The basis is that Nokia is a bunch of idiots that actually tried to do manufacturing in India, showing all the judgment they did when they went with Windows Phone as a platform.

See, India's intelligentsia, by and large, doesn't like manufacturing. It might be necessary to some degree, but, offered a chance to replicate Taiwan or China's success by starting with cheap manufacturing, they'd decline. They want to jump straight ahead to a service/software economy via education rather than pass through an intermediate step of actually making physical things. So the basic self-interested counterbalances that you'd see elsewhere ("But we need to learn from Nokia so we can do this!" or "We need to treat Nokia well so others will build plants here too!") are weakened.

So, there's going to be a new owner for the factory, and thus there's an opportunity to extract protection money. After all, it's not like India wants manufacturing anyway.

Well, mostly, because this way people don't send me fundraising letters.

. . . I saw this headline and expected to see something about the use of lead and mercury in attacks on commercial shipping.

Oh, yeah, that's Heinlein, all right, as exemplified by his very next book, Stranger in a Strange Land.

Look, Robert Heinlein was a writer of speculative fiction. The whole damn point was to extrapolate, odd consequences included. Which is why you get such radically different results (Double Star, Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, for example, all having completely incompatible takes on modern democracy) depending on what premises Heinlein was playing with at the time.

Ideally making the point to the thoughtful reader that the reader's society and that society's accepted theories, conscious and unconscious, are just as guilty of absurdities as those explored in the books. But some readers are too dense to notice that, and some are so invested in the propriety of their absurdities that they abandon all rational thought in their defensive denouncements.

Kinda-sorta. In this context, they mean the known type of neutrinos, at high energy (and thus mass), as opposed to an undiscovered WIMP.

There are all sorts of issues with this, especially when you get into which is why undiscovered WIMPs are favored.

It's an analogy.

Taiwan is an island. It wouldn't matter if the People's Republic of China, Republic of China, United States, and United Nations all deny it is one; it clearly is surrounded on all sides by water. "According to who?" is a pointless question; it's an observable fact. If the PRC, ROC, US, and UN all denied it, it would simply mean they're all denying reality.

Similarly, Taiwan is a sovereign nation. It doesn't matter if the People's Republic of China, Republic of China, United States, and United Nations all deny it is one; it clearly is not actually under the control of China or anyone else and just as clearly is not in control of the mainland. "According to who?" is a pointless question; it's an observable fact. That the PRC, ROC, US, and UN all deny it simply means they're all denying reality.

Possible, yes, it just seems less likely than the existence of WIMPs.

The trouble is the Bullet Cluster lensing pretty much requires non-visible matter, even with the theories that assume relativity is wrong at large scales. It seems you can reconcile TeVeS with the Bullet Cluster using lots of neutrinos instead of WIMPs, but then when you plug that sort of neutrino abundance in TeVeS, you apparently get other inconsistencies elsewhere.

(Now, apparently STVG manages to handle the Bullet Cluster and galactic rotational curves without WIMPs . . . it'll be interesting to see what happens when people poke at that a bit more.)

Maybe. Physics does have people working that line (TeVeS with massive neutrinos to explain the Bullet Cluster, Moffat's STVG). But WIMPs still are considered the most likely candidate.

Even if the PRC, ROC, US, and UN all declared Taiwan a peninsula, it wouldn't change the fact that it is an island.

Wait, you want to abolish the police?

Or, you know, just not give a shit at all, because the current strategy is doing fine, thanks, which is why Google just had a major stock price spike.

"You want me to give you different paper for your paper? Not a problem. I've got the Bureau of Engraving & Printing all set up."

The Internet Companion: A Beginner's Guide to Global Networking, Tracy LaQuey, 1993, p.122.

Apart from in one of Ballmer's wet dreams, when on earth was WinCE (or its descendants) ever en route towards monopoly status?

In 2004, Windows Mobile (CE) had 11% market share in "smartphones". In 2005, this increased to 17%. In 2006, it moved up to 37% (tied with Blackberry, well ahead of Palm's 17% and Symbian's 9%), and in 2007, it hit 42% (while Blackberry lost share).

That flattening of the growth of Windows Mobile marketshare in 2007 may have been inevitable . . . but it may have been the iPhone. Nobody in late 2006 should have considered Microsoft taking an absolute majority in 2007 and then grinding down Blackberry into a niche by 2013 particularly unlikely. If the iPhone had flopped as bad as the previous "iPod phone" (the Motorola Rokr E1) . . .

One thing to be noted is that all three episodes of the original trilogy had an excellent editor (whose other credits included the critically-acclaimed Taxi Driver) who was sleeping with George.