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Speaking of a sense of proportion.... in the United States you're three times as likely to die from a shark attack (1 death per year on average) as you are from from the measles (1 death every 3 years on average from 387 reported measles cases per year).

To put that into further perspective, the U.S. averages 11 deaths from fireworks and 24 from train crashes per year. Death from a literal lightning strike is 141 times as common than dying from the measles in the United States.

So let's not overreact quite yet.

Yes, there are things that kill you other than measles. The difference is that measles is pretty easily preventable - people just have to get vaccinated.

The other issue with measles - and most of the "childhood diseases" - is that they have other complications besides death.

https://www.cdc.gov/measles/ab...

"About one child out of every 1,000 who get measles will develop encephalitis (swelling of the brain) that can lead to convulsions and can leave the child deaf or with intellectual disability."

"Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE) is a very rare, but fatal disease of the central nervous system that results from a measles virus infection acquired earlier in life. SSPE generally develops 7 to 10 years after a person has measles, even though the person seems to have fully recovered from the illness. Since measles was eliminated in 2000, SSPE is rarely reported in the United States."

That last line is ironic.

Speaking of a sense of proportion.... in the United States you're three times as likely to die from a shark attack (1 death per year on average) as you are from from the measles (1 death every 3 years on average from 387 reported measles cases per year).

To put that into further perspective, the U.S. averages 11 deaths from fireworks and 24 from train crashes per year. Death from a literal lightning strike is 141 times as common than dying from the measles in the United States.

So let's not overreact quite yet.

And more people die in the bath than by terrorism but where does all the money go? I don't see many anti-bath teams running around, do you?

Speaking of a sense of proportion.... in the United States you're three times as likely to die from a shark attack (1 death per year on average) as you are from from the measles (1 death every 3 years on average from 387 reported measles cases per year).

To put that into further perspective, the U.S. averages 11 deaths from fireworks and 24 from train crashes per year. Death from a literal lightning strike is 141 times as common than dying from the measles in the United States.

So let's not overreact quite yet.

I'm not sure where the "Yellow" came from [...]

In the late 19th century Pulitzer and Hearst were going at it hammer and tongs trying to outsell one another in the newspaper business. They ended up in a contest over who could come up with the most sensationalized headlines and copy to sell papers. One of the simplest going theories for the origin of the term in the use of yellow ink during this period of big, exaggerated headlines. There are, however, other theories as well.

Thanks for the history lesson. I thought it had something to do with Hearst; but couldn't remember what.

I'm not sure where the "Yellow" came from [...]

In the late 19th century Pulitzer and Hearst were going at it hammer and tongs trying to outsell one another in the newspaper business. They ended up in a contest over who could come up with the most sensationalized headlines and copy to sell papers. One of the simplest going theories for the origin of the term in the use of yellow ink during this period of big, exaggerated headlines. There are, however, other theories as well.

Quote from Reversible Computing: A Brief Introduction

Interestingly, in this long term view, taking optimal advantage of thermodynamically reversible techniques requires not just different electronics, but also changes to all higher levels in computing - different logic designs and CPU architectures; different programming languages and algorithms. The reason is that in the reversible approach, as in the laws of physics themselves, information is a conserved quantity - it cannot be destroyed, although it can be uncomputed by careful, deliberate design. If information is simply discarded, as occurs continually (and implicitly) at all levels in traditional computing, it inevitably becomes heat.

This suggests that the end goal is *not* actually a general computer you can program like any other CPU. Is Michael P. Frank just making shit up?

Bees consume pollen. Some even call it 'bee bread'...
http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/in868
http://www.hhmi.org/biointerac...

I'm not sure that analysis is correct. The case you linked to (in the indystar) never went to court. To consider it differently, if you are at a town-hall meeting, and CODEPINK runs in and starts shouting, they can be arrested.

Yet I am sure, since there's a bit more law in this area then the example that I provided. If you pay me, I'll teach you. Otherwise, I've given you more than enough resources and keywords to figure it out in your own.

