Being against the death penalty is not an extreme progressive position, it's the default position of the civilized world. The only places with the death penalty are totalitarian China, Islamist hell holes, and third-world African countries. And the US.

Partly because a solar-powered city is gauranteed to still need power at night, and local storage eliminates loss inherent to transmission and distribution. But mainly because trying to tie into the grid means the big investor-owned utilities will screw you.

The US might spend more on education per student than other nations. But how much of that per student spending is actually spent *on* students? And how much is going to pad administrators' salaries, benefits, and offices?

Only mooks think MOOCs will improve education.

It's a BBC story. England is the absolute worst "Not Invented Here" country on the planet. For the English, nothing exists until they've let a monsterous bureaucracy and army of know-nothing consultants design-by-committee it into atrocity.

Without diving into the source material, I suspect the paraphrasing would be better stated as: sophisticated mind control is unnecessary. In North Korea, you believe the dear leader aced eleven holes the first time he played golf, rides a unicorn and farts rainbows, because if you don't, you're tortured and killed. Elaborate PSYOPs not needed.

Yes to Cree, no Philips. Too much IP lawyering at Philips.

Tyrone Willingham

Great, kid! Don't get cocky.

France isn't insolvent, that's ridiculous. Their borrowing costs are barely above Germany's. Get your economic facts from actual factual sources like the Federal Reserve, not from nutso right-wing opinion mongers.

No, that is how (one metric for) UNemployment is measured. The FRED data I referenced is the comprehensive employment (_not_ UNemployment) of all persons aged 25 - 54 in France and in the US. No issues about measuring who's looking for a job and who isn't. You should actually look at the data source I posted instead of making these inaccurate statements.

I am getting my data from the Federal Reserve's domestic and foreign data: http://research.stlouisfed.org...

Tons of data you can view there. Pull up France's 25 - 54 employment, and the US's. My statement is true.

You, and Business Insider, are pushing a narrative that relies on apples-to-oranges. You and BI are relying on unemployment data covering all 18+ year olds. But that's a ridiculous metric for a country with strong educational social programs for the younger generation and strong retirement social programs for the older generation. The young take the time to learn more skills, the old are able to retire at a much younger age than the wage slaves in the US.

But of course the free market fundamentalists are going to seize on faulty reasoning if it can be used as an argument to dismantle social programs and worker protections.

Just prior to the 2008 economic collapse, France's employment for those aged 25 - 54 was around 83%, compared to 80% in the US. Lately, after the collapse and some recovery, the rate in France is 81%, compared to 76% in the US.

France has good educational opportunities, skewing comparisons for those under 25, and good retirement benefits, skewing comparisons for those over 54. But apples-to-apples for the core years of productivity show France has the right idea.

And thus the beginning of the end of the RESTful fad. Not that there's anything wrong with RESTful architecture per se, but as a fad it has been shoe-horned by ideologues into so many inappropriate domains lately: embedded P2P, M2M spaces, etc. Sure, it makes sense for one-to-many patterns involving human-readable, human-discoverable resources, particularly of semi-static resources that can be cached and proxied by middle agents. But of course that later part only works for unsecured transactions. So now the exemplar of RESTful design itself, the WWW, is abandoning one of the key supposed benefits of being RESTful.

Ah, the "Whoosh". Because when your poor attempt at humor is indistinguishable from idiocy, clearly it's the audience's fault.