The problem is not analytics. The problem is that the analytics are applied exclusively to what will sell more games, and not to what makes better games. Obviously, they have to devote some or perhaps even most to selling more games, but they should devote at least some time and effort into making better games.

Decisions made in the absence of evidence will almost never be better than evidence-based decisions. That's why when you get sick you go to a doctor instead of a shaman.

I for one hope those redneck douchebags secede again. I for one will support their secession movement in any way that I can.

...is that if you want to reduce prostitution, the most effective thing is to stop going after the prostitutes and start going after the customers.

If you want to combat prostitution, Sweden showed the most effective way. Stop prosecuting prostitutes altogether (in most cases they are the victims) and go after the Johns aggressively. After you have convictions for the Johns, then publish their names.

...believed in a "personal god", which includes but is not limited to Christianity.

Evidence of alterations come from textual analysis. For example, some of the alterations use phrases that were in use much later than the stories were supposedly written down.

People have been talking off and on about how to bring science to poorer nations that necessarily deal with very small budgets. This is more about helping people in those poorer nations (giving smart kids in those nations something to strive for) than about making science better, although it does help with science advocacy among the global population.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/19/science/small-telescope-helps-make-big-discovery.html?_r=0

I'm going to assume that you are making assumptions based on other fantasy novels and games, but in the World of Warcraft, orcs are not inherently evil. Some of them are good, some of them are bad, just like any other mortal race on Azeroth. [TONGUEINCHEEK]Gnomes on the other hand, clearly are evil in the World of Warcraft universe.[/TONGUEINCHEEK]

Just because you like and dislike people based solely on their party designation, it does not follow that everyone else must be doing the same thing. Believe it or not, there are perfectly legitimate reasons to dislike Romney, hard though that may be for you to fathom.

If I may return to the topic of the original post, this doesn't exactly mean very much. Torvalds seems to launch expletive-laden diatribes in every direction. Sometimes his tirades are right on the money and sometimes they miss the mark by a very wide margin. The simple fact that Torvalds directed a bunch of expletives at Romney doesn't tell you a thing about Romney himself.

If the Higgs field is "disturbingly like" the luminiferous aether theory, then so are electromagnetic fields. :p

Burn the heretic! Burn! Death to the heathen infidels! Burn! *chews on desk, mouth frothing* ;)

90% of scientists from the relevant field as well as 90% of all scientists agree with anthropogenic climate change. In the world of science, this is what we call a "scientific consensus" and it's a pretty overwhelming one at that. If man is indeed affecting the climate, then at the very least we can reduce the things we are doing that affect it.

I can never get over just how fervent the climate change denialist religion is. On one side of the argument, we have 90% of all scientists, representing every conceivable nationality, set of political views, economic status, and funding source. On the other side of the argument, we have a small group of "scientists" from a single political ideology from a narrow range of customers all of whom draw their paychecks from oil companies, coal companies, and/or right wing think tanks. The most prominent, most published, most cited member of this group is someone either so incompetent he literally doesn't know degrees from radians, or is a staggeringly deceitful fraudster.

http://crookedtimber.org/2004/08/25/mckitrick-mucks-it-up/

Based on work of this quality, millions of conservolibertarians have concluded that 90% of the scientists in the world are participating in a vast and incredibly complex conspiracy to... what? Make American rightists feel bad? Conservolibertarians never seem to be very clear on the goals of this massive and complex international supposed-conspiracy.

Ah well. Once someone adopts a religious view, they will cling to it no matter what evidence is presented to them.

But the reason this has traction is that Microsoft has a long history of doing sleazy things to undermine those it considers competition. I do think Microsoft has improved in this regard and finally understands how it hurts their public perception when they do underhanded things to competitors, but the public still remembers how Microsoft used to be, and you can't really blame people for jumping to these particular conclusions. If Microsoft hasn't done so many things like this in the past, then stories like this wouldn't gain traction without firmer evidence to back it up.

Look, I'm a liberal, and I found this to be funny. He was pretending to be from Microsoft and was pretending to be a FOX News zombie, and in that character he listed off a bunch of phrases that any conservolibertarian might want to block for fear that any site using such a phrase might also contain information contrary to the usual right wing propaganda. I do not believe the author's intent was to offer any actual commentary on any of the phrases nor was there any intent in trivializing any of the issues associated with those phrases. It was simply a list of phrases likely to make a right wingnut fearful and/or angry.

The target of this humor was Microsoft and to a lesser extent conservolibertarians. I do not think any slight to the severity of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was intended.