"fuck that, I *would* rather walk than step into one of those four-wheeled nightmare machines) so you'll literally have ZERO control over the machine"

Have you ever ridden a bus or flown? What sort of control did you have there?

"Several of our patients described feeling 'reset' after the treatment and often used computer analogies"

I just know there must be a formal logical fallacy related to expanding anecdotal evidence to cover the entire range. I'll leave it to the logic experts to point out which one.

I'm adjunct faculty for a University in the Midwest

The school newspaper is a sorry propaganda rag. No stories are printed unless they include racism, white privilege, LGBTQZ or some other pet project. It's fine to let students have their own view, but the (lower division) students that I see appear to be shaped more by this agenda than they are shaping it.

States that require someone be 21 years of age to consent to engaging in risky smoking behavior will also ban those under 21 from enlisting in the military, right?

Young people do lots of risky things. Let's be consistent.

Also remember that an officer is dealing with difficult circumstances. If the person filming becomes a distraction in the execution of their job, they are well within their rights to stop it, and should. The benefit of the doubt should be given to the officer.

If we want to discuss good decision making, let's talk about why they were called in the first place. I'd guess it wasn't because the subjects were peacefully enjoying a nice evening without bothering anyone.

"The bottom line is that there are very few nice, generous employers anymore"

The margins for doing business in many retail spaces have been going down for quite some time.

I'm certainly no expert in employee relations. I worked in IT for telemarketing company for several years. Draconian rules much like this were put in place there because employees regularly abused the system due to alcohol/drug addictions, poor decisions, and the stress of the job. Basically, lots of people couldn't bear to come in to work, so they'd call in sick. It made it impossible to tell the real issues from the imagined. It was very sad.

The hard truth was that it was just as cheap (and sometimes cheaper) to train someone new for unskilled labor as it was to deal with absences by existing personnel.

Of course those people who did a really outstanding job didn't have to deal with that issue. It's always been up to the employee to make sure they are valuable enough that the company doesn't want to work without them.

Lambdas and method references, which I thought would be a nice-to-have, has turned it into a completely new language, streams are great, the multi-threading support is not too shabby and the new time API was loooong overdue.

This

There is a reason that scripting languages aren't normally used for large applications. After the initial "wow that was super simple to write", you get to the phase where debugging takes forever, and maintenance is a pain in the ass. Maintenance is always the major share of software cost, and the amount of time it takes to write the initial code should be a secondary consideration (IMHO). Anyone who thinks a strongly typed language is just a pain in the ass probably hasn't done much long-term maintenance on a large system.

Streams are awesome. Everyone who codes Java needs to spend more time using them. The time API is greak (but everyone with a clue was already using joda time anyway).

"The alarming study also reveals that only one (University of Alabama) out of the 121 schools required three or more cybersecurity classes to graduate."

This is an excellent example of tailoring a news story to fit a goal. One university (Alabama) requires three security classes to graduate, so that was picked as the benchmark, and obviously all other schools would fall short. Nothing newsworthy was imparted by that little bit of information.

Computer security certainly is an issue, but it won't be solved by college classes, for the same reason that time/date and character encoding issues will persist until the end of time. Sorry guys.

"Renewables are not dispatchable for the most part. Nuclear certainly can be"

The term dispatchable is usually used in the context of adjusting load to demand in real time. Nuclear is NOT that in any way. It's useful for base load only.

People who say they never became somewhat routine may be looking back through time-tinted lenses. They never became quite as routine as the space shuttle though. During the 80s-90s, they shot off so frequently that often they'd get just a 5 second blurb on the nightly news, or not even that if something more important was going on.

There are obviously benefits to manned spaceflight with regard to public awareness. Whether those benefits outweight the per diem science cost might be up for debate. Publicity equals funding. As we've seen with the Mars rovers and New Horizons, it doesn't always take an astronaut to do the trick.

Unless we want to re-invent the wheel over and over, it's necessary that people have a basic understanding of the work that has been done in the past.

The problem isn't how hard it is to memorize facts. The human brain is capable of memorizing a lot of facts. The problem is that (US specifically) kids are just too lazy to do it. They have the ability, but not the desire. (Source: My wife is a high school science teacher of 30 years).

Let's address the real issue and stop trying to give participation trophies.