The science on this is good. The lawyers will eventually get payments and may make the cost of current water disposal prohibitively expensive. That is not going to stop the earthquakes in Oklahoma because Oklahoma does not have a diverse vibrant economy, so voters, in general, are not going to ask officials to stop water disposal or fracking.

Compare this to Texas where local bans are in place and it is only oil industry bribes at the state level that keeps fracking.

I have not been in New Mexico when the Trinity site has been open. I need to just fly out for the weekend and see it one day...

However, I have been to The National Museum of Nuclear Science & History in Albuquerque(where bugs bunny always goes). It is a nice museum, apparently on a tight budget, with many interesting planes. They usually have a good traveling exhibit.

109 East Place is a good book on the secret site in Los Alamos. It was so secret that all communication and travel when through 109 East Place in Santa Fe.

Do not underestimate the religious wackos that have been elected to state government over the past few election cycles. Their fear that someone might be having fun somewhere cannot ever be discounted as a cause.

That said commercial interests are often combined intricately with religious desires to dictate how people live. In many states alcohol sales are overly regulated to insure that states and the corrupt religious organization that engage with them in defrauding the public of funds through the regulation. In such states powered alcohol could lead to reduction in power of these corrupt officials.

That said, I fail to see the legitimate market value of this product. If I go on an outing, and want to take booze, I have a flask, as for most people it does not take much to get tipsy. I even have a one shot key chain flask. If I to on the river, I have a six pack in the water to stay cool.

I do see a case where governments weigh the benefits of this product to the costs. The costs being the ability to sneak alcohol into where it is prohibited, the ability for children to drink, and the ease of not properly diluting it making it easier to drink enough to cause death. Some of these are clearly religious issues, but other of these are valid public health issues.

The only reason that anyone has a Facebook account is to spy on their kids. Last time I mentioned Facebook around a bunch of teens, they all said no had Facebook anymore, or at least did not use it. Look how quickly Myspace became something kids did in middle school, but not high school because it wasn't cool.

I think for people 20-40, Facebook is still a pretty big force. We see that people in college are still embarrassing themselves on Facebook. I agree that the college students should get punished for what they do on facebook, not because of the content, but because they were dumb enough to think that putting it on facebook was a good decision. I suppose I think it is a good way to be social, which is of course a code word for lots of sex. In reality every new group of adults is going to redefine what social means for them, and it will be a little different than the group before them.

I have seen Linkin, OTOH, be useful for some of my friends in terms of professional contacts. Business tends to move much more slowly, so something stodgy is still of benefit.

This is the nature of science, which in many respect only fully matured at beginning of the 20th century when all this was happening. It depends on observation, and without observation all one has is religion.

Here is what is now thought when science is done. An observation is made. If we take Galileo as an example, he observed bones in animals. Then We make a mathematical model. In that case it was the relationship between mass the bone volume that was needed to support the mass. Then we make testable predictions based on that model, Galileo made the prediction that Giants do not exist, which is true, and could not have existed, which is one of the things that made the Church mad.

Relativity and Quantum mechanics both depend heavily on the mathematical model to make predictions on things that are not part of our everyday experience. This is different from classical physics where the mathematical models were based on things that most people observe. Classical physics is a ball falling and bouncing off the floor or light refracting through a prism. Quantum mechanics is a ball tunneling through the floor or light refracting around a galaxy. What I find interesting is that people take Relativity at face value and have a problem with Quantum Mechanics. It is true that we see a limit in velocity in the macroscopic world, but that has to do with friction, not relativity. There is nothing in our experience that says we cannot go as fast as we have the energy to accelerate. Certainly our mass does not increase if we are traveling at 80 miles and hour in a car instead of 30 miles an hour.

OTOH, our experience does tell us that second and third hand information is unreliable, and we are often better off making direct observations if possible. Are we just going to let some stranger bury our cat on the statement the cat fell off the roof and died? No, we want to see the cat, and until we do we hope the cat is alive, but there is chance the cat is dead. Is it both? No, it is uncertain, which is the key thing that people do not learn about science. Uncertainty.

In Quantum Mechanics this is called a wave function, and the cat is in a superposition of wave functions that represent all possible states. The wave function collapses when we make an observation.

Here is another interesting thing. Quantum Mechanics came about to a problem with infinity. Relativity never solved it's problem with infinity, at least not completely, and when combined with Quantum Mechanics develops more infinities. This is what does not make sense.

This is the funniest joks so far I hope you can replace the meth before it is too late.

And when we get tired of them we can always bring out the Slim Whitman yodeling music

Mark Hamill kind of screwed his career with his accident. If not for Star Wars he may not have worked again. As it is, he is a freak on a third rate superhero show.

One has to assume that Carrie Fisher might have had more a career if not for her mental health and drug issues.

Alec Guinness of course was only doing it for his pension.

Everyone is prequel who was not already an established commodity was crap. I do not blame the actors, it is just that there was no way to do a good job with such a script. When you can't even get the comic relief right, there is little hope for anything else.

Natalie Portman is a working actor. She works on her own terms, and does not appear to want anything else. She has a movie every year. She seems to like to act. There is nothing wrong with that.

