Slashdot Mirror

Same-sex pairs are free to live together, and even sign voluntary contracts sharing their property.

But if government institutes same-sex "marriage", then everyone is forced to recognize it. Companies will have to provide benefits, hotels will have to allow them to sleep on the same bed (and smear it with blood and feces), etc.

See http://frexpression.wordpress.com/2010/10/20/a-gay-man-decries-gay-rights/

(Posting as anon to avoid being Kharma-lynched)

"Missouri was the most anomalously hot state in July, yet measured maximum temperatures were only sixth hottest on record – five degrees cooler than 1934."
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2012/08/08/heatwave-center-was-sixth-hottest-on-record.

"Warrenton, Missouri is located right at the hottest of the hot in July, 2012. ... Average temperatures in Warrenton during July were six degrees cooler than 1901, 1934 and 1936, and almost one degree cooler than 1954. ... July 2012 wasn’t anywhere near as hot as July 1936."
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2012/08/09/record-heat-fraud-ground-zero.

"Missouri was the most anomalously hot state in July, yet measured maximum temperatures were only sixth hottest on record – five degrees cooler than 1934."
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2012/08/08/heatwave-center-was-sixth-hottest-on-record.

"Warrenton, Missouri is located right at the hottest of the hot in July, 2012. ... Average temperatures in Warrenton during July were six degrees cooler than 1901, 1934 and 1936, and almost one degree cooler than 1954. ... July 2012 wasn’t anywhere near as hot as July 1936."
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2012/08/09/record-heat-fraud-ground-zero.

oh of course...

I mean, the Honda Fit, the Chevy Aveo, the Suzuki Aerio and Nissan Versa are so different looking there's no possible way I just mixed them all up.

Companies build products that are easily as similar as what Apple is complaining about, and they never even hit arbitration. Apple is only pursuing legal action because they can afford it (they're likely the most over-capitalized company in the world) and they think they stand to gain market share by suing everyone into being afraid of them.

Clown College, perhaps?

I'll thank you not to refer to Princeton that way.

Jan Weiss - The House of a Thousand Floors.

If you want depression, this is up that valley.

Clown College, perhaps?

I'm an ME, so I don't know much about reverse engineering electronics. maybe this will help? http://s3cu14r.wordpress.com/2010/07/15/boiling-chips-in-tree-sap/

I use to occasionally decap 'plastic' ICs, which are typically molded using an epoxy based compound. We always used fuming nitric to open those. We used a dropper to put the heated nitric on the top of the package, the goal being to have the pins intact and the device functional afterwards. Not real safe unless you have the proper equipment and know what you are doing. Later we had commercial equipment that did pretty much the same thing.

I suspect the rosin used in the link only works on some types of non-epoxy based plastics.

you're a 4th year EE student, why not just take one apart?

The SNES uses custom chips for most of its functionality. Unless he has access to decapping facilities, taking one apart will provide only limited information.

I'm an ME, so I don't know much about reverse engineering electronics.
maybe this will help?
http://s3cu14r.wordpress.com/2010/07/15/boiling-chips-in-tree-sap/

Hey hey ,don't knock VMS! It was relatively simple. Case-in-point (stolen from http://andyxl.wordpress.com/2011/09/04/ancient-vms-vs-unix-joke/)

A young scientist has an urgent job to finish, but disastrously the whole departmental network goes down apart from one ancient VAX. He hears there is an old-timer a few corridors away who still knows how to use the VAX, so he rushes down, bursts in, and insists that the old guy shows him what to do, because, you know, sorry, but this deadline is really important.
“Calm down”, says the old guy, “what do you want to know ?”

“Well, ok, for instance, how do I edit a file ?”

” You type EDIT FILENAME”

“Right, fine, suppose I want to make a copy ?”

“You say COPY FILENAME1 FILENAME2

“Err, right, ok, now suppose I need to delete the file ?”

“You say DELETE FILENAME”

“Ah, right, right, err.. now what if I want to print it ?”

“You type PRINT FILENAME”

“But what if I just want to see it typed onscreen ?”

“You say TYPE FILENAME”

“What if I need to figure out what a command does ?”

“You say HELP COMMANDNAME”

“Ummm.. umm. suppose I want to create a new directory ?”

“You use CREATE/DIRECTORY”

“Ok, ok, but look – how the hell am I supposed to remember all that ?”

Don't you know, the government likes the robots.

Except that it likes them in the form of weapons, so that they can kill more people with those robots.

