Church-Turing Thesis
They are equivalent in that any algorithm represented in one of the 3 forms can be transformed into any of the others without changing it's behaviour

This doesn't seem right to me. For example, imagine I make a "Magic halt detector" turing machine that limits the amount of memory used by the input program to a finite amount.

After each instruction is executed, I can look at the total state of the finite tape, the position of the tape head, and the current instruction, and store it in a set of all seen states. If that state has been seen before, then I know it's an infinite loop. If not, then I simply add it and the execute the next instruction.

Given a finite program with a finite alphabet and a finite memory, there is a limit on the total number of unique states. Eventually, either the program will have to repeat a state, or halt.

Google does the same thing, it will make them more money, and, frankly, nobody cares.

KMail is the only "native" mail app but, unlike gnome, KDE works well with thunderbird. With a little effort you can even make it use the KDE theme and dialogs. Not 100% ideal, but maybe 95%. And, after switching, I've been able to stop thinking about my mail client and actually get some work done.

Do you use email as part of your job? I am always a part of at least a dozen or so email conversations between groups of people. Reply-All is my default since I usually want to be talking to everyone in the conversation.

In fact it's much closer to one of the other classic NP-Complete problems
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knapsack_problem

http://dell.com/ubuntu
They even have a page extolling the virtues of Ubuntu with a snazzy short url.

Well, the consensus among climate scientists seems to be yes, yes, and we really hope so. I'm merely a lay person and I don't know what "your field" is, but I do know that current research that is published in climate journals is way past the point of arguing about whether it's happening or not. There are a lot of very intelligent climate scientists who believe in global warming so if the entirety of argument is that they are missing something obvious (like the inaccuracy of thermometers, or global warming on mars) it makes me wonder if you have actually ever asked a climate scientist about it or if you're just looking for some reason to reject their results.

Based on your paragraph on "radicals" and "wealth transfer" I'm assuming you're a libertarian or something along those lines. Perhaps some of your resistance to accepting the current consensus is that the consequences don't fit into your political ideology. Maybe you have better/different ideas on how we should go about dealing with the problem, but please don't pretend it doesn't exist just because it's considered a "liberal" issue.

I think your math is a bit off

20% of all smartphone users say they are going to buy Android, including current Android owners. Pretending for a second that people actually do what they say they'll do and that everybody upgrades their phones at the same time, Android would get 20% of the market.

We know that 77% of current iPhone users will buy another one but we don't know about how many the other 72% of smartphone users will buy iPhones. So all we know is that at least 21% (28% * 77%) of current smart phone owners will buy an iPhone, but it's likely to be much higher.

"Open Source" as a term was coined explicitly to serve as a better brand name for Free Software. It was intended to be a more business friendly, pragmatic version of Free Software.

The Open Source Definition found on the OSI site was how the term was introduced to the world. Even if you believe that the term was being used before that and with some different definition (which I haven't seen any evidence of, but it's possible), this is the source of the term as it's currently used.

What's really going on here is that proprietary companies hoping to cash in on the Open Source brand are attempting to broaden the popular definition to include things that aren't really open source.

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software#History
• http://opensource.org/history
• http://www.catb.org/~esr/open-source.html
• http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=98/02/09/213900

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html

Maybe, but because the jvm is targetted at Java my guess is that as alternatives like parrot, llvm or, god forbid, mono become more mature I expect more and more languages to start using them instead if for no other reason than it's easier to do. I doubt scala and clojure are going to decide to drop the jvm but unless you're writing a new language that looks a lot like java it seems like a lot of unncessesary work to target the jvm.

A good article I just found that talks about the jvm as a general platform:
http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=176597

What are you talking about? Yes, for a single packet it's best effort, but you're ignoring all the other technologies and protocols that make up the internet. Assuming there is *some* route to the destination and enough bandwidth to support the extra packets that come from resending large amounts of lost packets and the Internet will always work. Don't confuse the low level architecture with the reliability of the entire infrastructure. Of course, all of that is irrelevant to this particular problem because this wasn't a connection problem but a software configuration error.

I think maybe you missed the point of the shoeless quote. The whole post is about reaching out to those RMS sees as "enemies", like MS, and viewing their dislike/distrust of Free Software as an opportunity.

good point, maybe one of those complacent companies could force the directly responsible ones to respect the "goddamned standards". Perhaps they could write some sort of plugin that replaced the rendering engine... hmmm