Just like Newton's ideas about gravity and the mechanistic universe were shown as flawed and debunked by the advent of relativity and quantum theory.

Being incomplete, yes, even being flawed, is not to be unexpected for scientific theories and studies. Indeed, almost all such endeavors in the history of mankind turned out to be flawed and incomplete. That does not diminish their importance though, as attempts to reduce the blurriness of our understanding of the world.

This is why I led my post with the deliberate statement of "[...] if the Kinsey studies have shown one thing [...]"; implying directly that I know that they were somewhat flawed and in many ways also a product of their times.
Still, their importance (along with similar studies done in Europe around the same time) helped western society grasp that a binary model of sexuality is even more deeply flawed and incomplete.

That is not to say the binary model does not approximately correspond to nature -- after all most species need heterosexual sex to procreate. It merely needed pointing out that it was missing a lot of the nuances of reality. Nuances that, when ignored, can lead to to wrong conclusions and predictions. And since these are applied to humans (instead of falling apples, to stay with Newton), the results of such errors can be quite ugly.

In that case, the number would be likely much higher. After all, if the Kinsey studies have shown one thing, it is that pure homosexuality is as rare as pure heterosexuality. Most people fall into the range where they "merely" strongly favour one gender over another, but not to the exclusion of the other.

Furthermore, sexual attraction is not the same thing as actually wanting sexual intercourse. It ranges from simple and almost universal things like the benign interest in the aesthetics of human bodies -- no matter the gender --, over gendered group bonding (best example: sports clubs) up until bonding with a specific individuals (best example here: soldiers in war).

And then remember that your mind is also capable of empathy on all levels. For example, if you see someone cut themselves, you most likely feel a mirror of their pain. That's why horror movies are so effective.
The same is true for sexuality. After all, if that were not the case, porn would not be as effective and desired (by any culture, any gender, really).

For example, if you see a movie in which two people kiss, do you totally ignore one partner? No, you perceive and are affected by them both. You might like some combinations of genders better than others, but you can not deny that the kiss will affect you either way and that something in your brain will mirror the feelings (physical as well as emotional) conveyed by the kiss.

Additionally, sexuality is the result of a developmental process and like any such feature (height, skin color, etc.) it has as much a genetic "pre-set" component as well as a environmental component that can divert the development. If you flood a male embryo with androgen-blockers, the embryo will turn physically female, along with an increased chance to be attracted to men. Same if you flood a female embryo with the right cocktail of male hormones.

And like your final body height is influenced by the supply of nutrients during development, sexual orientation is influenced by a myriad of environmental factors. And like height, the result is a sliding scale. In many ways, your genes only supply the starting point for that first cell, but not where you will end up.

As such, if you don't limit "bisexual urges" to people who actively strive to have physical sex with either gender, you will see that your 10% is an estimate on the lowest conservative threshold.

Private law (privileges) do not mean that they only apply to yourself. It means that the law is your own law.

For example, a privilege of kings in times past was to hunt in the royal woods (i.e. all woods owned by the king; under strong feudalism that meant all woods). Only the king and his men were allowed to hunt. If you were caught "poaching", that was usually punished quite draconically.

As such, the law was private in so far as that it applied to, or benefited a select few; not private in so far as that only the king was beholden to it.

Another form of private law is when you enact a general law that ostensibly applies to everyone, but only benefits specific individuals. One such law was the three-class voting system of 17th-19th century Europe.
For example, in the German Empire (1871-1918), every free man over 25 was allowed to vote. But the vote was not equal (aside from excluding ~70% of the population to begin with).

You see, the parliament was split into three categories of seats: 1/3rd of the seats were elected by the general populace. 1/3rd by the clerus (church) and the last 1/3rd by the landed aristocracy.
Which meant that 90% of the voting populace was represented by the first third; the 8% working for the church got the next third and the last third was voted in by a paltry 2% of the voting populace (~0.5% of the general population). Three guesses how the parliament usually voted...

