If the plant is killing them slowly with leukaemia, maybe they'd be better off if they did?

Seriously though, the suicide rate at Apple contracted Foxconn plants was blown way out of proportion. The suicide rate at the plants was LOWER than in the general population. Try to have a little perspective. People commit suicide all the time. It's tragic, and doesn't usually have anything to do with the one specific job they were working at the time. As far as I know, Foxconn employees were never barred from quitting; if the conditions were that bad, they really could have left. Instead, many of them were disappointed that the maximum number of hours they could work was cut. (This is, by and large, a Chinese cultural thing. They believe that you should work hard and make a lot of money even if the job sucks because you can quit and take all that money with you. My Chinese half of the family is often recommending that I move to somewhere terrible and work for tonnes of money for a few years; they don't understand that I'd rather enjoy my job and make less.)

1) The big oil conspiracy is out in the open. They're out to make money, and they've relatively little regard for the environment at large and the long-term prospects for it. They only care insofar as the government forces them to. The penalties for violation are fairly minor. Large corporations rarely have a sense of long-term perspective, and the oil companies know that their long-term prospects are inherently limited (oil will eventually run out), so they need to make money now while people are still willing to buy it and they can get to it so easily. Big Oil subsidies in North America are well known. Somehow, they're still getting tax breaks and incentives from governments despite the massive profits.

2) The predictive power of the models isn't exact, but that doesn't mean it's not sufficient to act on. Long term climate analysis is hard, but for our purposes, the problem isn't intractable. Think about it this way: I can already predict the climate with sufficient fidelity to know what clothes I should be putting at the front of my closet in December of 2015. The fact that I won't know the day-to-day temperatures or whether there will be wildly anomalous days where it's freakishly warm aren't relevant: December of 2015 in Canada will be cold, like it always is. (I can't predict what it'll be like in 2050 just yet, but it's almost certainly still the case that it will be colder than July 2050.) The science is better than you think it is, I reckon.

3) Some of the catastrophes are somewhat beyond our ability to fix or adapt to, for a variety of reasons, and most of them have to do with greed or fundamental undermining of the system. If you're talking about ocean acidification, for instance, it's really hard to undo. Jellyfish are taking over the oceans because we've fundamentally overfished them and upended the ecology. We're likely to see the collapse of several fisheries, and those take a long time to recover. With the added pressure of climate change, we might not see those species recover, and that means a huge portion of the world will lose an essential protein source. We're doing incredible violence to a lot of systems, and it may have been possible for them to survive them well enough, but we're hitting them on a lot of levels simultaneously. If climate change due to CO2 emissionswere the ONLY problem, I might be a little less worried--we could plant more trees, or change our farming methods, etc.--but we're in a bad spot where we've given ourselves no room to manoeuvre. Technology and science will help, but only if we sit down and believe in what the science is telling us and move to fix the problem. Deluding ourselves into rejecting the problem out of hand means that it CAN'T be solved.

This seems almost certainly correct, and I think one additional step will be implemented, which is to try to deploy safety gear inside the car before the impact actually occurs. Airbags work well in preventing injury, but they require the impact to actually trigger the sensors before deploying, and so they have to deploy in fractions of a second, causing their own problems and injuries. If you've got half a second before the impact actually occurs, and you might be able to reduce the severity of the impact by starting the braking as soon as possible (a window of opportunity that humans can miss entirely, due to our slow-ass reflexes, relative to the speed of travel) the vehicle can additionally inflate the airbags and prepare the seats in such a way that the passengers take the least amount of damage.
If you're trying to avoid a non-vehicle, then do what's necessary to avoid hitting that entity without guaranteeing the death of the vehicle passengers (like driving off a cliff), even if that means smashing into a wall.

The point of this exercise is to avoid hurting people, even at the expense of the vehicle itself. It's a meaningless exercise to try and decide which vehicle to destroy. If the technology inside the vehicles is good at preventing damage to the passengers, you can almost not care about anything else.

I think, honestly, that he IS that one-dimensional, and that's exactly what proselytizers kind of need to be. Any variation in his message stands to weaken it.

