It's not ass-backwards because "its" is fully consistent with "yours," "his," "hers," "ours" and "theirs," while "it's" is consistent with "he's" and "she's" (and with the general convention that omitted letters in contractions are indicated by an apostrophe). Your claim that "using an apostrophe to indicate the possessive is universal everywhere except in the case of 'it' " is plainly false.

As well as consistency with he's and her's?

I never said the indigenous Americans didn't have technology. (In fact, I didn't bring them up at all.) I implied that hunter/gatherer Stone Age peoples didn't need a "high-technology industrial base" to survive in "fairly hospitable natural environments," and that the size of the smallest viable isolated human populations in the past is therefore not a meaningful guide to what scale a completely self-supporting, independent Mars colony would need to be.

They weren't living on Mars, though. Surviving in a fairly hospitable natural environment where a small cluster of people can sustain itself by gathering, fishing and hunting is one thing. Surviving on a planet without its own ecosystem, where the only way to stay alive over the long term is to maintain a high-technology industrial base is quite another.

The genetic diversity isn't the limiting factor here. For a Mars colony to be self-sustainable (without planet-wide terraforming), it would have to be able to support a huge operation of mining and resource extraction, processing and production, construction, manufacturing, agriculture, waste processing, water reclamation, air filtering and recycling, and repairs. Without huge advances in self-organizing and self-repairing robots, this would require a human workforce of a size that would make inbreeding irrelevant.

And if you're going to assume massive scientific and technological development to make the concept viable (which is probably necessary in any case), there's no reason to limit yourself to natural breeding. We have sperm banks and egg banks on earth already, so it would be relatively easy to provide the required genetic variation through IVF treatments, even if you only have a tiny group of human colonists. Or you could imagine electronic gene databases that could write any desired DNA sequence (stored or procedurally generated) into a sperm or egg cell.

The latter.

Illegal methods can undermine the legitimacy of a government even if they weren't ultimately responsible for winning the election. Just ask Richard Nixon.

What is the basis for believing this option will disappear once Google consolidates its privacy policies? TFA says that on March 1, "after all your odd searches, secret obsessions and kinky lunch reading is ensconced inside a special database, you won't be able to get to the data any more." This claim appears completely unfounded.

Actually, this (the last ten years or so) is widely hailed as a golden age for quality TV shows. You have excellent dramas (e.g. The Good Wife, Terriers, Homeland), comedies (e.g. Parks and Recreation, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Louie), sci-fi/fantasy (e.g. Game of Thrones, Fringe, Doctor Who), animated shows (e.g. Archer, American Dad, The Venture Bros.) and talk shows (e.g. The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, The Late Late Show). Even in the primetime soap genre you get addictively watchable shows like The Vampire Diaries and Revenge. What more do you want of a mainstream entertainment medium?

If you are looking for an original adventure game title, Gemini Rue was released yesterday. It's made with the same engine and runs in the same resolution as KQ3, but rather than reusing an existing property it creates a new science fiction game world and story (though fans of the genre may find many elements that remind of Blade Runner, Beneath a Steel Sky etc.). It was made mostly by one guy, and it won the IGF student competition last year.

They did make an original game before this. It was called Al Emmo, and it wasn't very good.

A lot of those questions are (presumably, I haven't RTFA) meant to establish the respondent's political orientation/bias, and are not counted as questions of fact.

All surveys are subject to sampling and nonresponse bias. Unless you have access to the complete population and the authority to force them to take the survey (which introduces its own problems in the quality of the responses), you are always going to be limited to the people you can reach and who agree to talk to you. That in itself doesn't make this survey more flawed than any other.

As for question #35, adding a preamble that "some people have suggested..." is a common method in survey question design to defuse any reluctance the respondent might have to answer honestly because they are afraid of being judged for their opinions or beliefs. It's essentially a way of communicating that there's no pressure, that no particular answer should be seen as the right one, by framing it as "some people think this, others think that, what do you think?"

The phrasing of survey questions is a very subtle art. You need to have some hypothesis of the likely main sources of bias, and target them specifically. There's no way to avoid any and all bias, that's impossible in principle. You do the best you can and accept that what you'll get is never more than an indicator of reality.

The thing is, the 1984 movie was never very popular, and is widely remembered as a box office bomb. (See Harlan Ellison's rant... errr, "essay," on how Universal screwed up the film's chances before it was even released.) Maybe a few people who saw it (and hadn't read the book) liked it, but a lot of others didn't, and most people didn't see it.

So I wouldn't stick to any elements from the Lynch version, but I wouldn't make any efforts to wipe it out, either. Just let it be forgotten.

(BTW, you misspelled "grammar.")

I'm sure you're right, but it's also true that most whistle-blowers have petty and selfish motives, and that they are often driven by personal grudges (which they tend to have a lot of, since they are generally quarrelsome and problematic people). Deep Throat apparently exposed Watergate because he was bitter about losing a promotion.

It takes an unreasonable person to go up against the system and against the culture of one's organization. These people may not be personally admirable in the way we might like for a Hollywood good-guy/bad-guy story, but that doesn't make whatever revelations they provide less important. Nor does it make it OK to persecute them for it.

Now maybe Dymovsky was arrested for some other shit he was involved in, but given Russia's history with internal critics, that would not be my first guess.

Actually, if a small scratch got infected in 1200 AD, your body's immune system would most likely fight it off and you'd be fine. Just like it would today. Sure, in some cases your immune system might be weak or you might have got a more aggressive bug, and you would end up with septicemia and die (or tetanus, in those pre-vaccine days), but generally a minor infection would not be, and is not, fatal.

I certainly don't advocate living without antibiotics, but if I get a non-serious infection I still wait a few days to let my immune system have a crack at it before I call up a doctor (unless it's worsening or particularly painful, of course).

Hygiene, vaccines and nutrition are very likely nearly as important factors as antibiotics in the rise of life expectancy since the middle ages.