because I can't imagine the scenario in which they uncovered that plot by looking at the metadata from American cellphones.

You take a young researcher who has put 7 years into a PhD and 3 into a postdoc, have them write grants that on average grant 20% of applicants funding, and give them a mandate to publish or kiss their career goodbye. They can't take a chance on looking at a hypothesis that has a small chance of revolutionizing their field, because if it doesn't pan out they are screwed. So, the researcher chooses a hypothesis that is safe. They spend a year or two gathering data at great expense. Now, if that data comes back and is ambiguous there is a strong incentive to use the data set to test other hypotheses. The problem with that is eventually you find a hypothesis that gives significant results just by chance. Some of the solutions are to:

1. 1. Evaluate based on more than just publications. Look at what the scientist did, why they did it, and how they did it.
2. 2. Get journals to publish negative results. That way if you test a theory and find it is wrong, it still counts as successful research.
3. 3. Set aside 20% of research funds to fund replication of published studies. Right now there is no downside to publishing a result that is likely spurious because nobody is likely to figure it out for decades. If a researcher knows that there is a 20% chance his study will be replicated the following year it will make him very careful to do things right. Make reproducing experiments count toward career progression.
4. 4. Include grant applications with the papers that they produce. That way readers can see if the hypothesis tested in the paper is actually the one that the scientist set out to test. If not, there should be information on why and on how many alternate hypotheses were tested.

Actually, a lot of that delay was to try to accommodate Republican state legislatures and Governors in the hopes that they would step up to the plate and create state run exchanges. In my state (Michigan) the Republican Governor fought the Republican Legislature to be able to build our own exchange but lost.

So you are advocating that journalists keep all their data on computer because we all know that if data is encrypted that computers are impregnable fortresses of data security -NOT. When data brokerage services, hundreds of U.S. companies, the Iranian nuclear program, and banks are hacked, botnets run wild, not to mention the NSA spying I would argue that even if you had an IT security department you might be safer keeping only paper records.

E-mail is fundamentally insecure. SMTP is easily spoofed because it has no authentication mechanism. By default every message travels unencrypted and nobody bothers to correct that. I can not remember the last time I got an e-mail that was encrypted. Sure gmail may provide me with an ssl connection to read my mail but any message in my inbox could have bounced all over the net in the clear. Every large e-mail provider has been repeatedly hacked. If you have are using a set of insecure protocols with no encryption adding another possibly insecure service doesn't change things much.

Might be true but if you are a US corporation you should be more afraid of China since they are interested in stealing your trade secrets and handing it to their businesses:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/military/july-dec13/cybercrime_07-08.html

Despite all the revelations of NSA spying they are not gathering trade secrets and handing them to American companies. Since neither Cisco nor Huawei is focused on the consumer market your argument takes the wrong perspective.

If you read a bit more than the review article you find that scores on the test of scientific literacy they used is highly correlated with years of education. Since the tea party is heavily skewed toward older white males you'd expect them to have more years of education than the general population. Years of education was not controlled for.

Yes, but what you leave out is that he got an economy in freefall, because of a financial crisis so bad that his opponent (McCain) had to suspend his Presidential campaign to head back to Washington to vote on a bailout for the financial system (he even wanted to skip out on the debates). His predecessor had turned the Clinton surpluses into deficits with tax cuts and two wars. So, he started with huge deficits and an economy shedding about 200,000 jobs a month and had a choice between austerity and stimulus. He chose stimulus and now we have anemic job growth and deficits that are headed back down. I've been to Greece recently and am grateful that he didn't choose austerity. Now, faced with a weak economy the GOP is shutting down the Government because they can't repeal the Affordable Care Act and they'll shave a couple tenths of a percent off GDP growth, making deficit reduction that much harder.

I've seen both sides of this argument. I have seen companies try to replace a system and be unable to replicate the functionality that they need in a new system. On the other hand I've seen companies decide after trying to replicate poorly documented business rules in new software that they need to take a long hard look at all the rules and jettison most of the software customization that is unique to the business. Some of it is there for reasons that no longer apply. Some customization is no longer used. Some customization is counterproductive. The trick is to identify which customizations are worthwhile and having somebody at the top who says no to customization that isn't really necessary so that it doesn't grow endlessly. Ask yourself how different your business is and how critical the customization is. An IT guy, especially a new one needs to get buy in from the top because he will not be able to say no to requests to keep and add business rules.

Losing your credit card and getting a new number won't solve the problem because the ID thieves can just open an account or take out a loan in your name since they have your name, social security number, date of birth and all the other information a bank uses to confirm that the person opening the account is you.

Linked in claims that it won't send e-mail to your contacts on your behalf without your permission. What they don't say is that they won't send e-mail to their existing members that happen to be in your contact list. They also don't claim that they won't exploit the knowledge that I am both in your contact list and an existing member. So, I have had a number of e-mails and web pages that list a particular individual as "somebody you may know" because she once answered a classified ad from her yahoo address and linked in has access to her yahoo e-mail account. I am nearly certain that she never asked linked in to connect us; if she had the message from linked in would say "Person X has requested a connection." Instead, for three years they have kept suggesting that I may know person X, and given that I have no other connection than a couple of e-mails in response to an advertisement, they are exploiting her e-mail contacts in a way that they don't make clear to their users when they are granted access to e-mail accounts.

No worries, the more complex the product the more complex the printer will need to be and the less efficient doing it on a small scale will be. We could all produce many things at home now but we don't. In part, it is more efficient to produce things in mass quantities. Then there is the up front cost. In part it is the complexity of producing certain components. There is a reason IC plants are so expensive; you can't print a chip without a lot complex machinery, a specific environment, etc. So, even if somebody comes up with a printer that can print a laptop it will have a large up front cost, require maintenance, and not be cheaper than paying a company that specializes in making laptops for many decades to come.

There is a difference between spending money to come see me and sending me a check.

You are wrong on two fronts. First, there are plenty of scientifically documented benefits to music and arts education. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/science-sushi/2012/08/21/even-a-few-years-of-music-training-benefits-the-brain/ http://www.nasaa-arts.org/Research/Key-Topics/Arts-Education/critical-evidence.pdf Despite the overwhelming evidence, my son's school system just fired all their elementary school music, art, and PE teachers. http://www.nasaa-arts.org/Research/Key-Topics/Arts-Education/critical-evidence.pdf