Both reproduce just fine on land as well as ice. That we think of them as ice breeding now is due to mankind's predation. See Farley Mowat's 'Sea of Slaughter' for a good rundown on how it's us that pushed their remnants into the areas we think of as native today.

The correct scale on which to consider the evolution of their Arctic adaptations in general is the 2.58 million years since the current Pliocene-Quaternary glaciation started. Which puts us in the only about 27% or so of geological record in which there's been permanent ice at the poles. Just to put this global warming hysteria over a handful of degrees into a proper context.

> First, it is still hotly debated when the next glacial period is due, and most geological studies I've read actually put it at closer to 50,000 years from now.

You're misremembering that I'm pretty sure. Quick google shows this at the BBC couple weeks ago:

"The last Ice Age ended about 11,500 years ago, and when the next one should begin has not been entirely clear...In the journal Nature Geoscience, they write that the next Ice Age would begin within 1,500 years - but emissions have been so high that it will not..."

Everything I've read is that the average is about 11,000 years before the next one starts, which means if we were on average track the Little Ice Age would have been the start of the next one. If the Modern Warm Period recovery is due to us, well then good for us I say!

> But even if the next ice age were imminent, and you actually cared about preventing it, you'd argue for saving our fossil fuels and doling them out slowly to stabilize against the gradual cooling, when we need them, rather than using them all up now and overshooting, when we don't.

A clever argument, but no: I'd argue for throwing up nuclear power stations now so they can pump out water vapor when the need arises. Water vapor is a way more effective GHG than CO2 is. Indeed, it's not actually clear that water vapor leaves enough stray IR around in the appropriate wavelengths for CO2 to have anywhere near the effect that IPCC models assume. That we're not seeing temperatures rise under clouded conditions as much as under clear conditions is a fairly sound piece of evidence that it doesn't, and the Modern Warming Period is likelier to be due to historically low cloud cover, pace the Svensmark cloud seeding theory; all the 20th C. warming can be explained by a 2% decrease in cloud cover without having to invoke GHG at all.

But since we only have 30 years of reliable (ie, satellite) cloud cover measurements, anything before being deduced from ship's logs and the like, and being able to measure the Sun's activity in any kind of quantitative fashion is of similar lack of vintage, we have no idea what changes in cloud cover there's been; nor how the models should account for them. Currently accepted models assume, with absolutely no supporting evidence for that assumption whatsoever, that they are a positive feedback. Actual measurements are unclear but support more the idea that they're actually a negative feedback. Should have a pretty good clue either way in another five-ten years or so.

> Uh, an Ice Age would not kill off the entire world's population.

Pretty much it would, as a matter of fact.

Thing is, there's two things about Ice Ages; first the ice thing, but more importantly, they're *dry* in the parts that aren't covered by ice. Which means biomass plummets even more than you'd expect from the temperature. And cereal crops are particularly hard hit, which cuts out the foundation of basically everything except fishing that feeds people.

After you account for these knockon effects, the estimates for how many people could be fed in an Ice Age range from 400 million worldwide down to a few tens of millions.

"Catastrophic" AGW has that beat all to hell. So go global warming go!

> Then, WHY is there global warming?

Short scale: We're climbing out of the Little Ice Age, just a hair above the three-century trendline right now, but not unprecedentedly so; early 1700s had quicker warming than the last half-century.

Long scale: We're approaching the end of an interglacial period, and that's when it's warmest.

> Regardless of the cause, that change must be stopped,

No, we should do our damnedest to speed it up, and hope to God the alarmists are right in everything they say. The wildest forecasts I've heard are that a billion, maybe a billion and a quarter, will be killed off by AGW. Beats the hell out of the six and a half billion or so that would be killed off by the next Ice Age, which we're a bit overdue for already; and if they are right than we can get the average temperature up 6, hey that's just about the amount than an Ice Age lowers it. How convenient!

> What was it like ... Before 1300?

Good bit warmer than now. We can tell because in Greenland receding glaciers are exposing Viking settlements, where beech tree stumps can be found in permafrost.

> ... Before 800?

Good bit warmer than it was just before 1300. We can tell because receding glaciers in the Alps are exposing Roman trading routes through passes that were considered permanently glaciated until the last few years; and unknown in the records extant at the time of moderate climate in Greenland, evidenced above.

> ... Before 300?

