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Well considering this can't self-replciate, and you must be duped into opening the zip, then launching the attachment, your statement is true in the scope of this malware. It's a trojan, not a virus.

This is about as nefarious as me sending a batch file to you saying 'run this safe file'.

It is pure social engineering, and has nothing to do with the OS security, other than it targets a Mac. Rather poor social engineering at that .

Yes I would assume this Mac attack will prove successful only among those geeks who normally would fall for this seeming legit instruction...
http://failblog.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/epic-fail-photos-fail-nation-seems-legit-fail.jpg

Anyone who rules by decree is a dictator. It doesn't matter where are they are from, or what they do.

In fact, you'd think we'd know a dictator when we see one, given our vast experience.

You would hope so, but to be honest I don't have a lot of faith in your judgement. Sorry.

Jefferson and Madison (primary author of the Constitution) had the opinion that there needed to be a very strong separation between state and religion.

"We are a nation of Christians, not a Christian nation." Which is to say that there should not be any state sponsored religion, but there is absolutely nothing wrong with religion being reflected from society into our government (e.g. the Ten Commandments posted in a City Hall for instance). Jefferson's allowances for church services to be held in federal buildings buttresses this assertion.

One needs to understand the physical realities of Washington DC in the early days of the Republic. It was in fact generally a wilderness with a few large buildings dropped in. It wasn't a developed city with substantial infrastructure. If you wanted to hold services the only physical structures available were in fact the government buildings.

DC had a population of 8,000 at the beginning of Jefferson's term. You posit that it's only a couple of government buildings in a wilderness? Let's take a look at an engraving of Washington from Jefferson's presidency shall we? There are scores of buildings in this picture. Tell me, who's exaggerating now? Your assertion is completely unsupported by the visual evidence (and bits of Georgetown history if you want to go there).

Also - are you aware that Jefferson and Madison were Deists who denied the divinity of Christ and much of the Bible?

Jefferson also created an annotated version of the Bible for his own personal study -- what's your point? I do not claim that Jefferson is some Bible thumping fire brand, but it is equally dishonest as some posit in this discussion that he didn't greatly value religion and Christianity in particular. I recall that Jefferson often attended church.

But we do thank him for the NBN (even if it might mean we will soon have a national debt to rival greece to pay for it).

Wow, get your facts straight.

http://nbnmyths.wordpress.com/how-are-we-paying-for-it/

The NBN is already paid for with government bonds, which will return 4% to investors, however, the NBN itself will make 7% ROI, which means Australian government will pocket 3% from the exercise. Which will probably be spent on even more infrastructure. Which is a lot better than Telstra did, I think all the money they ever made went straight to Sol Trujillo's retirement fund. How on earth can you describe 3% profit as sending Australia into debt?

Please Mr Abbot, stop mucking around on Slashdot and go develop a real policy alternative instead of just spreading FUD and automatically gainsaying whatever the ALP comes up with.

A couple of people have raised this issue, and it relies on a fundamental mis-understanding of how the universe works on a molecular scale.

  Suppose that I have my colander and I wash some vegetables in it. Gunk can get stuck in the holes and it has to be washed off, which requires a fair amount of work because I have to break the interaction between the gunk and the surface. That's your macroscopic intuition about how filters and such work.

  But your macroscopic intuition will lead you astray in this case. The individual holes in graphene do not work that way; yes, occasionally, molecules of one kind or another will spend some time stuck to the graphene (a useful phenomenon in other circumstances - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-performance_liquid_chromatography) but, on the scale of atoms, they are effectively in a high-powered washing machine ALL THE TIME.

  Can't find quite the movie I want... this'll do:
http://protonsforbreakfast.wordpress.com/2012/04/11/brownian-motion-observed-in-milk/

  So you see those oil bubbles wiggling around? Given that amount of constant wiggle, are you worried about having them "stuck" anywhere? That's thermal vibration from being at room temperature. Those milk bubbles are over 1,000 water molecules across, so each of those "wiggles" is 10 or 100 times the size of an individual graphene pore; are you worried about anything another 1000x smaller being "stuck" anywhere? It would be like worrying about gunk stuck in your colander while your colander was sitting in a fire-hose 24/7.

  Anyway- to cut to the chase:
obviously you could have you take the graphene and you run the sea water *past* it at high pressure. Occasionally some gunk gets in there but it washes away sooner or later; and nothing spends any appreciable amount of time stuck in an individual graphene hole.

