The funny thing is Facebook bought for billions a company which makes software running over XMPP. THAT was pathetic.

They didn't pay $19 billion for the app. They paid for the userbase. From what I read it's about 450 million, which would make the purchase price about $42 per user. A little steep, but not outlandish in advertising terms. Now they have to figure out how to hang on to those users and grow the user base.

Board is usually 'institutional investors' i.e. banks and insurance companies. Small stockholders don't have a chance of influencing it.

He just drank too much of the koolaid.

Whatever. It sounds like you have found an easy way to make a few dollars.

Skype? Hah. Remember ICQ?

The funny thing is Facebook bought for billions a company which makes software running over XMPP. THAT was pathetic.

On a global scale, indeed: 0.7C is a small variation. The Earth has had larger variations before, and this is not unusual on a geological scale (although to be fair, its happening at a faster time scale than most of the climate changes in the past.)
However, 0.7C pretty much validates the models. If the anthropogenic greenhouse effect is not real, you need three things:
(1) You need to find an explain an explanation for why the radiative forcing does not increase temperature
(2) You need to find a hitherto-unknown effect that is causing the warming that we measure, and
(3) You need to find an explanation for why the amplifier that amplifies effect (2) to be large enough to increase the temperature doesn't also amplify the greenhouse effect. (and, contrawise, you need to explain why whatever effect it is that cancels out the greenhouse effect, (1), does not also cancel out effect (2).)

While 0.7C may be small, you should also note that we are continuing to put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Games probably use native code.

You have two options. One is that you NEVER resell the software to anyone. GPL does not forbid you from doing such as long as you don't redistribute it. The other option is to simply cease to use the GPLed software. If you have distributed the software to a 3rd party you have to distribute the source to ALL of it however.

If Microsoft can't touch it all the better. They are the scummiest software company on Earth. Well them and Oracle.

The story is bullshit. Not going to happen. I can see them replicating the Android API and virtual machine but not the kernel. Plus it would take them a lot of time to do it and they would be continually behind Google in API development. Good luck. Not.

Steve Jobs had a salary of $ 1 per year. He shared in the success of the company because he owned a good chunk of it.

That, I have no problem with.

DavidHumus notes "Maybe the bigger question is why is CEO pay so entirely disconnected from company performance?"

Because ownership has been replaced by control, and leadership has been replaced by management.

The first and largest is that the Kinect is a product differentiater. It makes the XBone different from the PS4. There really isn't that much a difference between the two boxes otherwise. Fine, you can go on with the technical differences between the types of RAM and the custom silicon for the XBone's APU but those are not large concerns for Mom and Dad buying little Sally's birthday present.

Until MS comes up with something besides the software that makes their product different, the Kinect is going to hang on. But the second that happens, it'll be tossed. They know they've screwed the pooch here. They know exactly what it cost them in terms of customer relations and in terms of developers.

My friend has an Xbone. It turns out Kinect is what caused his WIFE to monopolize it. Yes, his wife took over the Xbone. Playing Just Dance 2014, Kinect Fitness and other Kinect games.

Enough so it's hard to get him on his Xbone. (And apparently, his youngest kids are all seeing mom dance and doing it themselves. And no, he's responsible - they take their kids outside to play which is why his Xbone gaming time is limited - they purposely want to keep their kids from getting addicted so they only play normal games when the kids are in bed).

Apparently they also really, really, really like Skype on it - the Kinect "zooms" in on the person speaking.

Of course, a popular peripheral for the PS4 is the camera - which if it isn't used to stream amateur porn shows on twitch...).

I have both, and find myself playing the Xbone a lot more than my PS4 - the camera's just so-so ($60 for what amounts to two $10 720p webcams...), and PS4 controller battery life is atrocious.

The only really bad thing is, on the PS4, I'm not buying games on it - I'm just waiting for them to show up on PS+. I did buy two games, though, but those were on ridiculous sale.

And no, the "p"s don't matter to me - because I end up playing PS4 using my Vita and remote play - about the best feature the PS4 has over the Xbone. But it also means the p's don't matter because ou're just squishing it down to quarter-FHD (540p) for display on the Vita screen.

Shocking! Who would have ever guessed before the advent of complicated math models that food riots tend to occur when food prices go up !

Next up, complicated fluid dynamics models that show that when it rains, you may get wet.

The actual point of concern from fracking is not about the fluids, the water, or any of the bullshit you see people ranting about. The problem is that they are re-using old wells which were drilled a long time ago, and those wells go through the water table and natural aquifers in many cases. Those old wells tend to have shoddy and/or degraded casings (the walls of the wells are lined usually with some type of concrete or metal tubing to prevent them from collapsing), so when they are pumping the shit down the well they can tend to leak somewhat.

Well put. It's important to realize that by the very nature of there being trapped gas, that means that there is at least one (generally several) layers of highly impermiable cap rock above the natural gas, so thick and durable that they've contained a highly-mobile gas for millions of years (despite earthquakes and the like), all of which is several kilometers down - versus the groundwater which is a couple dozen to a couple hundred meters down. Creating cracks a couple dozen centimeters long several kilometers well below the cap rock down has essentially no effect on the leak rate from the reservoir up through *kilometers* of rock (which would take ages for anything they're injecting now to reach anyway). The problem is the well, which by its very nature must pierce through each layer on its way down - including your groundwater layers. Even new wells aren't perfect (as we well know). Reusing old wells is a recipie for leaks.

The solution to water shortages isn't to cry about frakking, it's to start advancing our de-salinization technology

I don't know... desalinization generally takes crazy amounts of energy to produce enough for agriculture, just by the very nature of the energy state of saltwater versus fresh. There is one concept I read about a few years back which I thought was pretty clever that might work around that, though - it was to use open evaporation pools to create super-saline water and to have it flow past two ion-specific membranes (one for negative ions, the other for positive) connecting to adjacent pools, creating a salt gradient pressure into those pools. Each of those pools in turn have their opposite ion-specific membrane connected to a final regular-saltwater pool. For an ion to follow the diffusion gradient and leave the super-saturated pool into an adjacent pool, that adjacent pool must suck an opposite ion from the final saltwater pool - which it will do if the gradient from the super-saturated pool is strong enough. The final pool stays balanced because ions are being lost to each adjacent pool. Eventually the final saltwater pool will become freshwater.

That which I find really neat about this concept is that it doesn't use electricity beyond basic water pumps and the like - the energy powering it is simply evaporation of seawater, which is ridiculously easy to achieve in many desert locations. In many places a mere jetty is enough to turn hundreds of square miles of ocean into an evaporation pool. The challenge is of course mass production of sufficient flow rate ion-selective membranes and keeping them from clogging.