Lolz. "Jehova's Witnesses" and "more sane" right next to each other. Thanks for the laugh. I needed that. :-)

(I'm very thankful that my family escaped from that cult before I was born...)

Meh - Huxley stole the line from Shakespeare... I'm not quite so sure that he'd have disapproved. ;-)

What are you talking about?

Apple didn't pull Carbon in Lion. The Carbon API is still there. Carbon-based apps still work just fine.

What they pulled was Rosetta, the PowerPC emulator. This means that you cannot run PowerPC-only Carbon apps on Lion. Intel-compatible Carbon apps still work fine.

It's significantly less than 1% right now.

Firstly as has been pointed out elsewhere, the beta is only available in a restricted set of countries right now.

Secondly the beta doesn't currently support devices with MIPS CPUs, which counts out several low-cost Android tablets.

Sorry to be a pedant, but back when Apple launched the iPhone, they did say that it ran Mac OS X, and made a big point of it. It was sometime later that they decided to say it ran iPhone OS (and much later still iOS).

Referring to the iPhone's OS as OSX was always confusing, as is the naming of the UI layer (Cocoa vs Cocoa Touch), especially since they are incompatible APIs. It was definitely a good thing when they stopped saying the iPhone ran OSX.

Heh - I was a big Acorn fan, and always felt that they were a bit like the UK's version of Apple. Part of that was the underdog thing - by the time I was aware of what was going on Sinclair was dominant in the UK home market, the IBM PC was around and Apple was starting it's long decline. I wasn't aware of Apple's prior dominance with the Apple ][, since that machine was an also-ran in the UK.

Acorn, like Apple, produced higher cost, higher quality products, whilst Sinclair, like Microsoft, aimed for the mass market. During the 80s those parallels were pretty strong - right up until Sinclair got things badly wrong with the QL and his drive to make electric cars, spending a fortune to produce the Sinclair C5, two pretty spectacular failures. Whilst Acorn outlasted Sinclair by a decade, Sinclair sold many more computers than Acorn ever did.

I don't really see such a strong correlation of personalities though. There's parallels between Gates and Sinclair (the nerdiness), but also between Jobs and Sinclair too (the control freakery, and visionary thing). There's some parallels between Hauser/Curry and Jobs/Woz - with the partners fulfilling similar roles within their organisations on their founding, but the ages around the opposite way. There's also some similarities between those guys and Gates...

Your guarded talk is amusing.

Lyonnaise de Garantie in my opinion must, empirically, be a bunch of crooks.

I don't see any other way of explaining their actions here. Were they not crooks, they should feel no need at all to stop potential customers from asking the question "are Lyonnaise de Garantie a bunch of crooks?", since their potential customers should be quickly come up with the answer "no".

The fact they were so desperate to suppress this question carries the clear implication that they believe the most likely answer that potential customers will come up with is "yes". By taking this action they themselves seem to me to be saying "we're crooks".

Their use of lawyers is in my opinion an attempt at bullying to get their own way - the actions of a bunch of crooks.

Besides which, they're an insurance company. As such in my experience they are by definition crooks - exploiting and overcharging the weak, vulnerable, and needy.

I'm not even remotely embarrassed that we have a Queen in the UK, and given the reality of the political system here (which was copied in whole or in part all around the world, including in the USA) I don't see why I should be embarrassed. The point is that under our democratic system she is not a ruling monarch at all, but merely a geo-political figurehead with a ceremonial role and no political power, hence the quotes that L4t3r4lu5 placed around "ruling".

Indeed, it would be folly to remove the Queen of her title. The Queen, and the rest of the royal family, are responsible for attracting many millions of tourists to the UK, all of whom spend money here. They are the major attraction for most tourists, even though most tourists will never actually lay eyes on them. If you removed them we'd get significantly less tourism (why else would people want to come to this dull and rainy place) and the economy would likely tank.

Indeed. The Falklands are UK territories.

The Malivinas are what Argentina claims are theirs... of course that happens to be the same place.

IMHO the ongoing sectarian war in Iraq would have been a much better and stronger justification for going to war in Iraq.

That case was never even remotely attempted to be made by Bush or Blair. It was not presented as a justification, or a factor in the decision making.

