Sticking things to other people's vehicles is probably illegal (IANAL, but it's a fairly good guess), and certainly could get you in a whole hell of a lot of trouble. Now, sticking it in the mail, OTOH, probably isn't illegal, and achieves much the same result.

No, he didn't "blame the victim by saying it's their fault", and the fact you claimed he did means you are part of the problem. Look at it this way: if I drive a Porsche into a bad neighborhood, leave it unlocked with the keys inside, and it gets stolen, are you going to say I didn't mess up? No, of course I messed up, because failing to lock the doors on your car is stupid. That doesn't mean I'd bear the responsibility for the car being stolen, but it does mean what I did was stupid, and I would partially bear responsibility for a chain of action that lead to the car being stolen, and I could maybe have prevented the car being stolen. Since I cannot control the actions of other people, only my own, what I can do to prevent my car from being stolen is to take the proper precautions: lock the doors, don't park in bad neighborhoods, install a tracking system, etc.

For women (or men: rape works in both directions, though it's generally a vastly worse problem for women, especially attractive ones), that means not wearing revealing clothing while drunk at 3AM in a bad alley, watching their drinks closely, only hanging out with groups of people they trust and know well, etc. None of that means they're the ones responsible for the rape if they do get raped: but it does mean they can lower the probability of rape happening by being smart, and since the goal is to stop rapes from happening, we should encourage them to be smart, and discourage them from being stupid.

In other words: we can't blame the women for being raped, but we certainly can blame them for being stupid. Yes, everyone should be able to be as stupid as they want with no fear of other people doing bad things to them, but so long as we live in the real world, that will never happen (though we can still strive towards it, of course), so we should tell people to stop being stupid, because that means bad things are less likely to happen to them.

No news on HL3 (and that's actually kinda a fact a lot of people miss: no news. They've never announced they've been working on it at all, all the expectation is fan hype, not DNF-style vaporware... which, as a Half-Life fan, is annoying, true). As far as the Steambox goes, well, they've got a release data. SteamOS they've been working on with fairly regular patches, apparently, and I'd assume the November date holds for that too. As far as the internal drama goes: that was almost two years ago, by a fired employee: not exactly an objective source, generally speaking. They've shown few signs of being internally fractured otherwise.

The thing about Valve is: they do a lot of experimentation. Some of it doesn't work out. Some of it works out fantastically. But they're actually experimenting, and in the world of video gaming, that's not all that common from AAA game developers.

And if the nation has no laws against those crimes? Because the people in charge of the laws are the people who committed the action? And yes, that does happen. Frequently. I'm not even going to give examples, because if you can't think of them, you really need to open a history text sometime.

No offense, but the idea that a country can't prosecute someone for anything they did outside the country is just plain stupid.

Actually, there is, sort of. You can refuse to accept cash: however, they are valid legal payment for the debt, so if you refuse the payment, you are either de facto implying the debt no longer exists (because you're not accepting repayment for it), or you're breaking the law by refusing legal payment. You cannot refuse repayment in cash and then claim the debt still exists. IANAL, so I'm sure there are subtleties involved with, for e.g., contracts (i.e. you agree to give them 10 widgets later in exchange for 5 doohickeys now, offering cash instead would be a violation of the contract), but generally, creditors must accept cash in repayment of debts.

Like what? It's designed to detect gravitational waves. It's not designed to detect not-gravitational waves. Since we can't produce artificial gravitational waves (the detector would be almost pointless if we could, since it's meant to prove the existence of gravitational waves), we can't use a known test to confirm it's detecting gravitational waves and only gravitational waves, but since all our theory and all our observation says it should be detecting them and only them, it's fairly safe to assume it's actually doing so (assuming no systematic errors: a large assumption, but not an unreasonable one if everyone involved did their job). In fact, if what it detects isn't gravitational waves, it's almost more interesting, because that means it's detecting something else which isn't accounted for in our theory. If it detects nothing at all, well, that too would be interesting, since (again) our theory says it should. Either way, interesting.

