Yay, more info to make the liberals and eco-crazies tell the rest of us how we must live in order to save the planet at the expense of our bank account and/or our comfort. We are more worried about the so-called issues the polar bears are experiencing than we are about the million babies aborted each year, which is REAL, not propaganda. Anyone who believes this is actionable info has their priorities messed up.

I'm in north central wv as well. I was outside from 5 to 930 and saw nothing but the usual stars.

This is supposed to be a phone I can carry in my pocket not a home theater in my pocket. I'm not an Android fan anyway but I wouldn't want any phone to have a 5" screen because I'm not going to use it to watch TV/movies. Granted, I watch youtube videos sometimes on my iphone 5 but I don't need a 5" screen to do that nor would I want one. It wouldn't fit comfortably in my pocket.

Not only is it a distraction but it isn't worth focusing on.

Many minimum wage workers begin getting raises within their first year or so of employment because they prove to be valuable assets to their employer and therefore their employer wants to reward them for their loyalty, productivity, and potentially a growth in skill set. This is how people move up the ladder. Minimum wage jobs are intended to be entry-level jobs. That's why they pay the lowest amount possible. They aren't intended to be careers but rather jobs that people entering the workforce can acquire due to their limited, or in some cases non-existent, skill set. This also means that many of the minimum wage workers are teenagers who don't have a family to feed and live at home. This means they don't need a high minimum wage due to their lack of responsibility to others. Their lack of skill set also doesn't justify starting out at a high wage.

So based on those statements, there isn't that many people left who are actually making just minimum wage after a year of employment who actually need a much higher wage due to having to support a family. So with that said, does raising the minimum wage for EVERYONE justify raising it for the very small subset of people who happen to be using the minimum wage job to support a family? No, it doesn't. A small subset of people will find themselves relying on a minimum wage job, sometimes to support their families, in the cases where they were laid off and couldn't find anything else or for those people who are near the end of retirement. Even if someone possesses a master's degree or has IT skills, those skills don't matter when flipping burgers, so someone who used to make $50k but got laid off and then who complains that they need $20/hr at McDonald's to support their family of 4 may as well expect to never get by with that job. There will be people who will work for less because they don't need to support a family because they are just a teenager who is applying for that job because it is indeed an entry-level job that requires no skills.

This doesn't mean I don't have compassion for those who need to support their families. If I didn't have compassion then I'd advocate making minimum wage $50/hr so that people making hamburgers and cashiers at walmart can get $100k a year just like other people who actually *have* skills deserving of $100k a year. But I understand economics too. I understand that if you keep having to pay someone more and more and not get anything more out of them for that higher cost (as in, more skills, more productivity, etc.) then they are more of a liability than an asset. Eventually, an employer will let that person go and make do with the other employees, OR, they will raise prices in order to still try earning profit in order to prevent the ENTIRE BUSINESS from collapsing due to employee costs that end up outweighing revenue thus equating to a loss of money. If that goes on for too long then the business closes up shop. THEN EVERYONE LOSES. So why would we want that?

Now, an employer who recognizes an employee is an asset, will move the employee to a higher paying position with MORE responsibility. But the original minimum wage job must still exist because there is still the need to have unskilled labor. There is nothing wrong with that. Kids and adults alike need to understand that there is a job for everyone; they are all important. I have worked my way up the salary ladder. I didn't expect $20/hr as a dishwasher. I knew I had to work my way up. For those who say, "but inflation makes things cost more". True, but you can thank the gov't (notice I didn't point to a specific president because there isn't one) for printing money that causes it to be worth less and therefore makes oil cost more and therefore fuel costs more. But when we raise the minimum wage they are just feeding the inflation fire because, as I said above, employers not only then have to contend with rising fuel costs (due to inflation and supply/demand changing) but now they have to continue their profit margin by raising their prices to account for having to pay employees more who don't deserve it (much like a union where the union fights to get wage increases for EVERYONE, whether they deserve it or not).

So when we raise minimum wage to $10.25/hr or whatever it goes to, expect the fast food restaurants and other businesses that rely on those types of workers to either raise prices (again), lay off those employees (unemployment jumps back to 9%+) or do both. Then the teenagers who are still able to work will have to spend the extra money they make on the higher priced food they buy at those same businesses when they go out with their friends. The end result? The minimum wage workers don't have any net gain because the extra money is needed to now pay for the items that cost more to make up for their higher wage BUT now many more of them are laid off, making the absolute minimum wage of $0 / hr. And who can we thank? The liberals who believe that everyone should be earning the same amount of money regardless of their skill set.

