Unlike the desktop, most people use the browser supplied with their smartphone/tablet. Apple doesn't allow any application competing with their own as far as I know and on Android Chrome is a central part of Google's all-or-nothing package of apps and services. Maybe they think that for once they'll be the default browser on something. Then again, they're not a first party browser on the desktop either so why they need to have delusions of grandeur I don't know. What I do know is that they have zero chance of pulling off a whole mobile ecosystem with apps and everything. Even Microsoft struggle like hell and they have poured billions into Windows Phone, the Nokia buyout and whatnot.

My first OCZ Vertex - the original one - I did nothing to optimize it and spent as temp drive for everything, including torrent downloads that I later archived. It does 1.5 years later after eating through a 10k writes/sector endurance, if I read the SMART data right it had 9.6k write average and 14k writes worst case. My replacement drive from WD I did all the basic stuff to optimize and kept my torrents to a HDD, it lasted about 3.5 years and the lifespan indicator said it should have another 1.5 years left but one day it just wouldn't boot.

Now I have a Vertex 450 (before you say anything it's for boot and gaming, I keep my documents on another drive...) and it has 9589 power-on hours, that's 400 days and 96% life left. At this rate, it should last 25 years or more. It seems to me they've done a lot to fix write amplification and other issues, that easily killed some of the early drives if you actually used them.

Strange how so many people around the world choose to use these "mostly useless" products. I'm not saying it's all for the better, but the "OMG I can't use this app it has a ribbon" people really should find some kind of job frozen in time where nothing will ever change. Funny enough, this place is crawling with all sorts of new languages yet very few go like "OMG I must learn a whole new syntax and standard library", then it's like change and multiple skills is no problem at all. Whatever they throw at me I'm sure I'll find a way to work with it...

And the US is not? Sure it's quite a bit different with State/Federal instead of Country/Union, but there's places in the US going to shit too like Detroit while others are doing well. Some 337 million Europeans use it daily, most of them for the last 16 years (exchange rates were frozen end of 1998, bank notes came in 2002) and there's one country of 11 million who might bail because they can't print their way out of a debt problem. Tough shit, but not worse than every US state has to deal with, they can't print their way out of trouble either. It's only vital if you rely on it to bail you out of loans you can't pay back.

Bullshit. The largest creditor to Greece is the EFSF and they're not paying a dime on the principal until 2023. They're choking just trying to pay interest and no, taking up more credit card debt to pay off this month's credit card bill is not a sustainable way to go. They do have a problem in that their GDP is going down, meaning they earn less to pay interest with. That will eventually make paying back the principal harder too, but that's not their short or even medium-term problem. They can't even manage their debt, much less repay any of it.

Yes, today >75% of Greek's debt is either the EFSF, ECB, bilateral loans from EU members or the IMF. Some was bought significantly below the nominal value though, so the net loss will be somewhat less. Of course at the time they very reasonably feared another wave of dominoes falling, either in the banking market or due to a jump in national debt interest rates. They bought time to show the other countries are past the peak and on a slow recovery and they built a giant insulating buffer. Some got bailed out, but Greece may also fall without triggering another crisis in the EU economy.

This is why I don't think Greece really understands the position they're in now compared to the position they were in a few years ago. The Greek government is pushing the EU into a corner where it would be politically unacceptable to make it look like Syriza won. At the same time everybody can see that the austerity isn't working very well, so if the EU decides it's better to let them crash and rebuild and at the same time put the blame at Syriza's feet now might be a great time. They're not just playing with fire, they've set themselves on fire and is gambling that the EU will put it out.

That aside, watching a mars rover live is like watching paint dry. Opportunity has a top speed of 0.18 km/h and on average it has moved 10 meters a day. It spent over 11 years on a marathon that runners on Earth do in two hours. Everything else it does is equally slow, it makes a sloth seem energetic. The reason is of course that it's running on a tiiiiiiiny trickle of power, but it doesn't make for great entertainment. It's like for example CERN, you get a huge splash when they find the Higgs boson but between that it's months and years between something newsworthy happening.

