But surely the CIA/Mossad would be clever enough to realize that Anonanonaon would quickly figure out their False Flag strategy and expose them on Slashdot, so they'd know better than to try it... meaning that the only remaining explanation is that Russia put out the fake photo as a False False Flag attack, to make the CIA/Mossad look bad!

This is why you never go in against a Russian when death is on the line!

Speak for yourself, bucko. ;)

I can think of one... Apple. Try bringing your $6,000+ quad-Xeon cheese-grater Mac Pro into an Apple Store for support -- the "geniuses" will all gather round to look at the fascinating museum piece, before they tell you that they can't help you with your "legacy Mac". :^P

No doubt that explains why they are such a tiny company that nobody has ever heard of, with such a minuscule user base. Do I detect some sour grapes?

Of course, a dishonest police officer can always find something to cover the camera with, or "accidentally" put it on backwards, or "forget" to charge the battery, or any number of other subtle or not-so-subtle bits of sabotage.

The real endgame arrives only when both the police officer and any person (s)he comes in contact with are both recording video. In that case both parties will have an incentive to record everything, since otherwise only the other party will have (possibly selective/edited) video evidence to provide.

Sure, in the same way that everyday mechanical physics is nothing more or less than the integral of quantum mechanics.

The statement is technically true, but also quite misleading, in that in both cases knowing something about the behavior at one scale isn't going to give you much intuition about how things behave at the other.

Ignoring the "spectra of a waking dragon" (whatever the hell that is), and fact that you don't appear to understand the difference between 'weather' and 'climate' -- can you point to the place in the report where it says that "climate change is our biggest threat"?

I suspect you cannot, and the reason you cannot is because you pulled that claim out of your ass.

Personally I'm in great anticipation of the upcoming flag day, when some particularly onerous climate-change related events (e.g. the permanent evacuation of Miami, or perhaps just food shortages due to widespread crop failures) occur, and Fox News shifts seamlessly from denying the existence of global warming to blaming the Democrats for not having done enough to prevent it. Good times.

Which makes me wonder, would it (in principle) be worth designing a chip with an ISA that is based explicitly on single-assignment-form, thereby avoiding both the need for transformations by the compiler and (more importantly) transformations by the CPU at run-time?

I think that is likely what many Joe Averages are doing ... but it seems to me that the negative consequences of denying AGW are likely going to be more severe than the negative consequences of agreeing with it (in the same way that the negative consequences of pretending you don't have cancer are more severe than those of getting it treated ASAP).

i.e. I think Joe Average is fooling himself.

They specialize in selling cars to people who can't really afford them. Their customers are considered high risk and can't get credit elsewhere, so they charge high interest rates. When said people fall behind on their payments, they repossess the cars and sell them again to someone else. It's not uncommon for a dealer to sell the same used car 5 or 6 times. It's a fairly dodgy business model.

There's nothing wrong with wishing someone would shut up. There's not even anything wrong with saying so publicly.

There's everything wrong with sending someone death threats and/or rape threats.

If you can't grasp that distinction, then there's probably nothing more I can say that would benefit either of us.

Demonstrating that your mind is the product of your physical brain's functioning is not particularly difficult. You don't even need even any lab equipment. A popular experiment (which anyone can perform, and many do) is to introduce a dose of CH3CH2OH into your brain, and then observe the resulting changes in your mind's behavior. If the mind and the brain were two separate mechanisms, mental changes like those would not occur in response to the introduction of a chemical.

If a piece of software has had lots of development and testing done on it by very talented individuals, the user gets to enjoy better-designed, higher-quality software.

In some (but not all) cases, the proprietary nature of the software supplies the money necessary to pay those talented programmers and testers to spend the extra time necessary to really develop/debug/polish the software's quality.

Open source software sometimes gets that extra attention too, but since it's often written by self-directed volunteers, the extra-mile polishing often happens only to the parts of the software that software developers find interesting. Hence Linux's great kernel, but mediocre [relative to OS/X] GUI.

Does being proprietary make software more secure? Unlikely -- but security is not the only yardstick by which software is judged.

I think "worthless" is a bit too strong of a characterization. Now that the company's certificate is known to be compromised, Apple invalidates their certificate, and all malware that is signed with that certificate will no longer run on any Internet-connected Mac. That's not ideal, but it's a lot better than not having any mechanism to stop known malware.

If there is a more effective security mechanism that Apple ought to be using instead, I'd be interested in hearing about it.