Samsung competes with Motorola, a side business of Android, one of Google's side businesses. Google has far bigger rivals in Microsoft's Bing and Facebook. Samsung sells a lot of phones, which is just what Google wants. It may be a version tarted up with a bunch of crapware, but it's still Android, and it's still funneling people into Google's web suite.

The reverse vampires.

To pile on, yes the GalCiv series is extremely bland. Toss Endless Space onto that pile as well. Master of Orion II holds up remarkably well. The patterns for me is that a new entry into the genre comes out, I play it a couple of times, then I reinstall MOO2 and play that for a week.

World of Tanks is pretty fun. Master of Orion is a completely different kind of game. Hope they can manage it okay. I'd love a decent sequel.

I believe you are referring to hookworms, which were found in an estimated 40%-70% of people living in the Southern US in the early 1900s in sufficient amounts to cause disease. They cause anemia and fatigue. They're expelled in feces, and can live in soil for a while. The problem was them digging out of outhouses through the soil and finding their way into people walking around barefoot. The solution was to dig deeper outhouses, so that the hookworm couldn't live in the soil long enough to reach the surface, and to wear shoes. On the flip side, there's serious current research into using small-scale hookworm infestation as a treatment for inflammatory diseases, including crohn's and multiple sclerosis.

ebooks are very convenient. I can fit a thousand of them on my phone which I always have with me anyway, and I can download a new when whenever and wherever I want. Paper books are a better experience. They have a nice tactile interface and good optical properties, and they're easier to navigate. Ask me which I "prefer" and I'll say paper. That doesn't mean that I don't sometimes use ebooks. Consider laptops. No way I'd say I prefer a laptop to a desktop, but sometimes you're out and about.

"Bell curve" means normal distribution. Unsurprisingly, human intelligence does follow a normal distribution. Are you disputing that intelligence follows a normal distribution or that there is such a thing as a normal distribution?

Neither. Both are indicative of general intelligence, and we don't have a thorough grasp on the mechanism for any of them yet.

We're already in that boat. One of the reasons it's so hard to make changes is that nobody really knows why the internet works. We know how and why individual networks work. We can understand and model RIP and OSPF just fine. And we know how BGP operates too. But that large scale structure is a mess. It's unstable. The techniques we use could easily create disconnected or even weakly connected networks. But they don't except for occasionally a single autonomous system falling off. We've built ourselves a nice big gordian knot already. We know what it's made of, and we know how it operates, but good luck actually describing the thing.

Due process is the 5th. The 4th is "secure... against unreasonable searches and seizures... and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause...". In short, to search you need a warrant, and for a warrant you need probable cause. Now I suppose in order to obtain a warrant once you have probable cause that could be said to require due process of law.

Screen protectors don't just protect the screen from scratches. They also improve the touch interface by increasing friction.

Think of it like a car, but instead of wheels, frame and engine, it uses binary.

It's almost as if words relating to relative magnitudes are context dependent. A weapon that causes mass destruction on the scale of an individual targeting a crowd isn't a weapon of mass destruction when a country targets another. A .50 is a high caliber gun during a drive by in urban LA, but not when a tank fires on another.  The Tsar Bomba was a really big bomb, but a tiny nova.

20 page function? IE? Does his code look like this?

if (foo)
{
    if (bar)
    {
        if (baz)
        {
            if (qux)
            {
                if (grault)
                {
                    i += 10;
                    DoCorge(i,
                            bar,
                            qux,
                            fred);
                    // All my
                    // horizontal
                    // space got
                    // eaten by
                    // "triangular"
                    // style :-(
...
 

Very interesting read, thanks. They wiggled around a lot at the end to move the figure from 106 to 250. Most of those bits I disagree with. CO2 is CO2 no matter if a rich person or a poor person produces it, so it makes no sense to charge variably. Wars have a proximate human cause (aggression) so I don't think it makes sense to "charge" that to CO2. Adding in Ocean acidification makes perfect sense (though I'd prefer a better estimate than their hand wave) and of course adjusting from 2005 to 2013 dollars is necessary. Sound more like $150 per ton. Great, we have a starting point. It's been a while so it'd be worth reexamining with the additional years of data, but that will ever be the case.

As for implementing it, yeah that could be a tough sell. Just to reduce the shock, you'd probably want to phase it in, say 20% a year or something (and you may want to swing to 120% for a while before coming back down to 100% to allow for cleanup of preexisting pollution). And you'd have to do it as a treaty otherwise one country fixes theirs and everyone else becomes a free rider since we all pretty well share a single atmosphere and hydrosphere.