Mars?
Oil and other loot.

http://onyricum.wordpress.com/2012/08/05/how-cuba-survived-peak-oil/ http://onyricum.wordpress.com/2012/07/25/a-farm-for-the-future-una-fattoria-per-il-futuro/

http://onyricum.wordpress.com/2012/08/05/how-cuba-survived-peak-oil/ http://onyricum.wordpress.com/2012/07/25/a-farm-for-the-future-una-fattoria-per-il-futuro/

A bit of googling found this:

http://atomfullerene.wordpress.com/dispatches-from-the-red-planet/

Basically, cellphones in any area signal to nearby wireless-router access-points (like your home wireless router) and send their own geo-location along with their signal-strength and MAC-address of the router to a database. Over time and multiple cellphones/smartphones, etc. doing the same thing, the router's MAC becomes traingulated and is mapped to a database. I think the database is managed between Skyhook and Google, which can be querried with the MAC address for the info. I'm pretty sure I've done a poor job describing this, but it's an interesting idea and a possible privacy issue. The only link I could find quickly is this: http://coderrr.wordpress.com/2008/09/10/get-the-physical-location-of-wireless-router-from-its-mac-address-bssid/

By a guy who thinks that Market share reflects on company survivability and that continuing sales growth is irrelevant. Interesting the way the market share graph in the original story has been cut out of the front page without any admission that this was done after it was shown to be complete junk. This is a person who makes crap labels on his axes so that you can't see a six month delay between effects he claims are simultaneous (the collapse of Nokia sales directly after they "Elope effect"ed themselves with burning platforms memo and the collapse of RIM sales after the Osborned themselves by announcing BB10). You are quoting him as evidence???!!

Repeat after me: Tomi is the only person to even nearly predict Nokia's market share. When Gartner and so on called tens of milions of Windows phones in 2012; when IDC predicted that Windows phone would be the second most popular Mobile OS; only Tommi correctly predicted Nokia's sales in signle figures of millions. Even if he's somewhat long winded sometimes, Tommi it seems to know a bunch of stuff you don't know.

By a guy who thinks that Market share reflects on company survivability and that continuing sales growth is irrelevant. Interesting the way the market share graph in the original story has been cut out of the front page without any admission that this was done after it was shown to be complete junk. This is a person who makes crap labels on his axes so that you can't see a six month delay between effects he claims are simultaneous (the collapse of Nokia sales directly after they "Elope effect"ed themselves with burning platforms memo and the collapse of RIM sales after the Osborned themselves by announcing BB10). You are quoting him as evidence???!!

Repeat after me: Tomi is the only person to even nearly predict Nokia's market share. When Gartner and so on called tens of milions of Windows phones in 2012; when IDC predicted that Windows phone would be the second most popular Mobile OS; only Tommi correctly predicted Nokia's sales in signle figures of millions. Even if he's somewhat long winded sometimes, Tommi it seems to know a bunch of stuff you don't know.

Repeat after me: Tomi Ahonen is a kook.

200,000 measly lines of code?

Having done a lot of code maintenance - including Y2K certification of the "MMDF" code base (first comments/headers would have negative unix timestamps) - he needs to start by learning about code beautifiers and finding a style he finds easy to read.

Then, personally, I try to storyline the code. Some times, more creatively than others but those are extreme cases.

200,000 measly lines of code?

Having done a lot of code maintenance - including Y2K certification of the "MMDF" code base (first comments/headers would have negative unix timestamps) - he needs to start by learning about code beautifiers and finding a style he finds easy to read.

Then, personally, I try to storyline the code. Some times, more creatively than others but those are extreme cases.

The third world will carry on starving until they have enough education to limit the number of children they have

There is no global overpopulation. Some places (such as Japan) are already experiencing population aging and decline, which is bad in many ways. Other places (such as the USA and specially Europe) already have sub-replacement fertility rates, and their population only grows because of demographic lag and immigration. It is predicted the the European Union population (now at 503M) will reach zero natural population increase by 2015 and zero total population increase in 2035 (at 520M), then start declining.

The USA will grow from 310M in 2010 to 403M in 2050. [1]
Asia will increase from 4.2B in 2010 to 5.1B in 2050, then start declining. [2]

The only region that is really growing is Africa. It will increase from 1B in 2010 to 2.2B in 2050. [2] Then its population density will be 73/km2. [3] Compare that to the current population density in Portugal (115/km2), in South Korea (487/km2) and in Taiwan (641/km2). [4]

Global population is predicted to grow from 7B in 2011 to 9B in 2050 and 10B in 2100 [5] and start falling soon after [6].

