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Aside from the 6 month window when PS3's were actually cheaper than equivalently powerful computers for some calculations there hasn't been a legitimate reason for other OS.

"I want to run Linux on my PS3" is itself a legitimate reason for Other OS. It doesn't require justification, and no intelligent argument can ever be made that it does.

You know that this is an absolute fact, and you agree with it completely, but you are pretending to disagree solely so that you can artificially inflate your perceived self-worth by distancing yourself from some imaginary strawman caricatures of people that you made up in your head.

You are, in short, a liar.

That's true, the Conservative Party of Canada who currently form the Government of Canada tend to base their views on what's "best" for Alberta, where they control all but one of the seats. The Prime Minister moved to Alberta as a child and has essentially become a caricature of Albertan disgruntlement with rest of Canada. It looks like the government was facing over $9 billion in fines for failing to act on Kyoto, mostly due to the tar sands projects which they haven't even bothered to monitor.

Although the CPC blames the previous Liberal Government, the CPC has been in charge for almost 6 years now. The Liberals didn't do much to meet the targets, the CPC has never had any intention of even trying to reach the targets. They've been actively working to sabotage international agreements since they came to power.

If you think the parody of the US flag was for your benefit, think again. It was aimed directly at the Iranian people and their few remaining friends. The propaganda win "on the Arab street" of this drone capture is likely pretty high, and caricaturing the flag is just part of that.

And the comms retooling? With luck, they have some encrypted comms hanging around that they can drop in in a few days or weeks. If not - well, you know how fast most government programs work...

Are you unable to make a salient point to address his comments?

Assaulting a caricature of your own making is pretty feeble, dude. Obviously you're incapable of formulating an interesting opinion.

I took it as a mock example of the type of derogatory caricature this politician will try to censor. I don't know of a stereotype that this describes. Troll? Trolls seek a pointless argument. No-one seems to be arguing with him.

You gotta be kidding.

BBT used to be smart. BBT used to be funny.

It's basically drivel now.

When was the last geek/nerd joke that felt like a natural part of the converstion? Hint: Not in the past two years.

Now it Star Trek Joke, laugh track, explain that it was in fact a Star Trek joke, laugh track, explain why Star Trek joke was funny, laugh track.

Brilliant? Please. I loved the first season or two of the show because all four of the main characters were somewhat relatable. Now they're just caricatures of the characters they used to be and the nerd/geek pop humor exists either as throwaways or excuses for the characters to do completely outlandish things.

Bad caricature of Steve. Doesn't match reality.

Quite right. Everyone knows he would have flung a monitor!

Bad caricature of Steve. Doesn't match reality. "You watch television to turn your brain off and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on." -- Steve Jobs, Macworld Magazine, February 2004

MacWorld? Is that just an Apple mouthpiece to make the users feel good about themselves? How did he reveal himself to investors?

"It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them."

-- Steve Jobs as quoted in BusinessWeek (25 May 1998)

Bad caricature of Steve. Doesn't match reality.
"You watch television to turn your brain off and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on."
-- Steve Jobs, Macworld Magazine, February 2004

I guess it's time for "make a caricature of the opposing side of the healthcare debate." I'll return with this "Healthco has found that you had a nose before you purchased insurance with us, therefore this was a pre-existing health condition and we are not going to cover your pneumonia. Please pay the full amount of 4 million dollars for your hospitalization."

Thanks to Brit colonization, India is now the world's largest democracy. Its common language is a particularly humorous dialect of English, which makes for occasional hilarious misunderstandings. Not sure what you mean by 'injecting' their culture, although one may argue that Indian popular culture is broadly a caricature of their former colonial masters, sometimes more successful than the source ( cricket anyone?). Yeah, India and China are ascendant, rising on the cresting tide of their populations. Let's see how that works out for them ;)

18 century political caricatures where very offensive - and if you compare the British press today the editorial cartoons a re far far stronger than anything published in the usa media - Steve bell would never get published.

I can't find any examples online at the moment. They were basically political caricatures that people at the time would consider extremely offensive. Of course, to say they'd be the equivalent of "terrorism" today is very subjective, but I think if they had YouTube back then they would have been taken down :)

So not everybody who did well dropped out: a PhD in art history as well as a maker (her PhD thesis title "A study of the use of caricature in selected sculptures of Honore Daumier and Claes Oldenburg").

