You know, since this is yet another "antagonize the West" type of action by Iran.

Right, just to clear this up: the fact they've developed their own UAV bomber is purely to spite the 'West' whereas any similar defense technology development by a western nation should never be construed as antagonising the Middle East, let alone Iran. Furthermore, Iran should not by any means be allowed the same fear sodden defense industry that the West so covets and they should simply accept that.

OK, thanks, I think I've got it now - you're schlepping the same drag-and-drop late-night-international-espionage-TV-drama idiocy that practically defines the geo-political arrogance of our precious West in the eyes of others.

You ought to remember that many countries see the supposed leader of the West, The U.S, as a terrible and amoral aggressor, having willfully used WMDs against civilians (carpet bombing, nuclear weapons), continues to stockpile nuclear weapons munitions while chastising the rest of the world for doing so using trade and political embargoes, trades big-brother-style protection rackets to arm-bend smaller countries into accepting U.S military bases, has camps in which they not only 'disappear' but spiritually and psychologically humiliate the prisoners using methods not seen since Vietnam (the list goes on). This is the stuff they see in talk shows on their TVs, read in their opinion columns in their newspapers, talk about in political science classes at high-school, etc...

Just to point you to the other side of the coin where the opinions of 6 or so billion other people may differ from your picture of it all.

I dunno, one of the functions of your average grazing animal is to be food for those higher up in the food chain, and that includes humans.

Very few of the animals eaten by people presently are "grazing animals". To cite an earlier post, given that a tiny proportion of cows actually slaughtered for sale of their parts have actually eaten grass in their lives, they are also full of all sorts of pesticides, dioxins in the fatty tissue being one particularly nasty result. These mutants don't eat eat grass, as their ancestors have, but corn, soya beans and oats.

Around 70% of all grains grown in the U.S are fed to animals to turn into tissue which is then eaten. A highly inefficient and environmentally costly source of proteins. In fact the inefficiency ratio is widely considered to be around 54:1.

Suddenly I had this thought that we were all just a bunch of apes, manipulating abstractions of abstractions of tools ultimately designed to help us catch our dinner.

The real abstraction you're talking about is post-industrial capitalism. Meat eaters often consider themselves somehow kin to the Great Hunter, that by eating a bloody steak they are somehow closer to the earth and it's mortal realities yet they couldn't be further from it. Rather, they cowardly pay another to kill a sick beast - stoned on antibiotics so that it can actually live and eat corn - on their behalf. I say that as someone that grew up on a farm and often ate what I killed with my own hands.

Unlike our hunter forebears, people caneat meat every day because of the abstraction of late capitalism. I encourage every meat eater to take the life of the thing they want to eat, at least once in their lives. Look at the beast in the eyes, take its life and then eat parts of its body. A highly valuable dietary - and somehow even spiritual - reality check.

They've got a lot of catching up to do, 26% of land area on earth is used for grazing, not to mention an area almost as large to grow grains to feed cows. Large tracts of land are being dehydrated as water is pumped in from elsewhere to feed these cattle. It takes 7000lbs of water just to produce 7lbs of feedlot grain which in turn is sufficient to grow 1lb of beef.

The impact of the oil and automobile industries are small concerns in comparison. If you want to help the planet, eat less (ideally no) meat.

The link between meat and all sorts of health horrors is fairly unavoidable. Beef from the U.S is banned here in Europe as it's deemed a health risk to consume it:

According to the European Union’s Scientific Committee on Veterinary Measures Relating to Public Health, the use of six natural and artificial growth hormones in beef production poses a potential risk to human health.iii These six hormones include three which are naturally occurring—Oestradiol, Progesterone and Testosterone—and three which are synthetic—Zeranol, Trenbolone, and Melengestrol. The Committee also questioned whether hormone residues in the meat of "growth enhanced" animals and can disrupt human hormone balance, causing developmental problems, interfering with the reproductive system, and even leading to the development of breast, prostate or colon cancer.iv

Hormone imbalances are also a problem:

Diethylstilbestrol (DES) was one of the first hormones used to fatten feedlots. It was banned in 1979 after forty years of evidence that DES was cancer-causing. In its place, sex hormones, such as estradiol and progestins (synthetic forms of the naturally occurring hormone progesterone) have been implanted to virtually all feedlot cattle. The least hazardous way to administer hormones to animals is through an implant near the animals ear. Unfortunately, many farmers inject hormones directly into the muscle tissue that will be later used to make meat products. The only USDA-imposed requirement is that residue levels in meat must be less than one percent of the daily hormone production of children. This requirement is unenforceable because there is no USDA testing for hormone residues in meat. Furthermore, hormonal residues are not practically differentiable from natural hormones created by the cow's body. As a result, the use of hormones to boost meat production is completely unregulated.

Moreso, the impact of all this extra estrogen is having on people (especially men) is particularly worrying. Maybe meat is making today's boys a little soft.

The amount of estradiol in two hamburgers eaten in one day by an 8-year-old boy could increase his total hormone levels by as much as 10%, based on conservative assumptions, because young children have very low natural hormone levels. In real life, the situation may be much worse. An unpublicized random USDA survey of 32 large feedlots found that as many as half the cattle had visible illegal "misplaced implants" in muscle, rather than under ear skin. This would result in very high local concentrations of hormones, and also elevated levels in muscle meat at distant sites. Such abuse is very hard to detect.

