Yes it is a big stretch. Your comment is just a variation of the just-world fallacy. In real life, the fact that something bad happened to a person or group, something which doesn't normally happens to other people or groups, is not evidence of the existence of a hidden reason for said people or group to deserve it.

I'm always surprised to learn about such progressive countries which doesn't have separation of church and state. The fact that an organization have to prove it is a religion on order to issue marriages seems so medieval.

I much prefer how things are in my country, where marriage is only a civil matter, a contract signed-off by an officer of the court. So around here, people also have religious rituals performed by some kind of cleric, but those have not force of law, instead they follow the ceremony with a pit stop at the civil office where a justice of the peace issues the actual marriage.

And by the way, I'm not sure how I feel about the USA solution as well, where they claim full separation of church and state but allow clerics to issue official marriages, with the excuse that anyone can issue marriages. It feels like a cop out and it is frequently used to weaken the separation of church and state.

TAG Heuer lost an opportunity to set themselves apart from the "childish" smartwatches from tech companies. They could have added, on top of the LCD (but below the touch-sensitive glass), proper clock hands driven by a precision step motor. This way it could vary the functions by changing the background labels and dynamically positioning the clock hands accordingly. So in clock mode it would look like a proper "adult" clock instead of a "child toy" like the other smartwatches.

Microagresions is a well established scientific theory with literally (and I really mean literally) thousands of peer reviewed papers published on the subject, including many papers with objective measurements.

Just because a subject goes against your prejudices doesn't mean that you get to falsely claim that it has no science behind it.

If one of the big ones had six or seven issues we wouldn't even know about, it would be just swept under the rug. You just have to do a google search to know that most other car companies just ignore those until the number of actual victims reach the three digits (I think GM holds the record with more than a thousand injured before their ignition recall). And even then, most only do a recall after receiving a court order.

It is not about being a fanboy, it is about trying to praise and generate good publicity for companies which do the right thing, so they will see that it is advantageous to keep doing it, and maybe others will also see the business advantages and do the right thing. In a world where is is so lucrative to screw customers, we have to do all we can to show companies that not screwing customers also can be lucrative.

You should have continued reading, because the author used parabola correctly.

A hanging cable of constant weight by itself would assume the shape of a catenary, but a suspension bridge is not just a hanging cable. The main suspension cable of a suspension bridge is also holding the (much greater) weight of the actual bridge trough a set of cables, so it assumes the shape of a parabola.

http://whistleralley.com/hangi...

As things stand today, the only parasites are the medallion owners, after all they are the only ones who siphon huge amounts of money from the system without providing any service. A medallion system is the textbook definition of a parasite, it doesn't create absolutely any value, instead it just subtract value from the taxi service causing the service to be more expensive than it should, more crappy than it should, and less profitable for the drivers actually doing the work.

And by the way, uber drivers also have those same costs as taxis (with the exception of the ridiculous medallion cost), so arguing that taxis are in a disadvantage because they have to pay fuel, maintenance, or insurance[1] is stupid and dishonest.

[1] I'm aware that in some cities the laws where so stupidly written that someone could drive for uber without paying full insurance, so in those cases people should campaign to change the laws to require all professional drivers to have the appropriate insurance, and that is it, that would solve all the problem. To argue instead that cities should ban uber is just a corrupt tactic to try and keep the faulty corrupt taxi system standing as it is.

From what I gather, the whole controversy was manufactured by the broom manufacturer BalancePlus as a way to discredit or even ban the competitor manufacturer Hardline. Basically BalancePlus created a prototype broom which is meant to resemble their competitor's model in a few aspects, but also have a many "enhancements" which completely break the game (this is the "magical" broom that can control the rocks "like a joystick"). They created this game-breaking broom with the sole purpose of getting it banned and trying to get their competitor's model banned in the wake, which they accomplished.

It is a bit like when Tomas Edison created AC contraptions to electrocute puppies in order to prove to everybody that Tesla's AC was dangerous and that everybody should use his DC standard instead.

