Local retailers (and apparently Walmart, too) were the leading forces in pushing such legislature through in many states. They obviously (and rightfully) fear that Amazon could completely destroy them. This legislation, they thought, would force Amazon to compete with them on an even playing field. Except the playing field was never even to begin with. Even if you force them to abide by the x% sales tax rule, they still completely dominate you in terms of convenience, selection, sheer operations efficiency and economies of scale. Only Walmart could really hold a candle to them. This is going to blow up in the brick-and-mortar retailers' faces and they'll have nobody to blame but themselves for their downfall.

Back in graduate school, my roommate and I would dumpster dive and repair broken ones. More often than not, it's a pretty simple fix.

All I can picture is one of the only good parts of Star Wars Episode 3: the opening battle where star destroyers and CIS ships are broadsiding each other with lasers.

...or does this sound like somebody's been reading too many with Dr Doom in them?

I propose fat farms! Not like the camp, I mean real ones. You can make a fortune in Alabama and Mississippi selling fat for $100/oz or whatnot.

...free Mars!

Those bees have what plants crave.

The important question is: can these taxis make the Kessel Run in under 12 parsecs?

Check fraud? Yep, there's an app for that. Need to know how to plead for a lesser sentence? There's an app for that too. Only on the iPhone 3GS.

Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse!

"...As Thompson sees it, any reasonable employer would pounce on an applicant with her academic credentials, which include a 2.7 grade-point average and a solid attendance record..."

A 2.7? Christ, when I was looking for internships as an undergrad (even now as an MSEE student), you need at minimum a 3.0 for the company to give you the time of day, let alone actually bother to interview or hire you.

...and it's the idiot social scientists who came up with this harebrained theory. It's not that they're wrong about under-representation, it's that there's actually a very good reason for it.

Think about the main audience for current video games. Predominantly young and male, right? Maybe, just maybe, these video game designers realized that these young male fans will want video game characters that they can identify with. Hence why so many protagonists are male! And guess what, a lot of these young male fans enjoy curvalicious women to ogle while they mash buttons, hence why the female characters tend to be so top-heavy and hourglass-shaped. I'm also pretty sure that your average 14 year old gamer doesn't really care about the depth of the big-boobed lady's character so much as he cares about boobs.

The game industry cares way more about people buying their games than equal representation. As soon as it becomes profitable to have a minority version of Mario, Link or Marcus Fenix, I promise you that there will be one.

And seconding the other post about Japanese games being very Asian-centric. Even some of the ones that get exported here are obviously so

It's cocaine in can, baby! Shazam!

Sorry, I meant to say Carbon-14.