Finally, someone uses their brain. Sure, we could send a big army over there and stomp them into the ground. But then what?

And if anyone thinks Saddam's dead-enders were a big headache, what do you suppose a bunch of religious zealots will be?

Cue Mencken on problems and solutions.

Actually he had better fear for his life.

But it's nice of them to tell everyone it's hitting them where it hurts.

Precisely the argument used to rationalize the war in Vietnam.

I miss the good old days, when you knew to blame everything on the Axis of Evil, and you could solve all our problems by bombing Iraq.

It's to help decide "whether" to bomb someone.

Space heaters are fire hazards.

I think the PIAP activists have started eliminating the competition.

Maybe we can get the FCC to take that on next!

Up with service! Down with monopolies! Up with net neutrality! Down with regulation! Up with Pluto! Down with Kim Dotcom!

Wait a minute - Today's stories leave me feeling edgy and confused.

At least they've improved the performance of using .zip files in Windows Explorer. Back when they first introduced that, it was *awful*. If the zipfile contained more than a couple of dozen files, copying them out took an amazingly long time. (It's still not as fast as some other software that works with .zip files, e.g. info-zip; but it's way more reasonable now than it used to be. It's no longer bad enough to drive me to put the .zip file on a USB 2.0 flash drive and hand-carry it to a Linux box to unzip it and hand-carry the contents back and copy them from the USB 2.0 flash drive to the Windows computer -- at one time, this was actually significantly faster than using Explorer's zipfile support, if the zipfile had a lot of small files in it.)

What jurisdiction do they have anywhere?

> You'd get whiter skies. People wouldn't have blue skies anymore.

I grew up in northeastern Ohio. I always assumed the notion of the sky being "blue" was a cultural symbolic thing, like how they teach you to draw yellow lines radiating from the sun to represent the sunlight coming from it, or the black lines you draw behind a moving object to show the motion.

When I was in seventh grade we moved to western Michigan. The first day, I got out my camera and took photographs of the sky being *actually* blue (well, sky blue), because I didn't think anyone would believe me, or understand that I was being literal, if I just told them about it.

I will never forget him, in his iconic white and gold uniform.

Seriously, though, terrible day. I feel like I knew him.

On the other hand, there is a case to be made for an aim-for-the-stars strategy. If you can build a turbine blade you can build anything. I would have thought compressor blades would be a much more likely candidate, but if they can get this to work, more power to them. And maybe 3d printing will give them options they would not otherwise have: internal bleed air cooling channels that follow the leading edge along its curvature, for instance. It's possible that given completely different design and manufacturing capabilities, they'll be able to make something that can do the same job with different tradeoffs.

The IRS targeted political groups that brought in the most money. That meant that most of them were PACs with large corporate contributions, which primarily donate to Republican candidates. So naturally the Republicans made it into a fake scandal. Ironically the guy at the IRS who was at the center of the "scandal" was himself a Republican.