Dude, really? Seriously?

Bush and his lapdog Blair did not try to justify GW2 on the basis that the conditions of the ceasefire that stopped GW1 had been breached. At no stage were arguments explicitly being made that the war was to be a continuation of the earlier Gulf war. To attempt to use that as retrospective justification is poor.

Bush and Blair built a knowingly fraudulent case for war based on "intelligence" they knew to be unreliable, flimsy, and possibly faulty. Their case was that Iraq had WMDs and was a threat to the security of the world and needed to be removed. The weapons inspectors and nuclear inspectors were loudly proclaiming that there was no evidence at all that Iraq had any WMDs, but they were getting shouted down by Bush and his cronies and their evidence ignored. Those with more than half a brain could plainly see at the time that the war was not justified. Millions of people protested in the US, in the UK, and across Europe, against this proposed war.

Whether or not Iraq is better off for the removal of Saddam and his sons is irrelevant to this argument. That is not a justification for war.

Sulu is American. He was born in San Francisco. See Star Trek IV.

The thing that prevents Intel from approaching ARM levels of power consumption is transistor count. Transistors consume power. If your chip demands more active transistors to operate it will use more power.

ARM processor cores simply require far fewer transistors than an Intel core. The phenomenally complex Intel instruction set necessitates this, and cannot be avoided without removing backward compatibility. In order to reduce the active transistor counts complex designs can be used to aggressively disable parts of the core that are not in use - although this technique for power reduction is also used by ARM too.

Intel's only remaining option of making their chips power competitive with ARM is to use smaller manufacturing processes, since smaller transistors require less power. ARM-based competitors to Intel chips are often two, if not three, generations of manufacturing process behind. Obviously this is not a situation that Intel can count on remaining the same forever.

sorry for the lateness of my response.

you're right - with voice recognition, as compared to a conversational user interface, it is important to have the ability for the recognition system to accept feedback in some way to improve recognition. the voice recognition system built into the iPhone 4S does put a dotted blue highlight underneath words or phrases where it was not confident of the recognition. tapping that will produce a pop-up with alternative options - presumably just like Google's. that even happens inside Siri too.

my point however was that whilst this kind of recognition correction is fine for dictation, it's very poor for conversation. so whilst recognition in Siri can be corrected, it will just plough ahead and act on it's first recognition result rather than waiting for confirmation/correction. it tends to manage well enough with that first recognition, and this approach doesn't interrupt conversational flow. the fact that it's recognition wasn't technically perfect rarely affects results.

your comparison of Grafitti vs. the handwriting recogniser Microsoft used (which was produced by ParaGraph - the same cursive handwriting recogniser that been in Newton OS) is an interesting one. ParaGraph's recogniser, in the form that it appeared on the Newton, would provide multiple alternative recognition options for everything it recognised, reached by double-tapping on a word, and it would learn from corrections. the Newton comparison gets more interesting when one considers that Newton included an inbuilt Intelligent Assistant which was, in many ways, very similar to Siri (and in some ways more advanced). one interacted with the intelligent assistant via text, usually inputted via handwriting recognition. but the written input was recognised before the user chose to submit it to the assistant - granting an opportunity to correct the recogniser before being processed by the assistant. it was not really conversational in the way that Siri is.

So your argument is that the US needs to get more innovative before it adjusts its patent system?

Has it not occurred to you that having such a fantastically stupidly rigid, overly broad, and inherently game-able patent system inhibits innovation?

Just about every new invention made in the US is already covered by patents. This makes it extremely difficult to bring new inventions to the market, especially for small new companies, since they can, and most likely will, be assaulted by lawyers wielding patents. The risks are greatly increased, and the potential rewards greatly decreased as a result of this. This is not an environment that encourages innovation - it's one that encourages playing it safe.

The incumbents with the power to change things (politicians, lawyers, lobbyists and corporations) don't really want the current system to fundamentally change since such change threatens their power-base.

Maintaining the status-quo, which inhibits innovation and over the long-term gradually decreases the competitiveness of the US, is of course short-term thinking. But for the most important incumbents wielding power, the politicians and the corporations, the short-term is the priority, since they need to win their next election, and post profits for the next quarter/year.