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Marshall Brain and James P. Hogan are two authors worth reading on these topics.
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary

Martin Ford also has a great website in this area:
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/

Lots more links and stuff on my site: http://www.pdfernhout.net/

And here are copies of some emails I sent to Ray Kurzweil over the years (someone else made a copy of them here) trying to get him to think more deeply about evolutionary and social issues related to the singularity:
http://heybryan.org/fernhout/

Basically, I tried to say much like what you are saying. Our trajectory coming out of any singularity may have a lot of influence on our path coming out of one. It just seems like common sense that more compassion, community, and cooperation now might make a big differnece later. See also Alfie Kohn's work:
http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/nc.htm
"No Contest, which has been stirring up controversy since its publication in 1986, stands as the definitive critique of competition. Drawing from hundreds of studies, Alfie Kohn eloquently argues that our struggle to defeat each other -- at work, at school, at play, and at home -- turns all of us into losers."

My sig below sums up my years of thinking on all this.

Defense of Marriage Act

Yeah, That was Reagan, right? No wait, it was Bush... Nixon? Dewey!

What's a sane response to this sort of thing? I like this one: http://cpontius.wordpress.com/2012/07/22/fear-of-the-dark/ .

Every other phone manufacturer seems okay with USB and a headphone socket. Same accessories, standard connector and charger.

Right, they should then abandon their advantage that they have built up over years with dock connectors on alarm clocks, portable stereos and car connection kits?

Wouldn't they have to replace the dock connector with two ports being an USB port and a mini HDMI port for video and audio? Even still, they would loose the serial interface for controlling/being controlled by accessories present in the dock connector.

See below:
http://irq5.wordpress.com/2012/06/25/the-apple-30-pin-dock-connector/

The dock connector supplied not only USB data but by-directional control signals, audio and video.

Their biggest problem is not fixable and is linked to what type of communication ultimately destroys a fraudulent society. Hint: It is the mundane stuff. http://dissention.wordpress.com/2012/02/19/spying-and-surveillance-is-rapidly-becoming-worthless/ and it also does not help that intelligence agencies are run by status hungry human beings. http://dissention.wordpress.com/2010/12/05/universal-organizational-flaws-in-intelligence-agencies-1/

Their biggest problem is not fixable and is linked to what type of communication ultimately destroys a fraudulent society. Hint: It is the mundane stuff. http://dissention.wordpress.com/2012/02/19/spying-and-surveillance-is-rapidly-becoming-worthless/ and it also does not help that intelligence agencies are run by status hungry human beings. http://dissention.wordpress.com/2010/12/05/universal-organizational-flaws-in-intelligence-agencies-1/

task to thousands of private businesses in the open market, rather than continue to hold a monopoly.

yeah, businesses don't eventually end up being a monopoly.
http://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2011/10/03/the-network-of-global-corporate-control/

Exept when unlockable content just doesn't work:
http://gamedevcoder.wordpress.com/2012/07/22/monstaaa-development-summary-part-3/

In short, this guy made a game where you have the first few levels for free, then you can pay to unlock many more levels. Despite the game having great reviews on most websites and great ratings in google play, it has more than 11k downloads, and has been unlocked 22 times in three weeks of existence.

... structural unemployment and a basic income http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA
"A parable about robotics, abundance, technological change, unemployment, happiness, and a basic income.
The knol mentioned in the video has been moved here because Google Knol is shutting down: http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
That parable and video was directly inspired by this:
"Structural Unemployment: The Economists Just Don't Get It"
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/08/04/structural-unemployment-the-economists-just-dont-get-it/#comment-254 "

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; their population only grows because of demographic lag and immigration. It is predicted 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 grow 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, theocratic 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 billionaire 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 : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africa

http://brokenpianoforpresident.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/jd-letter-entire-big1.jpg

Fund raiser car washes... you just have to do them like this

as for the guys who wash your windscreen and demand $2 later.. like having a clean windscreen is going to stop them.

http://2012patriot.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/food-stamps-pic.jpg

http://preetul.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/22072_103448173014925_100000492294641_91284_8224118_n.jpg?w=600

If you're interested, there was a study done into the effects of the French law (Hadopi) using iTunes sales provided by the major record companies. The full study is here if you're interested and it found a 50% relative increase in iTunes sales ... when the law was being debated in the French Parliament, but no change when letters or disconnections were taking place.

