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California used to grow grains and other commodities before irrigation was developed.

California grew winter crops before irrigation, because that's when the rains come. You can still see winter oats across the central valley when the canals are empty. When irrigation came, it allowed people to start growing melons.

The reason farmers have switched so much to almonds is because other crops (like peaches) are high-labor, and with recent improvements in shipping technology along with free-trade agreements, means American farmers are competing against the labor costs of peach farmers in Chile. You can harvest 20 acres of almonds with two people, but 20 acres of peaches can require dozens.

That said, California is still extremely important to the US as an agricultural region.

California produces a sizable majority of many American fruits, vegetables, and nuts: 99 percent of artichokes, 99 percent of walnuts, 97 percent of kiwis, 97 percent of plums, 95 percent of celery, 95 percent of garlic, 89 percent of cauliflower, 71 percent of spinach, and 69 percent of carrots (and the list goes on and on). Some of this is due to climate and soil

I don't know why Chile can compete on peaches but not on plums.

There once was a time when you hovered over a link to check the 'real link' before you clicked on it. Well no more. Just looking at it makes a 'silent request.'

Maybe. But, that's nothing compared to some of the Komrades at Mozilla having inkorrekt thoughts. That had to be end...

Well, that is not actually correct -
"In that case the court held that a plane flying just 83 feet in the air—the commotion was literally scaring the plaintiff’s chickens to death—represented an invasion of property. The justices declined to precisely define the height at which ownership rights end. Today, the federal government considers the area above 500 feet to be navigable airspace in uncongested areas. While the Supreme Court hasn’t explicitly accepted that as the upper limit of property ownership, it’s a useful guideline in trespass cases. Therefore, unless you own some very tall buildings, your private airspace probably ends somewhere between 80 and 500 feet above the ground."

Source:
http://www.slate.com/articles/...

Dummies Article on the Topic:
http://www.dummies.com/how-to/...

Google Search With Many Articles:
https://www.google.com/search?...

What does all of this say - the Supreme Court has ruled you own at least 83 feet above your property. So no, all airspace is definitely not public. Hopefully this will lead towards a new ruling which will legal define how much airspace you own; opposed to it being left in a legal grey area for heights between 83 feet and 500 feet.

Slate has an excellent summary on the GMO scare.

http://www.slate.com/articles/...

To quote Will Saletan "But the deeper you dig, the more fraud you find in the case against GMOs. It’s full of errors, fallacies, misconceptions, misrepresentations, and lies. The people who tell you that Monsanto is hiding the truth are themselves hiding evidence that their own allegations about GMOs are false. They’re counting on you to feel overwhelmed by the science and to accept, as a gut presumption, their message of distrust."

The $70k/year figure coincides with a scientific study about happiness.

The relative velocities are quite low, because there is very little gravity. So their plan was not to make a jet system that reduces the landing velocity (you may be thinking of the moon landing), but instead to use a cold-gas jet to press the lander onto the surface. That system, unfortunately did not fire. Secondly (and perhaps related?), the trigger that should launch harpoons to anchor the lander did not execute. That is why it did not land, but bounce off again.

This was true in 2012. I do not know if it still is.

http://www.slate.com/articles/...

When are those lazy anarchist pedestrians going to start paying sidewalk and crosswalk tax?

Sidewalks on a street benefit the property owners, so a property tax proportional to street frontage would be an equitable and practical way to pay for sidewalks. In fact, for the same reason it also ought to pay for the property owner's half of the street.

Of course, this assumes a distinction is made between streets, which are low-speed roads at destinations; and non-street roads, which are meant to move traffic efficiently between destinations. This is a distinction that not every country makes, and that's why those countries have so many street/road hybrids that have a high frequency of at-grade intersections like streets but also have high speed limits like non-street roads, making them neither good destinations nor efficient at moving traffic. They are the jack of all trades and master of none.

And when are they going to have registration plates so we can report jaywalkers?

Are you aware that motorists violate the right-of-way of pedestrians more often than the reverse?

How's this then?

http://www.slate.com/articles/...