And according to [7], 40-50% of America-produced food is thrown away. According to [8], 1/3 of the world food is thrown away.
And this does not take into account that people eat, just for pleasure, excessive quantities of resource-intensive food (such as meat). If Americans/Europeans want to help the poor, an easy way would be to decrease (say, by 30%) their diet of meat. This will immediately reduce food demand and, for double bonus, the saved money can be donated to charity. And much arable land is wasted on subsidized inefficient corn-based ethanol. You can lobby your government to stop that.

Plus, there does not seem to be a negative correlation between population density and GDP per capita. [9]

African hunger is not caused by overpopulation. It is caused by corrupt and authoritarian governments, and by guerrillas/terrorists motivated by Marxism, theocractic Islamism, ethnic hate or simply greed.

Overpopulation fear-mongering is very old - at least as old as Malthus. One of its more recent incarnations was the 1968 book "The Population Bomb", which predicted mass starvation to occur in the 1970s.

Anyway, for better or for worse, there is already strong action taken by individuals, foundations, and Western governments, to restrict fertility in Africa.

1 : http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Analytical-Figures/htm/fig_11.htm
2 : http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Analytical-Figures/htm/fig_2.htm
3 : According to [2], Africa will have 2.2B people in 2050, and according to Google[10] and Wikipedia [11], the area of Africa is 30,221,532 km2
4 : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependent_territories_by_population_density
5 : http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Analytical-Figures/htm/fig_1.htm
6 : http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Analytical-Figures/htm/fig_6.htm
7 : http://www.foodnavigator-usa.com/news/ng.asp?id=56376-us-wastes-half
8 : http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/74192/icode/
9 : http://sanamagan.wordpress.com/2011/03/10/population-population-density-gdp-per-capita-ppp/
10 : https://www.google.com.br/search?q=africa+area
11 :

And most of the entrants are professional or at least experienced game developers, and the rules do not exclude non open-source platforms, which opens up the use of many tools that make writing the entries much easier.

Plus the entries to LPC have been much more complex than most LD entries. I know, for instance, that there have been MMORPGs entered into LD before (e.g. http://0fps.wordpress.com/2012/04/24/making-an-mmo-in-48-hours/ ) but they tend to be extremely simplistic. LPC had 3 entered, by my reading of the list, and they seem to be much more complete than the one I linked there. As in, they have actual things to do.

LD games tend to be exteremely basic. The last one was one by this. And sure, it's a fun little and kind-of cool game that I enjoyed playing for 5 minutes. But it only takes 5 minutes to play to conclusion. Many of the LPC games have much, much more content. They are all much more graphically appealing. Many of them are as fun.

What Watts has shown is that he can get a lower warming trend for the continental USA than others get. All you have to do is systematically eliminate the data you don’t like, while ignoring things like station moves, instrument changes, and recording data at different times of day. Don’t you dare correct for known biases (unless of course doing so would make the estimate of global warming smaller)! And if the satellite data should be in better agreement with others than with yourself, don’t breathe a word about that.

The irony is that Watts is doing exactly what he accuses others of: tilting every aspect of the data and analysis to suit his ideology. The joke is that he actually thinks this is “science.”

Since his original chest-beating, it seems that even some of his co-authors (one can’t help but wonder, did they all even know they were listed as co-authors?) take exception to his methods. Alas, it looks like important details are missing which are required for those who want to check his results. I certainly didn’t find any links to the data or computer programs used. Doesn’t Anthony want to be audited?

I've read Byte magazine since the 1970's, when the geekiest thing was to spend evenings running Life simulations at 32x32 resolutions. Back then, the S-100 rack system was the coolest thing to own. Users typically came to think that "big was best". IT directors would compete to have the largest department, the largest mainframe, the most number of rack units in their telecoms room. That carried on for a while as electronics miniaturized, you'd find a whole vertical rack dedicated to a single circuit board, with some loud noisy fans and an access cover only removable by a qualified engineer from the corporation.

When the PC came along in the mid 1980's, that carried onto to some extent with those tall tower units for servers. But IT directors saw that mini-desktop units were easier to manage and if nothing else made good monitor stands. They also liked their Filofaxes and pagers.

Desktop PC's have tried to become smaller, but they have power problems with the most powerful GPU boards. For the past 5 or 6 years, PC computers started to slip when there weren't any new killer applications for the CPU - word processing, WYSIWYG editing, spreadsheets, web browsing, video editing can all be done on a regular PC or laptop. On the GPU side, there has been a massive advances in lighting, geometry rendering, instancing, texture mapping (compression, resolution, bit-depth), shaders, super-scalar architectures, texture RAM and video resolutions.

Then the big clunky mobile phones and "luggable" computers came along. Those were popular too. Over time Nokia miniaturized those and added the LCD screen. That evolved to LED screens, which slowly became larger. SMS messaging replaced paging. Cameras were added, and then you could take pictures, make movies. Even back then, the worst thing to happen to a geek or yuppie, would be to lose their Filofax. It would be the corporate version of having brain damage.

