As of right now, the average Chinese person emits as much carbon as the average European [todayonline.com] -- and there are many more Chinese people.

Most of the Chinese emissions are for the creation of products shipped to Europe and the US. These are basically emissions that are exported to China.

At some point, we will have used up enough land so that pollution, species loss and loss of renewable resources makes us get a Darwin award as a species.

Species grow until they reach the carrying capacity of the environment. They don't die out when they do, they stabilize and/or evolve. Humans have done this many times before.

You think it's a bad idea to seed the oceans with iron, because our interfering with the natural ecosystem might have unintended consequences. So instead, you're suggesting that we should do nothing to stop our interfering with the natural ecosystem by pumping huge amounts of CO2 into the air.

Of course, we should reduce our burning of fossil fuels, and we will, as new technologies become available, because fossil fuels are expensive. Governments should stop subsidizing oil, gas, and coal and they should invest more in research on renewable energy and energy efficiency, as well as loosen regulations for the deployment of nuclear and renewable generators.

What we should not do is compound the problem by engaging in additional environmental tinkering, subsidizing both fossil fuel and renewable energies, or give governments even more command over the economy, because all of those will make the problem worse.

Every operating system (including iOS) has some technical problems in its initial release,

WebOS didn't have "some technical problems", it used entirely the wrong paradigm. And by the time it came out, Palm was already dead.

It was only after the deluge of low-cost Android i-clones that the bottom dropped out for Palm, so I think that it is pretty clear that Apple's inability to protect its design killed Palm.

Stop saying that it was "Apple's design"; Apple ripped off most of that design from others, much of it Palm. In fact, since Android's release, Apple keep ripping off features from Android.

Apple's declared m.o. is to look at other people's products and steal the best features:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW0DUg63lqU

What Jobs didn't say was that Apple then turns around, patents like hell, and tries to sue others.

And if WebOS had been a success, Apple would have sued Palm into oblivion.

And, yes, Android phones are cheap. Easy to use $100 smart phones are a good thing, as opposed to Apple's overpriced, heavily restricted toys for whiny teenagers.

Your post proves again that sufficiently advanced sarcasm is indistinguishable from genuine stupidity.

You're arguing about the rounding error on his poverty line value?

A more than 50% increase is hardly a "rounding error".

People who cannot afford to live without government assistance seems like a pretty good definition of "poor" to me.

Well, then Obama wants us all to be poor and keep us poor, given that he keeps telling us that without government assistance, we can do nothing. Just look at his "Julia".

WebOS was dead before it even reached the market and beset with technical problems.

My parents saved for a decade before they bought their house, in the suburbs, and waited with kids until they bought a house. I saved for a decade before I bought mine. And you expect to be able to just plunk down money, move into a house in the city, and have kids right away? What kind of fantasy world do you live in? Furthermore, home ownership rates have actually increased significantly since the 60's.

You don't pay taxes if you're near the poverty line.

~$600 on a $20,000+ figure is within standard deviation.

How is the difference between $23000 (4 persons) and $11139 (one person) only $600?

It does not matter if USA poverty rates were higher than the typical wage of another nation. The relative cost of living differs greatly

Which part of "purchasing power parity" do you not understand?

Relative poverty levels are all that matters;

Relative levels (i.e., relative to other earners) are irrelevant. What matters is how you live: how big your house is, how much food you have, what transportation and education options you have, and those depend on purchasing power parity (PPP).

I can't imagine that piracy makes more than a few percent of potential Android purchases; most people just don't have the time, and the prices are too low to make it worth it. I suspect this is a marketing gimmick. As I recall from the reviews, this game already used to be free, but was constantly bugging people about in-app purchases.

That calculation is bogus, starting with the fact that the poverty level for a family of 4 is $23000.

In addition, people with that kind of income level qualify for food stamps, housing assistance, and numerous other programs.

In 1960 a college graduate could own a home and support a family on one full time salary. In 2012, positions like that are vanishingly rare.

You can easily buy an home that's the size and style of the 1960's and furnish it with 1960's-level furniture and technology: a phone, a TV receiving three channels, and not much else.

If you want two cars, modern health care, iphones, cable, Internet, large screen TVs, video game consoles, two garages, 2500 sq ft, all close to the highway, coast, and a major urban center, however, then it's going to cost you more.

Your choice.

I think that what ultimately killed Palm (and Blackberry) was all of the iPhone knock-offs running Android.

No, take it from a long-time Palm user: Palm failed because it was an obsolete and buggy p.o.s. That's why the Android founders left Palm and... founded Android.

Palm could have competed with Apple's limited, and somewhat pricey, product line

No, they couldn't. Palm had been resting on their laurels, Apple had ripped off all the best features of Palm, and Palm had no way of competing with that. Since Android has been released, Apple has been ripping off feature after feature from Android, that is, when Apple isn't ripping off features from small software developers.

Apple and Steve Jobs were evil rip-off artist, but that's OK; that's business competition and it caused Palm and RIM to disappear from the market, which they well deserved.

Where I draw the line is if Apple tries to claim ownership of other people's inventions.

That kind of "poverty" is relative poverty; it's just another way of saying that the income distribution is skewed in the US and is really just a bad version of the Gini index. It has nothing to do with actual, absolute poverty. You can be absolutely rich and relatively poor, or absolutely poor but relatively rich.

Look at it in international comparisons. In 2007, US poverty level for a family of three was $17000/year, and median household income was about $31000. In terms of purchasing power parity (PPP), in the same year, median family income in Germany was about $21000, Japan was about $19000, in Italy $17000, in Israel about $14000. EU median is about $15000.

So if you apply US poverty measures, more than half of EU citizens, and a large part of even rich countries like Germany and Japan, live "in poverty", and it gets worse if you consider all of continental Europe and if you consider that PPP doesn't account for a lot of taxes and expenses.

But if you really think that Europeans are doing so much better economically, it's easy to get a work permit for Europe and move there.