Standardization. Getting 30-40 (or in some cases 200-300) students to have the same version of a textbook basically requires that you set the current edition, as you can't guarantee that older editions will be available. This has to be done well in advance and normally agreed first with the department (who may have already forced their choice of textbook on you) then the university bookstore, who are also usually in it for their cut.

Your professor gets nothing (except headaches) out of their choice of textbook. The administrators won't let you pick anything that isn't a current edition. It's a pain for us too - I don't like having all my sections moved around, set standard questions shifting etc. It makes more work for me to go through and test-run exercises to see which are good or bad etc.

Croteam did this with the HD versions of Serious Sam, they're actually quite nice.

"Tomorrow", for one.

Anti-joke-chicken-mode:
OP was using hyperbole, all day names end in "y", hence he's implying that the lady at work forgets her password every day.

I think Entropic Gravity is looking very promising.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropic_gravity

Verlinde claims that it is starting to make some sense of the Dark Matter and Dark Energy problem.
http://www.scilogs.eu/en/blog/the-dark-matter-crisis/2012-06-28/discussing-gravity-with-eric-verlinde

This theory could change a whole lot of things in physics. And might provide a way to finally bring Quantum Theory and Relativity together.

General Relativity actually adopted equations that would be consistent with Newtonian Gravity without deriving it from first principles.
And probably that is the problem with its current formulation. The Entropic Gravity might provide the deriviation and mechanism for it.

You know, I was trying to be polite - there's no need to be rude in response. You generalized to all social sciences, I showed that you were wrong with this generalization - that indeed some of the social sciences (namely sociology, with which I have quite some familiarity now) are sciences. Then you respond by saying things related to the outcome of wars. I then tell you that your statement isn't relevant as it doesn't address the point that indeed sociology is a science. Therefore the statement you initially made "Social Science isn't science" is false, by my counterexample. You simply tried to move the goalposts to mean "this set of things (most of which wouldn't qualify as social science) aren't science".

Of course, I agree that history isn't a science. But I don't think many people would put it in a "social sciences" category, for myself it falls squarely in humanities.

I think you're confused about what sociologists do. They are not concerned with the outcome of wars, but more with the impact of social policy or phenomena. People as individuals may not obey immutable laws, but en mass they can be modeled quite effectively, just like gasses of particles can be modeled without knowing the motion of any individual particle. It is impossible to model the individual particles accurately due to their number, but given extensive properties (Temperature, Density, Volume etc) I can tell you how the gas as a whole will behave. Based on the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, I can never tell you exactly how any one particle will behave, only give you probabilities of certain behaviors, just like people. They aren't "rational".

You absolutely can say within social science that certain things will happen at certain rates within tolerances - this is exactly what my partner did in her PhD. She performed statistical tests to show (at a 99% level of confidence) differing care-giving levels (measured by hours worked for family members) based on variables such as fertility of the individuals concerned.

She can certainly tell you, with 99% accuracy, based on the number of children a woman in Togo has and her desired levels of fertility, what the probability of her getting AIDS in the next year is. She can compare this with Benin, which has a different social support structure, and show that, for instance, the more localized family networks reduce this fertility desire and in turn reduce instances of people developing AIDS. And she can absolutely tell you, ahead of time, what the impact of building a new road to a remote village will be in terms of fertility desires, migration and infection prevalence. With measurable, repeatable numbers, statistical significance, etc. If you changed "fertility preference" for "quark mass" and connectivity of a village for "phi^4 coupling" what she and I do end up looking almost identical, so I can't claim to be doing science if she isn't.

I've got a PhD in physics, my partner a PhD in Sociology. Her dissertation consisted of obtaining qualitative data regarding a social phenomenon, building a model, collecting quantitative survey data and statistically analyzing that data to test hypotheses drawn from the qualitative data.

So: Model building from a theoretical basis, hypothesis testing from observed data and analysis. That, my friend, is science. The only difference between her work and that of my colleagues who are experimentalists is that her instrument was a survey instead of an atomic clock.

I, on the other hand, did a bunch of maths, and was an exception in my field by being able to test my work against observations. A master's in Polisci might not have got you close to science, but don't presume that science isn't being done in the social sciences - it is, and done right it can be of vital importance to the society we live in.

You need to convince just over 50% of the _voting_ population, and sometimes not even that. This tends to be much less than half of the population for most countries. Turnouts rarely break 80% in most countries, in US presidential elections it doesn't exceed 60% these days - http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0781453.html - so really it's about 30% of people you actually need to convince strongly enough to actually vote for you.

In some systems it can seem fairly ridiculous: The UK 2005 General Election was won comprehensively (in terms of seats, and hence power) by the Labour party. They had 56% of the seats with just 35% of the vote. The turnout was around 61%, meaning that just 20% of the electorate voted for them. http://www.ukpolitical.info/2005.htm

The shouldn't assert it in a castle, estate or roundhouse either...

Do yourself a huge favor and go with Civ IV not V. Civ V is really dumbed down, and I found IV (or even III) to be the best version, especially if you get the Beyond the Sword + Warlords extensions.

So that's what, less than $2 for every man, woman and child in the nation each year? I'll gladly pay $2 a year to never have to waste time with pennies. My time is worth that much to me.

God yes. There needs to be an auto-disable for videos. Sure, I can understand that you might want them to be displayed one time, but every time I start the damned game?

With a lot of games you CAN get around this, either by just deleting all the video files, or some (eg Valve) games take start-up parameters like 'novid'. I just wish there were at least a simple option in every damned game to do this.

Just think what heinous acts of child abuse could go on behind those curtains. Perhaps the honourable member would leave his curtains open at all times or stand with those who commit child rape behind them.

No. If they can offer more money/better conditions than I can, they deserve the workers. You don't OWN your employees, they're yours until a better offer comes along. Employees don't owe their employer anything outside of fulfilling their contract.

There is no such thing as "Stealing" employees any more than there is "stealing" customers - offer me a better deal and I will move. It's as simple as that - market forces.

Agreed, you hit it much better than I did. Thanks.