Considering that the US ranks about 25th on the list of highest life expectancies, and that plenty of the countries above it have public or strictly regulated healthcare, I think those dirty marxist communist hippie countries must be doing something right.

Or perhaps those countries simply have a lower level of corruption of their government than the US, allowing them to have saner and more efficient government regulation of life essentials such as healthcare.

Considering that this voting process has evolved in the face of thousands of years of intrigue and backstabbing that makes even politicians look like choirboys, why is this a surprise? The evolutionary pressure was most certainly there.

And of course this analysis overlooks the most reliable way of rigging an election, and one that is most certainly practiced here: hand-picking the electorate. Who appointed those cardinals in the first place, eh?

Wow, only one sentence, but a huge pile of bovine fertiliser.

• These poor people pay premiums for health insurance, so they're now covered. So they do get healthcare.
• Obamacare forces the insurance companies to accept people with preconditions, and not deny coverage for some kind of nonsense reason.
• Obamacare forces the insurance companies to actually spend the money they collect on care for their customers, or else they have to return the excess money to their customers.
• If people cannot afford the insurance premiums, they get a subsidy.

I'm sure Obamacare is flawed, but if you argue against it at least argue with the facts, rather than making up things.

You're talking about a net loss to society, but you're not doing karma bookkeeping? You've completely lost me here.

Perhaps it is because of the contents of the movie? Wilders' movie was just a collection of lies and distortions that had two goals (1) piss off the people he hates (2) stroke the egos of his followers. In other words: he is just a schoolyard bully, a troll. Any talk about `opening a discussion' was just sanctimonious posturing.

It would have been nice if everyone would just have ignored him, but sadly he did manage to piss off a few too many people. Don't feed the trolls is a hard lesson to learn for many people.

Given all that, I can't say that I blame other countries if they don't want him, although it does mean that we `enjoy' his presence in the Netherlands all the more. Fortunately, his 15 minutes of fame seem to be drawing to an end. He has to say more and more outrageous things to get attention, and his support is fading.

The big flaw in this argument is that he could just as easily have spent his money on exclusive cars, bling, hookers, and donations to moronic lobby groups. There are plenty of rich people that have made this choice.

Instead Bill Gates is doing his sincere best to spend his time and money on doing good for world society, and he now has a long history in this. Moreover, he does a lot more than just write a cheque now and then, he is deeply involved in many of these projects. I think he deserves a lot more praise for this, not the acid comments he normally gets here on /.. No, the man is not a saint. However, if the evil things he has done still deserve to be mentioned after all these years, I think it is only fair to also remember his long history of charity. Has he done more evil than good? Personally I prefer not do get into karma bookkeeping; I think it is pretty arrogant to do so, especially because we don't know the full story, both of his charity and of his evil deeds.

Exactly what crimes are you talking about? The rape charges he denies, and leaking secret US documents is not a crime for an Australian citizen.

Come on, predicting aircraft behavior is far more than just 'CAD design of a piece of machinery'. It involves predictions of aerodynamic behavior, which also requires far-from-trivial computer models, and it involves predicting 'flyability', which requires careful modeling of human-machine interactions.

Nobody is claiming that whole-world climate models are already as robust or as accurate as these aircraft models, but they are getting more and more sophisticated, and they are certainly far beyond the stage where these predictions can be dismissed as random, meaningless numbers.

But exactly what are you grumbling about? You think the error margins in their results are too large to draw any conclusions? From the quoted fragment of their conclusion it doesn't sound like that. You think they are too optimistic in their error margins? Can you give a specific reason for that? Yes, not all mechanisms that influence the climate are fully understood, but exactly why do you think the authors have underestimated the influence of these mechanisms? Or perhaps you simply think that the journalists are misreporting the results of this scientific paper?

Computer models are nowadays also used to design aircraft, and they are so good that new aircraft routinely perform nearly perfectly on first flight. Modern highly complex ICs in bleeding-edge processes are supposed to work at first tape-out, all design and verification is done by computer. As long as you know the limitations of your model, computer modeling is a very valuable tool.

