To take a couple of examples from that list:

In February 1992, Stella Liebeck ordered a cup of coffee to go from McDonalds. Liebeck was sitting in the passenger seat of her nephew's car, which was pulled over so she could add sugar to her coffee. While removing the cup's lid, Liebeck spilled her hot coffee, burning her legs. It was determined that Liebeck suffered third degree burns on over six percent of her body. Originally, Liebeck sought $20,000 in damages. McDonalds refused to settle out of court. However, they should have. Liebeck was ultimately awarded $200,000 in compensatory damages, which was reduced to $160,000 because she was found to be twenty percent at fault. She was also awarded $2.7 million in punitive damages.

NSFW, but check out these burns and see if they look trivial. Also the documentary Hot Coffee wonderfully explains why this isn't a trivial lawsuit.

In 2003, Richard Schick sued his former employer, the Illinois Department of Public Aid. Schick sought $5 million plus $166,700 in back pay for sexual and disability discrimination. In fact, Shick was so stressed by this discrimination that he robbed a convenience store with a shotgun. A jury felt his pain and awarded him the money he was seeking. The decision was then reversed. Unfortunately, the $303,830 he was still awarded isn't doing him much good during the ten years he's serving for armed robbery.

In scanning through the case, the boss seemed to be a vindictive asshole who had him remove a sleeping bag he had in the break room to deal with sleep apnea, moved the copy machine close to his desk to interfere with his hearing aid, in addition to numerous other complaints. Sure, the dude surely could've done things to combat some of his issues (carpel tunnel can be mitigated with proper exercises), but the boss should probably not be a dick.

I'm not going to lie. I got entangled in this mess last weekend.

I am a fairly technical user, but by no means an expert. I had a fantasy draft scheduled for noon on Sunday. I loaded up my browser at 11:45 only to be greeted with errors loading. I thought I had an updated version of Java, but I went ahead and ran the update. Again, no go. Now this is under some time pressure so I didn't do as much research as I would've with a level head, but then again, what I did is what I'd wager the vast majority of folks would do at their best. Ran update again, no go. I decided to say screw it and used Chrome.

That would be helpful in some respects, but not cut and dry, especially since salaries are sunk costs. It seems very possible that there are organizations that have support people who would otherwise not be doing anything important. Those folks would need to help retrain others, but their time doesn't have any organizational opportunity costs attached.

Coming from friends in the Army, that's still happening regularly. My good friend is currently dealing with being incorrectly docked jump pay.

I'd like to see some more support for the claim that NCLB contributed much for this.

When I was in middle school, my 7th grade teacher found a printed off copy of the Anarchist Cookbook of mine that a friend printed off and gave to me at school. This was a bit after Columbine, which meant I probably was going to be expelled for this sort of thing. I was lucky that that particular teacher was the one who found it. She was a former Army officer and, at least in this instance, was a good judge of character. She sat me down, sternly told me that she did not have the slightest inclination that I was planning anything beyond teenaged mischief, but that I could never bring anything like this to school again. She explained that I would be expelled for this sort of thing and that essentially I owed her. While I was an honors student, I did have a rap sheet 1, which would've surely meant automatic expulsion. I was extremely lucky that that teacher was reasonable; most were not.

If NCLB did anything, it may've amplified the trend, but that trend has been going for quite some time, I suspect.

1: I had jumped a kid earlier in the year. He was making fun of the fact that I and several other boys had recently lost our fathers. We explained that if he kept it up, that we would kick his ass. He kept it up and we obliged. Maybe it was due to this being the South, but no administrator or adult told me that I did anything wrong per se, only that they had to suspend me for two weeks. The most condemnation I received was from my football coach who was upset that he had to lose a starting player for two games; he advised me to take the kid off campus in the future (so kidnapping and assault).

This sort of issue is why I am upset that Paypal has turned out to be a problematic company. The main problem I see for getting people to pay, who would want to pay, is that payment causes a hassle. Have a seemless micropayment option would facilitate people paying without the need to enter your financial information into yet another random site and perhaps also create an account. That extra effort just isn't worth it for many users and for me as well.

I've often wondered whether the micropayment option would provide sufficient revenue to online magazines as well. Rather than going with a paywall where you generally prepay for content, have an easy payment option. Every day I read articles that I'd gladly pay $0.10 or $0.50 for without pause. Asking me to prepay for content even for a provider that I like, e.g. foreignaffairs? Only a rare few sites will get that out of me.

Currently running or in production: Game of Thrones, Homeland, Louie, Boardwalk Empire and Breaking Bad (I can't personally vouch for it, but a lot of people whom I respect love it so I am quite confident that it is worth your time if you're remotely interested in watching good TV).

Ran in recent memory: The Wire (might be too pessimistic for your tastes but excellent nonetheless), The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Freaks and Geeks and Battlestar Galactica.

If you're interested in comedies then there are mounds more. Like with all things, there's a lot of crap with a few gems.

I don't know what measure you're using to claim that alcohol is the 'hardest' drug. This source certainly doesn't agree with you. And while there are a very small number of drugs that can directly kill an addiction during the withdrawal phase, alcohol isn't alone. Benzodiazepines and methadone are also in that group.

You do realize that sports books do not set lines with the intention of accurately predicting the outcome, right? They set lines to induce equal betting on both sides so that they make money from the vig. The final outcome plays a role in setting the line but other aspects weigh heavily, e.g. whether a team is a public team or whether one team had an overwhelming recent win that will weigh heavily in the minds of the public.

Also, the Packers weren't really very middle of the pack.

I didn't get that from the article and I don't see why you should presume that based on a popular press news article. The article seems to describe a bunch of techniques that they use to ferret out cheaters but each technique (which surely isn't an exhaustive list) surely isn't used on each test.

The metric of large gains is best used on tests like the GRE or LSAT where there is sufficient incentive for the test taker to be halfway competent to begin with so future scores are unlikely to be extraordinarily higher; contrary to what some believe, there are marginal returns on studying for tests like the GRE and LSAT. This is less effective for say a 8th grade remedial math test.

Whereas the metric of erased answers is useless for computer based tests like the GRE and much less useful on tests like the SAT where there isn't sufficient incentive for an individual to go behind the test-takers and change answers. There may be for teachers at elementary, middle and high schools where their merit pay can be linked to some test performance measure.

I agree that calories are calories

"A calorie is a calorie" violates the second law of thermodynamics.

The Mineral Miracle? Or a Massive Information Operation?.

The biggest tragedy (to me) about Africa is that the people there are left hanging between the two systems - hunter gatherer and civilized. They cannot go back, because due to our "humanitarian help" their numbers are too high.

Go back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle? Do you have any evidence for this? There are very few genuine hunter-gatherer tribes in Africa (Hadza, San, a few pygmy groups, and maybe a handful more). Colonization may've pushed some into an agriculturalist mode of production, but the powerful African kingdoms were doing that well before any European had ambitions of exploiting Africans. And since this story of agriculturalists pushing hunter-gatherers onto marginal land fits with the experience of every other geographic location, I have no reason to think that Africa would be unique and that European colonization is a particularly good explanation for this trend.

BTW, after seeing all the posts online about how many people hate the iPad even before it came out should have predicted it wouldn't sell at all - even though it seems to have sold pretty well so far. I guess their theory didn't predict that their theory failed. Oh wait, now that I've posted this it does predict it.

Did you get a representative sample? Or are you just voicing the opinion of a small group of tech blogs?