Yes, they weigh nothing in backpacks. But the only reason to have a backpack is if you're carrying a computer around. If you don't need the netbook, you leave the backpack at home which is much more convenient.
For you, maybe... but I take a backpack most places anyway. And I'd guess you could throw your netbook in a briefcase just as easily if that's the way you roll (never tried this since I don't own a briefcase and hope I never will... but netbooks are small and thin enough).
OTOH, if you don't need to have a high-powered computer with you, then I completely agree about just carrying your phone around. But sometimes I need a real computer on the road -- and for those situations, a netbook is perfect for me. Does everything I need it to, has heaps of battery life and doesn't take up space or weight. Maybe it's a little slower than my core i7 laptop, but it's fast enough for most things.
Doesn't matter, the netbook still has no advantage over the laptop. The annoyance of a laptop is having to carry it. Either you need to lug around a backpack or you need to lug it around under your arm just like a laptop.
You've clearly never owned a netbook -- they fit in the inside pockets of small backpacks and weigh nothing. Laptops, on the other hand... well, good luck carrying one of those around the world and carrying anything else with it.
Same here, and I've replaced it with an Asus Transformer, which is a much more versatile machine.
If the Asus Transformer could run LyX, LaTeX, Darktable, GIMP, Open Office and R, and gave me 160Gb of storage space to boot, then I'd agree with you. But it can't -- it's a great piece of hardware, but ultimately it's just a web-surfing toy that isn't good for anything other than basic typing. In comparison, I wrote several scientific papers on my Acer Aspire One whilst travelling this year.
I've played with the original Transformer heaps, and I think the Transformer Prime is going to be the greatest tablet available, period. But I still can't see any reason at all in buying one -- I can't do work on it, and I can do my web surfing just as easily on my phone which fits in my pocket.
Having had this happen to my 12yo daughter as well (and also refusing to provide Google with any form of ID, for what I would have thought were obvious reasons) I'd say the real issue was that Google provided no means to back up data -- it was really a case of my daughter unwittingly entering her birth date, and then bam! all data gone for good.
I understand that Google has an obligation under US law to prevent kids under 13 from using email accounts. But since this is clearly new legislation that wasn't in place when my daughter set up her account and wasn't part of the terms and conditions she signed up to, a kinder notice and an option to at least download the data from the account would have been greatly appreciated. As it is, my daughter's learnt a valuable lesson: never give out truthful personal information on the internet; always give out incorrect and/or misleading data unless you (a) have a strong reason to give it and (b) trust the recipient. I only regret that I didn't make this clearer from the start (I tried to, but apparently nothing teaches a lesson like the pain of losing hundreds of emails.)
As it happens, she's got most of her important email threads back from her contacts forwarding them to her, and she's got a new gmail account with a different, spurious birth date. But if Google was thinking of the children, a kinder approach than the sudden inactivation of google accounts would be nice.
I'll be thrilled to try it, but the fact that it took this long to get GPU acceleration is kinda sad.
GPU acceleration has been around since Android 1.0; it just wasn't used for all elements. What ICS has done (actually, this was present since Honeycomb) is to enable GPU rendering of all elements within an application window, and to turn this on by default. Dianne Hackborn's written a very nice explanation of it all -- worth a read.
Judging by Android's popularity, though, I doubt that most end users care too much or will even notice the difference. Knowing whether or not something is GPU rendered is appealing only to geeks, methinks.
iOS was designed from the ground up to support it (every interface element is backed by a GPU-accelerated Core Animation layer).
This is changing within Android -- Honeycomb and ICS make much better and more extensive use of GPU acceleration. There's still some work to do, but using ICS after GB is a massive leap forwards.
the interface is simpler because you don't rely on users to know they need to check the "menu" button for a bunch of options and suboptions.
This seems a rather subjective classification -- some of us like having a dedicated menu button, rather than sacrificing precious screen real-estate. In my opinion it makes for much better UI design, as the user always knows where to access options for an app, rather than searching for some dinky little settings icon that may or may not be there...