Nice to know it's possible to balance the two, it will make some of my PhD student friends very happy indeed :-)

The project wasn't completed by a government developer. It was done by a contractor, because everybody knows that the government is inefficient and costs a lot of money.

So they demand that they outsource it to the private sector, which means all kinds of extra overhead. Private contractors, being driven by the profit motive, will turn in crappy work unless you spend huge amounts of effort clarifying precisely what's required, followed by meetings to ensure that they have done it. Just the product spec meeting cost more than the time spent actually doing it. All because the Government is Bad.

So the next time, they're going to install even more extra levels of control, thus raising the costs. The alternative, decreasing the right-wing screech machine so that the government could just let some in-house developer bang out an app for a request that somebody needs, won't even be considered as an option.

Speaking as someone who works at a contracting firm: It's not simply that the government is inefficient. It's that they don't have the expertise and can't recruit or retain the expertise.

They're actually acutely aware that they're spending other people's money, and as such they have tons of controls to prevent wasting money, which usually means they that are highly risk-averse. So if you're a professional looking to do cutting edge stuff, you simply don't go into the government. Further, everything is based on rank and seniority, so if you're a young wunderkind, you're not going to be rewarded for your talents. Worse, you're going to have to take direction from your mediocre boss who, even if he recognizes your talent, can't reward you.

Private contractors are usually people like me who were in the government (or military, in my case) and still want to make a difference by working as closely as they can. If there were a way I could do what I'm doing now and still be in the Army (or, hell, I'd go to the dark side and join the Air Force), I'd do it. But I would have had to wait 10 years before I was senior enough to get to choose what I wanted to do. Instead, I get out, and within a few months I'm doing exactly what I want and what I'm good at.

All because the Government is Bad.

Really, the only "bad" party here is you. You're self-righteousness is matched only by your ignorance and stupidity: you've clearly never actually worked with the government, you have no idea what the problems are, and yet you're ready to lay blame and insult the men and women who are seriously committed to making our government work. Most of the contractors working for the government are ex-military or ex-government themselves, but you dismiss them as some idiotic caricature of Capitalists Motivated By Greed. Fuck you, buddy.

Here's Peter Thorne at realclimate.org:

It seems that a couple of my mails have been highlighted by people wishing to take them out of context. Both related to a very early draft of the IPCC fourth assessment observations chapter that I was asked to review informally as part of the accepted report preparation pathway. This would have been in 2005 or 2006 not 2011. IPCC has several review cycles and numerous lead authors on each chapter to ensure balance and representivity. However, the very earliest drafts inevitably reflect the individual contributor’s perspectives. The review which I undertook was and still is intended to catch such cases and rectify before the formal reviews. I would note that none of the formal review versions retained the vast majority of the text that was being discussed in this email. In other words the process worked. I would note in passing that my understanding is that US FOIA precludes early drafts of papers and discussions thereof precisely because it is vital to be able to discuss fully and frankly scientific work prior to publication, peer review being a necessary but not adequate condition. It is good that scientists care about issues and imperative that they are allowed to discuss report and paper drafts openly if we want the best reports and papers possible.

As to the tropical hotspot issue I raised it was correct in 2005/6! Here’s some headline news (if a second email tranche release also constitutes news then the bar is set very very low) science does not stand still. In the past five years there have been multiple new studies using satellites and weather balloons, including the thermal wind evidence. These studies have highlighted even more than was the case then the substantial uncertainty in tropical tropospheric temperature records. We never made these measurements for climate, they are bedevilled by non-climatic artifacts that are poorly understood. The observational evidence is so uncertain as to include anything from somewhat less warming than at the surface to substantial amplification of surface changes aloft. So, no there is no longer anywhere near as strong evidence for a lack of a tropical hotspot as was the case then. Although of course absence of evidence is not equivalent to evidence of absence for some kind of discrepancy between observations and models. The large observational uncertainty and strong inter-model consistency make the observational uncertainty a far more plausible explanation which was also the state of the science in 2005/6.