It is generally suspected that the Minoan Warm Period was warmer than both the Roman Warm Period and Medieval Warm Period because of descriptions of crops grown, but there's no "go look for yourself" smoking guns like the above.

> let us remember all the Chinese workers who commited suicide

Let us remember that the suicide rate of the 1 million+ workers at Foxconn is less than a third of Chinese as a whole.

Reducing suicide rate by two-thirds is a pretty decent accomplishment.

> My music library contains somewhere on the order of 30k files; I'd gladly pay $25 to replace all the crap automagically.

One note here, it seems from initial reports that your $25 gets you 20k songs max. I would suspect that's probably a licensing limitation, along the lines of iTunes allowing you to only burn 5 copies of a playlist to CD back in the day.

Still, I'm with you, $25/yr to keep more music than I can plausibly listen to in adequate for mobile quality handy in the cloud sure strikes me as a massively worthwhile deal for time saved compared to backing up and syncing to my half-dozen iDevices myself; and I'm pretty darn sure it's likely to strike a lot of other iDevice users the same way. Even leaving completely aside the whole amnesty debate.

"It's possible that this is either an oversight or that Apple deliberately kept the old JavaScript engine for web apps in case it broke functionality that the app was depending on."

No, it's a security thing. This was noted when people first found out about Nitro.

"apparently iOS 4.3 features JS JIT. did they lift restriction from the kernel that prevented mmap-ing rwx memory pages? hmm."

http://twitter.com/mraleph/status/43030240175468544

So in 4.3 they've lifted it for Safari.app and only Safari.app. Presumably they will lift it in future for at least web app bookmarks; UIWebView in general might be somewhat more problematic security-wise, but we shall see.

"Can you (or since you are unwilling, anyone else) point to where in the license the FSF position is codified in legal language instead of baboon like posturing"

I quoted the "baboon like posturing" of the Free Software Federation's Brett Smith, which is the reason VLC is not in the App Store today.

Or perhaps you have an explanation of why VLC is not in the App Store today that is not reliant on the "baboon like posturing" of the Free Software Federation's Brett Smith? Absent that, I will take his "baboon like posturing" and the consequent removal of VLC from the App Store as being conclusive evidence of the actual issues at hand, and your blathering as of no consequence.

"There's nothing at all about the App Store that prevents this, as long as your provide all of the code for your project somewhere everyone can get to."

You appear to utterly misunderstand the FSF's position. From the PC Magazine article on the VLC flap:

"The GPL gives Apple permission to distribute this software through the App Store. All they would have to do is follow the license's conditions to help keep the software free," wrote the Free Software Federation's Brett Smith earlier this year. "Instead, Apple has decided that they prefer to impose Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) and proprietary legal terms on all programs in the App Store."

You see "source" mentioned anywhere there? Nope. That's because it's not about the source. It's about restricting distribution to signed binaries, and about reserving the rights to remote kill malware and suchlike. There is no issue with source, as my Wolf3D example shows nicely. The issue is that the FSF refuses to accept that a consumer device capable of exploiting the user's personal and financial information really does need to have its access curated, and although sure Apple's current policies could use significant tweaking, there's no way that they can ever both satisfy the FSF and be responsible to their nontechnical users.

If the source were included (or included as an option) in the download,

That's exactly how id does it for instance, pop open the Wolf3D.ipa iTunes installed and hey presto there it is.

> would that resolve the issue?

No, the alleged issue -- the biggest, anyways, there's a few more -- is that you can't redistribute the binary (well, you can to jailbroken devices or developers who can run codesign themselves, but in the general case you can't). Source doesn't come into it at all; anyone who claims source distribution is an issue should be gently corrected that there is no impediment to including all GPL-required assets in the .ipa iTunes provides, and pointed at the live example of Wolf3D should they need to prove so to themselves.

Since there is no way in hell ... and nor should there be, anyone who is sane enough to recognize security concerns attendant on any responsible smartphone provider will accept ... that Apple will ever allow unsigned binaries access to their devices, this issue is effectively unresolvable until the FSF pulls its head out and accepts that the general public really, truly, should have code signing protection, remote malware killswitch, etc. for their smartphone devices; there's just too much personal and financial information available there for any responsible company to not do their best to lock down the platform.