However, that study has all sorts of other problems with it (such as missing some other relevant points, and having a rather dubious control group); if you're really, really interested, I got angry enough at the IFPI and politicians using this to justify the UK equivalent that I wrote a counter-paper, which can be found here.

iOS (which is BSD based) runs the majority of phones and tablets in use, while Android has the majority of the rest.

Citation? I smell an Apple fanboy.

http://fortunebrainstormtech.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/screen-shot-2011-06-21-at-6-28-47-am.png

Android continues to lead the smartphone market in the U.S., with a majority of smartphone owners (51.8%) using an Android OS handset.

http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/?p=32494

For tablets, Apple has a lead, but the numbers are quite low for total number of devices.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/26/android-reaches-39-tablet-os-market-share-standing-on-amazons-shoulders/

So overall, Android is king in marketshare. Not sure how you got "apple runs majority of phones and tablets". Maybe "only tablets, for now, because of headstart".

It's not different at all.

Bummer. Link is 404. From the same artist, will you accept Captain America instead? If we want something nerdy, how about Tron? Hellboy?

With everything else from the 80's returning, He-Man must be somewhere in the queue. Then perhaps we could have rule 34 combining the two. Not that that's relevant to my interests. At all.

If you're willing to turn off the TV and read a book, there's always the possibility of doing a mashup with He-Man and popular literature.

(Having seen that, just between you, me, and the rest of the Internet, I'm sticking with the ponies.)

Khan Academy is a great resource, but it's far from a perfect substitute if one want to accomplish deep learning. The fact is that there is a LOT of free and very helpful tutorial learning material on the Internet. Khan has caught a lot of interest because of the sheer scale that Sal Khan accomplished on his own. I think it's a great tool, but is becoming quite overrated in terms of what we know from those who teach face-to-face, and learning science.

Here are some valid criticisms of Khan Academy. http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/castingoutnines/2012/07/03/the-trouble-with-khan-academy/?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

http://fnoschese.wordpress.com/2011/03/17/khan-academy-and-the-effectiveness-of-science-videos/

In sum, Khan Academy is NOT a revolution in learning; it's a tool that many will use to help revolutionize education.

Yeah... I happen to presume that taking a hand gun to the theater is idiotic but that is just my personal opinion... in fact, I think it says a lot about your culture (or personal insecurity) if you feel that you need to do this. Of course, you are entitle to disagree.

It seems to me that you fear taking personal responsibility for your own security. I do not know your nation of origin, but this is a typically European "nanny state" point of view. Over here the cops aren't for protection, they're to mop up the mess and conduct an investigation after the fact.

From the grandparent:

You are presuming that the owner of the gun is an idiot. Though it might be true in some cases, most of the people are responsible.

From you:

No, I cannot cite examples... it was a question (i.e., how... [sorry I forgot the question mark at the end]). Can you provide examples to support your claim?

Read about Joe Zamudio for that.

From the link on the Gabby Giffords shooting:

Here is a man that heard gunshots and ran towards them in an effort to help however he could. He did this without knowing the situation or who was in danger. Arriving on scene he recognized that the criminal was no longer a threat and provided assistance in restraining the assassin. Several things should be noted: He did not draw a firearm and charge into an unknown situation. That would have added to the confusion, possibly leading to him being identified as a second gunman.

He was aware that there was a crowd and recognized the danger of hitting bystanders.

A person other than the assassin was in control of the firearm when Joe arrived. He did not misidentify the criminal and fire on an innocent.

He did not act as “judge, jury and executioner”.