Obviously that isn't something the creators of the constitution had thought about when they wrote the amendment, and none of the prior judgements really address the point, so the Supreme Court ruling would be based entirely on the opinions of the members of the court.

Law fail. Perry Educ. Ass'n v. Perry Local Educators' Ass'n, 460 U.S. 37, 45 (1983), as explained in Section III.A. of Christian Legal Soc'y Chapter of the
Univ. of Cal., Hastings Coll. of the Law
v. Martinez, 130 S. Ct. 2971 (2010).

This is the questionnaire, http://dcf.psychiatry.ufl.edu/...

That would be the 'A' in 'STEM'.

These systems already exist - used for protecting rugs, carpets and furniture on sundecks. Just needs a water/wind sensor and an electric motor:

http://mil.ufl.edu/4924/projec...

Oh and if you want to keep bringing up stalking guess what else women are more likely to do than men.

If you're talking about the Garden Gem tomato (not actually a GMO, I think, but a very carefully created cultivar), see here: http://hos.ufl.edu/kleeweb/new....

Here are the GPA numbers from the University of Florida: https://www.studentinvolvement.ufl.edu/Portals/1/Sorority%20and%20Fraternity%20Affairs/Grade%20Reports/Fall%202013%20Academic%20Report%20by%20Council%20PUBLIC%20VERSION.pdf

The fun numbers are at the end:

Women: 3.36
Sorority: 3.41

Men: 3.20
Fraternity: 3.18

University average: 3.29

By being male, you lose 0.9 GPA, and by joining a frat, another 0.2, for a total of 0.11 loss.
By being female, you gain 0.7 GPA, and by joining a sorority, you gain 0.5 more, for a 0.12 gain overall.
Note that the effect of joining a sorority is greater than that of joining a fraternity.

Interestingly, the fraternity with the highest GPA just got suspended for spitting on wounded veterans and trying to urinate on the flag at the beach. Interpret that as you will.

The oldest references that I can find to the age of the American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis) is the Florida Museum of Natural History, who are of the opinion that the morpological differences between Alligator olseni (White, 1942) and Alligator mississippiensis (Daudan, 1802) are insufficient to justify calling them separate species. By the rules of zoological nomenclature the senior synomym applies. Specimens ascribed to olseni (and therefore, if you accept the FLMNH position, to mississippiensis) date back to the early Miocene at 16-18 Myr, possibly the earliest Miocene at 22-23 Myr. If you don't accept the FLMNH synonymy, then the oldest known fossils of Alligator mississippiensis date to the Pliocene around 5 million years. http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/vertp... http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/vertp...

Sorry to destroy your assertion by doing the most trivial of research. I hope that your attention to detail is better when you're coding Ruby, but you've hardly left that impression.

The oldest references that I can find to the age of the American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis) is the Florida Museum of Natural History, who are of the opinion that the morpological differences between Alligator olseni (White, 1942) and Alligator mississippiensis (Daudan, 1802) are insufficient to justify calling them separate species. By the rules of zoological nomenclature the senior synomym applies. Specimens ascribed to olseni (and therefore, if you accept the FLMNH position, to mississippiensis) date back to the early Miocene at 16-18 Myr, possibly the earliest Miocene at 22-23 Myr. If you don't accept the FLMNH synonymy, then the oldest known fossils of Alligator mississippiensis date to the Pliocene around 5 million years. http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/vertp... http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/vertp...

Sorry to destroy your assertion by doing the most trivial of research. I hope that your attention to detail is better when you're coding Ruby, but you've hardly left that impression.

According to the University of Florida it's malaria that has been eradicated, not the Anopheles mosquito.

There are over 80 different species of mosquitos in Florida. This method only targets one of those species. There will still be plenty of mosquitos.

And I say your mosquito eradication doesn't go too far enough.

