All the Google nonsense was pure speculation. It turns out it was here employer who turned her in.

http://feedly.com/k/11xS8Y7

IPad (and others) allow you to switch to white text on a black background. For book reading indoors, I find that more comfortable.

From the Google blog:

You may notice that at the moment we include a limited number of U.S. cities and show results for round-trip economy-class flights only.

Yes, MS can get Samsung or some other vendor to put some hardware together for them, and throw a copy of the Windows 7 phone OS on it, but that's not really a product. You're going to need the set of applications (Kindle, etc.) that make a tablet interesting and some form of integration as well. Some of them may exist for the phone already, but unless they're optimized for the table screen, the user experience will really suck.

Apple has a service that allows you to find a lost or stolen iPhone. Presumably, the phone logs its position so it can upload it when asked. Nothing scary here, though the fact this data is available means people will try and extract it. My guess is that the next iOS release will wipe this data every seven days or so.

That story doesn't leave much to go on, it's pretty low information content. However, it should be noted that a vintage wine can contain up to 15% of its grapes from another year. That would obviously skew any carbon dating results.

That's not an unreasonable point of view, however, there's a "truth in advertising" issue going on. If Amazon said, "We'll sell you this book as a physical object for $X or rent it to you for $Y" there would be little argument about the issue. However, that's not what they're doing. They are claiming to sell you the ebook. But if you buy an ereader that's better than theirs, you can't take the book with you. If they decide you don't deserve the book (the 1984 fiasco), they can take it away without due process.

So if Amazon wants to get into the book renting business, more power to them. But that's not what they're claiming to do now.

It's not clear the constitution protects. All the protections enumerated in the Bill of Rights are granted to individuals.

Not overkill at all. I have an iPhone 3G and the browsing experience is passable. Using the NexusOne was like using a desktop computer almost. The web pages snapped right on screen. If I didn't have so many iPhone apps I like, I'd switch in a heartbeat.

like Stagecast Creator.

I don't think the competition between Google and Apple is the issue here, but the point about telcos as commodities seems spot on. Apple could sell unlocked phones just as easily as Google, there have been rumors about a Verizon iPhone for months. Also, having the telcos as commodities doesn't hurt Apple's ability to be an "experience company." Apple's machines plug into the same internet, the same power grid, the same USB connectors, etc. as all the rest. The way Apple controls the experience is buy selling both the hardware and the software together.

Not only is the CO2 data available, it's easy enough to compute with only high school algebra. Burning one gallon of gasoline generates 19.4lb of CO2. In the US, we went from almost zero gasoline burned in 1920 to around 160,000,000,000 gallons in 2000 and the usage graph is conveniently linear. Thus we can compute the area inside the triangle to find that we have pumped 1.24 x 10^14 lb of CO2 into the air in the last eighty years. 62 billion tons from the US alone.

Unfortunately the global consumption of fossil fuels has grown to the point that the world is now emitting around 30 billion tons per year. There's absolutely no question that we humans are changing the atmospheric makeup of the earth.

You think it would be cheap or easy to move the displaced from the Maldives, Bangladesh, and even Florida to Siberia?

Billions for one city. Now increase the scope to entire globe. It's going to cost trillions anyway, the question is, how many people are going to die in the process.

The point about whether it's better for you personally is not the issue. The issue is that there are millions of people who will be affected, not just you. A 1m rise in sea level (deemed possible by 2100) would destroy farmland near coastal areas, salinate fresh water supplies, displace entire populations, and cost billions to build seawalls to protect cities like London. A country like Bangladesh could lose as much as 17% of it's land.

Problems of this magnitude can only be solved by political action. The data that humans are changing the climate is quite unambiguous, despite what you've been reading above, which is focusing on a few fractions of a degree in temperature. Other measurements, such as the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere are much more starkly descriptive.

Yeah, he's crazy like a fox.

1) He gets lots of free publicity complaining about Google (and some people will buy into his point of view.)
2) He gets Microsoft to pay for him for his extortion.

Despite holding movie studios (20th Century Fox, Fox Searchlight), TV networks (Fox, STAR), cable (Fox, FX, National Geographic) and internet properties (Hudu, MySpace, Rotten Tomatoes, IGN) and publishing companies (Wall Street Journal, Harper Collins), he can's switch to a paid model alone. There's too much competition. Only WSJ works behind a paywall because it's a tax writeoff for so many subscribers.

So instead of getting subscribers to pay, he's out hunting for other deep pockets. Google has turned him down, but Microsoft is desperate for leverage so they're willing to pay. Murdoch will sign a time-limited agreement with them and take the cash. If the experiement fails (he loses too much revenue) he contract ends and he's no worse that he was to begin with. If he wins, and other media companies take their content off line, or require payment in some way, he laughs all the way to the bank.

Still don't want him running the country, though.