What he said.

39% market share ain't bad at all for a nearly twelve year old OS. Glad to see that a superior product (albeit rather bloated by default) has already overtaken it though.

This. In the music production world, VST and Audio Unit hosts on OSX are still transitioning to x64, as third party authors drag their heels. RPC proxies are required to run x86 plugins on x64 hosts, or vice versa. Basically all in-process plugin architectures get screwed over every time the architecture changes. And anything realtime-sensitive or processor-intensive gets hosed as rickety emulation layers are used as a shim. I guess the solution is to move to a server-client plugin architecture, and/or to provide GPL-friendly SDKs to allow Open Source authors to contribute extensions, which can be ported by volunteers to new architectures indefinitely. Ardour is certainly a very fine example of what can be done by a dedicated open source evangelist.

None of that was true even before the respective Apple products came onto the market.

Amen to that - my old Razr V2 was virtually indestructible.

This should be a prerequisite, but is half the battle with a lot of code. The rest is explaining how all those descriptively-named functions do what they do, why they do them in a specific way, and known issues and gotchas. But generally, the more human-readable meaning we can impart to the actual commented code, the more meaningful our stack traces, logs and diagnostics will be. The more code can be written in an easily human-readable form without comments, marking the intended purpose and context of use, the harder it is to hide (and write) buggy code. See BDD, where one defines pre- and post- conditions for every function. In an ideal world, we would express tasks in a precise declarative language, with the minimum of hints as to how to perform them, and the compiler/runtime would deduce the implementation. Unfortunately, Prolog and constraint programming languages have so far fallen short of this dream. In the meantime - the 'what' should be in the code, the 'how, why and watch out' should be in the comments.

As Oppenheimer once remarked "Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

Agree. I barely met anyone excited about 3D stuff, other than those with more money than they knew what to do with.

I wish mod points went to 6.

Point proved ;)

Sounds like you need smart underwear. Of course, this security technology is vulnerable to social engineering.

I do think of Dawkins as a devout Atheist - and he certainly likes to spread his ideas. Some of his arguments against religion seem merely to argue that it is bad just because it is most likely delusional (which I don't necessarily go along with). However, when it comes to the impact of freedoms of others, contraception and other issues, the malignant aspect of a virus seems to manifest itself much more clearly in the theist's park than Dawkins' proselytising.

Of course, some would describe religion thus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viruses_of_the_Mind

If the uptake were greater, as it is in, for example, Germany, then the fill rate would be much greater, and there could be more routes, and hence fewer stops. It's a classic chicken and egg problem which requires large subsidies to solve (something rather thin on the ground right now, admittedly), but certainly in urban areas it's very effective (see the Vancouver Trollybus figures in the same Wikipedia section cited). Come to think of it, perhaps offering a few of these self-driving cars for cheap hire as a last-mile solution would offer the best of both worlds...?

It's a lot more energy intensive than mass transport, still. You are of course right about our yield from renewable energy sources - but can improve that quickly enough to meet demand?

Not every journey is going to be catered for by public transport, end to end. But surely the vast majority of everyone's daily mileage could be fulfilled with it.

Kudos to Toyota, though. As an automotive development this is a great thing.