"I believe that the Earth is getting warmer, however I do not find sufficient evidence to show that this will be a net bad thing for humanity. Further I do not believe that the proposed measures are the wisest course of action, and we should be investigating alternatives such as geoengineering. In any case we should not act yet, as we do not have a solid enough model of what will happen and the net impact on humanity."

They can easily find a way to say "I support science, but think that this issue isn't clear cut."

Goes double if the people who are doing the vote try and make it a black and white issue. If they try to make it an issue where you either have to support everything they say, or you are an evil denier of all science, it'll be much easier for people to abstain and have a good argument.

Science is just a process for knowing about the natural universe. It never gives us guidance on what we should do, it only tells us what is, and lets us predict what will be. What to do is always policy and politics. You can have a matter in which there is complete agreement on facts and theory, yet a disagreement on what we should do about it. While a solid scientific theory backed by good facts could tell us what is likely to happen if we take a certain action (or if we do not take an action) we then have to judge that result and how we value it. We have to look at the benefits and costs (everything has costs) and decide if we believe it is the best course of action, and on that point people may disagree.

That is, I think, a flaw many people make in talking about the AGW argument. They believe that since the facts (things like temperature and CO2 measurements) and the theory (the causal explanation of the relation of the facts) is solid in their estimation, that the course of action they believe should be taken is therefore scientific. That because there is a scientific theory at the core of what is happening, that means the conclusion they have reached is also scientific.

That's just not the case. Policy and politics aren't science. They can, and should, use science heavily to have good information as to the policy that is decided upon, but that policy is always a human construction, always a value judgement.

To some degree, this is handled by unemployment insurance premiums.

Most unemployment offices, in addition to the direct unemployment benefits, have retraining programs that often last well beyond when the direct benefits expire.

For example, I started my masters' degree part-time when I was still working at my first job. 4 weeks later i got laid off.

I got the standard unemployment benefits (26 weeks I think???) but when those ran out, I was still eligible for New Jersey's tuition waiver program (free tuition at a state school with some limitations - you're last in priority when classes fill up pretty much but that wasn't a problem in an EE graduate program) for the entire remaining duration of my M.S. program.

I played with it a little, but the poor state of support for multichannel audio was a major issue for me.

What I want:
Record video with my camera along with a "reference" (for timing) audio track
Record audio with a Zoom H2
Replace "reference" audio track with multichannel (surround) audio from the H2
Edit the various clips after I've synced/replaced the audio
Export to H.264 + AC3 surround

Last time I tried that with kdenlive, it was pretty much impossible

Most of those emulation layers have failed... While it's 95%+ compatible, that last 5% causes many people's apps to not work. Blackberry tried Android runtime compatibility and failed miserably.

No one has really managed to provide competition to the iTunes ecosystem (I consider the iOS App Store as part of this ecosystem) or Google's Play ecosystem.

Samsung has tried multiple times to begin establishing their own ecosystem, and those attempts have consistently failed. In many cases (myself included), those attempts drove people away from Samsung's products. (The most annoying thing I remember about Touchwizz was the constant bombardment of "register for Samsung blah" shit - you couldn't disable the pestering without either giving in or rooting the device and nuking Samsung's bloat. With ICS on the GS2, they broke things to the point where various parts of Android, even the fucking launcher, broke if you removed any of the bloat.)

Really the only entity I know of who has any chance at this point of establishing themselves as a third player in the mobile market is Amazon - they have a pretty decent ecosystem. In fact they've done reasonably well in set-top-box style and tablet-style hardware, and while the original Fire Phone was a catastrophic failure, Amazon is one of the few organizations with the ability to recover from something like that.

That it runs TF2 well isn't saying much. That wasn't very intense when it came out and it is very old. TF2 runs great on integrated Intel cards. Try a game that is a heavier hitter, and uses more modern API calls. Then you'll see issues.

Se what you are really saying is "A problem can be fixed by throwing enough hardware at it." Your GPU and CPU are unimaginably powerful compared to what was available in 2007. So of course it runs well, it could be running at 25% efficiency and still run well because your monitor's scan rate is the limiting factor.

However that's not so easy to do with new games that push the envelope. You can't just throw tons of hardware at them because they are already pushing the high end hardware that is out. So efficiency matters. If the driver is slow, you are going to have poor performance.

Further there is the issue of crashing. AMD drivers seem to have a tendency to 'asplode when you start throwing some of the new features at them. These features are there for a reason, they allow greater detail, more efficient rendering, new visuals, etc. If you can't support them, then that's an issue.

If you want a real test, fire up Metro Last Light Redux, see how that works.

"Oh that's an old version, we aren't going to patch the bug." Really? That's an acceptable response that something that's 3 years old is too old to patch? But somehow, taking 100 days to patch a product that's 5 years old (in 7's case) is too long? Much easier to deal with patch issues if you just declare you only support the latest greatest and require everyone to upgrade all the time, no matter the issues.

