I know what you do NOT do, you do NOT put a gun to OTHER people's had to steal their money from them to 'help' anybody whatsoever under any circumstances. No amount of misery can be justified to destroy individual freedom.

If a person is irresponsible and has children, too bad for those children, however that's what other family members are for. Beyond that there are private organisations that try to help children. Governments cause massive pain for children by destroying the economy that they and their parents live in.

I don't mind the start screen too much, but a proper start menu is a good start, and bringing Metro apps to the desktop is a start. The library for metro application actually has a long of good ideas in it, so expanding it beyond touch applications is a good idea.

The toughest part is that Windows 8/8.1 came with some really noticeable kernel and userland performance improvements. The switching between metro and the desktop is pretty smooth on all the hardware I've used. If they get back the power user desktop functionality, it's a good start back.

The six has a flat back, Mr. Always Corrected.

- government has no place in anything that private individuals need and provide for themselves and others absent government.

Energy, clothing, food, shelter, education, transportation, roads, schools, investments, entertainment, mail, anything at all that people need, individuals need, individuals, people create and once they create it, if others like it, they can also buy these solutions from the individuals that created it. That is what businesses are: individuals solving individual problems that become solutions for the entire societies.

Your complete lack of understanding of these simple realities of life and your dogmatic belief in something 'grander' than you are, are blinding you and obviously somebody so blinded cannot see the forest for the trees. "Libertarian" is just a moniker. The point is individual freedom.

Free people create stuff based on their own creativity.

Slaves only work hard enough not to get beat up too much (just enough not to be taxed too much).

Looks to me you prefer a 'society' of scared, ignorant children rather than a society of grown up people actually thinking for themselves and building stuff they need and trading with other grown ups for stuff they built.

Type-casting -oh my lord type casting- is so astoundingly bad in Swift

What don't you like about it?

I like it because it precludes a lot of stuff from going wrong unless you are very explicit in telling swift how you would like to be shot in the foot.

Whoever wrote that article doesn't understand Swift well, or Apple for that matter:

Swift is designed to support a world built bottom up in Objective-C. It's meant to play well with the bazillion lines of existing Objective-C, not supplant it.

This is totally wrong. Apple could not be more clear that Swift is built to supplant Objective-C. It will take a while to re-write the frameworks but they are encouraging everyone now to write new stuff in Swift, and as rapidly as possible making the bridge over to the Objective-C frameworks as Swift friendly as possible.

I think Apple will not open Swift at the moment because they want to have a small core group directing where the language goes, at least at first... and then it will open up more from there. But that also supports the notion that swift is not an auxiliary language, but the primary path going forward.

So 'unfortunately' if you are going to build a product that people may need and enjoy you are going to start a business, that may create new products and create investment opportunities and jobs in the process, you are going to 'siphon'? 'Siphon' talent away from government ('and everybody else')?????

This 'story' is one gigantic flamebait.

There is nothing unfortunate about building your own company to pursue your own goals and you are not siphoning anything from anybody by building your own business. Under all circumstances, it is better if government doesn't get any talent whatsoever, why should talent be wasted in government rather than be applied where it is actually needed: in the private sector, doing something useful?

This entire premise is insane and asinine.

If I, as a third party, want to offer telephone services that use broadband internet (VoIP), Comcast will be able to make my access to their consumers so crap

Well it's a shame then the FCC rules under discussion would have nothing whatsoever to do with that,.

Gosh, I wonder what you are getting if it's not at all what you thought. I wonder what you are getting from an agency intertwined with the cable companies, when you ask them to provide regulation from same companies... Perhaps utterly the opposite of what you wanted?

When people read the summary of this story, I'm sure a lot will be like "blah blah blah blah MAGNETS GOOD FOR HEALTH AND CURE EBOLA blah blah blah.

The greenhouse effect was first proposed by Fourier (yes, that Fourier) in 1825. Way back before modern technology and computers he already figured out the basic relationship between heat trapping gases and planetary temperatures. From his paper in 1827:

"The establishment and progress of human societies, the action of natural forces, can notably change, and in vast regions, the state of the surface, the distribution of water and the great movements of the air. Such effects are able to make to vary, in the course of many centuries, the average degree of heat; because the analytic expressions contain coefficients relating to the state of the surface and which greatly influence the temperature."[

In 1864, John Tyndall furhter refined Fouriers work to show that different gases had different absorption spectra, and that water vapor, methane, and CO2 specifically were potent green house gases.

In 1896, Svante Arrhenius (considered the father of modern chemistry) put forth the first climate model and was one of the first to quantify the impact of CO2 on planetary temperature.

Since then, the science has only improved. We've gone from basic physics models to complex integrated global climate models. And they all show the same thing.

There was never any "global cooling". There were a handful of discredited papers in the 70's that tried to establish a possible cooling scenario. However the overwhelming majority of papers on the topic were all discussing warming and it's impacts.

And warming, while accurate, doesn't really define what the real problem is. Warming isn't the problem. It's what happens as a result of the warming that's problem. The additional energy into the climate system shifts the climate, which we, as a civilization, depend on. Also, warming gives the impression that every place on Earth is going to get warmer, which is not the case.

Climate change is a more accurate description of what's happening.

Incorrect. We can say quite a bit about the macro. There is quite a compendium of science out there. The problem is that people don't know the difference between a projection 100 years into the future about general climate conditions and the weather in their backyard. Ignorance is the problem, and there are those who hope people stay that way.

I and many others would like to see this contrary evidence you speak of, along with the physics that model the scenario AND can adequately explain observations from both present and past AND does not violate little things like thermodynamics and conservation of energy.

The Antarctic sea ice extent was not and is not projected to shrink in the near term. It was expected to expand as a result of the influx of fresh water from increasing land ice melt. As the planet continues to warm it will reach a point where the ice extent will start shrinking again (as the 0C starts pushing further south), but that isn't projected to happen until later this century.

If you're going to troll, at least try to do a decent job.

1. Al Gore is not now, nor has ever been, a climate scientist.
2. His remarks were purely speculative and had absolutely zero scientific support. There is not a single peer-reviewed research paper anywhere that makes such a claim.
3. The AR4 and AR5 model ensembles show an ice free summers in the arctic around the middle of this century.
4. The article is talking about ANTARCTIC SEA ICE, which has absolutely nothing to do with the ARCTIC SEA ICE.

Climate model ensembles have consistently predicted an overall increase in ANTARCTIC SEA ICE in the near term as a result of increased freshwater runoff from the continent. The decrease in salinity allows for ice to form at higher temperatures, thus expanding the sea ice extent.

This problem could have been easily avoided. Send iTunes users an announcement that they can go to the store and get the U2 album for free, if they want to.

That's how it worked for everyone that didn't enable auto-downloads of purchases (which is not enabled by default).

I *wanted* the album, and it took me two days to figure out how to get it. It did not appear for me anywhere automatically...

I can't believe people get worked up over being given music for free. Hey guess what, all sorts of free crappy music is in whatever music streaming service you favor also. Why not complain about that?

They're both still vulnerable to supernovae. You should have at least one backup in another galaxy.

Fun fact, the real reason for the Voyager mission was someone wanted a permanent backup of William Shatner singing "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds". You didn't ever see the back of that record they included with Voyager, did you... now you know why.