You seem to see this a some sort of rogue element within VW. While that may be true, I think it's more likely that it is just a refection of the way the company operates, and their desperation to gain a fresh foothold in the US market.

Given that the current "thinking" is that corporations are people, then the employees and shareholders are nothing more than some sort of symbiote that live off of the corporate host. The host needs to feel pain, or it will do it again.

Lots of car companies have had coverups about design flaws, but I can't remember another auto industry case of outright fraud like this one.

I expect there to be a variety of class action suits. I expect the US government to at least try and recoup the amount given out in tax credits, based on VW's supposed "green" status with their TDI engine. I imagine this will play out in every country that has any sort of emission laws.

I prefer my placebos to have more flavor. Like chocolate, or beer, or vindaloo. In fact, I think I'm going to try a nice chicken vindaloo with some beer tonight, to cure my cold.

No, they haven't been so judged.

https://www.google.com/search?...

They were continued as part of a brokered budget deal. The Democratic house & senate didn't particularly like it, but it was the best compromise on the table at the time.

"Except I can CHOOSE to not own a car, and I don't need insurance at that point.
Call me when I can CHOOSE to not carry health insurance."

That's not quite an accurate analog (although partial points for continuing the car analogy.)
More accurate is "I can CHOOSE not to live, and I don't need insurance at that point."

Not on OS X. See http://www.java.com/en/downloa...

Safari and Firefox are both 64-bit, fwiw. I don't understand why Google is dragging their feet on this.

Why is this still a 32-bit browser? Java won't install in 32-bit browsers.

If you extrapolate in 3D from a point, you get a sphere. We are off to the "left side" of the Milky Way (although I don't think I would want to be in the middle.)

All churches get a government handout in the form of not having to pay taxes. This should stop, IMO.

You mean other than Apple and the other people who helped make it happen?

Microsoft's problem moving off of the desktop has always been that they want a very similar experience on the desk and in the hand. This was a bad idea when they tried to emulate the Windows experience in WinCE, and is a bad idea going the other direction with Metro.

I think you're wrong there. I think Carly Fiorina _is_ smart enough to run a hot dog stand.

They were set to 00000000 for decades anyway, so why not?

Well, Apple is pushing an open API that will run on lots of hardware, while nvidia is pushing an API tied to their hardware. I think everyone would benefit with a widely supported open API.

Yes, but having "your CAD software [..] be updated to take advantage of that specific hardware" mostly means writing things to use parallel cores, and to leverage the graphics processors through OpenCL (and OpenGL, for the graphics-specific stuff.) This is stuff that a software author would want to do to help future-proof their code, in general, I think.

This was my immediate reaction, as well. Analog computers do some things extremely well, and faster than could be done digitally. Absolute accuracy may not be possible, but plenty-good-enough accuracy is achievable for a lot of different types of problems. Back in the 1970s I worked for a small company as their chief digital/software guy. The owner of the company was wizard at analog electronics, and instilled in me a solid respect about what can be done with analog computing.