Conversely, when a company says that, by lowering taxes, they'll reinvest into the community, that's to be taken without any grains of salt at all.

Actually, what it likely means is that they'll just spend that untaxed money on campaign contributions (western world speak for bribes) and executive bonuses.

To add to your point, a majority of the members of congress are millionaires [1]. Keep in mind that reporting rules don't require disclosure of amounts above $1M, just that they are "over $1M". So it's getting harder to track the wealth and it's corruptive effects.

[1] http://www.opensecrets.org/new...

So is this a possible migration path for those who were using Adobe AIR? If it's C++, could it tie in with Apple's ObjectiveC framework and thus create deployable apps in the Mac App Store?

This quite a non-sequitur - most of europe's diesels are as clean as the new diesels you see in CA - the reason CA disallowed them for years was the lack of availability of low-sulfur diesel fuel..

Tailpipe emissions are exactly why France's cities stink. I know, the number of cars on the road there has multiplied, while the capacity to meet them has not (and likely cannot).

Yes, as I deal in data interchange all the time, XML is great as it allows schema definition/sharing (XSD) and XSLT is a mature transformation language, that, after many years in the woods, is now available with functional capabilities (XSLT v3.0).

The only problem we have is that often, endpoint partners/vendors don't provide the XSD, nor do they share how they plan to validate files we send them. Or they ignore our XSD. But I still can't imagine things would be better if JSON were the interchange format.

If I control both endpoints (i.e., our browser script talking to our server through XHR), then JSON is an acceptable format. If not, I prefer XML.

So why then has the EU and CA established even higher restrictions on emissions? Could it be that SULEV, PZEV, or ZEVs actually make a tangible difference?

I visited France again (Paris, Tours and Grenoble) a three years ago, and the one thing I remember is feeling that the inner parts of cities (centre-ville and environs, or most of metro Paris) literally stank of exhaust - likely because turbo-diesels are so popular in Europe (if I didn't own a high-mpg hybrid here already, I might have bought one stateside). I don't remember this impression 10 years ago. I'm sure the problem has steadily gotten worse.

If you think it's a bad experience when you have a single OS (plus first-party apps) vendor, and a separate manufacturer (e.g.: my Lenovo and it's bevy of task-tray items), try it now with two fully supported OSs out of the box.

While I agree that it sucks that Google and Microsoft both are trying to defeat this initiative, I can also say with a 95% certainty that even if the both condoned it, it would still be a really bad experience.

Google's hypocrisy with android being "Open" is what's really exposed here - in honesty, both Microsoft and Google are as bad as Apple in desiring closed platforms. It's just that Apple seems better at delivering said platform.

I'm suspicious she has institutional support and funding - perhaps from some right-wing Christian fun die groups or perhaps from the corporatoracy class that wants to sell more vaccinations.

But putting her on trial would certainly uncover the rock and send the cockroaches scrambling.

I drove 5-ton dump trucks in the military, most of systems were redundant including air-pressure brakes and the like. Your Honda, unless it's 30+ years old, will not survive the EMP either.

One answer - Common Core + No Child Left Behind = ways to screw over schools, teachers and children.

Remove the funding based on mandatory tests (i.e., NCLB) that have been proven to be gamed, and the ideas of Common Core might make sense to implement.

If NCLB is a pit trap, Common Core for many schools becomes the punji stakes hiding in it.

Not going to discuss content, but if your entire sourcing is from the "Tea Party News Network", everything looks like liberal/socialist/marxist conspiracy.

You don't happen to have any non-biased news sources, or corroborating links do you?

A nano/shuffle's entire purpose is to support your workout (shuffle = music, nano adds radio, podcast, and recently BT headphones). It's for folks who have a decent but not large selection of music that just want to use it for a specific purpose.

Nowadays, with streaming radio and decent data plans, the smartphone is definitely better and doesn't even need more than 32 much less 128GB.

In fact, I would go so far as to say it quite literally changed computing by showing that a low power non-windows laptop could work (crank charger? hell yes). The form factor was closer to what made the Asus eeePC 701 famous - and get this, the even the name seems to derive from the OLPC mission [1]

According to Asus, the name Eee derives from "the three Es", an abbreviation of its advertising slogan for the device: "Easy to learn, Easy to work, Easy to play".

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

No your analogy was horribly flawed and hyperbolic. Movies are never re-encoded if you're just interested in watching them and all your devices support the format (like JeffSH, I also encode, but to an apple friendly h.264 of a decent bitrate). If you really want the quality for a given movie, make an exception and upload the blue ray image.

Photos however, often require post processing, and are often resized to fit smaller form factors (i.e., avatar pics, MMS sends, uploaded to get printed). A larger "reference" does make sense (again, 30MB is ridiculous - not everyone has a digital medium-format camera).

You get free tethering with tmobile's simple choice plan. For a family plan you can get tethering of 1G (recently upgraded from 500MB) data for free for each line, for $22/line (sans fees/taxes). I'm doing exactly that - it's quite good.