The problem is that articles on /. are only discussed for a couple hours after they are posted. It is impossible to have a reasoned debate on a message board unless there is a sustained discussion lasting at a few days.

Was Microsoft really worth more than Apple in 1980s? According to Google finance, since pi day 1986 (Microsoft's IPO) Microsoft stock has increased 24850% and Apple stock has increased 10820% (adjusted for splits). Obviously there is not a perfect connection between stock increase and market value (because of stock buybacks, acquisitions, etc.). But if the Google finance numbers are correct, it seems implausible that Microsoft was worth more than Apple in 1986. And since Apple stock did not increase between Apple's IPO (1980-12-12) and Microsoft's IPO, Apple was almost certainly worth more than Microsoft in the early 80s.

Not really. The control animals in these studies are given unlimited amounts of food. They eat excessively because evolution has programmed them to feast when food is available. They are the equivalent of obese humans. So eat 30% less than the typical obese person eats, which would be approximately the RDA not 30% less than the RDA.

I was very interesting in transhumanism in late 90s and early 00s. Back then Kurzweil was not in the picture. The most prominent transhumanists were Nick Bostrom, Max Moore, Natasha Vita-More and FM-2030. Furthermore, to the best of my knowledge, Kurzweil did not make any important theoretical contribution to transhumanism. In fact transhumanism today is ideologically almost identical to transhumanism in the 90s, except that the term "transhuman" is deemphasized in favor of the totally ridiculous term "singularity". So it is surprising to me that Ray Kurzweil has been able to establish himself has the singularity/transhumanism guru despite being a latecomer and making no important intellectual contributions.

How many workers in your office would prefer using Linux and OpenOffice.org to using Windows 7 and MS Office? I suspect almost all of them would prefer using Windows 7 and MS Office. Even a small dip in productivity or worker satisfaction would outweigh savings from using FOSS.

Gmail vs Exchange is a different matter. I suspect most workers under 40 would prefer Gmail, and most older workers would prefer Exchange. If there are savings, a switch might be justified.

to ban your children from reading fiction.

after using Chrome for several months. Chrome was faster and worked better for certain sites including /., but I prefer Firefox's GUI and it handles downloads better. With Firefox pausing and resuming a stalled download almost always fixes the problem, but with Chrome I had no such luck.

Killing Hitler is not really necessary. A better strategy would be to go to Austria a few years before his birth and interact briefly with his father. This would almost guarantee that the same sperm would not enter the same egg and Hitler would be never have been conceived.

The web has been getting more linear for a long time. Greedy businessmen are only part of the problem. The other part of the problem is the emphasis on recentness. The most recent articles are placed first creating a linear organization. Blogs, /., twitter, reddit are all part of this trend. In the past content was more likely to be organized hierarchically (e.g. most personal websites) or with the most recent comments first (message boards and newsgroups). The consequence of this trend is that now articles are only viewed and discussed for about a day after they are posted. In the past discussions would drag on for weeks and months (hence Godwin’s law), and 6 month old content on your website was as likely to be read as 1 day old content.

The author of the poll should estimate the distribution of the quantity in question. For example,

height~normal(70,9)
income~exponential(0.000025)
sexualpartners~poisson(e/pi)

The choices should be the based on the quantiles of the distribution. For example,

How tall are you? a. <5'7" b. 5'7"-5'8.75" c. 5'8.75"-5'10" d. 5'10"-5'11.25" e. 5'11.25"-6'1" f. >6'1"
What was your income last year? a. <$7000 b. $7000-$16000 c. $16000-$28000 d. $28000-$44000 e. $44,000-$72000 f. >$72000
How many people have you had sex with? a. <=0 b. 0-0 c. 0-1 d. 1-1 e. 1-2 f. >=2

What percentage of blog posts get a reply? My guess is a lot less than 29%. 29% is shockingly high.

do not mean much because many patents and papers are low value. A better measure of innovation would be papers in prestigious journals like Nature and Science. If you look you will see a decent number of authors with Chinese names, but most of these researchers will be based outside of China.