While I agree with these questions, the fact of the matter is that the government does have jurisdiction over it at the moment, and as long as they have jurisdiction, it is incumbent upon them to not discriminate against people when applying their own rules.

Given that two people of opposite genders can be married, it's an unreasonable abrogation of human rights to deny these same privileges to an entire class of people.

I think the government should get out of the marriage business too, but as long as they're in it, they need to do it fairly.

You do do that, whether you're conscious of it or not. We all do. You've decided that the things that these people do isn't bad enough to warrant you not using their products, and that's fine.

I don't buy anything from Walmart. I find their business practices and the way they pay and treat employees unfair.

I don't buy meat from supermarkets. I don't know where they're getting the meat and how ethically it was raised. I prefer small shops that deal directly with farms.

I don't use Firefox because I've never liked Firefox. But this isn't making me any more likely to head back to them, even if their product magically got better overnight.

We all make decisions, and this is just more information that we can use to make decisions with. It's amazing the vitriol I'm seeing here considering that all OKC has done is factually inform people of a situation and make a recommendation that they're under no obligation or compulsion to follow.

They're not forcing anyone to do anything other than pay some attention.

Isn't the idea of capitalism based entirely around people being able to make INFORMED decisions? Now the people using OKC and Firefox are more informed, both about OKC and Firefox.

Acceptance of equal marriage is something that should flow naturally out of justice, not tolerance. This is no more a matter of 'tolerance' than accepting black people as 5/5 human than 3/5 human. LGBT people are PEOPLE. This is a matter of justice.

They've taken no action against Eich and they haven't asked anyone to take specific action against him or his rights. He's not being discriminated against, he's being outed as someone that holds views are fundamentally unjust. I'd feel exactly the same if the issue were about any minority group. If he were a member of a white power organisation, or if he'd said that he thinks all Irish people should be shipped back across the pond, it wouldn't matter. It's an abhorrent view, and people have the right to know.

People can do with that information what they will. It's nice that OKC is willing to stick up for a minority community.

This is a completely false equivalence.

OKC asked people to consider stopping using Firefox as long as Eich is the CEO. They haven't asked people to attempt to have Eich's marriage annulled, put money into a fund to pass laws that abrogate his fundamental human rights, or indeed to take any action against him at all.

I don't see why racists and homophobes shouldn't be called to account for the things they do and the things they support. He supported a law that in the end was unconstitutional--by definition, the thing he supported was against the rights that these people hold. It's not hypocritical to ask people to denounce inequality unless what you're proposing is a NEW KIND of inequality. Saying that you should think twice about using the product from a company that is run by someone with identifiably questionable positions on human equality isn't taking anything away from him other than his hopes that this will blow over quietly without notice.

And there's a way out for him, certainly. Admit that what he did was wrong, and contribute $1000 to marriage equality in some other state. Done.

I have no sympathy for racists or xenophobes. I live in Quebec, and right now an entire election hinges significantly on one party's desire to codify discrimination against religious groups. They've admitted that they'd use the Notwithstanding Clause--a clause built into the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms that allows a province to override fundamental protections for five years--which is a tacit admission that what they're doing is deliberately holding groups of people down. It's dirty and disgusting and I want nothing to do with it.

If it's hateful of me to believe in the rights of other people, well, there's no hope for any of us.

ACARS may have been turned off, but the radio interface used by the ACARS system was still pinging.

The article does not make it clear that the satellite signals in question are those of ARINC's ACARS data system, developed in 1978.

ACARS

Calculus is OUR way of DESCRIBING the motion or action that is happening. The fact that you can use calculus to determine the area under a curve doesn't mean that the area under a curve is 'calculus'. Or that the volume of an arbitrary vessel is 'calculus', just because you USE calculus to determine the volume.

The fly has evolved a set of behaviours that corrects for certain environmental conditions while it's flying. That's all. There's no real computation going on.

The CANDU reactor program got it right decades ago and keeps getting better, but since it's not from the US, and has the false reputation of promoting nuclear proliferation, the US is not interested.

CANDU also, unfortunately, has a politically-fueled false perception of promoting nuclear proliferation partly because it was falsely accused to have aided the Smiling Buddha program (that was CIRUS, not CANDU, but who's paying attention?).

Oh, there is that unavoidable 1% tritium release rate, though.

It is not "coal sludge." It's coal ash slurry.

Did the OP even read the article? Even TFA refers to the flood as consisting of coal ash slurry.

There is no such thing as "coal sludge," but there is "coal slurry" which is something entirely different from coal ash slurry that allows transport of coal through pipelines in a very expensive process.

Let's get this out of the way: I have an iPhone 4, I tend to like Apple's designs, and I've scornfully referred to Samsung's phones as "the phones that Tupperware made" in the past.

This isn't changing my mind any.

Let me also say that I think that the Lumia phones, the HTC one and the Xperia Z1 compact all tickle my design bone in some way, so this isn't just some anti-Android rant.

Samsung really seems to slap together their phones from stuff that's available with no mind towards anything other than just cramming stuff in, and it turns out they're not even very good at that. Why anyone continues to buy them is honestly beyond me when there are so many good options available, even just within the Android ecosystem. This is why Apple continues to have so many fans. They at least try to have all their ducks in a row before making announcements and promises.

Hopefully more people start bailing out of the Samsung trapâ"what differentiates their phones other than 8GB of system software and a flimsy plastic body?

Until recently, all Apple devices used a common charger. At some point in the not-too-distant future, all Apple devices will use a common charger again.

So, by platform, Android isn't that much different than iOS.

Apple made some design decisions vis-a-vis their connector. You don't have to agree with them, but they had some specifications that they wanted to meet that USB didn't and still doesn't allow them to. (Having a reversible connector that doesn't need to be aligned a specific way is a perfectly reasonable design decision from the point of view of usability.)

Anyway, you can plug that cable into basically anything that accepts a common USB 2 connector and it'll work. So it's compliant on at least one end of the cable.

I don't know what expensive proprietary software you're talking about--iOS? I mean, yeah, I don't want to stop using iOS because I like it. I'm not sure what you're getting at.

Yeah, see my UID? This has been happening for as long as I've been here. :)

The flat Earth hypothesis has a 'kernel' of truth in it as well. The Earth looks flat from our perspective. It's just that when you decide to look at it with a more analytical eye things start to break down.

The kernel of truth that you're seeing is one that we have to acknowledge: men and women have the opinion that women aren't as good at math, and over the course of history, it's abundantly clear that fewer women have been stand-out mathematicians than men.

The *actual* question is whether or not this is down to biology or societal conditioning. I'm on the side of societal conditioning at this point. It seems unlikely to me that evolution would select for women that aren't as good as math as men in a biological sense, or conversely, that only men would benefit from being better at math (or the prehistoric math analogue) and that would be a characteristic that is located only on the Y chromosome, or is enhanced by testosterone and muted by oestrogen.

Meanwhile, our species has had a long history of systematic and institutional sexism since we became agrarian. Women have only been openly welcome in Universities for less than 100 years, and they haven't even always been allowed to study 'male' subjects like science and engineering. It seems MUCH more likely that conditioning is a greater part of the equation than we've given it credit for until recently.

This is cool but let's not delay commuter rail and subway construction.