Comment Re:A Luxury (Score 1) 332
You know how it works. Provide a leftist with a service, and in a week he's calling it a human right.
Comment Re:But that's not the real problem. (Score 5, Insightful) 1651
Bullshit.
Cycling was as common when I was a kid as it is now. But cycle helmets were not mandatory then. By your logic, cycling should have got less popular over time. It hasnt.
Where I live (US), it's certainly less popular. When I was a kid, people, and mostly other kids, would cycle everywhere. Every kid I knew had a bicycle, and it was their primary form of transportation. Now, I rarely see someone cycling, and when I do, it's usually an adult, and usually on a designated bike trail, not on the streets or sidewalks.
That's not just an anecdotal observation on my part either. I no longer see bike racks installed for parking bikes near schools or stores anymore, they used to be common. If you watch any old children's TV shows from the '50s or '60s, you can see how ingrained the bicycle was in the culture (almost as common as smoking!).
Of course, in those days when you wanted to ride your bike, you just jumped on it and off you went. If we'd had to dress up like quarterbacks every time we wanted to run to the store or a friend's house, we probably would have lost our taste for bicycling, too.
Comment Says who? (Score 0) 218
What makes you think it was a mistake?
Submission + - Using lasers, researchers were able to take over the worm's brain (harvard.edu)
An anonymous reader writes: In the quest to understand how the brain turns sensory input into behavior, Harvard scientists have crossed a major threshold. Using precisely targeted lasers, researchers have been able to take over a tiny animal’s brain, instruct it to turn in any direction they wish, and even implant false sensory information, fooling the animal into thinking food was nearby.
Submission + - NASA to Build Manned Space Station Beyond the Moon? (gizmag.com)
Zothecula writes: After forty years of venturing no farther than low Earth orbit, NASA may have decided to establish a manned outpost at a greater distance than humanity has ever traveled before. According to documents seen by the Orlando Sentinel, NASA has chosen a proposal to build a space station beyond the Moon that will act as a “gateway spacecraft” to explore the Moon, the asteroids and eventually as a staging post to launch a manned mission to Mars.
Comment Re:EU needs money to give to Greece (Score 0) 292
What? There's still an EU?
Comment Re:Federal Judges Need to Go Back to School (Score 2) 584
They have no understanding of constitutional law. The constitution does now lay out our rights... we have our rights with or without the constitution. The constitution was meant to restrain the government. Since a few people thought that enumerating some of our rights explicitly in the Bill of Rights was a good idea, some how the foolish judges have the idea that if they weren't explicitly enumerated that they do not exist.
That may be true. OTOH, that doesn't necessarily mean anything you care to pull out of your ass is a right.
Submission + - Post Homo sapiens homonids (eurekalert.org) 1
ISoldat53 writes: Researchers have identified a group of Africans that appear to have diverged from the H. sapiens gene pool. See the RTFA for details. We have spent years trying to find out where we as a species come from; it's interesting to speculate on where we are going.
Submission + - New genetic light shed on human evolution (ft.com)
HanzoSpam writes: A new genetic study of a group of sub-Saharan peoples has challenged the prevailing view that modern humans emerged from one location in Africa before spreading out across the world. An international research team found that the Khoe and San groups from southern Africa are descendants of the earliest diversification event in the history of modern humans – 100,000 years ago. Instead of localising the origin of modern humans to a single geographic region in Africa, the researchers discovered a complex record of interbreeding and genetic stratification, challenging the view of evolution in one place.
Comment Re:Altruism... (Score 0) 263
Education is a broad category...
Indeed it is. If you're looking for a broad, you can't beat the local community college!
Comment Re:CAFE Kills (Score 2) 1184
As long as we're gonna be legislating technical advances into existence, I'd like to request that congress passes legislation requiring a warp drive is developed by 2020.
Comment Who's "we", kimosabe? (Score 1, Interesting) 1774
'I say to the grownups, if you want to deny evolution and live in your world, in your world that's completely inconsistent with everything we observe in the universe, that's fine, but don't make your kids do it because we need them. We need scientifically literate voters and taxpayers for the future. We need people that can — we need engineers that can build stuff, solve problems.'
I love the arrogant presumption that my children are a public resource at the collective's disposal. The last I checked, they were individuals entitled to pursue happiness in any way that suited them, not resources at Mr. Nye's disposal tasked with building whatever kind of world he wants to live in. Maybe they have other ideas about what kind of world they want to live in?
Assholes like this guy worry me a lot more than any creationist.
Comment Re:If Obama's BIRTH can be an issue (Score 1, Flamebait) 571
Many Democrats were disenchanted with Obama and probably wouldn't have come out to vote for him again in the fall. But stacking him up against an insane-right-wing Ayn Rand ideologue who wants to abolish Medicare and Social Security to give tax cuts to the wealthy is a pretty fucking great way to motivate them.
Yes, because nothing scares a Democrat quite like the possibility of being forced to take his hand out of other people's pockets.
Comment Re:Pity the first-world RIM workers (Score 2) 15
Posting as AC because I'm still in the business and it wasn't so long ago that IBM was up the chain from my paycheck.
If IBM acquires this division, expect all first-world workers to be downsized systematically while forced to train their third-world replacements under threat of not receiving their severance packages.
Comment Re:Hansen again? (Score 0) 605
Hansen is the kind of scientist that lends legitimacy to the proposition that scientist is a political activist that also wants to take credit for innovations actually developed by engineers, entrepreneurs and lay inventors.
