And what, god was supposed to have directed that company to mimic his beetle? You know, I don't usually respond to ACs but given Marco Rubio's recent comments I figured I would. Here's what he said:

Him, you and all the people like you couldn't be more wrong. Science and mathematics has everything to do with the economic growth of the United States. How can the U.S. compete in biotechnology if what we learn in biology courses is that god created the beetle? How can we compete in oil production if all we learn is that fossils are there to fool the unbelievers and the earth is 6000 years old? Time and evolution created both: 4.54 billion years is a LONG time, animal species can change a lot over that amount of time.

Frankly, I think you people are all nuts, and I'd happily let you live in your bubble if not for the fact that you all are ruining my country. I think it's a real shame that our education system has failed so miserably to produce roughly 48% of the voting population who can't even do basic arithmetic (i.e., go read Ryan's or Romney's economic plans: they either don't add up or impossibly vague). This has nothing to with Democrat or Republican, you could have figure out who was the right person to vote for just by looking at which one could do basic arithmetic. This election, my vote went for logic and reason, and that fortunately prevailed, but only by 3.3% or so.

Actually, EPA and DOE jointly sponsor a web-site that gives you not just EPA ratings, but allows users to enter in their own ratings. Here is the link to my car:

http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/Find.do?action=sbs&id=29712

You can see the EPA rating and the average user's rating are similar, but not exact. The more popular a car is, the more estimates there are. If you click on view individual estimates, it'll show you the locale, driving conditions, and the last time the estimate was updated. I found this site to be invaluable when trying to calculate how long it will take my hybrid to pay itself off in reduced gasoline costs. The answer, BTW, is 90-99k miles, or 5-6 years. Since the hybrid battery is warrantied for 100k miles or 8 years, it'll be fine.

On a different note, I can't help but wonder if Lucas is in poor health

He's pissed off because everyone keeps bitching at him. Nobody liked the Star Wars prequels, nobody liked Indiana Jones 4 (a.k.a. Indiana Jones and the kingdom of just how stupid do they think we are?), and Red Tails. He's declared he's going back to directing art films.

My opinion is that the Star Wars prequels not only showed that Lucas was making it up as he went along for the prequels, but in episodes 4-6 too. All that wondering about why Obi Wan would lie to Luke about Darth Vader killing his father? It's because Lucas pulled it out of his ass because he needed to make another movie after Star Wars was a hit and wanted some sort of continuity and dramatic tension to bring the characters together. Meh, he's still brilliant in terms of special effects, etc., it's just a pity he could never recognize that he should work with someone to get less silly storylines.

Did he now? I really appreciate your comment, it gives me hope! Shit, I wish I still had one of those candy colored imacs. I can still remember replacing OS 9 with os X 10.0 beta on the graphite colored imac. I remember booting X11 up in rootless mode and remarking, "this is going to put SGI out of business." Good times man, good times. Nothing like that sort of innovation going on today in the desktop-space (i.e., yeah yeah, unix had X11 for years, but what I liked about it was that I had all the power and functionality of that SGI 4 processor RISC workstation in my desktop -- just awesome).

So if you head over to macrumors.com, the posters are gleefully proclaiming the death of skeuomorphic design in iOS and OS X. This is a good thing. The leather stitching, the ridiculous animations in ical, the stupid contacts list, the game center that made me feel like I trapped in some creepy casino with chain smokers and octagenarian gambling addicts: this is all gone, and good riddance to bad rubbish. However, on the other hand, if you read this article with the following very interesting passage:

Inside Apple, tension has brewed for years over the issue. Apple iOS SVP Scott Forstall is said to push for skeuomorphic design, while industrial designer Jony Ive and other Apple higher-ups are said to oppose the direction. "You could tell who did the product based on how much glitz was in the UI," says one source intimately familiar with Apple’s design process.

