Definitely the best episode i remember. Actually one of the only ones I remember very positively. Great acting, great story, no rush for effects.

It is in the nature of a 95% confidence band to include a scenario which only hits you with a small probability. Ignoring these without good reason is not a valid procedure.

If i dont know a road and my experience is that the speed limitations are too conservative in 99% of the instances (e.g. curves), it is still not a valid procedure to assume that these are always too conservative.

The IPCC report is *not* a scientific publication, since it is self-edited, has no anonymous reviewers, and no otherwise independent mechanism for the control of the content. As a scientist, i dont consider publications under this circumstances at all for making up my mind about the world. However, it is an acceptable pupose to report on the body of (scientifically valid) non-falsified hypotheses (please refer to Poppers theory on science) for advising politics how to spend money for research.

Whether the IPCC reports succeeds in this or not, is not mine to say, but i think the debate is not going well (from all sides), considerign important topics like cloud formation are not understood wnough

  (My personal opinion is that we need *more* research on the extend and possible mechanisms AGW to direct our efforts to the places where we have the bese cost/performance ratio)

When setting your speed on the road, do you orient yourself on "the worst case scenario" (e.g. you car not handling your steering to avoid a suddenly appearing cow and hitting a tree in the middle of nowhere), or do you usually consider the "average scenario" (going on a dry, empty road)?

Considering the first scenario and reducing the impact enough can save your life.

"nuke it from orbit only way to be sure"

He is not my hero, but:

Bill gates did a number of decisions against the mindset of the time, and made computing available to the masses. While other companies required you be in some kind of exclusive club to interoperate, MS allowed to run basic on pretty much everything, even low priced systems (C64), and do everything with it and never demanded that anybody writing programs for their OSes paid them a fee or asked them for permission. The path to put computing to the masses (and go outside the idea of exclusive deals) was probably seen risky, and could have gone wrong.

And while i personaaly mounr over the suffering of OS/2 from a technical viewpoint, i am not sure that staying together in bed with IBM would have done the world much good (although i am sure the short-term revenue could have been higher for MS).

But there is no service which only google can or does provide.

...and the manufactures own brillant vision of a "simplified" android ui...

to use google closed source code if you want to run android apps on your device. Nokia/MS can do it, blackberry too, and obviously many cheap Chinese nameless devices. There are other app stores than google play.

That being said, I understand Google why i they don't like to brand a "dual boot"/"switching device which probably would suck even more power and have a more indeterministic behavior than even the most crapware-loaded samsung device.

If MS or asus likes this so much, nobody hinders them to to the right things, which are either
* give Windows the capability to execute Android Apps from the start
* make an android app which runs windows programs.

Major and popular: yes, one or two. And dont expect me to go into the details. Look for yourself.

Typical sicknesses to look out in open source code:
-bad glue code
-missing or ill-defined tests
-lack of documentation
-code which the current maintainer imagined to start a ne coding style (and misestimated the work associated with this)

Still, i have to admit, the worst open source i have seen comes from commercial projects open sourced at some point.

That is an illusion. I have seen Open source code which looks like shit if you take 10 Minutes to look into it. I have seen worse close-source, though, but i have also seen great closed source code.

If you really need to have a look at a close source lib, you can sign a license agreement with the compnay in question.

We also charge the customer if we install Linux for him. If the price is reasonable is in the eye of the customer, but installing and configuring Linux has the same hourly rate as installing Windows.

Did we forget a little factor in the product?

How much would correcting for this change this changhe the numbers?

As strange as it may seem, Megacities are the most resource-friendly way to live. Unless you are fortunate enough that you and your wife work at the same employer for you whole life, and schools for your children during all their school years are accidentally in the same suburb (pretty unlikely), and all shops happen to be directly in front of your door (that would be in the city), one or more family members will be commuting, and additionally you will go 10 Miles on the highway even for buying a small pack of milk. I always try to live at a place where i dont need a car (even to go to work) or, at worst, only need a car for going to the work/doing shopping and do everything else by foot/bike/subway/train/bus.

Yeah. Imperialist pride. Sure. How about: Maybe they were sent there and did not like it, but after they lived in a purely russian city, where russuan language was demanded from the Soviet Union, newly built there for 50 years they are not welcome at "home"?

Never keep people living somewhere responsible for the political actions of their leaders 60 years ago.