Well, maybe not the actual scientists but there are quite a few dead cultures and species wiped out because guns and bullets beats spears and claws. And I don't think anyone doubts Oppenheimer was a bright guy, even though he wasn't the one dropping the nukes. Since you mention cats, would you like an AI treating you like you treat the cats? My guess is you would not, particularly not when they decide we're too fickle and resource hungry and would rather not have cats.

The reason I'm not worried is because we have no clue on how to build systems with self-awareness. The software is running, but the computer can't look at itself in the mirror and realize I need electricity and CPUs and RAM sticks to "live". Wake me up when we have a computer that can actually refuse me from hitting the off switch.

As for trapped AI, you should all see Ex Machina, great movie.

Pardon me, I might be one of those godless heathens but I suffered through quite a few years of Christian teachings - what exactly has the Bible promised us apart from forgiveness from our sins and heavenly bliss in the afterlife? The old testament was as I remember it mostly punishments. Punishment for eating the apple, building Babel's tower, Sodom and Gomorrah and of course the flood to wipe out everything. We're all sinners from the original sin and if we don't repent it's hell.

The new testament was pretty much all allegories on how we should live, there were a few "one-off" miracles while Jesus lived but all those who saw him raise the dead, turn water to wine or walk on water has been dead for 2000 years. So there's good and evil in the world, but that's pretty indistinguishable from good and bad people with free will without God or Satan pulling anyone's strings.

So I'm curious, what is it you feel God has promised? And what do see that makes you feel he's delivered? Because I can't find a lick of difference, the devout believers get injured, sick and die like the rest of us and terrible sins go by without being struck down from the heavens. It's of course possible that all of this gets tallied up and justice is served in the afterlife, but here and now in this life I can't find any sign of God. Maybe I should ask this in the opposite direction, if you were to envision a world without God what exactly would be different?

Look, I understand what you're trying to say. If they're trying to hide their atrocities we should expose them, if they're using them as propaganda and to terrorize we should suppress them. But as a guideline that would be very confusing and hard to live by since it assumes you know the details of every conflict and who wants what, assuming they're all in agreement which they're probably not. Not to mention the answer is probably (d) all of the above, some are inspired to fight against the atrocities, some are frightened by them and some are cheering them on.

Every year we send busloads of teens to visit Nazi concentration camps, not because we have some morbid fascination with death camps and genocide but because at some point you have to learn how cruel human beings can be to each other. But that is quickly fading out of living memory, it's 70 years since the war ended so those who really remember the war is in their 80s and 90s by now. Very soon it'll be "museum" knowledge that you read about in a book and look at an exhibit and it's going to be filed away as ancient history. But it's not, because there's still shit like that going on but we're not sure if we want to see it or not.

I'll admit that watching cruelty will make you die a little inside. You will want to punch something or maybe cry a bit, but at the end of the day I want the truth about the world not the PG-rated version. Which is of course not to say you should lose perspective, with 7 billion people it'll seem like anything you focus on happens a lot even if it deals with 0.01% of the population or less. And I'm here in the safety of my living room looking at a screen, I'm not the one in a war zone getting shot at. I'm not the one hoping nobody will bomb the market I go to. I'm not the soldier who needs to pull the trigger risking that innocents die if I do or die if I don't. I still got it easy.

Not really. I believe there is a clean hands doctrine that says if your inaction has amplified the harm then you might not get relief for that. For example if you live in the downstairs apartment and notice water is leaking from the upstairs apartment but don't do anything to stop it or limit the damage because you'd rather get the insurance money you can get cut short. It's a lot trickier with an IP issue, is it a lump transfer or an ongoing violation but I think it has most the characteristics of the former where you take a half-finished product and hand it to someone else to finish. In that case there's no harm in delaying apart from the statute of limitations.

