I am rather surprised that the National Academy published the results of a study which violated multiple ethical guidelines put in place to protect human subjects.

The only real point of being accepted to the National Academy is access to Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They don't turn down anything from members.

For NA members, it's where you publish when nobody else will accept your paper.

And as we know, farmers are on the cutting edge of science.

Many are, actually, because agricultural science is one area where the government both funds it very well (at least in the US) and there's a lot of work put into practical applications. (Some) farmers are using RTK GPS for tending their fields, robots equipped with vision processing to pick fruit (a piece of fruit's IR reflectivity is an excellent way to judge ripeness) and so on.

I know someone who owns a milk farm. He jokes he's got a "degree in dirt" - but what that means is that he spent four years learning about soil/nutrient management and how to most effectively use his family's most valuable resource.

Now, that said: these guys are idiots. We have more than a hundred thousand years of ice core samples showing climate data. Everything we're collecting now is far off the charts from everything else.

"we've been doing quite well overall."

Except for the bit where your business had little cash reserves, and apparently no line of credit?

2600 is a business with plenty of history and should have lots of proof they're doing OK, if that is in fact the case. Getting a line of credit to make up for the lost issue or two shouldn't remotely be a problem...which means one of three things: they're not doing "quite well", they're incompetent, or they are, in fact, trying to take advantage of the community.

This is nothing, I once got a Navy Achievement Medal (one step down from a Commendation medal) for setting up a mail alias on my own domain for my reserve unit to use for group communications, and for installing and updating anti-virus software on the unit's laptops. It all literally took me half an hour to complete.

Even if the hard drive isn't yours, or it hasn't been established that it's yours, if they know you have the password for whatever reason they can compel you to give it up. Failure to do so would at least be obstruction, or perhaps as bad as aiding and abetting.

Provided they also have probable cause to think there's evidence on that device of course.
=Smidge=

Plus, you'd scoop up a lot more oceanic plant and animal life trying to extract that plastic material.

Actually, the critters might be a better fuel source than the plastics...
=Smidge=

What most bike riders don't like to acknowledge is that, as much as we would love to blame the volvo driver, we tend to kill ourselves by ourselves. Have a look at the statistics. A huge percentage of fatal motorcycle accidents are single vehicle.

That's irrelevant when you're talking about whether or not to "blame the Volvo driver" (also, you haven't compared it to other vehicle-type crashes.)

In cases involving pedestrians, motorcyclists, and bicyclists, the statistics are the same: car/truck/bus drivers are at fault in the vast majority of crashes with them. But it's much easier to blame the victim, and cast pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcycles as "reckless" and supposedly completely unaware of the danger they face.

TLDR version: "Big Box Store" bikes are not a metric for what a bicycle "costs", and cheap bicycles have high operating expenditures. Why not spend more on capital expenditures (the purchase), take less trips to the bike store for repairs, and have a nicer bicycle to boot?

BBSBs are the bane of every bike mechanic, because 1)their owners have extremely unrealistic expectations in terms of cost of labor and parts (ie: "I paid $75 for this thing, you want $50 to replace this whosamahwhasis?") 2)the components are almost never standard (so parts are not normally stocked, or may not even be available) 3)Everything, and I mean everything, is as cheap as can be, and falls apart, so they're 'frequent fliers.' The cables and housings are weak and made of poor, incompatible metals so they stretch making proper adjustment difficult, and corrode the second water even comes near them. The bearings are poorly sealed (ditto on water) and substandard (so they fail quickly.)

I know shops that pretty much point-blank refuse to even work on such bikes. Just the overhead of all the extra time explaining to the customer why they have to pay "so much" sometimes puts a shop into the red on that particular transaction.

The bicycle industry is full of competition. There are three major component manufacturers, dozens of frame builders, and more than three major distributors of parts and bikes in the US. In my city I can name about twelve bicycle shops within a 4 mile radius of me, and each one of them stocks at least half a dozen brands. If you think the bike industry is a "ripoff", then by all means, start your own component, framebuilding, distributor, or retail business and "do everyone else in."

  The problem is that bicycles are considered toys, and as such: people pump $60 of gas into the tank of their car that they're paying $400/month for a loan plus at least $100/month to insure....and then go to the local bike store and whine and bitch and moan about the price tag on a $400 bicycle that will last them years of commuting...

"Stuff that is a relatively minor obstacle for a larger wheel is going to outright stop this bicycle."

Larger wheels do not make obstacles "easier", at least when it comes to anything you'll encounter while riding on paved or hardpack surfaces like this tandem is intended for.

What matters is tire load, thickness, and inflation pressure.

The slip's form fields align with a credit card, but that doesn't mean the waitstaff can't write it in by hand. Impressions just made it faster, and gave some limited proof of "card presence."

Also, why would you eat at PF Changs? PF Chang's is for people too afraid (to be polite) to step into the local Asian restaurants. It's overpriced low-to-mid-tier produce/meat with a sauce that came out of a can. If you're lucky, that can says "PF Changs teriyaki sauce", not "Sysco teriyaki sauce."

I once ate there and the waiter actually felt it necessary to tell us that "soy sauce is like salt for chinese food."

Stop eating at chain restaurants. They suck - the food's bad, they run the local non-chains out of business - and they prey upon people who want bland consistency. Live a little. Support the local economy. Etc.

In a perfect world, there would be no primaries at all because there would be no rigidly defined political parties as such... but I suppose it really is too much to ask that a candidate be considered on the weight of his individual ideas and actions rather than a postfix next to his name on a ballot.

But the next best thing would be to have each party solely responsible for nominating their own candidates, without outside influence. At least in that respect we could get someone who best represents their party, rather than the WORST representative.

Campaign financing is a whole other ball of wax...
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Not really, no. There is almost always more than two candidates for any particular office. The only exceptions I've personally encountered were lesser thought about elected officials like judges and public works.

But I think the parent's comment about "fewer choices" still applies: You are choosing the least bad instead of the best, so the real choice is diminished. Giant douche, or turd sandwich?
=Smidge=

Install XposedFramework:
http://repo.xposed.info/module... ...then the Xprivacy module.

This isn't a great option for many, however, as you need root access. It does give you extremely fine-grained control over permissions, and includes options like randomizing (on each boot) the garbage data returned to apps to keep them happy.

Xposed is great; the GravityBox module, for example, has a ton of interesting and useful functions, like setting your cellular radio to 2G when connected to wifi, a mode to have an increasing ring, a network speed indicator, etc.

While I'm plugging Android software I use: the F-Droid open source repository is full of nice stuff (like AdAway.)

https://f-droid.org/

It's a primary election, not a general election. Nobody is being elected into power here. The primary election is only to choose who the candidate will be that will run for office for that particular party.

If you want your political party to win, and you have open primaries, to group together to force the opponent party to select the LEAST desirable candidate, thus increasing your own candidate's chance of winning.

That's not democracy, that's gaming the system - and we all lose in the race to the bottom.
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"I was providing my experience, dick. I didn't say it was true for you or anyone else."

You were being That Guy who, when someone says something, feels it necessary to be a "dick" and say "THE LIGHTBULB WORKS FINE IN MY OFFICE" in response.

"TV showed us all that Gage and DeSoto were responding to medical calls on Emergency! in 1972,"

Did you seriously just cite a TV show?