Seriously, read this. Whichever side of the issue you fall on. Be informed. This isn't some corporate propaganda; it's an in depth look at actual real world GMO. It talks about the good and the bad. Bottom line: GMO are safe and we need to do more with the technology than just pesticides. Read it. http://www.slate.com/articles/...

Except that you can't ask a drone questions.

I expect this to be a legal mess for a long time. This will probably come down to property rights.

The area above the property is private, but the extent of that ownership is not entirely defined. Cases like this will probably define it.

So your rebuttal is that in one specific eco region there's been some additional greenery?
Yay! We're saved!

Idiot.

http://www.skepticalscience.co...

CO2 enhanced plants will need extra water both to maintain their larger growth as well as to compensate for greater moisture evaporation as the heat increases. Where will it come from? Rainwater is not sufficient for current agriculture and the aquifers they rely on are running dry throughout the Earth.

  Unlike Nature, our way of agriculture does not self fertilize by recycling all dead plants, animals and their waste. Instead we have to be constantly producing artificial fertilizers from natural gas which will eventually start running out. By increasing the need for such fertilizer you will shorten the supply of natural gas creating competition between the heating of our homes and the growing of our food. This will drive the prices of both up

Too high a concentration of CO2 causes a reduction of photosynthesis in certain of plants. There is also evidence from the past of major damage to a wide variety of plants species from a sudden rise in CO2 (See illustrations below). Higher concentrations of CO2 also reduce the nutritional quality of some staples, such as wheat.

The worse problem, by far, is that increasing CO2 will increase temperatures throughout the Earth. This will make deserts and other types of dry land grow. While deserts increase in size, other eco-zones, whether tropical, forest or grassland will try to migrate towards the poles. However, soil conditions will not necessarily favor their growth even at optimum temperatures.

When plants do benefit from increased Carbon Dioxide, it is only in enclosed areas, strictly isolated from insects. However, when the growth of Soybeans is boosted out in the open, it creates major changes in its chemistry that makes it more vulnerable to insects, as the illustration below shows.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad...

Simply claiming increased CO2 will help plants grow while ignoring everything else it does is a stunningly tone-deaf argument, yet one deniers seem to use over and again. Looking at a few plants growing better due to more CO2 is like ignoring that you killed a patient while curing their hangnail.

http://www.cnet.com/news/nsa-d...
http://www.theguardian.com/wor...
http://www.slate.com/blogs/fut...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Facebook video is already filled with copyright infringement from YouTube channels, where rebranded content is being posted. The rebranding of content, plus the limited lifespan of most videos plus the inability to find it publicly, are causing pain in the "YouTube Star" group.

How is the MPAA/RIAA/Whomever going to deal with Facebook facilitating massive copyright infringement? I mean, it's one thing to share a fairly powerless guy's content with 20 million followers, get caught and just have to remove it. But when I want to see a movie my friend has, so he just posts it so only I can see it...?

Given how Facebook is trying to make most people's whole internet experience solely based on their servers,t his is the one time I'm hoping the MPAA can make a ton of trouble for someone.

My wifi is near unusable at the extremes of my own house. When I go outside, I can't usefully hitch to it more than a few feet from the house. Any drone that wants to inject something would have fly really close.

From what I can dig up, where I live in the US I own the air over my house up to at least 80 feet from the ground (possibly as much as 500). So I'd be well within my rights to shoot down any drone that could come close enough to hook to my wifi. Unless of course they have a subpenoa, but those have to be served, at which point I already know so the drone is kinda pointless.

I'm wondering how tough it would be to develop anti-drone devices that are smart enough to not kill birds and bats.

In fact, you'd think a better and cheaper idea would be to just send someone with said injection device in their pocket to the person's front door posing as a magazine salesman or Jehova's Witness or something. Or better yet, just mail the injection device to the victim. If its small enough to put in a drone, you can probably find a way to slip it into a piece of cardboard or in the packing material for a package or something.

It means that these people are trying to RAM smoke up your arse, but cannot make it look convincing enough even then,
so want help to polish the turd.
They are trying hard to pull a 'correlation is causation' scam, but dont even have the ability to do that it seems.

