I sailed past Peleliu in 1994, the 50th anniversary of the battle. It was horrible to see that insignificant hunk of rock where so many young men died for... what, exactly? It was dubiously important in the first place and looked an awful lot like other rocky islands I'd seen, which drove home the utter futility and waste that it represents. It was a very emotional experience and I'm getting choked up now remembering it.

I'd be perfectly happy never seeing another battlefield in my life.

Who are you talking to? What do you gain by having an imaginary conversation with someone that you're pretending has said something that nobody said?

All domestic dogs are the same species. Just like all humans. But let me guess: you aren't willing to refer to Standard Poodles, or Chihuahuas, or English Pointers as breeds, right?

Why ignore that? I chose those specifically because - despite the serious melting-pot stuff of the last 100+ years or so - those PLACES have also been home to readily identifiable large groups of people who share very obvious genetic traits.

But, inconveniently, it's also a perfectly reasonable way to look at a large group and say, "Wow, that group of several million people sure do have a LOT in common, genetically."

Yes, just like most know cases similar to the family with 3 smart kids and 1 much less smart one.

How about: reasonable people of normal intelligence can readily observe the inheritance of broad classes of physically obvious traits - related to skeletal and muscle structure, pigmentation, hair formation, disease susceptibility, and so on - that plainly manifest themselves in large groups of people that have developed together and have tended to breed amongst themselves.

That you try so hard to proclaim that such obvious things are not real makes you sound like, well, a total tool.

Who says it has to be distinct, unique enough perfect compartmentalization enough to put people entirely, precisely in one box of the next?

But are you REALLY pretending that you can't immediately spot some people as being obviously of Mongolian, or Russian, or Ethiopian extraction? I can spot people of Scandinavian heritage a mile away, and can readily see the differences between people carrying DNA from the Andes vs. DNA from the jungles of Central America. Why are you trying so hard to pretend those differences are plainly obvious? What do you gain, other than street cred with the willfully obtuse politically correct set?

Allow me to paraphrase your comment: I'm a jackass who thinks nothing substantial can be said when opinion counts, even when the accomplishments are well-documented and acknowledged by the larger scientific community. I also entertain spurious allegations about Eisenstein having plagiarized his wife, which has no credible evidence.

Not clear if Case is claiming Blackberry's were never of interest to hackers or are just of no interest lately.

Blackberrys were until recent years very high value targets, they were the phone of choice on Wall Street, for politicians and reporters.

It wasn't that long ago repressive regimes like Saudi Arabia were telling Blackberry to back door their phones/servers or get locked out of their market which tends to suggest they must have been pretty good at something.

There is probably something to be said for phones without a third party app market if security is job one. Android in particular is a pretty juicy target for malware.

Please. Annus Mirabilis papers

That's four groundbreaking papers in one year (1905), any one of which would have made Einstein of historical significance. To follow that up with the only major advance on gravity since Newton 10 years later puts him well past Feynman.

He did good work on the panel, but it was hardly a big mystery as to why the launch failed. There was actually a conference call the night before the launch between NASA and the manufacturers of the O-ring. The latter wanted to scrub the launch because of the cold, but pressure from NASA and worries about an upcoming contract with NASA resulted in a go-ahead.

Feynman was as much a showman as he was a scientist, which explains a lot of his fame. Who were the scientists who shared his Noble Prize for QED? Right.

Don't get me wrong, I like Feynman a lot. But saying he was "far greater than Einstein" is a joke.

I know this because I actually read. The Russian government does you the favor of making their clamp-downs on freedom of communication very clear. Of course you know this, which is why you're trolling anonymously and pretending you don't. Here, just from today's /. ...

http://politics.slashdot.org/s...

Oh, please. How many people are paying to run Skype on a system that can't or won't be upgraded to Snow Leopard? Supporting Leopard means that Microsoft can't use APIs released in the last 5 years. They probably have to support x86-32 or PPC processors (which is the reason most people on Leopard are still on Leopard). They have to use relatively ancient tools to compile the packages.

All that, or they can just decide to never, ever upgrade the underlying protocol to handle new security requirements or additional features.

I can't for the life of me figure why MS would want to bother to keep supporting that old code. What's the return on investment for keeping someone's PPC Mac limping along? Or perhaps that's it: they want to make it easy for people to stay on stone age hardware to try and compel Apple to have to support it. Sounds conspiratorial, but I'm hard pressed to think on a non-conspiracy explanation that satisfies Occam's Razor.

Also, Microsoft is killing support for their own WP7, whose last release came out less than a year and a half ago. So much for your assertion, huh? Maybe they've just decided that supporting a 5 year old OS X version has a better business case than Windows Phone 7, which is very likely true.

Oh, that weird-ass thing that Miguel invented to try to drag the Linux crowd away from multi-vendor, vetted languages? Yeah, I've heard of it.

No, the point is that Russia is a fundamentally less free place to live than the US, and getting worse by the day.

And prison only enters into it when, like Snowden, you scam your coworkers out of passwords, and then do something like deliberately steal all sorts of sensitive data and take it right to Russia by way of China.

Just not free to travel. Just no free to get on TV with Putin and ask unscripted questions. Just not free to run a campaign of anti-Putin editorials, or to run a journalism organization without having that organization torn down by Putin for being contrary to his wishes, and perhaps have its reporters gunned down on their home doorsteps. But plenty free, of course, to conduct economic activity that directly supports a guy who is violently annexing a neighboring country while transparently lying his ass off about what he has his troops (and artillery and anti-aircraft missiles) doing. Free to support the guy that's propping up the Assad regime's deliberate mass slaughter, and free to operate in a country that purposefully, and cooperatively - gleefully, even - harbors some of the worst, most violent organized crime operators in the world. Yay, free!

Qt is far easier to use and more elegant than .NET and other Microsoft solutions. The number of Windows-only apps leverage Qt is amazing. Your choice of desktop OS does not limit your choice of application development frameworks.