Never ascribe to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest. She's not disconnected from reality, she's trying to disconnect you and me from reality.

She doesn't seem to be very good at it.

Nonsense rationalization.
Part of what makes a sport a sport is the consistency of competition.
Do you see Germany playing with different-sized soccer goals than Brazil? Do you see Finnish hockey played with golf clubs? To use your example, do you change the number of pins based on the bowler?

Of course not. The idea would be absurd.

To then put the rules and standards at the whim of the populace is crass and ridiculous, tantamount to making a motor-race more like a racing version America's Got Talent where 'viewer votes' materially affect the outcome.

Let's say Danica Patrick joins the ePrix. She promises to drive topless if she wins the vote, and does, beating the next-best driver by 0.05 seconds. Did she win because she was a better driver, then? Or because she had tits and was willing to show them? Maybe Kim Kardashian could join the next race and really make it competitive?

I don't know about you, but I'm frankly uninterested in any 'sporting' contest in which the victor is decided by who prompts more slavering fans to call in. That's no longer a "sport" but merely "celebrity".

Any crime perpetrated by someone held responsible for the victim or subject by reasonable judgement shall be tried and sentenced as escalated one step more severe than the normal context of the crime, according to the following list:
infraction -> misdemeanor -> gross misdemeanor -> felony -> capital crime.

Therefore, while "beating someone up" might be a gross misdemeanor assault in the eyes of the law, when performed by a custodial parent on their child, or a nursing attendant on one of their wards, it would be considered a felony.
Petty theft of $100 might be a misdemeanor, but when it's done by someone in custody of the cash drawer, it's a gross misdemeanor.
By this standard, however, sitting members of Congress and the President could be considered to be "responsible" for the entire country, and thus automatically always escalated.

Yeah, I just *hate* haters, don't you? /irony.

You might want to review http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-...

But here's the key: When a Scientologist (or Muslim, or Christian, or yoga enthusiast) says it works for them, this is what they're talking about. The mythology isn't important -- if these rituals have saved your life and later on a teacher says, "Yeah, this technique works because of the ancient thetans that live in your *******," you're going to shrug and say, "Sure, sounds good." If you tell the lady in yoga class that the reason she feels better afterward is because negative spiritual energies tend to pool in the hip joints, you'll get the same reaction.

Then if you, as a cool, rational person, butt in and say, "Actually, yoga is just engaging the endonomic nervous system and reducing cortisol levels," all they're going to hear is you replacing a very easy-to-understand explanation with a very complicated one that sounds like gibberish. If you smirk and roll your eyes at these gullible lemmings, then go grab a mirror and smirk at yourself, partner, because you do it too.

You physically don't have room in your brain to keep track of how everything in your world works (****, you don't even really know how your brain works) so you can feel all superior to a Christian who doesn't believe in evolution, but somewhere there's an engineer who feels superior to you for not knowing how your iPhone works (and you know "endonomic nervous system" is just a nonsense phrase I made up, right?). The reality is that you don't know how your iPhone works because knowing that wouldn't change your day-to-day use of it at all. Likewise, thinking the Earth is only 6,000 years old doesn't make it any harder to have, say, a career-repairing air conditioner. But believing that self-discipline, patience, and hard work are sacred virtues from God definitely makes it easier.

And if you look hard enough, you'll see that this flaw -- favoring what works to the exclusion of everything else -- encompasses everybody. The compulsive liar got to be that way because it works. So did the bully, the racist, and the greedy bastard. And every single cult, hate group, or political party has figured out that you can ensnare people by gluing the weird parts onto a bunch of common sense axioms that nobody can disagree with.

At some point your freedoms will clash with my freedoms. Who wins then, Tim?

For every person demanding that kids be taught that homosexuality is normal and natural and thus should be accepted by all (as proved by its persistence throughout history despite brutal efforts to suppress it), I'd like to submit that we - using the same criteria - teach that murder, rape, and war are LIKEWISE "normal" and "natural".

Oh wait, one is obviously "good", the other obviously "bad"? Some people might assert that homosexuality is biologically deviant and phylogenically a waste of resources, while war culls the weak.

(I'll just point out that even composing this post and the examples above was an intellectually challenging exercise, but the moment we don't TRY to understand the viewpoint of our ideological opposite - who likely has the same moral stance, just a different set of facts/priorities/filters - our arguments are bankrupt.)

Personally, I believe that racists, and homophobes, and sexists should be allowed to just do what they want, and be who they are, as long as they don't actually harm anyone. If they want to refuse service in their business, that's a commercial decision they can make, and can cheerfully live with the consequences of that choice - I mean, it's not like the internet would make it simple for the world to be informed of these choices, and the marketplace - the true democracy, with people casting votes they actually care about with their $ - can vote on whether it's anathema or ok.