He has stated (on the Fox and Friends interview) that he has no special training for such situations.

Major Caudill does not exist. This essay was originally written by Marko Kloos in 2007.

http://munchkinwrangler.wordpress.com/2007/03/23/why-the-gun-is-civilization/

Shortly thereafter it was plagiarized and falsely attributed to the nonexistent Major Caudill. It even appeaed in a certain celebrity's book.

http://munchkinwrangler.wordpress.com/2009/05/17/major-caudill-hits-the-big-time/

Major Caudill does not exist. This essay was originally written by Marko Kloos in 2007.

http://munchkinwrangler.wordpress.com/2007/03/23/why-the-gun-is-civilization/

Shortly thereafter it was plagiarized and falsely attributed to the nonexistent Major Caudill. It even appeaed in a certain celebrity's book.

http://munchkinwrangler.wordpress.com/2009/05/17/major-caudill-hits-the-big-time/

Oh no, that isn't true. The Higgs Boson is a small but consistent data blip in a multitude of a huge number of experiments. Its only been found in this one collider though so the blip in the data could be due to an issue in the equipment.
http://theskepticalteenager.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/higgsbosongraph1.png
As the Input Energy of the collisions changed the expected output of the collisions changed following a predicted exact graph. The Higgs Boson is predicted to alter that straight curve at an exact spot and it did alter the curve at that exact spot. The issue is wither its a glitch in the detection or a different particle that isn't predicted.

I think you'll enjoy it :
http://bananenplanet.wordpress.com/2012/07/17/10-things-most-americans-dont-know-about-america/

This is a wonderful post! Thanks for sharing your knowledge with us! I hope to read more of your post which is very informative and useful to all the readers. I salute writers like you for doing a great job! http://www.hotelguide24.wordpress.com/

I dunno, could be the thousands of sites that have been cracked over the last 20 years (some publicized, most not.) Have you not been reading about the growing hacker war between China and the rest of the world? Someone with DEEP pockets could get to anybody's data if they so wanted. That seems way more likely to me, and the police in question do in fact have a squad who investigates cybercrime. This isn't exactly a South American backwater.

You have WAY too much faith in the incompetent buffoons of the Norfolk Constabulary. One of the first things they did was to seize the computers from the guy that ran a blog where links to the leaked emails were first posted, including his adsl router. Really? The blog wasn't even hosted on those computers!

Any claim from these guys that they know how the emails were obtained has no credibility whatsoever. Better to just listen to the experts.

http://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2011/10/03/the-network-of-global-corporate-control/
"Within this there is a large ‘core’, containing 1347 corporations each of whom owns directly and/or indirectly shares in every other member of the core."

For only a few more dollars you could have a slightly more powerful CPU like tha allwiner A10 and a little more RAM soy you can run real debian and real ubuntu like the Beagleboard, Beaglebone and the Odroid-X can and you wouldn't need a forked, stripped linux distro, you could run the real thing. You don't need a weird graphic processor without drivers that nobody will touch, you need RAM and compatibility.

I hope they fix this in the next revision, the allwiner is selling for penauts nowadays.

Sure. Go ahead. Make corporations 100% people. Give them all of the rights they've been lusting after, and once they've grabbed that carrot, shut the door behind them and give them the responsibilities and the punishments as well. I fantasize about this sort of thing on my blog. This one launched a series: http://klurgsheld.wordpress.com/2007/08/30/short-story-logical-conclusion/

And before [artists] see any [royalties] they have to pay off certain things the label forces them to pay for

So what? "This restaurant owner doesn't distribute gratuities fairly, therefore I won't pay for the meal I enjoyed" keeps money from the hardworking staff. I'm not sure what argument you're failing to make, but whatever it is David Lowery demolishes it in the section starting

He's right that that doesn't make it okay, he's wrong that it in the vast majority of cases it isn't true. It is true. I spent much of a year working at Universal Music Group, building a royalty calculation engine, so I saw a lot of contracts and a lot of details, and spend a lot of time talking to people who administer those contracts on behalf of the labels.