No insurance company that I know of is in business as a public charity.

For sake of technical correctness, let me mention that there are a few faith-based mutual insurance societies. Some are even set up such that the money goes direct, by a personal check, from you to the person who needs it. The society then only reconciles the numbers and publishes sums of donations. But those societies are tightly closed, and available only to members of a specific religion. Sadly, my sincere faith in FSM does not count. The closed nature of those societies is actually understandable; its operation is based on honesty, and allowing outsiders would lead to insane levels of abuse.

if you've got any sense (and money) you'll be going to one of the private providers that accepts cash

In the old USSR there was a joke: "Medical services are free as long as the outcome is not important." There was a reason for the joke: public healthcare was staffed with poorly paid doctors and equipped with machines that were many decades behind the curve.

To illustrate, a dental drill in at a Soviet public healthcare provider was straight from 1920's - it had a low speed motor somewhere and a set of belts and rollers to transfer the power to the drill bit. The speed of that drill was something like a thousand RPM. (Modern dental drills spin at up to 400K RPM.) Anesthetics were unheard of; there was no nurse, no suction, no X-rays. And indeed, why would the State spend money on such luxuries? You already paid for all that largesse, and now the government decides what to give to you instead. Of course they'd give you the bare minimum. Read this link or this one for a better explanation of what was NOT done. Now you know why 100% of escapees from USSR have bad teeth. It's because every visit to the dentist was a torture - literally. It was true even in UA3Axx, let alone some faraway provinces like UA0xxx.

USSR had commercial dental clinics, and they were somewhat better. For example, if a tooth has to be extracted they would give you an anesthetic first. But they did not have best of the best equipment either; that was reserved to clinics that serviced the leaders of the Party - and doors of those were always barred to the peasants.

The USSR's healthcare in its setup was actually better and more practical than Obamacare. There were no death panels in USSR. If you wanted you could visit every specialist and present your case - and they all would suggest the best treatment they had access to. There was no insurance bureaucracy simply because the healthcare was wholly owned by the government. The only bottleneck was the lines. A good specialist would be pretty busy (just like anywhere) and you would need to wait for your turn. Canada has a system that is half-way there. You go to the doctor, the doctor bills the government, the government pays. There is no middleman. Obamacare seems to combine worst elements of all known systems.

Because I still managed to leave out a link. Sorry.

I think Julian Assange is a rapist. I still like Wikileaks.

Of course I should actually link to the random article. http://savolainen.wordpress.com/2011/09/ This article also has some more information, but less cool diagrams. http://eetimes.com/electronics-news/4376121/Applied-tips-dielectric-etch-tool-for-3-D-NAND-production- Disclaimer: I work for Applied Materials (not for the etch division though).

And others don't. Opinions differ on merits of different desktops; story at 11. "Desktop A rules, desktop B sucks" is, absent data from a broad population of users, a personal opinion, not a statement of fact

Yes, but what IS a fact is that some desktops allow users to configure their desktop the way they like it, with focus-follows-mouse, click-to-focus, and other properties. The problem is that most desktops do not; the designers think they know what's best for everyone, and refuse to allow any configuration at all. If all or most desktops allowed users to set these things, you wouldn't see all this complaining.

Yes, but "more configurable" and "less configurable" are't ipso facto statements of objective merit.

"More configurable" is an advantage to the people who don't like the default configuration, and may be completely irrelevant to those who do.

As for "less configurable", at least when it comes to click-to-focus vs. focus-follows-mouse, some question are:

• whether introducing a vendor-supported focus-follows-mouse option would require work on the GUI code that takes away resources that could work on other parts of the GUI - it's quite possible that it would;
• whether it would add a point of potential confusion for users - I personally don't think an extra knob, especially under an "advanced" pane, would be a problem here);
• whether it would cause problems for existing applications - I have the impression that the focus-follows-mouse tweaks may break some Windows apps, although, apparently, Vista has a configuration option that gives focus-follows-mouse+autoraise, so perhaps those issues have been fixed; I don't know whether similar issues exist with OS X focus-follows-mouse+autoraise tweaks such as the one in MondoMouse, or whether it combines poorly with the single menu bar model of OS X; I don't know whether focus-follows-mouse-without-autoraise would be harder or have other issues on either of those platforms; note also that the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines speak of some issues that app developers have to worry about with focus-follows-pointer:

