My question is - do you believe that Mr. Jobs is rightfully praised as an inventive genius?

In the popular press, Steve Jobs is often praised as one of history's greatest inventors and as an inventive genius, and I feel it does a disservice to true inventive geniuses (such as Tesla) to praise talented businessmen with modest or little inventing talents as great inventors.

From my reading of the history of Apple and specific Apple product lines - his talents are primarily with business and marketing - with providing little in the way of invention or technical skill.

He of course has his names on numerous Apple patents - but this seems more as a hedge against having patents invalidated by not listing all who 'contributed' to an invention due to the risk of any feedback or comment being viewed as a contribution to the invention however minimal.

Mr. Jobs did have some true inventions to his credit - for instance using plastic cases for the Apple I, insisting on good quality bitmap fonts for the Macintosh.

Most of the inventions that the public attributes to him are primarily based on the inventive and technical talents of others (Ie the Apple line, Macintosh line, iPod, iPhone), were almost all completely developed with almost no significant invention on the behalf of Mr. Jobs (sometimes as with the case of the iPod, the products were concieved of and invented and developed almost completely outside of Apple) .

He certainly contributed by providing good user feedback (ie reducing the delay time for loading and switching for the iPod OS), but such feedback aren't inventive in nature.

While it is true that you can engineer essays to be 'bad' and still score 'good' - the question is - are there natural essays that score good but are actually bad; and good essays that score bad but are actually good.

Every analysis I've seen suggests that these algorithms do have problems with good essays that are highly creative. Essay graders also have difficulties with this kind of essay - giving drastically varied scores.

However there doesn't seem to be much evidence of other issues except when an extremely knowledgable issue deliberately trys to make the algorithm fail. Any student or other individual who can do this probably knows that material well enough to 'get an A' if they were to properly apply what they know so this seems like a non issue.

Probably failing to take into account the value of the targets compromised was the biggest flaw.

Since the average apple user will be far more profitable (apples are a luxury good and thus will have a higher percentage of wealthy users) to compromise than the average pc user, he needed to adjust the numbers downward to take that into account.

We can already tailor antibodies to particular protiens. The issue is that cancer cells, bacteria and viruses are complicated. Their populations change under selective pressure from antibodies so that the protiens that were useful targets beocome useless, etc. While we are finding highly conserved genes to target it is non trivial.

Completely agree - bad ideas are common as dirt, good ideas are extraordinarily rare. Those who say 'ideas are a dime a dozen' are usually wanting to get good ideas for cheap or free.

What is claimed by the article is that the patent should not have been granted because corporations already had hardware on the market that used the particular combination of algorithms recommended in the patent years before the patent was filed. No one had patented it because it was in fact 'patently obvious' since that is what was already being used.

Unfortunately I don't know enough about the technology to know if the claims of the author are accurate.

This wasn't a mistake, it was a deliberate misrepresentation on the behalf of whoever did the editing or ordered the editing done.

When the corporation claims 'oops' when it is obviously deliberate, it leads to distrust. There most definitely should have been firings over this.

You could contribute to Ogre, Crystal Space, Blender Game Engine, or Erlicht. Or physics frameworks such as Bullet; or if AI is your interest - Recast and Detour. Or sound openal. If you are interested in the 'tool' side - then write importers/exporters for Blender; add tools that make rigging; skinning; modeling; texturing; animating; etc easier. You might also try writing importers/exporters for non opensource projects - ie Maya, 3DSMax, XSI, ZBrush - one taskthat would benefit blender users and build your knowledge of scripting and APIs for commercial 3d Apps would be to expand the .bullet importer to handle a wider variety of data. (Bullet format is the .blend format with the parser rewritten to be BSD compatible but not all of blenders features are currently handled).

You can also find a volunteer team and program some actual games.

You can also use commercial frameworks (Unity, etc.).

If you are a student you could apply for 'Google Summer of Code' for one of the projects listed above and add one of the items for their wishlist if they get accepted.

The inventors of Siri, NOT Apple implemented 'attitude' for Siri, when Apple bought them out they didn't undo that decision. Also Google naming the software with a nod to the historical popularization of the idea, does not mean that the implementation will be similar in nature to popularization. You would likely have greater success in persuasion if you would check your facts and make sure that your assumptions are valid.

It increases intensity and frequency of both droughts and floods - it is divergence from 'moderate' climate that is what you are looking for.

If you have a basic understanding of physics it should be obvious that increased warmth would cause more floods and droughts - increased total temperature causes faster evaporation both over land and ocean - for those areas where the clouds tend to not drift (and hence low rain fall historically) this will lead to more droughts; for areas of historical high rain fall - the greater ocean evaporation leads to more rain and hence more flooding.

Actually flooding and droughts have been expected from the beginning. There is greater total energy which results in greater evaporation both over land and over ocean. Thus those areas that recieve modest rain fall historically end up with higher rates of evaporation leading to more frequent droughts, and those areas that have high rain fall historically get more frequent and stronger rains leading to more flooding.

The only ones who thought it was just droughts that would happen had little or no understanding of the science.

Except that is the opposite of history - Jobs kept trying to kill the project at Apple that brought the GUI to the masses. Raskin and his team had already incorporated most of the Xerox PARC technology in the Macintosh project, and Steve wanted it killed, so Raskin went over his head. Steve still kept trying to kill the project so Raskin organized a field trip to Xerox PARC so that Jobs could get a clearer idea of why the ideas were important and would hopefully stop trying to kill the project. After this instead of trying to kill the Mac, Jobs forced Raskin out to take his project.

So we have the GUI in SPITE of Steve Jobs, not because of him.

http://www-sul.stanford.edu/mac/parc.html

Actually the real history is that Raskin arranged the visit so that Steve Jobs would see why the technology that was in the Macintosh was important and hopefully convince Jobs to quit trying to kill the Mac.

http://www-sul.stanford.edu/mac/parc.html