Amazon price (physical book): $20.77 (reduced from a list price of $35) External seller: 45 new, from $14.90; 18 used, form $14.48 Kindle price: $8.82 (reduced from a list price $11.03)
Not saying that the kindle price isn't exactly on the expensive side, especially for a bunch of electrons that often haven't been subject to quality control. But it's definitely cheaper buying Kindle books when compared to paper-books, especially when you compare the prices from Amazon alone.
I have a real problem with folks who muck with my machines without asking.
Fair enough, although the mucking was on the minor side to say the least, and in any case, judging by his subsequent apology I'd say the dev would agree with you. At the same time, I can personally understand his frustration and why he'd do it, especially given the context of AdBlock specifically targeting NoScript's site. Doesn't seem to warrant hate to me, but obviously our mileage varies in this context...
I think you're reading way too much into that post; after all, he goes on to say "We didn't talk to Google, we didn't take money from them, there is no conspiracy here", and states that money is not the requirement to be unblocked.
That's why the asshole that runs noscript silently killed ad-block without telling users, so that his ads would be seen.
"Asshole"?? That's an awful lot of hate for someone who's probably just trying to pay for his development time, and gives an excellent extension away for free. I dislike internet ads as much as the next guy, but come on -- was loading the noscript home page what, at most once every week, really going to hurt you in any way, shape or form?
Sheesh, sometimes I feel bad about not maintaining my own software projects, as I never have enough time and don't make any money from them; and then I read comments like yours and suddenly I don't mind as much. Some people feel way too over-entitled.
... or it could simply be an acknowledgement that -- like it or not -- the web runs on advertising and allowing a bit of it in might not hurt you if you wanted to be more ethical. Ever thought about how small non-profit websites can afford to keep their domain names? In any case, the Adblock Plus devs have long been clear that one of their aims was to change advertisers' behaviour. This is clearly a move to drive change to a point where advertising is present but less intrusive (and also more ethical, i.e. not using psuedo-OS dialogue boxes to fool the gullible).
Anyway, as long as the option to turn all advertising off is present (and it clearly is) then I can't see how this hurts you or anyone else. But hey, if you don't like it, don't use AdBlock Plus.
Might as well buy a Kia and complain that it's not as polished of a driving experience as a BMW.
Not exactly -- if you have a look at the one-star reviews on Amazon you'll see that most people are complaining about obvious UI flaws that Amazon should never have released -- e.g. the lack of lockscreen, an abominable launcher and even incompatibility with some Kindle books. You'd think at the very least a lockscreen would standard these days.
It's a bit more like buying a Kia, only to find that locks hadn't been included on the doors and a readout on the dashboard showing everyone who was a passenger exactly where you'd been driving. I think you can appreciate that some people might be unhappy about this!
Thankfully, most of these issues come from Amazon screwing around with Android and aren't hardware related; it looks like ICS should be up and running on the Fire soonish, which should make for an excellent cheap tablet. And by the sounds of it, running Amazon's normal Kindle android app on a rooted Fire is likely to be more compatible with Kindle books!
Most of the time I'm cursing because they've moved an option or function to a buried menu and trying to remember where that submenu went is infuriating.
Exactly -- a traditional hierarchical menu system (in which the options are only scattered in Y) is much easier to scan than a ribbon in which the options are scattered in both X and Y. Finding an option you haven't used before in the ribbon interface will always take longer than in a traditional menu/submenu system.
The advantage of the ribbon is that more options can be displayed at any one time, meaning that once you learn the XY coordinates of an option it's faster to access. But this works only to the advantage of power users and comes at the expense of intuition and learning curve. It's the graphical equivalent of using control key sequences for everything, and makes MS Office about as user-friendly as WordStar for CP/M used to be.
Now if one of the Excel jocks would please come on here and explain to them why calc don't cut it I'd be grateful. i'm not a spreadsheet guy so i don't know the lingo but the spreadsheet guys at the SMBs I've worked for says calc is like a bad joke. I can say that it looks like, at least under Sun and oracle, that Writer got all the love and the rest was treated like the red headed stepchild.
As a molecular biologist, Calc works fine for me. Note that I'd never use either Excel or Calc for serious, complex stats work -- that's what R is for. But there's no difference that I've found in the stats capabilities of Excel or Calc -- in fact, I'd personally argue that Calc got all the love and Writer is the bastard, forgotten child that never quite got it right.