Perhaps they need to ban Icecream first.
Killer Icecream

The obvious problem here is that there is almost certainly a correlation between these locations and poorer communities,
which also have a very well established correlation with increased health issues.

The scary thing is that this is even being reported. Congratulations Slashdot. It almost but not quite makes it to satire!

Nice catch! The article: Are we headed for a new ice age? By Phil Plait | June 17, 2011

Unless Phil Plait is a time traveler then he didn't address this new model's predictions 4 years ago.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2015/07/14/global_cooling_no_were_not_headed_for_a_mini_ice_age.html

No, We’re Not Headed for a Mini–Ice Age
By Phil Plait - July 14 2015 7:00 AM

...The funny thing is, I debunked this Sun-influenced cooling idea back in 2011! [link to the article you talk about]

Gee, maybe somebody accidently linked to the old debunking instead of the new one.

You're Australian. You people find specifically invent vaguely insulting ethnic terms and then use then to refers to yourselves (are you a Pom, a Wop, or other, Mr Harlequin80?). You also don't have a large West Indian minority, so the Jamaican accent angle not occur to you.

OTOH, in the states:
http://www.slate.com/articles/...
http://articles.baltimoresun.c...
http://www.cnn.com/SHOWBIZ/Mov...

You'll note that even over here it was not uncontroversial to call Jar-Jar racist, but if you were paying attention to pop culture in the US in '99 you would have had a position on this.

NFL coaches are legends for being workaholics, and many seem to get ridiculously small amounts of sleep. What to they do with their time? A lot of it is spent reviewing game videos of their own team and those of opponents, very slowly with lots of stop action, to assess as precisely as possible the strengths and weaknesses of different players, team units, and schemes. Then they have to come up with plays and new variations of plays, and new practice drills. And of course, people management.

Of course it sounds insane, I'm only reporting the world as it is: fallen, and corrupt.

Now They Want to Euthanize Children

FIRST, Dutch euthanasia advocates said that patient killing will be limited to the competent, terminally ill who ask for it. Then, when doctors began euthanizing patients who clearly were not terminally ill, sweat not, they soothed: medicalized killing will be limited to competent people with incurable illnesses or disabilities. Then, when doctors began killing patients who were depressed but not physically ill, not to worry, they told us: only competent depressed people whose desire to commit suicide is "rational" will have their deaths facilitated. Then, when doctors began killing incompetent people, such as those with Alzheimer's, it's all under control, they crooned: non-voluntary killing will be limited to patients who would have asked for it if they were competent.

And now they want to euthanize children.

In the Netherlands, Groningen University Hospital has decided its doctors will euthanize children under the age of 12, if doctors believe their suffering is intolerable or if they have an incurable illness. But what does that mean? In many cases, as occurs now with adults, it will become an excuse not to provide proper pain control for children who are dying of potentially agonizing maladies such as cancer, and doing away with them instead. As for those deemed "incurable"--this term is merely a euphemism for killing babies and children who are seriously disabled.

For anyone paying attention to the continuing collapse of medical ethics in the Netherlands, this isn't at all shocking. Dutch doctors have been surreptitiously engaging in eugenic euthanasia of disabled babies for years, although it technically is illegal, since infants can't consent to be killed. Indeed, a disturbing 1997 study published in the British medical journal, the Lancet, revealed how deeply pediatric euthanasia has already metastasized into Dutch neo natal medical practice: According to the report, doctors were killing approximately 8 percent of all infants who died each year in the Netherlands. That amounts to approximately 80-90 per year. Of these, one-third would have lived more than a month. At least 10-15 of these killings involved infants who did not require life-sustaining treatment to stay alive. The study found that a shocking 45 percent of neo-natologists and 31 percent of pediatricians who responded to questionnaires had killed infants.

It took the Dutch almost 30 years for their medical practices to fall to the point that Dutch doctors are able to engage in the kind of euthanasia activities that got some German doctors hanged after Nuremberg. ...

Killing babies no different from abortion, experts say

The authors therefore concluded that “what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled”.

After-Birth Abortion - The pro-choice case for infanticide.