I don't actually believe in much of what he says, but I feel that, like many extremists, that he serves a really useful purpose from the perspective of philosophy. Most people won't adopt his views, but he serves to pull the middle over to his direction a bit and create a space where more of us can work. GNU/Linux wouldn't be the same without him, and he keeps the whole community a bit honest.

As he gets older, he'll be even more set in his ways. He can learn new tricks, but only within the confines of his philosophy. Fundamentally, I don't think he knows that trading freedom for convenience is something that people always do, in every society, and always have. Without that acknowledgement, he thinks that it's reasonable that perhaps everyone would rather go without a phone instead of give up a bit of theoretical freedom.

The iPad is still more convenient than a macbook Air, if you ask me. I do a lot of reading on mine, and there are a lot of apps that I prefer to actually being in a browser. My RSS reader is generally nicer than the stuff I have at a desktop machine, and I like flipboard and tumblr better on my iPad as well. I find that I rarely sit at my desktop at home anymore because my home computing life centres more around relaxing than doing.

I'm not going to write a novel on it (though people have written novels on their mobile phones using T9, so it's not like it's impossible), but I would say 90% of my personal emails are done on my iPad or iPhone.

But the thing is that every tool has its place, and the pundits have decided that a screwdriver should try to be a hammer. It's not that the iPad isn't a useful device, it's just that it's not the useful device that a bunch of other people said that it was. I don't think Apple has ever tried to tell you that it's going to be your desktop replacement--they just want it to be another tool in your box.

I agree, and it's a major reason why I haven't switched and don't have plans to. I dislike the telecom companies more than just about anyone, so Apple wins points with me just by being a different major power that pushes back against them.

Realistically, the biggest change that Apple made to the smartphone market wasn't really the tech--that probably would've happened in due time if Apple hadn't done it; Jobs probably pushed the schedule up somewhat--it's that they dictated terms to the carriers and not the other way around.

My iPhone 4 has already last me 4 years. The main limiting factor, honestly, is whether or not the device is getting current OS updates. Because my phone will be dropped from support this year, I've finally decided it's time for a new one.

If HTC can keep the M8 up-to-date for the next 4 years, I see no reason why it wouldn't be able to do the same.

One of the best things Steve Jobs ever did for the security of computing around the world is slowly crush Flash under his heel.

It's bad.
It's always been bad. Apparently, it will always be bad.

Just let it die. It's a CPU and memory hog (another good reason not to use it on mobile; the CPUs these days can handle it, but it's bad for battery life) and it's a massive security hole. Why in the world should it get a pass? Someone at Adobe should've nuked it from orbit years ago.

Especially since--according to Apple--iPad users account for 4x more traffic than all Android tablet users.

This isn't about iPads so much as tablets as a market. I love my iPad and it made me realise what I actually use my computer for at home--entertainment and news. I have a PC at work and I work on it and when I get home, I'm not trying to do more work. I play some Diablo 3 on my iMac on the weekends, and I have a scanner that I use from time to time, but other than that, I get 95% of everything else done on my iPad. Even some stuff that would count as 'work' or 'content creation'.

I think a lot of people don't know that they could really shift to a tablet instead of a PC. There's the problem that iPads aren't (in my opinion) multi-user devices, and PCs are a bit more family-friendly, but other than that, I think most people could get by on a 16GB (yes, the small one!) iPad. But these are also people that were paying $300 for a crap PC, so why would they pay for a tablet that's more (usually) expensive and doesn't fit into what they know about computers?

I think there's a lot of room for the market to grow, but now that the initial demand is more or less met, it'll grow slower. I still have my iPad 3, and I'll keep it until Apple stops supporting it, which I suspect will be at least a year or two more. (I'm basically on two offset 4-year upgrade cycles. I have my iPhone 4 and I'll replace that this year, since it'll be dropped from support, and it's a bit slow after 4 years. In a couple years, I'll replace my iPad with whatever the new one is.)

To further the point, the placebo effect is at work even when you take medication with an active ingredient.

Pain reduction, for instance, occurs much faster than is possible by purely chemical effects when you take a tylenol. I've heard up to 40% of the painkilling effect is placebo, and it happens moments after you take the pill. You're anticipating relief from the drug, and so your brain helps things along.

