Google's main priority is the Android ecosystem. One attractive property of Android is the level-playing field (or at least one that is only reasonably bumpy rather than mountainous). Google's ownership of Mobility gave it patents that will probably be useful, and of course they aren't letting go of those, so what is sold is not what is bought. Google's ownership of one player can at least give the impression that Google will favour its own, or at least will tend to under commercial pressure. Letting Mobility go, even for a significant writedown compared to what they paid, may in the long run be repaid in the value of Android compared to what it would have been had Google held onto Mobility. We can never tell, though, since we can't do a copy-on-write fork of the universe, and run both cases in parallel: and if we could there would surely be better uses for the facility than evaluating smartphone economics.

Trying to cover all cases with one universal standard is rarely the best solution. Covering the core with a small number of good standards, and having a few others that work differently to handle the rest is often the best way. This is simply because the 'solution space' covered by a single universal standard has many more regions of possibility that will never be touched than a few more focussed standards. Whilst it's massively oversimplifying, imagine the problem of covering a bounded region of a plane, that has an interesting shape, with squares. Hardcore minimalists will point out that one big square will do. That is what the universal standard approach tries to do. The trouble is that a few interesting cases can push the required size of the square to large proportions. If one wants to optimise for area, many small squares are better, but at the expense of having to manage many squares. A balance between these two, with a very small number of large squares and a slightly larger number of smaller squares, tends to be the best solution. Things work similarly with languages, both human and computer ones.

HTML+CSS attempts to have a content-with-markup source file, and a standard format non-programming language for styling, with no control over how things are layed out. This is great for simpler styling duties, but eventually becomes unwieldy. What is needed is to analyse and factorise how a web browser today actually does layout internally, and create a programming language that can access that directly, drawing on specifications in a CSS-like stylesheet for its source information. That would result in the CSS not, by itself, determining the style, but being subject to the whims of the engine that maps CSS-styles to actual screen representations. But hey, isn't that what we've already got with multiple browsers each implementing their own layout, and the programmable mapping layers hard-coded into the browsers (especially with IE and standards vs. quirks mode)?

I would like to see the Cairo model of drawing standardised, and the layout facilities of an HTML browser and other things added at an API level with the actual browser implemented as a light wrapper on top of that. That would also allow broswer-like apps with different document structures to be developed much more easily. I can dream, I guess.

When faced with an inconvenient truth, the corrupt will try to hide that truth, and destroy those who would speak it. This is hardly a new phenomena for humankind. Thsoe who are not corrupt will, naturally, be joyously corrected and be happy to have improved their understanding of the world. Thus those who would try to suppress the truth about polygraphs can hardly be seen to be in the latter category, so why are they tolerated in government and police?

But those leading the 'Christian faithful' in states where these arguments are happening seem to have no understanding of what they claim to follow, nor how to actually live the examples their scriptures describe. What happens is that wanabee religious leaders learn all the political and power grabbing techniques, almost subliminally, since this is the shorter route to their 'pastor dream', and effectively bypass the hard work involved in actually internalising the spiritual discipline that should lie at the heart of a true spiritual faith. Then, of course, they cannot translate the abstract concepts and principles described into modern language and conceptual frameworks, and are left just spouting the external form of the words in their scriptures with no real understanding. This is tragic, especially in Christianity where there is a clear illustration of this problem, how it unfolds, and the natural egotistical reaction of those in power when faced with someone who actually understands what the scriptures are there to teach... and if you have a Bible to hand you can hardly miss it, since it's repeated four times in four different accounts at the start of the New Testament. How organised religion can make the same mistakes over again is an almost comical picture of precisely what the core of Christianity is meant, in part, to teach against. It's amazing how the faith, so distorted as it is, can still support many in their lives even still.