After reading that, I realized that this was indeed true and in fact there has been an alternate philosphy besides the skeuomorphic design which is the "war on color" in some aspects of OS X (e.g., the flat gray scroll bars, the gray linen background for the virtual desktop manager, even the world map for changing the time zone). So, now I'm wondering if the skeuomorphic faction led by Forstall has lost the debate, was Ive and the other minimalist design people behind the "war on color" and if that's true, is that what we'll see in future versions of the OS with Ive leading the interface design? I'm not sure how I feel about that, I really don't like using an OS that is drab and boring, it's depressing (I actually liked Aqua for the most part, which was also Forstall's invention I guess). Either way, it's good to know that Apple isn't afraid of rocking the boat still. That skeuomorphic crap might have been good for increasing everyone's vocabulary with regards to interface design, but it was annoying as hell to use.

Now, if only Apple would admit they screwed up the document versioning system beyond repair and give us a proper "Save As..." since the dawn of the computer (or thereabouts) I would consider Apple as having fully realized the error of their ways and moving decidedly in a less terrible direction. But alas, Federhigi is still in charge and they haven't brought Serlet back from retirement unfortunately.

Okay so I'm blowing my mod points (sorry to the people I bumped up) but I just had to jump in here. If you want to read something by Delany, read Dhalgren. My buddy and I both read this book while in college one summer just after the spring semester ended and the town had cleared out of all the students. I had nothing to do for a week except sit around and reading this novel where time has no real common frame-of-reference. Since at the time I myself was in a situation with no fixed schedule, this gave me the most complete mind-fuck I can remember a book giving me.

Many pitchers of very cheap beer were consumed disussing this book and what precisely happened. It's crazy, but it's not so delusional as William S. Burroughs and it's intriguing enough that you keep turning pages and Delany gives you hints and pieces about what's going on as things progress but never enough to completely solve it. The ultimate question was what we ourselves would do put in this situation, in a city where time becomes confused and careers or even jobs become irrelevant. This was one of those books that teaches you something about yourself when you're a young person reading it.

Oh... and while I'm at it, here's the actual quote:

-- John Rogers.

I love this quote! But you really ought to attribute it to the correct source, which is John Rogers.

I hate to disappoint you, but no, it won't. There is some (shaky) evidence that conservatives tend to be much less strongly influenced by facts when dealing with political topics, and that education level does not change the outcome. Chris Mooney wrote a book about it, I haven't read it, but it seems that there isn't a silver bullet so much as a lot of studies suggesting, but not proving, the same thing.

Whatever the reason, the point is that it doesn't matter who funded it, the conservatives won't accept climate change, no matter how many facts or studies you perform. If you confront a conservative with a climate change argument, and show them this study, I guarantee that they will shift the argument to saying that Muller now says, yes there is climate change, but it isn't what caused Katrina, nor what caused the drought in the U.S., nor is what is killing polar bears. If you were to fund a massive to study to prove those things, they would shift the argument to something else.

It's utterly depressing, because it suggests that a lot of the political divide in this country is insurmountable (although it explains a lot about why we had to fight a devastating civil war in order to free slaves).

No, the GP didn't mean people who play with overclocking settings. What that user is describing is an overwhelming trend today for the software to take away manual control from the user in order to make the software accessible to a wider base of people who don't have expertise in computers because they can take advantage of the manual control. The problem is that by making things automatic you can alienate people who are more experienced with how the system works. It's a lot like the manual vs. automatic transmission argument in cars.

I'll name one example I can think of for this from OS X, but gnome (and linux in general) has suffered this as well: "Save As..." disappeared in 10.7. In the ars technica review the writer makes a strong case that the idea that the user must define when a file is saved is archaic because hard drive space is vast now and everything can be saved. However, for many of us, we use Save As for version control, or when we're just screwing around to see how things would look if we did it another way. In those cases, we don't want to save the document. The problem is compounded because the "Duplicate" feature which replaced "Save As" takes more keystrokes and is unwieldy.

I find I am spending more and more time trying to get new software to behave the way I am used to it behaving, because I don't see any real advantage in the "Usability enhancements" that developers keep pushing and it just seems like a lot of reinventing the wheel is going on. Now... get off my lawn!

Well, the only thing you convinced me of is that your sig is true, yes, you are a crackpot. This is why: A) You need to plot your data in terms of percent spending per GDP. Talking about absolute monetary value is absolutely meaningless because GDP goes up with time, and so does inflation. To put that another way, as the population grows, so does the tax receipts and so does the government providing services for that growing population. The only useful metric is therefore to normalize spending to GDP. The way you have it written is destined to show the most current president as the worst spender (gee wonder what political party you vote for?) B) Congress approves a budget, but the president proposes the budget. The reason is because the president is running the executive branch which is where most of the money is getting spent. Or why do you think we always get ready for each fiscal year by discussing "the president's budget" and whether congress will modify it?

