(with the exception of those rare instructive YouTube videos that show you how to do something useful).

You realize that your entire argument goes down the drain with that one exception?

How about if you wanted to take down notes with your phone WHILE watching said instructive YouTube video?

Point is, people have perfectly legitimate, non-time-wasting reasons to "bellyache" (as you so put it) for multitasking. Don't treat those reasons as unimportant (implicit from your accusation that "they have already decided that their time isn't valuable") just because *you* don't have those reasons.

I read another article where a guy was mad because he couldn't go switch to something else in the 5-6 seconds while a page loads in Safari

I hope you don't mind me omitting the trollish end of your sentence. I *do* switch between the web browser and the maps app on my Android phone when navigating on foot to somewhere, with the web browser bringing up the website of my destination (to get address details that the map won't show, e.g. when the destination is inside a mall).

Even though it's one USER task, those are still two PHONE tasks running at the same time. I expect my phone to keep up with me. 5 to 6 seconds is an awfully long time when you're running late.

Needless to say I'm quite glad I've been able to do what I do on my Android long before *anyone* can do it on an iPhone, thanks to multitasking.

Heck my older Nokia 6680 has been doing it way before these new-fangled phones, and I've always found it useful.

I wonder what the obsession is with your kind about BASHING the existence of multitasking on phones.

If your phone got stolen, the thief would get access to your google account (if you've ever set it up) or your browser history in the first place. Those are things that you wouldn't have been able to delete at the point of theft. Even if you lock the phone -- a good enough thief whose purpose is to steal your data would have researched enough to know how to get it. So that supposed "security hole" is moot -- it's just a tiny thing compared to the other data the thief has already gotten hold of.

My only real concern is if the issue is exploitable remotely.

TFA says it's stored in the internal storage on the Droid, which is more difficult to delete. (Not by much, but still worth noting.)

I've noticed that my HTC Desire (also with Sense UI) does a similar thing, except it stores the thumbnails in my SD card. (The factory reset won't touch SD cards.) Maybe it saves to internal memory when there's no SD card, but I have not checked.

So it's probably more of a feature with a failsafe (i.e. write to internal memory if no SD is there) that wasn't implemented correctly, and you can still delete the files manually anyway. No big deal for me, but it's enough for me to know in case I do dispose/resell my phone in the future. (And if the phone gets stolen, the thief would have gotten hold of the SD card too anyway, so it's moot.)

Jesus was not even portrayed in cinema until 1961's "King of King's".

An earlier silent movie also named King of Kings (1927) also portrayed Jesus. In fact, depictions of Jesus go back as early as 1897, almost in line with the advent of film itself.

Maybe you mean non-sacred depictions? In which case I can only go back as far as 1979 (Life of Brian).

I'm not disagreeing with your main point... just that itty bitty claim. :)

(*if* scaling based on GDP is appropriate)

That's a pretty big if.

As for actual cost of living... my university, NUS, doles out out-of-country subsistence allowances (for when a student/staff goes abroad) based on a per-country estimated cost of expenditures (excluding accommodation) per month. The circular estimates this at S$450 for US and S$300 for China.

No idea how they calculate this, but it was pretty accurate for me. It was S$265 for the Philippines (where I live), roughly translating to Php 8745, which was close to our minimum wage. For Singapore it was S$480, which is close to my current monthly expenditures if I don't splurge on anything.

Given that 1.5 : 1 ratio for US : China, $7.30/hour in the US is roughly equivalent to $4.87/hour in China.

If we use this (admittedly not firmly grounded) calculations, $.52/hour is not enough, even for China.

If it's fat (not the flavor) that makes prime beef sought after, then McDonalds hamburger beef ought to be considered prime.

And you've sidestepped your own original point ("Exercise adds flavour to the meat"). Exercise reduces marbling. Kobe beef comes from Wagyu cattle which don't exercise at all, to the point that workers have to massage them to keep them from getting sick.