No, I didn’t make this up. “Partial-birth abortion” is a term invented by pro-lifers. But “after-birth abortion” is a term invented by two philosophers, Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva. In the Journal of Medical Ethics, they propose ....

2. Prior to personhood, human life has no moral claims on us. I’ve seen this position asserted in countless comment threads by supporters of abortion rights. Giubilini and Minerva add only one further premise t

It is hard to believe, Brendan Eich was the last one to be purged over a thoughtcrime. Will there be more, or have people learned to hold their tongues and hide their identities better?

If nobody cared about civilians why are we killing less of them then in any previous campaign?

I consider myself a leftist, but one of the things that is simply true about military policy is we don't get it. We run in at the last minute, notice a lot of death happening, and condemn the death as unprecedented Un-American evil without bothering to learn any of the precedents. We spend half our time condemning them for doing things that may or may not be stupid/evil/pointless/etc. (we really don't know), and the other half shoveling money on military retirees. And it's dumb.

But we've got a lot of Professors, so we make it sound smart. To people who can't figure out we're clueless, that is.

The civilian to combatant casualty ratio is lower for the drone war then for literally any other method invented.

As a non-pilot I can't tell you why those weddings were picked. I suspect there could be a number of factors -- maybe the target only leaves hiding to go to weddings, maybe the strike was considered important enough to do immediately regardless of the collateral damage, maybe this was the only time three bigwig terrorists were all going to be together, maybe some idiot fucked up the coordinates (this happens in warfare), etc. Hell maybe somebody else bombed the wedding and counted on everyone to assume it was the drone war (this kind of thing happens in Pakistan).

I can tell even those wedding strikes tend to be fairly low carnage. I was at a wedding on Saturday, and you could have killed dozens with a single grenade on the dance floor, and yet casualties from wedding strikes are almost always limited to one or two cars. Moreover there haven;t been any particularly recently. The last I could find was December of 13.

Stereotypes exists because they reflect natural gender differences. Yes, boys and girls are different. All research show this.

"Research" means nothing to the folks, who confuse the Universe that is with the Universe that should be. And, unlike the former, the latter is malleable and subject to change without notice.

Remember the denunciations — both passionately angry and "scientific" — of people, who suggested, "homosexuality is a choice", for example? We were repeatedly told both in print and in schools, that "gays are born that way" and thus it is both stupid and cruel to blame them for their lifestyle.

And maybe it is — I do not know. But the The Current Truth is changing. And, unlike Ben Carson, nobody yells at Miley Cirus for "adopting a more fluid label to her sexuality". Sexuality, you see, is a "social construct" now (and since 2004!) — and whatever a human actually feels is simply a reflection of "stereotyping" to be broken, and "peer pressure" to be resisted. With pride.

Whichever is true, both can not be true at the same time, but the conflict of these two ideas does not bother their proponents whatsoever, such logical rational beings they are. "Research" my tail...

And that is different than the US Congress declaring climate change doesn't exist?

Yes, because the opposite happened.

the principle you're looking for is "keeping poor people poor and in their place".
its about punishing the poor.... for being poor
it's about punishing parents and starving kids.
there is also very much a racial element to this.
and of course there's the fact that the predominant users of drugs aren't the poor to start with.

"States already do a good job of ensuring no one gets a 'free ride.' We don't need another one--especially one that stigmatizes"
http://time.com/3117361/welfar...

"The rush to humiliate the poor"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

"The Myth of Welfare and Drug Use"
http://www.thedailybeast.com/a...
http://www.slate.com/articles/...

America should be about 2nd chances. And 3rds. and 4ths. And 5ths. Indeed, that's the idea behind the mythological American Dream, that anyone can make it here. But people who support this punishment of the poor seem to believe that people should be expected to accomplish a home run on the first swing, and be punished if they fail to do so. They tell people to "work harder", "try harder", "pick themselves up", while simultaneously doing everything they can to impede their ability to do so.

So no. It's not about responsibility. And it's not even about principles. It's a lie to say that it is.

