How much of this is really from his mind, vs just being paid sufficient sums to allow his name to be stamped on it?

Oh, how I hate this simplistic meme about how "blue" cities support the "red" suburbs and rural areas. One thing that it ignores is that a great deal of the wealth generated in cities is created by people who live (and vote) in suburbs and rural areas. it's called "commuting."

Or try this thought experiment: cities stop "distributing their wealth" to the suburbs and rural areas, and the suburbs and rural areas stop distributing their wealth to the cities... as well as "their" food, water, oil, gas, and electricity. Now who needs who more?

Thank you for having dealt with all the other more pressing problems, domestic and foreign, so that now you have extra time for these folks! I'm sure they'll have lots of informed, trenchant, challenging questions for you, the answers to which will be informative and enlightening. It'll be the adversarial press speaking truth to power!

Most managers manage less than a couple of dozen individuals personally. They can afford to spend some time to shape employees into appropriate productive parts of the team.

If you're at a higher level and in one way or another in charge of thousands of individuals most people on lower levels will have the sense not to waste your time unless absolutely necessary, they're completely sure of what they're doing and their communication is highly relevant. Mail your 5k+ employee corp CEO with budget suggestions based on random numbers taken out of your ass? Best case you'll get ignored. Expecting a polite reply after he's personally taken time to run your numbers and realized you haven't even actually looked at the current budget, checked with someone else or know anything about accounting? I... don't think that's what's going to happen.

The purpose of such communication back isn't to encourage more such waste of time. It's to ensure it doesn't happen, ever, again. And preferably make sure nobody _else_ wastes time that way either. In a company with a normal hierarchy and a reasonably accepting management culture, that would most likely be handled by the employees manager being tasked with making sure that the employee understands that while input is welcome, pure waste of time is not.

Now, I suspect this is rather academic, as I don't think that many patches causing obvious bunches of compile errors actually reach Linus these days, but would go through possibly multiple layers of reviewers and maintainers before he'd even see it.

But it's an interesting topic. I mean, if you're intellectually honest, you'll admit that in the absense of an actual hierarchy that can manage problems, there is a certain percentage of people without sufficient social awareness and self-control that would eventually take up so much time when you scale up a project that you'd get stuck with all your time being spent on those individuals. Polite and friendly replies do not work; these are not people with normal social awareness who can read between the lines in your reply (or anyone over the age of 10 wouldn't have sent the unchecked work in the first place to someone most people understand is fairly busy, but would rather carefully ensure they know the proper procedure and have more senior but less busy persons help them to ensure they do nothing wrong).

Can you come up with an _effective_ way to manage the problem? Personally I'd probably simply put such people on ignore and lock them out, I don't like insulting people. Alternatively, not reading anything by default and ensuring anything I see is already vetted would be an option if I had others I could rely on but then their time would have to be cheap enough that I thought it reasonable to waste or I'd ask them to ignore such people as well.

Insulting someone? Well, while I wouldn't chose that option, such words do, as you say, have an impact. If that impact is what is needed to prevent the waste of time, while still allowing the possibility of them changing and contributing in the future then it might be less unappreciative than my own likely method of simply permanently ignoring them.

I agree that "too thin" is an issue. I'd be happy if Apple stopped making iPhones thinner and instead used the space for more battery.

I'm not sure you're right about technological advances, though. While I'm not obsessed with the latest and greatest, I think it's impressive and meaningful that phones are getting to have near desktop-level processors, excellent cameras, etc. But I find it hard to image that Google will be able to create modules 1) with more impressive specs than an iPhone 6, and 2) be able to sell them at a competitive price.

This has all the earmarks of another sounds-cool-at-first Google project that won't amount to much in the end.

Modularity sounds like a good idea, but in practice, in cellphones, I don't think it'll work. In objects of that size every millimeter counts, and modularity takes up quite a bit of space at that scale, because each part needs to be enclosed, securely attach to the others, etc. The trade-offs will mean you'll be able to pick one or two things (e.g. speed, battery life, extra features, etc.) but not all at the same time. And the prices won't be good, because manufacturer(s) will not have economies of scale: it'll be hard to compete with Apple and Samsung making millions and tens of millions of identical units.

You must work for the treasury department.

But if you look at the facts of that rpisode you will find some serious truth there. It's the same with this issue. It may be that global warming is entirely true. You all seem to think so, having studied the issue so closely over the years. And it is certainly true that some of the criticism, especially of Michael Mann, has been over the top.

BUT.......

It is ALSO true that there has been some serious fraud and disarray in the climate science field that cannot be simply explained away by some of you "climate scientists" doing the same thing to critics that climate scientists are claiming is being done to them. Watch this post get modded down if you doubt that.

For example, (and this is one of dozens), do you know what the phrase "Hide the decline" means? It was featured prominently in a YouTube post Mann didn't care for and is part of numerous howlers uncovered by the Climategate emails. Here's what happened.

In a multi-variable graph these scientists put together several plottings of temperature measurements that showed the temperature was rising. This included bona fide modern thermometers. ONE of the measurements, however, showed temperatures DECLINING during the same period when every other measurement showed temperatures RISING.

Hmm. That didn't look so good because if they published it with that sole line going down, they would have to EXPLAIN it, and they didn't want to do it. So what did they do? The Climategate emails show this clearly:

They erased the line. They HID THE DECLINE by showing it as it went into the decline, but then it disappeared and was absent as the graph showed a rising temperature, sans this errant line that wasn't behaving itself.

Tsk, tsk, you say. They shouldn't have done that. In the interests of full-disclosure and, you know, TRUTH, they should have published their results and not HIDDEN THE DECLINE.

But it gets worse:

The DECLINE was shown by the line representing tree-ring data. Now you all know about tree-ring data, right? And you know the rings get fatter when it's hot (or wet, let's not forget) and thinner if it's cold. AND since there were no accurate thermometers thousands of years ago, guess what these scientists used as a "proxy" for thermometers. This is what Michael Mann is famous for. He used tree ring data from a few trees in Siberia, among other places, but FEW TREES, to "prove" that the climate has been warming.

SO, if the modern tree-ring data is showing a decline in temperatures when every other measuring device they used was showing an increase, HOW could you reliably use tree ring data from thousands of years ago to prove anything at all? The DATA SHOWS THE OPPOSITE.

This shows and roves fraud. The emails confirm it because they are a smoking gun. They've been caught red-handed.

But you guys don't want to hear that and you don't want to investigate the truth of it. You just resort to doing what Michael Mann says is being done to him by calling the critics of global warming cooks and conspiracy nuts and suggesting they ought to be thrown in jail.

Now, do you want to hear about the famous climate scientist Al Gore who, in his huge graph on sea water temperature and CO2 levels, mixed up cause and effect when he claimed rising CO2 made the oceans warmer when, in fact, the warming oceans out gassed CO2 and made the levels rise? You don't want to hear that, do you? Al Gore refuses to debate it, too. Then he'd have to defend his screw up.

The most astonishing thing here is the attitude that if a scientist said it, it must be true, but when Michael Mann complains that he's being called names you perk up your ears. Here we have proof of massive fraud in this area and you don't seem to care.

Yeah right up till the end when all those people died, excellent safety record...