Wait, when did stopping work on old projects become arrogant?

Jesus. If that's now arrogance then I must be far more arrogant than I ever realised, as I've worked on many projects over the years and presently work on just one or two ...

The thing that always bothered me about Swartz is why didn't rich benefactors

Really? When the prosecutor was tring to shoot for 30 years and crap like wire fraud, that was what bothered you?

Quoting song lyrics does not make you correct, even if Van Morrison had some kind of point he was making.

Point out anything counter to the politically-correct paradigm on global warming. B-)

Religious zealots are more than happy to abuse the moderation system to suppress discussion threads when they begin to question any aspect of their religion.

Turning it on its side and putting it into the Google Cardboard (or similar) stereoptic holder gives you about a 1440x1250 display per eye. Looks right to me.

Now if (as I suggested in the Cardboard item) they installed two cameras on the phone back, separated by about eye distance, you'd have a camera that could take and display stereoptic pictures and/or do augmented reality without losing the scene's depth.

This is a great use for the (otherwise excessively) high-resolution cellphone displays such as Apple's "retina".

Also: This is a strong argument for putting TWO cameras on a cellphone's backside - separated by about the typical distance between a person's eyes and equally speced relative to the centerline of the phone. That would enable the formation of a stereoscopic augmented reality display showing the correct image of the background. (It would also enable taking stereoptic pictures.)

Even some of the more extreme estimates of the amount of temperature change expected just mean, to a farmer, that his great grandsons might do better if they switch to crops that are currently grown a couple hundred miles closer to the equator or a couple hundred feet lower on the hillside. (Something like they did during the Medieval Warm Period, when Iceland had lots more cropland and grapes were grown on a large scale in Britain.)

So even if you convince them that global warming is real, don't expect anything but a cheer from the farmers of Sweden.

There are a lot of steps between "It looks like the average temperature might go up four or five degrees C in the next couple centuries." to "We must take drastic action RIGHT NOW to AVERT DISASTER!". Like figuring out whether such a temperature rise is really a threat - or might even be a boon. We're still working on "Is it real?"

Except, of course, for politicians, who can use that last claim to increase their power, or (like Al Gore) make billions off a "carbon credit exchange" built on anti-global-warming legislation.

The last thing I need, if I'm injured in a way that disfigures my face, is a car that won't let me start it to drive to the emergency room.

That's right up there with the federal experiment, back in the '60s or so, with mandating seatbelt and seat weight sensors that interlocked with the starter, so you can't start it if all the passengers aren't belted in.

(I, and about five of my friends, were very luck my car dated from before that mandate, the time we were visiting a friend who worked in a trainyard, my car stalled across a track, a train came {slowly but inexorably} around the sharp curve, and my right-front passenger unbelted in preparation to bail if I couldn't get it going again. We didn't have enough time to all bail ...)

So apple is retiring a photo editing software product and expects their customers to switch to their cloud photo editing service. They're replacing images stored locally with images stored externally.

Ignoring Snowden and the NSA for the moment, let's look at LEGAL seizure of your pictures to be used as evidence by government agencies, in rule enforcement, investigation, and criminal prosecution.

Not only are files under your physical control y'harder to get to physically than those transmitted over the Internet and stored in a vendor's server farm, they're also on better legal ground. The Supreme Court seems bent on treating electronic files, under your control, just like paper files locked in a safe at home. Just three days ago they ruled that police can't even search information stored on a cellpone carried by an arrestee without first coming up with probable cause and obtaining a warrant.

The last I heard, though, they considered information you stored on some vendor's servers to have been disclosed - that you have "no expectation of privacy" with respect to it. The police can go fishing through it just by asking, without jepoardizing prosecutions that result from what they fiind. Even if the third party cloud service demands paperwork rather than just giving access, a company like Apple has far less interest in protecting your data from fishing expeditions than you do.

Given the rat's nest of laws in the US, the prevalance of false or mistaken prosecutions, and the deliberate use of the legal and tax systems to punish those disliked by those in power (at all levels), I'd think nio sane person would put any personal information onto a cloud service (without at least encrypting it locally first with a key unknown to the service), let alone in a form that could be manipulated on the service. Photos are a particular risk, for a number of reasons I don't think I need to enumerate.

So I'd think that, both for personal use and for professional photographers, the substitution of a cloud service for a local tool working on locally stored data, would be unacceptable.

ivory tower

I've got a working hypothesis that anyone who uses the term "ivory tower" generally has a massive chip on his shoulder and very little idea what he's talking about. I have yet to see a counterexample.

"You cannot force people to do jobs they have no interest in"

Really? Most people, given the choice (e.g. won the lottery) would not do what their day job is. While you can't force people to do jobs you can provide a strong incentive with money. This is why desirable jobs tend to be badly paid (e.g. working with animals---many people want to do it and would do it for fun) and non desirable jobs are well paid.

K-12 CS is wreckless and ignorant. a 12 atom potassium bonded to a single Cesium? what are you doing?

Doing bad chemistry clearly. That would K-12 Cs. K-12 CS is some organosulper.

Google was originally going to show that message only on pages that had results removed. But that would make too much sense so the EU banned it, because then you'd know someone was trying to hide something! So now they just put that message on every query that contains a name.

After the cookie law that broke my browser settings by displaying a stupid nag on every website I visit, I thought the EU couldn't fuck over internet users even more, but yup they found a way!

How? That sounds like a pretty apt description to me.

Anyway, the real problem with this ruling isn't that it's stupid (though it is), it's that it's unenforceable without building a Great Firewall of Europe, and when people realise that they're gonna be pissed off that their new "right" doesn't really exist or work.

It should go without saying why a GFE would be a disaster of unspeakable proportions. It effectively means partitioning Europe into its own internet. And I don't think that will happen just to defend this stupid "right" of people who don't like what appears when people search for them. They have a much better solution - either put better information about themselves online, or go after the people who uploaded the original information, and if neither of those appeal, then learn to deal with it.