Clearly no such ban is immanent. That said, prop 8 passed in California with only 52.24% of the vote.

Wasting mod points to post, but: US Americans are not that heterogenous. What specific groups (with dissenting views relevant to the matter at hand) are systematically excluded from the sample?

They offer up their sampling procedures and methodology here.

A larger sample size is not inherently better. 1000 isn't much different from 10,000 or 10 million. If the sampling method would be unrepresentative with 1000 cases, it wouldn't be any better with more.

I've played games that let the old content sit untouched.

Hardly anyone played it, so you had to essentially con top level players to milk run you through content to get geared - unlikely in cases where there wasn't already a real-world friendship. Once a game hits that point the influx new players that stick with the game long enough to raid drop to nearly zero, and the game ossifies, then dies. There is no way that it is a "better" solution.

and hardly a new phenomenon.

You need a Masters Degree in many fields to have a snowball's chance in hell of getting anywhere. This varies somewhat in technical fields, but as we see time and time again, once your age climbs over, say, 35, it can be tough as hell to get a technical job. Outside of tech fields, you need either a top flight BA/BS or a higher degree to set you apart, and there is no reason for this trend to reverse.

Allows anyone to submit a paper? Who will review them?

Uh, yeah. Did you actually see Terminator?

I don't see why Luddism is the necessary conclusion.

It could just as easily be: Sky-high unemployment, and to hell with the workers anyway. Human input isn't really necessary for a variety of tasks. When machines become cheap enough for a short-term profit, why hire humans to flip burgers, push mops, write tickets?

Jobless recovery and all that.

How about 2.06 Districts of Columbia?

are nearly entirely made by people who don't know what they are talking about?

This is a real problem in all of the sciences. The biomedical sciences have had the best money for a long time, and if they are beginning to have problems, it isn't good.

For those not in the know: grad students are slave labor. postdocs are a notch better, but only barely. Remember how Gordon Freeman was treated in the intro to half-life? Consider that a documentary.

Yes, and I won't. Most others won't, either.

HBO can wake up and come to terms with the fact they can't fully control distribution, or they can continue to lose sales. Piracy is a market pressure that keeps prices low. HBO can react to that pressure or stick their collective heads in the sand and look like buffoons. Currently, they're engaged in the latter.

Besides, I fully expect HBO to pill the plug at the end like Deadwood anyway. Why? Because apparently they were afraid they wouldn't be ably to sell enough copies of Deadwood elsewhere. Your $900 a year meant fark all. Hooray!

Between 40 and 50% of US Americans do not believe that Humans evolved from earlier forms. (PEW reports, Gallup polls, GSS data).

Relying on the stated position of a denomination or sect as a proxy for individual beliefs is misleading and biased.

Wasting mod points to reply:

We were a superpower after WWII not because of how badly we treated our own labor, but because we were the only industrial economy that wasn't bombed to oblivion and back.

We still had our factories. Pretty easy to "build" a superpower when you're the only one with the buildy-thingies.

Towards the end of the 20th century the other developed nations caught back up.

Wasting mod points to comment: The first claim is not entirely correct. As is, in certain ways, the second. In both cases, a collection of empirical facts can be stacked just so to support either statement. If one accepts the general epistemological rules for building consensus data through empirical observation (and the surrounding baggage), then the theist position is the more convoluted one. Every day things happen without miracles (or anything demonstrable as such), and every day more observations get added to the evidence pile for an atheist position.

If one doesn't accept or follow the general epistemology of science (particularly in the modern, Kuhnian and Popperian way) then one likely sees what might be miracles all the time, and those observations get added to the theism pile.

Disagreements about what constitutes evidence are where we are, not two incommensurate positions that are entirely untestable. Well, I suppose someone could be in that third position, but they'd be the third person out in any debate. I prefer the a priori assumption that the universe is comprehensible until, well, it's not.

Is it really possible to cyberstalk an attention whore?

To re-hash the point for the millionth time:

Technically, no, he does not. There are gnostic and agnostic atheists, just as there are gnostic and agnostic theists.

A gnostic atheist "knows" there is no god(s), an agnostic atheist does not believe in the existence of a god(s), but will claim they cannot know for certain.

Admitting the lack of certain knowledge -and- the lack of a belief in what are essentially unsubstantiated rumors don't require much faith in anything other than one's own powers of observation.