This sound like Microsoft's strategy all over again. Anyway you cut it a single platform ecosystem is ugly, as it just lets another monopoly.
Sure, Microsoft's strategy, only with an open source OS being built in this case by hobbyists and enthusiasts. Definitely sounds like monopoly building at work to me...
They are. They make the most profits and are single most successful vendor.
Apple may make the most profits, but they're no longer the single most successful vendor -- Samsung overtook Apple in the most recent quarter sales figures from Gartner. (And it wasn't even close -- 24 million units to 17 million units).
(This may be partly due to the delayed release of the 4S, though -- we'll see what Q4 looks like. But that's a big difference to turn around even with the increased 4S sales...)
Amazon missed the boat on one feature. With my Nook Touch I can hold it in one hand and press the hardware buttons on either side to turn the pages. With no hardware page-turn buttons on the Kindle touch you must tap or swipe the screen to turn a page, so it takes two hands to read a book. But, maybe I'm the only person who sometimes holds their e-reader with one hand.
Yeah, I was surprised that Amazon removed the buttons on the side. You could still turn pages by tapping, though, which makes it possible to read with one hand -- you just need to curl your thumb around a little more. Not as nice as a button, though, and you'll get the screen dirty...
In any case, the kindles with buttons and a keyboard are still available, and are the same price as the Kindle touch I believe... Do you really need a touchscreen to read a book?
But seeing people on Slashdot mindlessly say "Apple is teh suxor" is about as intelligent as saying it about Microsoft or Linux without having used them... it's generally an uninformed opinion based on what people think they know as opposed to anything factual.
See, I think this might be the cause of some misunderstanding. I personally dislike Apple not because of the quality of the hardware (which is excellent) or the software (which is likewise excellent), but rather because of their walled-garden strategies (e.g. iOS) and corporate philosophies (e.g. attempting to block the sale of rival products).
Like closed vs. open source, it's a position based on philosophy and ideology, not a spec-sheet comparison. Nobody's saying that Apple makes crap products -- they don't -- but some of us would still rather avoid them.
Then, Settings --> Applications --> Manage Applications, and on any app you want, where the permissions are listed, just touch the permission itself to toggle it...
The issue is that many apps make money through ads, and if you allow editable permissions then that effectively allows anyone to opt out of ads for any software. Because of this potential to block ads, some of the CM crew seemed pretty nervous about ever talking about the permissions feature, and the discussion during the code review process, IIRC, almost suggested leaving this feature out for fear of repercussions.
At least with Android, apps have to declare their permissions to the user transparently before installation. Whether or not people care is another matter, of course...
(I agree with you, though -- I'd never use a ROM without either permissions management or a firewall installed; I find the naive trust many people place in third-party software vendors extraordinary!)
I also just discovered Permission Denied this morning. It (theoretically) revokes specific permissions from already installed apps. Handy for when you want an app that asks for location permission and such but you know it doesn't actually need it. Whether or not it actually does what it says it does, I don't know...
FWIW, CM7 gives you this ability natively. And you can easily check that its working by disabling net access on an app, and then seeing if you can still access the internet through that app...
*sigh*... I wasn't suggesting that "Earth will get hot because Venus is hot", merely pointing out to you the power of the feedbacks you had dismissed in your original post. I couldn't agree more that the chance of a Venusian runaway greenhouse effect is highly unlikely on Earth without some serious effort by mankind; nevertheless, that doesn't mean that feedbacks don't exist, or that they can't strongly influence climate. Venus is merely the starkest example of this occurring (and one which I thought everyone knew of -- apparently I was wrong!) Take another look at my original reply to your post (and then my reply to your reply) and you'll find you're getting carried away with your distorted beliefs (as opposed to reality) again.
