They make some outstanding fake jerseys over there and sell them at a fraction of the price they go for here. Nobody in their right mind buying those would think they were legit though. Not at those prices.

You got a whole planet secreting insecticide? WTF! I'm no scientist person but even I know that's a bad idea.

That's because game economies are like real economies in many ways and they know that economies collapse when you have austerity...when too little new money is created.

To flip things around for a moment, what about all those female-dominated careers? Why is it that we aren't up in arms about the fact that yoga studios, elementary schools, secretarial staff, birthing services, and hospital nursing staffs are overwhelmingly dominated by women? Nobody seems to be losing sleep over the idea that there is some kind of pervasive gender discrimination that discourages men from these careers. Is that because these careers are seen as somehow less worthwhile- and if so, why? Because women do them?

Modern feminism seems consumed with the idea that career success for a woman can only come by pursuing a traditionally male career path. But this seems like an incredibly sexist viewpoint, because it's assuming that the only kind of job that's worthwhile or important for a woman to aspire to is one that a man traditionally has done. If you're not a CEO, a surgeon, a professor, then you're somehow less worthwhile. But taking care of other people- which is something a lot of female-dominated careers have in common- is incredibly important, and probably contributes as much or more to society than coming up with a better way for Amazon to flood my inbox with special offers.

The other issue is that feminism seems obsessed with the idea that women will be happy if they can pursue these career paths. But here's a thought. Maybe women opt out of certain career paths in favor of other career paths because those career paths better fit what they want out of life. Maybe many women- not all of them, but a lot of them- find working with kindergartners or being a midwife more rewarding than firing employees, shooting at insurgents, or writing computer code.

It's a bit like the iridium spike at the K-T boundary in that the use of nuclear weapons is an event that will have a worldwide signal, in fact it wouldn't surprise me if they got the idea from the asteroid impact. This would be a bit ironic because Alvarez, the guy who discovered the impact, was a Manhattan project alum who actually worked on the explosive lenses and triggers used in the Trinity implosion bomb. The issue with using Trinity is that from a biological/evolutionary standpoint its not that meaningful an event. The Chicxulub impact is a huge deal, it's the driver of the biggest mass extinction in 250 million years. The Trinity test has the advantage of being easy to measure but nuclear weapons have had pretty much zero effect on the biosphere. In fact, primitive hunter-gatherers running around with fire and spears have a vastly larger effect than nuclear bombs. After Homo sapiens moves out of Africa into Australia, Europe, and the Americas, we see massive dieoffs of the megafauna which, combined with the use of fire to alter the landscape, dramatically alter the fauna and vegetation on a continental scale. From an evolutionary standpoint, these migrations are important; they mark the first time the species began to alter the world on the level of entire ecosystems. So I'd argue that the migration of Homo sapiens out of Africa would be the defining event, but obviously that's kind of hard to date.

Not likely. I don't think that's the same thing.

That's unfortunate because you're far more likely to get a treatment that made you content being the man you were born than a genuinely effective way to make your body into the female that you believe you are supposed to be. I feel for you because that can't be easy but eventually it will be treatable and when that happens you'll have the opportunity to make that decision though it won't come down to "jump of a building or be male". It will probably look more like "jump off a building, be male, or continue as you are dealing with it the best way you can" because thankfully society seems to (slowly) be getting better at this kind of thing.

And since then? What have Muslims contributed to the sciences since the medieval age? Honest question. I have been told over and over again about the substantial contributions to science from the Muslim world back in the "Long ago time" but where did that go? Why did it go from world-leading and brilliant to a slow trickle and then dry up almost completely?

I haven't actually met 99% of the people who bash the Windows 8.x interface so I'm not able to say how long they have or haven't used it. I know that I use it every day and while I still find it to be a minor annoyance I can safely say that it isn't unusable or the giant tragedy it's made out to be. It's not good and I should never have had to go through the trouble of getting used to it. It seems the work of persons trying to do the opposite of what would have made sense and so it suffered the appropriate fate. Microsoft went and attempted to improve upon something that no one wanted fixed. But it's not as bad as the worst of the critics make it out to be.

Sometimes. Not always of course but often enough.

Check this out man. I personally think Crimea should have stayed part of Russia but that decision was made during the Soviet era by your leaders. No big deal, leaders make mistakes (US leaders sure make plenty of them) but then when the Soviet Union broke up Russia didn't demand the return of Crimea to where it really belonged. Then when Ukraine agreed to give up their nukes Russia agreed to honor their borders. So tell me, why can't Russia stop being a lying piece of shit straddling the continents of Europe and Asia and actually keep their word? As for the oil that's a huge misconception on your part. Saudi Arabia is cranking out the production to undermine your economy and they're doing it at the behest of the United States because that's how that stuff works. They did it in the early 80's under Reagan and completely shuttered the US domestic oil industry once before. I know because I lived through it. Reagan took away your only major export then challenged your country to a military buildup race and broke your economy in the process. It was a pretty good plan if you think about it. We can afford it. We can sacrifice our oil industry (which really is no big deal because it's not like the oil is going anywhere) and let cheap fuel power the rest of our economy into prosperity. You on the other hand depend on fuel prices because your economy is shit in every other way imaginable so when we take that away you feel the pinch. Yes, Crimea is yours forever. At least your heating oil will be cheap this year. Can't say the same about much of anything else.

Ahh yes, you mean "birth defects".

I look forward to having better options to treat these people than simply carving them up and reassembling them into what they feel like they should be. That seems like figuring out how to let an anorexic live a productive life on a 300 calorie a day diet. It would be better to find a way to genuinely solve their problem instead of making a poor substitute for a member of the opposite sex out of them and putting them on hormones for life. At some point we'll be able to actually fix issue in their brains and this entire issue will hopefully fade into history. Come on progress!

Hmmm, interesting. We change our phones out probably around every two years. Sometimes we go a little longer. I think my wife had her last Samsung for almost 4 years and I skipped all the iterations of the iPhone 5 but more often than not I just tend to skip a generation (Had a 3, skipped the 3GS, got a 4 near the middle of its cycle and skipped the 4S and all the 5's. My 4 really was fine even when I traded it in to AT&T. Only reason I upgraded really was that they gave me a $300 credit for an aging phone. That almost paid for the iPhone 6 that replaced it.