There are over 80 different species of mosquitos in Florida. This method only targets one of those species. There will still be plenty of mosquitos.

That's a relief. For a second I was worried that this could get out of control and kill all of the mosquitoes.

There are over 80 different species of mosquitos in Florida. This method only targets one of those species. There will still be plenty of mosquitos.

No - it's not even a question. Bury the lines and you will remove a large number of causes for power outages.

My parents live in a neighborhood with buried power lines. Yeah, on average the power goes out less often. However, they've had a recent issue with the buried lines decaying after 30+ years underground. When that happens, it's a much longer, and more expensive repair.

The thing that bothers me is well meaning landowners planting trees near power lines. Personally, I blame schools that hand out saplings to children without proper education. Yeah, they look nice when they are small. They don't stay small.

There's a professor at Georgia Tech researching that sort of thing, except for sidewalks instead of streets and using a tablet strapped to a wheelchair.

(Why yes, it is weird that I can only find an overview of a GA Tech professor's research on a ufl.edu site....)

Cohn and Zheng, also members of the UF Genetics Institute, found that the developing digits of male and female mouse embryos are packed with receptors for sex hormones. By following the prenatal development of the limb buds of mice, which have a digit length ratio similar to humans, the scientists controlled the gene signaling effects of androgen — also known as testosterone — and estrogen.

Essentially, more androgen equated to a proportionally longer fourth digit. More estrogen resulted in a feminized appearance. The study uncovered how these hormonal signals govern the rate at which skeletal precursor cells divide, and showed that different finger bones have different levels of sensitivity to androgen and estrogen.

We know that the 2D:4D digit ratio shows a correlation to both sexual orientation and gender identity. So, now the influence (or lack thereof) has been tied to what happens before you're born. My 2D:4D digit ratio is female. Thank you for playing.

Our sense of smell is the sense running at the lowest level. It's wired straight into the brain in the shortest path of any sense.

This is why the peanut butter smell test can help diagnose Alzheimer's disease. I would expect nontraumatic loss of smell to highly positively correlate with damage to the structures of the temporal lobe (amygdala, basal ganglia, etc). This is where memory lives (in all its forms).

Smell is a pretty raw sense, as opposed to say, vision, which is highly processed by many different cortical systems and areas. I would therefore expect it to yield the best raw cerebral status metadata.

The only startling thing is your poor spelling and grammar. Read.

Skip the beer...use blueberry wine!.

Plenty of food crops are grown in greenhouses. According to this, "The 2002 Census of Agriculture estimated a total $15 billion of greenhouse, nursery, and floriculture crops sold in 2002, including [...] $1.2 billion or eight percent food crops such as tomatoes grown in greenhouses."

"Some 1800 hectares of vegetables are grown in greenhouses" in Israel.

"In Europe and Israel, essentially all of these crops [peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, and melons] are produced in greenhouses." Source.

The hot oil would whirl around faster in Jupiter's gravity. Difficult to predict by how much due to the viscosity of the cooking oil. I speculate it would travel about 60% faster (square root of 2.53), just like the most comfortable walking speed on Jupiter is 60% than on Earth. I say most comfortable because your legs work like a pendulum and the frequency of that is 60% higher. In lower and lower gravities walking becomes impractical because it is so slow -- you have to wait longer for your legs to complete a step. http://www.phys.ufl.edu/courses/phy3221/fall07/DanielDimAnalysisMost%20Comfortable%20Walking%20Speed.doc

There is a colder spot on earth, but it is not natural:
http://www.phys.ufl.edu/microkelvin/

here

And Florida is mostly sand.

Really, it is: http://gardeningsolutions.ifas.ufl.edu/giam/maintenance_and_care/soil_fertilizer_and_nutrients/florida_soils.html

A horse will not mow your lawn; it will eat all the grass, down to the soil. You will be left with bare earth, with a few deposits of processed grass on it. I'm not sure I'd want my lawn to be like that.