The FBI implemented a program of poisoning illegal alcohol in the 1930's that killed over 10,000 people. These self-proclaimed goody two shoes that shield themselves by hiding behind the women and children they call their families are capable of doing anything to the outsiders of their extended community.

Their goal is to have everyone on record convicted of something, thereby making every american a dirty untermenschen -- chattel property, easily manipulated and disposed of on a whim.

A little understanding goes a long way to dispelling and preventing the spread of myths and misinformation: http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad...

Even more, playing devil’s advocate, the scientists tried to force their data to show them a hiatus; they redid the calculations starting in 1998, as so many deniers have done. The result? The warming from 1998 – 2014 is 0.106 C per decade. It’s still there.

The corrections they applied have to do with the way sea surface temperatures were taken; the method has changed over time, and that introduces biases into the data. The good thing though is that new methods, new understanding of the nature of data measurement, allow scientists to go back and re-examine older data and apply corrections to it.

Different measurement methods have their own inherent biases. They went back through the data AND ITS SOURCES and found that some of the data believed to be from buoys was from engine intakes, and some from intakes was from buoys, and some was from the really old fashioned method of "haul up a bucket of water and measure it".

All corrections are about canceling out those inherent biases so that everything starts from the same baseline.

First of all, I do agree, that neither bank-withdrawals (in whatever "pattern"), nor lying to anyone (unless under oath) should be a crime. Absolutely not.

But, as long as it is a crime, people like Dennis Hastert — who had the power to do something about these laws, but did not, absolutely must be prosecuted under them. To the fullest extent and without mercy. (I argued the same thing about Spitzer — whose case was even worse, for he not only kept the laws he broke on the books, he strengthened them.)

He is not a regular citizen — employee, student, businessman. He had the power — and more of it, than even an "average" Congressman.

All that said about him, I find it disturbing, that the ruling party would prosecute the opposition's politicians. It does not look good. At all... They should be focusing on their own — like the aforementioned Mr. Spitzer, whose sole "punishment" for breaking federal laws, was resignation...

the Darpa grand challenge led to Google's self-driving car, which is poised to put 3 million truck drivers out of work.

"Poised" my lily white ass.

You panting, drooling idiots who think this will be reality soon are deluding yourselves.

Google is on the cusp of having some demonstration technology which will be perpetually 10 years away due to legal issues, corner cases, and the myriad of ways in which it will almost work as an idea, but fail in practice.

Um... OK. Fair point.

If it's not Google, then how about Daimler Chrysler?

Can they do it? Or am I still a drooling, panting idiot?

SMS notifications are a service provided by google for their calendar product. Hence they are shuttering a service.

They also shut down the SMS google query
http://www.slate.com/blogs/fut...

Or perhaps http://www.pcworld.com/article...

Disagree.

The Slate article makes some good points. On the other hand, I almost stopped reading at this nonsense:

In a four-year study that started with nearly 3,000 college students, a team of Michigan State University researchers led by Neal Schmitt found that test score (SAT or ACTâ"whichever the student took) correlated strongly with cumulative GPA at the end of the fourth year. If the students were ranked on both their test scores and cumulative GPAs, those who had test scores in the top half (above the 50th percentile, or median) would have had a roughly two-thirds chance of having a cumulative GPA in the top half. By contrast, students with bottom-half SAT scores would be only one-third likely to make it to the top half in GPA.

This tells me almost nothing about a test's effectiveness, other than it can differentiate pretty well between "high-achievers" and "total morons." I could probably come up with a "test" that could satisfy this stat by talking to each student for a minute.

But hey, I gave the Slate article author the benefit of the doubt, so I tracked down the actual article he cited in this paragraph, which provides data summarized in more helpful and less dubious ways.

You can read that article, if you like, because it presents a much more nuanced picture. Long story short: correlation of SAT/ACT performance with college GPA is at a level of 0.53. That's exactly the same correlation (0.53) of high school GPA with college GPA. Meanwhile, high school GPA and SAT/ACT performance correlation with each other is 0.58.

