I would suspect alcohol also has an undesirable effect on high school graduation rates.

CD and 32x were addons, not separate systems in their own right.

Honestly given that the Sega CD and 32X could be used in conjunction with each other, they should have released the Saturn as a standalone Sega 32X CD system.

Dreamcast had some issues that were hard to overcome that weren't just marketing related.

1. The proprietary "GD-ROM" disc format. 1GB of storage space which was a fraction of what PS2 had with DVD's. It also didn't let people play DVD movies at a time when DVD movie players were still expensive.

2. Incredibly easy piracy. Most of the games targeted for GD-ROM's were capable of fitting on a regular CD, and people figured out how to make easily burnable pirated games without even needing a modchip.

#2 was a fluke, but #1 was just a bad decision in general. I honestly think if Dreamcast had shipped with a DVD drive Sega would still be making hardware.

In the first link he says to get vaccinated; and he's only wrong if you look at it from a libertarian political perspective. In the second he says that TV weathermen should once in a while mention that a heavy storm is "consistent" with climate change (not "caused by"). That's a typical denier tactic is to imply that since we don't know which individual storms were worsened by climate change, then we can safely say that none of them were. That's exactly what Marsha Blackburn said in that video.

Quite true. Last spring I went to the US (Indiana and Texas) from Iceland with my then-fiance to show him where I grew up and went to school (he grew up in Iceland). It was too bright for him in Indiana, and in Texas it was downright painful for him.

We don't get much of that "sun beating down straight overhead" stuff here that you get in the states, it more sort of rotates around you, with really long sunrises / sunsets (sometimes with multiple sunrises / sunsets in a day as it moves past mountains).

Waaah. I live in Iceland, don't complain to me about a lack of winter sunlight.

I wasn't excusing anything - I don't support any geoengineering that works by increasing the albedo, for many different reasons. But it's simply fact that a large portion of the world's people live in areas that get proportionally little sun. And contrary to myth, they don't have higher suicide rates or anything like that.

The US (where many if not most slashdotters live) is actually an unusually sunny country, by first-world standards. Even Seattle is sunnier than Berlin, which is sunnier than London, which is sunnier than Glasgow...

Germans are sort of polite, but they have some anoyingly stupid habits that I've only seen here:

1.) When a train stops, those wanting to get on will group around the doors and give those wanting to get of a hard time in doing so. It's a site like from a Monty Python sketch. Like sheep you often have to shove them aside. I've resolved to boldly stepping straight out and onto the feet of anybody standing smack in the middle of the way and making loud suggestions on how to organise things so the people getting off can do so quickly for the benefit of all.

2.) Blocking the left side of escalators. Really annoying! I recently was to belgium and was astonished how orderly people standing on an escalator would move to the right side, so that people could walk on the left side. I was so astonished I pulled out my camera and took a series of pictures of this "phenomenon". ... Not so in Germany. Regularly people will stop and stand wherever they like to, no matter if they're blocking the way or not. I've resolved to the habit of just about stepping on peoples heels and breathing into their ear if they're unneccessarily blocking the way. Stupid remarks are riposted with witty "... or you could just stand on the right side just like everybody else in every other country on the planet." ... Usually shuts them up. I've actually seen people embarassed because of this. Good.

3.) As for people mindlessly tumbling about with their smartphones and earplugs: That annoys me greatly, especially in public spaces that are crowded and where you have to expect frequent social interaction, like on a crowded trainstation during rush-hour. ... Take out your f*cking earplugs and put them in when you've found your place on the train, for goodness sake! Nowadays, whenever I try to address someone and he doesn't listen because of earplugs and/or audio cranked up to max, I usually just push or pull them aside gently. Some are so zoned out they're actually OK with that. ... Guess electronic escapisim is shaping our social interaction in that way too.

Yeah, a lot of people already live in the sort of environments that they're warning against. This line got me:

And the sky is one of the few sources of that experience that's available to almost everybody

Is that a joke? People's ability to see the night sky varies vastly depending on where they are. In big metro area, all you can see are the brightest of stars. There's little to no majesty to it. It's when you get out into the deep, deep countryside and look up at the uncountable multitude above you that you feel little and insignificant compared to the cosmos around you. There's nothing universal about ready access to a dark sky. And it's getting rarer and rarer.

If they create an exchange with a current crypto currency and conver all their money to it except what is needed from day to day, then drop out of the Eurozone and create their own dollar, each crypto dollar will be the value of the crypto currency used.

Sorry, but unless there's hard assets behind it, it's going to float. And the float will be way down, just the same as any other Greek currency. Greece's creditors and exporters don't want New Drachmas, CryptoDrachmas, or anything of the sort: they want dollars and euros. To get dollars and euros, Greece has to make and export goods and services at a rate competitive with their rate of imports. For their government to get dollars and euros, they actually have to stamp out corruption, tax evasion, and so forth. Greece's inability to do these things is the reason they're in the bind they are today.

You mean this article? Albeit the summary was poor, but it covers the firmware hacking.

And FYI, if anyone actually takes the time to read the Kaspersky report they'd catch that the infection is believed to have been done on thousands to tens of thousands of computers, NOT "most HDDs". The firmware has the capability to infect most HDDs, but most HDDs are not infected - according to the very source report itself.

Which should be obvious. Because if you're the NSA and you're writing a super-infection to use against top-level targets, the last thing you want to do is have it on every last computer in the world, increasing your likelihood of being found by many orders of magnitude. The NSA's preferred method of infection is interdiction - intercepting objects while in transit to targets, such as CDs or hard drives, infecting them, then letting them continue on their way.

Once again, the NSA doesn't give a rat's arse if you're going to the Pirate Bay to download I Am Legend. It has far more important things to worry about, like people building atomic bombs and invading other countries.

Actually I don't think this characterizes Nye's position at all (and the article summary sucks BTW). On a show with him, Marsha Blackburn said that "I think that Bill would probably agree with this, neither he nor I am a climate scientist. He is an engineer and actor, and I am a member of Congress, and what we have to do is look at the information we get from climate scientists." He responded that "you don't need a PhD in climate science to understand what's going on". It seems a distortion to say that he thinks "only the high priests of science should be allowed to say anything," only that you need to be scientifically literate.

You originally said that to be consistent, if I shout down someone who says X is true, I should also shout down someone who says X is false. I didn't need to bring up "authority" at all to point out what a dumb statement that was.

BTW, this was also wrong:

Consensus is part of the scientific method. You come up with a theory, test it with an experiment, publish your conclusion, and subject it to peer review where it may or may not gain consensus.

I assume you're talking about this.

That "petition" was a hoax.

"The simpleton's theory is usually correct."

Yes, be consistent... if you shout down people who are wrong, you should also shout down people who are right.