Well I have my Ph.D, and I work with a lot of Ph.Ds. The fact that this goes on a lot is hardly any secret. Where are you getting this notion from?

Yeah the "herded" comment could come across as being rather conceited. I've seen this guy talk at a gathering before in person, and let's just say I think he's pretty used to preaching to the choir.

The answer was definite "no" with the Wii, but now it's much closer to a "yes" (especially if you want 2 players), and you get all the other benefits of a computer besides gaming. I personally think Nintendo misread why they did so well with the Wii - I personally don't think they'll be repeating that success.

I guess I was referring to an individual or activist group that takes the minority employee % of a company or organization, and uses that as ammunition against them in court. You're probably right though - it's probably not a law, maybe just a court ruling or precedent or something.

But this is my point: the Supreme Court could rule that indirect discrimination goes against the intent of the law (disallowing hiring based on the employer's prejudice.), and thus would not be considered discrimination anymore.

I'm interested to see what will happen if a case involving this goes to the Supreme Court. The lawyers could conceivably argue, "Our minority employment % doesn't fit the current laws. However, we nonetheless didn't actually discriminate, and WE CAN PROVE IT. Please toss the law."

Don't know if people older than 30 in Russia would agree with you.

Indeed. Apple culture groupthink - a fine example of pitfalls of extrapolation.

A 10-inch screen is too small for hard-core gaming, and if you start to build a tablet that's bigger, is becomes less mobile, and less of a "tablet" and more of a "laptop".

These sorts of statements are so over-the-top. No ipad is going to replace my desktop at work, nor my gaming laptop at home. Apple's success in the last decade has been in part by doubling-down on particular demographics, but notions like these seem to suggest that Apple's success might clouding their perception a tad.

Re-read the opening paragraph. The author's stance is obvious, but doesn't come out and explicitly say "all who don't wholly buy into global warming ideas are idiots", because that would be too easy of an attack point. Rather, they set up a straw man and let the reader knock it down. Yes, you could say strictly speaking that the methodology of the study doesn't need to assume the validity of global warming, but then that only begs the question of why the author's opening paragraph was stated in the way that it was. They could have simply said "global warming is a controversial subject...", and still provided the same motivation.

For simple programs this might make sense, but for more complicated scientific programming, a function may do something rather complicated, have caveats, and may do something similar to another function (but not quite). You're going to end up with a function name that's 5 lines long. Comments have their place.

That sword cuts in both directions, mind you.

Social Security was initially set up to be where retirement was around the average life expectancy. It hasn't changed because no politician wanted to commit political suicide, even though life expectancy has gone up. The whole notion of having "retirement years" for every average joe resulted.

Every government agency and recipient of government funds receiving cuts has their own sob story right now - some more valid than others. Well, welcome to reality, where we are currently experiencing a recession.