This is precisely one thing that irks me about living in the US. People get the coffee culture completely wrong, they even say things like "let's grab a coffee". In civilized countries, you never *walk* around with a coffee. You sit down, spend 10 focused minutes on an espresso and maybe conversation and then go on doing things with both hands. Walking around holding some significant fraction of gallon of coffee is just pointless - you get gorilla arm, you never enjoy coffee and you never enjoy a real break.

Yes... Just fine. Those stories of long waits, or unavailable diagnostic care are just rumors, I am sure...

Yes, they are.

Believe me,I lived for 7 years in UK and now I'm in my 6th year in USA and it is incomparable. US system is just massively inferior - and I work for a big national lab and hold the most expensive insurance option.
So yes, I'd go back to NHS any moment.

I don't know what these people are trying to prove. We know communism doesn't work, because we've tried it in eastern Europe. We also know that libertarism doesn't work, because take any failed African state and you see that people don't self organize into well-functioning society.
Besides, I really despise these smug libertarians, who thump their chests about liberty and privacy and are not even remotely aware how much they got from this society, not to mention they they are not willing to give any of it back in taxes... Big egos, little brain and compassion.

The best way to fight these retards would be to demand that Magic Smoke Theory of Electricity is given equal class-room time as the Maxwell's equations. And if anyone asks why, you tell them.

I think this is bull. I just don't believe 1% of computers give wrong answers. There are many reasons why precomputed table might differ - threading, reordering of floating point operations, etc. Basically, compilers guarantee certain precision, not by-bit determinstic result (unless you set up certain IEEE flags, which are not on by default).

There is absolutely nothing new here. My Nokia in 1999 had a 10 day battery life and today I recharge my HTC One S every day. It is just a fact of life that we use phones todays for so much more that the batteries just last less. No phone has a 10 day lifespan these days.

No, you don't weight with average income. Do you weight sony television and apple laptop prices with average income? (they also pay on-the-ground workers like sellers in shops and truck drivers, which are more expensive in more developed world)

Yes, they didn't realize that when you buy ipad, you are sexsiually pleasing Steve Jobs.
If you buy a non-Apple product, you are not sexsiually pleasing anyone.

That is the difference.

Hubble gave us a lot of very nice pictures, but let's be realistic: in terms of science per dollar we've got much more from combination of WMAP and SDSS I and II. JWST just killed a whole lot of more interesting projets in the same way LSST is now threathening to kill amazing and cheap projects like BigBOSS.

They should still fly JWST, after all this money spend it would be stupid to kill it and interesting things will come out of it. But let's be fair about science: pretty pictures that excite public are useful for PR, but for real science you need better than that.

Wasn't postscript supposed to solve these problems 20 years ago?

How much does the use of neutral (for example google's) DNS services rather than default ISP's DNS help?

I don't know where they get these numbers out! In my field, I don't know a single guy that is still on Windows. Last time I was on a workshop and there were 80 participants and exactly two PCs (me and a toothless french guy). In fact, all my friends are purely apple as well. I hear all these claims that windows still oversells apple, but it just doesn't click. I'd guess it is 95% OSX 5% apple and if I correct for selection effect, maybe 50%-50%, but this article claims just 4% OSX?!?! I haven't seen anybody using windows for a long time. In fact, I use bing just out of support for the underdog...

Umm, I tried to find impact factor of Journal of Cosmology and it is too shitty to find. This is a crackpot journal as far as I can tell...
(Don't mix it with SISSA's Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics (JCAP) - that is a decent journal)

As a professional astronomer I hoped this thing would never have happened. It costs 6 billion and at this price tag a 5% overrun is $300 million, about six times the cost of the entire SDSS project, which has undoubtedly gave us more science that James Webb ever will. True, Hubble and JWST make great pictures, function as amazing PR machines, but most science at the end of the day comes from survey imaging and spectroscopic observations.