God liked it, so he put a ring on it.

Aside from some of the obvious mistakes this opinion piece makes.

> There is no need to worry about toxins leaching into the water supply. No elaborate liner or monitoring is required

This is wrong. There are some situations where organic rich runoff can cause problems.

The following link:
http://toxics.usgs.gov/topics/rem_act/saco.html

describes:
" dissolved organic carbon in the leachate plume is dissolving arsenic from arsenic-containing iron oxides in the aquifer and bedrock"

> It's a 2D array of MEMS which open and close a slit in a variable size

No.

The resonator is what cause the interference that controls the colors rendered. If you look at the article you'll see there's no mention of controlling the pitch after it's fabricated.

Very interesting, but compare the details of the filing to the statement released by the superintendant that states:

Upon a report of a suspected lost, stolen or missing laptop, the feature was activated by the District's security and technology departments...This feature has only been used for the limited purpose of locating a lost, stolen or missing laptop. The District has not used the tracking feature or web cam for any other purpose or in any other manner whatsoever.

Seems someone needs to get their story straight...

Seriously, what could have made the school district think that this was, in any way, a good idea?
Well, it seems bone-headed now but a year ago when (theoretically, I don't actually know) a few laptops were stolen on the bus, from the locker rooms...figuring out which students were stealing them doesn't seem so bad, does it? Okay, you're right, it still seems like a bad idea...

So it might be money, as others have said.

But I have some other questions.

1) Why hasn't this fairly simple experiment been done before?

2) Why do three types of corn with fairly different modifications have very similar toxicities?

Screwing makes me happy, I can do that myself.

FTFY. Also, TMI.

As the GP says, what D-Wave is claiming is pretty much not physically possible. And what they've demonstrated is possible to emulate with classical computers.

That Google is working with them is interesting. But D-Wave still looks exactly like an investment scam.

I agree that it's annoying, though in my experience people never refer to SPICE without prefacing it with "Berkeley". SPICE all by itself is used as a generic term.

TFA could also use some more references. It sounds intriguing, but I've been around long enough to be distrustful of what's in press releases.

> aluminum hydroxide which, apart from helping us with our stomach ulcers, may be linked to brain disease

Are you talking the Alzheimer's link? I thought that that was found to be a non causal link quite some time ago.

Here's a link that pretty much flat out says it's not an issue:
  http://www.alz.org/alzheimers_disease_myths_about_alzheimers.asp

There are a lot of websites that talk about it as being a problem, but they all seem a little woo woo.

The meaning of the phrase has changed.

The phrase used to refer to "a logical fallacy in which the proposition to be proved is assumed implicitly or explicitly in the premise."[1]

Now it means, "I'm trying to sound like I'm well educated, but I'm not."

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

The main problem was with resource forks causing a bunch of ._foo files, but there's not too much you can do about that if you're copying data from HFS+ to something else

Try rsrc = false in your unison profile.

I'm a troll because I think flu vaccines are bullshit? Wow.

No. You're a troll because you used the word fuckall in way that was at best gratuitous.

It's just not that hard to avoid. Good hygienic habits, good nutrition, and a good night's sleep are far more effective than any flu vaccine and those habits don't have mercury.

Got any studies to back those measures up?

Calling it "excellent" might be a stretch but a lot of what they do is generally "better than average" -- take Gmail, since that's mostly what this article is about. Before Google, no free email provider offered POP access, much less IMAP; incoming and outgoing attachments were required to be small, and archiving old messages was limited by severely small data limits. Gmail really raised the bar of expectations.

Not that being this way excuses their behavior, especially in cases like this; but there's certainly more to Google's "reputation for excellence" than just their search engine.