Let's say I'm in an accident with you, but it seems at first to not be a big deal and I don't sue for damages. However it turns out it won't heal properly and I lose a lot of money and decide to sue anyway. Am I too late? No, those costs aren't caused by the delay, they'd come no matter what and it won't count against me. Of course I'm not in the US, there you find the nearest ambulance chaser and sue for $millions, unless it was a hobo that hurt you.

No, of course FDR didn't cause the Depression (just extended it).

He was a commie in the 30s and early 40s, despite the fact he never sent anyone to the Gulag (kinda the defining aspect of Communism in the 30s and early 40s)

If you want to be pedantic about what is and what isn't Communism, you could at least break out the Manifesto because I can think of a lot of ideological nitpicks that you could put in advance of "did not establish a gulag".

the business community fought him tooth and nail the whole way ... but he enriched his friends in business, etc.

Yeah, go read about the National Recovery Administration. Essentially they suspended antitrust law if you adopted a certain minimum wage. Clarence Darrow (of Scopes Monkey Trial fame) briefly headed up the National Recovery Review Board, a body which issued a few nice reports on how effectively this crushed smaller businesses, and was then promptly dissolved. You could try reading one or two. (Of course the Supreme Court found the act establishing the administration unconstitutional, leading to the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937, an utterly transparent attempt to pack the Supreme Court.) The Montgomery Ward incident, incidentally, was much much later, in 1944, during the war.

but then it was never sold as a way to reduce overall costs.

Hahahhahahahahahahhaha... let's see what Google can say on the topic in the next 15 seconds... Key White House allies are dramatically shifting their attempts to defend health care legislation, abandoning claims that it will reduce costs and the deficit and instead stressing a promise to "improve it." -- Politico, 8/9/2010. (I'm sure I could find more coverage in the event that you don't think Politico's worth the paper it's printed on.)

they were the ones beating the "FDR is a Commie" drum when he created Social Security, etc.

FDR was a Commie, though. We only see Social Security seven or eight decades after the fact, but the FDR administration completely overhauled the nation's economy, especially the agricultural sector, placing enormous swaths under extensive government control, with explicit production targets and price targets. The administration actively disbelieved in competition and a free market, and thought it could restore the nation to prosperity by paying people to fallow their land and by burning crops. By "disbelieved in a free market", I don't mean that they had a bunch of Regulators out there keeping Rich and Powerful People from doing Bad Things. I mean that they kept the Rich and Powerful People in business because they were rich and powerful friends of the FDR administration, and they did a lot to help them.

The FDR administration's interventions are a primary reason that the Great Depression was so Great. Fortunately, most of them were disassembled after World War II, resulting in an impressive game of catch-up as the nation returned to economic growth and prosperity (and unfortunately convincing some people that war is an economic catalyst instead of an exercise in spending valuable effort blowing stuff up, including some of the most economically valuable stuff out there, human lives).

Anyway. If you hate Big Agriculture, factory farms, and crop monocultures, then you should despise FDR, who erected the system which brought them upon us.

As for the rest, Social Security was the icing on the cake. It's an out-and-out wealth transfer in a way that the other programs, but at least it's an honest wealth transfer -- a generational wealth transfer, and future generations are likely to be richer. It makes a ton of economic sense as a transfer program (by tying your retirement pay to actually working it avoids the worst negative incentives of transfer programs, among other things). You just need to make sure the demographics and economic growth work out relative to the benefits -- easily doable. From an economic standpoint, it's wildly superior to the current health-care reform effort, which... let's just say it hasn't been a wild success at delivering its headline promise of cheaper health care for all.

And yet it's an obvious case for cheap political rhetoric, "What do you mean that's never going to happen? You're sitting there making plans for it right now!" I don't think you should underestimate the explosive power of contingency plans. For example in a supply chain you might have a contingency plan in case your business partners, vendor or distribution network turn shit but nobody's going to like that you have a plan to stab them in the back. And there's always those who willingly or unintentionally confuse planning in case of failure with planning for failure.

TL;DR: Some things you should just keep your mouth shut about, even if makes sense.