When San Francisco raised their local minimum wage to $10.25/hr a while back the Subway restaurants in the area had to stop offering their $5 footlong deals because they were losing money on them. That is just a relatively benign result of rising employee costs. In addition, many restaurants have already announced they are cutting back worker hours to about 30-32 hours in order to avoid having to pay health insurance costs for them under Obamacare. Of course, some of those businesses just outright laid off workers. So Obama has forced the hand of businesses to lay off more people at a time when a record number of people are already on food stamps and while we're still battling an unemployment rate that is the same as it was 4 years ago when he first entered office. He has made no progress in that regard and yet we voted him back in.

to gather information to 'one-up' your competition or to make yourself look good to your friends then you aren't very good. And in this case, breaking the law by breaking into companies is cheating.

I was a gov't contractor for 8 years and worked in small cube farms (when at the contractor facility) but eventually got located to the actual gov't facility where 3k+ people worked. There were certainly distractions in both situations due to people (including myself) talking to their coworkers about certain things, not always work related. Our work still got completed. However, given the nature of our projects where we had project mgmt, software engineering, system engineering (me), integration and testing, and the infrastructure teams all working together every day, we needed that face time where 2 or 3 of us would sometimes have ad-hoc meetings to hash out some issue that cropped up that involved using a whiteboard.

Fast forward through about 3-4 years of being onsite with the customer to when I took a job with a silicon valley company (I live on the East Coast). The first year of that position I was actually assigned to be an onsite tech for the same gov't agency and in the same facility I had been working as a contractor for the last 8 years. So not much changed. The contract expired last year and hasn't been renewed yet. So the plan was if that happened I'd just work from home as a member of the tech support team. So that's what I do now. Our structure is that the majority of the members work onsite in the silicon valley office. But even some of them don't commute everyday (if anything, due to traffic) and so work remotely from their homes. One person lives in the central US and only commutes every couple months and then there is me on the East Coast. I have only visited my company HQ 3 times since I started and will have a 4th trip next week.

How do things go in that situation? I won't deny that face time is always a good thing when working out problems but most of the time in tech support if you have enough experience then you can handle most issues on your own anyway. All of us sometimes have an issue we aren't sure about so we rely on IM and email to find out if someone has already encountered the issue before. We'll still chat over IM to still simulate the office banter to keep ourselves entertained but we are able to focus on support cases better, I think, because we can *choose* when to have the typical office distractions. Of course, our office distractions over IM are definitely more invisible than people laughing loudly in the cube next door. And, at least for me, 3 people carrying on loudly doesn't bother me because I'm at home.

Is working from home perfect for everyone and for every job? Definitely not. Even if someone has a job like I do in tech support their home life may not be conducive to the job and vice versa. Luckily, I have a reasonably well set up home office and I've worked out how to organize and layout everything with the space I have. My wife eventually moved her office downstairs away from me so we wouldn't distract each other. We don't have kids but we do have 3 dogs. So we don't have kids constantly running around and being loud but the dogs do need tending to. My job allows me to do that as a way to take a break from being on the phone with customers. An important item to note here is that our manager and our manager's manager trust us to work when we're not in the office. And they of course can see if we do by looking at our support case statistics. They understand that, at least for us in tech support, it can be stressful, and working from home can be a stress reliever (again, if your home life is conducive to that). Those who can't manage time wisely and get easily distracted will probably have trouble working in an office environment or at home. But if their family life isn't conducive to working from home then they will probably have a more difficult time at home because kids don't always understand that daddy has to be left alone for a while but co-workers do understand that (except for occasional office pranks).

Another thing that helps greatly in my opinion is that, since I'm in the tech support dept, most conversations that occur between us and the customers gets sent to an alias so other support techs can see the conversations. I use this both to help other techs out if I see a conversation take place about something I know the answer to but the reverse also works and can save me time because I may recall someone else working an issue so I just simply search through my mail or past case notes. This helps facilitate resolving issues as a partial substitute for those of us who aren't in the office and have easy access to others' quick experience.

Does telecommuting work for projects that require integration with many other people/teams? No, not if telecommuting is over 50% of your time and more than, I'd say, 25% of the team does it at any one time. Telecommuting can slow things down if you have to work with others in a many to many relationship. This isn't too much different than if some people on a team worked 9-5 but others worked 12-8. There are only a few hours there where "shifts" overlap. So on project-type work that occurs in phases and requires different teams to work together having offset hours (this could occur maybe simply due to time zone differences) makes productivity nosedive and projects take longer.

