Exactly this. And just like with the anti-vaccine folks, if you debunk one claim "Electrosensitive" people make, they will deny your evidence to the contrary, claim it's part of a conspiracy, and/or give new reasons why EM Sensitivity exists/vaccines are bad. In the latter case, it becomes a game of whack-a-mole where NOT disproving their latest theory PROVES (to them) that they are correct. It doesn't matter if this is Theory #7,453 - you must prove it wrong or else they are right!

This isn't a "get rid of pervy teachers" move (though that is certainly a justification that is given). If it was, there would be measures put in place to make sure they were only targeting the pervy teachers. Instead, this is all focused on test scores. Test scores (and whether students improve on them past a set mark) don't correlate to whether a teacher is a perv.

Instead, the real reason behind this attack is two-fold. First of all, the teachers' union didn't support Andrew Cuomo in his re-election campaign. So this is political retaliation. Secondly, Cuomo is a big fan of business-run Charter schools and has said that he would love to replace public schools with charter schools. In fact, part of his recent "reforms package" was that a school deemed under-performing would be placed into receivership. The third party receiver could turn the school into a charter school and fire all of the teachers/administrators regardless of any tenure. (This is happening in my son's school.)

Most of this is tied to the high stakes tests which Cuomo said students shouldn't feel anxious over because the tests don't matter for the students. How much incentive do you think kids will have to do well on a test that doesn't affect them directly?

The whole system has been designed to punish public school teachers for the sole reason of punishing public school teachers. If Cuomo has his way, don't be surprised if - in 5 years - we have no more public schools and only have business-run, for-profit charter schools.

In New York, our governor is trying to undo any form of tenure that public teachers have by using high stakes tests rigged to have students fail. These tests count for half of a teacher's evaluation. If a teacher fails their evaluation two years in a row, they can be fired within 90 days. If a teacher fails their evaluation three years in a row, they MUST be fired (for incompetence) in 30 days. There is no defense they are allowed to give for this except for fraud. In short, our governor has ensured that many of our public school teachers will be gone in 3 years even if they are great teachers but just have kids who don't perform up to state-mandated par.

If you are promoting a link, it's always best to use your own domain. Even if it just redirects to another URL. Suppose you post videos under the name "VideoGuy." You could register the domain name "VideoGuy.com" and promote "YouTube.VideoGuy.com" which redirects to "youtube.com/VideoGuy". Then, if Google decides to give your URL to someone else and you need to change to "youtube.com/VideoGuy2", you can change your redirect but keep promoting your "YouTube.VideoGuy.com" URL. This would also work if you decide to move off of YouTube to go to another service. You could do the same for Twitter, Facebook, etc. This way, you are constantly putting your main website ("VideoGuy.com") in front of users instead of other services' sites.

I find it oddly funny that China doesn't want to buy our "contaminated" garbage, but is perfectly happy to ship us products contaminated with lead and other toxic stuff.

Reading the comments, I've gone back and forth as to whether this would be effective and I think this about sums it up. There is demand for rhino horn and even if we flooded the market with fakes, people would know there are fakes and would demand the real thing. What would likely happen would be that any poorer folks would buy "cheap rhino horn" which is really the fake stuff being passed off as real. They might even know it is fake but wouldn't care as they wouldn't be able to afford the real stuff.

Meanwhile, the rich would pay more for verified real rhino horn. Perhaps this would mean that some of the rhino flesh is attached to the horn. Perhaps this means that the rhino's entire head is cut off. (Bonus: They get a rhino skull to hang in their homes along with their "horn pills".) Either way, authenticity is proven in some way while still keeping the entire trade black market.

We can make some efforts to save the rhinos, but one of the most effective measures would be for the Chinese people to stop using rhino horn. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening anytime soon.

Expensive? My google voice is free.

We initially had a land line and then moved it to a less expensive mobile line (add-on to our main plan). Finally, we moved that number to an existing Google Voice account. The total cost for this last move was $40. $20 to keep our existing Google Voice number and $20 to port our number to Google Voice. This was a one-time fee, mind you, not a recurring fee. This was over three years ago, so we've saved hundreds of dollars so far.

I use Google Voice also. I especially like the "blacklist" feature where you can mark a caller as "spam." The next time they call, they will hear "This number is no longer in service." Scammer will remove you from their list (no point in calling a "disconnected" line) and you don't need to deal with them. Often, Google will block scammers without the phone even ringing or me marking them as spam. (In the same manner that they will send a spam e-mail to your spam box without any intervention on your part.)

Backups might keep records around slightly longer, but chances are you reuse your backup tapes and so you'd eventually overwrite them with a "doesn't contain the old data" backup. I highly doubt that they are backing up, putting the backup into storage, and never using that backup tape again unless they need it to restore from.

They lost the footage because it clearly shows a TARDIS in the background. Can't have everyone knowing The Doctor is real, now can they?

Exactly this. It's the same reason why there are missing episodes of Doctor Who and other early television shows. Yes, it was the first moon landing, but tape was expensive and people didn't think about saving this stuff as much. After all, if we had gone by aspirations from the 1960's, we'd have had a moon base by now with permanent residents. Going to the moon might have been akin to going on vacation to a far off foreign country - a special trip you take once or twice if you can afford it. Not something for the masses, but not quite "rich people only" either.

*remembers that there hasn't been a moon landing in my lifetime*

*gets very sad*

Exactly. I did an IMDB search and found a Sci Fi movie from 1969 - Journey To The Far Side Of The Sun. Take a look at some of the effects. They were probably state of the art then and must have looked amazing, but they look extremely fake nowadays. Even if NASA had gotten the best and brightest of Hollywood on the "moon landing production", I doubt that 1) they could have pulled it off with so much realism, 2) they could have all kept the secret for so long, and 3) they wouldn't have used their knowledge from faking the moon landing to make more realistic movie special effects.

If you're on shared hosting, you should get off ASAP. I used to have a few sites on shared hosting and we'd either a) be impacted by other users using too many resources or b) be threatened with disconnection by the host for using too many resources. The sites were small and not using that much in the way of resources, but shared hosting is tossing a thousand people into a pool and then kicking out the ones who try to swim the slightest bit. The hosts can do this because they know that there's a line of people ready to jump in to take the place of those kicked out.

Instead of going the shared hosting route, get a Virtual Private Server. It won't set you back that much. I pay $34 a month - and that's for managed hosting, unmanaged is much cheaper if you're comfortable managing the server yourself. Yes, this is more money than the $2 a month for "unlimited" space/bandwidth shared hosting, but you'll actually get what you pay for instead of being crammed together with a thousand other sites on an overloaded server.

(You could get a Dedicated Server, but these cost a lot more and only make sense for the biggest of websites. Get a VPS first and if your site grows to the point that it needs a dedicated box, then congrats.)

My father was fired from a job (decades ago) and received a severance package. He was made to sign a contract that said that merely talking to a lawyer about why he was fired would be cause for the company to revoke his severance. Could a decent lawyer have ripped this to shreds? Probably. However, my father needed the money and couldn't risk losing his severance - much less spending time/money on a lawsuit instead of finding a new job.

What "is legal to do" and "what is done" are often two different things and companies will often bank on people not having the resources of a big company to fight back legally.

You start a company. You make 1billion shares. You sell one share to your mom for 40USD. BOOM! your company is worth 40 billion.

Next step: You sell your company to another company for a "reasonable" $1 billion and leave before the purchasing company realizes that your company wasn't worth anywhere near that amount.

Repeat the above steps as many times as possible.