> Because we never had people trying to wipe us out before Muslims came along...

Were you trying to be funny? The Muslims have been trying to conquer Europe for a very long time. If anything, the last couple of centuries is just a temporary lull. They have been at this pretty much since their religion was founded.

"before Muslims came long" gets back to about 700AD.

ONE person dies and they go full retard? WTF? This was one guy with a gun. It's no reason to engage in national hysterics. They have managed to outdo us in US by a country mile.

I'm 55, the phrase has been around for a long time, Carl Sagan was fond of it (unfortunately my HS never mentioned it) so it wasn't until I dropped out and saw Sagan and Randi talking about it on TV that I became personally aware that it was a skill that can be taught. Perhaps it's been hijacked lately in the US to mean something else but I haven't noticed. To me it has always meant 'skepticism', in particular self-skepticism. Sagan also referred to it as his "bullshit detection kit". As for TFA, memorising facts* is essential but insufficient, ie: you can't even start to think about things that you don't remember, which is what Newton was getting at with his "shoulders of giants" comment.

*Facts as in - "two bodies attract each other with a force proportional to their combined mass and the distance between them", that the force is ~9.8m/s on Earth's surface is trivia, handy to know but not essential to the concept that's being memorised since it can easily be looked up or measured. A physics teacher who sets up a gravity problem and expects students to know the value of 'g' from memory, is doing it wrong. Of course there are exceptions where memorising numbers is a useful "short-cut" for the student, multiplication tables being the most obvious

> I don't use Windows because I'm "forced to", I use it because it works well, everything runs on it, it supports just about everything in the PC business, and its cost is so low, it might as well be free.

I have known plenty of people that use Windows because they think they are forced into it. This idea goes all the way back to the 80s.

They would still think that way if not for tablets. Tablets look just different enough to the untrained eye to get people off of their "must be DOS compatible" fixation.

That wedge helps undermine the longstanding FUD that average people need to run WinDOS so they can run unecessarily bloated applications that are really meant for professional secretaries.

Windows is still a malware magnet. This is enough of a motivation for "average people" to seek out alternatives.

> If lowering the price to $0 doesn't work, you can only point fingers at yourself.

Yeah. It's not like there are no other factors involved like a 30 year entrenched monopoly or zero companies that are doing any real marketing for the product or the fact that the company that "does everything right" can't manage to get past 10% market share.

Although none of that really matters. I just care about the AAA titles that play as well (or better) on Linux as they do on Windows. I don't have to put up with an inferior monopoly product just to play a cool game.

If Gabe feeling threatened by Microsoft can cause the 20+ year association between WinDOS and games to shatter then that's a win for all of us.

I know gamers that would dump Windows tomorrow if they could.

...and this is all fine so long as you apply the approved checklist.

> They do the same thing over again and expect something completely different to happen.

That's the perfect megacorp employee. They just need to follow the checklist and all is good. A critical thinker might question the checklist and that would be considered very bad.

If this were from some rag in Silicon Valley, it would be less absurd. The companies in that area actually do need real employees rather than trained monkeys.

The idea that the Wall Street Journal and the corporations they represent are worried about "critical thinking skills" is just laughable. Those kinds of corporations actively discourage independent thinking. They want everyone to be a trained monkey so that they can devalue your labor and replace you easily.

The LAST thing they want are people with hard to replace cognitive skills or tribal knowledge.

They want COGS.

Indie games were already being made for Linux before Steam came along. Legacy games were also available. They're a non-moving target, so they are relatively easy address with wine or dosbox.

It's the AAA titles where the real gap was.

This is something else for the mothership to sell to the individual franchisees. As others have stated, the structure of McDonalds is such that the master corporation really has no reason to be concerned what the minimum wage is. This is only a consideration for the individual restaurants.

Those can just as easily be put out of business by the mothership at any time for any reason.

Just jack up the price of buns.

What's wrong with our system is that corporate shills call anyone who suggests any restraint on corporate behavior a "socialist", and enough people are scared that only bloodless corporate tools can get elected.

We vote like a bunch of pussies, and we get the government we deserve.

That's because you use ridiculously vaguye language like "easy to transmit". You need to specify the conditions under which the potential transmission takes place. What peoiple don't realize is just how primitive conditions are in Africa, and what a difference it makes. These are countries where medical providers re-use latex gloves, sometimes even hypodermic needles. Granted, this guy was part a medical mission that probably had all the protective equipment, but you have to keep in mind that the primitive conditions that preceded them meant that there have been some TEN THOUSAND cases in the region.

It's immensely labor intensive to take care of an Ebola patient, especially with the precautions required by close contact., but the overwhelming numbers introduces yet another deadly risk factor: fatigue.

So yes, I suppose you could say the medical personnel who contracted Ebola are stupid because they made a mistake under pressure. But what about the rest of us? This epidemic should never have got big enough to pose a global concern. It was our choice to cut the CDC's emergency preparedness budget to a billion dollars below the FY 2002 mark.

Say what? The UK will not extradite anyone to a country where they have a reasonable chance of receiving the death penalty, Sweden has no such qualms. When the UK decided to extradite him to Sweden he moved into the Ecuador embassy to prevent that happening.

... I repeat: your use of a heat transfer equation, rather than a radiant power equation, to calculate the radiant power output of the hottest object in an isolated vacuum environment is just laughable. Your own "power in = power out" claim shows it to be wrong. It contradicts your own calculations, which I showed to be wrong 3 different ways. Hell, you even got some simple math wrong. ... [Jane Q. Public, 2014-10-23]

Once again, Jane confuses "radiant power output" with "electrical heating power". Since "electrical heating power" is zero if the chamber walls are at the same temperature as the source, Jane is simply wrong to use a "radiant power output" equation to describe "electrical heating power". As I just explained, mainstream physicists and even most climate contrarians agree that "electrical heating power" has to account for the chamber wall temperature.

If Jane tried just once to write down an energy conservation equation for a boundary around the source without wrongly "cancelling" terms, he'd realize that this Slayer nonsense is wrong.

Or maybe Jane could listen to Prof. Brian Cox. Jane/Lonny Eachus likes Prof. Brian Cox and is very bothered by the fact that Prof. Cox agrees with mainstream physics. Jane/Lonny urges Prof. Cox to take time from his obviously busy schedule to review the actual state of the science on this extremely important subject.

Jane/Lonny seems to think that physicists just need to be told the glorious Sky Dragon Slayer "truth" and then they'll happily abandon conservation of energy. Maybe Jane/Lonny Eachus could convince physicists like Prof. Cox by finally writing down an energy conservation equation for a boundary around the source without wrongly "cancelling" terms? Or maybe Jane/Lonny could just ask Prof. Cox if the required electrical heating power depends on the cooler vacuum chamber wall temperature?

I bet Jane/Lonny Eachus $100 that Prof. Cox answers "yes" to the previous question. Is Jane/Lonny Eachus chicken?