Rocket Scientists won't, not just because NASA isn't giving up on rockets, but because those are used by the military too. Astronauts might be SOL for a while though as we seem to be done with federally funding orbital missions and we're probably not technologically ready yet to do much else.

Not that there's anything wrong with the changes in NASA's focus so long as they aren't used as an excuse to defund the entire organization. Government organizations like NASA are at least in part about doing the things which won't be remotely profitable for another half a century after they've been discovered, and that means setting our sights a little higher.

Herd immunity is the idea that because everyone around you is immune it's very difficult for a pathogen to spread far enough to actually get to you. In some cases a virus can survive in extremely harsh conditions and be transported around without a host, but examples are fairly rare and the traits which allow this to occur are generally counter productive when it comes to easy infection.

Some very few viruses have been rendered genuinely extinct or would have been if military groups hadn't kept samples. Small pox for instance is, to the best of my knowledge, not naturally occurring in any human population in the world at this point in time. There's some of it frozen in a couple of labs, but there's no one out there with Small Pox right now. This happens when herd immunity extends to the general human population.

And of course the actual answer is that "Research is showing a correlation to the definition of autism as a disease and reported incidents of autism".

Anyone who has had any experience with people on the autism spectrum will recognize that these people are not new. Even the most extreme cases are not new. Go talk to your grand parents, don't ask them if they knew anyone who was autistic but describe the symptoms. It's a safe bet they knew someone like that when they were growing up.

We define new diseases which is great, but then when the number of cases increases dramatically over time we freak out as more people become capable of diagnosis.

Actually that's a pretty good analogy. Lead pipes caused some problems, but indoor plumbing and proper sanitation created much more significant benefits for public health. They were replaced with better pipes not removed entirely, and I would say that over the course of time their benefits have far outweighed their costs.

Immunizations also have some problems(though nowhere near as severe as lead pipes), but they also have massive benefits. My Aunt had polio. She was fairly lucky and it only caused her to go through torturous rehab and be in residual pain for the rest of her life, which is much better than paralysis or death. These days polio incidence in the western world is effectively zero. On the down side, modern immunizations have been causally linked to a few short term adverse reactions and the occasional incident which is more related to poor care than the vaccine. Responsible practitioners keep children for an hour or so after an immunization to deal with any reactions and the vast majority of the serious consequences for immunizations would have been prevented by this practice.

The link between autism and vaccines has not only been discredited on the basis of the science, it has also been conclusively proven that the doctor who performed the original study rigged his results.

There is hard science behind the benefits of immunization and belief in proven science is not fundamentalism. Belief in Jenny McCarthy whose greatest achievement in life has been posing naked, despite a mountain of scientific evidence refuting her BS however is.

Just because the value you choose to set $DEITY to is a poor one doesn't refute the value of the algorithm. Garbage in, Garbage out after all.

I often see the 1918 flu referenced this way, and it's true as far as it goes that this strain of flu had an inordinately high death toll compared to ordinary flu strains, but that isn't entirely because the flu strain was particularly lethal in and of itself. H1N1 was probably just as lethal in terms of the symptoms, but didn't have anywhere near the death toll. 1918 had a number of extenuating circumstances related to the war, general economic conditions, and the medical treatment available at the time.

TLDR: The flu can be dangerous, particularly for small children and the elderly and flu shots, particularly for people in these population groups are a good idea. However, just because the 1918 flu killed 100 million people doesn't mean that the same would happen today.

Because your "iTunes account" is your Apple Id, which is how you do everything with your iPhone/iPad/etc. Apple devices are not particularly enterprise friendly, but enterprise staff still want them, hence the adapt or die problem.

It's a trivial example certainly, given it's a recessive trait with a fairly simple gene pattern it's probably about the most trivial example you could take, much more so than this particular experiment. Nor was it my intention to imply they were similar, merely that selecting for an existing trait is fairly easy if you are rigorous enough in your selection processes.

That said, performing even the trivial human example could the first step along a continuum. After this point you have a population which is genetically different from the rest of the species. Evolution is a lot of little steps, maybe the blue eyed folks haven't evolved, but that's a little bit like looking at the moment a levee breaks and ignoring all the build of water that got you there. Generally speaking water doesn't just magically fill a damn or overflow a levee, the individual drops which get added may not make much difference, but when you're looking at a process of change, where do you draw the line? Do you count the original mutation, even if it may only have affected one individual? Do you wait until a unique population has been created(as would be the case with the blue eyed folks)? Do you not count it as evolution until there's a certain amount of difference from the baseline? Are you waiting for a new species? How do you determine where in a process of change that process has occurred?

Natural and artificial selection acts on all species all the time, a lot of the time it acts to keep things exactly the way they are, but that doesn't mean it's not acting. I'm arguing that there's a distinction between saying that something has "evolved" and the process of "evolution".

So some dickhead designer decides at the last second to retool an assembly line because either he made the wrong decision or is just a douche, 8000 people get woken up and shoved on a 12 hour shift and that's a good thing? We're applauding the fact that the Chinese are treated like slave labor now?

I'm not saying that the west hasn't gotten a little soft on entitlement lately, but really? We're going to applaud 12 hour shifts and zero work life balance as a great thing and we're going to call companies that want to operate like that great because they created a couple of entry level support positions at Telcos?

Apple make their products in Asia because their workers in Asia will work for almost nothing even taking into account cost of living differences. They treat those workers like machines which can be turned on and off at will and have no right to any kind of life outside of work(or even the ability to actually live away from work). They then sell those products to western consumers at western prices and pocket the difference, which given they're the most valuable company on earth must be a pretty big difference. They're assholes plain and simple, and when the Chinese workers get too up themselves and start asking for basic things like not working 12 hour shifts 7 days a week, or being able to get a good nights sleep, they'll move somewhere else.

Saying no to working 12 hours a day isn't lazy, it's being human, it's seeing your wife or husband and spending time with your kids, it's being involved in community activities. It's all the things we used to value in the US, but now consider to be lazy. Chinese workers don't do that because they want to or because they have some massive work ethic, they do it because they have no choice.

My point was in response to your comment that selecting for people with blue eyes wouldn't be evolution.

Evolution is the process by which differentiation occurs due to selection processes. Yes, taking a population of humans and killing or sterilizing everyone with a certain eye color is a rather pointless example, but you've changed the genetic makeup of that population. True you haven't created a new species, but evolution is the process of change, not just the end result. You don't just all of a sudden say "Oh, I've got a new species, now evolution has occurred."