  Note that point-to-focus places a number of restrictions on GNOME applications that are not present in environments such as MacOS or Windows. For example, utility windows shared between multiple document windows, like the toolbox in the GIMP Image Editor, cannot be context-sensitive— that is, they cannot initiate an action such as Save on the current document. This is because while moving the mouse from the current document to the utility window, the user could inadvertantly[sic] pass the pointer over a different document window, thus changing the focus and possibly saving the wrong document.

  so I'm curious how Windows or OS X apps handle that case if focus-follows-pointer is turned on - autoraise might make that inadvertent focus change more obvious, but not everybody wants autoraise.

I'm a click-to-focus user myself, these days (I went that way when I had a Windows machine on my desk, even if most windows ended up being terminal emulators sshed into a UN*X box, as I figured if I got used to it I'd have fewer problems switching between different desktop environments, given that I could always turn it on for UN*X+X11), so I personally am fine with OS X in that department; people who like OS X and, presumably, don't mind click-to-focus shouldn't confuse that with "OS X IS THE BESTEST UNIX DESKTOP EVAR FOR EVERYBODY!!!!!!11111ONE!!!!!!!".

Somebody who loves focus-follows-mouse may want to ram his or her fist through the screen when using OS X, and that's a perfectly legitimate response for them - as long as they don't confuse it with "OS X IS TEH SUXXXOR FOR ALL UNIX USERS!!!!!111ONE!!!!!!".

"Or that the professional managers outperformed the Dow Jones Average index only 51 out of 100 times?"

Since the DJIA goes up over time, on average, matching it makes money, over the long term. If a trader, high frequency or otherwise, is making money on average, he is participating in something that is very much NOT like a casino.

Fallacious logic. And the same logic that led mass hordes of people to think that investing in housing will ALWAYS make money on average. The OP supposes that actively investing is a skill set, and not based on random luck. Therefore, professional investors who have spent years training and being educated on investing should be able to consistently beat (A) monkeys throwing darts at stocks and (B) beat an index based on a LISTING of stocks, not on professional predictions of how well they're going to do in the future! They can only do (A) 61% of the time... and doesn't it worry you that they can't beat the monkeys 99% of the time? And they can't beat a LISTING of the biggest stocks more than 51% of the time!

So what happens when the index listings themselves come crashing down? I certainly hope you're not expecting those professional fund managers to exercise those wonderful "skill sets" and pull your retirement out of the fire...

"claimed its Mac computers were completely immune to viruses"

No, that's not what it said. It said, and I quote, "A Mac isn't susceptible to the thousands of viruses plaguing Windows-based computers."

No, the second sentence is "That's thanks to built-in defences in Mac OS X that keep you safe without any work on your part". If you want to quote it, quote all of it.

So yes, they were claiming immunity to viruses. In perspective, the first sentence is merely a comparison between the number of viruses on Windows based computers and the number of viruses on OS X based computers.

http://sophosnews.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/mac-osx-before-after.jpg

Also read the part under "Download with peace of mind".

IIRC, the claim was that Macs were immune to "Windows viruses".

Actually, the claim was "thousands of viruses that plaguing windows based computers" not "Windows viruses".

Its a comparison about the number of viruses on Windows and OSX, not a statement of immunity against windows specific viruses. It's meant to imply that OSX cannot get viruses, while not directly saying it, it is enough to be done for false advertising in many countries which is why Apple removed it (they've just been stung for false advertising on the Ipad in Australia).

http://sophosnews.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/mac-osx-before-after.jpg

It’s difficult to be logical about something that’s so illogical.

Suppose Nessie was real.

Then either she’s an entirely new species of unknown lineage, or she’s an evolved plesiosaur. Her existence would enthrall paleontologists. However it doesn’t disprove Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Evolution is scientific fact. It’s been scientific fact for about 150 years. That boat sailed a long time ago.

The Free Exercise Clause ensures creationists can argue their beliefs. The Establishment Clause ensures they can’t masquerade their religious beliefs as pseudoscience in publicly funded schools.

Louisiana seceded once. She lost. If she secedes from science, she’ll lose again.

Guns are to shoo off inspectors, not trees.

And while you can tranquilize them, they still remain a nuisance. You've got to cull their population every now and then so that they don't prey on kids.

