Not quite. Not quite.

Personally, I recall the $700 billion dollar TARP program advocated by Henry Paulson and signed into law by George W. Bush. Can you provide us with links describing the Obama bailout program you refer to? (Don't worry, I'm not holding my breath).

I also recall Obama announcing that the banks had paid back their loans with interest, such that the government made a profit on TARP.

In summary, you are entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts!

We pretty much already knew that the MPG we saw on the sticker was higher than the MPG we would actually be getting. Hence the phrase "your mileage may vary."

But we also know that the sticker MPG numbers are good for comparing among similar cars, and that's mostly how we use the sticker MPGs. Kudos and thanks to 'What Car?' for calculating the 19% offset figure. I wonder if they could tell us how the offset varies among different types of cars. Maybe SUVs vs econoboxes vs sports cars have somewhat different offsets.

BTW, I would bet that different driving styles, lead foot vs hypermiling, makes a bigger differnece than the 19% calculated by 'What Car?'

I agree, this could be used invasively, and I'm not in any hurry to show the world the interior of my house.

That said, this could be incredibly useful in public spaces.

For example, you get off a bus in New York's Port Authority terminal, 2 stories above ground, and you need to get on a subway to the Apollo Theatre in Harlem. It would be very helpful to have stairwell & corridor directions to the correct platform. Suddenly smoke starts pouring out the lead car train in that maze of platforms. It would save lives if people, not only on site up upstream from the affected area, were suddenly told to reverse course and clear the exitways. It could be like traffic for pedestrians.

Another example:

You have a factory full of pipes and valves and 2000 amp busbars and 440 volt 3 phase machinery. You've always painted your piping different colors (raw materials, steam, cold water, product, etc). Now you would like to be able to pay someone to build a digital model of the whole factory, including locations of every pipe, valve, switch, gauge, etc. The cost of building that digital model used to be prohibitive; suddenly now it's reasonable. With the digital model, you can plan improvements better, find potential safety issues, target repairs, etc.

So yeah, I get that it could be invasive, and we need to make sure it's not. It could also be incredibly helpful.

2000000/(365.25*20) = 273.785 lines per day; 7 days per week, 52 weeks per year.

If we assume a very heavy work schedule of 3000 hours per year, approx 60 hours per week, that's 66.667 lines per hour of fully debugged working code. Seems a bit of an over-estimate to me. (Exaggerate? I don't know the meaning of the word!

Interested readers might also like to see what the Catholic Church itself wrote regarding the 1992 pardoning of Galileo. They cite a mutual misunderstanding, and place blame on both sides. Here's a quote from a portion blaming the Church:

I think the fact that in 1992 the Church itself, after more than a decade of studying Galileo's case, concludes that Copernicanism was Galileo's suspected heresy, should lay the question to rest. Heliocentrism, AKA Copernicanism, was indeed Galileo's heresy.

Actually, the funny thing about Galileo is that he wasn't so much challenging the Bible as he was challenging Aristotelian ideas that got conflated with scripture. A few years ago I asked two Jesuits and a Protestant minister (on separate occasions) where in the Bible I could find statements about geocentrism. They all told me that the Church at the time was full of Aristotelian "science" and that the source of geocentrism was Aristotle, not scripture, though one fellow did note the "sun stopped in the sky" line from Joshua.

Galileo's famous "ball drop experiment" (whether or not it really happened at the Leaning Tower of Pisa) proved Aristotle wrong in one case (Aristotle claimed that heaver objects would fall faster). Galileo's observation of four of Jupiter's moons proved that not all objects orbit the earth or the sun, and that, combined with observations of the Earth's moon, Venus, and Mars, gave him the idea that maybe smaller object orbited bigger ones. These views also opposed Aristotelian teaching, but just like with the ball drop, Galileo arrived at them with some evidence in hand, after observation.

Therefore, I don't think it's fair to say Galileo touted geocentrism without empirical evidence. Without proof, certainly, but not without evidence. And again, the funny thing was that Galileo wasn't so much opposing the Bible as opposing Aristotle.

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?