The things you mention have always been left as an exercise for the reader.
What benchmark isn't tagged with qualifiers that explain what it does and doesn't mean?

Marketing literature in computing has always been littered with metrics that are completely useless unless you know how to interpret them in the context of what you want to be doing.

Iran dilutes nuclear material
July 21, 2014
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/latest-news/iran-dilutes-nuclear-material/story-fn3dxix6-1226995916083

If you really cared about Iran and not about piling up perceived failure at Obama's feet, you sure as shit would have seen this headline from last week.

It wasn't a secret. The AP, AFP, Reuters, and pretty much everyone was talking about it.

/Naturally Fox News did their best to report only on the extension of talks.

Companies float these trial balloons to see if it gets shot down out of the sky.
If it doesn't, then they progress to the next stage of the trial.

So yes, get pissed off at "a non issue," because with enough outrage, most companies will say "I'm sorry" and then pull back.

The intentional death of a human being is always murder.
Societies then create moral and legal exemptions to allow murders that the people consider necessary.

Sometimes the people (in uniform) dehumanize the enemy to make it easier to murder them.
It's an extremely ugly road to go down: http://i.imgur.com/riixJyL.jpg
And I'm not exaggerating: http://i.imgur.com/ODMmE5i.jpg

I'm glad we're civilized enough to have stopped making dehumanizing propaganda the official government policy.
I hope you can catch up with the civilized world.

There's a lot implicit in that sentence.
Which freedom is "provided" by our military.
Which freedom specifically are we all basking in?
What freedom has been preserved or provided by invading Iraq or Afghanistan?

Post 9/11 laws have done more to take away our freedoms than anything the military has done to recover or preserve them.

Is freedom from terrorist attacks more important than freedom from warrantless wiretaps, loss of due process (hello terrorist watch list), freedom from enhanced interrogation, National Security Letters, Guantanamo Bay, extraordinary rendition, freedom from assassination (sorry, targeted killing), freedom from secret courts (separate from the loss of due process), and I could keep going.

If you went back 50 years and told someone this is what the USA would become,
they'd laugh and say that you're describing Soviet Russia or East Berlin.

I recall reading a paper which studied market behavior and it concluded that even 4 or 5 companies that aren't colluding can still naturally behave like a cartel.

It's not just enough to have competitors, you must have meaningful competition.

All this talk of level playing fields ignores the entire point of subsidies.
The idea is to foster a new industry whether it's through loans, grants, or University research.

"Level playing field" ignore the fact that the fossil fuel industry is an established multi-trillion dollar global industry.
Last year, the oil industry spent ~$700 billion just on finding new oil.

Cutting everyone's subsidies is not leveling the field, it's taking green energy out back and shooting it.

Roads belonged to pedestrians and they had priority, not horse carriages, bicycles, or eventually automobiles.
The status quo, where you separate pedestrians and drivers, is entirely a concoction of the automotive industry.
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26073797

Roads were originally a shared space and the thinking is moving back towards that direction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_space

Texas has uniquely dumb laws that let you suck up whatever water is underneath your land.

So if you own a couple acres on the edge of a giant underground reservoir that spans several counties, you are allowed to drain the entire reservoir from your property.

Texas tried to mitigate this by allowing for local water boards, but they get bullied/sued if they don't allow the resource extraction.
Read more here: http://www.mensjournal.com/magazine/print-view/who-stole-the-water-20140623

Look into http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photorefractive_keratectomy (PRK)

PRK came before LASIK and doesn't involve cutting the cornea.
The recovery time is several days and, like LASIK, it takes months to see the maximum benefit.

The headline and opening doesn't make it clear, but they're specifically talking about online harassment.

Trolls will target anything and everything about you.
Gender just gives them extra ammunition.

Mirrors are cheap, it's the several acres of tracking mechanisms which the mirrors are mounted to that are expensive.

The idea is, if the steam generator requires less concentrated light, you can save money on the solar tracking mechanisms, which lowers the final cost of each solar array.

I'd be interested in code snippets that are shared by all the canvas fingerprinting implementations and unique to canvas draw.
I could nuke any script with that code and never think about it again.

Israel bulldozes Palestinian homes and builds settlements, Hamas fires rockets into Israel.
"Both sides" is usually a shitty argument to make, but in this case, both sides have been aggressors for decades.

If it wasn't complicated, we'd have peace by now.

A few States tried it too. And they succeeded

Georgia: http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/05/17/the-law-of-unintended-consequences-georgias-immigration-law-backfires/
Arizona: http://business.time.com/2012/06/14/the-fiscal-fallout-of-state-immigration-laws/
Alabama: http://business.time.com/2012/06/14/the-fiscal-fallout-of-state-immigration-laws/
Indiana: I couldn't find a decent article specifically about Indiana, but it's the same story.

The good news is that by shooting themselves in the foot, Georgia, Arizona, Alabama, and Indiana provided a wonderful example of what not to do. All the other States that were thinking about passing similar laws... didn't. Or they exempted farm and maid labor, which more or less undercuts the core purpose of such laws.