This is stupid. At one time I had poor credit due to not having a credit history. I got a secured credit card from Discover with a $2,500 credit limit and 1% cash back. I spent roughly $25-100/month on the card and put everything else on my debit card. After 8 months my credit score was high enough to apply for other credit cards with higher credit limits and "perks."

TLDR, no one is forcing you to charge everything to your credit card -- you can get a debit card for free from your bank. If you want to build credit, don't max out your credit limit every month.

Ah, you must be the author of this 2003 study in the British Medical Journal, Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials.. There are some things you do not need a "double blind" study to know. Repeatedly asserting otherwise does not somehow make you right.

Well, it's a good thing doctors have been wearing masks since the 17th century to reduce transmission of airborne and droplet diseases. I think if masks had some kind of horrible health effect for the wearer we would know by now. As to your other points, asserting a falsehood (that home made masks have "miniscule" efficacy) repeatedly does not make you right. Homemade masks are 1/3 as effective as hospital masks, but better than nothing. Also, at this stage in the game, hospital masks are cheap and widely available (Amazon link), so there's no excuse not to wear them.

What are these hypothetical social considerations you are alluding to? The freedom of Trump supporters to look like ignorant pricks in public? You wear your underpants in public, so please wear your mask too.

I guess I'm an optimist, and so is Dr. Fauci, about having a vaccine by early 2021 (source Fox News). I guess the other endpoint for mask wearing is herd immunity after 1,385,800 Americans die.

1. As noted in other replies, a double blind trial of mask wearing is not possible, and abundant evidence of mask efficacy already exists.
2. Wearing a mask is not difficult. Please just do it, even if you personally believe the probability of efficacy is small.
3. The endpoint for mask wearing is when an effective coronavirus vaccine is produced and widely distributed.
4. Facts are not political. In my experience, it is those who question obvious facts who are politically motivated.

Those "useful [sic] idiots" are probably screaming "listen to the SCIENCE!!!" because, I don't know, maybe you should actually try that fatwilbur? It's not hard to find the evidence (Lancet journal) that masks work. The probability of airborne transmission appears to be low, yes, but the probability of droplet transmission is very high, and that what masks are designed to help with.

Also, I'm not sure where your idea of "extremely low probability of serious health impacts" is coming from. 22,000 Americans died of the flu in all of 2019 compared to the 209,000 Americans who have died of coronavirus so far this year, and we haven't even gotten into the winter months of 2020 yet. Thankfully that's a small proportion of the 328 million people living in America (so far), but it's still a pretty big difference in fatality risk!

Or, you know, ask them to wear a mask. So that they can keep breathing but also not infect you.

The fallacy of this comment is the word "violently."

Although I count myself as a "lefty" I actually agree that the left has a problem with political correctness, thought crime, whatever you want to call it. To the extent that we promote certain world views (e.g. "Black people are not an inferior race") we should do so with then intention of persuading people who disagree with us, not cowing them into submission. There needs to be a safe space for conversations about sensitive topics, and for people to be able to talk and reason through viewpoints without fear of reprisal.

There is a time and a place for such discussions. For example, it might be appropriate for me to debate racism with my close friend in private. It would not be appropriate for me to say hateful things about black people in front of, say, my boss or a kindergarten class. Twitter has decided that they don't want to be a forum of these types of discussions, and they have every right to moderate the kind of discussion that takes place on their platform.

Twitter isn't censoring David Duke with "violence." He is not being arrested and put in jail. Twitter is just saying, hey, this isn't the kind of platform we are, we're worried that your hateful comments are going to drive away users and impact revenue, go promote your hate speech somewhere else.

Seconded, Inkscape is a wonderful vector graphics software and I deeply appreciate the work of its developers!

It would be even nicer if they made a version of this without the IR cut filter. The existing Raspberry PI NOIR camera is one of the cheapest infrared cameras on the market, but it's limited by the absence of a lens mount.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/pr...

Why not clean energy?

http://energyfromthorium.com/2...

Oh well, I guess we'll just have to buy it from this guy:

http://www.itheo.org/bill-gate...

Maybe in addition to flexible screens, a brain scanner, and antigravity, this Nexus phone will finally feature the latest in high-bandwidth media transfer technology. An unnamed source tells me this wireless technology will take the revolutionary form of a small, fingernail-sized chip that can be easily inserted into and removed from the phone. Many gigabytes of data from the cloud can be stored on the chip and then transfered between the phone and other compatible devices such as phones, tablets, and notebooks. Some media sources have speculated that this pioneering technology may even allow users to access their media when an Internet connection is not available, although experts have cautioned that the technology to implement such a feature will not be available until 2015 at the earliest...

I'm not really sure what they mean either. Why is it running Android 4.0 when the latest is 4.1? What flavor of Android will it be running? Vanilla Android Open Source Project (AOSP)? Cyanogenmod? Will either the Linux or Android kernels require binary driver blobs for full functionality, or will this thing be totally open? What distribution of GNU/Linux will it run -- Plasma Active on Mer? Can it run Debian or Ubuntu? Is it easy to hack on or upgrade after it ships?

This device sounds cool, and $185 for a 10" capacitive touchscreen with expansion options ain't bad, but it would be nice if the specifications were a little bit more nailed down.

Oh yeah, because this sort of technology worked so well in Fast and Furious when Mexican drug lords used American assault weapons against us after the batterries in the GPS tracking system meant to locate them failed. I am not very convinced this sort of technology would be very difficult to override. The comparison of the Syrian rebels to the Afghan Mujahedeen, aka Taliban, who we are still fighting now, demonstrates an unfornate grasp of history by the people behind this idea. It's still not clear if the Syrian rebels should get military aid from us period -- they are still not a cohesive group, and elements of the rebellion still engage in things like torture and attacks on civilian targets.

What "sorry" track record? Last I checked we've been doing quite well with vaccines. I managed to get into a trial for one of the more recent ones, Chickenpox, and am certainly glad I did. Why are you so worried?

This is precisely why we have a division of power between the federal governments and the state. States, for example, are able to set their own early voting and absentee rules for their own elections (although the federal government may arbitrate if someone sues the state about these). It makes sense -- the absentee voting needs of Texas, which will have temperate weather during the election, are different than Alaska, where residents may be snowed in on election day. Another example would be subsidies for energy efficiency, which would be better spent on heat pumps in Texas, gas furnaces in Alaska.

What bothers me about not-quite-secessionists like you is that you like to apply state purview to issues that have nothing to do with locality, especially issues where you personally disagree with the federal government's stance. Are healthcare needs best left to the states? I suppose work related injuries vary somewhat by location, but lets face it, people get sick and die of cancer no matter where they live. May gays marry? While rural folks tend to have a different view than urbanites on this, I really don't see how it has anything to do with geographic location. Yet these are two issues conservatives seem to cite most when jacking off about State's Rights.

If rumors are true, there should be five new Nexus-branded devices compatible with the Android Open Source Project coming out November 5. In addition to running the most hackable version of Android, it should also be relatively easy to get them running Debian, Ubuntu, or even MeeGo.