Yes, someone should. But I don't see why that someone should be an EU bureaucrat. Why should the EU be telling the British how to run Britain? If they want porn to be opt-in, that is their own business.

I am skeptical about these figures. Many people have an interest in covering up this problem. In China, there is also a lot of cover up in the other direction, from parents that had a daughter, and didn't report the birth, so they could later have a son as their "one child". Often times these girls are raised in the countryside by their grandparents, and kept out of school, so the government doesn't know about them.

We don't need to eradicate all mosquitoes. Just the anopheles mosquitoes that transmit malaria. There are plenty of other mosquito species that would be happy to fill their niche.

No, twice as many women report being victims. The men are shamed into silence.

Of course not. These chemicals have been extensively tested. There is no question that they cause some harm, but it is not clear how much harm, or if they cause more harm than alternative chemicals, or the economic costs of using no chemicals. Many factors should be considered, in a deliberative scientific process, rather than just caving in to some green pressure group out of political convenience.

The spokesperson at Google making these claims, is not a tech. She is a lawyer. So there is likely no connection between what she says, and what she actually believes. Anyway, since she is a lawyer, her parents clearly didn't raise her right, so she may just be projecting the failure of her own parents onto others.

60-70% of domestic violence is initiated by women. The reason we don't have "battered men" shelters is that it is socially acceptable for women to be violent, and that any man that "can't handle it" isn't a real man, and should be ashamed of himself. In the media, when women are depicted as violent toward their partners, it is almost always supposed to be funny.

I coach an after school program in robotics and programming at my local elementary school, and I agree that this is baloney. The parents are pushing hard for their girls to pursue tech, and it is the girls themselves that are disinterested. We have tried many things to keep girls in the program. I recruited an engineer mom as a co-coach to provide a role model. We let the girls form "all-girl" teams, so they can use more collaborative teamwork, and consensus decision making, which they feel more comfortable with, rather than the hierarchical teams that is natural to boys. But we still got only a few girls to sign up this year, and most of those only signed up because of parental pressure, and half of them dropped out when the try-outs for the school play were announced. It is very frustrating, and I don't know what the solution is, but blaming the parents is hogwash. I don't see that at all.

No. The proposed ban was suspended because researchers have, so far, been unable to find ANY actual causality. Yes, these pesticides are harmful if you mix them into a mouse's drinking water. But that doesn't mean they are significantly harmful in the way they are actually employed in agriculture. Even if they are harmful (and it is likely they are to some degree) that needs to be compared against the harm from the alternative chemicals that would be used instead.

Environmental regulations should be based on a deliberative scientific process, not on which interest group can shout the loudest.

These are not good options for home users because they all involve ongoing work. Just install a 4GB network drive (available on Amazon for less than $200), and set up your home computers to do hourly incremental backups. For extra safety, buy two, keep one at your office, and swap them once a month.

Part of managing loss is understanding what makes different media lose data. For optical media, it is light. Don't leave them sitting in the sunlight. For SSDs, it is temperature. Don't store your SSDs in a hot attic, or leave them in your car parked in the sun. I put all my flash media (SSDs, SD-Cards, thumb drives) in a ziploc bag to protect them from condensation, put that inside a sealed mason jar (just in case there is a pinhole in the ziploc bag), and then put that in the bottom drawer of my refrigerator, right next to my battery stash.

It is also interesting to note that Seagate's HDDs are the least reliable. Hitachi's are the most reliable. I don't know how much Seagate's lack of attention to quality in their HDDs is reflected in their SSDs.

Sure, but so far there has been NO discussion here about the actual tech in these pesticides. TFA doesn't even name the pesticides affected. Instead, about half way through, it switches to an unrelated rant about Canadian tar sands.

Just in case anyone is actually interested in the technology, here are a few links:

Pesticides may block male hormones
Effect of Endocrine Disrupter Pesticides: A Review
 

This has nothing to do with TPP. TPP is the "Trans Pacific Partnership". Get out your globe and look at the big blue thing between America and Europe. That is the Atlantic Ocean, not the Pacific. This is about TTIP, not TPP.

Yes, this is a very slanted article. Most of the lobbying companies were European, not American, and I don't think the US government was involved in the lobbying at all. No pesticide is completely safe, so they should be banned based on relative risk considering many factors: effectiveness, spectrum width, persistence, health effect on humans, health effect on wildlife, etc. The proposed ban was not based on sound science, just scare tactics from European greenies.