And with a degree from Harvard College she is a good role model.

Science we know it is only a few hundred years old. Science, as can be taught to the average kid in an advanced manner, is not much more than a century old. In my lifetime we have gone from teaching Calculus in High School to a gifted few, to, in some places, teaching it to as many people as we can.

When I read this article this is what I saw. A traditionalist complaining that we don't teach kids arbitrary ancient skiils, like drawn up handwriting, or going to the library, finding a physical book, and looking up some factoid.

I know a lot of people over 40 who cannot use the computer. They are skilled, but never were taught how to learn new skills. This is what STEM education offers over what many see as a classical education.

It is not that classical education does not offer critical thinking, it is that we need to integrate critical thinking with the machinery that runs our civilization. A lawyer who is going to be successful cannot just have read the classics. A lawyer like that will probably be replaced by a machine in my lifetime.

When I was in school, parents were told that a pre-engineering program was not just for engineers. I was a holistic program that would give kids the background to succeed. We could write an essay, we could write fiction, we could write technical reports, we could program a computer, we could draw a schematic.

The only people who are going to value a pure humanities education over one that stresses science and math are those who are afraid where the world is going.

"I think I will go to class today, I need the sleep"

Do kids still wear this T-Shirt in college?

Most MOOC have a big problem. They don't educate a different kind of student. They educate the same highly motivated student. The only benefit is that student may not be able to afford a traditional college, or be able to read at a level required for college. It is a real benefit, but the nirvana.

Codeschool does a good job leveraging the strengths of the computer and targeting learning to those who were raised playing video games. Learning for non-traditional students involves active learning, not watching a guy on video.

If it is apartment,it might be that low. When I don't run air conditioning, the house, with a DVR and several computers, can be $50 for electricity. It depends on rates in your area and how much other stuff you have. For instance, I have a TV that probably only takes a couple dollars a month to run in electricity, but some easily take $10. If you have equipment supplied by your cable company, that could be double than if you bought your own.

He is an entitled dope, plain and simple. Half the fault is Comcast, because they said they could do it, but half the fault is his, as you said, for not asking the neighbors and the like. Sure, one should be able to get internet anywhere, but there are limitation. In particular the county he is in has only 500 people per aquare mile. The largest city in the county is 40,000 people. Can every house in every rural area have fast internet? Probably not. When someone who works at home and has to have fast internet make one of their primary constraints be that the house already has internet? Can you imagine a trained engineer not being able to make a list of constraints and using a decision matrix to make sure the purchase meets all specs? Years ago we bought a used car, unfortunately the primary constraint was that the car was 'cute'. Of course it ended up being a lemon. If I had made such a mistake, I would have kept it hidden, being afraid the Streisand effect would mean that every future employer would know how incompetent I was.

A couple points here, and note that I do not completely understand the complaints here. Apple has typically sold expensive software. That means that the end user pays more and the developer tends to make more. On upshot of this was that Apple products sold less because it was generally considered as a fact that one not only had to pay more for the Apple brand but also to run the machine. This meant that most developer went for MS Windows, assuming that though writing for MS was a race to the bottom, and knowing that MS could put you out of business any time they wanted, the number of users meant that you would make money. Writing for Apple could also be more difficult. I,myself, have written very few Apple specific programs. I have not really taken the time to learn the library. I appreciate the fact that Apple has taken the time to standardize much of the work so that once the library is learned, writing an application is easier, as long as one is willing to live within the Apple UI. So, as I understand the complaints, Apple has created a new mobile market and new software marketing method that has created million of new customers for developers to sell to,and has actually made writing the applications easier, and developers are complaining about it. Yes, dealing with a UI that is dictating from above is difficult, but that is not different for MS, recall the Ribbon? Yes, dealing with Apple and the App store is probably very expensive. OTOH, I am sure many are like me. I have spent more on applications over the past couple years than I did in the past 10. OOS, no cash cost software, does most of what I want.

Eating concentrated calories that do not fill you up is the problem. All simple carbohydrates, chips, white bread, wheat tortillas, fried potatoes are an issue. An 8 oz steak is 25% of the calories most us need for a day. A Chippendale carnitas burrito is half.

So there is also an issue of food availability. When I was young I split all entrees at restaurants with the person I was with. I don't do that anymore and it has become an increasing issue. Also, one does not burn off calories and fat as easily when one gets older

I don't know what drinking, smoking, or having tattoos has to do with anything. Does he have a computer? Does he use it for mischief.

A couple cases of kids going to jail will limit the problem. Teenagers are always going to test limits, and some do so to the extent that the adult legal system is required to help motivate them not to cause problems for other people.

It was not so long ago that the telephone was a new thing, many parents were not raised with it, and did not really know how to manage it with the kids. Kids got into trouble, and laws were passed to help define what was good and bad behavior.

I know that adults say this all the time, but if we do not figure out how to play with our toys nicely, we are going to lose the privileged of unencumbered play.

From a personal point of view, from personal experience, in my opinion there is no punishment too great for someone who files false police reports, and that goes doubly so for those cowards who hide behind computers.