> retired it due to not having any PS2 machines any more.

That isn't a reason to part with a Model M. Get a USB converter (you may have to try a couple) and keep on trucking. I have an original Logitech three button mouse on the same adapter with my Model M. I use the middle click a heck of a lot more than the wheel so prefer an actual button that won't end up sending scroll up/down every time I middle click on a link to throw it into a tab for later reading. Have to clean the mouse out every month or so but other than it is still good to go.

Can I get an AMEN!

I have a pair of em. Thinkpads also tend to have darned good keyboards even after the Lenovo takeover.

If ya spring for the good stuff it lasts. And face it, keyboards aren't something that you need to change out every year or two when you buy a faster machine. Keyboards endure. Old keyboards even have a full size spacebar instead of those almost useless Microsoft mandated keys.

> Its a good idea to have scientists advising politicians on science.

Agreed. But when debating the policy implications of AGW a climatoligist is useless. What insight can they offer into whether cap and trade is a good idea? They aren't economists. If the conversation turns to carbon sequestration they aren't the person to ask whether that is feasable. If we want to talk alternative energy they can't provide any insight on that either. You need different scientists and experts to answer those questions. Climatology is a pretty narrow specialty.

> notwithstanding Mann's dubious practices

But that is just it. Mann is the elephant in the room, you simply can not ignore him. He was so obviously a fraud, and stone cold busted, and not a single voice was raised against him by the warmers. That is called a clue. What more do you want, the hand of God to reach down to you with a graven stone tablet saying "AGW IS A FRAUD!" or something? They didn't care if the science was fake because they aren't interested in the least in science. They have a policy solution in mind and the science will be tortured until it confesses.

AGW may indeed be real. But it is literally impossible to say at this point. The raw data was destroyed and the 'adjusted' data we have left is unreliable. Not only that we would need a lot more data for a lot longer than reliable records have been kept to say with the reliability normally expected from science. We do know the Earth has been both a lot warmer and a lot colder than at any point in the last hundred years. We are making predictions on time horizons as long as our reliable data set of past history and covering that lack with a lot of proxy data of dubious reliability. Doesn't sound very scientific if ya ask me, but I'm just a lay person. But somehow I doubt anyone would build a multibillion dollar chip fab on a theory of such reliability yet we are supposed to entirely reorder our economy on this theory's predictions. And anyone who expresses a doubt is called an idiot, anti-science and worse.

Exactly. I am exactly as qualified to discuss the policy implications of AGW as Mann. Both of us are interested lay people who have studied the issue and can debate it as ordinary citizens as part of the political process. Except of course that isn't how it works, he is held up as an expert. He isn't. Al Gore on the other hand, IS a politician and is actually qualified to debate (I can disagree and experts on my team can take him on, it is politics) the policy side. Where he fails is in trying to go the other way and argue the science. He isn't a scientist any more than I am and it is silly when the media hold him up as an expert on the science, scientists were embarrassed by much of the science in _An Inconvenient Truth_ but because they agreed with his politics they kept their yap shut.

No. I have looked into the HIV/AIDS thing enough to be willing to bet that if it isn't the entire story it is pretty close to it. But when the banhammer came down in the 1980s on any dissent (the science is settled! Settled I say!) there was still some room for doubt. That is the sort of thing that creates conspiracy theories. Especially when you have celebrated cases like Jordan who was announced to be HIV positive how far back and still AIDS free?

There is a lot of areas of scientific inquiry that are simply forbidden. People notice that. There is also a lot of 'settled science' that is probably far from settled. There is a word for that sort of thing. Politics. So the only people who don't believe science has been politicized is the few who agree with so many of the political decrees they don't even see it as a controversy. I.e. progressive academics.

Damned right. As a rational person pissed at the debasement of science by the political hack poseurs.

At most a climitologist can rightfully say the Earth is warming, CO2 is the cause and human activity is the likely cause of the increase of CO2. Beyond that they should say NOTHING. Other scientists, in other fields, are qualified to evaluate proposed policies. What to do about it in the policy realm is as far outside their expertise in climatology as Sally Field's infamous Congressional testimony on the plight of farmers because she had played one in a movie. The second they use the cloak of science to push policy solutions they aren't scientists anymore, they are amateur politicians. Emphasis on the amateur.

Lefty professors ask a loaded question rigged to produce the result they wanted, anyone suprised? Good way to prove our point that science has been politicised to the point a lot of us take a default position of "BS!" on any pronouncement from the white labcoat set that has the slightest whiff of politics.

We notice that all of the mentioned 'science' issues are tied to public policy positions of the left and that the 'scientists' are working outside their areas of expertise when they push policy solutions to the problems they 'find.'

We doubt AGW because we have been given very solid fact based reasons to. We see hacks like Mann protected from the consequences of his fraud with the 'Hockey Stick" and nay, even rewarded for it. Cleared from all wrongdoing by the same corrupt institution that turned a blind eye to Sandusky and covered his crimes until they exploded into the newspapers. And both for the exact same reason, they were stars who brought in the sweet sweet cash money.

