I just don't buy it, if the Ukrainians wanted to investigatesome airliner they could send up a couple of MiG-29s to fly rings around it and wave at the pilots to get their attention. Why on earth would they shoot it down blindly with a SAM? The Russians have lost all credibility although their propaganda will probably be widely beleived at home. There is little doubt that the separatists shot this aircraft down, the only question that remains is who operated the weapon. One of those sigint soundclips said literally: "These are Chernukhin folks who shot down the plane. From the Chernukhin check point. Those cossacks who are based in Chernukhino." make of that what you will.

No purportedly about it, there are two rounds missing. As to authenticity, how likely is it that there is another Buk launcher is being hauled throught the E-European countryside on a civilian truck with two rounds missing from it's launcher as we speak? Surely the Russian army has specialist military trucks to move these beasts.

I just watched the entire speech, he went out of his way to mention the Netherlands and the bloodlettign they have had to suffer..

It works until the political weasels start falsifying the absorbtion capacity of carbon stinks in order to increase the supplies of carbon quotas far beyond what carbon sinks can handle so as to lower prices. One way to achieve this is via the time honored American tradition of putting industry insiders in charge of the agencies meant to regulate them which is a good way to render regulators and watchdogs ineffective.

Both KAL 007 and KAL 907 went off course into restricted airspace by mistake, one was forced down by the air defence forces the other one was unfortunately shot down. In both cases according to the Russians the pilots ignored multiple warnings. According to German TV it seems that in this case commercial aircraft have been overflying the Eastern Ukraine routinely. So let's get one thing straight: Commercial airliners have no business overflying warzones which should have been obvious from the beginning. This is especially true of warzones where the popular press has observed rebels shooting down combat aircraft, where these self same rebels did not shrink away from shooting down an unarmed military troop transport plane and where said rebels are known to be in possession of highly potent SAM systems capable of shooting down aircraft flying high up in the stratosphere and are likely to receive voulenteers who know how to operate such systems. It is a great tragedy that all those poor people on that Malasyan Boeing have had to pay with their lives to teach the airline industry this lesson.

You can say that again, Anomalocaris is a good example. The feeding appendages of this creature were initially identified as a type of lobster, it's body was identified as a species of sponge while the mouth was identified as a jellyfish. It was only later that people finally realized these finds were the components parts of a single critter. It makes one wonder what kind of weird creatures exist on other planets and if we'd even recognize them as life if we saw them.

... as are Android and Windows Phone devices, they do the same kind of tracking and leeching of personal data.

News at 11!!!

Will this pact also prevent patent trolling by Google, Dropbox, and Others? Whoever others are but one would hope they include: Oracle? Microsoft? Samsung? Apple?

I'm not so sure too few patent examiners is the only problem. According to a patents documentary I watched recently one of the big problems is a piece of legislation passed in the USA during the 80s or 90s in a panic over patent rates in Asia outstripping those in the USA. It caused the number of patents in the USA to rise sharply but it also allowed people to patent ridiculous crap because the patent office was now totally overworked and the restrictions on what could be patented had been relaxed. The Danes have a saying "He just tried to patent hot water" which is equivalent to the English proverb "He's not the sharpest knife in the kitchen", i.e. "he's stupid". The unfortunate thing is that these days you'd actually stand a good chance of patenting hot water if you tried, especially in the US where the rules are very lax. Come to think of it I'd actually like to see somebody try to patent hot water, just to see if they succeed. That being said I'm not generally against patents, I just think the system need major reform. This same documentary I cited above also included an interesting interview with James Dyson, the vaccuum cleaner guy. He described patents as a major pain because they are expensive to obtain and defend and don't really do much to help the small inventor anymore (which is what they were originally intend to do) and because patents have become weapons used by big players to stifle competition. But at the same time he also said he wouldn't want to live without some sort of patent system and took an example in his company's bladeless fan. It took them several years and tons of money to develop and they'd hardly released it when the market was flooded with cheap ass Chinese copies. The problem from Dyson's point of view is firstly that the copies are crappy and don't work very well which reflects badly on Dyson whose product actually works. Secondly the patent system (broken as it is) still helps companies like Dyson to crack down on copycats, even in China and even though the Chinese take significantly longer (years) to process foreign patent applications than they do Chinese patent applications (months) in violation of WTO regulations.