If you don't want to read my entire post, here is a summery:

Eugenics was/is NOT science.

Why?
01) Science requires use of the "Scientific Method"
02) Science requires repeatable results.
03) Took hearsay as evidence.
04) Took prejudices as evidence.
05) Took folk-tales as evidence.
05) Preformed no experiments.
06) Produced no repeatable results.
07) Took scientific data from other studies, and applied it without testing it first.
08) Produced ZERO "superior" or even improved people.
09) Eugenics never produced any "new" or revolutionary theories.
10) Eugenics never overturned any old prejudices.
11) Eugenics ever only reenforced the old prejudices.

The rest
===========

Did you actually READ the link you posted?

The FIRST two sentences (both the subtitle and the Editor's Note) called Eugenics a PHILOSOPHY, which is exactly what it was.

Here they are:

Our editorial from 1911 praising the new science of eugenics also hints at the darker side of this philosophy

Editor's note: This editorial was written and published in 1911. Although our editors of a century ago pondered some lofty aspirations for the orderly future of humans, it was only three decades later that the brutal reality of a Nazi social order suffused with a eugenicist ideal brought home the practical shortcomings of the philosophy.

Philosophy. Not Science.

Here is a link for you to read: Science and Eugenics. And here is the first paragraph:

The truth about the science of eugenics is that there is no science to eugenics. What passed for scientific method in the eugenics movement is almost laughable now; if it were not so disturbing. Eugenicists were trying to explain complex human behaviors based on second hand accounts and in some cases heresy.

Here is the link to the whole article: http://iml.jou.ufl.edu/projects/Spring02/Holland/Splash.htm

Eugenics was based on principles of plant biology and its evolution

You are falling prey to the thought error of false equivalency.
Engeneering too is based on science, but Engineering is NOT science.
Science Fiction, also based on science, is not science.

Just because something is based on a science does not make it science.

Besides, goal of science is knowledge, and nothing else. (Some scientists may have goals that extend beyond knowledge, but not science itself.)
Physics, biology, genetics, geology, paleontology, quantum physics, astronomy, etc. all only have the discovery of new knowledge about how the universe works as their goal.

Eugenics, on the other hand, ALWAYS had 2 goals. Neither of them being the quest for knowledge.
The first (and stated) goal was to create the "Perfect Man". (A nebulous and poorly defined concept to begin with.)
The second (and unstated), but more important goal of Eugenics was to justify the already existing prejud[g]eses held by those with wealth and power, and to justify their places in society as leaders.

Your "proof" even states that the goal of Eugenics was the creation of a "Perfect Man" (in itself a logical fallicy), a concept they don't even bother to define. What would a "Perfect Man" be? First, being realistic, the definition of a "Perfect Man" is different in different times, different cultures, and different situations. The definition even will vary from person to person. (BTW, the Christian bible defines being human as living in a state of IMPERFECTION, with God being the only perfect being, so if you're Christian, there's that.)

We may not be able to use the article to define what a "Perfect Man" IS, but taking the talking-points of the article, we can defi

If you don't want to read my entire post, here is a summery:

Eugenics was/is NOT science.

Why?
01) Science requires use of the "Scientific Method"
02) Science requires repeatable results.
03) Took hearsay as evidence.
04) Took prejudices as evidence.
05) Took folk-tales as evidence.
05) Preformed no experiments.
06) Produced no repeatable results.
07) Took scientific data from other studies, and applied it without testing it first.
08) Produced ZERO "superior" or even improved people.
09) Eugenics never produced any "new" or revolutionary theories.
10) Eugenics never overturned any old prejudices.
11) Eugenics ever only reenforced the old prejudices.

The rest
===========

Did you actually READ the link you posted?

The FIRST two sentences (both the subtitle and the Editor's Note) called Eugenics a PHILOSOPHY, which is exactly what it was.