Homeopathy is garbage, and it should be treated exactly as the Australian government is treating it. But it's worth noting that a lot of these people DO have noticeable health benefits from being in contact with a homeopath. But homeopaths take time to talk to their patients and understand what the problem is, and sometimes that in and of itself is of benefit. On top of the vials of water, many of these homeopaths will make dietary and lifestyle recommendations that a regular doctor might not consider at first. Going for a doctor's appointment and feeling ignored doesn't increase one's sense of well-being.

What we should really be doing is providing more layers to our healthcare systems that centre less around overworked doctors prescribing medication, and more around trained health professionals (nurses, nutritionists, etc.) that can take some time and help you figure out what your trouble is and whether you really need to see a doctor, or if maybe you just need to cut things out of your diet or walk more or whatever.

First of all, that was probably a statement of opinion.

But looking at it critically, it may be a statement of opinion based on the fact that as a CEO, his credibility was damaged, and that's a major impediment to his actual ability to do his job. If the employees of the company hold him in low regard, he'll have a hard time motivating them or retaining them. In a year, he may well have been forced to resign for being unable to successfully fulfil his CEO duties, entirely because of this somewhat intangible quality.

Or, look at it this way: Steve Jobs was a great CEO not because he was an amazing engineer, but because he was inspiring to his workers as well as being an interesting and popular public figure. His ability to deliver on his responsibilities as CEO were based almost entirely on his personality. Eich was starting at a bad place, and it was going to be much harder for him to move forward.

I'd argue that it was more about the straight allies of the LGBT community than the LGBT community themselves. OKCupid is run by straight dudes, and they're not a front for any LGBT organisation that I know of.

This was a delightfully broad-based protest, not stemming from any group in particular.

It is, in fact, why I find it so absolutely irritating that bloggers keep going on about how 'damaging' this is to 'free speech'. This was free speech WORKING. This was a whole bunch of people speaking out and saying that it's no more acceptable for CEOs to hold this kind of opinion on equal marriage as it would be for them to hold a similar opinion on interracial marriage.

There's no outrage because he's changed his position (or, possibly, as other commenters have said, he had that position all along and merely claimed he was against equal marriage because that was the political thing to do).

Eich was given the opportunity to recant, but he didn't, strongly implying that this is still the thing that he believes.

I do believe he can think what he wants. He can vote the way he wants and he can donate money to what he wants. What he DOESN'T get is a life absent from scrutiny and consequence for his beliefs. We are all held to account eventually for what we believe in.

He has had no rights trampled upon. He thought a thing, and other people find that thing offensive. As a result, they decided that they didn't want to associate themselves with something that he was involved in. Eventually, the company that employed him decided that the number of people making a free choice based on information that is true was detrimental to their direction and bottom line.

If anything, this is a remarkable example of how our system works well. The government didn't need to intercede. Nobody was hurt. People made their opinions known and all they had to do was turn their back on a particular product. I'm not sure where all the outrage is coming from. This is how capitalism was supposed to go. This may be the least corrupt example of how capitalism works that I've ever seen in my life.

Well, in point of fact, it's likely you don't believe in democracy either. I'm not aware of a true functioning democracy in the world today. (That doesn't mean one doesn't exist; merely that I'm not aware of it.)

The USA is a republic. Canada is a constitutional monarchy. These things are forms of representative government, but they're not democracy per se. We have a vote, but we don't vote on every bill; those things filter through a proxy.

And the reason these things filter through a proxy is precisely to avoid tyranny of the majority. Majority opinions can be dangerous, and we've seen that time and time again through history. The subjugation of minorities isn't something that's hard to find in the history of any western democracy.

I don't believe in firing people for having opinions, as such. He donated money to a cause that sought to remove rights from people. It doesn't matter the group of people that was aimed at, I find such an action deplorable and wrong as a matter of justice. At the centre of our law is the equal treatment of all people. I really just can't abide anyone that swims against that tide.

It is not 'intolerant' to hold people account for their beliefs that some people deserve more rights than others. I don't give a free pass to racists, and I won't give a free pass to him.