Romney in 2012 made dramatic and what he thought would create shock value by promising 2$ a gallon gasoline. Obama actually saw 2$ gasoline for a brief period! Free market has a way of doing things no one predicted.

The current trend is 500 million new solar panels without any special action by any legislator/executive. Simple market forces and trend lines. Residential solar is becoming competitive with subsidies and net metering. Utility scale solar is on track to become competitive with natural gas in a few years. It is already competitive with coal for fresh installations. No new coal plant has come on line this year and last. The pipeline is dry too. Number of coal plants have fallen from 633 to 518 in the last decade. Coal has lost 20 GW of capacity in that time, and is on track to lose another 40 GW. Natural gas providing base load and solar meeting the peak load is going to become the norm in the next 10 years. No new breakthrough in energy storage, no battery wall made by Elon Musk, no widespread investment by home owners needed. Simple existing technologies, free market forces, interest rates and world flush with 2 trillion in capital not knowing where to invest for good returns.

So half billion new solar panels might happen no matter who wins, Hilary or Jeb! or Walker or Trump or Bernie. We might even look back and see Hilary's half a billion solar panels the same way we look at Romney's 2$ gasoline.

Creating a joke is truly a very creative innovative activity and jokes deserve full measure of copyright protection. Anecdotes are not data, but still: I have so far created less than 20 jokes in total in my life (if you don't count joining the threads like "Nate Silver is so geeky, when his code throws an exception, he catches it before the debugger").

Having said that, most people would like their jokes to be told again, if possible with attribution. So unless the creator has gone through the process of copyrighting the joke and enforcing it, it seems to be an overkill to enforce it suo motu.

We all know how this will end. It starts with noble intentions, and fancy presentations with large numbers like "500 million first world citizens" blah blah blah.

Then Germany and UK will claim Greece and Spain are free loading on the great programming created by their virtuous tax payers and demand that they too pay the wireless receiver license fees. Greek population will be limited to half an hour of TV per day and people will line up with their thumb drives in front of TV stations to download their daily quota of programs. Old pensioners without the stamina to stand at all those lines will break down and bawl like babies in front of the world TV cameras. CEOs of apparel hawking companies in USA will ship emergency supplies of programs....

Wonder why they insist on creating a fiscal/mercantile union without creating a political union. They envy the USA with its large market, but they don't seem to take the lessons of urban population putting up with the antics of Ted Cruz or the rural folks putting up with SCOTUS ruling on same sex marriages.

Yeah, we have a large unbroken market. And we paid for it in blood at places like Chancellorsville, the sunken road, the stone bridge, the corn field, multiple times at Manassas, Shiloh, Antietam, Vicksburg, Gettysburg...

The controversy does not seem to be related to evolution or anything about it. Looks like the specimen is in some private collection and it has only sketchy notes about the location of the find. Some suspicion that it was mined illegally and the real source location is obscured, either to avoid the law or to hide it from other fossil seekers. Thus dating of the fossil is confused and there is some speculation.

Title seems to be simple click bait meant to attract creationists and their opponents.

New York mayor Bill de Blasio pledged this week the mayors succeeding him will [to] reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent by 2030.

Thanks. Good the conspiring cabal caught their comeuppance.

What happened to the woman CEO of the airport? Looks like this guy was conspiring to replace her and discriminate against her because she was a woman. What happened to that more interesting thread?

These calls had a very apt descriptive term. Now they are calling pocket dialed calls? Is pocket the new euphemism for butt?

It is true, some surgeons who are willing to treat very difficult cases would be adversely graded. But shouldn't there be some mechanism to apply brakes to the aggressive treatment? Some patients, and some of the relatives will be seeking treatment even when the situation is utterly hopeless. There are incentives for the doctors and the hospitals to pursue aggressive treatment. So, under these circs, is it really bad these grades are making them reevaluate the cases and be more realistic about the prognosis?

If start giving grades to personal injury lawyers, it should have a salutary effect. All those risk averse simple lawyers who go for really egregious violations of doctors and companies would get good grade. Those irritating aggressive ambulance chasers would get lower grades.

The doctors are chumps to operate under these rules rigged by the lawyers.

It is bad, but not so bad. At least the connection resets after 2 minutes by default.

I naturally assumed Google maps would have some way to access the settings mid navigation. But in a typical desktop application I would have been confident that the application was not designed correctly. In the phone apps I am never sure. I keep thinking, "May be if click and hold there, or swipe here or pinch over there, the menu might appear".

I am a meta engineer, who optimizes the process of optimization. If the cost of doing the optimization is more than the potential benefits, don't optimize. The cost of thinking about optimization is more than any possible improvements you might achieve after the implementation, don't even think about it.

As it is I am struggling to use most features of a smart phone. I still have not figured out a reliable way to tell which parts of the screen is active and is clickable and which parts are not. For example, today I got into the Google maps directions in the "walking" mode. 13 hours of walking to destination. Could not find a way simply change from walk to car. I have seen the icon, I know it exists. But if you are already in walk mode, switching to car mode was very non-intuitive. I am sure hundreds of young slashdotters will follow up with variations of "I am not getting off your lawn, grandpa".

Now all the key features are through gestures? How are the available gestures indicated on the screen? Or we are expected to go through the entire routine of dressing in drags and doing a hoola? Is it left right left right up up down down A B A B or right left right left up up down down A B A B?