Here is a link showing the before and after of the Apple web page in question.

http://sophosnews.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/mac-osx-before-after.jpg

I don't think they could be sued, there is no false advertising on their part. It blatantly states "A Mac isn't susceptible to the thousands of of viruses plaguing Windows-based computers."

That is a completely accurate statement. Mac OS X cannot be infected with a Windows virus.

http://spacecadetprogram.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/space-cadet-background2-1.jpg
incase anyone's interested

In other places, they have forest kindergartens, in the US, the lawsuit-driven regulations prevent trees, streams and cats at schools. http://freerangekids.wordpress.com/2011/02/12/school-inspectors-say-trees-too-dangerous/

There's a segment of Americans that want to live in a perferctly clean, safe bubble. The lawsuits they file against anybody and everbody when the world doesn't meet their expectations bring about regulations keep the rest of us from having the choice to be dirty and unsafe. The laws have changed significantly even since I was a kid. According to conventional wisdom, I should have never survived childhood.

Correction, it was Duplo bricks.

http://clintjcl.wordpress.com/2010/05/20/journal-computer-old-school-computing-tribute-to-nethack-i-used-to-look-for-the-net-in-nethack-but-never-found-it

Android needs to support standard X applications so the whole code base such as LibreOffice works on Android, allowing it to function effectively as a laptop replacement

It looks like they're heading down a different path and trying to get the app stack running on Android. Buying QuickOffice suggests they won't be pushing too hard to get Libre on there. http://googleblog.blogspot.com.au/2012/06/google-quickoffice-get-more-done.html.

There's already third party X11 servers, so they may appear on the open source versions of Android soon, if there's enough demand.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.theqvd.android.x&hl=en

http://my20percent.wordpress.com/2012/02/27/android-x-server/

You have a point about things not being black and white.

But from those who advocate partial solutions, I expect that they define clearly what they consider "bad things". And that there are checks against abuse of the system, such as the web site of the political opposition "accidentally" being blocked.

In the past, some secret filter list have been leaked and it was promptly discovered that they did not restrict themselves to "extreme cases".
Here is an example from 2009: http://mattcbr.wordpress.com/2009/03/19/australia-internet-filter-list-leaked/

Representations about the sort of split artists have with "middle men" are casually fraudulent and slanted pro-Free Content propaganda. "Pirating everything" just puts money in the pocket of ISPs, it doesn't help the artist in any material way -- Comcast, Google and AT&T thank you for your "Piracy (for Civil Disobedience)", they profit smartly off it! A hell of a lot more than the musician does.

What the fuck does an "Android, C#, Ron Paul" fanboy know about music industry contracts?

Agree

If you want a clean taxonomy, you would have to first determine your hierarchical structural preferences (geo then thematic; vice versa; public/private etc) AND you would still have to support the current system for a very, very, long transition period - so don't touch it.

The face that ICANN HAS touched it and want to extend it, is an act of near criminal stupidity

You might note that that graph has its x-axis logarithmic. That means that if you were to convert it to a linear graph, you'd have a sudden rise to $300/yr on the left, and then an exponential decrease extending far out to the right. It's not strictly a logarithmic curve, but it's such a heavily skewed bell curve that most of it resembles a logarithmic curve. If it was an un-skewed normal distribution, you would expect the peak to be about halfway down the range on the x-axis, not way off to the left.

This graph of US income distribution in 2011 (first relevant result off Google Image Search) looks pretty similar too. If it was a normal distribution, you would have as slow a buildup to the peak as you do a decline from it; discounting the >$250K outliers (if they can really be considered outliers, it looks like there's a good number of them), you should see the peak at around $125K, not way down in the $15K range. And likewise the median would be there, too, not in the $50K range.

In fact, that's a good way of looking at it: most people make below an average income; if you were to divide the GDP by the population, you'd have a significantly bigger number than what significantly more than half the population makes. (Nine folks have $1 each and another has $91 each; they all have $10 each on average, but 90% of them only have a tenth of that average, and the other 10% have over nine times the average). That's not possible in a normal distribution, where the mean, median, and mode are all roughly equal.

http://thetrichordist.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/letter-to-emily-white-at-npr-all-songs-considered/

Considering WordPress.com alone has over 800 million views a week, stats available here. You've got a serious sampling problem. Your website is a niche which skews toward IE use.