While it's true that labels give advances, 95+% of the time that advance is all of the money the artist ever sees, and the advances really aren't that big in most cases. Further, the vast majority of artists that never recoup do, in fact, recoup their full advance and then some. But the labels have all sorts of additional recoupable expenses, many of which are grossly inflated. According to the labels, recording an album costs several hundred thousand dollars, most of which actually goes to the label. Labels do things like sending a "complimentary" limousine to take the band to the recording studio... and then add $1500 in recoupable expenses to cover the 30-minute drive, even though the only reason it cost that much was because they dramatically inflate the costs for their vehicle and driver. There are hundreds more tricks they use to inflate recoupables to the point that only the biggest artists will ever see a penny of royalties.

The sleaziest trick they pull, IMO, is that sometimes they simply don't pay the artists the money that they're clearly owed. Most often this happens in cases where the contract terms are a little hard to compute, but it also happens sometimes just because the label thinks the artists aren't savvy enough to catch it. The term of art for this blatant thievery is "settle on audit", meaning that if the artist ever bothers to pay auditors to trawl through the books (which are often provided in the form of huge boxes of paper that contain transactions from dozens of artists all mixed together, just to make it difficult), then the label will negotiate a settlement for some portion of the money owed. They don't pay all of it, of course, because the artist's auditors and legal counsel recognize that getting all of it would require an expensive and time-consuming lawsuit, so it makes more sense to accept a partial payment.

As for the advance, the amount is normally enough that if a band were to handle the money carefully they could make an album every other year and live a reasonable middle-class lifestyle from it (say, $50K per year, per band member). But, of course, the label convinces them that they're going to get lots of money from royalties and encourages them to spend hard and fast. Why? Because it helps to ensure the label "owns" them. This is also why contracts always lock the artists into multi-album deals, at the label's option. These lock-ins can be broken, but doing it requires an expensive court case.

Bottom line: While the sleaziness of the labels doesn't justify violating copyrights (assuming doing so is wrong to begin with; I'm not addressing that point), to say they aren't sleazy or that they give the artists a fair deal is just wrong.

And before [artists] see any [royalties] they have to pay off certain things the label forces them to pay for

So what? "This restaurant owner doesn't distribute gratuities fairly, therefore I won't pay for the meal I enjoyed" keeps money from the hardworking staff. I'm not sure what argument you're failing to make, but whatever it is David Lowery demolishes it in the section starting

Every time I hear of stuff like this i always think of the same thing...Kudzu. Before my grandmothers passed on we used to talk about what life was like during the depression and both told me how the scientists were just completely sure that kudzu was the answer, why it'd fix the dust bowls and save the farms! Oh it fixed it alright, if you call spreading like a cancer a 'fix'.

Let us just hope they are smart enough to keep this shit under lock and key and never ever let it out, because i seriously doubt that if it mutated the average creature would have any immunity to a 500 million year old bug.

SQL injection AGAIN? There's just no damned excuse for it.

Several people have made similar comments. What worries me is that they are not also slamming them for storing passwords in plaintext AGAIN. User passwords should not be stored anywhere on the system. You store a salt and hash of the password - this is fine for login, but fairly useless for hackers should they get it.

I used to think that, (and also assume no site on earth stored plaintext passwords) until I looked it up after the linked-in decable.

A modern $200 GPU can calculate every hash for a 9 character (A-Za-z0-9) password in just over a month *

I now use a basic 12 character password, and prepend it with a site specific part which I store in a file on my laptop. This gives me a password length of 15-18 characters.

There's a few stupid sites (password must be 8-12 characters etc -- agean airlines want a numeric password, and my bank only let me have 4 friggin numbers!), but on the whole it works well. Even if you got hold of my local password, you'd still need to crack the 12-char suffix.