If the racing guys can't figure out how to give electric cars a reasonable range with their budgets and top-end engineering skills, then no, electric cars are NOT READY FOR PRIME TIME.

Besides, WTF is this:
"...Although power is limited to 150 kW during the race, three drivers are actually able to use 180 kW for up to five seconds. This is called the FanBoost, as fans vote online for their favorite drivers in the hours before the race. This extra slug of energy can come in handy to overtake or defend against a rival, although obviously it will drain the battery even faster than normal...."
This is absolutely idiotic. It would be like fans voting which batter can take an extra strike, or if a team gets an extra down in (American) football. Who comes up with this crap?

Of COURSE it isn't sufficient.

When - ever - has an activist said "yeah, well, what's being done is pretty much good, yeah. I'm happy. I guess I don't have much to be upset about any more"?

Here's a hint: if there's one thing I can guarantee the climate won't do, is be static.

So much this.
If that single factor (be it "Xmbps broadband", or "no cat dander" or view of the fucking Eiffel tower) is the controlling factor of whether you can live in a house or not, then just put it in the closing documents as a contingency.

Done.

Not one line of new regulations or laws required.

"I've watched every episode of Top Gear since Clarkson joined the programme. I like him as a presenter. But I see him now for what he really is"

Seriously, I find Clarkson amusing, but if you are only just now figuring out that he's an arrogant, narcissistic prick, I'm not sure if you really even saw a single episode?

"You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time," and that's all a politician needs.

I don't vote party, except that I avoid both D and R whenever there's a candidate who doesn't want to put half the people I know in prison for smoking pot.

If anyone but Bruce Rauner had run against Quinn I would have voted for the Republican, becuase Quinn just wasn't a good governor. I think Rauner will be even worse, maybe even as bad as Ryan(R) or Blago(D), both were crooks. I don't know if Rauner is a crook but his policies are terrible. There were only two named on the ballot, so it was indeed a choice between two evils.

Look, Republicans are against the Social Security I paid into all my life and am now enjoying, against unions, without which I would have no pension, against the single payer health care system which has countries with it in place enjoying half the costs we face with far less infant mortality and longer life spans (Obamacare is really Romneycare in disguise); against the Medicare I again paid into and will get in a couple of years; against food stamps (that's simply un-Christian, yet they claim to be Christians?); against taxes (again, an un-Christian stance). Tell me, what Democrat views that the Republicans don't share are detrimental to me, a middle class retired guy?

But both parties are against pot legalization, for our insanely long copyrights, and quite a few more where there really isn't a valid choice.

Well, when a child says bye-bye, it sounds like a contraction (b'bye), but bye-bye is not a contraction. It's more like Cory Doctorow spells sidewalk: side-walk. Wnat contraction uses a hyphen instead of an apostrophe? Not bye-bye, it isn't a contraction of anything.

As to "SyFy", that's a trademark, not a word. It only applies to that bad cable channel. Hi-fi and sci-fi aren't contractions of high fidelity and science fiction, but new words made out of old ones.

I guess that could argue the validity of e-mail and e-books, though.

This paper, and its conclusion seems remarkably premature.

The study starts with the assertion "The statistics of extrasolar planetary systems indicate that the default mode of planet formation generates planets with orbital periods shorter than 100 days and masses substantially exceeding that of the Earth. "

That's a pretty substantial, definitive statement right there. Yet, two of the very basic rules of statistical analysis are collection bias and contextual sample size.

In reverse order, then, first we're looking at a TEENY sample of systems, given the potential population. This is quite literally, taking a drop of water from the ocean and drawing massive, systemic conclusions therefrom. Now, one could even perhaps make such conclusions decisively from a small sample if one could be sure that one's sample was representative - leading to a Godel's Theorem sort of problem in which you can't know enough about your sample to be sure that it's representative without knowing more about the context, which implies a larger sample anyway. Our testing methods allow reasonably certain detection (of a minimum size, more on that later) to what, the nearest 40,000 stellar candidates? That's 4/100,000ths of 1%. Do we know that our system is 'typical'? Do we know our stellar neighborhood, the Orion arm, or even the Milky Way is 'typical'? Without knowing that, we can hardly be categorical that our pinprick of data is at all representative of everything else, even relatively nearby.

Second, and I believe more important, is selection bias. We have a number of different methods to detect planets today, but I think it's relatively accepted that we're still in the very early stages, where our methods are - at best - looking through a glass darkly. If your methods can only detect relatively major stellar motions (requiring massive perturbing bodies) or gross dips in luminosity (consequential of substantial occlusion taking place) then logically all the samples you'll get are large. It's like casting a 1" crid net into the ocean, and concluding that none of the fish out there are less than 1" long