I've long suspected swipe-passcodes are theoretically less secure than 4-number PIN, if for no other reason than the swipe leaves a single trail (only 2 possible paths based on finger smudge), whereas buttons you have thousands of possible numbers. Assuming the 4 numbers are all different of course.

Seems the math backs this up.

Of course this all assumes the user started with a clean screen, entered the passcode/pattern, then immediately locked it and gave it to someone to guess. In real life other interaction will probably have obscured the code/pattern somewhat.

Really? Might wanna go look up Krokodil and Russia. That's the result of prohibition.

Ban the good drugs and fiends will go for whatever substitute they can cook up and trust me, we definitely want people who go sit in the corner looking at the pretty colors rather than people coming into the ER with their flesh rotten to the bones:
http://mylifeasateenageloser.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/127550-horrifying-side-effects-of-krokodil.jpg (NOT SAFE FOR ANYONE!)

I just asked Google - I got the book right. Search for "plague" on this page: http://biblioblogaroni.wordpress.com/2007/09/13/survival-of-the-sickest-a-medical-maverick-discovers-why-we-need-disease/

Man, why is this place so full of ignorant people, who believe they actually know or understand something, anything around them?

Marriage has been redefined often throughout history.

But the "lifelong convenant between man and woman for starting a family and begetting children" has remained for millennia.
The Latin "matrimonium" is derived from mater (mother). The other part of matrimony comes from monium, an action, state or condition. The implication is clear: Matrimony is the action, state or condition within which motherhood rightly occurs

I have to admit, I have no idea what's wrong with polygamous marriage. It's prominently featured in the Bible (not negatively either--I hope you don't bring up Leah/Rachel, where the fault clearly wasn't polygamy but dishonesty) and has been legal or encouraged in many societies through the years. Forcing a young bride to marry an old man is certainly wrong, but why would I want to prevent eg. four loving adults from pooling resources? It's not for me, but that's irrelevant. Incestuous (straight) marriage has a good chance of producing genetically disabled children, which is a bad enough thing that society has an interest in preventing it, so I am provisionally alright with banning incestuous marriage on those grounds--though making incestuous child-making illegal is more direct and preferable.

So you have nothing against a man "marrying" his own father, because they have no chance to beget genetically defective children?

who am I to deny them when I have no real reason to do so? "Ick" doesn't count.

Your "denying" language is wrong. When the government recognizes a "marriage" that most people do not want to recognize, the government is not merely "allowing" something, it is actually forcing people to act against their will. For example, suppose that a Christian bread&breakfast only allows married people to sleep together. Most likely, such a bread&breakfast does not want a man to sodomize his own father in their room. By forcefully instituting homosexual incestuous "marriage", coupled with anti-discrimination laws, the government is forcing the bread&breakfast to do something against their will.

I want to reiterate how poor your arguments have been

I don't remember offering any positive arguments; I merely applied reductio ad absurdum to the pro-same-sex-marriage argument that "marriage is a civil right", and then I complained that that side very rarely offers argumentation, and 98% of the time they simply shout down their opponents with "SHUT UP YOU ******* BIGOT!" screams.

As for positive argumentation, see
http://frexpression.wordpress.com/2010/10/20/a-gay-man-decries-gay-rights/
and
http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20030731_homosexual-unions_en.html

A man was thrown to the ground and severely injured, so he sued the TSA, and the TSA refused to turn-over the videos because of "national security". The man was forced to drop the case since the evidence was being withheld.

What is this man's name? I would like to add the citation to my list of TSA bullshit.

I'm pretty sure you are not talking about John Corbett since he was not assaulted and has not dropped his case.

At least you're starting to show your work. Your entire first paragraph, until the last sentence, is actually correct. Two issues still: the 7% increase in albedo is not a unanimous fact. See here for quite a few papers discussing the evolution of albedo, the accuracy of the Earthlight project, etc: http://agwobserver.wordpress.com/2009/08/17/papers-on-the-albedo-of-the-earth/. Secondly, the calculation has been met with great skepticism, precisely because the 2C drop in temperature hasn't been observed. This means that changes in albedo have a very limited impact on the global temperature. Finally, Grey-body calculations are fine, but they are far more complex than you let on. For one, what's the impact of dealing with irradition onto a sphere, instead of onto an ideal black-body cavity with an albedo factor applied to it? Hint: it involves integration.