Also, to correct a mis-conception (zombie argument?) that the tropical upper-troposphere hotspot is somehow a unique signature of anthropogenic warming this is frankly baloney. The tropical troposphere is dominated by convective mixing processes. Although its not as simple as just a moist adiabatic lapse rate adjustment the net effect is that the tropical tropospheric column simply amplifies whatever changes occur at the surface. If it warms the troposphere warms with greater warming aloft. If it cools the troposphere cools at an increasing rate aloft. Models and observations concur on monthly to inter-annual timescales. So, a forcings run with a net +ve surface radiative effect will have a tropical hotspot and one with net -ve surface radiative effect will have a tropical coldspot. Single forcing model runs can easily verify this and show that the hotspot is no unique signature of CO2 forcing. It just doesn’t stack up physically. The unique anthropogenic signal is a warming troposphere / cooling stratosphere something that we see very clearly.

Finally, the caricature that has been painted of numerous of the principle actors but particularly Phil Jones are so divorced of reality and distorted. I do not know of a single person who has done more to try to advance data sharing of meteorological data for the last 15 years than Phil Jones (if you doubt me you could mine something useful instead of personal emails the GCOS report series to see how hard this really is to get to happen and ho

Wow. There's nonsense, and then there's this. I would LOVE to see some actual cites for this one - up there with we only use 10% of our brains.

I think it's infinitely more likely that the ability to deal with complex levels of abstraction is normally distributed. It is CERTAINLY not a binary trait. Even the dumbest people are capable of some form of symbol manipulation. If you lacked this ability completely, you couldn't understand caricatures or cartoons or read or do simple math or even play monopoly (the car is an abstract representation of you in the game). The notion that 40-60% of people naturally and completely lack the ability to do this is without any basis in psychology or neuroscience. Abstracting the physical world is pretty much what the cortex does, and just about all humans have one.

And the topper is that this supposed binary capability to manipulate symbolics representations has nothing to do with intelligence. Intelligence without abstraction = meaningless.

Where do people get this stuff from? Not from reading the relevant science, that's for sure.

I finally had a chance to read the article you posted. It looks like they're not being completely stupid about it, as while they're now on probation, they haven't been actually suspended or kicked out of the sorority, and the requirements put upon them to return themselves to good standing seem mostly educational, not punitive. In short, I think that the punishment matches the crime, as described in the article.

Why one paints one's face is very important in this issue- if one is simply ignorant of the history of why blackface is bad, especially in its intentional caricatures of black people to degrade them and to attempt to force them into only certain places in society, then it's a fairly minor matter. If one is aware of what blackface stood for and did and still chooses to engage in it for those reasons then I really don't have a problem with any organization choosing to exclude those who participate in blackface from also participating in that organization. I don't care if the organization is a sorority, fraternity, employer, non-post-secondary-fraternal organization, club, or anything else.

You seem not to understand what the "full force of the government" really means.

If the police/government(s) involved were really the jackbooted thugs that they're caricatured to be, none of the protesters would be going back to their (average $300,000) homes or (average $1500/month) apartments; they'd have been either incarcerated, disappeared, or simply killed.

Rather than address the caricature ("crony capitalism"), I'll keep it simple: the free market is nothing more (or less) than a statement that groups of people are both untrustworthy (as individuals and in groups) and yet the only means of efficiently measuring the desires of other people.

So on two points the free market is held up in opposition-- not to government (in se), but to "Statism": (1) that all transactions should be done without violence and (2) central planning necessarily fails to accurately predict (a) pricing or (b) goods and quantities (as a function of failed pricing analysis). (1) is violated when the state compels one to (a) not do something one otherwise wants or (b) do something one would not otherwise do. (2) was largely proven by Mises, and does not imply that private entities are superior at the analysis or prediction, only that they care more due to the profit/loss requirements.

"Statism" looks to government as its god in the same way you broadly accuse Americans of looking to the idol of "Free Market". Us Paleo-Conservative minarchists (new word for the day) don't want government abolished-- we already agree we need it because evil exists, we just want it to operate in its proper sphere.The very crony capitalism/corporatism you despise is a function of the a state failure, not a market failure. You want a solution? It's not "Regulation" that's the answer, it's "Enforcement." We don't need any new laws, quotas, procedures, or double-check overhead to know that bad stuff gets done, and such things NEVER catch it beforehand. What we need is for our executive branches (not digging at POTUS, just the entire "law enforcement" segment of government) to have the stones to throw the cronies in jail. Don't blame the market for failures at the governmental level, and don't look to the already-failing bureaucrat for a solution