I've seen at least one hard disk manufacturer -- I think it was WD, but I'm not sure -- using these hybrid units, too, i.e. selling disks with 1GB == 1,024,000,000 bytes.

What really gets to me is the minority of hard disk manufacturers who use a rather bizarre scheme where 1KB = 1024 bytes, but 1MB = 1000KB, 1GB=1000MB and so on. You can see the origins of this scheme in the common reference of floppy disk capacity as being 1.44MB (it isn't --- it's 1440KiB, which is neither 1.44MB nor 1.44MiB).

I'm a long way from convinced by this. I'm pretty sure my pre-MS double-density 5 1/4" floppies contained 368,640 bytes, not 360,000, yet were generally called "360K". This article suggests the practice dates back to DEC 8-inch drives (although apparently IBM used powers of ten for their 8-inch drives).

Sure, but with quad-core phones on the market these days, why does the single-core performance matter?

It's quite simple, really: my usual PC died last week and I had to resurrect an old one. The old one is inferior in almost every respect to my phone. Its single-core performance is somewhat faster (despite only having 50% higher clock rate, it benchmarks at well over twice the speed), but as it's a quad-core versus my desktop's single core in terms of total CPU power it's much better. They both have 1GB of RAM, but my desktop's onboard graphics uses up a rather large chunk of that for video RAM. My desktop's integrated intel graphics has a theoretical shader throughput of about 1300 Mpix/s while my phone's Mali400 can handle about 1600. My desktop has a 40GB hard disk, which is larger than the integrated 16GB in my phone, but I have an extra 32GB SD card in there, too.

Despite the lower power of my PC, it handles Windows 7 just fine. No Aero, but I don't really care that much.

You seem to be under some kind of misunderstanding concerning what the word "species" means. For reference, coyotes and dogs are not the same species. Neither are wolves or jackals. They are, however, all from the same genus.

It is true that we have never directly witnessed evolution of a new genus, but then the question of what exactly would constitute a new genus is somewhat difficult to nail down to an accurate answer -- we struggle to classify existing genuses accurately, and regularly change our minds about what consitutes one and what doesn't, so how we'd cope with an entirely new one is a bit of a mystery.

To be fair to GP, our closest surviving relative is believed to be the chimpanzee, which is classed as an ape, so it seems likely that whatever ancestor we had in common would be considered an ape also. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hominidae

Please do research before making statements like this. We've sequenced both human and ape DNA, so we know exactly what modifications would be required. Here's a good place to start reading about them.

To summarise briefly:

- No new DNA strands are required. In fact, you'd need more new DNA to go the other way -- Humans are short a chromosome compared with apes, and have lost around 80 genes in the process.
- Slight modifications are all that is required. Ape DNA can be converted to human DNA with only around 3.5x10^7 single-base-pair modifications and a handful of splicing errors, which is to say around the same number of mutations you'd expect to see in about 21,000 generations, or the overall number you'd expect to see in less than 1/8th of the time since the genera diverged if the process were purely random.
- Most of the changes are in gene regulation, not in the genes themselves. This means we might make more or less of a particular protein compared to, say, a chimp (which is still believed to be our closest living relative), and is a much easier change to happen randomly than creation of an entirely new form of protein (although that has happened in a handful of cases, too).
- One of the most important changes is in a gene that suppresses brain development in chimps; this activates much less easily in humans, meaning we grow larger brains.

You need to learn to research before you make bold assertions like this. Here are some counterexamples. Here are some more. See also the wikipedia article, which may or may not use the same examples, as I haven't read it in depth.

This is not entirely true, as I understand it, and I'm lead to believe it was a subject of some debate at the second vatican council, which rather cautiously made the following statement: "the books of Scripture firmly, faithfully, and without error teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the Sacred Scriptures." Which is to say that they acknowledge that the bible may be in error regarding issues which God did not wish to teach us for the sake of our salvation. See Brown et al, The New Jerome Biblical Commentary page 1169 for further discussion of this idea.

You're probably right. We should ban libraries, just in case.

Further to my above comment -- see: http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=9907256353585916992&hl=en&as_sdt=2&as_vis=1&oi=scholarr in which a US court held that the title "The Book of Virtues" was eligible for trademark protection, because it had acquired "secondary meaning", i.e. it was associated by consumers with a particular source. Now, I make no argument that this is true for "space marines" -- it blatantly isn't -- but it does mean that your suggestion that book titles in the US cannot be trademarks is clearly wrong.

Depends on the title. If it consists of terms that are considered generic, or are descriptive of the content, then you're right. However, try releasing a book called "Lord of the Rings 2" or "Star Wars: Jedis vs Ninjas" and see if you successfully defend against the inevitable trademark violation suits, even if your books otherwise have nothing in common with the original works whose names you have reused.

Exactly. Now we just need a law saying that if we infringe on copyright for 10 years without the owner doing anything to intervene, the copyright becomes ours... not only does it make the comparison to tresspassing/squatting even more accurate and obvious, it's also a useful solution to the orphan works problem.

Meh. Once upon a time I would have agreed with you, but now I actually run Windows 7 on a PC that is less powerful than my phone, and it doesn't seem too bad, so I think the idea of resource constraints stopping you from running a desktop OS on a mobile device is something that will soon be consigned to history.