What about taking a slower look?

It's the only way to be sure.

You're cute. I've done this shit for a living for a while. Yes, many companies' incidence response procedures are crap, but they shouldn't, and it is perfectly possible to get an emergency countermeasure deployed within 24 hours with all the t's crossed and i's dotted and perfect SOX compliance and whatever else you need. It's just something you need to think about before the emergency hits you.

Of course everything else is never equal.

But what are you trying to accomplish here? Argue that a project with 100 developers has more eyes on the code than one with 4? Moot point, no argument.

We don't get the luxury of having 50 identical software projects with different team sizes and a size control, so we have to go with the real world and "everything else being equal" is just a way of saying that you if you want to compare closed vs. open source, you need to compare comparable projects, not an open source project with a handful of people with a closed source project two orders of magnitude larger - or the other way around.

Conspicuous consumption? Also, some people happen to have cars only for occasional usage (weekly raids of supermarkets, e.g.).

That U.S. crotch you're cheerfully kicking might not be able to bail out your "actual civilized" buttocks from the next war.

I'm pretty sure Europeans are more worried about the US starting the next war.

The thing Europeans like best about the US military is all the coin we drop having bases there. Unless you count Serbia, where the US military is about as welcome as a bladder infection.

Because it's one jot different anywhere else in the Industrialised World.

I don't know if this is nuts. I'd have to see the full arguments on both sides, and so far what we have to go on is a one-sided summary.

If the *only* effect of the proposed regulation would be to increase beer prices, then sure, I agree with you 100%: government is being stupid. But if there's a good reason for the regulation, then I'd disagree with you.

Reading the article, it seems like the idea that this regulation will cause beer prices to spike dramatically seems a bit alarmist. The regulations would require brewers who send waste to farmers as animal feed to keep records. It seems hard to believe that this would significantly raise the price of beer or whiskey given that alcohol production is already highly regulated. On the other hand, it seems like there is no specific concern related to breweries. They were just caught up in a law that was meant to address animal feed.

If you want an example of a regulation free utopia, look no further than China, where adulteration of the food chain is a common problem. If the choice were a regulatory regime that slightly complicates brewers lives, and a regime that allows melamine and cyanuric acid into human food, I'd live with higher beer prices.

Fortunately, we don't have to live with either extreme. We can regulate food adulteration and write exceptions into the regulations for situations that pose little risk. Since presumably the ingredients used in brewing are regulated to be safe for human consumption, the byproducts of brewing are likely to pose no risk in the human food chain.

Distortion lowers contrast? I thought internal reflections lowered contrast. Also, while all you've mentioned is true, I'd expect that lenses of moderate quality (and reasonable aperture) are probably possible, if expensive, in the thickness budget (which seems to be the limiting parameter in phones). But people certainly aren't ready to pay for such lenses in cheap phones.

Right, that is the only thing that would make sense - you simply can't use the traditional "flat" trajectory (because that wouldn't make the velocity vector "largely upward" - it's largely horizontal for expendable first stages) with such a small amount of fuel - you'd either need more fuel to cancel the horizontal momentum and to put it on a return ballistic trajectory (one that would have somewhere around 700-1000 m/s of terminal velocity in vacuum, though), or you could redesign the whole flight profile and use a combination of gravity and aerodynamics to save fuel when returning along a steeper trajectory, even if it means greater gravity losses for both the first and the second stage. I'm just uncertain about how they want to deal with the dynamic stresses when hitting the dense atmosphere at higher speeds. Well, I guess we'll simply have to accept that they wouldn't be doing this if they thought it wouldn't work.

I'm aware of all the things you mention, but they're irrelevant since they don't answer the issues (in the case of the Earth rotation, they don't even make sense since the launch goes eastward and with small flight distances over a mostly-eastward trajectory and with small altitude changes, you'll hardly notice the effects for the purpose of designing the first stage trajectory). OTOH, cjameshuff rightly points out that the only way of coping with this with the small amount of fuel allocated for the return phase would a complete redesign of the flight profile, since the overwhelmingly horizontal component of velocity of the traditional "flat" launch trajectory is a show-stopper. You have to take the return leg of the first stage into the calculation of the new flight profile, but in that case, all the numbers go completely off and we won't be able to infer anything applicable to a flight with a first stage return leg from this recent test flight.

Since Miami won't be there in a hundred years anyway, I wouldn't make such a big deal of it even if they managed to do just that. ;)

"Recover" as in "fetch the debris from the sea", or "recover" as in "have it land nicely"?

But it's you who sees religion where there isn't any. Why else would you call it "Calvinist"?

All right, all right. I'll stop having a beef with you.

(...if there is a hell, I fully expect to go there for that.)

What "Mann's program" are you talking about? All those studies are independent, there's no single Microsoft Climate program that everyone uses.

Well, if the US has all the ICBMs only for defense, why have them when they won't have their strip of land either after an attack regardless of whether they use them or not? Same logic.