Heh, that's interesting - one of my favorite things about The Culture is that Banks isn't given to aggrandizing "the human spirit" or any other such malarkey.

Without daily worries, the vast majority of Culture citizens dedicate their lives to finding new and interesting ways to get high and stimulate their genitals. It's a very, very few that have exotic adventures, which is actually pretty hard to get into, since you either have to be invited to SC or convince a Mind to take you along.

I just finished Excession a few weeks ago and, for example, the picture it paints of Phage Rock "high society" sounds very far from the ultimate expression of human potential.

You're not getting it. It's likely that the 5 copies were characteristic of the cancer cells when she died - as the parent said, cancer cells are all sorts of fucked up.

That's entirely besides the point, though. These cell lines are not used as a model of cancer they're used as a model of human cells. Those working with them understand the limitations of the model (most of the time, at least); it's well known that cell lines are not the same thing as cells in a live organism, no one was assuming otherwise.

There is no new information here. This is a little like looking at humans and mice, noticing that they are different, and announcing that this "Invalidates all research done on mice!"

Please don't assume that all researchers are idiots all of the time.

Oh, calm down. All this means is that you have to export your stuff, and import into a different, nearly identical service.

What do you want them to do, anyway? Swear a blood-oath that once they start up a service, they will continue with it forever?

If they don't think it makes sense to commit the resources to maintain it, then it's certainly not going to make sense to maintain a paid version - not everything is about revenue.

You act like this is some kind of galling defect in Google's collective moral fibre - some things don't stick, it happens.

Not to mention when he says that Venus' upper atmosphere is "room temperature" - duh! rooms on Venus would have a very different temperature from Earth's rooms! What and idiot.

Kind of an odd example since that's definitely more of a "value" brand. (wouldn't go as far as 'piece of shit'...)

Is English not your primary language, or are you being difficult on purpose?

When people use 'feels' in this context they mean 'produces a tactile sensation'. We are concerned with this because that's the best way to determine the build quality of a product.

The devices mentioned feel (again, words can be tricky, try to follow along here) like cheap pieces of shit, because they are cheap pieces of shit - purposefully built to fall apart withing 1-2 years.

Physically examining something is pretty much the exact opposite of "subjective assumptions". I don't really understand what kind of "data" you're looking for, do you not trust your senses to tell you what materials something is made of?

I don't know who the hell decided that the only acceptable expression of "sexy" is 'round corners and shiny surfaces', but I hate that guy. Has made shopping for electronics a lot harder, unless you're super into stuff that looks like Apple made it, obviously.

That and motherfucking glossy, reflective as fuck screens - I can't imagine how anyone thought that abomination was a good idea. Seriously, what the fuck?

So one would be hard-pressed to argue that there is a positive correlation between gun control and murder rate (regardless of weapon).

Oh, what nonsense.

The US is by far the highest of the developed nations on that list. The next one after it is Finland, with half the murder rate of the US, and all Western European countries have rates 3 to 5 times lower. Japan has some of the strictest gun laws around (no guns for anyone, essentially), its murder rate is 14 times lower.

Sure, if you want to compare the US to Colombia, Uganda, and Sudan it looks great. It's also utterly ridiculous to say that the difference has anything to do with gun laws.

Personally, I don't think the US's #1 spot has that much to do with gun control, or that banning guns tomorrow would magically transform the US into Germany. But to say there is no correlation is just stupid.

You found a way to work a "tech" angle into this story.

Congratulations.

Maybe you are right....how exactly do you expect the journalist to know this is wrong? Ask a PhD? That's what he did. Maybe he can find another one who is on the opposite side of the issue.......

I have to admit, I honestly don't know if you're being facetious (so, never mind if you are), but yes, that's essentially a journalist's entire job description: doing research to confirm whatever someone is telling them is kind of the whole reason they are there.

Google doesn't let you weight search terms, but they do the other two: http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=136861&rd=2

Maybe I could follow along if you added a couple more paragraphs about what pixels are.

Gosh, I hope the next monitor I buy will have enough vectors to support this futuristic technology. I probably need to hurry, do you think pixels will be dead before the end of the year?

That's exactly why it's the journalists fault - their job isn't to follow along with whatever self-promoting bullshit the person being interviewed is spewing.

I check mine 'Never.' not 'Never!'

We're stuck with JavaScript in webapps (where there are plenty of excellent implementations already), but the JVM has little to do with that.

If they just want a native general purpose scripting language for the JVM, then JS seems like a terrible choice.

At least, the work that goes into this project should benefit other dynamic languages on the JVM as well.