Uhh, yes they do? All the time? Hell, I could have laser beams from two completely independent sources and generate an interference pattern. The dual slit experiment shows absolutely nothing about the wave/particle duality of light, and is in fact absolutely completely 100% explained by classical electromagnetism. Seriously, this comment is simply dead wrong. The dual-slit experiment in it's classical form only shows that something is propagating as a wave, not anything about the particle nature (of course, you can modify it with detectors at each slit to show the particle behavior, but that's really a different experiment).

The various sensors (IR and optical) on the thing would probably notice a massive amount of electromagnetic radiation hitting it. It's possible the frequency used was invisible to the onboard detectors, but that seems fairly unlikely. Much more probably it just had some kind of malfunction: the thing is probably loaded with mono-propellant and of course it has a battery, either of which could easily spontaneously explode if something went wrong.

Everyone who looks at the photo will see the dress as *some* color. That's the point. It's not a conscious judgment, you see what your eyes/brain are telling you is there. Some people see it as white, some people see it as blue (and some people have seen it as both).

But your brain does it anyways, because that's what your brain does.

Yeah, and that's kinda the whole point: everyone who looks at the photo is automatically (and completely subconsciously, without realizing it) applying color-correction to the dress, based on the brain's similar experiences with color-correcting and the visual clues in the picture. What makes the picture interesting is that it's so close to the edge between white/gold and blue/black that different people can perceive it differently, even on the exact same screen. Actually, I've seen it both ways, though I believe the picture that I saw as white/gold was ever so slightly lightened (based on a totally not scientific color picking of the blue areas). The picture was also a smaller version, which may have made the difference. The point is, the picture is a fascinating example of how what humans really perceive is not what they're actually seeing, but a heavily interpreted version based on context and various visual clues. In fact, humans would be effectively blind without that processing (imagine face blindness, but for everything you see).

Yes? Obviously? I mean, a pistol fired right next to the face can blind you as well (or deafen you if fired next to the ear, possibly permanently). That's not banned, because the point of the pistol is to kill people with bullets, not cripple them. In fact, virtually any weapon (and most tools, such as tanks, planes, etc.) can cause all kinds of debilitating damage if used in the wrong way or if someone ends up in the wrong situation, even if they're not designed to do that. Hell, a pair of binoculars can cause permanent blindness if you look at the sun through them. Can cause blindness isn't a good reason to ban anything.

A common misconception. Peer review does not verify that the data is correct, that the methodology in the paper is followed, or in general that the results are reliable. It looks at the methods outlined in the paper and tries to spot obvious flaws or oversights, as well as any major problems with the structure of the paper. It can't detect fraud, cherry-picking data, or a host of other problems. Some "scientists" have gotten away for years with made up data or other fraud. And of course the quality of the peer review (or even if it is peer reviewed, in some cases) depends heavily on the journal that publishes it. Anyone can make the "Journal of American Climate Study" or some other professional sounding name and publish total garbage.

This has pretty much already happened. He's published papers with deeply flawed methodology that has misrepresented the work of other scientists, espouses a scientific viewpoint (that solar variation causes most observed climate changes) that has been shown wrong years ago, and has failed to disclose the source of his funding, a fairly major ethical violation.

Not at all. The public sector tends not to care about costs, since they take the money more or less by force (implied force, if nothing else), and they have little to no threat of competition to force overheads to remain low. And of course one government providing a service for money to another government also has the motive of profit, making this situation more or less the worst of all possible worlds. In a theoretical optimum world, public sector would be by definition cheaper. Unfortunately, we live in the real world, which isn't always quite so nice (a tiny snag that many political philosophers/economists/et al often overlook).

In this case, for example, SpaceX is attempting to lower costs through a practical reusable design, whereas the Space Shuttle (in practice) ended up raising them considerably, despite being reusable, due to a number of ridiculous design constraints enforced on it by various government interests.

Not in the US, and not in Britain (I think) since they changed the laws. The liability shift is to the merchants if they don't support EMV.

If you're gonna factor in transmission line losses and charging loss, then you also have to factor in idling and drivetrain losses, which brings the fuel efficiency of an ICE down to about 15%. Not counting the energy required to actually make the fuel in the first place (which is also not zero). More importantly, though, electric cars are source-neutral: they don't give a shit if their electricity comes from coal, nuclear, or solar.