Given that a tiny proportion of cows actually slaughtered for sale of their parts have actually eaten grass in their lives, they are also full of all sorts of pesticides, dioxins in the fatty tissue being one particularly nasty result. These mutants don't eat eat grass, as their ancestors have, but corn, soya beans and oats. 70% of all grains grown in the U.S are fed to animals to turn into tissue which is then eaten. A highly inefficient and environmentally costly source of proteins.

Like it or not, any non-grass-grown meat is pretty much poisonous. Sadly grass grown meat is such a tiny proportion of meat eaten as it's just not a market-competitive means of production. It's all hormones, antibiotics and a high protein diet for the animals that are eaten these days. Any vet will tell you we're eating very sick beasts.

Even we Europeans are not safe - most of the meat eaten here is raised on imported grains. Farmers have a practice of putting a few cows near the road to graze just to give the look and feel of that classic pastoral scene while what's really going on is hidden in the back blocks. There's a joke here in Germany that the cows by the train tracks are the one's the farmer keeps for himself!

Last post disappeared to /dev/null. Trying again.

It's perhaps worth considering that Australia's neighbour New Zealand had what's probably the world's largest flightless bird at 4m tall (12ft) , the Moa. Much like the Kiwi, it simply didn't need to keep wings as their were no mammals with which to compete. It was soon hunted to extinction by Maori settlers some 500 years ago. Of note it's considered to be a relative of the Australian Emu..

While the rest of the bird kingdom in NZ devolved their wings, the world's biggest eagle, The Haast Eagle enjoyed the easy life, often making short work of the Moa from time to time.

I hope that this Chrome OS features a toggle for Desktop Effects. It seems silly to have a low-power, battery dependent device dedicating resources to window management ballet.

The vast proportion of airports and hotels (increasingly cafe chains) in Europe have 'open' wireless networks that require browser authentication. You pump for an IP, are granted one, yet must authenticate in the browser (usually with a bite of your credit card) to get you through the gateway. Up until you authenticate you're a member of the LAN only. These APs usually have a EULA that prohibits such uses as the downloading of copyrighted material.

So, what specifically constitutes a Protected Network in the context of this new law?

or at least it seems..

Rather than stylish and in-the-know people buying iPhones plumbers, social workers and truck drivers have iPhones here. This is due to the offerings by telcos such that iPhones are practically free with a fairly tenable contract. iPhones are becoming not just middle-class but traversing further down the so-called classes. A few of my very self-conscious dyed-in-the-wool Mac using friends (France, Germany, Austria) have mentioned a desire to escape this ubiquity, in their lifelong quest for edginess.

Here the uniformity of iPhones, the sheer lack of definition in their outward appearance has become a problem. Differentiation - in the quest for affirming individual identity - is much easier with other brands. The Android market will start making a lot of sense to the snobbish and the trend-setters. The Apple brand is less and less the 'BMW' or 'Mercedes' within the market.

You can think of the forest floor

Should've read: You can think of the ocean floor..

The fishing industries, particularly those using the deep sea trawling method, have worse long-term impact on the oceans than all the oil spills combined, particularly in that they destroy the cold-water coral that a great proportion of the lower ocean ecosystem ultimately depends upon. Secondly, bottom fishing stirs up sediment that chokes life down there, turning it into the ocean equivalent of a dusty desert. You can think of the forest floor as the home of the vital organs of the ocean: the supposed right to have a ready supply of just a few species of fish impacts thousands of other species.

This oil spill is absolutely terrible, of course. But if you care for your kids future and/or want to save the oceans, eat less (or no) fish and encourage others to do so. We're not poisoning the ocean so much as eating its guts out. Your children and grandchildren will be enjoying the wonders of the ocean eating an icecream in a perspex tube at this rate.

Yes, it's that bad.

Practicing 'defense' produces a desire to prove it. The next step to that end is the creation of conflict itself.

Chicken, meet egg. See you both in hell.

The question is not whether Google can deliver but whether they'll be fashionably late enough while doing so.

Give me a dumb, predictable computer any way, then I can accuractly predict how it'll respond to my input, and this tailor my input for the exact response I want, every time.

Well said..

So often it's the geeks that are the real humanists - those that know enough about 'intelligent software' to be suspicious of it.

It's not just (suicidal) self reflection but a potent mix of ignorance and laziness that steers us toward Vinge's Singularity.

This in built 'subjectivity' in the search mechanism represents a kind of fragmentation of the commons the searchable Internet supposedly represents: sometimes I want to know what other people know, what they are looking at, what is popular or interesting for them.

Secondly, grouping searches around an assumption of my interests assumes that my interests are 1/ Statistically quantifiable (solving a loathesome and boring problem may result in many queries), 2/ Particular to me (I may be searching for someone else, or my computer could be shared with another), 3/ Can be built from clear-text (sometimes I might be searching within a context do take me to a binary, like a video, arbitrarily linked in a page (like the comments for instance)).

Finally, isn't there a problem with diminishing returns here? The set that represents my interests will get 'smaller' in subject matter as I continue to search within that set.

I'll certainly be switching if Google's approximation of my interests goes under the radar, digging into cookies when I'm 'signed out'.