Unfortunately, I can't seem to find a more thorough analysis in this article about where the mismatches occur. THAT would be really interesting. What are the characteristics of students who get high GPA in high school but low SAT scores -- how do they perform in college? And the reverse: high SAT, but low GPA? That's the only way we could actually tell how much information the SAT is actually adding... but alas, most such analyses don't look at the data that way.

Also, college GPA isn't everything. You also need to, well, FINISH college. According to that cited article, turns out high school GPA is a much better predictor in this regard than SAT scores. Having a better high school GPA gives you an odds ratio of 3.77 to actually graduate college, while having a high SAT has odds ratio of only 1.3. (This isn't mentioned in the Slate article, which only notes how high SAT correlates with graduation -- well, yes it does, but nowhere near as well as high school GPA.)

Anyhow, you can take from this what you will. I've read a number of such studies on SATs, and my conclusion is a little different from the Slate guy. Yes, SATs are correlated with college achievement. But so are some other things too (like high school grades). In borderline cases, having the SAT score may help with an admissions decision, but is the level of correlation high enough to justify letting student A in with an SAT score of X, while rejecting student B with an SAT of X-50? That's really the kind of question we need to ask if we want to justify the rampant use of SAT scores in admissions.

And I'm not sure if any research out there really can answer that question well. Certainly not most of the citations in the Slate article, which focus on broader correlations, and definitely not the Slate article itself, which cites some stats that barely qualify the SAT as useful as if they were truly revelatory.

SAT scores correlate closely with measured IQ

Here's the other problem -- the SAT was originally designed as a proxy for IQ, more or less. But over the past few decades, each

Disagree.

SAT scores correlate closely with measured IQ, and, when taken together with high school grades, are a decent predictor of success at university. I do think that article discounts the extent to which the SAT can be "gamed", though. Of course, if you get a high score because you spent hours studying the SAT in order to get a high score then that also measures something. Maybe not intelligence, but "ambition" and "self-discipline". Which, of course, also contribute to success at university (and in the job market).

WTF? If you don't like hoppy IPAs just order something else. It's certainly not like the only craft beer that's available.

While that's true, the percentage of hoppy IPAs (and similar styles) available on many beer menus has skyrocketed in the past decade or so.

Meanwhile, just about every craft dark beer (stout, porter, etc.) can't be sold unless it's brewed with some odd concoction of chocolate, coffee, herbs, and who knows what else. (I'm very sensitive to caffeine, so I don't want coffee in my beer, thank you.)

If you don't like hoppy lighter beers or coffee-infused dark beers, in most bars you're stuck drinking some "classic" beer on the menu. If you're lucky, you might see some craft brown ale that isn't completely "off the spectrum" of normal beer.

I actually love trying "interesting" beers. I also appreciate breweries that create variations on standard styles (not every stout needs to taste like Guinness, and there is a great deal of room for decent porters, cask ales, etc.).

But if I'm looking at a place that has 20+ beers on tap, there's often only one or two choices for people who might be interested in trying something different that's NOT overrun by hops or coffee. (A couple months ago, I had a beer that literally tasted like eating burnt pine cones and huge amounts of nutmeg -- terrible. But at least it was different. I only tried it because there was nothing else on the large beer menu which wasn't a standard classic beer, a hoppy IPA or ale, or a coffee-infused dark beer.)

If I wanted something incredibly bitter and/or full of coffee/caffeine in a wildly out-of-balance way, I'd just go drink crappy coffee at Starbucks. Ironically (to my mind), it seems that's where craft beer is taking its cues from these days.

The right doesn't "want stuff" taken from other people. They want to earn it.

Right. That's why most "red" states take more money from the federal government than they contribute and the top 10 states receiving federal assistance are "red" and the bottom 10 are "blue":
http://www.politifact.com/trut...
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the...
http://www.motherjones.com/pol...
http://taxfoundation.org/blog/...

Cooking is subject to trends, if you haven't noticed. Clunky 70s housewife equipment is out of fashion, to say the least.

Umm, while you may call it "clunky," pressure cookers are decidedly in fashion as an appropriate tool used for the right purposes. The cool, hip tech-savvy cooks use them along side their sous-vide machines and blowtorches for a number of important kitchen tasks.

