What's with the charts that we are doing even better than his best and most optimistic case scenario? There seems to be a lot of misinformation about what he predicted. What's your source?

Why do violent crime rates go up or down? Social "sciences" can make up all the theories they like, but it just isn't known. So let USA carry on and UK and Canada and Switzerland carry on as they are. We wouldn't know what effect the change has, if any, and the people already know the situation as a fact of life.

Gun ownership seems to get spun as a sort of moral argument that people should trust the state to protect them, or spun that people should be responsible for their own protection. There's perhaps more people with strong opinions either way on that, than have ever had to defend themselves in real life, thankfully.

"Every wind farm is a gas plant" -- said at an energy conference.

Our civilisation's huge infrastructure means we have big this and big that controlling our lives. Big oil is big energy is big gas and big wind. Those windfarms cost billions and the gas costs big money too. We have knowledge about the environment but the politics of who wins the contract is still there. All we can hope for is a reduction in corruption. That's the "ecology" problem. Doesn't matter if a scientist somewhere figures a well tested fact -- vested interests everywhere are competing and spinning the message. There is no more safety from corruption voting to the left or to the right. There are messages and narratives which appeal to the left, and different narratives which appeal to the right -- both are spin. Both are driven by vested interests competing for money and power.

Until everyone's integrity is raised, we won't make any sudden leaps in protecting the environment. We will continue to slowly improve, but it is slow, on the back of occasional tech developments. The Women's Suffragettes started in the most developed nations in like 1897 and over a hundred years later we still don't have equality (and just forget the developing world). The left villifying the right and the right villifying the left show neither side has any credible integrity.

Are they the ones who said "no compromise" ?

I gather "deal with us or deal with the Taliban" is a tactic ––but their aims may be quite similar.

And at some point is gets hard to tell the difference. Ordinary folk write comments like, "we don't want Communism, and we don't want Capitalism, we want Islam."

It is the path of renunciation and purity — everything will work so much better if everyone just submitted to the proper and good system, namely Islam.

The West also had a thousand years or more of that sort of strive for purity — but in the end it largely dawned upon us that you can't crush the impure stuff out of existence —people need to think for themselves how to deal with the messy stuff in life, like sex and relationships and the meaning of life.

Islam is a political system —there is no separation of Church and State. It also considers itself the best and purest version 3, where Christianity was v2 and Judaism v1. Version 3 seeks to "correct" all the mistakes (corruptions) made by versions 1 and 2.

Versions 1 and 2 failed to pursue purity far enough.

But you don't know if your model correctly describes, if it can't predict.

Otherwise I can describe to you tomorrow's lottery numbers, the day after tomorrow, and call it science.

A far cry from let's help kids develop cognition and imagination by learning programming; a developmental tool like how Alan Kay might have wished.

Maybe a picture is, user awareness is the very last line of defence. If the terrorist is on the plane and armed, the passengers are the last line. But it was the failure of everything before that point that's to blame. Gee we really should increase passenger awareness of how to spot terrorists -- he has a big beard, no wait he doesn't have a beard, no wait he's dressed ordinary but is reaching into his bag, no wait he's taking off his shoe, no wait he's actually a she and young, etc.

We all know there are "bad guys" out there. And we can alert people about specific attacks occurring today. "A man in a blue T-shirt is walking around and police say he has a record and probably looking to steal equipment". People will listen to that. But indeed, general vague "you should be security trained" is not much use, it seems; you have to tell people exactly what they can and can't do and that list is too long and complicated and keep growing.

formZ deserves a mention.

Glossy fine print magazines are horrible on anything less than a 9.7" retina display. The 10" is for the sofa. The smaller tablets are for everywhere else, so they have more usage scenarios. But I wouldn't give up the 10" form, as it is well suited to the sofa.

Perhaps it was also a better size to kickstart the market. Obviously not a phone, nor a netbook, nor a laptop.

Islam considers itself the updated purified version of Christianity. ie. God gave the truth to the Jews, but they corrupted it, so then God gave the truth to the Christians, but they corrupted it, so Islam is today the True version, and last thing they want is for it to be diluted in any way.

I don't know how you can equate our certainty that the world is round, with being certain about model runs simulating a complex system.

Calling people names doesn't prove anything to anybody.

Yes, and there's an old joke where Moses meets Adam and Moses asks, "hey are you the Adam that ate the apple?" and Adam in his defence says, "yes but you know it was written that I would." The Koran is "unwritten" ie. it was not created at a point in time (opening it to the critique that it reflected the times and needs reinterpreting for today's world), instead it is "unwritten" -- it is and always is the mind of god, so it is always right. Any parts that don't make sense don't bear questioning.

The reason it is so unreasonable is that they had a big debate about it and one side said, we can demonstrate that your ideas are wrong, and the other side said, yes but being right makes no difference if we can just kill you, therefore POWER is the only thing which matters.

So anyway, they had that debate 1000 years ago, when they were wondering about modernising, and the POWER side won.

The "open society" argument is that democracy relies on everyone acknowledging their fallibility. Ie. we can never be sure our view is correct because views are by nature self-reinforcing. Maybe it is bias because of lack of education. But it can also be bias because of lots of education (we are the experts, so we are most likely to be right). So no matter how sure you are about the science, about a political idea, or whatever, fallibility says you should't impose it on others just because you think it is right. They need to have the option to think their own thing. So it is actually not about majority rule, it is about allowing minorities a voice just in case the majority got it wrong.

Nope. There's lots of books and analysis about culture in the last 50 years. So there's lots of ways for you to decide whether something is going on or not.