Heh, seems I'm wrong about the fungi - randy little buggers.

Technically, "evolution" is the change in statistical distribution of alleles in a genetic population over time. There's little uncertainty about that happening - every genetic change over time is absolutely evidence of evolution, in the technical sense, because there's nothing more to it than that.

Any uncertainty is about what shaped the emergence, then dominance, of certain traits among species that survived today. But of course in the case of sexual reproduction with distinct sexes, it's still a reproductive corner case only used by a small percentage of the biomass of the planet (and heck, only plants and animals do it in any form, while most of the biomass is found in the other kingdoms).

Is that really much of a mystery? Gene exchange as part of reproduction has obvious advantages for speed in adaption to changing conditions. There are plenty of hermaphrodite species that show the stepping stone to specialized organs for gene exchange. Splitting into 2 sexes, each with just one set of reproductive organs, is just a cost savings, reducing the amount of otherwise unneeded organs to maintain.

I recommend a project that auto-edits slashdot headlines to avoid trailing prepositions.

Poor headline grammar is something up with which we should not put.

Except that Windows probably has just as many holes only you dont know about them because they aren't public or because Microsoft has decided not to invest the engineering resources to fix them or because Microsoft has fixed them in a patch but the actual security flaw is still unknown publicly.

An unprovable assertion.

That's like saying Perl or PHP can't have any remote code execution vulnerabilities, because you have to apache with mod_perl or mod_php turned on to exploit them.

When you load mod_cgi, your shell becomes a potential platform for remote exploits.

You are correct. The President's belief in Christian social justice causes him to favor government imposed social programs and punitive taxation, in defiance of economic theory and practice.

I like Pope Francis, but he probably spent more time bouncing people out of nightclubs than in a lab. Appeal to authority, and all that.

Where is Fox News in this article?

Seriously, where is it?

Some of you people have a anti-Fox News fetish, and it is crippling.

Hopefully America will seize the territory from the Russians, enemies of the world.

I'm a 2-decade subscriber to Consumer Reports, but sometimes they just get their science (engineering) completely wrong.

A force doesn't bend an object. A moment does. That is, the propensity to bend is not proportional to the force applied. It's proportional to the force times the lever arm. i.e. A 90 pound force applied to one point on an object may not bend it, while applied to a different point it can easily bend it. So the bigger (longer) phones were actually resisting greater moments, even though the force was the same.

Another problem is the test they came up with supported the phone at both ends, while pressing down in the middle. Basically a simply supported beam. The important thing to note here is that in such a config, both sides of the phone are resisting the bending moment. If it took 90 pounds of force applied to the middle, then the left side was resisting 45 pounds, the right side 45 pounds.

When a phone in your pocket is bent, it is in a cantilever configuration. One end of the phone is held rigidly, while the other end is free-floating. If the phone reached sufficient deflection to permanently bend in a simply supported config at 90 pounds, it will reach the same deflection at just 45 pounds in an equivalent cantilever (more precisely, 45 pounds pushing one way at one end, while your body weight holds the other end of the phone in place). You can try it in the calculators I've linked. Give both the same load, make the cantilever half the length, and you'll see the cantilever has twice the deflection. Make the load on the cantilever half that of the simply supported beam, and they have the same deflection.

(The actual force and moment diagram when you're sitting on your phone is a lot more complicated, since the force is distributed along the phone instead of all at one point. Integrating this is trivial for anyone who's taken a structural engineering course, but explaining it is beyond the scope of a forum post.)

I don't think Yahoo was ever top dog search?

I remember switching from Altavista to Google sometime around 98/99. WebCrawler before that? Yahoo is one of those companies I've never understood why people used their products. Or, for that matter, how they're still around today.

Won't work. Well it work in one special case, but not in the general case. Any time the fiber path (defined by the two endpoints of the fiber) isn't parallel to line of sight, the light coming out the end of the fiber won't match what's directly behind that point. So if you place a camera in a specific spot, and you route the fibers from the front to the equivalent position in the back (relative to the camera), then it would work. But the moment you moved the camera, the fibers would then be at an angle instead of parallel to line of sight, and the "background" as seen through the fibers wouldn't align with the actual background. It also fails when there's parallax. Line of sight is diverging rays shooting out from the eye, so the fibers have to be aligned at that exact angle of divergence. If the eye is closer or further, there's parallax, and again the background through the fibers doesn't match the exact background.

Basically, your optical fibers are just mimicking putting a TV in front of the object and displaying an image of the background on the TV. A real cloak can't just take light which strikes a plane (sphere, whatever) on one side and emit the same light on the opposite side. It also needs to preserve the arrival angle of the path that light was taking as it struck one side, and emit it on the other side at the same departure angle it would have taken had the cloaked object not been there. Which this clever arrangement of lenses does (albeit for a very narrow field of view).

My dealer offers "free" loaner cars, so I don't wait. Of course, that's quite an expensive free rental, but it is convenient. "Valet service" is a thing now at some luxury dealerships, too (they come get your car, do the work, bring it back). But that's all only if you're not watching the price.

Wait, who's president again? I thought we had taken a break from rich old white men? (You forgot Protestant, BTW.)