Our thoughts are with those folks, this just really sucks...cause it begs the question, how do you turn this around and there's no nice answer to that. Deeper into the dark Putin takes the country.

Great points. I've thought about the XP EOL issue as well. Unless MS changes plans somehow, is nearly all downside and not much upside. They've still got close to 40% of their user base on it - they drop the security updates and every new security update for the newer versions is just a road map on what to exploit in XP. If the users dump XP in large numbers and don't upgrade (go Linux, go Mac, go Chrome) MS looses big chunks of marketshare (further making things look worse for them).

About the only upside is that they won't have to pay for the updates for XP, but since they have to do it for the newer versions anyways (and the updates often overlap) - it won't be saving alot of money.

Seems like it'll be better to wait till the last month or two before turning things off (that way you've got all the upgraders upgraded) and then tell the world that they're going to keep XP updates going (or make them pay per use & make it cheap).

They should just offer extended security support for $4.99 per year per machine and watch the profits roll in. Otherwise its just a big opportunity for folks to switch platforms since those old machines will run Linux and Wine but can't run newer versions of Windows because Microsoft changed the device driver architecture - if they hadn't done that they could just tell everyone to upgrade.

Very true. I saw this the other day. Over at the BBC, their Android development team is 3 times the size of their iOS team. http://blogs.computerworld.com/android/22269/android-fragmented-and-costly-says-bbc-it-denies-apple-bias As for PBS, I can see why they might be reluctant to step into that briar patch until they're sure they have the funds to do the job right. Until then making sure things work through the browser might be the best fallback position.

Probably this can be traced to the fact that the scientists/companies doing GMO work are often doing it for enormous profit - and that profit wants to be served (solution pushed as "what we need") whether its actually a good idea for the population paying for it or not. This is a huge change from science of 30 years (and before) when scientists tried to stay disconnected from the commercial side of things. There are no impartial players in this area these days.

People have wisely grown quite skeptical of such proposed solutions. JMHO...

It's amazing how much Bin Laden changed our country, for the worse. In just a few years we openly torture (something George Washington wouldn't allow and hadn't since the founding of the country), publicly kill Americans and others and of course spy on the entire population.

He may be dead, but we lost so much to the weak minded choices of our political weenies in Washington (the prior administration coming up with these awful choices and then the current one not stopping them so the become "the new normal" in perpetuity - its amazing what he changed our country into via our politicians.

""Strongly encrypted data are virtually unreadable," NSA director Keith Alexander told (PDF) the Senate earlier this year." Hmmnnn, should I trust what the Emperor of the NSA, who has directly lied under oath numerous times, is saying? I have no doubt that if the companies don't provide those master keys (seems many if not all of the big ones won't do this), this intelligence empire would just obtain them illegally via direct attacks and/or people on the inside of these organizations.

I agree on this, it seems lightweight on the resources, unobtrusive and free. As others have pointed out, Microsoft stops Windows XP security updates in less than a year. You want to have them transitioned to something else before that happens (Vista will take security updates into 2017 and Windows 7 will take security updates through 2020). Same story with Office as well (if they have that on their machines), Office 2003 stops security updates next year when XP does. Linux would be the lowest cost choice, but you probably don't want to be the training resource - they'll want something that works like the old computer.

Well, its always best to know the actual details of what was going on. The problem was that Amazon was selling its "e-books" (i.e. Kindle) versions of books for well below their cost they paid to the publishers to buy them. Several years into this Amazon also started its own publishing arm. In the end, assuming Amazon would demand low pricing like they were selling e-books for or not sell them (after all other large scale sellers had been eliminated) this would likely bankrupt and destroy much of the publishing industry (the industry and Apple could see this) - leaving Amazon with sales and much of the publishing to itself (a monopoly).

Apple talked with the publishers and said we want to sell e-books, but since they are electronic they need to be cheaper than the paper based versions, but the publishers have to make enough to be around (as nobody wants to just have Amazon destroy the publishing industry and be the only large scale publisher/seller of books in the U.S. - monopolies tend to not work out well for the consumer in the end).