And look here, the authors of this article do know the limitations of their model:

The uncertainty is due to variation in the global models and the complex seasonal and topographical features of the L.A. regional climate.

Doesn't sound like hubris to me.

Ok, that's an easy answer: yes, predicting the weather is still hard, although modern predictions are actually very good most of the time, and certainly not as bad as common `wisdom' thinks they are.

However, climate models are about climate, not weather. They predict average weather, and that is easier than predicting the weather on a particular day. In a very similar way you cannot reliably predict the next roll of a dice, but you can very reliably predict the tallies of the next hundred rolls.

When predicting the next rolls of the dice you can even predict the expected error in the prediction: the standard deviation. The climate model of this article is apparently so good that they can also predict the expected deviation, which allows them to predict that there will be these hot spells, even though they are not able to predict the exact days these hot spells will happen.

As an Android developer, I have made this mistake myself. My app uses the Bluetooth API to listen to external GPSes, but can also run on 1.6, where this API is not present. I do this by carefully checking that the required API is there before using it. Google even has some documentation on how to do this.

However, it is easy as a developer to make a mistake in this. Forget to do the necessary checks in one place, and your app crashes on 1.6. So for every new release you must carefully check that it runs on every version. Guess what: not every developer will do that religiously, especially if all he did was change something completely unrelated. In my case I fortunately caught the problem before a new release because I have a 1.6 device myself that I use semi-regularly, but it is far to easy to overlook this. Far, far, to easy.

Now of course you can label me and everyone else who makes this mistake a bad programmer, but that doesn't change the fact that this happens, and I suspect it happens pretty often.

If you're not even willing to accept that, what is the point of arguing with you? Here on planet earth there is a lot of solid science that indicates there is global warming. Just see the UN reports for a start. On your planet there might not be, but that is of no concern to us here on earth.

I think you underestimate the repetition there is in the app market: identical book wrappers around hundred of different books, club/idol fan apps that are identical except for a few logos and urls, and so on. And not every app is regularly updated.

Moreover, Apple has strict guidelines about good coding practices, and they have the tools to enforce them on the source code. That's much more than the Android market does, even counting the virus checking that the parent post mentions. So even if all Apple would do is run code inspection tools, there would be significant difference in `vettedness'. In reality they must have tools to make sure that a supposedly innocent book wrapper doesn't use any network communication at all, and similar common-sense checks, and they will have have some knowledgable people that handle the difficult cases. Last but not least, one reason they have this reputation for capricious rejections is that they err on the side of caution.

Calling all this just security theater is not realistic. No, it will not catch every bug and malicious trick, but I'm sure the lock on your front door can also be picked by a competent burglar, and that doesn't make that lock security theater.

Both the Android and the Apple approach have their advantages. It's a bit like a holiday: some people prefer organized trips, some people prefer to do all the planning themselves. But do not underestimate the value of the organized trip to some people; it gets them to places they would not go otherwise.

Apart from what others have posted: the apps in the Google App store are hardly vetted: any developer can post whatever s/he likes, and it is immediately available in the store. Google may remove the app later on if it breaks some of the rules, and I don't think that happens very often. In contrast, Apple checks every version of every app, and only when it is approved it is published.

Yeah, yeah. A good investment for a government is something else then for a shareholder. What I of course mean is that it makes sense for a government to spend some public money on exploring and stimulating alternatives to oil with all its political and pollution problems.

Your economic theories make no sense to me. The point of this kind of public investment is to be a `launching customer' that makes the price low enough to attract other buyers, and hopefully after a few years the government money is no longer needed for a healthy market. Since the cost of solar energy is dropping rapidly, that whole theory doesn't seem so farfetched to me. No doubt there were other factors in play here, but nevertheless it still looks to me that the money did some good, and was well spent.