A common refrain is - "you are not a climatologist therefore you can not comment on anything we do". However, when one examines what is being done it immediately becomes apparent that 'climatologist' is a useless definition. Much of the more controversial stuff is pure statistics. I am a scientist and my statistical ability is greater than most of the climatologists. But, for some reason, people would claim that because I am not a 'climatologist' I can not comment.

Is that your position? That highly educated people who didn't happen to tick the 'climatologist' box when they graduated can't comment? While you might not find a physicist making a mistake about the first law of thermodynamics you can find them making a mistake about the central limit theorem or the asymptotic properties of estimators. As a person with a high level of statistical training I am shocked by how bad the statistics used in some of these climatological papers is. You then get into a bizarre situation where a statistician is telling a 'climatologist' that R-squared is an invalid statistics to use in a particular situation and the 'climatologist' saying 'I'm the expert here because the topic is the climate and I reject your criticism. Some 'climatologists' aren't prepared to defend their work against legitimate, good, criticism.

They can handle it - it's part of the job description. We have the same thing in Australia and I have yet to have a switch fail anywhere in my house (or houses I have lived in throughout my life). It works on high current kitchen appliances like kettles and toasters and it works on lights.

Think about it for just a minute and it might dawn on you - you don't need to be an electrician to get this. A 15A appliance will work in a 30A socket, but a 30A appliance won't work or will cause safety problems in a 15A socket. You don't want people plugging 30A appliances into 15A sockets and the socket design ensures this. It's kind of like backward compatibility - it only works one way and it should only work one way.

I think the most amazing part of the story is this:
"According to the report, the teen told investigators he'd heard if you make threats online against a plane, the police would show up at your doorstep. The teen told investigators he was only testing that theory."

Test successful! Big Brother is watching.

Yeah thanks for that. Just because I didn't decide to follow an academic path after getting my PhD in Economics at MIT you have decided that I am the dregs of the program at MIT. I'm sure that my classmates and professors there will be happy to disagree. Do you place working for the Federal Reserve in the same category? Just fit for the dregs of the MIT economics program?

What I did was return to my home country to pursue public service. Strangely enough, some people don't want to spend their time in academia but want to make a more direct contribution. This has no correlation with their ability to do economics.

Bottom line: You are speaking out of your arse making sweeping generalisations about something you know nothing about.

What the publishers fail to realise is that the price they can sell new games for reflects the fact that buyers are factoring in the ability to sell the product on the used market. While some people buy to keep, others buy to play and resell. If you kill the used game market the price they can sell a new copy for will drop as all the people who were planning on reselling refuse to buy the game now. Only people who buy to keep will pay the currently inflated prices. (Unless they drop the price.)

The net effect is actually that the amount publishers make will be exactly the same regardless of whether there is a used game market or not. Or whether they take a cut from Gamestop or not (because any cut they take from Gamestop is going to be reflected in lower prices paid by Gamestop for used games, which is going to affect how many people actually buy the game new).

Lots of other industries seem to indulge in this short-sighted thinking. If you offer people an inferior product - use of something for a limited amount of time versus use for an indefinite amount of time the price they are willing to pay for it is reduced. This is even more so where people don't know what the value to them is and are taking a risk by buying it. If there is a possibility a game will suck, the ability to resell it on the used market makes it much more likely that people will take the risk. If the used market gets destroyed there will be fewer customers like that and, once again, the publishers will have to drop their prices if they want to keep making as much money as they currently are.

I tried to do this with Optus and they said they couldn't do it. They said they could block all SMS - but not selectively block premium SMS. How did you manage to get them to do it? Surprisingly Telstra can and will block just premium SMS but most don't.

Anyway, given the money Optus make out of premium SMS it is unsurprising that they refuse to selectively block it. technical problems my arse.

Unless you receive a message from a premium SMS number. Then they charge you $6 a message and send multiple messages within a minute to slam high charges onto your bill.

They supposedly need consent, but many rely on phone numbers entered into websites and general deception as ways to get 'consent'.

Bah! Kids these days!

When I played them they seemed to require the following player input:
plugh
use brass lantern
drop no tea

There were no levels, but you still had to run from angry wizards every now and then.