As for realclimate.org -- it's not my primary source for climate science either (I'm more than capable of doing a literature search, thanks very much!) but I think you're completely misunderstanding the site. Take a look at the articles listed there and find the most recent one even you could classify as polemic. I suspect you'll be going back a long while. Realclimate very rarely contradicts the pseudoscience on the internet. They do comment on the occasional contrary paper that makes it through the peer review process, although they always rebut the paper scientifically, just as they would had they reviewed the paper themselves. But most of the time they provide an excellent forum for researchers to present the findings of their papers to a wider lay audience. (Yes, a lot of the time the posts are by the authors of recent papers, discussing their papers). If you do actually read climate science papers (which I sincerely doubt) then you should find the names of most of the contributors to realclimate familiar; and I find your apparent reliance on the IPCC reports especially curious, given the fact most of the realclimate contributors are IPCC contributors also!
You're a very strange individual -- you clearly have the right principles in quoting Huxley, yet despite his words you somehow seem to have developed an awful lot of preconceived notions of your own. And, worryingly, most of these seem to be based around the concept that anyone who disagrees with your way of thinking is wrong. There's nothing wrong with questioning established research (that's what all of us who make a living as scientists do) -- but you don't seem very good at accepting existing precepts even when you are incapable of arguing against them. Worst of all, though -- when someone points out your errors to you, you attack them rudely rather than realising that you were wrong. That is not the way a decent, educated individual behaves, and it will not make you any friends or help you to win your argument.
Er... do you realise that the people behind realclimate are some of the foremost researchers in climate science (and that they get guest posts from most of the rest)? Does the name Gavin Schmidt mean anything to you? The site provides citations for all that they post and provides full and complete discussions of newly published data. They are even prepared to discuss highly complex aspects of climate science with lay people with, I think, admirable restraint and even-handedness. If realclimate is not scientific, then the scientific method is not scientific. You'd also have to claim that all current climate science is fraudulent and wrong (which, let's face it, you probably believe).
Seriously. You and Dunning-Kruger. Have you ever stopped to think that you might not know as much as you think? Because so far you've got everything back-to-front, upside-down and completely wrong -- and judging by your capitulation on every point in our discussion so far, I think you at least realise this much. Maybe at least on that point, despite your blatant ignorance and unnecessary rudeness, there's hope for you.
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Yes, they weigh nothing in backpacks. But the only reason to have a backpack is if you're carrying a computer around. If you don't need the netbook, you leave the backpack at home which is much more convenient.
For you, maybe ... but I take a backpack most places anyway. And I'd guess you could throw your netbook in a briefcase just as easily if that's the way you roll (never tried this since I don't own a briefcase and hope I never will ... but netbooks are small and thin enough).
OTOH, if you don't need to have a high-powered computer with you, then I completely agree about just carrying your phone around. But sometimes I need a real computer on the road -- and for those situations, a netbook is perfect for me. Does everything I need it to, has heaps of battery life and doesn't take up space or weight. Maybe it's a little slower than my core i7 laptop, but it's fast enough for most things.
Doesn't matter, the netbook still has no advantage over the laptop. The annoyance of a laptop is having to carry it. Either you need to lug around a backpack or you need to lug it around under your arm just like a laptop.
You've clearly never owned a netbook -- they fit in the inside pockets of small backpacks and weigh nothing. Laptops, on the other hand ... well, good luck carrying one of those around the world and carrying anything else with it.
Same here, and I've replaced it with an Asus Transformer, which is a much more versatile machine.
If the Asus Transformer could run LyX, LaTeX, Darktable, GIMP, Open Office and R, and gave me 160Gb of storage space to boot, then I'd agree with you. But it can't -- it's a great piece of hardware, but ultimately it's just a web-surfing toy that isn't good for anything other than basic typing. In comparison, I wrote several scientific papers on my Acer Aspire One whilst travelling this year.
I've played with the original Transformer heaps, and I think the Transformer Prime is going to be the greatest tablet available, period. But I still can't see any reason at all in buying one -- I can't do work on it, and I can do my web surfing just as easily on my phone which fits in my pocket.
Having had this happen to my 12yo daughter as well (and also refusing to provide Google with any form of ID, for what I would have thought were obvious reasons) I'd say the real issue was that Google provided no means to back up data -- it was really a case of my daughter unwittingly entering her birth date, and then bam! all data gone for good.
