It still will be when it goes into production. The cost per bird will drop greatly once we've fielded over 2500 of them.

The f-117 shootdown was pure dumb luck, it was hit by a ZSU firing blindly into the air. The ZSU works because it puts so much metal in the air that if you fly over-it at low altitude as that plane did, you are going to get hit. Shooting it down had nothing to do with countering the stealth capabilities. The Iraqi's had much more capable systems and didn't get a hit on any of our stealth birds.

He wasn't hanging out with a different buddy when we first went into Afghanistan. By the time he fled to Pakistan the Taliban had already been removed from power and the new government needed time to become established and capable of standing on it's own.

Because not all can be vaccinated. How many times does this need to be explained. Your choice not to vaccinate put's others at risk. It is not just a choice for your family, but for the immuno-compromised and the very young in our society as well. We all rely on the herd immunity and if you compromise it your choice then affects others and your rights end when they start harming others.

Amen, and forget choosing to keep the old UI as a preference. It forgets it every time. Seriously dislike the new UI it is less user friendly and less intuitive than the old one.

No, the President, submits a budget proposal. The House can enact that budget, parts of it, or toss it out the window entirely. The only real say the president gets on the budget is a chance to veto it after both the House and the Senate have had their say on the process.

Perhaps this is why Nigel Powers Hates the Dutch. Simply short mans syndrome.

Most who qualify as veteran achieved that status before President Obama was elected. It has nothing to do with serving HIM but rather serving the country. Veterans have a higher unemployment rate than the general public, mostly because most employers don't recognize the skills they bring and that their military training doesn't always translate clearly into civilian HR job listings.

Also this isn't a jobs program but a training program. If the economy doesn't create 75k jobs for those trained through this program it won't help them. But if the market is there then they will have the training to work in the field.

And of course there is the fact that such events are most commonly set to all go off together so by the time the Feds react to the first boom, and issue the order to shut down the cell networks, all the other bombs have also detonated. And now mass panic ensues because family members can't reach out and confirm safety to one another.

Real life attacks are rarely if ever as scripted out as in the movies, which is the only place you find an evil mastermind who sets a series of timed bombs being set off at different times for maximum evil doing.

We were fighting these beetle infestations back in the 70's when we were worried about global cooling. The beetles are not new, their presence is not a result of global warming but rather of our meddling with natural burn patterns for so many years.

In un managed forests a fire sweeps through every couple decades killing off the beetle killed trees and most the beetles in an area, the healthy trees are singed but not really harmed and are thus protected by the killing of most the beetles. In managed forests where we basically stopped all fires as soon as they started, the beetles killed a few trees, then a few more then a lot more and so on. After several years a dead tree might finally fall over allowing new growth to come up in it's place but mostly they just stood as forests of reddish grey dead trees.
Now we try to allow some burns, manage others and intentionally set many management fires each year. But thanks to the decades of mismanagement managed and natural fires are frequently getting out of control due to the massive swaths of beetle killed trees.

Once burned those forests will at last begin to naturally regenerate. Not right back to the forests of standing conifers, but through the natural stages often first of grasses and shrubs then deciduous trees like quaking aspens and scub oak and then over decades back to conifers. Depending on the water cycle in the area. Other areas with more moisture will get back to the conifers more quickly.

Agreed, Looking at the map around where I live. Almost all the pink is the result of fires the last few years. And it takes a while but those trees are growing back. Intentional, accidental or natural wildland fires, they are all recovering nicely, the new growth thriving on the ash enriched soils. It will be decades before the end stage forests that burned return to that point but the natural process is proceeding nicely.

And I for one, welcome our new Lame Aprils Fools day joke overlords!

The "OMG Ponies!" day was the best, but I'm liking the posts so far and found this amusing. If you don't like it, go read something else. It's not an easy task to build a full day's stream of funny.

But with the exception of the very first generation of recipients that is NOT what it was meant to be. It was supposed to be a forced investment towards retirement with a little extra to aid the first generation of recipients. But then congress repeatedly raided that huge stockpile of money leaving it now little more than a vault full of IOU's and turning it into how you described it. But it was not supposed to be the way it is.

If shot straight up yes. But if shot at an angle, that bullet can and likely will retain deadly forward velocity at the end of it's parabolic arch. It's not common but people have been killed by bullets fired into the air.