Thank you, dear Cuban! I was gonna say pretty much the same: Castro is not particularly murderous, but he certainly does not believe that people should have the freedom to do or say whatever they want to (within the constraints of democratically founded laws).

G.W. Bush was quite murderous, and well - he did his best to be oppressive to those who stood in his way: The US Constitution, evil-doers and those who were not with him. Whoever disagreed with him were aiding terrorists and/or being unpatriotic. And his actions show he does not care about non-American civilian deaths - Blackwater/Xe were allowed to run amok and were not stopped until the Iraq gov't rebelled etc etc etc. He also had a bloody record when he was Guv'nor in Texas.

The question is then if there is a higher dose of antibiotics in the remains of those who died from disease than those who died from accidents and violence. If there is a higher concentration of antibiotics in the remains of those who died from disease, then this suggests they knew about the healing properties of their beer. After all, the body is better at defeating infections when sober than when you're hammered so not drinking beer while being ill would be a better choice had they not known of the medicinal properties of the beer.

3) They deliver better products than their competition, and their customers are too ignorant, uncaring or too trusting in anti-trust legislation to care about their actions.

While I agree on all the things you said, I believe a flash implementation would make Joe Average like his iPad more and not less. It's a slick pice of technology: Install it, and without further involvement from your part you will be able to stream video from all over the web, play small games and do other fun stuff. For free!

Unless he's a raging alcoholic, I don't think Assange is so stupid to rape twice in a week, while the US government is looking for him and he has the attention of the world. Of course, there is a slight chance the allegations are real, but I find it very peculiar that no such charges has been made earlier. I'm with the conspiracy theorists on this one. I was fairly trusting in the 90's, but after the 00's I don't trust the industrial-military complex nor the US Government to play by the rules.

I agree about how people are usually more complex than hero/villain, though. Assange may very well have other skeletons in his closet, but - well - I think "they" picked the crime to be rape simply because it's a "he said, she said" kind of crime unless there was a huge scuffle. As such, it's perfect for character assassination - charges of rape sows the seeds of doubt in the heads of those who are not firmly behind Assange (and don't think this through).

Nah. One has primary focus on customer
satisfaction. The other must have primary focus elsewhere.

Sorry for being a bit snide. If it helps, this message was typed on an Android phone.

Anyhow, Ballmer had been falling behind on the arguably most important new market: The smartphone market. Windows Mobile 7 better be great, otherwise Microsoft may be in real trouble on the medium term.

I was surprised by these numbers. Anyhow, they are positive in the sense that Facebook is indeed vulnerable to competition. As you state, the tricky part of any competitor is to gain enough momentum to get Joe Average to try it out. I guess if Diaspora or something along those lines has sufficient quality and capacity upon launch, and they get positive press, enough people might be swayed to try it out that they gain critical mass. We'll see. Giants fall.

I enjoy being ambiguous. It makes people think harder.

Pandora's box has been opened. I'm excited to see what pours out over the next decades. We all know we need radical new technology to fix the energy crisis and reduce climate gas emissions. Hopefully, we can engineer more efficient organisms, providing clean(er) energy and food for the world's ever-growing population.

30 years ago, most of these issues were pretty much solved. Evolution wasn't questioned, everyone was vaccinated.

Well - there was always a fringe. However, the internets has enabled the fringe to get organized, communicating effectively many-to-many. And guess what - their interesting stories are more popular than the drab, boring, responsible stories of the establishment. Their stories are grander, more scary and explain what the establishment stories could not explain. Yes - that's what it's come down to. Telling a good story, not being right. We're screwed.

Jayzuz. PR firms feed the journalists with pre-researched, pre-angled cases. The journalist checks a few of the facts, rewrites the prose a bit/writes the prose. And the desk approves. Everybody does this: Government, big tobacco, Toyota, UNICEF. Everybody. There's no need to control the media when the productivity expectations of the journalists ensures they are toothless and more than happy to regurgitate your propaganda.

Nope. And no-one would if drugs were legal and cheap.

Sure, this is the way things are going, but until prices come down we won't be seeing SSDs replacing HDDs; work fine for the desktop, tho'

We won't be seeing SSDs replacing HDDs until people start calculating differently: (Total power consumption costs + total cooling costs + price) / years until failure or replacement. And let's face it - 128GB of storage is enough for a lot of servers.

For about 10-20% of the programming positions - sure.

But there are other skills that are much more important in the majority of the positions:

1. Usability - it does not matter if your program is correct if "nobody" can figure out how to use it, or if the layout encourages incorrect usage.
2. Communication skills - effectively communicating with both middle management and end users is key much more often than being able to grok linear algebra.
3. Judgement - knowing "how much is enough", and "how much is too much".
4. Design skills - writing code that is maintainable and testable is always a requirement for creating a good, durable product.

Mind you, they keep improving the libraries. And they keep adding stuff like Grand Central Dispatch. Is an OS just the kernel, or do you consider the default shipping libraries as part of the OS? Do you use Linux, or GNU/Linux?