You can think of the forest floor

Should've read: You can think of the ocean floor..

The fishing industries, particularly those using the deep sea trawling method, have worse long-term impact on the oceans than all the oil spills combined, particularly in that they destroy the cold-water coral that a great proportion of the lower ocean ecosystem ultimately depends upon. Secondly, bottom fishing stirs up sediment that chokes life down there, turning it into the ocean equivalent of a dusty desert. You can think of the forest floor as the home of the vital organs of the ocean: the supposed right to have a ready supply of just a few species of fish impacts thousands of other species.

This oil spill is absolutely terrible, of course. But if you care for your kids future and/or want to save the oceans, eat less (or no) fish and encourage others to do so. We're not poisoning the ocean so much as eating its guts out. Your children and grandchildren will be enjoying the wonders of the ocean eating an icecream in a perspex tube at this rate.

Yes, it's that bad.

Practicing 'defense' produces a desire to prove it. The next step to that end is the creation of conflict itself.

Chicken, meet egg. See you both in hell.

The question is not whether Google can deliver but whether they'll be fashionably late enough while doing so.

Give me a dumb, predictable computer any way, then I can accuractly predict how it'll respond to my input, and this tailor my input for the exact response I want, every time.

Well said..

So often it's the geeks that are the real humanists - those that know enough about 'intelligent software' to be suspicious of it.

It's not just (suicidal) self reflection but a potent mix of ignorance and laziness that steers us toward Vinge's Singularity.

This in built 'subjectivity' in the search mechanism represents a kind of fragmentation of the commons the searchable Internet supposedly represents: sometimes I want to know what other people know, what they are looking at, what is popular or interesting for them.

Secondly, grouping searches around an assumption of my interests assumes that my interests are 1/ Statistically quantifiable (solving a loathesome and boring problem may result in many queries), 2/ Particular to me (I may be searching for someone else, or my computer could be shared with another), 3/ Can be built from clear-text (sometimes I might be searching within a context do take me to a binary, like a video, arbitrarily linked in a page (like the comments for instance)).

Finally, isn't there a problem with diminishing returns here? The set that represents my interests will get 'smaller' in subject matter as I continue to search within that set.

I'll certainly be switching if Google's approximation of my interests goes under the radar, digging into cookies when I'm 'signed out'.

Typical US-centric, generalisation, extrapolated to the corners of the galaxy..

The US has what the vast majority of mobile phone users consider utterly unacceptable, total telco lock in. A company like Nokia has 41% of the world's largest handheld market, China, where Nokia phones are a status symbol, not to mention South America and India! Really open phones haven't been tested in the market (the Moko doesn't count, it never left the developer version and was never intended for the mass market) - it's too early to ring the bells of doom. Western Europe alone has more people using the internet than there are people in the US, that's a lot of people that want the web in their pocket and this is where the N900 proves to be a perfect fit.

From where I sit, with my N900 (which incidentally is selling like hotcakes - Nokia is struggling with the demand), such speculation seems vacuous. The N900 is an absolutely incredible device with the best browsing experience bar none, flash support, beautiful screen, powerful preamp, great phone (Skype/SIP VoIP and regular calls) absolutely gorgeous UI and a physical keyboard you can actually type on at a real clip.

As proof, I typed this post on the thing.

Thanks Nokia for being this brave. I'm glad it's clearly not just us geeks that are loving the thing.

This 'Per-backing-device writeback' is pretty significant. I'm sure the feature film and database industries will love it especially:

The new system has much better performance in several workloads: A benchmark with two processes doing streaming writes to a 32 GB file to 5 SATA drives pushed into a LVM stripe set, XFS was 40% faster, and Btrfs 26% faster. A sample ffsb workload that does random writes to files was found to be about 8% faster on a simple SATA drive during the benchmark phase. File layout is much smoother on the vmstat stats. A SSD based writeback test on XFS performs over 20% better as well, with the throughput being very stable around 1GB/sec, where pdflush only manages 750MB/sec and fluctuates wildly while doing so. Random buffered writes to many files behave a lot better as well, as does random mmap'ed writes. A streaming vs random writer benchmark went from a few MB/s to ~120 MB/s. In short, performance improves in many important workloads.

