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Anybody else notice the stowaway ridding on the outside of the Grasshopper during the recent test flight. Looks like a Texan! This is a cropped blowup of a still from the video - http://s22.postimage.org/s82e5jpgx/Grasshopper_Stowaway.jpg . Yea Haw ride-em cowboy. Who says rocket scientists don't have a sense of humor.

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Ubuntu and its new fanboys.
http://i.imgur.com/g7DmlYW.jpg (mirror)

"Or perhaps statistics like "80% of all gun owners are male, but 70% of all gun crime victims are male" - if guns protect you from crime shouldn't that statistic be EXACTLY the other way around ?"

Or statistics like: people defend themselves from violent crime with guns 20 or more times for every crime actually committed with a gun?

And quite frankly, I don't give the slightest damn about the suicide figures. In places where guns are not available (Japan is one example) people commit suicide by other means. To use your own argument: show me cause-and-effect.

"Or maybe correlation does not imply causation ... But the first set of statistics we CAN rationally evaluate..."

Correlation may not imply causation, but we have decades of statistics -- government's OWN statistics -- that show the correlation. And it probably isn't what you think.

Let me give you just a few solidly known correlations -- for which we have ample, hard-to-refute statistics -- as examples:

The areas in the United States that have the strictest firearms restrictions have had, and continue to have, the highest violent crime rates, including crimes involving guns.

The areas where restrictions are lifted tend to see a lasting reduction in the rate of crime, including violent crime. Washington D.C. is a good, specific example.

Per-capita crime in the United States, including violent crime, is HALF of what it was 20 years ago, and even less compared to 30 years ago. It has been a pretty steady and consistent decline. That includes firearms homicides. And yes, even mass shootings and school shootings are DOWN. And during that entire time, per-capita gun ownership has been going steadily UP. Not only that, but states that allow concealed carry have MULTIPLIED during that same period.

I really don't care much whether you accept a cause-effect relationship. One thing we DO know from the statistics is that one cause-effect relationship definitely does not exist: more guns do not cause more crime in the United States. Because we have more guns -- lots more guns -- but crime has dropped dramatically. So cause-and-effect or no, the correlation is pretty much indisputable. At least if you have any inclination at all to believe GOVERNMENT (DOJ and BCS) statistics.

With all of the debris we collect from space,eve, when it burns up in our atmosphere, our planetary mass is constantly growing. Every time that happens, our planet's mass distribution changes. It's negligible. I also don't find it entertaining to consider the potential repercussions of something that sounds really freaking sweet to spitball about. Can we get more pictures and diagrams please? Or at least start debating the different zero-g ways to re-create our heavy industries? http://s9.postimage.org/4hgptrfnj/SPACE_STATION.png

Listen to the Soundcloud link I posted. Use headphones. This is not a hyper-accurate note-for-note cover. If it were that, there would be all sorts of stereo phasing wildness going on in your ears, because they would be all confused by the Haas effect. That is not going on because the instrumentals are the same instrumental.

http://s9.postimage.org/qq104s1zh/joco_glee_comparison.gif

Here is a spectrogram comparison I made from the first 15 seconds of each song, starting from the attack of the second 'clap' sample. They're not identical obviously, owing to different mastering and compression on the tracks, in addition to the differing vocal performances going on over top. But, the spectral components they share in common are clear. If you look at that clap sample by itself, before the vocals and other instrumentation start up, they are obviously the same sample.

http://s7.postimage.org/8dz5g30jv/Screenshot_1.png Anyone else getting this too?

Dude. You do know you can use the arrow keys to move left and right, or click the left and right arrows in the app, right?

http://s9.postimage.org/e3bpduttb/arrows.png

You can also press escape to go "up" one level and view the thumbnails of the folder.

By the way: here is that graph I mentioned. From your own source.

"It was too old to make my earlier list (January 2012), but it's still quite relevant and informative. It should also help you make much better sense of the TIOBE data."

I disagree on several levels. Not only is it a year old (2011 data is all they claim), it does not agree with TIOBE at all.

Look at this comparison chart of many of the same languages as in the TIOBE Index. Just for one example, you can see that their results for Objective-C (which they should roughly agree upon, if they were going to agree on anything) are not even remotely similar.

Further, I repeat: Ruby has only been in popular use for a bit over 5 years now. Maybe 6 at a stretch. That makes it the youngest of the bunch.

