Where did it say he was a scientologist? They didn't even exist back them. You made that up to pump up your argument.

Jack Parsons was friends with L. Ron Hubbard for a time, and this friendship allegedly failed because Hubbard took off with a great deal of Parsons' money. Again allegedly, Scientology was founded with that money. Malina and Parsons are two major figures in rocketry who did various occult rituals with both Alastair Crowley and L. Ron Hubbard and basically the historical links between those last two are mostly links through the rocket researchers more than direct contacts.

Implementation makes a difference. Early versions of NT were quite good, but unpopular because you needed 16MB of RAM (if I recall correctly) to run them in an era when a high end personal computer shipped with 4MB of RAM. Over the years they tried to hold the line, at one point getting the minimum down to 12MB of RAM, but perhaps not coincidentally stability got really bad.

With slave labor, no less.

Yes people are limited by their culture and time, but not *that* limited. Braun deserves condemnation for using slave labor in WW2.

I wasn't aware that he was an american citizen.

Plus we didn't off him when he was murdering Kurds and other "undesirables", or when he started a revanchist war against Iran that resulted in several hundred thousand, possibly a million, casualties. He only got in the doghouse for seizing Kuwait, threatening the carefully engineered balance-of-powerlessness established in the middle east by the the allies after WWI.

Interesting observation about the other phone. I wasn't aware that anyone else had actually made it fully to market prior to Apple on that score.

As for the iOS vs. Android situation, I'm not sure we disagree as much as you suggest, but I do think perhaps we are talking slightly at cross-purposes. For example, I agree with just about everything you said about which apps are and aren't successful on the iOS platform today. As I think I mentioned right back in my first post to this thread, I don't see the wildly successful iOS app developers leaving the platform any time soon. However, I suspect those represent only a very small minority of the overall iOS developer population.

My point there is that simply in terms of the popularity of the platform -- hardware sales, in short -- Apple seems to be losing momentum, while Android devices are gaining market share. I'm not necessarily suggesting that this will result in native Android apps becoming a better market for developers. I don't think I've suggested anything at all like that anywhere in this discussion, and if I did appear to imply that then it was entirely accidental. I'm just suggesting that those iOS developers who haven't either hit the big time in the initial gold rush or carved out a niche where they can stand out and charge sensible money seem to be starting to give up and look elsewhere, wherever that might be.

Personally, I do have my (and my businesses') bet firmly on web apps being the way forward for a lot of general informational/basic interactive apps for the near future. These work portably across all the main mobile devices and of course desktops as well, they have no lock-in or tax, and most importantly, they don't come with the preconception that something good that cost a small fortune to develop should still be sold for peanuts, which means you can viably invest enough time and money to offer something well polished and comprehensive/innovative/otherwise interesting. We could have built similar things as native apps on each mobile platform, but we saw little if any advantage to doing so.

The fact that Google seem to be betting the same way, and applying their considerable resources to further that end, and slowly capturing market share from Apple (whether as a consequence or coincidentally for other reasons doesn't really matter) just makes the prospect of developing such projects as iOS apps that much less appealing in the long run.

As a final point, while there certainly are premium apps out there, typical B2C apps on the App Store are not among them. Sure, prices might be up from 5 cents to 6 cents this year, but based on the stats that have been floating around in various on-line discussions this week, it appears that I already pull in more revenue per month from a side project web app that isn't complete yet and has had almost no advertising than the average (mean) app on the App Store. We appear to have reached the point where anyone who doesn't win big fairly quickly can't actually sustain a viable business writing iOS apps, and any way you look at it, that surely can't be promising for the future of the platform.

And meanwhile, as you worry about a hypothetical threat from your government, real people with real lives are really having them destroyed by people who put themselves above the law through the mechanism of anonymity. The big bullies are a concern, but so are the small ones, and it's far from clear which is overall the more dangerous threat to quality of life in the western world today.

I'm happy for you that you're comfortable with a black and white view where there are absolute rights that are the only important things and where any unintended harmful side effects can be explained away somehow, but in my world there are shades of grey and no such easy resolutions to these issues.