I understand that Google has an obligation under US law to prevent kids under 13 from using email accounts. But since this is clearly new legislation that wasn't in place when my daughter set up her account and wasn't part of the terms and conditions she signed up to, a kinder notice and an option to at least download the data from the account would have been greatly appreciated. As it is, my daughter's learnt a valuable lesson: never give out truthful personal information on the internet; always give out incorrect and/or misleading data unless you (a) have a strong reason to give it and (b) trust the recipient. I only regret that I didn't make this clearer from the start (I tried to, but apparently nothing teaches a lesson like the pain of losing hundreds of emails.)
As it happens, she's got most of her important email threads back from her contacts forwarding them to her, and she's got a new gmail account with a different, spurious birth date. But if Google was thinking of the children, a kinder approach than the sudden inactivation of google accounts would be nice.
I'll be thrilled to try it, but the fact that it took this long to get GPU acceleration is kinda sad.
GPU acceleration has been around since Android 1.0; it just wasn't used for all elements. What ICS has done (actually, this was present since Honeycomb) is to enable GPU rendering of all elements within an application window, and to turn this on by default. Dianne Hackborn's written a very nice explanation of it all -- worth a read.
Judging by Android's popularity, though, I doubt that most end users care too much or will even notice the difference. Knowing whether or not something is GPU rendered is appealing only to geeks, methinks.
iOS was designed from the ground up to support it (every interface element is backed by a GPU-accelerated Core Animation layer).
This is changing within Android -- Honeycomb and ICS make much better and more extensive use of GPU acceleration. There's still some work to do, but using ICS after GB is a massive leap forwards.
the interface is simpler because you don't rely on users to know they need to check the "menu" button for a bunch of options and suboptions.
This seems a rather subjective classification -- some of us like having a dedicated menu button, rather than sacrificing precious screen real-estate. In my opinion it makes for much better UI design, as the user always knows where to access options for an app, rather than searching for some dinky little settings icon that may or may not be there ...
That's strange: I get,
Amazon price (physical book): $20.77 (reduced from a list price of $35)
External seller: 45 new, from $14.90; 18 used, form $14.48
Kindle price: $8.82 (reduced from a list price $11.03)
Not saying that the kindle price isn't exactly on the expensive side, especially for a bunch of electrons that often haven't been subject to quality control. But it's definitely cheaper buying Kindle books when compared to paper-books, especially when you compare the prices from Amazon alone.
I have a real problem with folks who muck with my machines without asking.
Fair enough, although the mucking was on the minor side to say the least, and in any case, judging by his subsequent apology I'd say the dev would agree with you. At the same time, I can personally understand his frustration and why he'd do it, especially given the context of AdBlock specifically targeting NoScript's site. Doesn't seem to warrant hate to me, but obviously our mileage varies in this context ...
I think you're reading way too much into that post; after all, he goes on to say "We didn't talk to Google, we didn't take money from them, there is no conspiracy here", and states that money is not the requirement to be unblocked.
That's why the asshole that runs noscript silently killed ad-block without telling users, so that his ads would be seen.
"Asshole"?? That's an awful lot of hate for someone who's probably just trying to pay for his development time, and gives an excellent extension away for free. I dislike internet ads as much as the next guy, but come on -- was loading the noscript home page what, at most once every week, really going to hurt you in any way, shape or form?
Sheesh, sometimes I feel bad about not maintaining my own software projects, as I never have enough time and don't make any money from them; and then I read comments like yours and suddenly I don't mind as much. Some people feel way too over-entitled.
Shady people, shady deals.
... or it could simply be an acknowledgement that -- like it or not -- the web runs on advertising and allowing a bit of it in might not hurt you if you wanted to be more ethical. Ever thought about how small non-profit websites can afford to keep their domain names? In any case, the Adblock Plus devs have long been clear that one of their aims was to change advertisers' behaviour. This is clearly a move to drive change to a point where advertising is present but less intrusive (and also more ethical, i.e. not using psuedo-OS dialogue boxes to fool the gullible).
Anyway, as long as the option to turn all advertising off is present (and it clearly is) then I can't see how this hurts you or anyone else. But hey, if you don't like it, don't use AdBlock Plus.
Apple is tough to beat because most of its mistakes are user based.
Huh? What does that mean?
It means you're holding it wrong ...