My understanding and point of view (with a background in maths and logic and a passion for physics, computers and internal martial arts) make the lessons of scripture/spiritual writing, whether Judeo-Christian, Buddhist, Vedic and Taoist, to be important and logical consequences of the maths and science we have discovered, explained insightfully in a way that contemporaries of the authors of these teachings would have a good chance of understanding. I have yet, in my studies (and I am rather thorough and minimalist about what I do and do not assume), to find a single teaching that, given a suitable interpretation, does not make proper sense in light of modern scientific discoveries. I just wish others would see it that way.

When faced with difficulties or inconveniences in daily life, humans are adapted to find a way to reduce the difficulty and inconvenience. This is natural, but has a few consequences.

This basic nature does not understand the difference between facts like 1+1=2, 0.999...=0, etc; Newton's Laws; QM; That JFK did get assasinated and didn't just decide to revert to his Lizardman form, and fake his death to explain his absence; etc...

When faced with facts like global warming, man's instinct is to change the facts: the problem appears to be people complaining about Global Warming... naive bloke thinks 'I can't see it--it's not there--just tell these guys they're imagining it and to get on with their lives'. It takes a lot of learning to understand that you can't change the laws of maths or nature. We take this obviousness for granted, because it is endemic in how we are brought up, but a perusal of the history of human thought should help you see that what is obvious today wasn't always obvious. Also, these more naive aspects of how we think on a more basic level are often obscured by our unified sense of self.

Is that the approx. 2000 year old Gospel accounts illustrate precisely that this behaviour occurs in organised religion, that it's not right, and that a good teacher teaches against such stuff. How can so many from so many Christian churches read their Bible regularly and not see this???

The government has a real chance of learning the lesson that pieces of paper containing the words 'A will do B or else C' for various combinations of A, B and C, are nowhere near as effective as an imaginary fairy with a wand when it comes to actually getting stuff done. If real fairies with real, working magic wands were an option, it would most likely work much better than the current approach, but alas all the fairies were driven out long ago by the forces of insistent scientists demanding that fairy magic has no place in a modern scientific world. 'Suit yourself,' said the Fairy Queen, 'we thought we were doing you a favour, seriously, it's better where we come from, magic works properly there, and we're only too happy to oblige!' So the Fairy Queen and all the magic fairies and their magic wands disappeared into the sunset, and the US government was left with only paper, letters and no magic spell power besides 'contractual terms' to allow the pieces of paper to have any useful effect.

There is no way we can experimentally test our ability to accurately predict the distant past from present day evidence, and no way we could have already done so. The past will never happen again, and we cannot magically create time machines. We do not know, and cannot know. What we can work out, however, is the answer to the question of what happened provided we assume 'continuity' of things like the laws of physics, and many other such assumptions.

There is a nice neat parallel in mathematics. You'll see people claim that 1+2+3+... = -1/12. This is not true, but is almost true. The zeta funciton zeta(s) = sum_{n=1}^{infinity} 1/n^s for all s>1. There is a unique analytic continuation of the funciton given by this sum where convergent to almost of the rest of the complex plane (and that almost the rest includes -1). If you evaluate that continuation at -1, you get -1/12. If you abuse notation, you get 1+2+3+...=-1/12. What is actually the case is that if 1+2+3+... converged to a meaningful value, that value would have to be -1/12. But obviously this doesn't prove convergence.

When it comes to distant past stuff, everything is done under an unproven hypothesis that the methods used work: there is no point researchers questioning this since it can't be verified. Again, this is similar to proofs that rely on the Riemann hypothesis. When we can't show something, we do our best to work around it. What you read in science books comes from that sensible school.

When people forget those tacit assumptions and make metaphysical pronouncements that things we can never have seen must look a certain way, using arguments based on evidence that we cannot possibly have tested in the circumstances we are applying them, is when proper science descends into pseudoscience. And too many of the science crowd are guilty here. You should know precisely what hypotheses your results rely on, and only a few have the time to care, what with all the need to crank out n peer-reviewed research papers a year to satisfy your funding body.