You're still completely lacking in citations. Here, let me help you a bit with a paper actually discussing the impact of bond albedo and solar cycles on future insolation: http://ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/apr/article/download/14754/10140 They don't discuss the

As for the other assertions, obviously we look at different graphs for sea ice -- the SH is over the 30 year mean and has been for a rather long time.

Sea ice is a rather minor aspect of the ice in the SH, as well as utterly uninteresting when it comes to rising sea levels. Furthermore, you are conflating ice area and ice volume. See here for some very accurate measurements that indicate that ice volume is decreasing: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-03/uoca-ais022806.php Now that you're 0 for 2, you want to try again?

If you google a bit, you can actually see the variation year by year over the last decade or more, all on one graph.

Yes, it's well known. It's the one I linked. I'm glad you don't even read the replies. It's a great way to stay ignorant and look like a fool.

Oh, and while you're worrying about explaining how you can tell what is a linear trend and what is cyclic in the absence of any sort of serious baseline for data or workable theory,

Ok, now I KNOW that you didn't read anything I linked to. Want to retry that AFTER looking at the graph in my reply? Or are you talking about the slight uptick that came from the Earthlight project, and that no one was able to replicate in their DIRECT measurements of albedo?

But either way the physics of both is perfectly clear, and any halfway decent climate model that includes the measured albedo as a parameter should be showing strong cooling.

The models do include measured albedo, you meandering, cherry-picking, misleading nimrod, and neither the data, nor the models indicate much cooling. Merely a bit of a pause after a record high in 1998, with a slight upward trend if you start your trend at 1999.

But they're not, even though this is bone-simple physics even more fundamental (and prior to) the GHE. I wonder why?

If you would read anything I've linked to, did any sort of research with the goal of understanding your question, rather than confirming your existing bias, you'd know that everyone has been asking the same question, came to the conclusion that the physics model is far too simple to be used as the only controlling factor, and decided that there's got to be more to the current data than what can be inferred merely from water vapor and albedo.

If you want me to take you seriously, you might want to start linking your sources. Because so far, you are batting a big fat 0, and coming across as someone who is mistaking expertise in one area for expertise in a completely different one - and making a total ass out of himself in the process.

Actually, it's against the law for the US military to perform military operations in the USA (with exceptions for insurrection and war, of course - both of which require an Act of Congress)....

Which is why they do it with NATO troops instead.

My suspicion is that this is basically observation bias in action. Every public system on the internet in every country is subject to a constant barrage of low level email driven malware, these days. We only hear the reports of the universities, IT security companies, and government services, because these are the only folks with enough security consciousness and enough to lose to notice it, and who are worth writing news articles about. This doesn't mean a particular attack is targetted, or trying to accomplish a particular goal.

The allegation that the particular attack is 'highly customised' doesn't really stack up. The attack vector here on a company called Digitalbond is a file called

Leveraging_Ethernet_Card_Vulnerabilities_in_Field_Devices.pdf.exe

Googling reveals

http://ciip.wordpress.com/2009/07/27/leveraging-ethernet-card-vulnerabilities-in-field-devices-white-paper/

In short, the attack file takes the same name as one of the company's own publications.

So really, the use of this filename does not indicate any particular understanding of what Digitalbond does, much less any real interest in it. It's absolutely trivial to construct such attack files algorithmically by crawling target domain name webpages, and is a common and class spam/malware method. There's nothing interesting here.

Bullshit, Texas Instruments sells silicon DSPs that operate at 1.2 volts, specifically for the hearing aid industry.

The rest of it sounds like that hearing aid company is desperately in need of some process improvements. Sonomax sells a self-injecting silicone system for earbuds and hearing aids that eliminates the need for multiple fittings(and takes about 4 minutes). And that's not even the best way to do it.

I'll give you the spectral customization because psychoacoustics is hard, but assembly should be bog standard on a flexible substrate so the silicone can flow around it., unless the circuits look like this.

I thought you were joking or exaggerating. but I guess not. yikes.

Good guess, but wrong.

Check out the figure in this post. This is a graph showing the first two principal components of *individuals*. The graph shows that using these principal components neatly clusters *individuals* by *self reported race*.

