I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy, but he has a point here.

Microsoft is a multinational corporation - albeit one that started in the US - and they have the perfect right to locate their operations wherever suits them. Immigration policies are a valid reason to make these decisions. I don't understand why American think it's their automatic right for all activities of companies like this to be located on their soil.

I referred to the drawing down of aquifers.

It's true, my comments envisaged conventional farming, not the methods the Israelis use with poly-tunnels. So in the long run, your point is true.

Yes but that food is already being grown (and the water being overexploited), so settling people there would not add any new food.

Would be nice for deserts to be un-desertified, but I'm not sure that can be done cost effectively just yet.

Dan

But those places are mostly not suitable for growing crops. What would people living there eat?

It's not physical space that limits populations, but the availability of resources such as food and water.

Mod me flamebait, but I am with Microsoft on this one. As mentioned in their press release at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us..., Samsung agreed that "Microsoft will receive royalties for Samsung’s mobile phones and tablets running the Android mobile platform".

I don't know how Samsung thinks it can use Microsoft products without paying for them. I paid for my copy of Windows, and I expect Samsung to do the same.

I don't believe he has published, but you might be able to get something from his patent:

http://patentscope.wipo.int/se...

the patent seems to talk in terms of surfaces for heat transfer, and does not mention anything about turbulence. When he first mentioned to me that he was working on it, I conjectured that it was vanes or ribs of some kind, and he told me that it was more complicated than that and had to do with the interaction with turbulence (I forget whether to increase it or decrease it). However, nothing like that seems to be reflected in the patent. I'll ask him to respond here on Slashdot if he can.

Re-posting this not as AC...

Dr. Povey mentioned to me that turbulence had something to do with how it works. [He's my brother.]

I read TFA, and unfortunately the research is very weak. They did not do a proper randomized study, they merely trained a classifier to figure out how good they thought a post was, and then divided up posts into pairs where their classifier thought they were the same but the feedback was different. They assume that their classifier is accurate, i.e. really reflects the goodness of a post. The rest of their research follows from this assumption.

If it had been a proper randomized study (i.e. roll a dice and up/down vote posts) I could have believed it.

What I wonder is-- how did the Syrians get hold of a zero-day vulnerability in Flash? I doubt they found it themselves. Did they buy it, or did the Russians give it to them?

I'm wishing there was a "+1 troll" option for moderation.

This is not an argument about pricing mechanisms for Internet providers; I think we all agree that charging people more for more data is reasonable. The issue is extorting people like Netflix just because they can.

I didn't realize replicants existed at all, much less replicant hackers.

Does anyone know if they are working on ... a pleasure model?

Their statement seems to imply that Google Docs supports OOXML but not ODF, but the reverse is true: it supports ODF but not OOXML. I just tried the file->download as link on a document there, and one of the options is "Open Document Format (.odt)" but there is no OOXML option.

A lot of people in this discussion are suggesting that pot users may be "self-medicating" and this may explain the correlation with schizophrenia. I don't follow the science closely enough to be able to cite specific studies that contradict this, but it's unlikely for the following reason. Marijuana and the drugs that are used to treat schizophrenia have *opposite* effects on the brain. THC increases dopamine; anti-psychotic drugs decrease dopamine.

No, it starts with a song.

Just re... member that you're standing on a planet that's evolving...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWVshkVF0SY