Grades hardly matter at all after you graduate unless you got really terrible grades. When I am hiring I don't care about grades, I care if you have a BS. I really don't care which BS it is. A BA is much less impressive, closer to an AA degree. So once you've been in the real world for a little while the grades won't count for anything. What will matter is how well you learned the material, and more importantly how well you learned to learn. So don't feel jealous of those kids getting A's in their easy classes, they'll be flipping burgers if they are lucky.

Waze figured out a way to make their users want to share their location data. Waze also leveraged that information to build a sort of self-healing map. If you are in a place like the Bay Area where there are enough users, the Waze traffic routing is vastly superior to anything any competitor has. A few months ago there was a dumb error in a google map that tried to send me on the freeway sought to the next exit get, off, turn around, get back on north and get back off, when I just wanted to drive over the open overpass. On Waze I could have fixed it that evening. With google I put the same effort into alerting google of the problem and two months later I got a thank you email telling me they had fixed it. This was a major overpass in San Jose!

So I see two very clear reasons for Google or another mapper to want Waze, user location/travel data, and self drawing / self fixing maps.

The tea party was almost immediately hijacked by the usual hot-button social issues. Initially it may have been about liberty and big government. Remember that since the late 1970s the Republican party has had a bifurcated base. The real base is the richest 10%-20% of the population. The rest of their base is people who have been convinced to vote against their own economic interests by the moral majority/social conservative/tea party issues of abortion, the "war on christmas," gay rights, guns, etc. A very nearly identical thing has happened on the left. Women and others with left leaning social beliefs have been repeatedly terrified of the anti-abortion, anti-minority, anti-women, anti-gay, anti-environmental, anti-science stances of the republicans so feel they have to vote for the lesser of two evils to prevent the crazies from taking over the supreme court. Now democratic policies have usually been ever so slightly less damaging to the economic interests of most Americans. So pretty much all voting Americans have been manipulated into voting against our real interests because of a nasty streak of religious fundamentalism held by about 35% of the population. These things are not accidents, they are the result of a century of persistent propoganda efforts by the people who really control our government. The rich and the the big corporations.

Actually the IRS conducted a multi-year investigation of the NAACP during Bush2. The PATRIOT Act and Bush2 invented the use of National Security Letters and they most certainly were used against dissidents. Bush2 began the use of blacklists for travelers and dissidents, particularly peace activists were put on those lists. You're right he didn't go after opponents with the EPA or OSHA. He put lackeys in charge of those agencies to make sure his corporate buddies were hassled by common sense safety or environmental regulations.
Much, but not all, of the rest of your post (after scanning it) seems similarly factually challenged, but who has the time to do a point by point rebuttal of every whacky Fox talking point from the last 5 years.

There are adults on /. ??!??

Baby poop from healthy babies that are feeding exclusively on breast milk doesn't smell very much at all.

Actually one of the biggest problems about GMOs is that in the '90s the US government declared that GMO's are "generally recognized safe" foods. This means that Monsanto et. al. do not have to do any testing. We are the test.

I don't see how having access to your apps list matters much when the FB app already has access to:
Your personal info (read and write contact data) Your location (fine)
Network communication
Your accounts
Storage (modify/delete usb contents)
Hardware controls
Phone calls (state and identity)
System tools

Translated closed captions for foreign vacations!

Download. hehe hehe.

Really? Seriously? How about... hmmm... Tahrir Square, and the rest of the Arab Spring. Remember when people poured into the streets to stop the coup against Hugo Chavez? How about the protests in Iceland that lead to the government collapsing and the new government telling the debt holders to suck and egg while prosecuting evil bankers. That was a good one. There were massive protests in Bolivia against Bechtel's privatizing of the water supply. They chased Bechtel right out of there. There were the ongoing protests at the Nevada nuclear test site that were instrumental in ending US nuclear testing. The list is longer, but I think the point is made.

He didn't post any facts or references to the peer-reviewed main-line climate research because doing so would be a huge task. You see the evidence is overwhelming both in quantity and quality. But I see your problem. You say that you've checked the predictions of activists. Activists are not scientists. Activists are typically more adept at getting press attention that scientists but at best they may have a passing understanding of science. Under the heading of activist you could include an unwashed hippy, a doom and gloom end of the world author, TV bloviators, big-oil PR hacks, the Koch brothers, and this Donor's Trust.

The predictions of the peer-reviewed main line climate scientists over the last 30 years have been quite good, and in fact as time has gone by the data suggests that the predictions are typically on the cautious side. Please review the conclusions of the Hansen Paper from 1981. There is a link to the actual paper on this page:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/04/evaluating-a-1981-temperature-projection/

if you are too lazy to read the paper you can just skim the story linked above.

Let me get this strait, conservative billionaires are funding groups that are trying to discredit science and this is news?

There I fixed that for you.