It must have been before recorded history. We have documented examples of such behavior for as long as we have documents.

Well, duh, they did it to verify that the people did give the "expected" answer most of the time. There are lots of scientific studies showing that something the "everyone knows" isn't actually true, so such beliefs are often worth actually testing. In this case, a number for what fraction of the people haven't a clue about DNA is interesting and potentially useful. It does put a lot of other such surveys in an "interesting" light.

Yeah, but there's no way to map the "middle" of the three top buttons to the middle mouse button - with on-board memory you can just swap the left and middle buttons...

Hey troll boy, learn how to read. The graphs explain precisely and exactly what I repeat time & time again to counter your general ignorance & obtuseness: OSX aggregates running tasks into blocks so that the CPUs can be put to sleep (and not just start transitioning only to transition back when an interrupt occurs). Linux has nothing like Grand Central, nor App-Nap, keeps getting interrupted & thus puts the CPUs into low power modes much less often.

I've said so in my first post in this thread, in my second post, in my third post, in my fourth post, ... I've detailed multiple times just how easily testable OS X's advantage over Linux is in battery time is but instead of performing the test yourself, you keep finding excuses.

The 50% added battery time has been tested & proven by everyone that has tried to run Linux on Macs. You say it's just me? Fine, point out even one recent site that has compared OSX & Linux battery duration on typical workloads. The test is trivial. Linux fails it every time. Thus I CAN know that OS X would be 50% more energy efficient than Linus is, because I have tested how Linux compares to OS X.

People talk about the Apple reality distortion field. You have a Linus distortion field that prevents you from parsing simple phrases & understanding simple graphs.

It's only apt to blame Bush if you chose to ignore Obama's mistakes. But of course Obama won the NPP so for people like you, he can do no wrong. Bush's actions had repercussions, but the rise to power of IS is almost purely Obama's responsibility.

Obama, by cutting and running - getting out as fast as he could, surrendered sovereignty to the Al-Maliki Shiite government who promptly declared the heads of the allied Sunni tribes terrorists and refused to integrate the sunni tribal members (as promised) into the national army nor continue to pay them to combat AQ. The allied tribesmen and the troop surge (criticized by Obama as sending more troops into a lost cause) that broke AQ in Iraq. It was Obama's abandonment of the Sunnis that what created the power vacuum that created IS. Had Obama not abandoned the Sunni tribesmen and forced Al-Maliki to respect the promises given to the Sunnis there would be no IS.

Oh sure, Obama is the prince of peace. He won the NPP, closed Guantanamo & left Iraq in a state capable of dealing with IS.

By cutting and running Obama abandoned the partnership with the Sunni tribes that were the main reason violence in Iraq went down to the level it did as Obama took office. In doing so, Obama created the power vacuum that birthed ISIS. But of course some will blame Bush for everything bad in the world.

Like send the Colorado congressional delegation to attack SpaceX for no particularly good reason. ULA has a large operation in Denver and they pay Colorado Republicans handsomely.

Meh. I took two years of chemistry in high school (second was AP). It was okay, and I suppose it's been marginally useful. I'm not sure everyone needs more chemistry than is taught in seventh and eighth grade science class, though... atoms and molecules, a bit about chemical reactions, an overview of the periodic table, including a basic notion of what the columns mean, a brief discussion of the ideal gas law, etc. I think that's sufficient for most. Stoichiometry, understanding valence shells, etc... not so much. The general structure is crucial. The details, including the construction of chemical names, really isn't.

What's more important, and not taught very well at all, is the theory and operation of the scientific method as a whole. I discovered a while ago that my wife -- who has a BS in biology and taught junior and high school science -- didn't really understand the scientific method. Specifically, she didn't understand the distinction between hypothesis and prediction, or why it matters, and didn't fully understand the critical nature of falsifiability and its implication that science is and always will be a series of successive approximations to the truth, never achieving perfect truth, yet being by far the most effective tool we have for getting ever closer to it.

The AC addressed this point quite well, so I'll let his comment stand.

Your reading comprehension needs work, then. But I'll summarize: I was agreeing with you.

I don't think it's that bad. I think this is "Dihydrogen Monoxide" trickery, only a slightly subtler form.