Exercise adds flavour to the meat at the expense of tenderness.

It would have a stronger flavor, yeah, but I'm not so sure it would be better. Usually it's the subtle flavor that makes prime beef sought after.

You can go all the way and put cows on strenuous daily exercise, and you'd get meat that tastes like liver all around. (Which is great if you LIKE liver... but ah well...)

So even if you were even close to right, those would not be tasty burgers.

I didn't say it would be tasty. :) I'm just saying that if all cows exercised, we'd be left with meat so tough that they need to be ground if we were to consume it.

I don't think all fat would be removed with exercise anyway, so we would still be able to get the McDonalds formula burger. But we won't anymore get to eat steaks that are cooked rare or medium rare (my personal favorite). :(

Really? Because a lot of hamburger meat is ground chuck.

Which is still tougher than rib and loin meat. That's STILL why it's ground for hamburgers.

But the biggest problem with your statement is that the treadmill is supposed to help this farmer power his milking machines...

Actually my own statement was that IF cows exercised to produce power and get cows lean, THEN all we get is meat suitable for hamburgers (and not much more) because the rest of the cow will be tougher and the meat will inevitably need to be ground. That was in response to the GG parent post's idea to exercise cows intentionally to get lean meat, which I disagree with. There are ways to get the cow leaner (making the meat healthier) without exercising its muscles (making the meat tougher).

I don't see how that conflicts with your statement "the treadmill is supposed to help this farmer power his milking machines, and exercising his dairy cows". That seems to be a different thought altogether from what I was discussing. Care to clarify how it opposes my statement?

Who really cares about energy when we are dieing from a bad hamburger...

Hamburger meat is most often made from ground beef. The beef is ground because it's tough. The beef is tough precisely because of exercise.

Prime cuts actually come from the type of cows that are restricted from moving so much in the farm. Not sure if they're healthier, as they do have more marbling (fat), but I'm just saying that hamburgers WILL be the only type of beef available if all cows exercised. :P

said professor Rao Yi, dean of the life sciences school at Peking University

"Peke" in my native language (filipino) is our rough translation for "fake".

It was hard to keep my face straight when I read the name of that university.

not a google expert, are you? hint: try searching for church programming language..

Why, thank you very much!... for illustrating my gripe with Goodman's approach by means of example. :)

That's EXACTLY why so-called "expert" systems such as MYCIN and Church will NEVER deliver on the promise of a grand theory of AI.

The way the author wrote the article, it seems like nothing different from an expert system straight from the 70's, e.g. MYCIN. That one also uses probabilities and rules; the only difference is that it diagnoses illnesses, but that can be extended to almost anything.

Probably the only contribution is a new language. Which, I'm guessing, probably doesn't deviate much from, say, CLIPS (and at least THAT language is searchable in Google... I can't seem to find the correct search terms for Noah Goodman's language without getting photos of cathedrals, so I can't even say if I'm correct)

AI at this point has diverged so much from just probabilities and rules that it's not practical to "unify" it as the author claims. Just look up AAAI and its many conferences and subconferences. I just submitted a paper to an AI workshop... in a conference ... in a GROUP of co-located conferences ... that is recognized by AAAI as one specialization among many. That's FOUR branches removed.

Actually, it might work.

You have to make the distinction between people who distribute CRACKS and people who distribute the SOFTWARE itself (presumably along with the crack). The latter people are usually the sociopathic, immoral, uncaring bastards. That, and they are usually pretty DUMB (they sometimes end up accidentally distributing software with malware on it). So dumb that I highly doubt these people would have skills to crack the software themselves.

The crackers, on the other hand, are usually pretty brilliant people (they reverse-engineer binary software after all) who just didn't have money and didn't (or refused) to make the connection between "illegal" and "immoral".

Many of these guys even claim in their release notes, "If you like this game, buy it!", which points to the likely possibility that they just cracked these things to get their fair-use rights back.