The thing is, you find that as nations get more free and accepting of men and women to do what they please, gender parity isn't something that develops. In fact, some careers stratify even more. This isn't a bad thing, this is because men and women tend to have different interests. When things are fair and equal and you can pursue the career you wish, what they wish on average is different. That doesn't mean there aren't outliers, of course, but that you will find some careers are "gendered" in that one gender prefers them more than the other.

We shouldn't try and stop that. We should just make sure that the reason someone chooses a career is because they want it, not because they have been prevented from entering another field and this is their second choice, and also not because they were pressured in to it. We want people to be truly free to do what they desire, without artificial barriers to that.

There are always limits to what they can take. Depending on the state you live in various assets are protected, and only so much of your income can be taken for payment. They don't get to just take everything you own and demand all your money. You will find it is usually things like your primary residence, primary vehicle, and so on are protected, and the limit of monthly payment is a certain percentage of after tax income.

So while a big judgement sucks and can effect you in various ways, it isn't a life ending "you are forever in debt and can never keep a dollar" event.

Not really. Ever since flat LiPo packs became the norm, I haven't seen a huge decline in performance over time. Long gone are the days when a two-year-old battery got half the life of a new one.

However, with current hardware, battery life varies wildly, depending on whether you're actually doing something of consequence with your laptop or merely using its screen to show a picture. The people who sit there running basic apps like Word, PowerPoint, Safari/Firefox/Chrome (with Flash disabled), etc. are likely to get very close to the rated battery life, because for all intents and purposes, their laptops are just sitting there idling with the screen lit for 99% of that time, with all but one CPU core powered down completely. By contrast, people who are actually using the CPU—compiling, running Photoshop, running Lightroom, using audio, etc.—burn through the battery in a fraction of the rated time.

Apple got a lot of bad press a few years ago for massively overestimating their battery life and is now quite a bit more conservative. They've gone from claiming 6 hours to claiming 8, but at the same time they've shipped lower power CPUs and doubled the size of the battery. There was a Kickstarter for an open source compatible laptop with very similar specs to the MBP floating around last week: they were also claiming 8 hours on battery, but they were shipping a battery half the size of the MBP. I guess they think Linux users keep the screen turned off.

Yes, all of those things can help. Of course, if you're running builds in Xcode or similar, you'll still be lucky to get three hours from that eight-hour battery. And if you're using musical notation software like Finale (which keeps the audio hardware "hot" continuously), you'll be lucky to get four. Lightroom? Photoshop? Same deal.

The problem is, what I want in a laptop is to be able to use it all day without running out of battery, and by "use", I actually mean use, not sit around and browse the web.

IMO, Apple still needs to get serious about battery life, which can only be achieved by putting in a much higher-capacity battery. If they offered one model of MacBook Pro 15" Retina in the old (pre-retina) case (but sans optical drive), they could stick in a battery that would truly last an entire day under actual use.

When retards make a comment like that on a public site, hosted in the US, viewed primarily by US citizens. You would think they could see the inherently contradictory nature of such a thing but no, they are convinced somehow that the US government clamps down on information like a repressive regime, yet somehow managed to miss this, and the millions of other, sites hosted in its borders.

Unless you're complaining that gasoline stations are a commercial infrastructure, in which case I interpreted that bit to mean electrical infrastructure.

They can be a great option for folks who only occasionally travel long distances, because 98% of the time, you're not dragging the extra weight of an ICE around, and you're (ostensibly) using clean energy to power your car, and you only use gasoline when you're traveling too far for electric cars to otherwise be practical. For people who drive long distances regularly, obviously a hybrid or even a traditional automobile would be a better choice (less pollution, better emissions controls, and better fuel economy in all likelihood).

Only for wars that never had any popular support in the first place.

And America can't afford to lose its high-tech aircraft, because they're so expensive.

That's because they had real bombers to do the grunt work. They'd sure have been complaining if the F-117 was the only bomber they had.

The F-35's stealth is only useful in a ground-attack role in a few tiny corner cases--which country, exactly, do you think it's going to be bombing which has good enough air defence for the stealth to make a difference, but not good enough that it makes no difference?--and, for that, you pay several times the cost of an aircraft that's just as capable the rest of the time. And, given the cost of losing one, odds are they'll just stay back out of range and launch missiles, the same way a cheaper aircraft would.

Isn't the F-35 heavily reliant on networked sensors to detect targets, since using radar immediately tells the other guys where it is? Doesn't that have precisely the same jamming problem as drone links?

Sure, it can keep flying without those links, but that doesn't help if it can't shoot anything.

Duh. You don't have to worry about 'air supremacy' when fighting third-world peasants, because they don't have any planes. What you do have to worry about are anti-aircraft guns and missiles, which are vastly cheaper than F-35s.

Sending a $337,000,000 (according to the 'War Nerd' post linked above) fighter to blow up Toyotas full of peasants is like using a 30mm gatling gun to hunt ducks. It's all very exciting, and fun if you can afford it, but not very sensible.

You do realize the F-35 has to carry most if its weapons on highly non-stealthy wing pylons for air-to-ground attacks, right? If I remember correctly, it can only carry two bombs or four air-to-air missiles internally, everything else has to go under the wings... including the external fuel tanks required for a long bombing mission.

The predecessors actually have to do something in the real world, like bombing third-world peasants, while the F-35 sits in a hangar. Besides, who's really going to risk a $200,000,000 jet to blow up a $10,000 pickup with a couple of guys with RPGs in the back?

Because everyone in Europe has a high-speed rail station outside their house from where they can take a train all the way to their destination by the direct route without stopping anywhere in between.

You're right that flying makes little sense on short routes, due to the time taken to get on and off the plane. But high-speed rail makes little sense on those routes, either. When I lived in the UK, even the relatively slow 220-ish km/h inter-city trains used to spend about the first half hour crawling out of London before they could get up to speed, then, after a few minutes at that speed, they'd be crawling in and out of the stations where they stopped along the way.

....as long as you have no intention of going car_range/2 further from your house... Otherwise you're still looking at a commercial infrastructure.

Or a generator pod on a small trailer.