MS's response is particularly understandable given the complexity of doing regression testing on the wide variety of hardware, software, and patch sets the patch might need to be applied against. If they released it and it caused issues, well then people would cry even more about how shitty they were for not testing it.

I think you are right about the mud slinging/political office: What with Chrome books Google now wishes to directly attack MS. They want to make Windows look bad, and thus make their own product look good by comparison. This isn't motivated by being a good citizen, it is motivated by something else.

For that matter one can get all conspiracy theorist and say maybe they chose their reporting date knowing MS's patch cycle to try and create just such a situation.

Interesting, I'm in the Explorers program but haven't gotten that email yet.

Surprised they even bothered to send that to you.

I agree with most of your assessment, except they've done even worse as far as iOS integration with Android Wear, and to be honest, I believe many of the iPhone integration issues were iOS limitations, not choices Google made. iOS has always been shit for "nonstandard" Bluetooth devices - for example, most Bluetooth OBD adapters don't work with iOS since iOS doesn't support Bluetooth SPP (Serial Port Profile) devices as far as I can tell. Only OBD adapters using special BLE-based protocols or acting as a Wifi AP work with iOS.

The battery life started as "OK but could use some improvement" until they deployed KitKat to Glass, which pretty much ruined Glass. XE19 made it suck less than XE16-XE18, but it was still never as good as XE12 in terms of reliability and battery life. XE21/22 brought back some of the reliability issues and made battery life even worse than XE16.

I haven't worn my device in 2+ months. Basically, it's been useless due to the battery life since XE21/22.

The current Glass XE hardware had potential, before they deployed KitKat on it and killed its battery life.

The hardware would've been great if refreshed with a more suitable CPU such as a Snapdragon 400 (The Cortex-A7 is a highly power efficient CPU, which is why most Snapdragon 400-based phones get great battery life, and in fact it has been used by all Android Wear devices except the Moto 360, which gets panned for poor battery life even after Moto made great improvements in that regard, it's still poor compared to other Android Wear devices).

But it appears that Google is moving Glass towards a design dependent on an external (belt-worn) battery pack, since some of their patent filings are clearly missing the battery and their announced partnership with Intel whose mobile chipsets are NOT suitable to a device like Glass unless it's externally powered.

All evidence from Google over the past few months (the Glass for Work initiative, their filing of design patents for Glass that are clearly dependent on an external power source such as a belt-worn battery pack, their partnership with Intel whose chipsets are not suitable to any form of Glass that does not depend on an external battery pack - note that Intel chips are suitable only to tablets/Chrombooks due to their excessively high power consumption) is that Google is targeting industrial/business uses.

They have done nothing to address Glass' biggest flaw as a consumer device - battery life/power consumption.

Just run the cable through a guitar amp. I mean, what can possibly go wrong?

Same reason I went with Z-Wave.

In theory, ZigBee is a more "open" standard, but... It's too open. ZigBee HA has pretty much no interoperability guarantees.

For example, ZigBee Lighting Link (ZLL) is standardized - but there are lots of examples of ZLL devices that won't talk to each other. Hue hubs won't talk to Greenwave bulbs, Greenwave hubs won't talk to Hue bulbs, despite all devices being ZLL certified devices.

Note that Vera has a fairly robust plugin mechanism, so it's possible to add support for stuff not built in using either USB devices or network connections. Vera can't talk directly to any of the ZLL bulbs mentioned above, but there are Hue and Greenwave/TCP Lighting (horrible name to have your lighting company share an acronym with a widespread transport protocol...) plugins that will talk to the hubs to command the bulbs.

I can click one button on my phone and have:
1) My thermostat (Z-Wave) temperature setting change
2) A bunch of Z-Wave lights turn on at various brightnesses
3) My Hue bulbs change brightness and color
4) My Greenwave bulbs turn on/off at various brightnesses

Aldrin is a hero, the hoaxer is a very annoying moron. While technically that shouldn't matter, justice should be truly blind, it isn't. Nobody wanted to find Aldrin guilty of any wrong doing, so any plausible explanation was taken to make sure he got off.

I'm talking about large pension plans. My employer (a university) has one of those. It is mandatory, they simply withhold part of your salary (and match it dollar for dollar) as a condition of your employment. If you work to retirement, it then pays out a defined benefit monthly, which is taxable. If you do not, you can roll it over to an IRA or other account, which can vary int terms of tax liability.

However while you work there, you don't report it, other than a check box that says you are participating in an employer retirement program. You have no access to the money, there's no provision for loans or anything, so it does not count as a gain of any sort. So even though you are having a sizable chunk invested on your behalf (12% of your salary matched so 24% total) it doesn't count as an investment that would need any schedule of reporting because you aren't actually investing it, just paying in to a defined benefit plan.