Angry Birds seem to sponsor all sorts of things, why not space exploration?

An Angry Bird shaped vessel hurtling out of the solar system would be awesome though I guess we'd have to hope that aliens aren't green and porcine lest they get the wrong idea.

In any case, there were tracks in the silver like some animal scurrying and eating through the layer.

That's the problem with WORM media.

There is caching and there is caching.

A caching proxy merely serves content that was specifically requested. Google's 'cache' is serving images that Google themselves are associating with a word or phrase. Thus Google is making some sort of editorial decisions in regards to the content that a simple proxy is not. Now that "editorial decision" may be being made by an algorithm and that algorithm may make it's decisions based on other peoples content but at the end of the day Google is in a very real sense curating that content.

It's a fine line (or perhaps a wide, murky continuum) but in the pursuit of being more useful to people Google has in many senses moved from a 'mere' indexer to an aggregator/publisher. As such it is probably not surprising that simply saying "hey, it's not us, we just link to what's there" doesn't always apply.

Because it goes against Political Correctness.

I think it's fair to say that this specific situation has bugger all to to with "political correctness" in the sense you mean it.
It's about oil, "stability in the middle east" (ie oil), an "ally to the west" (ie oil).

It is not "political correctness". It is diplomacy in the worst sense of the word. The sense that allows countries to "smooth over" inconvenient realities and buddy up to the extent that dependency increases to the point becomes practically impossible to say "no". The "bleeding hearts" didn't get us here, the cold pragmatists did.

Political expediency is the problem not political correctness. The solution? Frankly I don't see an easy one.

Doesn't sound like "marketing speech" to me, it sounds like trying to express the life in a fashion more useful to a human being. The term "Marketing speech", at least when used derogatively, suggests obfuscation or hiding reality.

Here what they are saying is clear. As someone considering the drive I can easily say (without doing any sums) that my use case is nowhere near as "bad" as the pathologically SSD unfriendly situation they describe and quickly conclude (to the extent I trust their information) that I don't need to worry about wear being an issue for the expected service lifetime of the disk.

If the numbers were more borderline then expressing it as write cycles might be more useful as people would need to do the sums for their individual use case. However because they are so large it makes sense to describe them in a way that obviates the need to do any sums for 99.999% of realistic use cases.

vaccinating children against various disease - by giving their immune systems an "easy ride" - their immune systems simply do not develop

That makes no sense. A vaccination only makes someone's immune system work harder, earlier. It is just like "playing in the dirt", only with particularly useful dirt.

I can be reasonably sure that my ISP and their upstreams aren't going to be injecting malware into the Slashdot pages I view. I might trust a coffee shop or a hotel. I'm not sure I want to routinely connect to random access points though.

Seems to me that IMEI blackilisting after a theft is one thing, but why not allow people to pre-emptively opt in to locking their IMEI so that it can't be used with another account without some additional authentication (a it like registrar locking for domains)?

Obviously not everyone would want it (ie people who switch sims etc) but for a lot of people it would make sense as a default.

What power does the President have to actually enact any tax related policy they have on their platform? Surely for the most part they a legislative rather than executive issues?

The American system seems very weird. Well, on paper it seems reasonable but in practice it seems to operate in a way that ensures nothing 'difficult' gets done and that everybody has someone else to blame for the inaction.

Meanwhile.......

Come on Google, you can afford to pay people properly for such valuable work

Presumably they _do_ pay people for such valuable work. This isn't a "cheap trick", it simply acknowledges that:
- No matter what experience you do employ, there will always be vastly more external experience.
- Not everyone interested in these things would necessarily be motivated by being employed by Google (or even by money).
- Offering an alternative to the black market for such skills is a good idea.

I think if you had something that combined gold and chlorine into gold chloride you might reasonably describe it as 'creating' gold chloride.

Thus I don't think it's entirely objectionable to describe something doing the opposite process as 'creating' gold (implying metallic gold rather than gold atoms).

Both "create" and "gold" have multiple meanings.

Which isn't to say that "extract" or something wouldn't have been a better choice.

Off the top of my head, cycling fell by about 40% in the aftermath,

It should perhaps be noted that approved helmets at the time looked like this.

You "know" ?

Yes, he has invented a machine that allows him to travel alternate timelines in parallel universes. He uses this machine solely for arguing on the internet.

Either that or the damage done to the helmets indicates a level of force best not applied to a naked head.

please don't use this.

Please don't just make shit up.

Your description sounds really weird. I've never had a CFL that doesn't turn on more or less instantly. The slowest would have been a very low wattage one (bedside lamp) and that would be on and bright in the time it would take to move your hand from the switch to a book.Surely you must know other people with CFLs, do they behave the same way?

Anecdotally there seems to be more complaints from Americans, is it feasible that the bulbs are less suited to a 120V supply?