So what you said is precisely wrong. The study has done exactly what you propose (do PCA on a group of black Africans and white Europeans + other races), and what you predicted would happen ("You'll get a bunch of clusters, but the black africans aren't any more likely to be in the same cluster than a white european and a black african") did not occur. In fact, africans appear in the European cluster 0% of times and visa versa.

Thanks for engaging in this and clearly stating your position. I would have said exactly what you said about 5 years ago, until I saw evidence like this which clearly shows the opposite.

Do you actually have a job? If you think ethernet is dead I can only assume not.

I've never worked anywhere, nor have I ever visited a client that doesn't still use ethernet, many of whom are fortune 100 companies.

"Any more than they were put off by the removal of floppy disks, RS232, Centronics printer ports, and VGA."

As MacBooks are still quite a rarity compared to the likes of Dell, HP, Lenovo, ASUS, I'd wager that's actually probably quite a lot. Apple's laptop division may well be profitable, but it's still a tiny fragment of the laptop market numerically, so each time an Apple fan says "Well, Apple doesn't have this but no one's put off by it" I chuckle a little. It's like the fanboys don't realise that even the likes of the iPhone, Apple's most profitable sector, still only hold a measily 15% - 20% global smartphone market share, that's only a few percent more than dying RIM.

See here, Apple's computer market share doesn't even register on the global scale:

http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/world.png?w=640

So keep this in mind each time you use your "Obviously it doesn't matter because Apple is oh so popular...". Hint: It's not, Apple users are still, to this very day, an absolutely tiny, somewhat irrelevant minority in the computing world, and only slightly more relevant in the mobile world, where Android has at least a 3 fold numerical advantage.

I've heard that before...
http://verydemotivational.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/demotivational-posters-th-grade.jpg

Or cut down on population. Which is doable without resorting to war or murder (but, I repeat myself). Put the money into sex ed uncontaminated by religion, free prophylactics, and rewards for not having children. Positive reinforcements, not negative like China did.

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 67/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 : esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Analytical-Figures/htm/fig_11.htm
2 : 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 : esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Analytical-Figures/htm/fig_1.htm
6 : 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

I think that this is an early draft text of the bill in question: http://inforrm.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/defamation-bill.pdf

I think that's the existing law, from 2011. The new proposal is linked to from the article: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/bills/cbill/2012-2013/0005/cbill_2012-20130005_en_2.htm#pb2-l1g5

It does indeed contain new language protecting websites that host user generated content.

This has happened at a minimum in England, New Zealand, and the United States. There are still easily findable references to a U.S. pornstar named Melissa Bertsch having to testify in court several times (once in England involving a military officer) about how old she was in a set of pictures.

(The English military officer in question was found not guilty, IIRC, though I can't find the outcome online. In another case in the U.S. the prosecutor wanted to keep prosecuting even after it was disclosed that the images were of a 20-year-old woman because the defendant thought it was child porn.)

In New Zealand, there was a recent (within the last few years) case of someone convicted for having had a collection of pictures of a model who was over 18, but looked younger. I can't find the reference. It was of interest because it was clearly presented that the model was over 18, and the court decided that it didn't matter. I don't remember the sentence, I'm afraid, though the Wikipedia page on the general laws implies that it may have just been a fine in that situation -- but note the relatively large number of countries on the list.

Well I can't say much on the topic because I don't live in the UK, but they still don't allow gay couples to get married, for example.

Please read http://frexpression.wordpress.com/2010/10/20/a-gay-man-decries-gay-rights/. Its author is an atheist homosexual.

You can turn Nepomuk OFF. Unfortunately, Akonadi is another story. [more below]

We're a Linux shop with around 400 desktops and have been running KDE for a decade. KDE3 was rock solid. KDE4, not so much. The KDE4 direction of "let's index everything" with nepomuk and akonadi doesn't work so well when home directories are NFS mounted. In fact, it killed our fileserver. Further, why on earth would I want 400 instances of mysql_community_server running and creating a 128MB DB for each user in their home directory just to index their PIM?

I don't blame you one big for moving to XFCE; AFAIC it's the next-best alternative to KDE4. You're probably set with XFCE for the near future, but I'll point out the following in case in the future you retest KDE4.