Here they are:

Our editorial from 1911 praising the new science of eugenics also hints at the darker side of this philosophy

Editor's note: This editorial was written and published in 1911. Although our editors of a century ago pondered some lofty aspirations for the orderly future of humans, it was only three decades later that the brutal reality of a Nazi social order suffused with a eugenicist ideal brought home the practical shortcomings of the philosophy.

Philosophy. Not Science.

Here is a link for you to read: Science and Eugenics. And here is the first paragraph:

The truth about the science of eugenics is that there is no science to eugenics. What passed for scientific method in the eugenics movement is almost laughable now; if it were not so disturbing. Eugenicists were trying to explain complex human behaviors based on second hand accounts and in some cases heresy.

Here is the link to the whole article: http://iml.jou.ufl.edu/projects/Spring02/Holland/Splash.htm

Eugenics was based on principles of plant biology and its evolution

You are falling prey to the thought error of false equivalency.
Engeneering too is based on science, but Engineering is NOT science.
Science Fiction, also based on science, is not science.

Just because something is based on a science does not make it science.

Besides, goal of science is knowledge, and nothing else. (Some scientists may have goals that extend beyond knowledge, but not science itself.)
Physics, biology, genetics, geology, paleontology, quantum physics, astronomy, etc. all only have the discovery of new knowledge about how the universe works as their goal.

Eugenics, on the other hand, ALWAYS had 2 goals. Neither of them being the quest for knowledge.
The first (and stated) goal was to create the "Perfect Man". (A nebulous and poorly defined concept to begin with.)
The second (and unstated), but more important goal of Eugenics was to justify the already existing prejud[g]eses held by those with wealth and power, and to justify their places in society as leaders.

Your "proof" even states that the goal of Eugenics was the creation of a "Perfect Man" (in itself a logical fallicy), a concept they don't even bother to define. What would a "Perfect Man" be? First, being realistic, the definition of a "Perfect Man" is different in different times, different cultures, and different situations. The definition even will vary from person to person. (BTW, the Christian bible defines being human as living in a state of IMPERFECTION, with God being the only perfect being, so if you're Christian, there's that.)

We may not be able to use the article to define what a "Perfect Man" IS, but taking the talking-points of the article, we can defi

Organic food has plenty of pesticides too. Most of them are worse than the synthetic ones.

So far, you have a good point...

Pesticide free...? Nature has its own pesticides. Many plants, especially fruit trees, produce their own pesticides when attacked by insects.

Yes, this also has been well-studied and documented.

These pesticides are *inside* the fruit and can be very toxic.

Holy {citation needed}, batman! There's nothing indicating that the natural pesticides (lectins etc) in commonly eaten fruits exhibit significant oral toxicity to humans in the concentrations encountered in these fruits. It would be unlikely too, given that we evolved for millions of years to effectively deal with these compounds.

Organic food has plenty of pesticides too. Most of them are worse than the synthetic ones.

Pesticide free...? Nature has its own pesticides. Many plants, especially fruit trees, produce their own pesticides when attacked by insects. These pesticides are *inside* the fruit and can be very toxic. You can prevent their formation (ie. make the fruit less toxic) by applying artificial pesticides when the insects appear.

Literally no one in recorded history has ever been killed by a meteorite. California has had a grand total of nine fatal shark attacks since 1926, so you're pretty safe on that count, too. You might still be right that tapeworms aren't that serious a problem, but you're way off base in your comparisons.

The UF Athletic Department contributed over 6 million dollars to the University (More than 3x the CS budget being cut). The department also paid 1.6 million for University Services they Consumed. All of their facilities, salaries, and scholarships (another 1.5 million that went to the University BTW) are funded from the athletic department budget as well.

If they run a budget surplus, that goes (at least in part) to the University. http://www.uaa.ufl.edu/uaa/Executive_Summary_2011-2012.pdf

Your assumption that arts and humanities are not useful is so incredibly flawed it is sad to think you might have more than a junior high education.

