Celsius or Fahrenheit? I presume Fahrenheit as he's an American tweeting to fellow Americans, but he's also a scientist so maybe Celsius.

125 Fahrenheit would be possible, but implausible.

125 Celsius would be absolutely ridiculous.

Most people wanting to speed means most people think getting somewhere faster is a good thing.

Most people wanting a burger means most people think burgers are tasty.

And most people supporting government action on climate change means most people think climate change is a real problem.

So despite your dismissal this poll (if accurate) is important.

It shifts the question from "Is Climate Change a problem?" to "What is the appropriate response to this problem?"

Now you can still argue that "nothing" is the appropriate response to the problem, but you've lost the argument claiming the problem doesn't exist.

Put another way:
Ethics = Brain(Money)

There are rational arguments in favour of the NSA's spying, it's in the Mathematicians' interest to adopt those arguments.

Given the choice between a) giving up a ton of money and feeling morally sound, b) accepting a ton of money and feeling morally compromised, or c) accepting a ton of money and feeling morally sound, most people want to choose c, and since it's a lot easier to change ethics than sources of money the morality is the part that's going to adapt.

Hell, I'm from Alberta, oil sands central. A massive portion of our economy comes from oil. Even though I believe in global warming and my work only has a secondary connection to oil & gas there's still a part of me looking for reasons to justify our continued extraction. I have no doubt Mathematicians are playing with similar rationalizations.

Not necessarily.

Jobs' brilliance wasn't in his management, it was in his design sense, personal charisma, and knowing when to throw his company behind developing and pushing a new product (OS X, iPod, iTunes, Tablets).

Tim Cook doesn't have the same epic level of charisma but that could change, and he clearly hasn't screwed up the management part, but we've yet to see his signature on the design and product fronts. I think you can call Apple Pay and the iWatch products of the Tim Cook era so their success will be the first real test of whether he can keep the Apple innovation machine turning.

That you know of. Besides, I'm sure you've had many that you've caught during the standard code -> compile -> run -> segfault -> debug cycle, but the more subtle ones are harder to trigger.

Depending on what the code is doing and what kind of legacy cruft you're dealing with it's not always trivial.

More likely the other devs feel like it's bad form to drag the names of past contributors through the mud in public. Particularly when the reviewers missed the bug as well.

I'm pretty sure it was implied that P(snowstorm) is high enough to make the cost/benefit rational.

Unless of course you think his comment would be better off at 4 times the length, detailing all of the obvious common sense assumptions he made.

I was aware but as the old saying goes:
To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer.

The same applies to traditional breeding vs GMOs. Genetic modification is a much more powerful tool than the various sources of random mutation. As such we're going to create new classes of risks that we don't understand yet. We don't exactly have the healthiest environment right now and farms aren't sealed labs, before we inject massive numbers of plants with several novel and powerful traits into an ecosystem we need to understand what the effects of those actions are.

The tone sounds like you're disagreeing him but it sounds like you're actually agreeing with him and debating my point.

Whatever the source of "natural" evolution (selective breeding, random mutation, horizontal gene transfer) we've been dealing with it for thousands of years and understand the risks. To use your example it's pretty easy to evaluate the safety of a fallen tree bridge. But with manmade bridges it took a while before we learned to avoid things like the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.

I think the labelling thing is nonsense since I don't think health risks are a big concern but I am a bit more cautious about the long term environmental effects as I suspect we're underestimating the probability of black swan events.

I think of selective breeding vs GMOs is a bit like traditional medicine vs modern medicine. Traditional medicine generally ranges from slightly beneficial to mildly harmful, you're not going to do yourself much harm, but you're not going to help much either. By contrast modern medicine is devastatingly effective in good ways and bad.

Right now you'd be a fool to choose traditional medicine over modern medicine, especially if you have a serious health issue, the benefits are too strong and we know how to manage the nasty side effects.

But at the dawn of modern medicine? You're probably better off dealing with the traditional stuff, a lot of people died because modern medicine was an incredibly powerful tool and people didn't know enough about that tool to use it safely.

I worry we're at that stage with GMOs and the environment. We don't really understand what it does to the ecosystem when we introduce new traits at that speed and effectiveness. We really can't know until we've done it a while. I'm sure GMO crops are the answer for the future, but I'm worried our capabilities are outstripping our knowledge.

I do a fairly limited amount of gaming but if I do any I'll do it on my the Linux desktop I built myself.

I have no interest in buying a copy of Windows just for gaming so install on a VM, it's not even a question of principal, I just can't be bothered to go through that much effort for a crappy solution.

Your making this into a binary situation when it's more subtle than that.

Should it be illegal? No.

Does it make people uncomfortable? Yes.

Why does it make them uncomfortable? Because the added possibility of a surreptitious recording makes them a little more cautious than they would have been otherwise (even in public). It's not about appropriate vs inappropriate, I know I wouldn't feel comfortable having a connected conversation about my feelings with a potentially global audience. You've never passively eavesdropped on a couple's conversation? What about the people who think that conversation is so interesting they'll start recording and post it to facebook saying "check out this fascinating conversation I overheard".

I'm still not saying ban it, but there are social consequences we need to consider.

I'm not saying Star Trek should be a plodding intellectual discussion, the action and adventure is an essential part, but without the philosophy the films have no heart.

Look at Wrath of Khan, you open up with Kobayashi Maru, a discussion about dealing with hopeless situations, and then transition to a discussion about growing old.

Khan isn't just a random villain, he has a somewhat legitimate grudge against Kirk who exiled him and his crew on a planet and then never checked up on them and thus never realized the world was dying.

In the new Star Trek Kirk is basically a kid with a spaceship, there's very little underlying philosophy guiding his actions and to the extent it does come up emotion is driving his philosophy rather than the other way around.

Even the first TNG movies remembered this and have a bit of lasting power, the new Trek movies are just very forgettable.

It was also terrible because it was terrible.

Well not quite terrible but completely forgettable in the way that generic sci-fi action flicks are.

I didn't hear that, though in retrospect it would have been cool to have a non-standard ethnicity in the role.

Either way I just re-watched the new Khan movie a few days ago, it was better, but still a fairly generic and forgettable action flick.

He'll do fine in the sense that it will be another generic and forgettable action flick.

I don't really understand why Abrams is getting all these franchises, he did some good TV series but I haven't found his film work to be particularly exceptional.

That being said I think he's a far better choice for Star Wars than he was for Star Trek. Star Trek was always about exploring the philosophy, something Abrams has never really shown any particular talent for.

Star Wars on the other hand is more about the myth, which is really the strong point of his best work. Maybe he will make something great with this one.

You've never seen a viral video of an ordinary person doing something really stupid? I can think of many.

Someone wearing Google Glass (and constantly recording) catches you saying or doing something that sounds incredibly funny/offensive/strange, they post it online, it goes viral, and suddenly your life is different.

Sure it's unlikely but the threat is there. I'm not going to be nearly as comfortable having a conversation in a restaurant when I know people are recording because there's an extra filter all my words have to pass through.

The snopes article doesn't quite back you up. It's possible that he spoke to a related gathering a few hours before the convention, not knowing it was EURO related nor that there were a few white supremacists in attendance. But it's also possible that he did address the EURO convention with full knowledge of who they were, either because he wanted their support (or non-opposition) and/or he was sympathetic to their beliefs.

The truth is there's insufficient information to know what really happened.