The Nazi leadership was blinded by the "grass is greener beyond the next hill" syndrome. If they had put the Heinkel 280 which first flew in 1941 into production and put some serious resources into making the HeS-8 and HeS-30 engines reliable enough for service they'd have had a workable jet fighter in 1943 with less of a performance advantage than the Me-262 but that would still have mopped the floor with most of the Allied opposition at the time. The Nazis failed to understand that fielding a mediocre jet fighter in time is better than fielding an outstanding one when it is too late. They were defeated by their aversion towards doing what Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond called "...the most un-German thing possible, a half-assed job".

Eisenhower was also right to be suspicious of 'think tanks', 'intelligence experts' and 'analysts'. One of the reasons he first pushed the U-2 program and then Corona was because 'expert intelligence tanalysts' told him the Soviets had Over 800 Myasishchev M-4 'Bison' bombers. Reconnaissance later revealed that the grand total strenght of the Soviet B-4 bomber force at the time was 20 aircraft, in fact one U-2 actually managed to catch the entire B-4 fleet in a single photograph. By the time Eisenhowers insistance on hard reconnaissance finally won out the USA had built hundreds of bombers to bridge an imaginary 'bomber gap'.

Yeah, F-35s replacing the A-10 good luck with that. The idea of the F-35 flying into the operational environment of the A-10, i.e. 0-3000ft which in a real shooting war is likely to be saturated by scrap fire and dominated by Manpads, full blown SAMs and mobile Flak such as Shilkas and Tunguskas and having the same survial rates as the A-10 always struck me as funny. Stealth is pretty much useless down there most of the kills are done with heat seeking missiles and the good old Mk.1 eyeball. Experience has shown several times now that no matter how many smart weapons they cook up there is no replacement for getting in good and close and blasting the shit out of the target with a 30mm gun.

But it is a real world coding language. When I was taking my CS degree we had a mandatory algorithms course (and not the "how does a for loop work" kind of course, they were teaching the kind of algorithms where a slight performance improvement can shave hours or even days off your execution time). On the first day there was much discontent when everybody discovered that they had to learn C/C++ because it was required to code assignment solutions in those languages. Finally somebody asked the teacher if they could hand in assignments written in Python. There was a short silence from the professor, an odd look flashed across his face and then he just said "NO" and went back to explaining how pointers work in C/C++.

Which is pretty amusing since it's pretty easy to design an algorith that will predict pollution levels for most major Chinese cities with pretty much 100% accuracy every day of the year:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <unistd.h>

int main()
{
    while(1)
    {
        printf("Predicted polution level for today: Very High\n");
        printf("Health hazard: Extreme\n");
        sleep(86400);
    }

    return 1;
}

A significant number of those Neanderthal and Denisovan genes are thought to be very helpful. For example Neanderthal genes are thought to play an important part in the way skin works in modern Europeans/Asians/Native Americans/Australians (cold climate tolerance, resistance to some diseases, synthesis of vitamins). However, having strong suspicions that this is the case because a whole bunch of skin related DNA in these populations seems to have come from Neanderthals and Denisovians and suspecting that this DNA is important because Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA seems to have been 'selected out' of some other parts of the genome but is still there in the skin related regions of the genome is one thing. Proving it scientifically is a whole other matter. These guys simply managed to become the first to prove in a scientifically rigorous way the helpfulness of one of the numerous bits of Neanderthal/Denisovan DNA suspected to be beneficial. Now let's hope this stands up to peer review.