Clearly you've never been to a bar in New Haven, or you'd know that's the rule rather than the exception.

Whatever, everyone knows Robert Bunsen plagiarized everything from his brother Honeydew. Beaker, you see, was his lover.

There's hardly any good reason to choose anything else over it, either.

Well, yes and no. Certainly in the space between the notebook computer and any but the mightiest supercomputers there's no reason at all not to go with x86. But in the mobile processor space, where ultra-low TDP is the order of the day, ARM has a big leg up on x64. Intel sold out their Xscale division (which was only ARM 5 anyway) and now they're losing this increasingly important segment of the market.

I'm not counting Intel out by a long shot in that race, but ARM is the new hotness for most geeks.

Supposedly the pebble-bed reactor type is also resistant to the type of damage suffered at the Fukushima plants, and it has the added bonus of not being encumbered by ex-Microsoft patent trolls. I remember reading that the Germans had been experimenting with the design but dropped it for political reasons.

See, if you read the _rest_ of Plato, you find that this is a very common trope for him. He distances himself from the truth of a statement by putting it at multiple layers of indirect speech. Also, the character doing the talking is quasi-fictional to begin with (Plato's Socrates is _not_ the historical Socrates).

The difference is that the Trojan War happened only a few hundred years before Homer's time -- a short enough span for some memory of the city to be preserved. According to Plato, Atlantis was destroyed by Athens some 6,500 years before his own day.

See, a lack of evidence leads _reasonable_ people to extreme skepticism. It is not an open invitation to invent a crackpot theory and then plug your ears while shouting "LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU."

Moreover, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. If you want to take Plato at his word you don't just get to point to a previously-undiscovered set of ruins somewhere in the Med and say "Atlantis!" You need to prove

a) that it was inhabited 8,000 years ago
b) that Athens was inhabited 8,000 years ago
c) That an apocalyptic war was fought between the two

because these are all parts of Plato's story.

You also don't get to say "the Egyptians told Solon/Plato/whoever" because archaeology proves that at the alleged time of this apocalyptic war the Egyptians (if you can call the Faiyum A culture "Egyptian" for any reason other than that the happened to leave near the Nile river delta) were still a Neolithic people with no system of writing.

Moreover, since all available evidence tells us that b) is not only not true but impossible, you're putting the cart before the horse trying to prove a) or c). If someone tells me, in earnest, that the CIA has been instructing him to kill the Pope by way of a radio embedded in his brain, nothing short of a CT scan showing me the radio and a bug detector showing signal origin at Langley is going to convince me that he's not insane. I don't start speculating on why the CIA would want the pope dead.

I realize that this type of reasoning from evidence rather than speculation is not the usual fare at the UFOlogy seminars and astrology club meetings you drag your knuckles to every night, but do pay attention, you might learn something.

[quote]there's no way to tell at which times[/quote]

[quote]we don't and won't ever know[/quote]

[quote]Likewise there is no way to tell[/quote]

Thanks so much for agreeing with me!

Yeah, and _they_ had records going back to 8,000 BCE that the aliens gave them. Unfortunately the data was all on NASA 1" tape, so the Egyptians couldn't read it until Plato cheerfully loaned them an Ampex machine...

This from a soon-Ph.D in Classics.

Atlantis was a story Plato made up in the course of a philosophical discussion. It goes no further back in the literary record unless you want to twist a couple mentions of "Atlas' island" in the earlier corpus like balloon animals.

Herb is kind of above reproach. Having grown up in Wisconsin and actually met the man once, I can say comfortably that he isn't some kind of fundraising whore; he's a principled legislator who will probably get swept out in the next tide of teabagging. So I would be very careful in ascribing any kind of sinister motive to his investigation, or in drawing any conclusions about what the committee's findings will be.

Erp. This was me, got logged out of /. for some reason.

Yes yes, I know we all hate Microsoft, but on the face of it this was a very shrewd business decision. Nokia was getting killed by the fact that people now want their phones to do such exotic things as email and Web browsing. They had no real internal direction in terms of software development, as evidenced by the schizophrenia of Symbian and Maemo, and the fact that they were trying to do it all in-house wasn't helping things any.

Meanwhile, Microsoft comes along with a ready-made solution to Nokia's woes in the form of a pretty complete mobile platform and a $1 billion payout to help with the transition. To Nokia's idiot board of directors this probably looked like a no-brainer. Meanwhile Microsoft gets amazing value in the form of a very, very large company now pushing out its software products worldwide. This isn't going to put WP7 ahead of Android or iOS, not by a long shot, but it will do wonders in terms of shoring up their position.

On the flip side of things, consider Motorola. At one point they were kind of in the same boat as Nokia, having missed the first wave of the smartphone epidemic, and went from being the company that had it all with the once-super cool RAZR to an also-ran. They got behind Android in a very complete and enthusiastic way and the results have really paid off for them. I'd venture to say that they make some of the best Android phones out there, and they're taking a great stab at the tablet market. And no one had to pay them $1 billion to do it!

In short, this is great news for MS, bad news for Nokia fans. I always thought the path to Palm's demise was paved by Windows Mobile ending up on Treo smartphones. They just couldn't be bothered to invest in an innovate mobile OS of their own until webOS, and that was obviously a day late and a dollar short...

We need to come down hard on miscreants like this. Sure, right now he's stealing passwords from the school office and changing grades, but soon that won't be enough for him, and before long he'll be wardialing military contractors with his IMSAI 8080 and acoustocoupler modem.

You mean he forgot that his institution probably had a weighted grading scheme where honors and other high-level classes were scaled to a 5.0 GPA whereas regular classes were scaled to a 4.0 GPA? No, he seems to have had that pretty well down.