basically disallowed the possibility of ever conducting a controlled experiment? Economists scour the world for "natural experiments" and are beside themselves with glee when they find one. (Best example I can think of: when one state raised its minimum wage and a similar, neighboring state didn't. What was the impact on employment? Spoiler: little or none.) Economics brought much of its trouble on itself by trying to come up with equations to describe how economies work. In order to make the math work, they had to make some ludicrous assumptions, like the mythical "rational man", and the whole concept of "equilibrium". More recent work in behavioral economics and Beinhocker's Complexity Economics has let some of the air out of these cheats, but the old joke still holds: "That's all well and good in practice, but let's see how it works in theory!" Many of the more math-oriented economists studiously ignore any connection between their models and the real world.

Why do we need yet another "standard". I know Java gets a (mostly undeserved) bad rap from a lot of people, but plenty of other languages are compiling to the JVM.

If only we had such good and motivated prosecutors to go after the massive banking fraud that caused the 2008 crash.

For the other graybeards out there, I have a Compaq SLT/286 "laptop" that I'd like to recover the files from the hard drive, a 40MB Conner Peripherals drive with what appears to be an early version of the IDE interface. The drive appears to work, and when I connect it to a Dell PC running Windows XP, it's recognized. But here's the kicker: I had partitioned it into two partitions (system and data), and the data partition was compressed with (as I recall) the disk compression driver included with DR-DOS 5. Is there any hope of retrieving the files on the data partition? I have the DR-DOS install floppies if that helps. I've considered trying to install DR-DOS on a virtual machine but don't really know how to make that work.

Like any such large-scale effort, climate engineering will produce both winners and losers (including, of course, many non-human species). How will we decide which people and other creatures will enjoy the benefits, and which will bear the costs?

Recent psychological research has showed that people will work well beyond meeting their needs, a phenomenon called "mindless accumulation". So the fear that everyone will become layabouts is unwarranted.

I'm not sure what "Top Gear" is, but wouldn't you think someone being quoted in the media would know that "phenomena" is a plural noun?

I'm just a Linux dabbler who put Ubuntu on an old Pentium PC to see what all the fuss was about. It seems to work fine (much snappier than Windows XP). Should I care about all this?

The evidence is becoming overwhelming: excessive sugar consumption causes not only Type 2 diabetes, but a host of other maladies including obesity, heart disease, premature aging, and quite possibly cancer. Must see: Dr. Robert Lustig's YouTube video "Sugar: the Bitter Truth". Must read: award-winning science reporter Gary Taubes' book "Good Calories, Bad Calories". In most people, Type 2 diabetes can be effectively cured by losing weight and following a low carbohydrate diet.

More irrational exuberance in the AI field! And as Douglas Hofstadter pointed out a couple of decades ago, if you could build a perfect simulation of a human brain, it would be subject to all the dumb biases and silly errors that the wetware version is. "Oh," you say, "we won't copy the brain exactly—we'll just keep the good parts!" Yeah, good luck with that. Will they invent digital Prozac to treat the brain with if it gets depressed? And someday they will have to realize that faster computers aren't the whole answer. The brain is actually a very slow computer—it's just very, very parallel. Something our computers still don't do very well.

If only we could expect the most minimal level of scientific literacy (and numeracy) from reporters who try to write about technical subjects. If I read one more time about a new wind farm that will generate "100 megawatts per year" of electricity, I'm going to lose it.

Look at the trend: the share of earnings going to capital vs. the share going to labor has been steadily increasing for a long time. Funny: nobody worried too much when technology only replaced menial jobs. But now that it's starting to take on the functions of middle-class information workers and the professional/technical set (radiologists, lawyers, software engineers), the screaming will begin in earnest. When a few rich people own the machines that do all our jobs, what do the rest of us do? Is massive redistribution the answer? This is a looming problem to which we have no good answers.

Anybody else consider it likely that the anti-Obamacare fanatics launched Denial of Service attacks against the insurance exchange websites?

I'd be thrilled with AppleScript on the iPhone.

The potential implications of 64-bit architecture go far beyond simply more computing power. With 18 billion gigabytes of address space, an iDevice could use iCloud as a giant virtual memory store, just as today's PCs use hard drives or SSDs. That means any bit of data--whether it's a document, a photo, or a chunk of program code--can be addressed by the mobile device as though it's in the device's local memory. If it's not, a "page fault" is generated, causing the data to be automatically fetched from iCloud, and the iPhone goes on like nothing happened. It's a much simpler and faster programming model than dealing with data in files, and I suspect the iCloud "Core Data" facility that is currently giving developers grief is just Apple's first step toward this. Stay tuned. Also, with that much available address space, Apple could dedicate a huge block of iCloud addresses to a massive database shared by all iDevices: things like maps, software updates, regional traffic and weather conditions, sports scores, Siri support, and on and on. (Cross-posted at http://www.macworld.com/article/2048623/how-apple-stretched-its-wings-with-the-iphone-5s-hardware-design.html)