Unfortunately it broke down with my UK Labour Party conference applicaiton -- they emailed my password back to me in plain text! Morons that haven't got a clue, no wonder they didn't get in.

* http://mytechencounters.wordpress.com/2011/04/03/gpu-password-cracking-crack-a-windows-password-using-a-graphic-card/ et al

this /. entry in my feed reader :)
What's new

Oh, how I miss my old G1's 5-row keyboard...

Numbers, three rows of QWERTY, then another row for space, alt, &c... I wish I could have that keyboard on a modern android phone.

Since you're too lazy to google "tree ring data proxy temperature" or some variation thereof...

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/30/yamal-treering-proxy-temperature-reconstructions-dont-match-local-thermometer-records/
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2010/05/17/comments-on-the-tree-ring-proxy-and-thermometer-surface-temperature-trend-data/

Basically, tree ring width is sensitive to a LOT of factors, and generally, temperature doesn't affect them nearly as much as these other factors. Using tree rings as a proxy data is analogous to using a car's radiator temperature to determine its speed. It certainly affects it, but the signal is pretty low and the noise is rather high...

http://sueliz1.wordpress.com/2012/01/08/catholic-church-no-longer-swears-by-truth-of-the-bible/

There *might be* more than one scientist in the bunch.

Yes, there are violent people who call themselves anarchists. There are anarchists who oppose a caricature of science (in my experience, they're much-confused about the history of science, especially the Enlightenment). Ask yourself these questions: How much violence has been done by self-proclaimed Christians and capitalists? How many Christians and capitalists have tried to attack or twist science?

Although "anarchist" has become a byword for "bombthrower", it derives from anti-labor propaganda in the 19th Century and (apparently) continues up until today.

And let's not forget that anarchism may be much closer to the heart of the free software/free culture movement than many would like to admit.

There *might be* more than one scientist in the bunch.

Yes, there are violent people who call themselves anarchists. There are anarchists who oppose a caricature of science (in my experience, they're much-confused about the history of science, especially the Enlightenment). Ask yourself these questions: How much violence has been done by self-proclaimed Christians and capitalists? How many Christians and capitalists have tried to attack or twist science?

Although "anarchist" has become a byword for "bombthrower", it derives from anti-labor propaganda in the 19th Century and (apparently) continues up until today.

And let's not forget that anarchism may be much closer to the heart of the free software/free culture movement than many would like to admit.

There *might be* more than one scientist in the bunch.

Yes, there are violent people who call themselves anarchists. There are anarchists who oppose a caricature of science (in my experience, they're much-confused about the history of science, especially the Enlightenment). Ask yourself these questions: How much violence has been done by self-proclaimed Christians and capitalists? How many Christians and capitalists have tried to attack or twist science?

Although "anarchist" has become a byword for "bombthrower", it derives from anti-labor propaganda in the 19th Century and (apparently) continues up until today.

And let's not forget that anarchism may be much closer to the heart of the free software/free culture movement than many would like to admit.

I wrote this on the morning of the announcement because I suspected that some wild and wacky stuff would soon be dancing across the Intarwebs, because even the "straight" reporting was conflicting.

The link was a mutant hybrid of this and this.

Here's how crazy of an effect nuclear bombs have had on our atmosphere. Basically, artifacts from the latter half of the 20th century and much of the 21st century will not be able to be reliably carbon dated in the future. Even if you want to include a compensation factor, the concentrations for a given location at different times over the lifespan of an organism and the organism's uptake at different points in its life aren't readily quantified.

Well, not quite. There is useful post-bomb carbon dating. Basically, we put a lot more C14 into the atmosphere in the 1950's than the natural background. It's largely gone from the air, but it will be decaying in trees and the like for some time to come, and that, too, can be used for dating.

Here's how crazy of an effect nuclear bombs have had on our atmosphere. Basically, artifacts from the latter half of the 20th century and much of the 21st century will not be able to be reliably carbon dated in the future. Even if you want to include a compensation factor, the concentrations for a given location at different times over the lifespan of an organism and the organism's uptake at different points in its life aren't readily quantified.

