You made no indication of who the owner of the was, I assumed it was either a company that does not exists anymore or some other abandonware. How do you expect me to know it was Blizzard you meant about when you did not even hint that is was a game you were talking about when you used the generic term "app"? Especially when you wrote "I have an app that doesn't work anymore under Lion. How do I get them to upgrade it? Sure, they'll help Adobe upgrade their apps, but the rest of us don't get anything." You also hint that the company you so perfectly obscured in your non-description is not of a similar or greater economic/political impact like that of Adobe one can only assume they are a smaller shop and therefore would be more welcoming for a licensing deal or even purchase. Next time, can you please be more up-front about it and you will not be irritated when people misunderstand you?

That may be a problem, but if the application is important to you perhaps you could work out a licensing deal with the owners?

What kind of blatant entitlement is this? Seriously!? If you go to a tailor you never expect to help you get your seems fixed for free, especially not twice before paying. Never, ever, would they accept any argument along the line "but it would make you look good if I wore a my suit sewn by you".

If you go to a a doctor to help diagnose your medical problem the doctor would just laugh at you and point to the door if you insist he should not be reimbursed for his time and knowledge and service to you because it might somehow be in his interest to have you healthy or somehow able to "spread the word around about what great guy he is".

If you take your computer to Geek Squad you pay for their service. You never get two technical support incidents fixed by for free by them.

It is the same thing, there is nothing inherent in a service that warrants it being provided for free. Only those who think that everyones time and knowledge is worth free (nothing) thinks that way.

Apple is quite reasonable in giving you a limited number of free technical support calls for something that is not a warranty (or similar issue) and then asking for about the price of a haircut (under $50 per incident) for something that could be looked at for days worth of billable hours if it was pure consulting.

Apple should not fix someone else's broken code, they have extensive documentation on their API:s, they have developer forums that are frequented by their own engineers. They promise will help you twice per year, for free, in addition they may help you an unlimited number of times on the developer forums. In addition they offer cheap DTS at a cheap fixed rate.

"Apple Developer Program members may contact Developer Technical Support for code-level technical assistance." At developer.apple.com/contact (under the Mac section) you can request an Apple engineer to look at your code and respond to your request. They have the same deal for every iOS developer as well.

Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Sergy Brin, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg

One of these things is not like the others.

One of them is dead as slashdotters are well aware.

I understand you some automated system capable of removing dust from a flat surface. :)

(another alternative)

Facebook has its own ad network essentially bypassing Google's potential revenue, that is the reason I suspect it might indeed be a threat to Google, however, it remains to see if Facebook is going to go into search and related areas. Facebook could conceivably do an Apple/Siri-like move since Siri only uses Google as a last resort while going directly to the sources (Yelp, Wolfram Alpha, Yahoo Finance & Weather). Siri could conceivably easily be extended with additional data sources and so could a Facebook search interface also.

China is trying, but then there is this free speech movement that tries to poke holes in that great firewall all the time.

It is supposed to augment/replace air conditioners and regulate drinking water and irrigation supplies, not cool down the exterior and interior of an entire city.

They do not need a nuclear reactor to dump energy into the environment ;), they need a simple and cheap way to cool parts of the city. A nuclear power plant, while relatively predictable is neither cheap nor simple. Nor will reactors dumping 2.3GW thermal per hour (as per your numbers) into the vicinity of the city help cool it down. Though a nuclear power plant could be used to replace the three old and toxic coal power plants currently powering the city, however, the country is poor and perhaps lacks the necessary skilled labor to keep the infrastructure and power plant running.

I suppose we could compare this to Ice Hotel in northern Sweden where they take 10 000 cubic meters of ice from the Torne River, since the flow of the river is about 370 cubic meters per second this means a disruption of slightly less than 30 seconds that melts back over the course of a few months. Tuul River that will be used for this seems like a river of comparable size (longer, but likely a slower flow). If the Ulan Bator experiment will produce use ten times as much ice (100 000 cubic meters) and it will take about 120 days for it to melt back into the river it would be at a rate of: about 833 cubic meters per day, or about 34 cubic meters per hour,> or less than 600 liters per second.

Now, for that to be a significant difference compared to normal flow during these months average flow must be if we say that anything less than 5% change is no big deal (I do not know what changes the river can actually deal with before botched migrations or flooding becomes a risk) for the river 12 cubic meters per second.

If the river is flowing at 30 cubic meters per second and 5% change as a threshold then Ulan Bator could conceivably take 300 000 cubic meters of ice, let it melt during 150 days (april, may, june, july, august) and still not make a difference in the normal water flow.

Here you go: Greenpeace annual reports.