Hence terrorism involving aircraft causes mass panic but road deaths do not. A large part of the reason we have this problem is due to our reaction to these events. Same goes for crazy shooters in malls and schools.

It's always been Amazon's stratergy to take a loss when entering a new market. They'll do that here too.

But it's no the high street that's responsible for the decay of the high street. Those shops that you mention don't exist any more because the manufacturing of the products they would sell has changed. Our electronics are cheaper and they are changing faster than ever (some of that is planned obsolescence, of course). It's often cheaper to buy new than to repair. Consumer electronics are now so well built and and idiot-proof that you don't need smart people to sell or explain them. Instead you need marketing and fancy adverts to persuade people to buy. The high street never stood a chance.

The Oxford comma is a style issue, sure. Commas in general are not, since their presence or absence can change the meaning of a sentence. I don't think the comma is an "example fail" or anything like the vi/Eamcs wars.

The grammatical rules invoked by pedants aren’t real rules of grammar at all. They are, at best, just stylistic conventions.

This is a silly blanket statement. It's true of some things, such as the split infinitive. Other things, such as correct comma placement, play an obvious role in understanding a sentence. I agree that languages evolve, but I don't think "text speak" is part of that evolution. Text speak is just lazy.

I'm sure they were expecting the stupid comments, though. They very likely have a filter to get rid of them.

Where possible, the gold standard should really be comparison against the best current treatment. Who cares if an expensive new drug is better than a sugar pill? It shold be better than the current cheapo generic (or whatever). In most cases new drugs are brought out to replace old ones.

Yes it is. Go read about the placebo effect. e.g. there was an operation that was carried out for some time for angina. It was pretty effective for a lot of patients, resulting in long-term symptom relief. I don't recall the exact details, but I think it involved tying up some superficial blood vessels under the assumption that this would reduce pressure on the heart. Some time later a surgeon did a study where some patients received a sham operation. Turns out the sham was as effective as the real operation. Because it was "no better than placebo" the operation got canned. Yet it worked. The reference is in Ben Goldacre's "Bad Science" book.

This is not really accurate, as it says in your link, placebos do indeed work for things like pain. You report feeling less pain because you do in fact feel less pain. This works without drugs. There are even studies that show the effects of placebos can persist for long periods (weeks, months, maybe years). The relationship between medicine and the placebo effect is a lot more complex than the article you link to suggests. Ben Goldacre's "Bad Science" book makes this pretty clear and is written by a hard core skeptic.

I find this verdict astonishing, TBH. Does anyone understand what the money is supposedly awarded for? "Lost earnings" is clearly not reasonable, for instance. Also, what normally happens about cover versions? Is the money in the verdict based on laws relating to that?

A friend of mine had his Android phone stolen in Baltimore a couple of years back. Thief contacted him via the phone and ransomed it back to him for a couple of hundred bucks. High risk scenario for the thief, of course.

I don't agree with a lot of what the recording industry do but, to be fair, they are obviously to be paying taxes on profits. +/- a bit of dodgy account, of course. So I don't see how it's really "different" for them.

The other thing I don't get about this article is that to use R you need a pretty good understanding of statistics. It doesn't hold your hand. I know plenty of practising scientists who would be unable to use R because they don't understand their analyses properly. How the hell "business professionals" would benefit is beyond me.

Exactly. Terrible as a programming language. Telling someone to learn R is basically the same as telling someone to learn statistics and analyse their data properly.

Are you sure about that? Laser beams diffract. The tighter you make it the more it diffracts. There are limits, therefore, as to far away it will work. I don't know how the numbers work out, however, or to what degree you can get around this with collimating lenses.