There is one "ground-breaking" aspect as Miranda rights are intended for alleged criminals. Trayvon Martin on the other hand is a *victim* of a crime. On the other hand, it's not uncommon for the defense to put the victim on trial in cases like this one. So while it may not be groundbreaking, it is sad.

Really? I thought it was about the murder of a teenager which went investigated because of Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law.

And just because somebody embraces his Hispanic heritage after being arrested, it doesn't make him not racist.

As the documentary Battlestar Galactica explains, all this has happened before and all this shall happen again. God has created many worlds inhabited by humans but each time humans have created artificial intelligence which wiped them out. Often the AIs would continue and advance so far that they would believe themselves human and create their own AIs who would wipe them out as well. And so on and so on....Basically, God is a grad student running a giant experiment and he still hasn't gotten the bugs worked out just yet....

For the most part people vote for third party candidates knowing that they can't win and see it as a harmless way of registering dissatisfaction with the major party candidates. That is it's just another way of saying, "Don't blame me, I voted for Opus and Bill."

Yes, webOS is the electric lamb which was sacrificed for our technological sins and which has now risen from the dead to point the way to our ultimate redemption.
                      - Palm 3:16

The current incarnation of Windows Phone is actually quite good. They've taken some good ideas from existing platforms, including a few from webOS and combined them into a pleasing, attractive package. The main problem with Windows Phone is that it hasn't been able to get any traction. It is certainly not number three.

And I tend to disagree with the notion that phone UI is not important. Android for example is highly dependent on having users go to its home screen to get things done. That's one of the reasons why the inconsistencies between different carrier versions are so jarring and why the iOS UI, simplistic as it is, tends to win out over Android - particularly with non-techies. ICS goes a long way to fixing Android's UI problems. But there are so many Gingerbread, Froyo, and insert silly pastry name here handsets out there that are still in use - many of them relatively new - that will never be upgraded by their carriers. And of course even the ICS and Jelly Bean phones that do make it into people's hands have been tweaked by handset makers and carriers often for the worse.

Meanwhile iOS remains simple and consistent. Often too simple; but sometimes it's better to be simple than sophisticated. And that's why I miss webOS. More than any modern phone OS, webOS managed to be elegant - able to combine simplicity and sophistication. Even now I'm reminded of webOS's power every time I launch an app on my Android phone. There are two reasons for this: 1. Android's home screen and launcher even with ICS and Jelly Bean have always been and continue to be a mess of icons and widgets with the launcher tucked away and completely disorganized. 2. Because I discovered a very nice little launcher called Wave Launcher which mimics the webOS Wave Launcher which allows to do exactly what you say above, get the UI out of the way and just let the app take over. As with webOS, I can just swipe across the screen and launch any or widget without going back to some home screen and hunting for it. This is what kept me sane during the transition to Android and it is what keeps me on the platform today.

Plus, the lack of existing planet means we get to create one, with our own design

Yeah we'll build our own planet! With hookers and blackjack! In fact forget the planet!

First they came for Julian Assange and Wikileaks. I didn't like Julian Assange or approve of Wikileaks' methods, so I didn't speak up.

Then they came for MegaUpload. I'm not a computer pirate, so I didn't speak up.

Then they came after JotForm. I hadn't even heard of JotForm, so I didn't speak up.

Then they came after me and my blog. There was no one left to speak up....

This is FUD pure and simple. And in a perverse way, it's actually a good sign for webOS and HP. HP has gone through four CEOs since it bought Palm and not one of them had ever bothered to spread fear, uncertainty, or doubt about Palm's mobile competitors until now. Is it possible that Meg Whitman actually cares about beating the competition?

I'm referring to the upgrade version. Even so, the joke was that MS should steal Apple's business model of offering tiny upgrades for $30 when Microsoft has been making tons of money off that model for years and your example is even better.

Where do you think Apple go the idea? What is Windows 7 if not two years of Vista updates bundled together with a new name and sold for $90?

As far as classic or even modern day "robber barons" go, Bill Gates isn't so bad. Certainly Rockefeller's old Standard Oil monopoly ruled the oil industry with a far more iron grip and crushed its competitors more ruthlessly than Bill Gates' Microsoft ever did. And I think I could even argue that Steve Jobs' legacy is probably tarnished more by Foxconn's business practices more than Gates' legacy will be by his own. But I think we can all agree that animated .gifs of Steve Ballmer dancing at developer conferences are hilarious. Let's get that as our Microsoft icon.

Forgot to ask - what license will Open WebOS be released under?

Apache

The man died in 1910. How could his autobiography not be public domain?

Because he had it published posthumously, 100 years after his death.

I curious, isn't the term 'dark matter' just a modern way to say 'aether'? I mean, a long time ago people thought that space was composed of aether because they didn't know what space was comprised of and needed a label with which to call the unknown unseen 'stuff'. Now they're saying space is full of 'dark matter' because it is thought there has to be something and they need a label to call this unknown unseen 'stuff'. So why not just call it aether? I just think it is kind of funny because it looks astrophysicists (or are you called cosmologists?) have come full circle back to aether.

The idea of the aether came about because it was believed that light behaved the way that waves of water or sound do - that is that light needed to travel through a medium. Just like waves must propagate through water and sound must propagate through air, so too light had to propagate through aether. And it was a perfectly reasonable theory until it was proven to be wrong.

So you are right in the sense that dark matter is a label which is being applied to something we don't completely understand in much the same way that aether was. But what invalidated the theory of aether was the Michelson-Morley experiment which tested an important prediction of the aether theory. Since Earth moves around the Sun and the Sun moves around the center of the Galaxy, it should have been possible for Michelson and Morley to detect an "aether wind" with their experiment as Earth moved through the aether. Instead, Michelson and Morley found nothing or at least not enough to justify the existence of an aether. And thus the aether theory faded into history as a failed theory.

The modern equivalent of the Michelson-Morley experiment for dark matter would be if there were some way to measure the strength of gravity (and thus the amount of mass) in a galaxy or cluster of galaxies. And in fact we do have a way to do that through gravitational lensing in which the light of background galaxies is distorted by nearby galaxies. So if we could find a region of space with a large cluster of galaxies distorting the light from other background galaxies and if there was a great deal of gravitational lensing coming from a region of the cluster are which has no visible galaxies, it would be considered fairly compelling evidence that dark matter exists. And that's why people keep bringing up the Bullet Cluster. Because the Bullet Cluster is just such a galaxy cluster where most of the gravity and thus most of the mass can be detected outside of the visible galaxies of the cluster. And while this isn't conclusive proof of dark matter's existence, it is a fairly compelling piece of data and since the Bullet Cluster was discovered there have been other similar observations which make the existence of dark matter seem more likely. So unlike the aether which failed its experimental test, dark matter has for now passed its test and continues as a viable theory.

Any alternative to dark matter would have to explain phenomena like the Bullet Cluster at least as well as dark matter does in much the same way that Einstein's Theory of Relativity simplifies into Newtonian physics when we deal with speeds significantly slower than that of light.