Just like all the other slightly-spacefaring nations?

The point isn't that all of Silicon Valley is as incompetent as Yahoo; but that the cash is flowing freely enough that even a company whose business model appears to be "Try to be Google, as imagined by an AOL user" can throw a billion dollars at some goofy blogging platform.

Now, I would not be at all sad to see fewer smart people wasting their lives trying to find new ways to get me to click on ads or analyze my behavior to sell me shit, (and there's a disturbing amount of brainpower going down the toilet on just that problem at the moment); but the trouble with a big wave of easy, dumb, money is that, while the crest is a blast, it can easily take down even solid people and ideas when the VCs eventually get spooked.

Just remember how much fun the economy of more or less the entire developed world managed to have, just because some banks were gambling on US real estate. Barely any connection to whether the economy of people who actually do and make things was stupid or brilliant, doing well, or doing ill; but down it came...

"What does it say about the NYPD when they think they can pick and choose which laws are appropriate, or which parts of the law they have to follow?"

That even pigs can be trained to know what they can get away with?

Refusals or demands for clarification qualify as 'answers'. Here, one third just disappear into a void, neither fulfilled nor denied.

Oh, I'm not saying that it doesn't happen for good historical reasons. Just that, unlike agricultural communities on volcanoes (which, with occasional inconveniences and/or mass-death-by-hot-toxic-gasses incidents, actually makes sense overall), cities on volcanoes don't have any compensatory advantages. As you say, you don't really get to choose where cities go (even wacky authoritarian central planners can choose where to build a new city; but they can't keep them from being a ghost town much of the time), so it isn't as though any particular person screwed up in any useful sense.

I'm afraid that I know essentially nothing about what plants crave; but this has 'Table showing concentrations of leachable constituents in ashfall from historic eruptions (all concentrations in mg/kg)'

My assumption would be that, given that ash consists of mineral/glass particles, of varying sizes(but all pretty small), it has excellent surface area, and so provides a fast-enough-to-be-useful (unlike larger rocks and bedrock); but long-lasting-enough that it counts as a soil property (rather than just a sprinkling of Miracle-Gro).

As for which of those components are vital and would otherwise limit plant growth, which are neutral, and which are harmful, I'm afraid you'd need somebody who knows something about plant biology, or gardening.

Obviously, in the short term, the mixture of mechanical suffocation and nontrivial emissions of sulfur compounds that crater the pH, is Not Helpful for crop yields, so you can pretty much write off at least that season, if not longer; but apparently the 'moonscape' appearance wears off pretty quickly.

While you'd get quite the opposite impression (and effect) from the ashfall immediately following an eruption, volcanic soils that have had some time to weather a bit and regain their organic and biological components tend to be pretty rich. Assuming that eruptions don't happen too often, easier farming and occasional disruption beats the alternative.

It's sort of like telling people not to live next to rivers. Sure, they flood on occasion, and that sucks; but the rest of the time that's where the trade, fishing, and relatively steady water supply is.

Now, you would probably be better off not building a city on, or close to, a volcano. You wont' be getting much agriculture done in an urban environment, and those things can be expensive to rebuild.

Why would somebody with the information he had call Congress? The house and senate intelligence committees have been the staunchest in the collective insistence that "Absolutely nothing even slightly wicked happened, simply nothing. And, if it did, we were kept fully apprized of it at all times, and it was For America and 100% legal." Plus, 'called'? that'll throw the NSA off your trail...

In typical 'Intel - because we can.' product differentiation, they've unfortunately gone and made that bit tricky to get: Apparently, only their R-series Haswells, the BGA ones, have the eDRAM on the desktop. On the mobile side, it's reserved for the highest end i7s, I don't know if any of those are LGAs.

I don't doubt that it makes economic sense; but Intel is continuing their annoying policy of deliberately having no ideal low-to-midrange part: If you go for a lower performance CPU, as a price-sensitive buyer would, they simply don't offer a GPU that isn't merely phoning it in. If you buy a screaming expensive model, you get their fastest GPUs, which are OK; but not great (and, with some CPU-heavy exceptions, quite possibly not good enough for the people who buy $500+ i7s.

It probably isn't in their interest; but if they actually were looking to put a nail in the coffin of the low-end discrete GPU market, they'd offer at least one i3 or i5 with full GPU punch.

No need to use the past tense. Even among the obviously gamer/enthusiast slanted systems represented in the Steam Hardware Survey, they place surprisingly well. Among people who don't care, buying a discrete video card went away some time ago, and Intel gets a default win on anything non-AMD.

Not a terribly thrilling market to dominate; but you make it up in volume, I imagine.

And we are valuing freedom at $0 for this exercise?

I assume that if the 'guys' were 8x8 or 8x16 sprites in 64 vibrant colors, the PC could (and the NES PPU was 5.3MHz). I suspect, though, that people might consider that a step backward from any PC graphics since approximately Doom, possibly earlier...

My google search on the issue came up with Ghana, Burkina Faso, and Bangladesh. Two of which seem to be African, the latter South Asian I guess.

I'm sure you can come up with better data.

Besides infant mortality, there's probably unreported miscarriage.

What good will your alibi do you when your job is replaced by a $2.30/hour 'work experience' inmate and you are arrested for "vagrancy"?

The postbellum confederacy had this system down to a science; but there is no reason that it wouldn't work elsewhere...

Plus, when compared to SAIC or other obligate parasites of the state, a few rapists and murders are probably refreshingly honest and easy to deal with.