It was in fact NOT a great quarter for Microsoft. I agree that the $6.2 billion loss on the acquisition is a red herring, but if you disregard that and look at the rest of their business, you'll find that their windows revenue declined 13% Yes, DECLINED 13%. Now, you can further write off most of that decline by saying that this is due to the reduced cost of Windows 8 that Microsoft offered to people buying Windows 7 now, but even after you do that, Windows revenue declined 1%. That's not huge, but they still DECLINED in windows sales. You know... WINDOWS... one of the two cash cows that Microsoft owns? Microsoft's core business is shrinking. If I help Microsoft stock, I'd be a bit worried. (For what it's worth, I do hold Apple stock, and I'm worried there too, Microsoft's wave has crested, Apple's is at the peak so there's nowhere to go but down, I'm just waiting for the right time to sell, it might be now.)

But don't let that stop the speculation about how "Microsoft" is doing great.

I can name regressions: 1) "Save As..." has disappeared (an option that has been present since I can remember using a computer with a "file menu"). The "duplicate" function requires more keystrokes and is irritating to use. 2) Mail.app and every app that uses text editing has a bug that when you delete a block of selected text, the text gets deleted but the selection area remains. Just to be clear here: Apple can't even get a TEXT EDITING BOX correct now. 3) The Finder doesn't actually get selected sometimes when the Exposé is activated, 4) Faux stitching in iCal and a silly looking address book, need I say more?, 5) Stupid animations that take too damn long and don't convey any useful information and are sometimes impossible to turn off (including changing pages iCal, moving files with the Finder, etc.), 6) Resuming applications whether you like it or not, regardless of what settings you have selected.

I could say more, but I'm tired of thinking about it. I will give you that Lion does have one or two nice features, but for every nice thing, there's a step back or regression as well. I even went as far as to issue a feature request for Apple to issue a firmware update for snow leopard that allows it to be installed on modern macbooks. Jobs once said something to the effect that large companies stop innovating because they are run by their marketing and sales departments. I think what we're seeing with Lion and Mountain Lion is the truth of that statement. I also don't think it's a coincidence that once Serlet, the VP of software development who was responsible in part for OS Xes 10.4-10.6, retired and now there is no more VP of software development. It's all marketing and sales now (well maybe iOS too)...

Don't use Lion, do you? It is moving very much in the direction of iOS. Read this article. It is rather inflammatory, but the guys makes an interesting point. There is no VP for OS X development listed in Apple's leadership team after Serlet left. He was the one responsible for OS X versions 10.4-10.6, which were the best ones (IMNSHO). If you spend some time talking with long time OS X users, you'll find tepid enthusiasm for 10.7 at best and worst, rabid hatred. Read the comments in this OS X hint on disabling the new autosave in os x. A lot of people don't like the changes in 10.7.

You know, I figured something out several years ago now: instead of upgrading the computer with a bigger hard drive/RAM/video card whatever some years down the line, I just "upgrade" those things when I buy the computer in the first place. So, instead of buying 1 Gb of ram, I buy 4 Gb. Granted, you do have to pay more money up front this way, but it means I also get an up-to-date machine that degrades to a not so up-to-date machine over time, instead of having a not so up-to-date machine, which becomes out-of-date machine, followed by a not so up-to-date machine again later down the road. See the difference? In one case you're ahead of the pace, in another at the pace or behind it. I'm guessing you don't save much money doing the upgrade path either because you have to buy two sets of components. Is buying the extra RAM or whatever more than twice as expensive? Usually not. I will grant you that sometimes one fails to anticipate what the requirements of the machine are going to be for the next five years or so, but that's the buyer's fault for not buying a machine that will suit their needs. It does happen, but on the odd chance, you can still upgrade things on mac laptops, I know, I've replaced two logic boards, hard drives and batteries on various old mac pro laptops over the years, but that's mostly for fun rather than for need. By the time I need to replace the components, the laptop is so old it's not worth upgrading.