Uh huh, Apple leads using parts outsourced to rival tablet makers. Apple got lucky in their timing and then have been using the profits trying to screw over rivals and consumers with frivolous lawsuits suppressing the competition rather than innovating. If somebody had said a couple of years ago that Apple would be seen as the scum of the computer industry even beneath Microsoft nobody would have believed it :-(. How low they have sunk.

Phillip.

Randi obtains results on the various fields he's interested in debunking not by collecting a representative sample through the offer of independent testing but by dangling the offer of $1,000,000 under the assumption that any opponents he selects will be misguided or fraudsters. This creates an obviously biased self-selecting sample and provides that justice is not seen to be done. Do you deny this?

Would you like to substantiate this by pointing out cases of people with genuine psychic powers that Randi has refused to test? And he is doing better than testing a representative sample, he has made the offer open to every single person on the planet.

Randi does not bring independent third parties to establish the tests but finalises his own terms for the tests. After all, this isn't an exercise is proving what's correct but in protecting his own money.

He has enough experience to formuate his own tests. What makes you think a third party would establish any better ones? If they can I am sure Randi would be happy to adopt it.

Even though Randi chooses his own terms, there is no peer review process for his work - e.g. through stringent analysis before publication in some third party journal with a reputation for adherence to academic standards.

What's that got to do with anything? He's exposing frauds, not proposing a theory on the origins of the universe.

Nor are the experiments repeated independently (especially not with a representative sample).

??? Anybody is able to repeat the test independently. Any why would anybody want to test somebody exposed as a fraud. The only time worth testing independently is if Randi can't expose them.

his "no-one's claimed my $1,000,000!" has nothing to do with the strength of his underlying claim

Er I think the general public would disagree. $1M is a pretty good incentive.

Phillip.

No, the credit card company only gets to see the total amount you spent and not an itemised list. A store is able to track an increase in your alcohol intake and sell that information to your health insurance company, the credit card company cannot.

Phillip.

Great answer. "People in accidents have often braked sharply, ergo we will reduce the premium for people that don't brake sharply". What do you think will happen in an environment where nobody on the road wants to be the one to brake sharply to avoid an accident as it will raise their premium?

Phillip.

Too right it has nothing to do with the car being stolen. When I went to get my first insurance, the price was up to £5,000 per year for a car costing £1000. Even after shopping and bargaining my insurance still cost more per year than the total capital cost of my car for 3rd party only. The two factors that determine insurance price are age and class of vehicle (loosely linked to engine capacity).

You can see why compulsory 3rd party is a good thing. You would hate it if somebody crashed into your car but then turned around and said "Would love to help out mate but I'm a bit skint at the moment". Jaster is right that the UK insurance companies run it like a cartel, though watchdogs have recently started to clamp down.

Phillip.

KDE and Gnome (now Unity) have always continually edged past each other. KDE dropped the ball with 4.0 but now is the most polished desktop out there. Unity is a bit buggy and not so usable at the moment but I wouldn't be surprised if it pulled back past KDE in the short to medium term considering the resources being thrown at it.

People don't migrate from Unity to KDE... they move sideways from Ubuntu with one DE to Ubuntu with another DE. Having Kubuntu as a more polished DE until Unity gets sorted keeps users on the *buntu base. I would expect most users going to Kubuntu will be from Microsoft Windows, but even if a few Unity users switch they are never more than an apt-get away.

I don't see anything more sinister than Canonical going broke and not being able to afford to spare a developer.

Phillip.

Unless you live in the UK, in which case if you use BT as your Internet provider they intercept all your communications. They then break down your data by protocol, using "deep packet inspection", and profile each subscriber for advertising purposes. All totally illegal yet done to tens of thousands of subscribers without their knowledge, not that BT cared. You can read more here.

Phillip.

Learning to fly a plane is not a criminal offence. I'm sure the terrorists rationalised the not landing bit at the time (eg next set of lessons when they have more cash). It's tough trying to spot trends in data, and mass surveillance just throws up more false positives than real leads. This is why targetting investigations, warranted phone tapping, undercover infiltration, and other traditional police methods are still the best. The variables are so complex we still need a human mind making the judgement calls.

Phillip.

They got the court injunction to prevent Samsung sales in the crucial run up to Christmas. Mission accomplished. They don't care that it's now thrown out of court.

Phillip.

I put on Unity on to try it out, whilst installing my usual kde-desktop at the same time, and I actually like Unity quite a lot once you've gone through the forums and worked out how to turn the auto-hide off. Otherwise it's unusable, eg every time you want to click back on the browser the task bar pops up and covers the button. There is still a way to go, the disappearing scroll bars are odd and the mac-os "menu at the top" takes a while to get used to, but overall I like it. It will stay my primary desktop as long as it keeps moving forwards.

Phillip.