There are enough errors in the parent that I think a few corrections are necessary.

(1) The USA GPS system was designed from Reagan's 1983 directive onwards to be used by both civilians and the military, and to provide better accuracy to the military. The first GPS satellites were launched in 1989. So it's not really accurate to say "when the system was opened up to civilian use in the late 90's."

(2) The "discrepancy" in civilian signals was known as "Selective Availability" (SA) by "dithering" the clock, and it was designed in from the start so that if an enemy tried to use civilian GPS, civilian GPS could be degraded worldwide without disturbing military GPS. That doesn't mean SA was always enabled. In fact, during the Gulf War, there was a shortage of military GPS units, so the military handed out civilian GPSs and turned off SA.

(3) The " idea of checking GPS against a known good reading" has three forms: differential GPS; only useful locally for work like surveying; WAAS, designed and implemented by the Federal Aviation Administration; and NDGPS, which is still being implemented on US land by Dept of Transportation (it's fully for US waterways thanks to the Coast Guard). WAAS is what you're using now unless you're a ship captain. The point is that except for local surveying equipment, the "someone" who made GPS better is your federal government. This is not a case of clever entrepreneurs outsmarting the government, this is another case of the government providing a new infrastructure that enabled new industries and widespread benefits.

(4) The reason President Clinton turned of the global selective availability dithering is because by then the GPS constellation had a new ability to deny civilian GPS regionally. So it's not accurate to say, as you did, " that the military eventually discarded the idea of putting in an intentional margin of error for civilian signals." In fact, the military has a better method than ever for putting error into some regional civilian signals. http://archive.wired.com/polit...

Galileo's peer review came a few hundred years too late. Torquemada was never peer reviewed. Neither were these Popes.

Conclusion: in religion, peer review is more the exception than the rule.

The workflow goes

Start

Activate Rear Light Source

Activate Front Light Source

Position Subject

...

To evade the patent, you could switch on both lights at once!

Or you could position the subject before you turn on all the lights!

Or you could vary the order in many other ways. It's a really stupid patent because it's so easy to evade.

Thanks for the excellent link. It does NOT support your summary. For example: "amphiboles are more potent than chrysotile in the induction of fibrotic lung disease and associated lung cancer" does NOT mean chrysotile is non carcinogenic. Similarly, "Asbestos-induced cancer is found only rarely in nonsmokers" does not support your claim that amphibole asbestos " was only carcinogenic to smokers."

The Supreme Court's 'Citizens United' decision makes it possible for billionaires to pour unimaginable amounts of money into each election cycle. Some of thse billionaires lean right, like the Koch brothers, and some don't like Google's owners. Personally I would like to see Congress pass laws reversing 'Citizens United,' but until that happy day, we're kind of on the sidelines as the big players battle it out.

Agreed. For me, the big draw of standard Android is maps/navigation/traffic. Decent speech recognition is the cherry on top. Being able to whip out my phone and say "navigate to airport" is worth a lot to me. The premise of the original article, "One of Android's biggest draws is its roots in open source" just doesn't ring true for me. In fact, I doubt it's true for the vast majority of Android users. I would suggest that Android's biggest draw is the price vs feature tradeoff. I'm aware that we aren't getting the main google apps for "free" but for many people they are getting them at an acceptable price.

According to many websites such as this and this the LG Optimus F3Q has a sliding qwerty keyboard, a 4" 800x480 display, and Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean.

A more useful article that lists the patent numbers and claims in dispute.

Anandtech points out that they chose a process with higher transistor density to go for greater IPC instead of high clock rates in the CPU. There's also an amusing comment in the review about how the Bulldozer CPU architecture "sure had a lot of low hanging fruit." In other words, why weren't most of these improvements included back in 2011?

Public facts?

If I subscribe to magazine X, is that a public fact? If I purchase book Y, is that a public fact? If my car spends time each week in the parking lot of organization Z, is that a public fact? Library borrowings? Video rentals? Websites clicked on? The list of information about us that might be "shared" goes on and on.

What companies are selling is not just one's info in the phone book, but the association of that info with one's spending habits and one's behavior. I know at present time we have no right to control this associated info, but, yes, I believe we ought to have a right to control it.

Sounds like we need to talk about what privacy really is. A good definition of privacy is "control of your personal information" (probably from This paper.) Of course, keeping personal information entirely secret is the best means of control, but in the modern world, complete secrecy is getting more and more impractical. So what else could we do?

One option I've heard is a property right, such as ownership (similar to copyright) of personal information. Joe "owns" his name &* address, and he'll loan a copy to Time Magazine for the purpose of delivering the periodical he has paid for. Any other use of Joe's information by Time Magazine is a violation, unless Joe & Time have come to some other agreement. This is very similar to copyright, so let's just call it personal copyright.

Copyright might be too blunt an instrument though, because remedies mostly involve (expensive) civil suits. A number of European governments passed legislation called Fair Information Practices. These laws basically say that personal information can only be used for the purpose for which it was given, and cannot be repurposed without consent of the person involved. Probably the governments involved have given themselves a loophole for national security, but I haven't investigated the details. This option reduces the cost to the individual, and makes it the job of the government to enforce the law. I see this as a benefit, though some may not.

Writing Fair Information Practices into law would probably explode the business models of the currently most successful tech companies in the USA, so maybe there's a way to ease into the laws and allow the tech companies time to adjust their business methods...

The "Flying Spaghetti Monster" AKA Pastafarianism was originally created to illustrate how easily one can invent a non-testable "theory" of creation and existence.

A poster above also posits the "10 minutes ago theory," which is likewise non-testable (what is there to prevent an all powerful being from planting memories in every brain; old photos in every album, and ancient dinosaur bones in the rocks?)

Science is about testable theories; in fact I would argue the word "theory" implies testability, so we'll call the non-testable ones "explanations". I'm not sure where to classify the non-testable explanations, philosophy is a reasonable guess. Perhaps the main point to be made with non-testable explanations is that they are so easy to invent.

In any case, the science classroom is the place for discussing methods for testing testable theories, with perhaps a quick glance at several non-testable explanations to see how non-testability operates.

Intel x87 scalar FP instructions use an 80 bit internal format for higher precision. Intel SSE2 vector FP instructions use 64 bits. You will see last bit variations depending on which instructions the compiler chooses. In fact, I've heard of cases where a JIT compiler vectorized a calculation sometimes (directing code to SSE2 hardware), and left it scalar other times (directing it to 80 bit x87 hardware). Might only make a difference in the last bit, but last bit variations can add up over a few billion calculations.

I can recall a physics simulation I was involved in years ago that got differences of 10% depending on what hardware we ran it on. Turned out the Sun &SGI workstations used 64 bit FP, while the IBM box used some 128 bit or something like that. Took a while to track that one down...

I just came across this animation of world-wide weather-station measured temperatures from 1880 to the present. I know it's only 130 years, but unless one can prove a bias in early hand-made thermometers, it seems to show a hockey stick.

I, too, would be amused by folks who used the 1970s as a baseline for global warming data. So, just for the heck of it, I googled images for global warming hockey stick and it seems most of the graphs start at the year 1000 or before. However, among the top four there is one graph that starts at 1970; amusingly, it was created by a global warming sceptic. I suppose you can cite example an example somewhere of someone who bases their global warming theories only on the last 45 years, but it certainly isn't the mainstream.