Might as well buy a Kia and complain that it's not as polished of a driving experience as a BMW.
Not exactly -- if you have a look at the one-star reviews on Amazon you'll see that most people are complaining about obvious UI flaws that Amazon should never have released -- e.g. the lack of lockscreen, an abominable launcher and even incompatibility with some Kindle books. You'd think at the very least a lockscreen would standard these days.
It's a bit more like buying a Kia, only to find that locks hadn't been included on the doors and a readout on the dashboard showing everyone who was a passenger exactly where you'd been driving. I think you can appreciate that some people might be unhappy about this!
Thankfully, most of these issues come from Amazon screwing around with Android and aren't hardware related; it looks like ICS should be up and running on the Fire soonish, which should make for an excellent cheap tablet. And by the sounds of it, running Amazon's normal Kindle android app on a rooted Fire is likely to be more compatible with Kindle books!
Most of the time I'm cursing because they've moved an option or function to a buried menu and trying to remember where that submenu went is infuriating.
Exactly -- a traditional hierarchical menu system (in which the options are only scattered in Y) is much easier to scan than a ribbon in which the options are scattered in both X and Y. Finding an option you haven't used before in the ribbon interface will always take longer than in a traditional menu/submenu system.
The advantage of the ribbon is that more options can be displayed at any one time, meaning that once you learn the XY coordinates of an option it's faster to access. But this works only to the advantage of power users and comes at the expense of intuition and learning curve. It's the graphical equivalent of using control key sequences for everything, and makes MS Office about as user-friendly as WordStar for CP/M used to be.
Now if one of the Excel jocks would please come on here and explain to them why calc don't cut it I'd be grateful. i'm not a spreadsheet guy so i don't know the lingo but the spreadsheet guys at the SMBs I've worked for says calc is like a bad joke. I can say that it looks like, at least under Sun and oracle, that Writer got all the love and the rest was treated like the red headed stepchild.
As a molecular biologist, Calc works fine for me. Note that I'd never use either Excel or Calc for serious, complex stats work -- that's what R is for. But there's no difference that I've found in the stats capabilities of Excel or Calc -- in fact, I'd personally argue that Calc got all the love and Writer is the bastard, forgotten child that never quite got it right.
This sound like Microsoft's strategy all over again. Anyway you cut it a single platform ecosystem is ugly, as it just lets another monopoly.
Sure, Microsoft's strategy, only with an open source OS being built in this case by hobbyists and enthusiasts. Definitely sounds like monopoly building at work to me ...
They are. They make the most profits and are single most successful vendor.
Apple may make the most profits, but they're no longer the single most successful vendor -- Samsung overtook Apple in the most recent quarter sales figures from Gartner. (And it wasn't even close -- 24 million units to 17 million units).
(This may be partly due to the delayed release of the 4S, though -- we'll see what Q4 looks like. But that's a big difference to turn around even with the increased 4S sales ...)
Amazon missed the boat on one feature. With my Nook Touch I can hold it in one hand and press the hardware buttons on either side to turn the pages. With no hardware page-turn buttons on the Kindle touch you must tap or swipe the screen to turn a page, so it takes two hands to read a book. But, maybe I'm the only person who sometimes holds their e-reader with one hand.
Yeah, I was surprised that Amazon removed the buttons on the side. You could still turn pages by tapping, though, which makes it possible to read with one hand -- you just need to curl your thumb around a little more. Not as nice as a button, though, and you'll get the screen dirty ...
In any case, the kindles with buttons and a keyboard are still available, and are the same price as the Kindle touch I believe ... Do you really need a touchscreen to read a book?
But seeing people on Slashdot mindlessly say "Apple is teh suxor" is about as intelligent as saying it about Microsoft or Linux without having used them ... it's generally an uninformed opinion based on what people think they know as opposed to anything factual.
See, I think this might be the cause of some misunderstanding. I personally dislike Apple not because of the quality of the hardware (which is excellent) or the software (which is likewise excellent), but rather because of their walled-garden strategies (e.g. iOS) and corporate philosophies (e.g. attempting to block the sale of rival products).
