I'll pick this comment to respond to, as a proxy for the many comments posted.

I would like to be clear - I oppose the current occupation of Afghanistan. I don't think it serves our national interest, and would favor a staged retreat starting today.

I also don't trust the government unconditionally - hence my comment about needing WikiLeaks. There's a long history of those in power abusing that power, and the only way to get justice is to expose the problem. No argument there.

But transparency serves us best when it shows us true problems. We gain little from broadcasting our honest errors - that innocents die in conflict is not surprising - but we potentially lose a lot. Obviously, as in cases where informants or soldiers are exposed, less obviously when specific cases become tools for the people who don't like us to use in stopping all our foreign policy actions, not just our current occupation.

I guess what I'm saying is, I applaud WikiLeaks for showing cases of malicious intent, abuse of power, negligence, and general wrong-doing. But I don't support them blanket broadcasting all the gory details of life in war. It doesn't server our interests as a country trying to do good, however misguidedly at times, in the broader world.

I'm not going to jump on you, but you're living up to your handle here a bit.

Prosecuting war (or police actions, or whatnot) is an ugly business. It has to be - armed men, bombs, etc are dangerous. Soldiers are fallible. They have seconds to make the right call, and quite often, screw up. This is a fact of war, and no one disputes it.

In an ideal world, full transparency would be great. If a country were being responsible in its usage of force, for every mis-called bomb strike or innocent victim there would be hundreds of examples of making the right call, calling off the troops just in time, doing the job professionally. A neutral reviewer could say "Yes, there were several major errors, but on the whole, the US troops are doing well in a very difficult situation."

But that is not how the world actually works. One single graphic image, video, or similar can be taken from the overall picture, blown up, put on the front page of newspapers, and tar the entire country and all its soldiers. We see this all the time with politics in the US - good people done in by a goofy on-camera moment (Dean's scream comes to mind) or poorly chosen word or phrase (potatoe!).

This is not to say that all transparency is bad. Simply that full transparency, in this real world we live in, is not all good. We still need something like wikileaks for the next Mai Lai massacre, or similar, where the authorities who should prosecute those who willfully screw up fail to take action. But we don't need full 24/7 coverage of every piece of the conflict. And in my personal opinion, the most recent set of disclosures crossed that line.

We aren't responsible enough as a society at viewing all that information fairly to be trusted with it indiscriminately.

Microsoft Bob lives!

And takes up the awesome responsibility of being the latest hyped MS product to utterly fail. Sheesh.

They aren't satisfied with knowing (and using to advertise and monetize) your social network. Now, they want us, 3rd party web devs, to help them figure out what other sites you visit, what type of music you like to listen to, and what movies you've watched recently.

So they can advertise and monetize it.

I'm not seeing a real good reason to add this "Like" thing on any site of mine. I'd rather my visitors build *my* site's community, rather than simply acting as a source of content and demographics info for Facebook.

Ah, another satisfied iPhone user.

Just bought the wife a brand new laptop for christmas. Booted up Windows 7, straight factory install. She bluescreened it within an hour.

Moving a desktop widget.

I don't even want to *know* how that is possible.

It always amazes me. The studios blow ungodly sums to hype up a new movie. They buy ads, the stars do interviews, etc. ad nauseum. And then the movie is out! But only in theaters! And if you love it, and just can't wait to own a copy, well, actually, you have to wait. Up to a year. By which time, you've completely forgotten the movie, and your initial enthusiasm is gone, and all the hype is dust.

What a waste.

This is just more of the same. Movie's out! You'll love it! But you can't see it! HAHAHAHAHA!

Please god, let them die.

ALL mutations are random. If they are advantageous, great, than it is likely that they will be passed along.

That's more an article of faith than anything rigorously proven. In face, we don't know a lot about how mutations are conserved. It's quite possible, given our relatively high-level understanding of the workings of the cellular nucleus that some mutation is in fact courted, or even driven, by yet undiscovered mechanisms.

