Wait, I thought hipsters were the guys who liked the new things?

I've never been convinced it's well defined.

It sometimes seems to carry some form of ironic post-modern cynicism, and some fashion sense which is either very modern or 70s/80s style in an ironic manner.

In other cases it seems to be "people who like new things".

Either way, I'm closer to the sore hip age than the hipster age, and they (fortunately) don't make skinny jeans for me. :-P

s/muslim/xian/g

This works for every ism out there. That's why the "no true scottsman" fallacy is such a fallacy. You can only ever judge something by what it produces. This includes the battle of Tours, the siege of Vienna, and ISIL.

They are "muslim enough" to take and hold half of Syria and half of Iraq without being ejected from either by the native population.

I've seen numerous people holding the big giant phone up to their head.

And, yes, it looks absolutely dorky.

What is not believable is that a person from nowhere might take control over the son of a powerful family, just as that son completes his acquisition of a position of power

Piers Gaveston. Elisabeth Woodville. Hans Hermann von Katte. And, at a stretch, Rasputin.

If someone speaks persuasively, flatters you and tells you what you want to hear are you really going to tell them to STFU because their family tree doesn't check out? Bollocks.

Some of those phones are enormous.

I've seen people using a phone which looks around the size of my Nexus 7.

And using it as a phone almost looks like a sight-gag.

Kind of like when I got my first-gen iPad and a friend held it up to his head and started saying "can you hear me now?".

Some of these phones don't look like they'd be either easy to carry around, or actually use as a phone. Because it's like holding a paperback novel up to your head.

Like desktops, the vast majority of people will never truly tax their CPU, and haven't for a long time.

Memory almost always becomes a bottleneck, and I'm of the opinion there's seldom such thing as too much of that, and almost never enough.

So, my older Android phone, or my Nexus 7 tablet ... a newer generation has more CPU power, and more memory, and would probably be an improvement. Between two of the latest and greatest phones ... probably not so much.

But, in terms of device longevity, in a few years when the OS has been updated numerous times, and your old device is old and busted, you will see it fall behind.

Which is kind of annoying, because my Motorola Krazr was an awesome phone which I had for almost 10 years. And I can't say I'm overly keen to get on the upgrade treadmill because new OS versions are out or the vendor has added some bauble to the phone.

Indeed. I did not intend to imply that his allegations were true, so hopefully I didn't.

My point was just that, even according to his own alleged version of events, he was never stripped of tenure (at all, much less on the basis of anonymous comments), he just suffered loss of tenure when he had an unsuccessful transition between two jobs.

I have no way of telling whether his story is absolutely true or absolute bullshit; but either way it's much, much, less notable than the idea that he would directly lose tenure over these comments. Having an offer fall through sucks; but revoking the tenure of an already tenured faculty member is Serious Business. The article makes the timeline fairly clear; but the summary and some of the discussion made it seem more like he was stripped of tenure over some nasty internet comments, which would be real news.

So, your assertion is that either:

1) A retro-reflector naturally formed, is perfectly aligned, and we stumbled on it without having been there and have been able to use it for decades in experiments
2) Aliens placed it on the moon, and we've somehow discovered it's there (again, without having been there), and that it's properly aligned, and have been using it for lunar ranging experiments for the last 45 years or so

You're either good at humor, or terrible at science.

Because the ONLY way there is a retro-reflector on the moon, that we know about, and that is aligned properly, and which has been used in lunar laser ranging experiments for decades ... is that we put it there.

Unfortunately, joke or not, to the people who believe it was a hoax ... no amount of facts or evidence will do. Because they're always going to believe this bit of stupidity.

I'm far from enough of a political scientist to say whether it's a matter of presidents drawing attention away from power, or a matter of president selection strongly reflecting the same factors that govern other areas of power allocation; but either way I'm having a hard time thinking of cases where killing the president will get you a new president with markedly different foreign policy attributes.

And, thanks to the combination of sheer size of government and the assorted more-than-slightly-creepy 'continuity' stuff they hashed out during the cold war, you'd really need to shoot Washington up to deplete the supply of people who are at least vaguely capable of keeping the status quo running for some time.

Ultimately, that's probably a better defense than the secret service could ever hope to be. If shooting the president were a good way to get a new president with substantially different behavior, it'd be worth it to a variety of interested parties with access to all sorts of dangerous toys. If it were a way to paralyze the American state, it would likely be even more interesting. In absence of those cases, you get a variety of dubiously rational actors and some domestic grudge settling, and most such attempts are far less competent and conducted on a relative shoestring.

Ah, sorry. I thought you were referring to improved tower backhaul or similar technical upgrades, not the guys on the billing side of the office.

With the critical caveat that cellular data caps tend to make even the biggest assholes in fixed broadband look like an improvement. Contemporary wireless data standards can, indeed, hit very impressive peak rates; but you'd better not be planning on doing any bulk data transfers, nor should you necessarily be optimistic about ping times.

How he gets away with his nonsense when all his followers are (admittedly, self-described) skeptics is beyond me.

Nonsense? Followers?

These are a bunch of people who debunk claims of supernatural phenomenon which are either:

1) Magic undocumented things, which nobody has been able to prove yet, and for which no physical laws would apply
2) Active scams and hoaxes

Are you suggesting there is some dishonesty in Randi's willingness to give you $10 million dollars if you can give repeatable evidence under controlled circumstances that you can do something amazing?

Because I'm afraid you're going to need to provide some evidence for that claim. That nobody has claimed that prize means that so far anybody who claims to have supernatural powers is full of shit.

Which is the expected outcome.

According to TFA, even the guy's lawyer is asserting that the loss of tenure was an indirect consequence of the anonymous campaign:

Sarkar was a tenured researcher at Wayne State University.

He applied for, and initially received, an offer from University of Mississippi Medical Center. In order to take that job, he resigned his position at Wayne State.

Before his new job started, they revoked the offer. His lawyer says that the revocation was clearly a result of the anonymous campaign against him.

Wayne State allowed him to un-resign; but not to grant him tenure again.

My understanding is that actually being stripped of tenure is a much, much, bigger deal, one that would take some nice evidence of malpractice or some very, very, ugly togetherness issues with a substantial portion of the faculty and administration. In this case, he never actually lost tenure anywhere; but resigned it and then was unable to get it back when his other job fell through. Similar end result; but very different process.

Why is it a given that validity and factual basis should be enforced by the site's moderators?

Legally, Section 230 protections are largely in favor of the site and moderators. Not absolutely; but it takes some work to be liable for what a commenter said on your site. As a matter of practice, I'm certainly open to arguments in favor of the idea (and definitely open to the notion that a site wishing to be taken seriously might want to voluntarily practice good moderation); but it's hardly so self-evident that you can just toss it out without comment.

It's possible that they were actually fooled(maybe somebody ancient enough to think that the internet has an editorial staff is still alive and has more seniority than god, maybe anonymous innuendo works even against people who think that they totally aren't fooled); but it's also possible that they weren't really interested:

It's not exactly news that, at least for jobs higher level than bagging groceries and not utterly standardized by some sort of hiring bureaucracy, a variety of somewhat intangible factors come into play. Good 'fit', how good the interviewers felt after talking with you, etc. If he rubbed somebody the wrong way; but but for one of those fuzzy reasons that either don't look good or probably aren't legal if written down, leaving some FUD on the table would be perfectly reasonable, if not entirely honest.