This law applied to everyone, and by becoming filthy rich enough to buy yourself into either the church or into landed aristocracy, you could increase the effect of your own vote. But still, this law was in effect a private law, as it applied to different people differently -- in other words: it granted a privilege.

Some private laws are unavoidable or sensible -- like withholding the right to vote from significantly mentally disabled or ill persons; or from children whose vote would be no more than either white noise or the vote of their parents.

But most private laws are just this: plainly unjust.

To be a cynic:
The voters got exactly what they wanted: Private enterprises buying their own law with no government in sight to stop them. That's what privilege means in its pure form: Private Law.

After all, remember that a democracy needs at least three pillars to survive: A strong executive (government), a strong legislative (parliament) and a strong judicative (courts).
Weaken one of them, and you open up the chance for people to abuse the disproportional strength of the other two (or even one).

Strong executive/legislative with a weak judicative leads to a police state, where the due-process of law is abandonded.
Strong legislative/judicative with a weak executive leads to corporatism with a nice load of loophole abuse and unfair privileges -- which is what you see above.
Strong executive/judicative with a weak legislative leads to a static, reactionary state, where a small elite forms a wall against any change.

Do note that countries that lose yet another pillar are usually civil-war-torn dysfunctional messes or dictatorships of the worst calibre.

So, why do you want a weak executive again? Or, if you interpret "small government" to include both legislative and executive, why are you so crazy to want that?

Just as a minor node to myself; it is "James Clerk Maxwell" not "James Maxwell-Clark". Figures I would misremember his name after just having read an article about the Lewis & Clark expedition. :P

Even if we restrict the definition of "science" to your definition; that is that science is purely "evidence-based, hypothesis-driven testing", computer science would still fit the bill.

Remember, that CS is as diverse a field as modern physics is. You have theoretical CS, where you tackle questions like: "What is a good, logical definition for computability?" or "How can you logically prove that a program terminates/runs in X time/consumes X resources, no matter the input". This is fully equivalent to the questions of theoretical physics, where you tackle the Grand Unified Theory -- joining gravity, the weak and strong force as well es electromagnetism.

These theoretical question can be brought up without need of evidence -- if all you're interested in is disproving something. According to your definition, this means that the theoretical aspects of both physics and CS are not "science". Okay, let's run with that.

The nice aspect of theoretical questions that can't be disproven by pure thought is, that they lead us on to try to discover concrete evidence that a given theory is true or false in real application! And this is where your rather narrow definition of science comes in, and the point where we find that both practical physics and practical CS fulfill the criteria.

For example in physics, we can test the theory of relativity by building telescopes that look at stars and black holes, to see whether the hypothesis' predictions hold true to raise the hypothesis to the state of a theory. As can be seen with the term people use for "X of relativity", this has happened for relativity.

But if you look with even more than a superficial glance at CS, you will see that the same process is at work in moving from theoretical CS to practical CS. One open question of theoretical CS is whether P = NP or not [1]. So far, we are incapable of disproving either possibility with pure thought. Thus, we turn to practical CS where people try to find evidence of either in the real world. After all, if you can create a program on a real computer that solves an NP-hard problem while never leaving the limits of P, you have conclusively shown that P = NP. So far, we've only found approximative or heuristic solutions that do that, so after 50 years of turning up with "no evidence" we are allowing ourselves to say that the hypothesis of "P != NP" should be treated (even if only cautiously) as a theory -- and we're indeed doing that, as you can see if you look at most modern encryption methods.

But you might say: That is not enough! After all, you could reduce any written computer program on a physical hardware to a sequence of logical steps in a system modeled with pure-thought. And indeed you can, as the Turing-Model of computation promises exactly that -- and so far physical evidence agrees with us. But isn't the same true for physics? After all, physicists search for such a description, too! It's what Maxwell-Clark, Einstein and lots of other physicist were and are after when they ultimately search(ed) for the Grand Unified Theory. How can you blame CS for already having found its Unified Theory?

But the last example finally puts the nail in you view: What about Quantum Computers? They are the point where physics and CS meet; both on the theoretical part (Quantum Theory / Quantum Computation) as well as the practical part (building the thing and proving that the shit actually works as advertised).