Like closed vs. open source, it's a position based on philosophy and ideology, not a spec-sheet comparison. Nobody's saying that Apple makes crap products -- they don't -- but some of us would still rather avoid them.
First, enable Settings -> CM Settings --> Application Settings --> Permission Management
Then, Settings --> Applications --> Manage Applications, and on any app you want, where the permissions are listed, just touch the permission itself to toggle it ...
The issue is that many apps make money through ads, and if you allow editable permissions then that effectively allows anyone to opt out of ads for any software. Because of this potential to block ads, some of the CM crew seemed pretty nervous about ever talking about the permissions feature, and the discussion during the code review process, IIRC, almost suggested leaving this feature out for fear of repercussions.
At least with Android, apps have to declare their permissions to the user transparently before installation. Whether or not people care is another matter, of course ...
(I agree with you, though -- I'd never use a ROM without either permissions management or a firewall installed; I find the naive trust many people place in third-party software vendors extraordinary!)
I also just discovered Permission Denied this morning. It (theoretically) revokes specific permissions from already installed apps. Handy for when you want an app that asks for location permission and such but you know it doesn't actually need it. Whether or not it actually does what it says it does, I don't know...
FWIW, CM7 gives you this ability natively. And you can easily check that its working by disabling net access on an app, and then seeing if you can still access the internet through that app ...
*sigh* ... I wasn't suggesting that "Earth will get hot because Venus is hot", merely pointing out to you the power of the feedbacks you had dismissed in your original post. I couldn't agree more that the chance of a Venusian runaway greenhouse effect is highly unlikely on Earth without some serious effort by mankind; nevertheless, that doesn't mean that feedbacks don't exist, or that they can't strongly influence climate. Venus is merely the starkest example of this occurring (and one which I thought everyone knew of -- apparently I was wrong!) Take another look at my original reply to your post (and then my reply to your reply) and you'll find you're getting carried away with your distorted beliefs (as opposed to reality) again.
As for realclimate.org -- it's not my primary source for climate science either (I'm more than capable of doing a literature search, thanks very much!) but I think you're completely misunderstanding the site. Take a look at the articles listed there and find the most recent one even you could classify as polemic. I suspect you'll be going back a long while. Realclimate very rarely contradicts the pseudoscience on the internet. They do comment on the occasional contrary paper that makes it through the peer review process, although they always rebut the paper scientifically, just as they would had they reviewed the paper themselves. But most of the time they provide an excellent forum for researchers to present the findings of their papers to a wider lay audience. (Yes, a lot of the time the posts are by the authors of recent papers, discussing their papers). If you do actually read climate science papers (which I sincerely doubt) then you should find the names of most of the contributors to realclimate familiar; and I find your apparent reliance on the IPCC reports especially curious, given the fact most of the realclimate contributors are IPCC contributors also!
You're a very strange individual -- you clearly have the right principles in quoting Huxley, yet despite his words you somehow seem to have developed an awful lot of preconceived notions of your own. And, worryingly, most of these seem to be based around the concept that anyone who disagrees with your way of thinking is wrong. There's nothing wrong with questioning established research (that's what all of us who make a living as scientists do) -- but you don't seem very good at accepting existing precepts even when you are incapable of arguing against them. Worst of all, though -- when someone points out your errors to you, you attack them rudely rather than realising that you were wrong. That is not the way a decent, educated individual behaves, and it will not make you any friends or help you to win your argument.
Er ... do you realise that the people behind realclimate are some of the foremost researchers in climate science (and that they get guest posts from most of the rest)? Does the name Gavin Schmidt mean anything to you? The site provides citations for all that they post and provides full and complete discussions of newly published data. They are even prepared to discuss highly complex aspects of climate science with lay people with, I think, admirable restraint and even-handedness. If realclimate is not scientific, then the scientific method is not scientific. You'd also have to claim that all current climate science is fraudulent and wrong (which, let's face it, you probably believe).
Seriously. You and Dunning-Kruger. Have you ever stopped to think that you might not know as much as you think? Because so far you've got everything back-to-front, upside-down and completely wrong -- and judging by your capitulation on every point in our discussion so far, I think you at least realise this much. Maybe at least on that point, despite your blatant ignorance and unnecessary rudeness, there's hope for you.