In the 1990's, Palm came out with the Palm Pilot PDA, which had basic text input with a stylus and docking with a PC, and helped replace the Filofax.Those "luggables" became laptops with LCD screens. Eventually those screens became larger and had better color resolution. It was possible to make them mobile network devices by adding wireless broadband dongles, but even then battery power only lasts an hour or two, and you couldn't remain in contact if you were on
a train or bus. So the Filofax/PDA merged with the mobile phone and became the tablet. The laptop has had to become the ultrabook.

But the rate of change was so fast that many consumer magazines recommended that the general consumer was better off buying a low-end £2000. If you do that, then you can buy a system every 2 years, rather than one every 4 years.

http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm

Intellectual property: Patents against prosperity | The Economist

Why abolish software patents - software patents wiki (en.swpat.org)

When Patents Attack! | This American Life

Johanna Blakley: Lessons from fashion's free culture | Video on TED.com

Do music artists fare better in a world with illegal file-sharing? Times Labs Blog

The Coming War on General Purpose Computation - Boing Boing

US patent trolling costs $29b: study - Strategy - Business - News - iTnews.com.au

Patents | Electronic Frontier Foundation

http://christianengstrom.wordpress.com/

Zynga might be too close, but the vast majority of games actually copy each other so much that they create a GENDRE for god's sake. And that has been alwways a good thing for gaming in particular. The truth is that yes, there are indeed assholes, there will always be, but they seem to be on both sides and the question remains to where do they cause the less damage.

As far as being non-creative, I'm not sure who you mean. Personally, I develop new software for a living and I was curiously enough working on my novel when I got your reply.

Never mind the "One Percent".

There are two major factors working against the bottom 99%: First, the underlying engine driving wealth inequality (taxes under a 70% rate for the very rich) remains in effect, so the top 1% continues to take wealth from the bottom 99% through the normal operation of the economy. This effect can be quantified.

Based on its computer simulation, Macroeconomic Advisers predicts the tax cuts for the rich will have a combined 2011-2012 budgetary effect (the difference between the 35% and 40% tax rate) of $124 billion. [3] The actual cost to the bottom 99% is seven times that, the difference in revenues between the 35% rate and the "equilibrium" 70% rate. (Again, that's the rate at which inequality of wealth and incomes was stable.) Thatâ(TM)s another $868 billion the bottom 99% is losing over these two years, following a similar amount in 2009-2010.

Through the provisions of the December 2010 tax compromise, President Obama countered this drain to some extent. Macroeconomic Advisers identified taxpayer stimulus items in the bill totaling $634 billion, and including those raised its model's growth projections from 3.7 % to 4.3% in 2011-12. These stimulus provisions last only through 2012....
as it extends from the normal operation of the dysfunctional economy to the abnormal functioning of government. We would not be surprised if the bottom 99% loses another $1 trillion from multiplier effects by 2012.

Emphasis added.
http://acivilamericandebate.wordpress.com/2011/04/13/growth-in-inequality-of-wealth-after-2007/

Why trust ANYTHING that comes out of the mouth of an officer in the senior Politburo of AmerCIA?

Apple sold 26 million iPhones and 17 million iPads. They sold 8.6 million iPods. Supposedly, the iPod touch is the most popular, so we'll give it 50%, or 4.3 million for a grand total of 47.3 million iOS devices sold. Samsung sold 50 million smartphones, but only about 2.4 million tablets to bump them up to 52.4 million Android devices.

Noobs...

There were 194.913 million handsets shipped in the China market during the first half of 2012, according to statistics published by the China Academy of Telecommunication Research (CATR) under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT).

Of the shipment volume, 94.855 million or 48.67% were smartphones in 822 models of which 801 models or 97.44% were based on Android. China-based vendors accounted for 75.16% of the half-year shipment volume, and international vendors 24.84%

http://lazure2.wordpress.com/2012/06/27/boosting-the-mediatek-mt6575-success-story-with-the-mt6577-announcement/

I think the native port of WPF was because they had nothing else anymore, which was a pity.

this goes into depth of why WPF is rubbish, and although they've made some changes for the native version, it's still not up to snuff. IE (and firefox) renders using Direct2d, and while I think it's only acceptable for LoB/web apps, I can see a reason why they'd want to push it for development over WPF.

Still, the big advantage of HTML over WPF is the cross-platform nature of it, that's probably a big thing with the level of acceptable Win8 seems to be getting.