Need examples? Nathan Myrhvold's Modernist Cuisine (2011), one of the recent "bibles" of molecular gastronomy, lauds the pressure cooker, in a list of "invaluable modernist tools" called it "a must-have; essential for stocks, tendering tough grains and seeds," and also noted its usefulness for sterilizing in various kitchen tasks. (For some specific home applications, see, for example, here.) Harold Blumenthal at The Fat Duck restaurant found that stocks made with pressure cookers were both faster and better-tasting once they understood the effects of diffusion laws on stock making. And here's a whole blog on Slate about their comeback.

I could go on. Pressure cookers may have been "out" a decade ago, but now they're back "in" again... best time to update your kitchen fashion files.

...perhaps restricting such tools will mean that certain critical vulnerabilities may not be discovered in time, or not reported.

Well yes, that is the idea. Reporting these kind of things will become illegal (for an example how it's happening in meatspace)

Yes, because the enterprise has been so good for the companies that have served it over the last twenty years. Look what happened to IBM, sold their PC business to Lenovo and now their server business as well to get out of the enterprise PC market. HP is on the verge of spinning off their PC business, Dell went private because their enterprise PC business is failing. And what happened to Compaq, DEC and countless others who died, consolidated with or were bought out by others. And what exactly has Microsoft's "iron grip" on the enterprise done for it lately?

Apple's PC business is growing just fine. They make more profit (1.) in their PC business than all Windows PC companies combined . Their PC business is growing faster than the Windows PC business. Since 2001 their PC business has grown sequentially every year with the exceptions of fiscal years 2003 and 2013. They are on track to sell over 22 million units in fiscal 2015.

(1.) http://www.slate.com/blogs/mon...

• Research on In-Class Use of Laptops and Other Devices: Effects on Students' Learning and Attention
• Classroom Laptop Users Distract Others As Well As Themselves
• You’ll Never Learn! Students can’t resist multitasking, and it’s impairing their memory.

My wife is a teacher and every couple of years some numbskulled administrator comes up with another brainstorm that boils down to thinking that throwing some more computers into the mix will fix everything. Of course computers are going to be part of these kids' world, so they need to learn about them, but figuring that kids learn better just because a computer is in front of them is a wrong-headed notion that's not borne out by the research.

wrong.
they are not skeptical.
that's the point:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/fut...

Skepticism is all about critical examination, evidence-based scientific inquiry, and the use of reason in examining controversial claims. Those who flatly deny the results of climate science do not partake in any of the above. They base their conclusions on a priori convictions. Theirs is an ideological conviction—the opposite of skepticism.

After hearing that the individuals in question did not accept the conclusions of climate change modelers at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other academic bodies, I asked them the simple question: “OK, what do your models predict?”

As you might expect, the response was silence.

If those who decry the claims of climate scientists cannot provide some sound empirical basis for their critiques of these claims and the data and models they are based on, then their denialism should be treated on the same footing as those who deny the results of evolutionary biology simply because they do not want to accept evolution.

To put climate deniers on the same footing as scientists, for whom skepticism is a central facet of their life work, is to do a great disservice to science, knowledge, and progress.

Yeah -- there are false rape accusations but THE MAJORITY ARE NOT (FBI stats show about 2-8% are false). And then there's the pressure women feel to not report (shame/fear), religious baggage, and then being re-victimized by cops/courts:

" Baltimore’s “unfounded” rate used to be the highest in the nation, at about 30 percent, due partly to questionable and sometimes downright abusive police procedures, such as badgering a woman about why she waited two hours to report a street assault. By 2013, an effort to provide better training and encourage full investigation of all complaints reduced that rate to less than 2 percent."

http://www.slate.com/articles/...
OR
http://www.theguardian.com/wor...

Some women recant, not because a rape didn't happen, but because of the shit they'll have to face. Only 40% of rapes are even reported because women know they'll deal with all the usual shit (were you drinking, what were you wearing, did you smile at him -- which to people like you seems to mean 'she was asking for it')

You sound like a rape apologist and victim blamer. So why don't YOU 'open your fucking eyes'

The "conclusions" of "abnormal behavior" were made from observations that kids would rather be at home playing instead of sitting in a class AND from the fact that young humans will seek sexual satisfaction but avoid rejection.