I don't find that this informs me about the TIOBE Index at all. Rather, they simply disagree. At least one of them is way off.

Like this?

Stop using these defective and unlicensed products and immediatly move to a Windows Phone ...

Insert Innovation Here :o

"No nation has ever adhered to a gold standard and any nation that tried to, wouldn't last 5 years. My sig. has the red pill."

You are just about as wrong as it is possible to get.

The United States (and prior to Federation, the colonies) were on a hard-metal standard for 300 years, and price levels remained virtually flat, except for small blips where the government borrowed money for wars, then afterward it went right back to the same healthy, steady level. Look at the damned chart. Those are figures from the most respected economic historians, until the last century, where they are the government's own figures.

Look at the events marked in that chart. You can see blips at wartime. But you can ALSO see, without the need for eyeglasses, 3 events that were related to removing the hard currency standard. If you don't know what they are, look them up. It is pretty easy to find them by year.

Hard, simple numbers show that you are completely wrong. Read some actual history; get a real clue.

"Same thing for USA. Since 1971, when Nixon defaulted on the dollar, the economy has been going down. If you take all sorts of graphs, that compare wealth distribution, compare wages, salaries, purchasing power, manufacturing, government spending, whatever you want, you'll see an interesting thing that happened since about 1971 - there is an edge there, and all these charts show that since then the disparity started growing, the real earning power started going down, the debt started growing much more than before, inflation really took off, all the bad things that eventually do destroy the economy started around that moment."

There is no need to get that fancy. A single number, the purchasing power of the dollar (price levels), is sufficient to illustrate your point. Alternatively, you can simply flip the graph over vertically, which shows the worth of the dollar over the same time period. Nobody ever shows it that way, though, because it's far too scary. The latter is the very same graph, just showing the opposite side of the same coin, as it were.

"Same thing for USA. Since 1971, when Nixon defaulted on the dollar, the economy has been going down. If you take all sorts of graphs, that compare wealth distribution, compare wages, salaries, purchasing power, manufacturing, government spending, whatever you want, you'll see an interesting thing that happened since about 1971 - there is an edge there, and all these charts show that since then the disparity started growing, the real earning power started going down, the debt started growing much more than before, inflation really took off, all the bad things that eventually do destroy the economy started around that moment."

There is no need to get that fancy. A single number, the purchasing power of the dollar (price levels), is sufficient to illustrate your point. Alternatively, you can simply flip the graph over vertically, which shows the worth of the dollar over the same time period. Nobody ever shows it that way, though, because it's far too scary. The latter is the very same graph, just showing the opposite side of the same coin, as it were.

What it says!

"The fact that you said this: Statistically, if the group they cited is 95%, it is almost certain that the broader domain of experts is a good bit LESS than 95%."

Yes. If you insist on citing Doran (my original comment was limited to the statement on Skeptical Science, not the Doran paper), then your own reference says so. Do you understand elementary math, or not?

"Doran (2009) found approx. than 95%, not less. Others have found more. But that's just splitting hairs"

No, they didn't, and no, it isn't. You are playing the "no true Scotsman" game again.

Let's take a look at their graph, and look at their own figures, shall we?

They say the highest-percentage group, i.e., the climatologists who are active publishers on the subject, came out at 97.4%. Granted.

BUT THAT IS NOT ALL THE "DOMAIN EXPERTS"!!! That is only a small subset of them.

The next highest group, the "active publishers" on the subject, more numerous than the first, came out at only about 90%. Add just those two groups alone -- still not anywhere near "all" the experts -- and your overall percentage is already below 95%, and it only drops from there as you add people who may not be as actively involved but who are still "experts" in the field. It says so, right in the paper, and you can see it in that graph. It's right in your face.

The only way you can get that 97% figure -- again as I have already pointed out -- is to play the "no true Scotsman" game and exclude many of those same "domain experts" mentioned in the original paper cited by OP.

And not only that, but again, Doran was not about just "CO2-based" warming either, which is what most people mean when they say or write "AGW". It includes other anthropogenic causes like land-use changes.

So yeah. Very simple mathematics shows that even the Doran study claims the percentage of "experts" who say AGW is true falls well below 95% on average. If you include climatologists their average drops below 90%. For ANY anthropogenic warming, not just CO2!