Coffee mug accessory is a must "Office Space"

In a way I hope Microsoft buys it.

no, wait!

Firstly, MS would do well with it - there is a ton of old MFC code out there that will need to be updated to something jazzy, and with the MFC->Qt migration tools, all that old code could be made shiny and modern. This is especially important given MS's renewed interest in native development. Its also important given MSs current GUI technology WPF being a bit shit - using way too much resources and performing really badly, really so for anything using lots of fancy animation.

For all MSs faults, they do good documentation and put a lot of effort into making their tools work - remember the monkey dance to prove that! They also have a lot of developers who would love to be allowed to use it in corporate MS-only no-OSS environments. Suddenly Qt would get a lot of push forward to a lot of computers and developers and MS would get a really good GUI system (at last).

I doubt Google would put much effort into it, and might end up shelving it after a few years like a lot of their other projects. They might be interested in Wt though - that turns the Qt code into a web front end.

Lots of hot air. Mostly complaining about things that don't exist.

The Watts, et.al. paper is a pre-release version that Mr Watts has made available for review purposes. The plan is that internet readers will find errors that can then be fixed before submission to a journal.

If the paper is garbage, then pop over to http://wattsupwiththat.com/ and explain, in detail, what is wrong with it. Mr Watts will be grateful for the help.

Insults and attacks on the paper or its author should be forwarded to http://127.0.0.1/dev/null.

Please also note that Mr Watts is not "denying" global warming (or anything else). He's trying to measure it. Sounds to me like a positive contribution.

The "science" is not settled. You're thinking of "history".

No, not really. http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/category/by-journal/science-journal-retractions/ Sokal was just the most egregious example of scholarly writings gone bad. If you want an example of peer review that failed, that is quite modern, you only need to look at NASA's much touted "life living in arsenic" paper that came out just a few years ago.

... the claim is that an increase in CO2 concentrations from about 380 PPM to 600 PPM will cause a "tipping effect" and exponential feedback loop causing catastrophically accelerated global warming.

Is that the scientific consensus? Or your straw man?

Are you really that ignorant of the basic claims of the IPCC and the climate models? You could argue that my numbers are off, but they are in the less than 400 PPM range, which far from "massive quantities" represents atmospheric increases of less than 0.05%. Of course there's not much talk about the tipping point these days, since NASA data indicated that more energy was being released from the atmosphere than the models were using.

Journals like controversial findings, for the same reason that newspapers up-play their headlines: it attracts attention. Furthermore, a shoddy paper with a controversial conclusion will often spur a slew of debate and comments, each citing the original paper, and thus raising the journals impact factor.

That's true generally, but journals focused on climate science are the rather obvious exception, and has been for some time.

Wow, he managed to get one through in 2011? Totally missed that. Probably because it actually doesn't say what he's been claiming in non-peer-reviewed research:

Temperature trend estimates vary according to site classification, with poor siting leading to an overestimate of minimum temperature trends and an underestimate of maximum temperature trends, resulting in particular in a substantial difference in estimates of the diurnal temperature range trends. The opposite-signed differences of maximum and minimum temperature trends are similar in magnitude, so that the overall mean temperature trends are nearly identical across site classifications.

Which had already been determined. I'm amazed that Watts was willing to put his name on a paper that basically undercuts his entire premise and says the same thing as papers he's been railing against for ages. Check out the lead author's summary of the paper, in particular the Q and A section. Although my favorite quote is:

we found that the global average surface temperature may be higher than what has been reported by NCDC and others as a result in the bias in the landscape area where the observing sites are situated.

Wow, Watts, you sure shot things out of the park with that one!

Which he does very well indeed.

may very well

There you go; pure speculation on your part.

Muller says only that hurricane numbers in the US are decreasing. The studies I linked show a trend of increasing observed numbers over the last 150 years, one of which correlates this with AGW, but later studies show that improved observation techniques are more likely the cause of the trend. No definite conclusion can be drawn yet. Thus, "scaremongering" about increased hurricane numbers is premature, and quite possibly misguided.

Muller does not say anything about hurricane intensity, as much as you'd like to think so. Emanuel 2005 shows that hurricane intensity is "highly correlated" with sea surface temperature, which Muller's own work shows is increasing, so he'd need strong evidence to the contrary to believe as you do.

Given that Elsner 2008 also observes that strong hurricanes are getting stronger, there's very good evidence to believe that the frequency of hurricane-related disasters will increase, and nothing Muller has actually said (you know, in words) indicates that he doubts this.

It's amusing, actually, watching people desperately reinterpreting the data or loudly rubbishing the messenger, all the while demonstrating even more strongly the same flaws in method that they're attempting to accuse the scientific community of.