The whole HIV/AIDS thing got wierd because it is a complex and murky thing and yet anyone with an eye willing to open it could see that it was totally politicized. It was the only disease in human history to get a bizarre sort of 'rights' attached to it. Whole lines of research were simply forbidden as career ending. Consipracy theories almost always pop up in vacumns of fact, especially when it is pretty obvious that facts are suspected but being supressed.

This is even worse than it first appears if you get past the hype and look to history. In the past pretty much every developer Microsoft could find would have development tools a year before a new OS launched to ensure apps would be ready to drop on release day. Nokia just announced product with Windows 8 and select brown nose devs will be getting complete dev tool support SOON? What?

Balmer may still be there but he ain't the same Monkey Boy who did the sweaty, bouncy, "Developers! Developers! Developers!" dance. It is clear that not only the hardware partners are going under the bus, the future for 3rd party application developers is dimming. Which of course is the way it must be. Microsoft currently has as close to a total monopoly on the desktop with Windows and Office as can be. So if they are to grow the topline they won't be doing it by doing more of what made them big. So they have to take in the hardware profits and eventually try to suck in the rest of the application space's profits. Dell's profit margins aren't huge but it makes serious coin on the gross revenue line and it will look good on the topline to keep the institutional investors happy a few more years. Plus, in the long run it is probably the only way to truly lock the platform, which is the only way to cut off the penguin's oxygen supply.

They could take out Netscape by making IE free but that doesn't work with Linux since it is already Free. But what it does need is a plentiful supply of commodity hardware and thus that is it's oxygen. Cut that off and it dies. Android can be dealt with later, assuming they don't end up just monitizing it through patent trolling to the point it makes them so much money they can't afford to kill it.

Preach brother.

If you wanna see the Mouse's attitude, go look at a Disney DVD. Every other studio puts a (C) year on there, denoting the year of Copyright, with the implication someone might want to know the year to know if it has expired. Not the House of Mouse, they just say Copyright without a year because as far as they are concerned it ain't ever going into the public domain if they can help it.

Except the local NBC weatherman was going "Huh?" since the odds of rain when they accounced the change were only 30% and more likely to drop than increase. In fact by today's forcast there was no chance of rain in the forecast. If they really were afraid of the chance of a little summer rain they never would have planned to do it outdoors in the summer. No, the move was because they were afraid they couldn't fill it and didn't want video of empty seats going viral.

> If something goes wrong on an unmanned mission, you can scrap it and try again and still get away with spending less.

Your argument works, but only to a certain point. A robotic mission requires zero defects and perfect foresight since, software excepted in some conditions, you have what you have and can't change it. The longer and more complicated the mission the lower the odds of achieving that go, which seems to be the crux of the problem with Mars missions. Even if each part/stage beats the fabled five nines of reliability, if you chain enough of those you get almost certain failure. Eventually you need the ability to fix things, adapt to the actual conditions you find yourself in, etc. That means people and as soon as you get beyond the Earth/Moon system the propagation delays make waldos impractical so the humans need to be in the same general area. If we had good enough waldos we might keep the humans in Mars orbit during the early stages.

Ok, didn't reply to this last night because I didn't want the main topic going off sideways. I only troll useless articles and try to keep the politics in articles with a political bent already. Around an election it seems every thread gets political but I won't contribute to that in a real News for Nerds article like this one.

I mean the Democratic Party in the US. It has become anathma to the ideals of the Revolution and is utterly incompatible with any republican (small r) form of government the Founders would recognize as related. Thus, like Cato the Elder I realize one will eventually destroy the other and I am making it plain that I have a preference. The Democrat Party (they hate that phrasing for some reason, so of course I use it) must be purged from all positions of authority down to the last city council member in San Francisco and the very last college president. Getting there will require a reawakening of political discourse not seen since the guns fell silent in the original Revolutionary War but everybody needs a goal, and that is mine.

Go look at eBay. There is a US based vendor selling a replacement for an iPhone 4 for 6.25. They claim OEM part and new but even if lying about the original equip part they are selling a battery, with free shipping, for cheap enough that it is a certainty that Apple could deliver them to their stores at a low enough cost they could sell them for $10 and make a profit.

And this is why robots aren't going replace people anytime soon. One little thing goes wrong with an unmanned mission and either a major subsystem is written off or the entire mission is a failure. People are able to do thigs robots aren't going to be able to do for quite a while longer. And it gets even worse as soon as you go beyond full duplex radio range. If you have to send a command, wait for a result, try something else, repeat until you scream, things get really slow the second you aren't executing preplanned directions without errors.

And people can perform physical actions we have yet to build a robot to do reliably. Sure they can put thousands of bolt on one after another on an assembly line but how many could deal with this one stuck bolt? None. Now try to build one that can open up a panel and troubleshoot wiring or plumbing.