And if you're not the general public, you can go right ahead and take the developer option mentioned above, and for the foreseeable future you'll probably be able to take advantage of the jailbreak option too. So there really is no issue here, to people who are reasonable enough to consider the user instead of just their rabid Apple-hating zealotry. 'Tis strange indeed that whilst the TOS of Android Market are similarly infringing in all the ways that are alleged to matter wrt remote kill and so forth, the Apple-bad crowd never seem to notice...

It's more like there's a whole host of genetic elements affecting what's a proper diet for you, and you've got to figure out which ones apply.

Dairy, starches, grains, and fructose are four of the most important. For my extreme northern European/Mongol ancestry, lots of the first and none of the last three is best. Take someone whose ancestry is 50 degrees of latitude south of mine, and the chances are pretty good that the exact opposite would be a good diet for them.

There have been experiments trying that diet for over 8,000 years at least, resulting in the healthiest population on the planet; archaeologists routinely find skeletons of 70+ year olds with all their original teeth, the only population on Earth to produce those.

Said population being Canada's Inuit. Zero carb birth to death except for partially digested stomach contents of prey animals. As there is no edible plant matter whatsoever in the traditional Inuit habitat.

In what is no doubt a complete coincidence, since a modern "healthy" diet with plenty of vegetables was introduced to the Inuit after World War II, obesity, diabetes, and cancer have gone from nothing to epidemic proportions and lifespan is plummeting.

"Sure, the source is distributed, but it is inaccessible."

Only if you're too stupid to find your "Mobile Applications" folder, unzip the .ipa, and "Show Package Contents". id software figures that's adequate for distributing the wolf3d source, as I noted, so it's good enough for me too.

"anyone who downloads GPL'd apps from the app store is not free to modify and distribute usable binaries."

Yes they are. The binary just needs to be signed before installation on a device (and does not need to be signed to be runnable in the simulator). The distributor can do that either with an ad hoc certificate or with a distribution certificate for distribution to be done through the App Store; or the recipient can do that with the codesign command line tool.

Seems to me that requiring the recipient be able to sign the binary to install on a device is not qualitatively different than requiring the recipient to have a compiler to compile the source in the first place.

" I am also free to distribute my modified work so others can use it; This I cannot do on iOS without paying Apple $100 for the privilege..."

Not true. Even if you don't have a cert for your own devices, you can throw a binary compiled with the free(gratis) Xcode download up wherever you want, and the recipient can run codesign on it with their cert. Is that a GPL violation? I say it's no more a violation than requiring a compiler to compile the source, or a 3D card to run an OpenGL program, or enough memory to load the program, or any other restriction that makes a particular set of source not runnable on a particular device. Is it a GPL violation that I can't run a piece of GPL'd Windows source on my Mac? Well, how exactly do you distinguish "not having a device certificate available to sign the binary" from "not having the Windows OS available to link the binary to" as a restriction on your alleged user rights? I see no point of legal difference.

"I would like to know where you got this number (92%), because I suspect it is much lower. I have no proof of this, though, and I'd like to know what the number actually is."

That was what Flurry pegged it at in their last monthly update I read, sometime around April. Granted that their source pool is only those devices running apps with the Flurry SDK installed, but I'm willing to bet that's acceptably representative of all devices. In any case, there is no publicly available info that's any better than what Flurry (and their competitors like Mobclix) provide.

Unless, of course, you obtained the software through the App Store...

So zip up the source files and drop them in the app package you submit to Apple. That's what id did with the wolf3d sources. Presto, source distributed along with every download from the App Store, now go sit in the corner with a nice big cup of STFU.

Since that alleged objection is so trivially dealt with, the FSF is taking the position that Section 6 of GPLv2 is incompatible with App Store distribution, since Apple limits the distribution of the downloads to the five devices linked to the downloader's Apple ID. In other words, their position is that Apple must remove the signing requirement for device installs before iOS devices can be GPL-compatible at all.

Well, nobody sane thinks that ever might happen.

You have the option to sign yourself whatever code you want on whatever devices you purchase by joining the iOS developer program; and furthermore you can sign it to be ad hoc installed on another couple hundred devices of people who trust you enough to give you their device IDs. If you're not interested in working with either of those options, then that's a pretty clear indication that what you're up on your high horse about has nothing to do with what's actually best for the vast majority (as in the 92% that have not jailbroken their devices) of users.