I'm sorry, but if you believe there is such a thing as "basic sanity checking" then you are not a software developer (or had some flaws in your education if you are). In a system of this size there will always be unexpected exceptions to any sanity checking that you can think off. By programming a "basic sanity checking" in the system you create a huge problem where several clients with perfectly "sane" inputs get rejected just because some of their information is uncommon.

That reminded me of an interesting blog post I read some time ago, about mistakes programmers make when creating "basic sanity checking" on a simple name field: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/...

If they play their cards right, pushing this as an open platform to attract third party module makers, this could be huge and bring a variety of "personalized" features to niche markets. This could be a little bit like the IBM PC in the early days, where companies or people with specific needs can buy a standard platform but then expand it with one specific module to cater to their needs. Imagine a big company that currently needs many of its employees to carry an expensive custom made device, and then could replace all of those devices for a fair phone with just a less expensive custom made module.

Littmann is not "mostly about brand recognition and status", instead it is mostly about standardization to a high level of precision. Maybe there are cheaper options that sometimes are better if you are lucky to get a good one, but cheaper options normally are the ones with more "flexible" manufacturing standards, resulting in batches with vastly different acoustic characteristics.

For the record, nurses can use £3.50 cheap mass produced stethoscopes because they use it to auscultate very unsubtle things. And on that same line I imagine an MD on a rich country also could go for the cheap ones as they also don't rely on subtle auscultation as a major diagnosis tool, instead relying on heavy use of tech like ultrasound, electrocardiogram, or even atomic imaging. But if you are an MD on a poor country having to diagnose subtle heart conditions with nothing but what you can hear, then a good stethoscope can make all the difference.

Let me address your comment part by part:

OK, that part is right and I have to agree with you. Unless you are a professional athlete, the amount of extra Calories you burn by going to the gym a few hours is negligible compared to the general amount necessary to just maintain bodily functions 24/7. Our society vastly overstate the weight loss that can be achieved by exercising. (General note for everyone: I'm not saying that you shouldn't exercise, exercising brings many many other health benefits and is linked to far greater life expectancy, it just won't make you lose weight).

That is technically partially right, but in fact wrong. It is true that only sugars (and glucose) can be "turned" into fat, but you ignore two facts:

1. Fats are not "turned" into fat because they are already fat. In fact, calories ingested as fats are the most easily stored.

2. Apart from fats, anything else with a high caloric content (most notable example are carbohydrates) is turned into sugars (or glucose), so by transitivity all those are also turned into fats.

That is simply not true, if you ate 10K Calories you would get fat, regardless of the composition of such a diet (unless in extreme cases like a person having a serious disease making them unable to metabolize a specific molecule and then proceeding to eat only that molecule). You can get away with ingesting more calories than you need depending on the composition of those calories (protein rich like steaks, instead of spoons of refined sugar), but the effect is small, maybe hundreds of Cals, not 10K.

If you ingest only 1000 Calories plus zero soda you will not get fat (although I can't guaranty you will not die of a heart condition due to all the sodium on the soda). As I said before, the body is not a moto-continuum, it doesn't create energy from nothing.

So although there is a very small possibility of not getting fat while ingesting a lot of calories, there is absolutely zero chance of magically getting fat while eating less calories than your daily expenditure, the laws of thermodynamics simply won't allow it.

I find it interesting that in any discussions about diet there are always people like you that believe that their body is some kind of moto-continuum, where the delta energy stored plus the used energy is somehow greater than the energy input. I guess many people assume the laws of thermodynamics are just "suggestions of thermodynamics" that you don't really need to follow.

Emergency brake is not a binary (on/off) switch, but instead a lever that lets you apply variable pressure to the brakes in order to slow down without locking your back wheels. I know that you may be young and only used to modern ABS brakes, so the concept of having to personally restrain how much you apply the brakes in order to not lock the wheels may seem like something alien to you, but that is exactly how all brakes (including the pedal) worked until the 80s' or 90s'.

You forgot almost two dozen items listing the times when the USA organized a "regime change" (i.e. coup d'état) on South and Central American countries (and some other places) in order to dissolve freedom and democratic institutions and instead place brutal dictatorships in power.