Nope. Men's basketball brings in $2 million in ticket sales, but brings in over $8 million (see page 17). There are an additional $19 million in revenues not tied to a specific sport (such as licensed merchandise and marketing agreements).

Please, read your sources carefully before misleading people with specific numbers.

Last year the Athletic department contribute $6 million to the university (beyond the Services used by the department). http://www.uaa.ufl.edu/uaa/Executive_Summary_2011-2012.pdf

So, by cutting football (read the budget) You would be killing two more similar departments, not just CS.

False, its already a combined Department

http://www.cise.ufl.edu/

It contains

Computer Engineering (CEN) (ABET Accredited)
Computer Science (CSE)
Computer Science (CSC)
Digital Arts and Sciences (DAS)

From their list of majors...

American Indian and Indigenous Studies, Film and Media Studies, Golf and Sports Turf Management, Information Systems, International Studies, Marketing, Modern European Studies, Public Relations, Recreation, Parks and Tourism, Religion (this is why we have seminaries!), Sociology and Women's Studies are all still there.

There are also three music degrees: Music Education and either a B.A. in Music or a "Bachelors of Music" in Music. Similarly, Art is broken down into three or four majors instead of 3 or 4 concentrations.

What we need is a tax payer revolt in Florida over all of those useless majors, especially, the grievance mongers like Women's Studies surviving the cut.

I heard Newton's father has been described as a 'wild, extravagant, and weak man'.

You see... I willing to bet the last 650,000 years didn't see an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico either.

You might lose that bet. A LOT of oil spills into the gulf every year naturally, and it wouldn't be surprising if there were a rupture after an earthquake that released a lot of oil at the same time.......at least once in the last 650,000 years.

First, the below is not to say that I accept the lack of evidence as a rebuttal of the "clathrate gun hypothesis"

Then let's evaluate the chances of me loosing the bet.

First at all - just to know what you should google for, the terminology one uses spills vs seepage. In this regards, a quote from here:

The Deepwater Horizon site releases 3 to 12 times the oil per day compared to that released by natural seeps across the entire Gulf of Mexico. [...]
Natural seeps are not constantly active; the volume of oil released can vary considerably throughout the day and from day to day. As a result, only a small area around the source is actually exposed to "fresh" non-degraded oil, which is its most toxic state.[...] Their research suggests that oil from natural seeps normally stays in the water for between ten hours to five days.[...]
A sudden, concentrated and massive pulse of oil from an event such as the Deepwater Horizon disaster presents a fundamentally more acute stress to marine and coastal systems

Seismicity in the Gulf of Mexico - just as an estimate for chances of major spills from earth-quakes.

Hmmm... I might loose the bet, as there might have been major earthquakes... but somehow I'm more afraid of the "human greed" as pushing the trigger of the potential "clathrate gun". You see, the presence of old inactive rift faults, with major causes for earthquakes being the redistribution of sediments... doesn't seem as a big danger of things going astray... not as probable as the human greed.

Weren't the problematic Deskstars in the 75GB+ range?

IBM Deskstar 75GXP was the main one, yes. However, I think all of their hard drives at the time had similar issues revolving around the BLUE GLUE used to seal the canister

This isn't as big an issue as people make it out to be. One of the biggest users of helium is the scientific community. They are making strides to curb their use and create more. Despite the economy, it is funded: http://news.ufl.edu/2011/05/23/nsf-helium/

Homo sapiens has had more impact on biodiversity than any other species. The Great Oxidation Event lasted hundreds of millions of years and, while we have no means of establishing a survey of taxa from that era, it was most likely the result of a very large number of species, and indeed is such a long period of time that many speciation events could readily have occurred. Further, the autotrophs that released the oxygen in the first place had no means of affecting many of the anaerobes that live deep underground—and we do.