If your job entails being assigned personal projects, whether that is being the sole person working on a website design, being a blogger, working in tech support like me, etc. where you don't have to interface with many people every day then you at least have the type of job that would make telecommuting a non-issue. Then the second question is do you have the organizational and time mgmt skills and the motivation to do the job without supervision? Thirdly, does your home life also support that type of job?

hopes to have the first flagship Google Stores open for the holidays

Why would they care about being open for Earth Day? I know companies like to be 'green' nowadays but what is so special about opening on April 22?

we need to stop the entire human race from living because we pollute the air too much so our planet just isn't able to survive anymore. Apparently all these studies are supposed to convince enough people among us believe the planet is more important than human life so the government then takes it upon itself to mandate we have to pay more to use energy to stay warm/cool, fine companies that use more energy or pollute more than others, subsidize 'green' energy sources that just aren't ready for mass acceptance just so we can transport ourselves around the planet, pay more to light up our homes and offices, etc. and feel guilty while doing it.

Maybe, just maybe, if the earth is getting warmer maybe it's just due to the fact there are 6 billions of us on the planet and our bodies give off heat (increasing the entropy of the universe) rather than the contraptions we build indirectly causing the earth to warm up due to pollution? Oh wait, that's not the right argument to make. That just creates a justification to kill human beings in order to minimize the impact on the environment.

Articles about evolution are always like that. They are also always devoid of any predictions, like a true theory should be able to make, like the theory of relativity could make and we could later prove as technology got better (even if it took 50+ years in some cases).

You hit upon all the words that point to the main issue I had with the article and every article like it that still can send a tingle up the leg of every God-hating, atheist on this site and that is the fact that they can't confirm any of these studies. They always have to include some non-committed phrasing because they have to continue to guess (and have *faith* they are right). They are no further closer to knowing how life evolved now as they were 100 years ago. Scientists in particular feel that just because they can trace common DNA snippets and show that fossil records of different ages means evolution must be real and that there are certain species that came into existence in a serial manner with others rather than all of them appearing in parallel. The only problem with that methodology is that I can prove it doesn't prove anything in particular. Case in point: I can give 100 people the same 1 frame from the same movie that none of them (or I) have seen before and ask them to tell me the plot and I'll get 100 different answers because they are working with a small snippet of the entire set of information but yet I'm basically asking them to give me the other 99.9999999% of the movie. It's not going to happen and I shouldn't expect to be so arrogant as to pick one of their answers and unilaterally deem it correct because all the other answers I got were just as correct. Since I hadn't seen the movie either OR was there to see it made then how would I know what the correct answer is? And of course, the entire sequencing and aging of the fossil record is based on a dating scheme that we all presume is reliable and consistent. But how do you measure your measuring stick to ensure it is accurate and always has been for as long as you need it to be (multiple millennium)? Or do you just become arrogant again and assume it's always been accurate because you get the values you wanted to see rather than what know you should get?

I'm tired of the constant same level of information that doesn't tell us anything about when our ancestors supposedly acquired the required attributes at the right time and explain why we are the way we are or otherwise we would be dead. When are scientists going to explain that? I assume they 1) can't and 2) don't want to because they know they can't and if they attempted to their theory would fall apart. But of course they will dismiss any competing theory as hogwash because any competing theory requires faith, a faith in God that is, rather than a faith in Man.

Then more people would question evolution, without being called stupid, an idiot, insane, a Bible thumper, etc. by those who they disagree with. People would realize we aren't just animals like all the other animals and that human life, above all else, is sacred. And that maybe we do actually possess the ability to choose right from wrong, possess a moral compass,and have free will, rather than falling back on the excuse that we're mere animals and therefore can't control the things we want to be able to get away with saying we can't control when it is convenient to use that excuse and all because we didn't evolve from animals.

And now because I mentioned God in response to an article about evolution I'll be modded down and the person who says "this will bring out the bible thumpers" will be modded up, because that's the bigoted world we live in. I'm not supposed to be questioning the liberal way of thinking. I'm not as smart as they are so I have to be told everything rather than think for myself because thinking for myself makes me look to God for answers and that's wrong. I have to look to government and Man for all the answers because they know best. All the issues I raised are all related whether you like it or not.

This calls for Impeachment and trial of everyone involved. It will not happen of course, because murder is not as big a deal as getting a blowjob from an intern.

If murder mattered then anyone supporting abortion would be looked upon negatively and anyone who committed abortion would be arrested. Women who like Obama for his stance on abortion don't care about their children. They only care about their body. They are selfish. And Obama caters to them because he wants their vote. He can't get the vote of the baby but he can get the vote of the supposed "mother" so he has nothing to lose and everything to gain by supporting people who want to rid themselves of the inconvenience of birthing a child. Obama has given his support behind the federally approved method of killing human beings. It's a form of eugenics. Kill off the babies if *your* life will be too inconvenienced by a disability the baby may have when born but try to sound nice about it when you say that you are killing them for their own good. Maybe gang bangers should try that excuse next time they do a drive-by and kill little kids. They are just doing the little kids a favor by not allowing them to grow up in the slums with drugs, violence and no father figure, right? Right?