Unfortunately, it's clear by this point that you don't understand what the so-called "right to be forgotten" that resulted from the European Court ruling actually is -- for a start, it doesn't involve "removing knowledge from someone else", nor to my knowledge does any technology exist that could even do that if we wanted to -- so I'm not sure there's any point in continuing this discussion.

Um, to. . .occupy the. . .(wait for it). . .Resolute Desk.

So, exactly how "[absurd" was my "analogy]", please?

As I was explaining to my dad during the daily call on the way home, the way politics works, you don't bring anything to a vote unless you know what the outcome will be. While, in a absolute sense, I don't doubt that orders of magnitude more information exists than would be needful to demonstrate "high crimes and misdemeanors"

Thus, November can be reviewed as a No-Talent Rodeo Clown Referendum: the same fickle electorate that returned Pres'ent Obama to the White House could just as easily. . .somehow expect the spineless GOP to locate some vertebrae, given power, I guess. Not holding my breath. I'm not sure, at that point, what difference impeachment is supposed to make, other than giving your girl the ultimate Race Card play.

Google cache?

I'm sure someone's crunched the numbers and this makes sense on paper, but seriously? Porting to Itanium before x86? I know HP wants to prop up its teensy niche CPU server line, but I just can't see how to justify that. Who's going to migrate software from old VMS systems to a new one on very highly vendor-locked hardware? It seems like anything likely to ever be updated before the heat death of the universe would probably have made the jump to Linux-on-x86 years ago.

Formal language specification isn't meant to be perused with a cup of coffee in one hand. It's primary purpose is that you can use it to prove that your implementation of the language does what the language specs say it's supposed to do. Your "informal (but exact) specification" doesn't do "a much better job" at that. It can't do that job at all.

Sorry, but I think this sounds like treason,

Frankly, it doesn't matter if you think it sounds like fishpaste. It may be reprehensible, it may be criminal, but in the US, treason is defined in the Constitution, and this ain't it.

a flash drive that's ALSO a HID device

It's also a Human Interface Device device?

I see where you are coming from, and even admire it in a way, but I feel compelled to point out another side of the issue (one other side, there are probably 20 more). Online bullys don't usually just make speech involving insults and putdowns. There's a high degree of these being accompanied by false accusations that can easily count as libel, and by misinformation which is often damaging in other ways. (In fact, for cases where bullying goes on for over 3 months, the chance of one or more of these other actions approaches unity). We've seen cases where, for example, the bully has progressed to claiming that a victim is HIV+, and then giving out a lot of misinformation about HIV in general, falsely claiming to be a doctor or to have gotten the information from one, an/or claiming to having hacked their victim's medical information. These things are generally criminal in and of themselves, and/or have other negative impacts (such as triggering security audits of medical records keeping to make sure the bully's claim isn't genuine), Protecting teens against insults and put downs is a mixed bag, but when you add in protecting them from bad medical and legal advice, and false claims that they can't protect their records if they see a doctor, and so many other things, any sane society is going to opt for some limitations, at least with regard to minors.
          This form of bullying has many interrelated bad effects: Laws get passed, because existing laws don't seem to be stopping the problem behavior. Free speech becomes hard to protect when the test cases are such unsympathetic types - even the ACLU sometimes declines to take a case where the jury is likely to be looking for any chance to convict on anything remotely applicable. Even if a politician actually cares about free speech (I know, I know, but some of them actually do.). The ones that actually try to live up to the Constitution, the UN declaration of rights, or other such inspirational ideas are also the ones who really want to stop these other related abuses, so even they will look to compromise (and for the ones who are just pandering to whatever group will get them elected, that sort of compromise is a no-brainer). Let a creep get away with enough, and everybody wants to see some sort of blowback, and if it looks like that creep is just hiding behind a first amendment claim, then the first amendment starts to be called a "technicality".It takes more character than most have to defend Vlad Adolph McKnife-wielding-Psycho. That's why there are phrases such as "Online Stalker" - behavior analogous to real world stalking, not just insults.
        My feeling is, even if we should let kids naturally develop tougher skins and reognize that free speech includes just the sorts of speech we find ourselves half wishing there was a law against, there's too many real creeps on the net for it to happen. The best way to stop it would be for the laws against slander, libel, and impersonation to be enforced so the things that are not just speech are what we are regulating, but we don't seem to do that, so bad laws WILL get passed instead.