrialization and farmers hired unskilled labour, that's true. But it doesn't change the fact that it took capitalism and industrialization to move the numbers (percentage of farming as of the entire economy) from high double digits into 6% today and this happened over the last 200 years.

stacks of blue waffles?

They didn't say Assange was a terrorist

They most certainly did.

Dec 19, 2010 The US vice-president, Joe Biden, today likened the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, to a "hi-tech terrorist", the strongest criticism yet from

Dec 5, 2010 This morning on Meet the Press, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell called Julian Assange a high tech terrorist for his role in publicly ...

You were saying?

Should I draw a Venn diagram?

Or, back up and try again...

...and the FBI has no interest in making domestic terrorism a high-profile issue by exaggerating both the intent and abilities of 'terrorists'.

If every domestic terrorist plot foiled by the 'war on terror' had instead been wildly successful, where would we be?

Well, we'd be pretty vulnerable to threats like these from the Heritage Foundation paper listed above:

"He was arrested for conspiring to use blowtorches to collapse the Brooklyn Bridge"

"His plans, according to authorities, were to kill President Bush and then establish an al-Qaeda cell in
the United States, with himself as the head."

"The JIS allegedly planned to finance its operations by robbing gas stations."

"Derrick Shareef was arrested on charges of planning to set off hand grenades in a shopping mall outside Chicago."

"Four men plotted to blow up “aviation fuel tanks and pipelines at the John F. Kennedy International Airport” in New York City. They believed that such an attack would cause “greater destruction than in the Sept. 11 attacks.” Authorities stated that the attack “could have caused significant financial and psychological damage, but not major loss of life.""

"Hassan Abujihaad, a former U.S. Navy sailor from Phoenix, Arizona, was convicted of supporting terrorism and disclosing classified information"

Setting aside the dubious competence and unbalanced mental state of the overwhelming majority of plotters, total success above and beyond what a reasonable person would expect given the actual capabilities of these groups would have resulted in negligible damage to society as a whole-- a couple planes bombed and a smattering of minor bombings if everything went perfectly for these disgruntled losers who are already unbalanced enough to be terrorists.

Surprisingly enough, most of these plots were 'revealed' by paid informants with a major financial stake in exhorting their idiot co-conspirators to plan something outrageous enough to warrant FBI attention and major payouts to the informants.

Modern democracies with strong civil society and no significant domestic conflict are inherently resistant to fringe nutbars-- all the 'war on terror' is getting for us is foreign oppression, dramatic restrictions on our own civil liberties, balooning 'security' spending and media scare tactics.

People who take the most business risk are not those who accept salaried positions for jobs that somebody thinks to be necessary to make more profit, it's people who take the risk in terms of putting in their own savings, capital, time and effort into a venture that nobody ever guarantees to be a winner.

Bullshit, the people who put in the REAL risks are the ones on your fishing boat, building your skyscraper, replacing your roof, logging for the wood your business needs, the ones on your loading docks, the guy who empties your dumpster, the people who actually fucking WORK.

Sheesh, stupid damned rich people... taking a risk? It's only money. Put your fucking life on the line and maybe you can speak intelligently about "risk". And although they risk losing a few bucks, do they risk their lives? If they lose their investment they're not risking abject poverty, but their employees are. Risk, my ass. Everyone else risks far more than they do and they should shut the fuck up about risk..

Portugal actually have laws that even prevent an U.S. citizen from being extradited under certain circumstances.
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=pt-PT&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.parlamento.pt%2FLegislacao%2FPaginas%2FConstituicaoRepublicaPortuguesa.aspx%23art33

I believe most people here are missing a critical point. Google Brasil DOES comply to hundreds of Brazilian court orders every year. See the Google Transparency site.

Orkut used to be huge in Brazil. YouTube is huge in Brazil. Android is huge in Brazil. Google cannot afford not having a strong presence in Brazil, and to do so they need to be in good standing with the law here. And this includes being able to take down content as ordered by courts, just like they do everywhere else.

You said, "golden plates that no-one ever saw". Now, if you knew even a smidgen of Mormon history you would know about the three Witnesses and the eight Witnesses. In fact, their testimony is printed in every Book of Mormon. Each of those eleven men to their dying day never denied seeing the plates.

I found it a bit interesting so I did a quick google on Book of mormon witnesses. The second hit was this at exmormon.org, which is very interesting reading. Much of it was apparently seeing through "secondary vision", "the spiritual eye", etc. Wikipedia also has a quick run-through.

lmgtfy
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lmgtfy

ABC: http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/09/dnc-apologizes-for-showing-russian-warships-in-tribute-to-us-veterans/

CBS: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-57511365-503544/dems-apologize-for-russian-ship-imagery-at-convention/

New York Times: http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/12/democrats-apologize-for-image-of-russian-ships-at-convention/

lmgtfy
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ABC: http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/09/dnc-apologizes-for-showing-russian-warships-in-tribute-to-us-veterans/

CBS: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-57511365-503544/dems-apologize-for-russian-ship-imagery-at-convention/

New York Times: http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/12/democrats-apologize-for-image-of-russian-ships-at-convention/

lmgtfy
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ABC: http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/09/dnc-apologizes-for-showing-russian-warships-in-tribute-to-us-veterans/

CBS: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-57511365-503544/dems-apologize-for-russian-ship-imagery-at-convention/

New York Times: http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/12/democrats-apologize-for-image-of-russian-ships-at-convention/

who's F**king Moronic idea was it, that this is even /. newsworthy?

In the run up to the US election, any excuse to publish political story will be taken. It guarantees hundreds of posts ignoring the supposed topic, just rehashing the usual political talking points.

And why is this dumb story sourced to "networkworld.com"? These assholes are just playing the same game, getting pagehits. Link to what Linus actually wrote: https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/2Z4pgYDFeEm?hl=en

Linus is allowed to have personal opinions. He's not putting "Fuck Romney" in the Linux kernel, just writing a personal blog.