Android Handhelds and related:
http://obscurehandhelds.wordpress.com/
http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/8/3072142/power-a-moga-controller-hands-on
http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/11/odroid-the-android-gaming-handheld-now-shipping-to-android-gam/
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/04/android-gaming-tablet-looks-remarkably-similar-to-sony-psp/
http://arpandeb.com/02/2012/gadget-preview/3-handheld-android-gaming-tablet-consoles-review.html

Android dominance:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10797_3-57448990-235/gaming-handhelds-relegated-to-niche-status-by-ios-android/
http://www.phonearena.com/news/Nintendo-claims-the-iPhone-killed-the-handheld-game-console_id29533/

Watts squirming ? You may want to check his new paper. It's Muller who's going to squirm - and how ! - as he stepped straight into a trap.

Just look at the graph mentioned above, realize that we'll cross 400 pm CO2 in about three years, that we're on track for over 450 ppm CO2 by mid-century, and see where that will lead in terms of temperature and sea level.
http://stevengoddard.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/screenhunter_43-jul-28-20-17.jpg

Firstly, let us be clear on what we're talking about: current temperature appears as a statistical blip in the historical record.

Secondly, Richard Muller is not and never was a skeptic. Way back in 2003 he was saying things like, "Let me be clear. My own reading of the literature and study of paleoclimate suggests strongly that carbon dioxide from burning of fossil fuels will prove to be the greatest pollutant of human history. It is likely to have severe and detrimental effects on global climate." and even more incredibly, "If Al Gore reaches more people and convinces the world that global warming is real, even if he does it through exaggeration and distortion - which he does, but he’s very effective at it - then let him fly any plane he wants."(2008).

Thirdly, even William Connolley, the guy banned from editing Wikipedia for 6 months due to his attempts to rubbish skeptics, thinks Muller is a wazzock for making the claims he has. So, slashdot, the excitement you are experiencing here is really quite misplaced.

...which matters not one bit.

The only difference here is that someone got old and became a hypocrite. What was fine for him to do to others in is youth suddenly became a crime when it was finally done to him.

Nope. The issue here is that you don't understand what the quote means because you don't know the background, while Jobs did. http://nancyprager.wordpress.com/2007/05/08/good-poets-borrow-great-poets-steal/

One of the surest tests [of the superiority or inferiority of a poet] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.

As for your fantasies about no other company ever suing because of designs, both Samsung and Motorola did long before Apple. Motorola is actually one of very few companies who got a preliminary injunction over a design patent.

If correlation proved causality, your statistics might actually mean something. I could also easily say that gun control results in more murders because the cities in the US with the greatest gun control laws in general have the highest percent of murders. In reality, while this may possibly be a result of tighter gun control, it is also the case that gun control laws were enacted BECAUSE these cities had high murder rates. The fact that they did not work or made things work is only part of the story.

A better question would be if murders went down significantly in countries that banned guns after the ban. They did not, and in fact the opposite happened.
Since Canada passed strict gun control laws, their homicide rate has gone up while at the same time going down in the US:
Canada 1
Canada 2
In England, people injured by firearms has increased by 110% in the 10 years leading up to 2008. (Ban was enacted in 1997). In late 2009 The Telegraph reported that gun crime had doubled in the last 10 years, with an increase in both firearms offences and deaths.
UK Gun Statistics
Australia did not ban guns, but has seen mixed results with their efforts to reduce the amount of guns owned. Accidental gun deaths are up, gun suicides are down with other suicides are up by the same amount, and assault rates are up. Gun robberies increased for the first 5 years but are now back down to the levels they were before the gun buyback program.
Australia Statistics

So comparing gun deaths in the US to countries that already had much lower gun deaths before the ban guns is obviously an irreverent comparison for this debate. Violence in the US is a complex issue, and one that will not be solved by more gun control laws. As long as one group of people is always blaming others for the problem, we will never get a handle on how to change our culture to reduce the attractiveness of violence in the minds of our children. For that to happen, we need to co-operation of parents, government, the media, Hollywood, etc. Unfortunately, that is unlikely to happen, because in my mind the biggest problem is children growing up without fathers being raised by TV, movies, and "music" artists which promote violence. As long as the government pays people to have children and pays single mothers to stay single and poor, this is not going to change.