There would be powerful advantages to organisms that could dial up or dial down their mutation rate in response to changes in their environment, for example. Or if there were a way to have mutation occur more frequently along beneficial paths. Nature has had a long time to tinker with this one - don't go making blanket assumptions until we truly understand the whole system.

It's long been known that the price of a game is fixed - that is, that the amount you can charge for a boxed game on a shelf has a very definite (and mostly arbitrary) price point.

What we're starting to see is publishers trying to sneak past that price point with tricks like this. And we'll see it more and more. Single-player games don't generate a revenue stream, so you've been forced to hit the customer all up front for whatever you hope to recoup from your new game. It's just too tempting to try and spread that cost out a bit and grab some more money.

Thank god for the indie scene. I can't imagine paying $80, $90 dollars for a game.

Or it could be that having more CPU/GPU power allows for more AI, animation, etc and thus more teammates. Ditto for co-op play - we finally have networking that doesn't suck. It's more a simple technology question than something cultural or political, IMHO.

What part of "don't have to pay Apple money to develop for Android" and "don't have to get Apple's permission to distribute" did you not understand?

Android is a platform that give much more, and more meaningful, freedoms to app developers.

I'll add another big one - on the Android platform, replacing core apps with your own version is *encouraged*, and in fact *designed into the platform*. Unlike Apple's recent filing about "altering the core experience" re: Google Voice. Apple could create an iPhone-themed app suite for the G1 tomorrow, host it on their own servers, and no one could say otherwise. That's a pretty fundamental difference.

Say what you will about the iPhone as a sexy beast, etc, but as a developer platform and ecosystem, the only thing Android is missing is higher handset sales.

Here are the languages I program in during a given week:

Ruby
PHP
Javascript
Java
Shell

And the frameworks/libraries I use:

Rails
jQuery
Regexen
Android SDK

And then there's the tools whose scripts and configurations I'm modifying:

Exim
Bind
Apache
Svn
IPTables
Postgres
MySQL ... plus about a hundred Linux commands and their arcane syntaxes

What kind of insane evil genius could keep all that straight without constantly checking the docs?

Overall, was tremendously impressed with the look, feel, cinematography, etc. Documentary style absolutely made the movie. And I generally loath shaky-cam. Thing is, shaky-cam has generally been used to imply that you *are* someone, so you never see what the hell is happening, whereas in District 9, it makes you feel like you're *watching* something, so you follow the action but feel the peril. Very effective.

There were some *amazing* scenes - I can't go into it due to spoilers, but really, unbelievably cringe-inducing moments of humanist horror. There is a richness to the interaction of the main character with his world that I just haven't seen elsewhere.

My friends and I kept looking over at each other with wild grins on our faces, unable to believe how intense, crazy, and just totally new the whole thing was. I really can't recommend it highly enough.

I see a lot of tags/comments asking what this is useful for. There are a few uber-nerd things like recording your life and whatnot that I'm not going to get into, but the big one is determining location.

There are a TON of sweet things you can do with accurate location information, but the one that I'm most yearning for is to control my bluetooth, wifi, ringer volume, etc based on where I am during the day.

I'm an Android user, and there's a very nice applet called Locale that attempts to do this, but it proves to be pretty useless. The reason is that you're either using GPS (drains battery, doesn't work indoors) or wifi (drains lots of battery, and is the primary thing you want to control) to figure out where you are. If using the microphone and cpu is cheaper in energy, then this will be a big win.

Beyond the energy use argument, one of the main things you want to control is bluetooth - again, it drains batteries when on, and is not generally useful. But it's EXTRAORDINARILY useful in the car if you have a hands-free setup. Again, figuring out when you're in a car is hard via GPS or wifi, but this technique would seem to knock that one out of the park.

So, in summary, having your phone know where you are in your daily routine allows it to be more intelligent about what services and functionality it enables, and thus makes your cell phone that much smarter and more valuable.

Just wanted to put a plug in for the HTC-built G1 phone, which has had built-in OGG support from day one.

Very nice toy, am loving being able to SSH into my servers anywhere there's cell service.