Well, the idea of taking at least one day off every 7 is a pretty old one. I am sure it's not limited to one particular nation state or culture.

It's a pleasant fantasy that you can drive labor indefinitely but the physical universe (and human bodies) has finite limits.

You have no idea what "scientific consensus" means. It does not mean "unassailable truth"; it just indicates where the burden of proof lies.

Including computer science.

I once sat in on an introductory CS lecture in which the associate professor teaching the course was explaining the requirements for lab assignments. First explained that the students were required to write down and turn in specifications and objectives for each program they wrote. I was very pleased and impressed; I thought this was a good habit to encourage.

Next the professor went on to illustrate things that should or should not be in the specifications. "For example," he said, "you should not specify that the program must halt. That's because it's impossible to tell whether any program will halt."

I could have cried.

The problem with the argument is that it tries to distort the situation and ignores any useful discussion of the market value of the item in question.

What is the single value of an impression? How does that relate to the value of a single broadcast? How does that relate to the value of a single?

Most of these headlines are loud whining that depend on general innumeracy.

What chip? It's a useful distinction that actual exists now in the real world. It's relevant to the discussion.

Performers don't get paid for radio airplay but songwriters do.

Plus I think Nye is committing the usual fallacy of conflating the equivalent of being familiar with the lastest Papal Bull with "knowing science". This is more about being able to repeat the current appeal to authority fad than it is actual science.

All of the current talking heads seem to replicate that fallacy.

> The nuts and bolts of computer architecture isn't in the scope of computer science.

It is in the ACM curriculum. Whether or not your ITT "computer science" degree included it is another matter.

You're raising a red herring issue. It's not that all papers have to disclose their funding: it's that he was required to disclose any potential conflicts of interest, which in this case would have included his funding sources. In essense he committed a mild form of scientific fraud. That doesn't mean he was wrong, it does mean he was deceptive.

Which is pretty much what he's worth. He's not an astrophysicist. That doesn't mean he can't publish. Some scientists have illustrious careers without having a degree in their field. Hank Stommel comes to mind. But those guys publish important papers that draw funding from within the field. This guy's career is totally a product of having the "right" position.

That's not true of other climate change skeptical scientists, who manage to have a career without politically motivated patronage. But their work isn't so quotable, because they're tugging at the loose threads of the scientific consensus. Their research doesn't show that the scientific consensus is wrong, because they can't do that in scientific terms -- yet.

If you want to overthrow the scientific consensus it's an uphill battle. It's supposed to be. Otherwise you'd have to give advocates of perpetual motion and creationism equal status, which they haven't earned yet.

True, but to the degree Sony ties one product line to another it's clear that Sony itself is trying to yoke those divisions to each other for marketing purposes. And to the degree that's true, Sony would be better off spinning off those divisions.

Why? Because this kind of synergy is the kind of thing that seems to make compelling sense inside the company, but is obviously insane to anyone *outside* the company, especially consumers, who see the strategy for what it is: overly complicated and obviously restrictive.

It's different if you enjoy a monopoly in one area. If you could only buy a game console from Sony, then anyone who's a gamer would consider buying a Sony smartphone to play his games. But if you deduct all the gamers who don't have a Sony console, or who have more than one console, and compare what's left to the size of the smartphone market and Sony's share of *that*, it seems a bit farfetched to beleive that an exclusive yoking of Sony consoles to Sony phones is going to drive significant sales to Sony phones or to Sony consoles.

Here's what I'm guessing: in practical terms the test in question won't tell you any more than your bleeding eyeball test would, if we're talking about people with obvious hemorrhagic fever symptoms who have recently spent time in an Ebola hot zone.

The reason that something like this is needed is that *early* symptoms of Ebola are pretty much identical to influenza or any number of other viral illnesses. So you have someone coming from Liberia with the flu, you give them the quick finger stick test and send them on their way if it's negative. If it's positive you isolate them and perform an expensive, time-consuming "gold-standard" test like PCR or neutralization.

And in case anyone is wondering, using a test like this for screening asymptomatic people coming from Ebola areas would almost certainly be futile. If there's no symptoms yet there won't be enough antigens to trigger an antibody test like this. At present there's no test that will catch recently infected people who aren't showing symptoms. Anyone exposed to Ebola have to monitor themselves for fever for a few weeks.

You do know what an excise tax is? It doesn't get charged on goods being *exported*. So you can stop worrying about Africa, if in fact you ever were.

Eye tracking isn't all that hard to do. I worked in a lab way back in the early 80s that did it with couple of phototransistors and an IR light source to measure corneal reflections.

There ain't no such thing as a 99% anything state.

The actual breakdown in Texas is 47% Republican to 35% Democrat. This illustrates something I've observed around the country: political control comes from holding consistent marginal advantages over your opposition. While the *politics* of two states may differ dramatically, the *population* of those states aren't likely to be quite that different. There are plenty of liberals in Texas just as there are plenty of conservatives in Massachusetts.

The way this works is that if you have enough of a margin over your opposition to win a string of elections, you accrue the advantages of incumbency and name recognition. This gives you an advantage over your opposition much greater than your numerical advantage, because most people are low-information voters who just go along with what they're familiar with.

I believe that *any* state could potentially be flipped, if you piss off those low information voters enough. And there's nothing like complacency to breed arrogance in a political party.

You keep using that word; I don't think you know what it means.

Not only was this guy nominated by Reagan, he was nominated on Phil Gramm's recommendation.

Someone should be answering to a judge over this.

If the DA won't do it then it's up to those "sleazy ambulance chasers".