If you accept money from someone, don't be surprised if they try to put conditions on how you spend the money. When you're begging for money in the international market because no private investor will give you a loan due to your reckless spending behaviour, don't be surprised that donors ask for conditions on how that money is spent. If the Greeks didn't want conditions, they could always radically cut expenses to meet tax revenues and not be dependent on any handouts to make the budget balance.

There already exists taxi regulations that cover Uber, which in every respect is taxi company. However, you're dead right as to why Uber is pushing for these changes - it allows them to operate and claim legitimacy, while providing a framework of regulation that is a "light" version of what real taxi companies have to deal with, addressing only the most egregious flouting of commercial taxi operations such as commercial insurance and background checks. These so-called ridesharing regulations appear to completely ignore allowable fare increases (Uber's surge pricing), who they can or cannot pick up, handicap access, amongst others. They are a way for Uber to legitimize into law their competitive advantage.

Fixed that for you. Single use devices never made sense for coffee either.

People have to live somewhere. As Seattle grows, if not from Amazon's expansion from other economic growth, the people moving in will need places to live. Placing those people in townhouses replacing low-rise bungalows is a good thing, in my opinion. The alternative is to expand the city ever outward, creating more suburbs. Instead what seems to be happening is that previously suburban neighbourhoods are becoming urbanized. Increased densification of these neighbourhoods makes public transport more viable, and will likely increase local commerce, making it a more walkable neighbourhood. I might have chosen a different architectural style for those townhouses, but overall I don't see how this is anything but a positive direction of urban development.

The current fascination with smart watches reminds me when I was in high school in the 80s and there was a brief fad of full feature electronic watches. Calculator watches were in the geek must have list, but there were also kids with watches featuring radios or mini-LCD screen games. There was even a rumour of a someone in school with a tv watch, which as it turns out wasn't so far from the truth.

None of these watches were very successful, for the simple reason that the watch as a form factor was never well suited for these tasks. Trying to use a calculator in a watch was slow and frustrating. It seems that the people trying to cram features into watches nowadays have forgotten how much of failure this was when it was attempted in the 80s

Would it not have been possible to have controlled the impact into the visible side of Mercury? I am assuming being able to witness the impact itself, and getting close-up photos of Mercury as Messenger was coming down, might have been valuable science to obtain.

Free speech applies to your interactions with the government - it does not apply to a private company. If Google did not wish to publish an ad that may damage their brand and business, that would be their own decision to make. Print publications already have policies on what is acceptable advertising, and will readily reject any ads seen as offensive and racist. Ad space is always limited - there is no reason they have to publish this ad over another less offensive ad.

When faced with incredible claims of medical cure, the Catholic Church has rigorous processes in place to verify that claim, which includes the testimonial of medical experts and independent confirmation.

When a medieval religious institution can be considered a model of fact-checking and skepticism compared to the media, the state of current journalism is in deep trouble.

They wouldn't have needed to go through her medical records to expose her claims. As soon as they called the doctors and hospitals she claimed to have been treated at, and had been told that they had no records of such a patient, that should have been their first obvious clue. Had the media that hyped her story bothered to place a single call her story would've been easily exposed as an obvious sham. This wasn't an elaborate lie - it was full of inconsistencies, contradictions, and the most fundamental facts about it were unsupported by any evidence whatsoever.