It matters as this is seen as some upstart with no experience taking control away from experienced men who cannot by themselves move into the 21st century. This interpretation is right and wrong

For the past 40 years TNR has apparently been owned by a incredibly bigoted person who used the liberal credibility of the magazine to push his white supremacists ideas. Certainly these ideals are accepted in some circles, but not the target audience of the TNR. As a new generation who was not raised on overt bigotry came into being, a generation that pretty uniformly saw the assassination of MLK through history books, not newscasts, and were not raised on magazine subscriptions, the new century saw the circulation of the new republic cut in half. The white supremacy could no longer be covered with the inertia of the respect of the magazine.

In this way we see the problems of TNR firmly rooted in old ideas and the destruction of the brand by the previous owner. If the brand is to be rehabilitated it is going to require the jettison of the previous ideas that are not consistent with far left ideology, and those who think that white supremacy is consistent with anything real in the US were free to leave with the editors.

TNR is only going to be saved by re branding as an online source of liberal news and analysis. While the editors did not promote any kind of white supremacy, they were complicit in the past, and that may have been a problem in the present.

Stars that are too big have lifetimes of only several million years, not billions. The Earth itself was still pretty messed up when it was only a million years old.

The counterpoint here is that when someone has no choice, then one ends up with a lot of unqualified people because they are it involuntarily. The reason we don't have good teachers because teaching is a trade with skills that are only acquired with experience. For instance, if you are going to be a master plumber, there is education and then two years experience. Programs like Teach For America, on the other hand, put teachers in schools but the vast majority leave the classroom before they have the experience to become a good teacher. The financial incentives also limit the retention of good teachers. Keeping a teacher more than 10 years becomes very expensive, so there is financial pressure to let teachers go in the 5-10 years frame, just when they are becoming master teachers.

The whole reason that a red dwarf is so dangerous to live around is its low gravity. It can hurl flares from its surface that ascend far out into space and reach its tight little "habitable zone", and its planets will occasionally orbit through a flare and get zapped. The flares are channeled and accelerated by electromagnetic turbulence that originates from deep inside the star. Even after the surface temperature of its photosphere finally declines, the star will continue to flare until it shrinks down to a white dwarf (which has no habitable zone at all, since its starlight is extreme ultraviolet radiation that can easily blast water molecules apart). Since M-class stars typically have expected lifetimes of trillions of years, you'd have to wait a long time to see it happen.

Also, infection rates are going up, particularly young teens and early adults,particularly men. HIV may now be a less virulent disease that is chronic instead of fatal, but is still a huge short term problem. I don't know if kids think there is less risk, or parent's are more conservative and not teaching safe sex, but something is going to have to change short term if the epidemic is not going to grow.

So Ford evidently got injured on the Falcon set.

Tie fighter over water was just them playing with special effects. Very gratuitous.

Guards on the light saber was definitely the silliest addition.

Air is 5 ppm helium and 15 ppm neon. Neon lifts balloons too, but we don't use it because it's too expensive to recover from the air, and recovering helium is even more inefficient.

NOTHING is a concern over geological time periods! The Sun will eventually swallow the Earth- but nobody seems to care too much. Helium depletion on Earth will be a blip on a geological time scale, but during that blip helium will be just a memory to several thousand generations.

Helium is for sissies anyway. I don't care if Donald Trump commutes to work in a blimp refilled with freshly scented helium-3 every morning. MY airship has a pedal-powered generator to pump current through a electrolysis chamber. Hydrogen works so much better than helium anyway... it really gets you high.

Prion diseases?

Absolutely agree. I remember when I was helping put papers together how painful Word was to get to work, and how nice it was when I finally learned LaTex. I recently had to put a piece of research together, and now of course everyone uses MS Word and one has to use it. For collaboration.

That said the error might not have been prevented with LaTex. If it was a conversion error from different versions of word, in which a comment was exposed, that might have been prevented. If it was a human error, a comment accidently exposed in the editing process, that is easier to do with LaTex.

In any case this likely has little to do with the process, and much to do with the technology. A typesetter would never copy marginal notes left in the draft, or would check. Also, things like twitter makes it easy and cheap for such trivial mistakes to be amplified to 15 minutes of fame.

Would Verizon really get in trouble for a DMCA violation? I think the the users with compromised emails have more to fear from the DMCA.

I don't think Obama needs to worry about the veto hurting the Democrats in 2016. His veto count so far is 2, a lower count than any president since James Garfield in 1881. (In comparison GWB vetoed 12 bills, Clinton 39, GHWB 29, Reagan 39.) This is mostly a consequence of the filibuster used to cut off the flow of legislation that reaches him- which effectively raised the required vote count from 50 to 60 during his term. But now, more stuff is now going to percolate through Congress and reach his desk, including some unpopular, corrupt shit that will scare the public. Before, he simply hadn't been given many bills to veto; now he's going to be tested. Even if he only vetoes one bill in the next Congress, that's going to be enough to elicit nuclear head explosions on Fox, so he might as well add a few dozen without having to worry about any additional meaningful repercussions. Hopefully he won't cave as usual.

Just four fucking million public comments sent by American citizens to the FCC- but they're not corrupt politicians, so screw 'em.

Why is it flamebait? (It got modded as flamebait but went back up to a 5). This video is two years old, but that's the new guy who's now going to head the Environment and Public Works Committee in 2015. He's already bragging that his staff is been poring over NSF studies to compile a list of "wasteful studies" to be targeted in 2015, and says that one of his "top three priorities" for that committee is going to be âoeshining a lightâ on wasteful funding of climate scientists.

I used to work for a guy who founded a software company in Sunnyvale. After Bush got reelected, he decided to sell the company to Agilent for a couple million bucks, went back to Australia, and formed a new company there. He comes back to visit sometimes, and says that he now gets a lot of questions from people in Australia- "What happened over there? Americans used to be smart!" His standard answer: "No, it's not that they're stupid, but the news they get in the U.S. is really bad."