I agree.

I have been vegetarian most of my life yet I used to hunt and eat animals. I differ from other vegetarians in that I see no ethical issue with eating what you personally take responsibility for killing.

Paying other people to kill animals for you however is cowardly, it's an industry built on cowardice, and is about as far away from the Great Hunter every meat eater loves to cite, in an effort to argue that eating meat is a vital part of human culture. Well, it's not. Worse, it's environmentally detrimental, causes gross hormone imbalances in humans and is horrifically cruel.

You don't need to eat meat to live a very healthy and active long life. You eat meat because you like the taste. Then go out and take another's life to defend your hedonism. Look at it in the eyes while you cuts its throat. Gut it, bleed it and eat it.

In that light, I think it makes perfect sense for an organization to support, say, Fedora Core, but no other Linux distros.

I agree.

They support OSX in many cases, a BSD, and so they can also support 'a Linux', ideally the distribution that is most popular. If other distributions complain - in the absence of source code - the appropriate response would be "It's a jungle out there".

Each iPod, sold in the US for $299, provides China with an export value of about $150, but as it turns out, Chinese producers really only 'earned' around $4 on each unit.

The differences in salary relative to cost of living ought to be taken into account. The average daily salary of a Chinese person is was around USD14.1 last year..

Secondly, it's not just about revenue but longer term industrial dependency. Were China to suddenly refuse (due to political embargo, for instance) to produce such items Apple would suffer a considerable economic loss, if only while they secured an alternative manufacturer. Chinese and Taiwanese companies are in a good position to steer the market in their favour, eventually producing (if not already) competing products for their own market - the world's biggest in many sectors - and others abroad.

We should be encouraged to compete and to play and to roughhouse.

That's all very lovely, the fact remains however that physical aptitude - the core value of the Male in a given society - has become increasingly irrelevant in post industrial Western society. Women are, by most accounts, able to do just fine without us. They are just as competitive and just as able, technically or otherwise. No conclusive evidence suggests otherwise.

In the broader scheme of things it's our own scientific and social revolutions that have outmoded the role of the male gender. Masculinity, it would seem looking at lesbian couples I've known, is something in itself relatively easily approximated where roles and children are concerned.

Oops, you're right. That rather important detail escaped me.

but I can't think of a time when a corporation patented something bad soley as a way of preventing someone from using it

I think you'll find that a cursory look at Pharmaceutical patents will reveal a large number of cures that no big player in medical marketplace would ever want to see in the wild, let alone see a vast population of people in need have access to at affordable prices.

Look also at Microsoft research: they come up with some extraordinary technologies/solutions that would no doubt undermine the broader, stable market for their existing inferior products if available on a desktop near you.

I believe that all these nonsense Apple patents relating to advertising may reveal that Apple may soon ship an ad-encumbered version of it's OS for Intel hardware more generic than that already in the Apple line.

Thankfully Europeans have banned what is considered safe practice in North America.

By introducing female and male sex hormones into the animals, it is possible to increase the amount of meat that they produce without increasing the amount that they are fed.By adding the female sex hormones oestrogen and progesterone to cattle, scientists can stimulate the animals to produce extra muscle and fat. Adding the male sex hormone testosterone increases muscle growth, and decreases production of fat. Oestrogen has been linked to an increased risk of breast cancer and to reproductive disorders in men. Progesterone has been shown to increase the development of ovarian, breast and uterine tumours in laboratory animals.

From here

Cows pumped up with hormones to produce milk all year round is seemingly also doing damage. Men receive a lot of oestrogen via milk produced in this fashion, nothing the dairy industry wants anyone to know about, of course.