So, if we accept your definition of science; then it follows directly that if CS is not a science, Physics can't be either.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_versus_NP_problem

I think you misunderstood the topic. Please re-read my posting and that of the parent again.

The topic was not about the SoC (where previous iPhones indeed already used the Apple A3-A5 bridges/systems). The topic was only about the CPU .

And the CPU part of the A6 is based to nearly 100% on the ARMv7 specs. If you compile stuff with an ARMv7 compiler, it will run completely unmodified on an A6 -- because its CPU is nothing but an ARMv7 with additional bits bolted onto it.

If you're generous, it's at best like the early AMD CPUs. A core licenced from Intel, created in a manufacturing process mostly designed by AMD (since Intel doesn't license that) with a few additional bits bolted on. Newer AMD Cores are diverging from that, thanks mostly due to microcode translation making x86 a very "virtual" design. And if you remember, ARMv7 -- being mostly still a RISC design -- can't and indeed doesn't need bother with that.

> IOW all based on ARM Holding chip designs - a company co-founded by Apple. Boo-fucking-hoo.

The question was about whether or not it was "designed by Apple", specifically "in California".

ARM is a British company, headquartered in the UK. They do have an office in the Silicon Valley, but they also have ones in Japan, Germany, Sweden, France and a lot of other countries. So if that's your logic you must say that Apple devices are pretty much "Designed all over the world".

I freely support you on the point that ARM was indeed founded as a Joint-Venture between Apple and 2 other companies (Acorn and VLSI), but nowadays Apple only holds ~13% in shares. If holding shares nowadays counts as "being designed by", ohhh, boy, copyright and patent law just got a million times more complicated than they already are.

> the CPU is very much "designed by Apple in California", though manufactured by samsung and/or TSCM.

If you mean by "designed by Apple" in so far as that Apple demands all its suppliers to print the Apple logo (and only that) on the chip, then yes. Other than that, though, you're sorely mistaken, as a 2 minute search would've easily told you:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone

CPU
1st gen and 3G: Samsung 32-bit RISC ARM 1176JZ(F)-S v1.0[3]
3GS: 600 MHz ARM Cortex-A8[4]
4: 800 MHz ARM Cortex-A8[5]
4S: 800 MHz dual-core ARM Cortex-A9[6]
5: 1.3 GHz dual core Apple A6

So only the iPhone 5 has a "design" by Apple. And that is stretching the meaning of design quite a bit (thus the scare quotes). 99% of the design of the A6 is based on the ARMv7 specification; after all, it has to, since it needs to be compatible with the previous ARM CPUs used in previous generations.

To use a car analogy: Calling the A6 "designed by Apple in California" is like saying that taking all the blue-prints from Volvo and just adding a BMW label plus steering wheel turns your Volvo into a BMW.

All the points you raised in your posting work just as well when you replace "ext2" with "FAT32" -- which is the current default amongst users and industry as well.

Let's see, your arguments for ext2 are:
    - It has been tested to death --> (check for FAT32)
    - It has implementations on virtually every OS and platform --> (double-check for FAT32)
    - It would need backing from major OS powers --> (FAT32 already has it)
    - Ext2 is powerful enough --> (so is FAT32, feature-for-feature actually)
    - It has a long history of backwards compatibility --> (FAT32 has seen several extensions; all of them backward-compatible)
    - You could access it from Win95 --> (true for Win95 since OEM Service Release 2.1; not that anyone cares.)
    - You could include a FAT partition to browse it on major OSs (implied: for those that don't support it) --> (Not needed for FAT32; even on DOS)

So if we take a rational look at your argument, we see that FAT32 wins even then. Why? Because it's exactly as you said: It is powerful enough, for the purpose.

As for the other niceties that ext2 has over FAT32; like native symlinks, support for larger files, slightly better permission concept, being more efficient on directories with many, etc. don't factor in, since on USB disks, these don't really come into play. And those that might (like the large directory penalty) are nowadays circumvent by aggressive caching.

