you can get soyuz launches from Arianespace. TRhey launch from Kourou, which gives them a higher payload capability than if you bought it directly from the Russians to be launched in Baikonour.

Arianespace clearly knows that things are moving and that a medium launcher which is very cost competitive is a good idea. Soyouz is almost imposible to beat... And they also know about the need for small launchers, which is why they have added Vega to their lineup -- vega development which are also useful for future booster capabilities.

Musk talks about Ariane as though it were the only product from Arianespace. Not so :)

Look, America has an unhealthy obsession with "private-good; public-bad". And guess what, the private sector does not need -- nor desires -- to enforce free speech. You want universities to be havens of free speech? It's a 2-step process:
  - make them public / make the institutions which are necessary for the public good follow the same rules as public institutions.
  - demand of the public institutions to respect your rights. This is actually pretty easy.

Also, the OP is right: it is a crybaby Murdoch piece about people unhappy that they can't hate in peace.

we know intelligence to fall on a Gaussian curve. If we track any remarkable point on that curve, be it the median or the hundredth percentile, we should see a similar trend. If we do not, then it is not human capabilities which changed, but their spread.

The problem is that you can only do that once: when you do it, pain ensues. If the companies/economy recovers, they don't need you anymore. Also, there might be retaliation: when negociating with the EU, the US basicaly does as it is told. Which apparently leaves the US negociators flustered and confused.

Which matters little, because the same lobbyists are pushing in the same direction both side of the Atlantic, so there are no real disagreements anyway.

More importantly, they could be a "misfiring" of some other, tangentially related (beneficial) characteristic. It is in fact very important to understand the biology underlining of those things to prevent them (the genocide, that is -- preventing homosexuality is a bizarre religious obsession)

These are not models in the sense that the Ether Theory was a model. You build gene regulation networks by accumulating data on what gene acts as a promoter/repressor of another and what are the activation cascades.

No one will ever invalidate that work through an experiment -- some of the network might be revised, but it is not the case that someone will come up with some experimental proof that there is no such thing as a gene expression network, which would be the equivalent of the MM experiment.

You could say that you are building a model in the physical science sense if you could look at your network and say: there must be a gene/gene group that acts here, here and here, because this is how the kinetics of the system are when stressed, and the network I built does not have the required dynamics. Now maybe this is what you are doing, and in which case I apologise, but in my limited experience, such papers are few and far between, and are certainly not bio_med_ papers (bioinformatics seem to be mostly about producing pretty pictures for most other biologists -- sad but true).

In biomed, there are not models to invalidate. the Michelson-Morley was significant because it proved that a model of the universe was wrong. To do the equivalent in biomed would require someone to have a model in the first place...

The problem with biomed research is that the field is rife with people who don't understand models. Biomed research is not really science in that we are not yet at the point where we can express mathematical models to make predictions which are then falsified or not.

All too often, it is a case of "I knock down/over-express a gene, find that it does something, and then make up some bullshit where I pretend it'll cure cancer". In many cases, articles get published because the reviewers don't say "this claim is not supported by your experiment (purely on the grounds of the claim being logically inconsistent)" or, "you say this thing is happenning, why the fuck did you not quantify it? (See, you claim this thing disappeared, what are the odds your method is just not sensitive enough?)".

This pepperred with idiots who put gaussian error bars on numbers of cells, which ought to be a motive of immediate rejection. No, I am not bitter.

This implies that an extra -5 scientists entered.

So much is wrong in your comment. a) This is about consumer protection. You don't get to lie to customers in Europe, even if you are more akin to a cult. b) The bailout of Greece is not funded by the EU, but by state actors and the IMF. That means that you, even if you are American, are bailing out the Greeks. c) If Apple decided to not sell stuff in Europe, they would lose a lot of money, and their market share would collapse to the benefit of google. Which would be bad for them.

Also, you need to get off the libertarian crack: if all "job creators" all left at once, they would be replaced almost instantly...

there you idiot, the vast majority of cases is against companies in the EU. The Comission's role is the functionning of the internal market. If you want to see action against US companies for petty nationalistic reasons, look at the WTO cases.

Also, it is Apple's subsidiary in Europe which is being sued.

I understand that for a US citizen it is difficult to comprehend the concept of good market regulation and going after companies which try to fuck over the consumer, but this is the way it works in the EU. The Commission, for all its defects, does one thing well: market regulation in the domains where it is allowed to regulate the market.

No, Although I sympathise with the notion that more people ought to be stalwartly and adamantly in favour of personal freedom, libertarians are not adding anything to the conversation. They operate on the fundamental principle that no-one should even try to stop dickheads from being dickheads because PERSONAL FREEDOM and MARKET WILL SELF-CORRECT.

This is nothing to do with personal freedom: this is just the expression of a wannabe psychopath angry that he cannot follow his impulses. But not all libertarians are like that. Some have been lucky in life, and they deeply want to believe they are successful because of their efforts, and not their circumstances. Think middle-aged white guy in a gated community.

Fundamentally, libertarian do not understand that their cherished market and contract law needs to be enforced. Enforced by an entity powerful enough for that: the government, and that the government to be legitimate and powerful enough, needs to stem from the will of the people, and be large enough, and that the people might think that the dog-eat-dog world of the libertarians is not what they desire. So deep down, libertarians wish that their perfectly free world be enforced by a fascist dictatorship.

If in space warfare one side uses crewed ships, they deserve to lose. Also, I expect that with advanced manufacturing, the ships would be constructed atom per atom. It might be that the economics of it makes the building of ships pretty much exactly as expensive as the building of decoys.

And then, of course, any FTL tech causes interesting things to happen if anyone actually exploits it. Imagine synchronising a grid of energy beams from a single ship, and then jumping close to your opponent for a dogfight were you use this information -- information which your opponent cannot have. What if he does the same, and preemptively tries to interdict your firing? Now everything becomes a question of calculating probabilities, and the ship with the fastest computer wins.

But Viet Nam was very nearly 60 years ago...

kwin is fully scriptable -- how much more power do you need than per-window/window class/app rules?. Also, it only does its job of managing windows, and the rest is taken care of by the desktop. Enlightenment is a wm+launchers+set of apps but refuses to admit it would like to be a DE like XFCE. They can't admit that because OMG BLOAT!

xmonad is a very interesting experiment, which some people find great. But these are the same people who think that the purpose of X is having more terminal windows open at the same time -- or their spiritual descendants.