I'm curious as to what subcultures you're referring to?

You may find this article interesting: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2013/12/gun_ownership_causes_higher_suicide_rates_study_shows.html

Yes, less guns means less suicides, as everybody who has ever talked to anyone whose suicide attempt failed will understand.

Its value is that you can pay taxes with it. Have fun figuring out VATs when doing business in bitcoin.

Yeah, like Apple would forgo an opportunity to earn money, simply because they also earn money elsewhere. They may not be desperate to make money from the data they collect, but they would be stupid (in the "maximum shareholder value" frame of reference) not to benefit from it as much as possible.

Well, who pumped money in there first?

Cannot blame anybody for playing along.

That's wrong. If a company buys assets, then it's profits decrease, but it definitely doesn't make your stake in the company any less valuable. Since stock prices reflect both the current assets of the company (after all stocks express owenrship on these assets) and the expectation of future gains (that's the speculative part), it is quite sensible for the stock price to go up for a company that invests instead of making profits.

Suppose that were true (I don't know) ... who could fix it?

1) The states by setting up exchanges. I mean, they wouldn't be so spiteful as to punish the poor because they don't like a federal law.
2) The house by passing legislation that fixes this gap. Representatives from states without exchanges wouldn't want to punish the poor in their states, and most others should also be willing to fix the unescapable slight gaps in large legislation.

Oh wait ...

If you don't see the connection between the two than you have spent no time actually thinking about the law. People who could buy insurance but don't are usually healthy. Take them out of the risk pool, and insurance becomes more expensive for everyone, increasing the incentive not to get insurance for everyone who can do without. But even though they are healthy and don't want insurance, you know that at some point, maybe 10 years down the line, maybe 20, they will also need health care.

Sievert is the unit of what is called "equivalent dose". As such, it takes biological effects into account, and different types of radiation are taken into account differently. The measure of "dose" is the Gray, which is J/kg (energy per mass).

The thing that surprises me in this discussion is that, as far as I've browsed through the 1000+ comments, the issue of what has to be proved doesn't come up. It's proven that Zimmerman killed Martin. I would, naïve person that I am, assume that self-defence has to be proven for him to be acquitted, given that a crime (the killing) happened, the self-defence (which renders the crime legal [for lack of a better word]) would have to be proven. It seems that at least American law thinks differently, the thinking appears to be: since it's not a crime, provided it's self-defence, it is sufficent to prove that it's hard to prove that it wasn't self-defence. Which seems to make killing a much easier solution to a conflict.

This might help: getTimezoneOffset documentation.

If someone is wearing unusual glasses, especially if they don't look like their special in an aesthetic or fashionable way, then it is fairly natural to assume that theyre wearing them for medical reasons -- in which case it would probably be rude to ask them about it.

Just for the record: I would ask people to turn of their recording device if they want to keep my company.

So Britain's liberal-conservative government, who don't care about the poor as evidenced again and again, fail to make a project work that would help paying benefits to the poor. Why am I not surprised?

What is the purpose of highway signage? 1) Establishing speed limits and 2) Allowing you to estimate how long your trip will take. Purpose 1 is easily fulfilled if speedometers use the same units as road signage and purpose 2 is easily fulfilled if road distances are measured in the same units as velocities. Therefore there is virtually nothing to be gained in converting highway signage to metric.

On the other hand volume measures are utterly confusing in imperial units. How about changing those instead? The only question remaining would probably be whether to give car efficiencies in miles per gallon, miles per liter, liters per kilometer or some other hybrid, as this is the main point of contact between the different systems of measurement.