Nepomuk can be turned off (on a per-user basis) by going to K->System Settings and then Workspace Appearance -> Desktop Search and turning off both the "Strigi Desktop File Indexer" and also "Nepomuk Semantic Desktop". Performance for Strigi indexing is still awful even on a local disk, let alone NFS, so I regularly turn these both completely off. Nepomuk still needs to be turned off IMHO, otherwise the Virtuoso database backing it slowly grows as you use the system. It isn't easy to find exactly what this does and what use you can make of it, but the following is a good resource that explains it:

https://kdenepomukmanual.wordpress.com/2012/02/06/detailed-kde-nepomuk-manual/

Unfortunately Akonadi cannot be completely turned off AFAIK -- and what's sad is that (as you correctly pointed out) it does not store information, but rather only indexes PIM information. By default Akonadi has a dependency on MySQL, and EACH user that logs in requires starting a dedicated instance of MySQL server. That's a huge WTF right there. However -- you can reconfigure Akonadi (on a per-user basis) to use SQLite instead of MySQL in .config/akonaki/akonadiserverrc. But another WTF is that this has to be set up on a per-user basis. Apparently at one time there was a server-wide setting available, but if it exists today in KDE 4.8 I'm unable to find it or even a reference to it. :-/

With Nepomuk turned completely off and Akonadi set up to use SQLite, KDE4 is performs much better. Unfortunately there are certain things that Akonadi apparently cannot store in SQLite, so supposedly there can be issues with using it, but in practice I haven't run into any of them.

Well, Mexico is technically in North America. Nevertheless, what's happening in mexico (drug killings) isn't new.

I'm not saying Argenina is a great economy, but I hate being compared to Somalia or whatever. Whenever someone mentions that living in Argentina is "bad" I just let pictures talk:

http://img301.imageshack.us/img301/1020/catalinas2.jpg
http://img25.imageshack.us/img25/3406/096catalinasnorte.jpg
https://ayudabuenosaires.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/obelisco-av-9-de-julio.jpg

I know that's just the capital, and things are MUCH better there. But I'll start to worry the day it stops looking as shiny as now.

Oooh, they have tall buildings and clean streets!

I've Brazilian and lived in Rio de Janeiro, where there are also tall buildings and nice looking places. Now I live in a rural town in the US, where the tallest building is 3 stories. Guess where I feel safer?

Neither Brazil nor Argentina is Somalia, but your pictures don't speak anything as to the safety of the location.

Beautiful landmarks of Buenos Aires. And then, you got the other side of the coin, less than 5km away, and in the middle of the same city.

That last one is the first thing a tourist arriving to BA by bus will see.

Whenever someone mentions that living in Argentina is "bad" I just let pictures talk:

...https://ayudabuenosaires.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/obelisco-av-9-de-julio.jpg

...

OMG you bastards! You stole the Washington Monument!! Have you no decency?!!

"They" that want to kill us have generally been a small number that

a) actually want to kill us
b) have the means to kill us
c) have the will to do it
d) have the opportunity arise

Generally, I think all four factors must be in play.

There are millions of Americans, probably even a majority, who believe that 9/11 literally came out of the blue. That on September 10, 2001, we were minding our own business, then on the next day the United States was attacked for no reason. But the truth is, in the eyes of the rest of the world, we haven't been minding our own business for a very long time.

source

But on the day of the attacks, where I was, at a roadside tavern in Glencar, Ireland, the subdued talk—aside from shock, bewilderment and sympathy for the innocent victims—centered upon that very question: Why had it happened? And everybody there instinctively knew why—as did every other adult European on the Continent with whom I conversed in the days immediately following. It was only the American public and especially the American news media, who appeared to be in the dark and who studiously avoided the subject.

source

If Americans didn't know we were already at war on 9-10 it was ignorance. Willful in some cases who cast this attack as unexpected or unprompted. The Iraqi sanctions alone may have caused the attack. We have no business meddling in the affairs of other countries and spending trillions we don't have in the process.

Well, Mexico is technically in North America. Nevertheless, what's happening in mexico (drug killings) isn't new.

I'm not saying Argenina is a great economy, but I hate being compared to Somalia or whatever. Whenever someone mentions that living in Argentina is "bad" I just let pictures talk:

http://img301.imageshack.us/img301/1020/catalinas2.jpg
http://img25.imageshack.us/img25/3406/096catalinasnorte.jpg
https://ayudabuenosaires.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/obelisco-av-9-de-julio.jpg

I know that's just the capital, and things are MUCH better there. But I'll start to worry the day it stops looking as shiny as now.