If it's not transparent and reproducible, it's not a proposal based on science, but authority. It holds as much weight as a statement by the Flying Spagetti Monster.

If you want a faith based approach to law making, just be forthright about it. It's not like you're alone. But, please don't denigrate the scientific process by claiming that's not what's happening. People are thick enough already...

Larry Niven as well. Was it the third or fourth Ringworld book that went on at great length about various humanoid species fucking?

What choice does Microsoft have at this point? If they simple cede the mobile market, they risk Google marching right up the middle with a series of devices that come to resemble a full computing platform. And that most certainly is Google's intent. That's why they're putting considerable resources into Google Docs; they want it to be good enough, and once it is good enough, then suddenly that Chromebook looks like a pretty decent competitor to a more expensive Windows laptop.

At the end of the day, Microsoft has to at least gain some market share or it will begin to see its most valuable market; Exchange-Office, begin to leak away.

Neither does saying "it is the greatest next thing", apparently.

As much as I need to access such documents on my phone, I can. I can't conceive of actually wanting to work on such documents on a smartphone, but to view them, Google Docs seems to a reasonably good job, and when I had an iPhone, Apple's ability to view Office files was good enough in most cases.

That's always been MS's problem, they bring nothing to the table that isn't delivered by Google or Apple, and the things that they could bring to the table, like AD integration, they don't. Coupled with an absolutely miserable app store that is a laughably stunted entity compared to the major Android and Apple markets, it's little wonder they've had such a problem.

So we need the Dr. Pepper of cell phones?

Heinlein wasn't the only one. Some of Philip Jose Farmer's later work had a pretty sexually bizarre bent

They can join BlackBerry in the "any day now, we'll be on top!" movement.

His later books got more than a little bizarre and disturbing. Strange things seem to happen to aging SF writers.

I'm sure it's true to a point, but considering the fauna that has lived there long before humans came along, I'd say the jungle predates human activity by a very long period of time.

Because mass surveillance doesn't exist in other economic and political systems.

Wrist you believe and what actually is at two different things. There is considerable prestige in overthrowing older views. But they are not overthrown by taking money from fossil fuel companies and writing pieces in the WSJ.

Newton looked at the spectrum and saw that it contained six distinct colours to the human eye: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. But his alchemist beliefs considered 7 to be a magic number and so wanted the spectrum to have seven colours. He decided that purple should be split into indigo and violet to reflect this, but didn't split any of the others (even where the difference is at least as pronounced) because it contradicted his mystical thinking.

If even Newton 'One of the smartest men to ever live' couldn't manage to keep his science separate from his mysticism, what hope do you think other religious people have?