That is called real estate investing. It is not spending. You still have the original asset in a different form.

Bill Gates did not get a perfect SAT score. He got a very good one, 1590 out of 1600, but not perfect. Being a billionaire does not entitle you to score inflation.

You are apparently referring to the Tea Party of 2010. The current self-identified membership seems almost entirely the hard right in the Republican Party.

Check out the vanishing support for the movement within the ranks of the Republicans .

Business does have the power to drop an enormous lawsuit on you and force you to wipe out your life savings trying to defend yourself, and if a judgment is obtained due their immense advantage in resources, they can attach your salary and assets for life.

They also have the power to put false information of your credit history, which is virtually impossible to expunge, and thus ruin your ability to buy a home, or a car, or a loan for any other worthy purpose, or even rent an apartment and even to deny you a job (since prospective employers invariably run credit checks).

Other than that, no power to ruin your life at all.

True, it does not disprove Sasquatch - but it also does nothing to support it.

And on that "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" thing, that is in fact an informal fallacy. Absence of evidence (if you have actively been seeking to collect evidence with tools capable of doing so) absolutely is evidence, but not "proof", of absence in every branch of science.

If you go to a doctor and get a biopsy looking for cancer, and no cells are found, that is absolutely a valid indicator that cancer of they type being screened for, is not present (though the tests can fail sometimes to detect it when it is).

Environmental DNA/RNA sampling is a very powerful technique to detect the presence of species that are difficult to observe. Almost any physical remain left by an animal, even extremely small samples (feces, blood, saliva, hair, skin, tooth, nail, etc.) will allow detection of its DNA to be matched against libraries to determine its phylogenetic grouping, and species identity if known.

If over a reasonable amount of time no one can produce a sample bearing the DNA of a novel creature, then it cannot reasonably be supposed to exist.

Wrong. The phenomenon know as "windchill", and is represented by "windchill factors" and such, has nothing to do with evaporation. It is the effect of forced convection on heat removal, the windchill tables were generated by examining the removal of heat from a dry cylinder. Evaporative cooling is an entirely separate phenomenon.

Does your space suit need to only provide pressurized air, or must it be a parka too? This is an important question for designing and wearing the darned things.

According to the actual paper (TFP) on Mars (at -60 C) the subjective temperature in still air is equivalent to only -8 C on Earth. This is because the air is too thin to remove much heat, wind or no. BTW -- "still air" is actually only an ideal limiting case of windchill, when air speed is zero and you are yourself are not moving. Genuine still air is a very rare in the open in nature.

It looks like Mars is something like a happy medium in terms of air pressure for a really, really cold place. In a hard vacuum the loss of heat from your body through radiation alone is a problem, getting rid of the heat your body and equipment produce is a problem in orbit. On Mars the air is thin enough that it has limited ability to remove heat, enough to prevent over-heating, but not too much. Space suits use evaporating water to dump heat form the suit.

I always thought that they should build Boomer retirement communities out of all those VHS tapes that were sold to them during the 80s and 90s. Where are they now?

Now if only this were true rather than what it is - a lie.

Hitler actually relaxed gun laws, making them much easier to get.

Despite the poorly written lead-in sentence to that Wikipedia article, "rent seeking" is not limited to political lobbying, that is merely a common example of rent-seeking. Regulatory capture, in which regulators expect to be rewarded by industry after they leave their regulatory role is rent-seeking via quid-pro-quo, not lobbying, for example. It is the act of obtaining wealth by gaining control of a limited resource, not through productive activity, is rent-seeking, no matter how it is carried out, so yes, patent troll portfolios are rent-seeking without being any king of stretch.

Excellent summary! Here, here!

In what sense would you have 'proved' gravity by walking outside? Did you "prove" Newton's law of universal gravitation? Unless you did some rather difficult to perform experiments when you walked outside then you did not. You could just as easily assert (with equal validiity) that you proved Aristotle's ideas that it was just the natural behavior of stuff to move toward the center of the Earth (with no equations providing any predictive value).

Proving evolution these days is really quite easy. The evidence is truly vast, all you have to do is look at the immense amounts of genomic data about the whole "tree of life". The systematic changes in genes as you move down through the phylogenetic tree proves evolution at a level of probability far exceeding any physical theory (indeed, no physical theory is ever likely to come close.).

To continue this conversation you really, really need to give at least one example of this "fact" you claim exists, otherwise it cannot be usefully discussed.

I notice the appearance of the word "relatively" now linked to "disadvantageous mutations". What do you mean by that?

Notice that the citation of "sickle cell anemia" above (and other cases of genetic diseases due to having two copies of a gene that confers advantage when present only once) do not support your claim at all. They are advantageous on average, and thus spread until an equilibrium is achieved (if such an equilibrium exists). Similarly harmful genes that only show up after reproduction ceases can spread through random drift since there is no selection mechanism removing them.

Sounds possibly similar to a gravity gradiometer, which is used for navigation in submarines. It measures the gradient of the local gravity field (its "slope") and with a gravity map you can map out your course, just as you could with a topo map of the Earth's surface.

Actually the use of "seeded" makes perfectly good sense, and is in fact a very evocative phrasing - that the control will continue to grow and spread as the 'seed' sprouts and reseeds among the sociopaths.

You, though, are quite a nasty jerk.

I did not notice that my brother had logged in and switched identities since earlier. I am actually "careysub"