And since then? What have Muslims contributed to the sciences since the medieval age? Honest question. I have been told over and over again about the substantial contributions to science from the Muslim world back in the "Long ago time" but where did that go? Why did it go from world-leading and brilliant to a slow trickle and then dry up almost completely?

I haven't actually met 99% of the people who bash the Windows 8.x interface so I'm not able to say how long they have or haven't used it. I know that I use it every day and while I still find it to be a minor annoyance I can safely say that it isn't unusable or the giant tragedy it's made out to be. It's not good and I should never have had to go through the trouble of getting used to it. It seems the work of persons trying to do the opposite of what would have made sense and so it suffered the appropriate fate. Microsoft went and attempted to improve upon something that no one wanted fixed. But it's not as bad as the worst of the critics make it out to be.

Yeah, I don't get it. Most of the commercial stations are Clear Channeled, even some "non commercial" stations are following the general model. Basically the same rotation of the same small pool of songs every day, If we're lucky, a song gets changed out in the pool once a month, and songs you'd think were played out from the incessant repetition are still playing a couple years later. I don't understand how people can stand that.

Sometimes. Not always of course but often enough.

Check this out man. I personally think Crimea should have stayed part of Russia but that decision was made during the Soviet era by your leaders. No big deal, leaders make mistakes (US leaders sure make plenty of them) but then when the Soviet Union broke up Russia didn't demand the return of Crimea to where it really belonged. Then when Ukraine agreed to give up their nukes Russia agreed to honor their borders. So tell me, why can't Russia stop being a lying piece of shit straddling the continents of Europe and Asia and actually keep their word? As for the oil that's a huge misconception on your part. Saudi Arabia is cranking out the production to undermine your economy and they're doing it at the behest of the United States because that's how that stuff works. They did it in the early 80's under Reagan and completely shuttered the US domestic oil industry once before. I know because I lived through it. Reagan took away your only major export then challenged your country to a military buildup race and broke your economy in the process. It was a pretty good plan if you think about it. We can afford it. We can sacrifice our oil industry (which really is no big deal because it's not like the oil is going anywhere) and let cheap fuel power the rest of our economy into prosperity. You on the other hand depend on fuel prices because your economy is shit in every other way imaginable so when we take that away you feel the pinch. Yes, Crimea is yours forever. At least your heating oil will be cheap this year. Can't say the same about much of anything else.

Ahh yes, you mean "birth defects".

I look forward to having better options to treat these people than simply carving them up and reassembling them into what they feel like they should be. That seems like figuring out how to let an anorexic live a productive life on a 300 calorie a day diet. It would be better to find a way to genuinely solve their problem instead of making a poor substitute for a member of the opposite sex out of them and putting them on hormones for life. At some point we'll be able to actually fix issue in their brains and this entire issue will hopefully fade into history. Come on progress!

Hmmm, interesting. We change our phones out probably around every two years. Sometimes we go a little longer. I think my wife had her last Samsung for almost 4 years and I skipped all the iterations of the iPhone 5 but more often than not I just tend to skip a generation (Had a 3, skipped the 3GS, got a 4 near the middle of its cycle and skipped the 4S and all the 5's. My 4 really was fine even when I traded it in to AT&T. Only reason I upgraded really was that they gave me a $300 credit for an aging phone. That almost paid for the iPhone 6 that replaced it.

Honest question here. I'm an iPhone user (on my third one starting with a 3, then a 4, and now a 6). I've never had any reason to replace the battery in my iPhone. Is mine an atypical experience? I ask because my wife is an Android user (gives me constant shit about the price of my phone vs. the price of her phone) and even though she has always bought phones with removable batteries she has never had to change one either. Now years and years ago I had to replace a battery on a Sony Ericsson T-610 but that was "The beforetimes, in the long long Ago". Seriously, do people run into this issue a lot? Maybe I've just been lucky?

My mom's 2003 VW Passat needed a new battery so I went over to her house to replace it. Found a replacement battery for like $50 or so and then when I got to her house I pulled out my smartphone and looked up instruction for replacing the battery on a 2003..... "Step 1: Remove the windshield wipers". WTF? The battery is up by the firewall and there's a plate under the wipers that has to come off for you to remove it. Called Firestone. They carry the battery and will install it for around $20 more than I would have spent for the batter alone. Doing it myself is just not worth the trouble.

This exactly. There simply wasn't a very deep field of movies this year that I wanted to see. Certainly not many that I wanted to see more than once. Looking at the top ten highest grossing films of the year I note that I paid to see 9 out of those 10 movies in the theater (I missed Interstellar, couldn't get the wife interested in seeing it and thus never got around to it) BUT I don't see a single one I paid to see more than once. Also I only genuinely liked 4 of them a great deal. The other 5 on the list I ranged from "It was OK" to "Fuck Peter Jackson. Fuck him in his stupid ass". Next year is going to be off the charts with blockbusters but this year the big tent-pole movies just didn't really pan out like they expected.

The man has a point. We're just not good at that stuff, peace and "nation building" (whatever that's supposed to be)

...and China continues to excel at stealing all the IP they can get their hands on. I guess in the long run it ends up being the same thing.

Does he understand that once he learns to control it we're going to expect him to fight crime with it? He's aware of that right?

Exactly right and if you're the company with the one, true "cure" for skin aging then you have to look at the population of the world and think "I've got an endless supply of customers!" This isn't something an entire industry would shut down. It's something they'd go into a crazy bidding war to possess.