I've observed that people who regard themselves as climate science "skeptics" generally insist that one should disregard information provided by web sites run by experienced scientists who have studied the primary literature in depth and have concluded that the scientific consensus on the nature and hazards of global warming is broadly correct. Apparently, in "skeptic speak," having studied the evidence enough to have formed an opinion constitutes being "biased" (presumably, only ignorant people can be "objective"). So sites such as RealClimate, Skeptical Science, Open Mind, the IPCC web site, and the the NASA GISS web site are all out of bounds. Of course the distinguishing feature of climate science "skeptics" is that (unlike the skepticism of successful scientists) their skepticism is quite one-sided, and they become quite credulous when it comes to anything that seems to cast doubt on climate science--so they will happily cite sites like "WUWT."

But I cite SkepticalScience not as a source of opinion (I've already stated my opinion) but because that it is a site that provides good links to published reports that contain the evidence supporting my opinion. Nevertheless, it happens that I've personally reviewed many of the summaries provided on SkepticalScience and have compared them to the primary literature, and I find that SkepticalScience tends to be reliable and accurate, and a fair reflection of the consensus opinion of working climate scientists. This is in dramatic contrast to my experience at WUWT and other "skeptic" sites, where I often find that descriptions of the published literature are highly misleading, sometimes in ways that appear to me to be intentional.

Take a look at the chart they're using vs a google search [google.ca] for the same chart. Why is their chart different than the rest? All the other charts show that real temperatures most closely match Hansen's scenario C, which involved CO2 emissions ceasing to increase past 1990.

And here we see an example of why a site like SkepticalScience is useful, particularly compared to a Google search, which often turns up frequently-repeated misinformation. If you doubt that SkepticalScience is accurately reporting the models, all you have to do is click on the link, and it will take you to the original paper by Hansen. And if you doubt that the GISS data is accurate, you can click on the link, and it will take you to actual GISS data. Moreover, it is quite obvious just from looking at the short term variation of the models that Scenarios B and C diverge only slightly up to the present day, so it is impossible that we could have temperature data that would differentiate between them. However, the question of whether there is any evidence of the warming trend "leveling off" as described in Scenario C (which was calculated for an unrealistically optimistic scenario of CO2 mitigation that does not at all correspond to reality) can be addressed statistically by mathematically subtracting known sources of short term variation, and the answer is "No."

By the way, one way in which real scientific skepticism differs from climate science "skepticism" is that real scientists are skeptical of even their own work, and often acknowledge errors and revise their conclusions in the light of new evidence and better analysis. So, for example, based on subsequent work, it is now generally thought that

I've observed that people who regard themselves as climate science "skeptics" generally insist that one should disregard information provided by web sites run by experienced scientists who have studied the primary literature in depth and have concluded that the scientific consensus on the nature and hazards of global warming is broadly correct. Apparently, in "skeptic speak," having studied the evidence enough to have formed an opinion constitutes being "biased" (presumably, only ignorant people can be "objective"). So sites such as RealClimate, Skeptical Science, Open Mind, the IPCC web site, and the the NASA GISS web site are all out of bounds. Of course the distinguishing feature of climate science "skeptics" is that (unlike the skepticism of successful scientists) their skepticism is quite one-sided, and they become quite credulous when it comes to anything that seems to cast doubt on climate science--so they will happily cite sites like "WUWT."

But I cite SkepticalScience not as a source of opinion (I've already stated my opinion) but because that it is a site that provides good links to published reports that contain the evidence supporting my opinion. Nevertheless, it happens that I've personally reviewed many of the summaries provided on SkepticalScience and have compared them to the primary literature, and I find that SkepticalScience tends to be reliable and accurate, and a fair reflection of the consensus opinion of working climate scientists. This is in dramatic contrast to my experience at WUWT and other "skeptic" sites, where I often find that descriptions of the published literature are highly misleading, sometimes in ways that appear to me to be intentional.

Take a look at the chart they're using vs a google search [google.ca] for the same chart. Why is their chart different than the rest? All the other charts show that real temperatures most closely match Hansen's scenario C, which involved CO2 emissions ceasing to increase past 1990.

And here we see an example of why a site like SkepticalScience is useful, particularly compared to a Google search, which often turns up frequently-repeated misinformation. If you doubt that SkepticalScience is accurately reporting the models, all you have to do is click on the link, and it will take you to the original paper by Hansen. And if you doubt that the GISS data is accurate, you can click on the link, and it will take you to actual GISS data. Moreover, it is quite obvious just from looking at the short term variation of the models that Scenarios B and C diverge only slightly up to the present day, so it is impossible that we could have temperature data that would differentiate between them. However, the question of whether there is any evidence of the warming trend "leveling off" as described in Scenario C (which was calculated for an unrealistically optimistic scenario of CO2 mitigation that does not at all correspond to reality) can be addressed statistically by mathematically subtracting known sources of short term variation, and the answer is "No."