Here are your citations for humanity's impact. Suffice it to say that many of them will still be noticeable in a few million years:

• Climate Change, Human Impacts, and the Resilience of Coral Reefs
• Consequences of changing biodiversity
• A continent transformed: Human impact on the natural vegetation of Australia, which went on for something like sixty million years before we screwed it up.
• Tropical forest recovery: legacies of human impact and natural disturbances
• The Future of Biodiversity, the abstract for which starts: "Recent extinction rates are 100 to 1000 times their pre-human levels in well-known, but taxonomically diverse groups from widely different environments. If all species currently deemed "threatened" become extinct in the next century, then future extinction rates will be 10 times recent rates. Some threatened species will survive the century, but many species not now threatened will succumb. Regions rich in species found only within them (endemics) dominate the global patterns of extinction."
• Urbanization, Biodiversity, and Conservation
• Biodiversity inventories, indicator taxa and effects of habitat modification in tropical forest (PDF)

I don't know why you then decided to compare humanity's effect on biodiversity to that of mass extinction events, but let me explain to you why they are completely different.

When an extinction event occurs, there is a single source of pressure that living organisms must accommodate, or at most a couple: the sky is darker, the air is colder, the atmosphere is now filled with water rather than ammonia, et cetera. Humans have not been exerting this kind of pressure at all. We systematically destroy ecosystems, replacing hundreds of species of plants and animals with just one or two (which are, naturally, attuned to depend on us feeding, fertilizing, irrigating, and sheltering them) and we poison the water, air and soil with thousands of chemicals and chemical cocktails (an issue which is now so bad it's affecting us.)

This is too much for evolution to handle. Especially due to chemical poisoning, many of the hardiest species most likely to survive a natural disaster have been snared by exotic and unexpected genetic vulnerabilities. DDT was found to act as a sex hormone in birds, for example, causing males to develop female genitalia. As a South African, I'm sure you're aware that it's still in use, combating Malaria, even though it has been banned in many countries.

We are whittling down biodiversity in ways that the Great Oxygen Catastrophe didn't. It selected one major branch of the tree, the organisms that depended on a reducing atmosphere, and marginalized them, creating room for the healthy and d

{citation needed]

Only by uninformed basement dwellers, anyone who's been even casually following "the news" for the past five years would know it's true.

That's the problem. "The news" broadcasts controversial events and propaganda and anecdotal evidence and videos of stupid hippies yelling at cops because they hate cops and unruly college students refusing to comply with peace officer demands at public speaking events and then whining when they get tazed. That's all I've ever seen on "the news". How about some actual data? How about some real statistics? Here's an irl scientific study which stated that out of the nearly 1000 cases of Taser use studied, 99.7% resulted in minor to no injury (as in, fall and scratch yourself on the concrete or similar), three hospitalizations, and two deaths which were found to not have been the result of Taser use: Taser Medical Safety: the state of the science - William P. Bozeman, MD, FACEP, FAAEM (PDF of a slideshow presentation made at University of Florida), Study: Tasers are safe to use - Physorg, Independent studies could answer questions about Tasers. I can't seem to locate a published record of that particular study, but here is another paper by Dr Bozeman that compares Tasers to other methods of incapacitation: Medical Aspects of Less Lethal Weapons.

Your turn.

In general, students may transfer 60 credit hours from community colleges as part of the hours needed for their UF degrees, regardless of when these hours are earned, subject to university and college degree requirements.
...
Junior-/senior-level (courses numbered 3000-4000) course requirements for the major must be completed at UF or, with permission of the studentâ(TM)s UF college, at another baccalaureate degree-granting institution. At least 25 percent of semester credit hours must be earned through instruction at the University of Florida.

--here

The content in Saudi Arabia's domestic mass media is under the control of the government, having to pass through censors before it makes it on air or in print. Furthermore, while the press is said to be privately owned, the editor-in-chief of each newspaper is appointed by the government.

From: http://iml.jou.ufl.edu/projects/fall09/jawad_n/traditionalmedia.html

Traditional media is already under government control. Thousands of people producing online media are less easy to control, so they're only handing out licenses to those individuals they approve of.