This is the sort of danger I refer to - what is obvious to us may not be the case - and it its process that "saves" us from things that appear to be obvious (i.e. that the earth is flat, sun revolves around earth etc. - these are obvious exaggerations but it displays my point)

I'm not sure what you mean here - I am actually quite familiar with this area of research.

I think this is the wrong attitude - yes there are no human scientists without bias, which is why we have rules, "best practice", and procedure to take the human out of the equation as much as possible. I think it is a mistake to go the other way and give up attempting to be unbiased.

Remember "clever hans"? His owner spent his whole life with him, and was fully convinced he could solve mathematical problems - after all he too saw repeatedly that he tapped his hoof the correct number of times - he could not think of any other explanation for it. But that is the kicker - it doesn't mean that there isn't. If he had just set up a correct double blind experiment - he would have seen it almost instantly that his hypothesis was false.

Obviously you could very well be right - but the point is that it needs to be carefully tested before you can be sure of it. There are a many researchers that have personal hunches that X is true - and they can see it from their experience that it is very likely to be the case, but they will tell you that they are yet to find a way to prove it. Much of the real genius (and naturally hard work) in this kind of science is figuring out ways of testing that X.

Not to pick on you but this is probably the most dangerous thing a scientist can convince themselves of. The easiest person to fool is always yourself.

I would recommend everyone to have a read of the link - its not as cut and dry as parent makes it seem and its actually quite a interesting discussion on energy efficiency.

Brand names simply protect the brand not the product - so you could make a 100% same coca-cola, you just wouldn't be able to brand it so. While established companies might be able to trade on their "good names" and beat out copiers, emerging companies would have a much more difficult time to establish themselves - not to mention that established companies with "good names" could just steal from emerging companies and get the best of both worlds while completely stifling innovation.

I'm not the OP but I agree that you need copyright protection - it makes it possible to be in the creative profession, and actually encourages scientific sharing (as you have no fear that they will steal the end product of your research).

Dunno what you are talking about but what I can find is that he is being investigated with regards to corruption within the SEIU, not links to foreign terror groups. His membership in the union is quite prominently displayed in this AP article at least: AP article and pretty much all the other articles I could see on google news.

It doesn't actually work this way - it only computes a smallish area around you and generates as needed from a fixed random seed (so going back to an old area will be the same) + changes you have made.

Apparently the sheer sophistication and amount of code, the use of multiple zero day exploits, plus a number of fake certificates all point to an operation outside of the resources of a small team. Likewise the payload seems to be specifically targeted at a particular set-up of a PLC seems to point to sabotage/intelligence gathering rather than blackmail/extortion.

Them's fightin' words

Well then you are just going to get another war - one even more closely matched then before with correspondingly more casualties so that is not a very smart attitude. Not to mention if you leave them in the hands of occupied territory you are just condemning people who live there to further cruelty which Japan certainly visited upon them.

For me there are two categories of books - "average" books that I like, but not incredibly, that I get as ebooks, and there are those that I really treasure that I get as hard-covers. It must be something about the physical nature of books that ebooks just dont do for me. Admittedly a part of me is also always preparing for the post-apocalyptic scenario where there is no power - you dont see e-books giving you a 2% increase in skills.

On the contrary - before the atomic bombs the emperor had quite a few conditions on the surrender - in fact it was more of a peace treaty then a surrender - including retaining power, the army being responsible for order, no occupation of either the home islands or Korea (Which Japan considered rightfully theirs) etc. In fact some of the more belligerent members were pushing for Manchuria as well. It was completely and utterly unreasonable.

Secondly - even just keeping the imperial court in place, which is indirectly or directly responsible for the war and its horrendous conduct IS too much to ask for - and they should have never even gotten that. Likely as a result of this Japan has never properly come to terms with its conduct in the war, which they still refer to as a "calamity" or "disaster" rather than a war they started and lost, and the history books they use in school are full of revisionist bs.

In that particular case the Japanese brought it onto themselves. Their conduct showed few morals and quite frankly it was a good call given the information available at the time.

Japan was defeated but they refused an unconditional surrender. Everything at the time indicated that they would fight to the last man. What are you supposed to do?

Its difficult to explain in a logical fact-based way why that perception might be the case (and I don't know enough locals to say one way or another) but Persians do dislike (hate?) Arabs. Persians feel their culture is superior to that of Arabs. The current regime has in the past and currently cracked down on certain cultural traditions that are not in line with Islam. This has been interpreted by some commentators as Arab cultural imperialism - and from there its not hard to see how an perception that their leaders are (culturally if nothing else) Arabic.

Give it a while - with some stuff you tend to fight it and then later realise its actually useful. For instance I've never used libraries before as I like to make my own directory structure and windows usually insists on its own for libraries - but for win 7 you can specify multiple directories to link to that library - so for games - some of which are in the steam folder, some of which are in a games folder - I can use the games library as a single point of entry for both.

As for the control panel I agree with you - I've found it difficult to use (why the subtle name changes?) - however the search bar on the start menu allows you to directly access all of the things in the control panel so I have never had to go there again!

The direct x10,11 thing is a bit of a dirty trick to force the high end folk to win 7, but I guess they cannot support xp forever.

That's fine, but are you sure others share your opinion? Do you think you would manage to keep that opinion while starving? What about those in the 3rd world who take jobs they know are going to kill them through poisons / poor safety etc. just so they can survive / feed their family etc. If they took that option would it not be too far to argue that faced with what I outlined they would take that choice? After all, desperation has driven people to do all sorts of things.

My key point (whether you think its valid or not) is that this is not a choice in isolation, it is an alternative to what would be conceivably be their "normal life". What I am saying is that animals face such desperate conditions in their normal life that it might actually make this choice the more "moral" choice of the two.