That's a really weird and out-of-touch assumption. Do you not realize that many of us are numb from GWBs tenure, and Obama's issues don't seem so bad by comparison so we let them go.

What? 1. Obama is forcing healthcare on a population whose majority said they didn't want it. His "health care reform" involved a gov't taking over health care, which was unwarranted and unwanted. 2. He is signing executive orders for gun control rather than letting Congress make laws. 3. He is against the saving of unborn children but rallies against guns that kill children. He picks the battles that get him the greatest popularity and votes (women can vote but unborn babies cannot) regardless of their moral or ethical consequences. 4, He has raised federal income tax levels. It doesn't matter on who the taxes were raised or that they don't affect you. It's the principle of the matter. Next time it might be YOU. 5. His spending is out of control. He has spent more in 4 years than Bush ever did in 8 years. Using Bush as an excuse to spend money doesn't fly anymore. Apparently it's patriotic again to raise the debt ceiling level. 6. Obama said he was change we can believe in but he just excuses himself of everything and never takes responsibility for something unless it can benefit him. He doesn't know how to accept responsibility for a failure. The stimulus plan did nothing besides waste money on *temporary* jobs. No good came of any of that. 7. He likes to throw around the fact that the economy would have been worse w/o the stimulus but no one can prove a negative like that so he panders to the idiots who love him because he is black when he says things like that. 8. He is enacting additional environmental regulations that are causing our utility costs to go up but no one knows he is the cause. People just assume the electric company wants more evil profits. 9. More people than at any point in history are now on food stamps. How is that a sign that our economy is doing well? Assume for the sake of argument Obama is just doing what Bush or Clinton did as far as food stamps or anything else is concerned. Why is he happy to maintain status quo? Why doesn't he want to put those food stamp people back to work instead of letting them live off our dime? Why isn't he wanting to make that kind of change?

On top of that, the fixed system gives us a fraud who panders to loons from the Republicans, so of course people flock to the Democrats as the only major party that hasn't been taken over by delusional people.

You are delusional and so are democrats. Actually, progressives or liberals is a more accurate term.

You apparently assume carbon-14 dating is reliable and accurate. What would you do if you found out it was multiple orders of magnitude inaccurate? We assume that carbon breaks down at a consistent rate to be reliable enough for measuring the passing of time. But what proof do we have that it *did* break down at a consistent rate?

A tree older than the world? That must be the one Eve picked the fruit from!

Your sarcasm and our dating methods assume without a shadow of a doubt that carbon-14 dating can be 100% accurate and 100% reliable. When your measuring stick is not accurate, how do you know in order to attempt fixing it?

Yes, that's why we call it science. If it were never wrong, it would be religion.

Except that when attempts or actual proof of being incorrect is exposed concerning issues that could render science incorrect while proving religion correct scientists are silenced by death threats or career assassination threats. And due to these threats, some potential evidence that could have been discovered that proved certain aspects of Christianity as true never even get attempted in the first place for fear of retribution from the scientific community. And yet I thought that science enjoyed furthering their knowledge, they just don't like it when their knowledge ends up being wrong and religion ends up being right otherwise, as long as they can continue making science the de facto source of facts, they are perfectly fine with it. I mean, science has brought us this supposed theory of evolution that now allows people to equate humans to mere animals, when the 2 are not the same despite the DNA showing that we are 90%+ the same.

Case in point, humans can distinguish right from wrong and animals *only* act on instinct. Why wouldn't scientists, with the media assisting, want to keep perpetuating the idea that evolution rules us and silence any attempt at researching opposing views? Because they feel they have an obligation to ensure people get fed secular propaganda at the expense of any potential to learn opposing theories because all the opposing ideas are based on religion and thus, conveniently, have no basis in scientific discussions. It's quite brilliant how the supporters of evolution and surrounding theories have rationalized that in their own heads. They fear being proven wrong in this subject area otherwise they should say 'have at it' just to appease their opponents and enjoy watching them make themselves look like fools. If the scientific community was so confident about a theory like evolution we'd be seeing more opposing ideas being researched and published just to give equal time to them and rule them out using peer reviews. That is what the scientific process is about right? Oh, I'm sorry, that is only acceptable when the opposing ideas aren't based on religion. When they are based on religion they are simply silenced as being crazy fairy tales, which is strange considering scientists have to have faith in some of their very own theories.

Raid cards that were $750 new can be found for $35

That's because the ones costing $35 are software-based RAID controllers. True hardware-based RAID controllers are still over $100, if not $200. Obviously still quite a discount from 20 years ago but still not as cheap as you might think (still have to leave room for the software-based cards to be priced in).