I wonder ... how many other useful representations / arrangements there are of the periodic table.

A surprisingly large variety actually.

If a service does not charge you money the service will either 1) spy on you and sell your information, 2) bombard you with advertisement or 3) fail (or a combination of the three).

If you remove "If a service does not charge you money" from your statement, it is still true. I pay a monthly charge for my phone service plus an additional charge for every text message I send, but all that money I spent doesn't stop the phone company from logging my "metadata" and selling it to the government (and god knows who else). Whether you pay for a service with cash or ad views, you're just a vulnerable to spying. Stop focusing on how services are paid for and focus on who is controlling them. Controlling them yourself (e.g. running your own email server on hardware you control) is ultimately the best solution.

The opposite of Darwinism, yet teaching Darwinism is very high on their agenda. I've yet to figure out why those who most adamantly demand the teaching of Darwinism are those most against it's implementation.

A better question might be, why are those so opposed to teaching Darwinism, so keen on applying it outside of the biological realm (i.e. Social Darwinism)?

Moore's Law applies to the number of transistors in a chip. Just because you have found an increase in performance that did follow Moore's Law for a while does not mean that Moore's Law is somehow about flash memory. Therefore, when the increase no longer follows Moore's Law, it does NOT mean that Moore's Law has failed. The only thing that has failed is your own prediction that things other than the number of transistors would follow that curve.

So what do you think NAND flash is made of? Tiny spinning hard drives? Magnetic bubbles? Pixie dust? NAND flash is made of (you guessed it) transistors on chip. As such, it is perfectly reasonable to expect it to conform to Moore's law.

Wouldn't visual defects, such as myopia, or an excess of floaters, impact the results of this exam?

or blindness ("Your IQ is zero sir, but luckily your companion dog is smarter than Einstein!"). They've just replaced a culturally biased test with a visually biased one.

People have been 3-D printing buildings from natural materials available on site for thousands of years. Somehow they didn't need new IP protections. Other species have been doing it even longer.

Yeah, that sounds messy, but perhaps claiming a name could revolve around some sort of bitcoin style "mining" service. That would help prevent mass registration and squatting (At least to an extent)

That's such a good idea that I bet someone else already thought of it.

Tongue is straight-up delicious.

The best part is, while you're tasting it...it's tasting you!

I never cared for pinball on the PC or consoles; it just felt "wrong". But I recently tried Pinball Arcade on my Android tablet and I'm hooked. It must be the way you can lay the tablet flat the way a real pinball table is oriented instead of looking up at a vertical screen.

Productivity improvements are nothing new. They have been happening regularly since agriculture was invented 10,000 years ago. In the past the neither of the two scenarios you listed has happened.

Actually, productivity improvements in the past did result in shorter work weeks. In the late 19th century, most people worked 12 or more hours per day, 6 days a week. Henry Ford standardized on a five day work week in 1926 (unheard of at the time). FDR established a 40 hour work week as standard in 1938. Increased productivity used to mean shorter working hours, however from about 1980 onward, average working hours have actually increased, despite continual productivity increases. The gains from those productivity increases have been captured by the top 1% instead of being spread evenly through the population.

Actually you do. If you're given or are paid in Apple shares, you're taxed the value of the shares at the time you were given them. When you sell the shares, you pay additional taxes (or receive a tax credit) based on any differences in price from when you got them.

In the first instance, you'd pay income tax on the value of the shares; in the second case you'd pay capital gains tax on the increase in value. They are taxed at different rates and not convertible, which can be a problem. Say you worked at Blackberry and received shares as income when the stock was high. The company's stock value tanks and you are laid off. You have to sell your stocks to pay your income tax bill (on the high stock value), but you have to sell the stocks for pennies on the dollar. You can record a capital loss on your stocks but capital losses can only be used to offset capital gains, not income. In short, you're screwed.

The problem with keeping your savings in cash under the mattress is that it is being constantly eroded by inflation (unless you meant gold or silver coins). Bitcoin is a deflationary currency and thus avoids that problem over the long term (at least in theory).

I'm sure they work just as well as other Security Theater props like porno-scanners and face-recognition cameras. In fact, they probably have a lot lower rate of false positives.

There's a lot of comments floating around which say "when you install this this 3rd party start menu and make it boot straight to desktop, it's fine". What they are saying is that if you undo all the big ideas that were added in Windows 8 it's fine.

No, they're saying if you're someone who is resistant to change, you can easily revert the UI to work the way you are used to.

Given that this whole rumor is based on Microsoft ordering 1.5" touchscreens, I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that they're building a smartwatch. Since the WiiU and PS4 both have some kind of touch device in the controller, it's pretty much a given that the XBox720 (or whatever it's called) will also have one.