QED. If you want to believe your own reference, that is. My point is made.

"And anybody who does any work in the social sciences would read a poll of 95% (or even 85%) as "nearly all", 'cause that is just the nature of polls."

No, they wouldn't. If they are doing scientific studies, they carefully measure and calibrate their samples, estimate the sampling error and uncertainty, and gauge from that. They don't just pull a percentage out of the air and call it good.

But that's still beside the point. Repeat: according to that very paper you cited (Doran), in order to get anywhere near that 95% figure, you have to exclude most of the people who would be considered experts, and take just a specific subset. That is the "no true Scotsman" game, in full glory.

"By what measure has the US economy been on a downward slide over the past 70 years?"

By rampant inflation that has not been matched by a proportional increase in income.

The early data is from a book on historical economics. The data since is from our own government's Bureau of Labor Statistics.

According to the government's own figures, this is the first generation since the depression in which the youngsters will almost certainly be less well off in standard of living than their parents were. And the reasons are right there in that chart.

"a live Web exploit that detects if the target is running Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux and drops a different trojan for each platform".

I typed 186.87.69.249:8081 into the address bar and this came up. Besides which, explain to me again why I would run a Java Applet from an unknown source and give it my root password?

Actually, why doesn't apple patent these? Just because we already have knives and forks?

It's not as if no computer has been wedge shaped before. My first computer was a Sinclair... from the side, it looked like this http://s19.postimage.org/s17afwooj/Sinclair2_A.jpg

The menu bar rendering on Windows has been broken/fugly since FF4

How so? Looks fine to me when I need to access it with ALT...?

This is what it looks like to us: http://postimage.org/image/hysbkzbzf/

An ugly bubble surrounding the menu, with text highlights that do not blend with the window manager.

I tried Win 8 last week and as a loyal Windows\MSDOS user and developer since forever, I thought MS were playing some kind of obscure joke. I think they should have released it on April 1st. It's awful! The mess of Desktop mode which seems to combine with Metro in some god-awful juxtaposition of paradigms is painful to experience.

As for people talking about the Start menu, yes, it's jarring not to have it. I don't use it all that much for obvious reasons, but it's an extremely useful feature. I've yet to meet anyone at work who has tried 8 and liked it. Totally the opposite experience of 7, which everyone seems to like.

Note that I've got an iPad and iPhone, and I'm quite happy with those interfaces. The thing is, I'm not likely to have 4 copies of Visual Studio 2010, 2 Word documents, a note-pad, an email client and God only knows what else all running at the same time there. In fact they're toys; I don't work with them. I honestly don't think Metro is going to be satisfactory for the average corporate user or developer. It's going to hurt.

Filter This!

link

Ask and ye shall receive:

http://postimage.org/image/ock2ro5g/

Although I think that's the older BigDog model.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqMVg5ixhd0&feature=player_detailpage#t=54s

I actually remembered one other UI toolkit that, while little known, is also very frugal. Like wxWidgets, it also wraps native widgets, though it seems to do a far better job at it (see below - I figured I'd check it out as well). It also has a distinction of being the only portable ANSI C toolkit wrapping native widgets that I know of.

The toolkit in question is IUP. Note that, even though they talk about Lua a lot, and it is designed to be used rather conveniently in conjunction with Lua, the library itself is pure C.

Now for the test, I took their precompiled libraries (which, by the way, means no LTCG, and I'm pretty sure it's optimize-for-speed rather than optimize-for-size), and their MDI sample. That one is actually more featureful than the one I used from wx, because it also showcases some of their widgets in MDI child windows (screenshot). And yet, the binary is a mere 360Kb - now we're talking!

Too bad they only wrap Win32, Gtk+ and Motif, and not Cocoa.

/signed

The ethanol scam and subsidies for other failed "alternative energy" ideas is far more damaging to us than supposed global warming. Here's another 1,600 jobs that could be lost because of the cost increase of corn and this isn't the only company that's looking at shutting down plants. Count on food prices going even higher as supply drops.
http://www.postimage.org/image.php?v=Pq1Mqi49

If it works, people will want it, and the business won't need welfare to survive. If it doesn't then just like any other business it should be allowed to fail until someone figures out how to make it succeed.

Subsidies on "alternative energy" kill innovation by rewarding failure.