The report says the data were not faked.

Was he ever accused of faking the data? The main accusation that should have been investigated is whether Mann (and the other climate scientists in his group) deleted emails to frustrate a legal Freedom of Information Request.

The scientific criticisms are different from the procedural questions.

Procedural
Is it okay to delete emails to frustrate an FOI request?
Is it okay to suppress the raw data that went into the analysis in a scientific paper?

Scientific
Is the "Hockey Stick" valid?
Do galactic cosmic rays influence global temperature by stimulating cloud formation?
Do climate models violate the laws of Thermodynamics?

.NET was written in anticipation of Itanium. Instead, the growth area is mobiles, pads, pdas and such, which use an eclectic mix of chips. The .NET option of generate-code-on-install doesn't apply to mobile apps, where the app store only has what the platform can use. And the big CLR doesn't always fit.

Apple is making a mint on hand-helds, and now has about 70 billion dollars in cash for a rainy day. Apple is huge. The comeback of the integrated hardware-software combination (Apple) changed the marketplace.

Now the Nokia-Microsoft deal is all about putting .NET on phones, so
1) That story is bogus or
2) .NET is making a comeback there, or
3) .NET will bankrupt Nokia.

For rich text effects. Bold, code font, italic, decent looking quote of previous mail.

We need a read-only mounting of a stick that can run software. I'd use it to bring anti-virus software (et cetera) over to computers I want to repair. If I can update it with the last anti-virus signature file on a good machine and then safely bring it over to the sick machine, running all kinds of portable software there. I'd also like to be able to boot from a stick — for the same purpose.

So we need a read-only button on the stick to guarantee the stick doesn't get infected from the sick computer. Does this exist?

I can do this with a CD or DVD, but a stick is more convenient.

Regardless of what the Qt developers do, the toolkit is very good and available. You can just use it to build your software and let the rest of the world jump in a lake. The worst that can happen is that Qt development will be slow and steady.

There were actual reasons that COBOL was more used than, say, ALGOL, although they both became available at the same time, and ALGOL was the better language.

JavaScript is a medium-quality language, with less utility but roughly the same number of flaws as C. What makes it so terrible are the broken tools, broken and old browsers, amateur coders, dumb DOM, and so on.

And what makes all of this worse is the inescapable monopoly it has over client-side web coding.

Consumers buying desktops have brand loyalty to Windows because they know how to operate it. But they don't like it.
Those same consumers buying phones aren't going to jump in because the phone runs some version of Windows. So it's just a cost.

What MS might do well, though, is integrate the phone with their game platform, Xbox. But that's a marketing gamble. The biggest selling apps for smartphones are music/entertainment, and games. There's no platform loyalty there, and only a little game loyalty. No lock-in for developers or consumers. It will never be the cash cow that Office and Windows have been. Likewise with maps and directions based on GPS.

There's a high-price market for a PDA+phone that helps the busy people schedule, manage contacts, and shop, but outside that market, it's all very cost sensitive.

The way ears and fingers are constructed, there isn't much of a market for a phone with a full keyboard, splitting the market. And voice input is still not capable of bridging the gap.

I think in the long run, hardware costs will dominate, software features will converge thru imitation, and it's the wristwatch business all over again.

MFC is bad, and C# is good, for opposite sides of the same reasons. MFC is a C++ wrapper around the Window API intended to "Give access to the API". BUT: Any really good C++ programming framework for Windows programming would also be a system where the applications would be portable to another OS! Oh Heavens! There are good C++ frameworks that allow that sort of portability. GTK and QT come to mind. They avoid being Stamped with the Windows API. No baloney about "Giving access to the API". Enter C# and .NET: Here, quality is not the enemy of Microsoft, but the friend, since only minimal development of C# apps can work on outside of Windows. It's very nearly a captured system. So they produced a very nice language and a very nice set of runtimes. The quality binds the coders to the OS, and the code is nearly as unportable as MFC: The best of both worlds, for Microsoft. If you're a young software developer, go with Ruby, it will improve your mind. Either that or Erlang, to master concurrent, multi-core programming. But if you need to make more money in your current career path, perhaps your wife is pregnant; take courses in management instead.

Most disciplines describe current as flowing from positive to negative, but the physical current is made of electrons flowing the other way. Sometimes it matters, other times not. Before I start experimenting (on my neighbors cat?) I want to know which way the current flowed, for sure.

It's because of Vint Cerf that it's called "Web Cerfing".

Lots of real-time and embedded code is life-critical and has the requirements you talked about. Of course, social networking websites are the opposite. But aircraft, satellites, military, medical equipment, telecom, and so on are just as critical. Look at the reliability inside your laser printer software. This software are made in the Silicon Valley and other tech centers on the west coast, from LA to Seattle.

LastPass will log you in to all your websites once you have logged into LastPass. Just one master password to get to LastPass from anywhere. But you have to have the LastPass add-on in your browser. Since you can't install add-ons in Internet Cafes, it's a limitation. But see LastPass.com for yourself.

Managers control the part they understand. They farm out the parts they don't. The Pentagon managers (Air Force generals, I suppose) don't understand software. They do understand aviation and bomb targeting. And they probably understand combat and intra-service rivalry.