There are perfectly valid reasons to keep Windows around, such as playing video games. (Yes I know, you can play through Wine, but I prefer not to). Dual booting to Linux for guests, however, seems perfectly reasonable.

I grew up in Concord, MA and would have loved to ban tourists in the fall. People out leaf-peeping in the fall near Old North Bridge... sometimes in the street with their cameras to get just the right angle.

As much as it would be fun to ban 'things I don't approve of' there are some real safety hazards. Texters on sidewalks often end up in crosswalks and expect cars to be looking because they can't be bothered (yes, pedestrians have the right of way... except when there's a walk light that they didn't check). Sometimes they're at the top of the escalator causing a pile up on said escalator.

There are also common courtesy items that go out the door more and more as people get more self absorbed in their devices. People stopping randomly to check their texts in the middle of a busy sidewalk, during rush hour, rather than taking just a moment to make sure they aren't going to cause a sudden pile up of people who thought said person was going to continue to... walk forward. It really doesn't take long to just do a quick check on the flow of traffic and make sure you're clear before doing something unpredictable.

Yes. A relative of mine works for a company that wanted to do a racing sim and they eventually gave up because of the nightmare that was trying to get permission to use real cars like Porsche or Corvette.

I would give this a resounding yes and that should be applicable to all electronics - especially laptops. I have a Samsung Series 9, which I generally love, but the hard drive space is abysmal. It advertises a 128 GB hard drive but the C partition only has 89GB of space to its name with 20 GB going to the recovery partition. Its been a while since I purchased it, but I believe it only had ~40 GB of the 128GB hard drive free when I first opened the box due to the space needed for Windows 7 and said recovery partition. After installing the software I wanted and uploading my mp3s, my hard drive is down to 11GB free.

I agree that we're becoming less violent, but the news is becoming more sensationalist and therefore people think we're becoming more violent.

This comes up a lot around the fact that it's frowned upon to let your 10 year old child walk somewhere alone in many places, even though child kidnappings are way down from the 80's when 10 year olds walking around by themselves was perfectly normal.

What are we going to eat after the nuclear fallout from world war III?

In the U.S. you are required to go a minimum speed on most highways (baring traffic). Even if bikers and horse and buggies were allowed on, they wouldn't be able to get to and maintain the minimum speed limits.

Tin foil pants? Try getting that through airport security.

People pierce the ears of their female infants. My understanding is that the ear piercing hurts more to an infant than circumcision (based on how long they cry afterwards).

This depends on what your games play out like and what aspects you personally like, of course. But for me, I like the aspect of participating in and helping tell a story, so that's how I explain it. That it's a cooperative story-telling adventure.

The other part that often comes up is that since you're helping tell the story, you don't run into plot events that you fundamentally disagree with which ends up making a more compelling story to me. (For instance, "You know how in Story X the main character lets NPC Y die? If that were a table top, you could decide whether or not you thought the main character would have done that)

As I understood the article: The big piece in the article that makes me skeptical is they that tested their mice antibiotic group while still on the antibiotics. That means that the mice had a weight change while on antibiotics, but it did not show whether that continued in the long term after the antibiotics were removed. That's the part that would matter since humans don't take antibiotics every day.

The part that looked at human data was tenuous at best and had a much smaller margin of weight increase than the lab mice did.

My horse is currently on Doxycycline for Lyme Disease and she lost ~100lbs in 4 days as a result. So if it can make her lose weight by throwing off her gut's bacteria I can certainly see it going the other way as well.

China also knows they hold a large chunk of US debt and therefore we would think twice before causing them too much trouble.

Likely to get the retina display on your operating system of choice. I considered it myself for the very same reason.

I use high level math in graphics. Sometimes to do actual graphics tasks, other times to verify that some piece of code is mathematically correct.

Recently, I had to calculate derivatives recently for splines. I couldn't find a package that did quite what I wanted (with a license that would work for my task) with splines which meant I had to roll my own. Splines are used everywhere in computer graphics and video games, namely for animation. In implementing my own, I found that I had to use a fair amount of calculus and linear algebra to understand a) which spline algorithm met my criteria and b) to understand the math behind the splines well enough to implement them.