The dihydrogen monoxide trickery is using an unfamiliar name for a familiar substance. Unless you've taken some chemisty and know how to parse "dihydrogen monoxide" as "a molecule consisting of two hydrogen and one oxygen atoms", you don't realize it's water and the selective quotes, presented in a context that implies that the speaker/writer is a reasonably-intelligent person who genuinely believes there is a risk, obviously causes listeners to assume that it's dangerous.

A really essential part of the joke/scam is the fact that the speaker/writer appears to be intelligent and sincere. It's a social engineering scam, relying on the fact that most people are intelligent and sincere (the slashdot elitist tendency to assume general stupidity notwithstanding) and that therefore absent some sort of contraindications people tend to believe other people, because that's what makes society work.

In this case, I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of the 80% who were confused actually know perfectly well what DNA is, and fully understand that most of our food contains it because most of our food is made from living organisms. And they understand that children get their DNA from their parents, including their mother.

But the way this is presented strongly implies that the topic of discussion is some other DNA, which is not supposed to be in the food and can have some sort of deleterious effect, and that warning labels might be useful. Further, the similarity of the ratio with those who support labeling of GMO foods indicates that the presentation may have caused the respondents to conflate the question with one about GMO. Some of them might even have assumed that the survey was in error and intended to ask about GMO foods and answered in the affirmative while shaking their heads about the cluelessness of the survey author. The apparent intelligence and sincerity of the speaker motivates people to believe there's a real issue, rather than this being a joke or a trick.

So I suspect that the 80/20 split here is less an artifact of education levels than it is an artifact of the distribution of different personality types. To what degree are you skeptical of scientific-sounding claims that are presented to you as factual? And how willing are you to lend your support to crusades pushed by apparently well-intentioned people, particularly when they appear to have little, if any, downside? The suggestion that the action to be taken is just labeling makes this a relatively low-impact campaign, even if successful, so the cost to society is low, and the cost to the survey respondent is nearly zero. In that sort of situation, many people will agree merely to be agreeable, regardless of their opinion on the issue.

I'm feeling pedantic this morning: The correct English plural of virus is viruses. In Latin the word is a mass noun, which means that the notion of a plural form didn't make any sense. In modern times we've applied a new definition which does allow for sensible pluralization, but historical Latin writings give us no clue about how to pluralize it. The most probable forms, though would be "vira" and "viri", not "virii". In English, though, the word is viruses.

It's ridiculous to assume that the mechanisms of selective breeding, where the changes originate in random mutations -- often accelerated by the use of mutagens -- plus random viral- and bacterial-vectored transgenic splicing, is somehow safer than deliberately-engineered splicing. It's like expecting that a bridge created by a fallen tree is more trustworthy than a manmade construct.

Has world peace made a major step forward in the years Obama has been President? No. In fact by abandoning Iraq before they were ready Obama fostered the Islamic State which we will be spending the next few presidencies working on.

Obama was indeed handed the NPP for not being Bush but that says more about the NPP's political leanings and how irrelevant the NPP is than anything else.

Oh look at you, trying to climb all the way up onto that high, high horse...

You badly paraphrase gizmo and try to throw dirt on him by equating his remark that women often use sex appeal with "she deserved it".

"well sure" versus RAPIST, hmmm, which carries the most weight? You have to be pretty stupid to not realize which is the stronger term, which is why you don't throw around "she deserved it" or RAPIST casually like you did.

Reread the post that you replied to. Nowhere did Gizmo say "she deserved it" That's all in YOUR mind.

Of course not. The main cost of living difference is housing. By way of example, consider me (I live in the Mountain West; Utah) and one of my colleagues (in Sunnyvale, CA). He bought a house last year for $1.2M. If I bought a comparable house in my area, it would be maybe $150K, probably less. My $400K house would cost at least $7-8M in the bay area. His house cost so much that he can't make the mortgage payments on his (fairly nice, by most standards) Google salary, so he actually rents out his master bedroom to make ends meet. He rents that one bedroom and attached bathroom out for not much less than it would cost to rent my whole 4000 square foot house.

The two of us make similar incomes. This means that while Amazon charges us the same, I have substantially more disposable income to spend (or would, if it weren't for my kids).