That sounds like something a ROBOT might find strange.
Not a human being. Particularly not one who actually went through puberty at some point in their life.

In short... like most psychology studies out there, this too is most probably bullshit.

Surprise - Greenland doesn't come to mind, but it is listed as almost 2x the murder rate of Russia. It's the suicide capital of the world.

Maybe that could account for a few cases, but there were other issues at least some researchers didn't think would be solved so quickly either. In the link I provided (unfortunately, the original article isn't found, just the summary), a researcher in 2002 was claiming that CMOS would end up at 45 nm and halt there because of the issues with thermal noise. I also remember these types of predictions being made by researches at Intel as well.

Look, I'll I'm saying is that *every* time so far the prediction was made, it's turned out that manufacturers figured out how to push the envelop a little further. Eventually, it's got to end at some point, but so far the scientists and researchers manage to surprise us each time. It's hard to predict when or how the next breakthrough will occur, because by nature, it's something that no one has though of yet.

Osama bin Laden was western educated and quite smart. al-Zawahiri is a surgeon. Mohammad Atta was an architectural engineer. 12 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 had a college degree. In fact, one study showed that 60% of terrorists born/raised in the west had engineering backgrounds and terrorists in general are wealthier and more educated than their countrymen. These are not dumb people. Sure there are goat fuckers mixed in there, but it is an epic mistake thinking these people are backwater hicks. http://www.slate.com/articles/...

Excellent point. Many people that are not religious have trouble understanding that someone can be religious and intelligent (I suffered this blind spot for a long time.) Actually, I think the blind spot goes further, I think that intelligent person of religion X frequently fails to understand that a follower of religion Y can also be intelligent. But the truth is that the more intelligent someone is, the better they are at rationalizing their own beliefs. Regardless of how rational the beliefs actually are.

Osama bin Laden was western educated and quite smart. al-Zawahiri is a surgeon. Mohammad Atta was an architectural engineer. 12 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 had a college degree. In fact, one study showed that 60% of terrorists born/raised in the west had engineering backgrounds and terrorists in general are wealthier and more educated than their countrymen. These are not dumb people. Sure there are goat fuckers mixed in there, but it is an epic mistake thinking these people are backwater hicks. http://www.slate.com/articles/...

Once again you are totally correct. I don't doubt that Eich quit on his own decision, but I do think he stepped down because he knew it would all fall apart anyway. The board would have slipped him a note a few days later so he pulled a Nixon. He was mostly diplomatic about it, good for him. And yes, it's very very rare that workers can mount that kind of opposition. I can also point to that grocery store case recently. Good for them! That is the best possible scenario for worker action.

http://thinkprogress.org/clima...
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad...
http://archives.politicususa.c...

Why do these people act so shock that the agency that is largely responsible for space holds most of the assets in space, even if theose assets ultimately complement other agencies? I thought cooperation between agencies is a good thing? (Or should scientific research have the sort of systemic walls between agencies that let to the intelligence failure known as 9/11 ??)

NASA has the bulk of space based sensors monitoring the Earth.
This is of course, completely logical.
Even for assets actually owned by other agencies, they still interact and support them, particularly in the launching and maintaining aspects.

But NASA has the bulk. So the gameplan here lays itself out. First they reduce NASA's earth monitoring capability. Note they dont kill it outright...they rarely do. First you reduce its capability and effectiveness to justify further cuts in the future. And then you just never replace that capability in the agencies they argued should have it.

Such as:
http://thinkprogress.org/clima...
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad...

We know this is the game plan, because the GOP has -already tried- to interfere with NOAA's earth monitoring and climate research capabilities, and defund it's climate research. Whereas with NASA They claim that work is best left to NOAA, when talking about NOAA they instead claim that NOAA's true mission is "weather forecasting", not "climate research", as if understanding the bigger picture better and monitoring the planet wouldn't improve the ability to predict weather to as a byproduct.