Eh, looks promising, might give it a shot, but frankly, I don't much trust the main gnome folks anymore after the fun that was gnome3 launch.

MATE works, gaining momentum, family members are all happy (and they were not happy with gnome 3 I can tell you that... my poor mom). I don't really have much incentive to switch.

MATE, personally. I've used XFCE4 in the past, but still has just a few too many rough edges for me.

Surprisingly, MATE did rather well in his tests, here. Better than XFCE4. Shame MATE still isn't ported to ARM.

http://l3net.wordpress.com/2013/03/17/a-memory-comparison-of-light-linux-desktops/

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTQzMTU "GNOME 2 Fork MATE Desktop Aims For Wayland"

Erm, I'm not tooootally sure what you mean, but, here's the chain.
1) You provide a link to goo.gl/maps/something
2) Reply worries that this could be a redirect to some evil website, even though goo.gl/maps only ever redirects to maps.google.com
3) I point out this /maps fact, and also strip down the link he provided to make it a bit shorter

The extra stuff in the link doesn't have any tracking info in it. Google just adds it to try to make a version of the page that matches what you've been doing (zooming, panning, your search parameters and such).

Well, some blogs and such don't play nice with long links.
Also people sometimes needs to copy and paste them.
As such, google offers a link shortening service right in google maps (click the chain link icon).

Note the url has /maps/ in it - he couldn't send you to something evil unless it was on google maps, which I suppose there might be stuff here and there.

He could also have trimmed some of the junk in the URL tho...
https://maps.google.co.uk/maps?ll=21.401534,72.199316&t=h&z=15

But, eh... Only works for the simple case I guess...
(? IS NULL OR foo LIKE '%'||?||'%') AND
(? IS NULL OR bar = ?) AND
(? IS NULL OR (A = ? OR B = ? OR C = ?)) AND
(? IS NULL OR baz = to_date(?||'-'||?,'YYYY-MM'))

Ah. Good point. Avoids a bit of spam in the binds. Fair 'nuff.

That doesn't seem to be a big improvement on readability to me, but sure, why not :)

Yep.
select 1 from
table where
(? IS NULL OR foo = ?) and
(? IS NULL OR bar = ?) and
(? IS NULL OR baz = ?)

where foo, bar and baz are all optional.

I was kinda curious what he meant, myself, so I checked out this old-ish paper.
http://crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/pubs/papers/privatebrowsing.pdf

I don't know if things have changed much, but their fairly thorough review seems to indicate firefox and chrome are pretty similar.
Looking at their table, one possible area of concern they listed (that Chrome might no longer have a problem with) is zoom level.
That could give information to a site that it is the same person, if they cared, although, that seems to be a pretty minor leak, given all the other information you could be revealing even if you hid your IP (a la panopticlick).
Looks like Chrome retains it from the non-private session, Firefox does not. The download list thing doesn't seem like a big deal. Depends on what you're using it for I guess.

Some leaks they fixed...
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=3493
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=21341

Open issues:
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=867
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=34593 (I'm not a fan of this one either, but multiple private windows in Firefox do the same thing)

Back in 2010 Flash added support for private browsing in their plugin (that is, wrt local storage) in Firefox. I have no idea if/when that got added to Chrome.

I saw one complaint that disabled plugins (like Flash) in Chrome were reactivated in Incognito, but I don't know enough about the browser to check that.

Anyway, they seem pretty similar to me.

Construction on the Vdara began in 2007 and completed in 2009.
Major news coverage of the Vdara death ray appears to begin summer 2010.

Construction on the Walkie Talkie began in 2010. They'd reached the basement level by January 2011 according to Wikipedia.

It seems to me that implies plenty of time to alter the design of the rest of the tower.

On the Vdara:
"Designers foresaw the issue, and thought they had solved it by installing a high-tech film on the south-facing glass panes"
(didn't work, looks like they were excessively optimistic or didn't count on the parabolic effect, just reflection)

http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/kits/corals/media/supp_coral04a.html
http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/kits/corals/coral04_reefs.html
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0103/feature2/
"For 20,000 years, since the peak of the last ice age, its coral base has gradually followed the rising sea level and slowly developed into the splendid, living atoll it is today."

The reef is constantly growing and shifting. As water levels incrementally rise, new coral will build up over the "dead stuff"
It really isn't a big deal. Witness history. The Maldives have been there for a very long time, and water levels have been rising for a very long time, considerably more rapidly than now.

The coral is considerably above the rock at this point, just due to continuing to grow as water rises and rock subsides.

Hrm.
The Maldives at least should be fine. They are coral atolls which always lie at sea level, regardless of what height the ocean has been in the past (coral grows).

Wikipedia says satellites show a rate of 3.3mm per year. There's no evidence at present of an accelerating trend. So, 33cm in a century.

NOAA says:
"growth rates of 0.3 to 2 centimeters per year for massive corals, and up to 10 centimeters per year for branching corals"

Maldives should be fine.
Louisiana could have trouble, especially since it has already been losing land. Loss of sediment from upstream, destruction of the delta.

Although delta systems themselves, assuming nothing else is screwing with them, also tend to lie at sea level. The problem ofc is if massive immovable structures are built on them. I guess that's similar to people who build on barrier islands made of sand.

I suppose New Orleans could just a bit higher levees, since they have them in place anyway.

It was more a response to the simplicity of text rendering parent post...

FWIW, you don't *have* to use Java for coding on Android, just like you don't have to use objc for coding on iOS.

Our game has a Java frontend (that's needed) but the game library and the libraries it bundles with (sdl, physfs, netlib), are C (or in the case of the game engine, pascal).

And ofc most of Android itself is absolutely not Java.

For UIs, you can use pretty much anything, even Javascript. They aren't really that demanding...