The last time Russia was fighting for its territorial integrity 24 million Russians died. The terrorists have severely underestimated what it takes to frighten the Russian leadership into making concessions. You see, as long as all the terrorists die, the Russians don't really care. If you look at the Beslan massacre or the Moscow Theatre Seige, there was very little concern for the hostages, many of whom died during the raids by the security forces. It seems the main thing the government accomplished in both of the raids was killing all the terrorists and minimal casualties to security forces. It's probably modeled after things like Stalin's decision to not evacuate Stalingrad when the Nazis invaded.

No, the worst problem is researching the causes of autism is now a stigmatized field. It would be good to figure out what causes it, whether it's genetic, a brain damaging pathogen, or some sort of new environmental toxin like BPA or even an old one like Dioxin. Now every time someone comes out with a study that probes the causes of autism, a huge avalanche of skeptics will come out comparing it to the earlier fraudulent vaccine finding and dismiss it before giving it a through review.

x86 is such a funny architecture. If you've ever done operating system development in x86 it's crazy to see how much old crap there is in there from the 80s. Real Mode! Hello? Not to mention such inglorious hacks as getting the keyboard controller to reset the CPU!

Windows also has the disadvantage of not being invented in a country like Finland that won a war against the Soviet Union!

What about the LLVM Java JIT? It apparently runs Eclipse and Tomcat.

I wonder if most Java development will stay on JDK1.6 and not move anywhere. That's sort of the problem Microsoft has with Windows XP.

This sounds like some sort of Harry Potter Cargo Cult.

This whole patent war reminds me of the famous computer science analogy: the dining philosophers.

If each fork represents a patent, all the philosophers have picked up a fork and now are unable to eat because they don't have enough forks to make a smartphone.

They could always move to The Go Programming Language. It's Google's homegrown attempt to get something in between Python and C++. It's got a lot of neat concepts in it and could eventually be a real competitor to JAVA IMHO. The standard libraries still need a lot of work, but in a few years, especially if Oracle screws up Java, it could enter the mainstream.

The Sierra club had a huge internal struggle between people who wanted to limit immigration for environmental reasons and those who thought it was outside the scope of the organization:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Club#Population_control_and_immigration

Yeah sure! This is patent World War I, in which patent France won and demanded patent Germany pay patent reparations. These patent reparations ultimately caused patent Hyperinflation in patent Germany and led to patent World War II. In patent WWII patent Stalin signed a patent non-aggression pact with patent Hitler and was completely taken by surprise when patent Russia was invaded by patent Germany. Patent Stalin allied with Patent USA eventually won and signed a patent peace where they divided up patent Europe in a patent cold war that lasted almost 50 years.

This almost sounds like a plausible analogy!

One good thing about using technology that old is there's no chance you could be violating any patents. It certainly makes sense as a symbolic gesture at least.

Flying cars would only be easy and safe enough for the average person if you had low-power anti-gravity. This is probably not going to happen in my lifetime, which is why I voted that we will never have flying cars.

Every connected device will be mandated to have the bottom 64 bits of its ipv6 address store a pc health certification identifier which will link to their owner's unique citizen identifier. I told you this was coming...

Just had to mention Heim Theory here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heim_Theory

Extended Heim theory (EHT) is being researched as a possible way to utilize non-propellant methods of interstellar travel, specifically in overcoming the massive distances involved in any space journey. [39]
[39]http://www.hpcc-space.de/publications/documents/AIAA2010-021-NFF-1.pdf