So Apple was proposing lower prices for e-book versions, but the publishers would force Amazon to not sell their Kindle versions at a loss. This was illegal to coordinate & price fix like this, but it didn't raise the prices of e-books the publishers were selling, it lowered them (as they were selling them for the same price as paper versions to distributors, including Amazon, before hand - Amazon was just selling their e-books at large losses, presumably to destroy their competitors in the large scale book sales market & possibly with an eye to eventually corner the market in the publishing industry).

Based on comments from Microsoft, supposedly the Kinect can see where the blood is going in your body, if your hands were hot etc. (i.e. see in infrared wavelengths in addition to visual) via "active infrared". This would also mean it would be able to look through (to an extent) light clothing. How the bozo's at the top of Microsoft thought this was a good idea is hard to fathom - as this will blow up in their faces (another thing, yet again).

Yes on the payload section you can see it tear off the vehicle since its not designed to handle flight loads sideways. I was stunned they didn't blow it up when it toppled over, you want as much burned up before hitting the ground (in case it goes where people are). It makes me wonder if they don't have a low altitude self destruct process and system for the vehicle (they sure should) - hydrazine is extremely nasty stuff.

I saw that too. I was rather surprised they didn't blow it up - it was obvious it was game over when came over the end there - instead just letting it impact with full force (good thing it didn't decide to topple over towards the ground crews or it would have been game over for them). Makes me wonder if they have self destruct on the Proton or not?

Not perfect, but better... http://mrdoob.github.io/three.js/examples/css3d_periodictable.html

Well, think about the statement regarding "wealth transfer scam". What power sources are projected to go nowhere but up in costs siphoning larger and larger amounts of money away to the largest most profitable (and politically corrupting) companies in the world as time goes on? That would be fossil fuels (oil, natural gas which has gone up more than 100% in the U.S. since Dec of 2011 as it comes out of its bubble and which on the world market is more expensive than oil, and of course coal).

Which power sources have falling cost curves which are expected to continue declining into the future? That would be renewable power sources (wind, solar, geo-thermal).

What would be the wealth transfer scam, stay on fossil fuels with ever greater prices (and profits for the massive corporations - boy they want that) as their prices increase in the future or transition off them to renewables which are projected to continue declining in costs as time goes on? Seems staying on fossil fuels longer is the wealth transfer scam. JMHO...

That's when you need to look at some basic questions that get to the core of the issue (other things aside).

If a greenhouse gas is released into the atmosphere, will it behave like a greenhouse gas? Of course it will. Have we been releasing massive quantities of greenhouse gasses (mostly CO2) for more than a century and are we accelerating that release? Yes

Another great question is if we just halted all manmade CO2 emissions tomorrow (burning fossil fuels) when would the warming stop? The answer is 30-40 years, because most of the warming has gone into the oceans (just a little goes into the atmosphere where we normally measure it) and they act as a huge drag as the climate moves to an equilibrium state.

Here's a great graph of the arctic ice volume at its minimum (how far back it shrinks every year) since the 70's...its down ~80% in that time and following its trend puts a melt out during this decade (20 years ago the scientists thought it wouldn't happen till after 2100):

http://economicdemocracy.org/eco/images/2012.volume.final.jpg

Now the ice cap anchors the jet stream in the northern hemisphere (gives us our weather and its already becoming unstable over the last 10 years or so & is why we're getting alot of the weird weather we've been getting in the U.S. over the last couple of years), it keeps Greenland from melting (believe its over 20+ ft of sea level rise just there) and keeps the permafrost ringing the top of the world from melting (which, once it melts out, would release more methane and CO2 than we have in the atmosphere - i.e. nature taking over control of the warming).

So does it make sense to put our future coastlines, weather (that we grow our food with, get our water from) and societal budgets at risk just to avoid getting off fossil fuels (i.e. to keep the status quo) or would it be better to get off fossil fuels?