The only point you could raise is that ext2 is fully open source and free (libré), while FAT32 merely has an open specification and a handful of minor features that still have patents on them. But as you see in the real world, that was no hindrance at all for its universal implementation.

By the way, here's a working link for those who wish to download this version of DosBox, while the original website is down:

http://www.emucr.com/2013/02/ykhwongs-dosbox-svn-daum-build-20130205.html

See my post from further up in this thread where I've linked to the SVN Daum build of DosBox. Among other things, it contains a very good "Ctrl+Break" patch that adds that particularly little oddity with almost 100% accuracy.

Nowadays, the SVN builds of DosBox can do so much more than the Vanilla DosBox, it's no wonder the maintainers can't decide which of those patches to add to the mainline first.

Actually, newer SVN + patches builds for DosBox go much further than that:
http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/SVN_Builds

The best one, if you ask me, is the SVN Daum build (alas, their website is down at the moment). To quote its set of difference to Vanilla DosBox:

I emphasized the important bit. What these two little words mean is the this DosBox build can not only emulate a DOS printer to dump stuff into various output formats (PNG, PDF, etc.), but it can also pass along the output to a Windows printer driver (which allows you to print to any USB printer) as well as use a real parallel port on your computer to let the DOS talk directly to the printer.

I know at least one company that is using this DosBox build to support printing out of a 20+ year old billing software.

Actually, the opposite would happen.

If you would ban cars, people would leave their suburbs in droves and return back into the city core.

After all, that's how it was from the very first cities of Mesopotamia (~65k inhabitants for the city of Ur in 2000 BC!) over the cities and city-states of Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece (~100k inhabitants in 1000-500BC), continuing with Ancient Rome and the first large cities in South America (up to 250k inhabitants) all the way to the metropolises of the industrial Revolution (London, Paris, Berlin; with millions of inhabitants) and finally the mega-cities of today; like Tokio, Shanghai, Singapore, Mexico and New York City with each near or exceeding tens of millions of inhabitants.

As you notice; all the way up to the very recent histories, these cities grew from ~65k people to over 6 million people; all without the help of cars. The jump from then to now (when cars were available) only pushed that up by a factor of 2.

Cars are actually the reason why cities grew slower than before, with the suburbs and "greater metropolitan" areas soaking up most of the excess population that'd otherwise live much closer to the city core where they could make use of public transportation much more easily. You would see nearby cities grow together, until the boundary between them vanishes; like the Ruhrpott [1] (which grew without the presence of cars) which is more like a huge city with multiple city cores.

So tldr; : No cars would mean even bigger cities. Not in terms of density, but sheer diameter and area filled with people.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruhrpott

I am not the original poster, but let me respond with: Yes, and that is why any sane person should err on the side of safety.

After all, if I can't prove you are guilty and you can't prove yourself innocent; I have to assume you are innocent. Because if you are actually guilty, I have merely just not punished you for what you already did. But if you are indeed innocent, I would commit a crime (or at least wrongdoing) on top of yours.

On the other hand, if someone has told you that I wrecked my previous 10 cars, you would probably not lend me your car; even if you have no proof for it and I don't have a proof against it. Here, the safe approach is to not lend me the car (unless I can prove to you I desperately need it and you believe me).

Erring on the side of caution is in itself always a very good thing.
The fine details come from when you believe the scales are in balance. For example, in the above case of the car, the person who told you that I'm a car-wrecker could've been a person that you know very well, or a random maniac with soiled clothing. I think in the latter case you'd be more inclined to believe my (still equally baseless) statement of innocence in terms of car-wrecking.

Now look again back at the track record of all parties in the question of "Is fracking safe?" and ask yourself: Are the scales in balance or even tipped in favour of the safe approack of not allowing fracking? If yes, then choose the safe route. If not, then you can contemplate being adventurous -- but be ready to examine the scales if new evidence comes up.

You see, the problem is not the question itself; just which side you find more trustworthy and reliable in its arguments and proofs.