Grammar only matters to a point because English grammar is an antiquated inconsistent mess of silliness whose chief purpose is keeping English teachers employed. Many great minds over the past few centuries have argued that grammar does not matter. Seymour Papert cites studies showing that children who are good at math can be turned off to English because its rules are illogical and inconsistent. Isaac Asimov blamed our inconsistent grammar and spelling system for illiteracy in America. Richard Feynman argued that if kids are having problems with grammar and spelling then there are problems with your grammar and spelling standards. Benjamin Franklin proposed a phonetic spelling system arguing that our current alphabetic spelling system would become like Chinese characters, devoid of an phonetic meaning if we did not implement reform. China implemented spelling reform to simplify its characters in order to improve literacy with quantifiable results.

I'm approaching this as someone who majored in English in college before going into programming. I couldn't get a job working for a newspaper because the editors would take one look at my BA and say, "Sorry. You know how to write." It took me years to understand what they were talking about. Grammar is important to the point of being able to properly communicate ideas, but that's all. Grammar-nazism is all about job security for elitist journalists and English teachers at the expense of increasing literacy in America. It's like the imperial/metric debate or qwerty/dvorak keyboards, just another out-of-date standard that could be fixed in one generation if that generation could get over the fact that "through," "coo," "do," "true," "knew," and "queue" all rhyme nonsensically but spelling them "throo," "koo," "doo," "troo," "nyoo," and "kyoo" simply looks silly despite being logical.

By all means, there's nothing wrong with primates... fine animals. They just tend to form hierarchies along lines off dominance, commit acts of violence on one another including infants, they're greedy, scheming, back-stabbing, self serving Machiavellian bastards (to paraphrase one of the world's leading authorities on primate research.

So we aren't as bad as baboons and we aren't as good as bonobos. We fall neatly on the primate continuum of behavior (good and bad.) The problem is that we have nukes. A pissing contest among humans could end in a 20 mile wide blue glass ashtray. All I'm saying is that as good as being a primate has gotten us so far, its perhaps time to begin rising above the worst of our inclinations while rising above them still makes a difference.

http://dymodevelopers.wordpress.com/2011/07/19/dymo-label-mobile-sdk-for-android-beta/

How bout this one?

Thought that was always just the Aussies. Huh.

chavs, not australians.
http://failblog.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/guidos-bros-douchebags-fratboys-bros-different-culture-same-bro.jpg

I wish they'd finish their maildir support, which apparently made it t experimental. The mbox format is terrible for backups and general folder reliability:
http://jaisejames.wordpress.com/2012/04/09/import-or-migrate-mbox-to-maildir-in-thunderbird/

Using Thunderbird is like taking a step back 10 years in MUA's. The core features (writing emails including their formatting, browsing folders, etc) doesn't really seem to have changed much since the Mozilla Suite days (which was only a small change from Netscape Communicator). It's looking pretty long in the tooth, and writing good looking emails is lagging behind other applications.

I don't suppose the re-assigned devs are going to anything useful, like multi-process Firefox. I switched to Chrome a few months ago for this one feature, and won't be coming back until they implement it as I now have per page/tab control over my laptop battery's life (I can kill CPU hogging tabs easily with Chrome).
http://lawrencemandel.com/2011/11/15/update-on-multi-process-firefox-electrolysis-development/

I think it's hard to present electronic documents on a server as evidence since it's hard to prove that the documents weren't altered after being submitted. (not impossible, but verifying cryptographic checksums is not how the courts are used to working)

Actually, 'electronically stored information' is becoming more and more common, and the courts are becoming comfortable with hashing. http://ralphlosey.files.wordpress.com/2007/09/hasharticlelosey.pdf

Some other people doing low-cost A10/A13 board stuff:
Olimex are developing an A13-based board currently.

Gooseberry is an A10-based board sourced from a tablet designer.