By the way, one way in which real scientific skepticism differs from climate science "skepticism" is that real scientists are skeptical of even their own work, and often acknowledge errors and revise their conclusions in the light of new evidence and better analysis. So, for example, based on subsequent work, it is now generally thought that

What are these machines being used for anyway? What have we achieved so far? How far has simulation of complex natural systems been helpful in understanding them? Can we make better predictions using faster computers or more refined algorithms? So far, computer simulations have not helped us understand or find dark matter- if something like that even exists. Our ability to predict the weather is still shit, and our climate models require “correction” factors to even approach observed values. Our ability to model protein folding and bio-molecular interactions is still pretty pathetic. This state of affairs has persisted in the face of colossal increases in available computational power. So what is going on? Why haven’t the computer gods delivered? Why would throwing more computational power at a problem solve it if previous attempts to do so have proved futile? http://dissention.wordpress.com/2012/06/20/the-super-computer-race-is-a-sad-scam/

I'd hope that people realise that web apps are fine for LoB apps, if you're entering data and getting results, these are fine. Some javascript libraries give fine performance for this kind of stuff (network latency considered), but when it comes to game-style performance, you need something more native. I wonder if webgl can step up to give us this kind of perf, but if it cannot then any webapp will just not be suitable for low-latency, fast response applications.

Of course, this means WebGL libraries are needed to make development of these types of app practical.

Of course, it depends on the framework you're using - WPF for example is a "native" platform for UI development, but it is worse than web apps for performance especially now MS is using Direct2D for IE rendering.

I found a picture of it. It looks cool, but tiring.

The Chinese had it right with their limit on family size

Shame on you. The forced abortions, forced sterilizations and other extremely authoritarian methods used by the Chinese government are crimes against humanity.

Plus, there is no global overpopulation. Some places (such as Japan) are already experiencing population aging and decline, which is bad in many ways. Other places (such as the USA and specially Europe) already have sub-replacement fertility rates, and their population only grows because of demographic lag and immigration. It is predicted the the European Union population (now at 503M) will reach zero natural population increase by 2015 and zero total population increase in 2035 (at 520M), then start declining.

The USA will grow from 310M in 2010 to 403M in 2050. [1]
Asia will increase from 4.2B in 2010 to 5.1B in 2050, then start declining. [2]

The only region that is really growing is Africa. It will increase from 1B in 2010 to 2.2B in 2050. [2] Then its population density will be 73/km2. [3] Compare that to the current population density in Portugal (115/km2), in South Korea (487/km2) and in Taiwan (641/km2). [4]

Global population is predicted to grow from 7B in 2011 to 9B in 2050 and 10B in 2100 [5] and start falling soon after [6].

And according to [7], 40-50% of America-produced food is thrown away. According to [8], 1/3 of the world food is thrown away.
And this does not take into account that people eat, just for pleasure, excessive quantities of resource-intensive food (such as meat). If Americans/Europeans want to help the poor, an easy way would be to decrease (say, by 30%) their diet of meat. This will immediately reduce food demand and, for double bonus, the saved money can be donated to charity. And much arable land is wasted on subsidized inefficient corn-based ethanol. You can lobby your government to stop that.

Plus, there does not seem to be a negative correlation between population density and GDP per capita. [9]

African hunger is not caused by overpopulation. It is caused by corrupt and authoritarian governments, and by guerrillas/terrorists motivated by Marxism, Islamism, ethnic hate or simply greed.

Overpopulation fear-mongering is very old - at least as old as Malthus. One of its more recent incarnations was the 1968 book "The Population Bomb", which predicted mass starvation to occur in the 1970s.

Anyway, for better or for worse, there is already strong action taken by individuals, foundations, and Western governments, to restrict fertility in Africa.

1 : http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Analytical-Figures/htm/fig_11.htm
2 : http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Analytical-Figures/htm/fig_2.htm
3 : According to [2], Africa will have 2.2B people in 2050, and according to Google[10] and Wikipedia [11], the area of Africa is 30,221,532 km2
4 : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependent_territories_by_population_density
5 : http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Analytical-Figures/htm/fig_1.htm
6 : http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Analytical-Figures/htm/fig_6.htm
7 : http://www.foodnavigator-usa.com/news/ng.asp?id=56376-us-wastes-half
8 : http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/74192/icode/
9 : http://sanamagan.wordpress.com/2011/03/10/population-population-density-gdp-per-capita-ppp/
10 :

no, you're not interpreting it wrong.. non-Metro stuff will not see any of these improvements.

Ars did a much better piece about it.

There's a nice technical blog about how bad WPF is for rendering stuff, and how Silverlight is even worse (most Silverlight rendering is done via the CPU). Fun reading.