I would like to see some reliable source for that 25% and 70% quotes.

The rest is not really worth commenting on.

And you want to say that beheading people is somehow *representative* of Muslims? Or opposing gays is somehow representative of Christians?

If your answer is "yes", then you really need to widen your horizons, mate - you are painting people with an enormously wide brush if you dare to say that most people sharing a certain religion are murderers.

You are pathetic.

Thank you for demonstrating your blatant racism and ignorance.

You do realize that there is 1.6 billion of people that are muslims in the world, spread out over the most of the globe? Your comment is like saying that we should ban all Christians from having human rights, because they are Bible thumping bigots opposing gays and abortions.

Please, do educate yourself before you open your mouth next time.

Unfortunately, that's not how real world works. I have pretty much screwed up the first year of Uni, failing a calculus course badly - exactly the case of suddenly having to work much harder than I was used to in high school, where I really didn't have to do much to have good marks. The guys from the more math-oriented schools were running circles around me.

Unfortunately, that early screw up in the first semester has costed me cum laude graduation, despite having no problems later on - the university rules didn't allow for someone do graduate with honors when they have flunked a course like that. And trust me, there is quite a difference when you are looking for a job after the school in whether you have graduated or graduated cum laude ... It is even more pronounced if you are thinking about continuing in grad school or doing a PhD.

Except that according to NTSB (http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/nov/02/virgin-galactic-spaceshiptwo-crash-investigators-fuel-warnings) the crash had nothing to do with the engine which worked fine until the breakup, but apparently one of the pilots unlocked the tail too early and/or the tail malfunctioned.

So much for the "we told you so!" brigade that jumps to conclusions and immediately knows the cause even before the wreckage has even cooled down ... sheesh ...

Sorry, this is pretty much BS scaremongering.

Buying a piece of metal that could be made into a centrifuge doesn't mean that you will actually succeed to make one. There is a lot of specialized equipment needed for that which is tightly controlled (try to export a high precision CNC machine, for example!).

Most of this gear has lots of legitimate uses as well. Not to mention that if someone really wanted to obtain this sort of gear, I cannot imagine them shopping for it on Alibaba or eBay - they would be spending a ton of money for a product of unknown quality possibly from a mom&pop shop somewhere in China that sells everything from rubber bands, dresses up to car accessories, that is assuming it isn't a scam in the first place. There are better ways of obtaining it - e.g. through shell companies abroad acting as middlemen to avoid embargoes or from friendly nations.

And before someone pulls out the "terrorist building nukes" bogeyman - that requires a lot more than building a few centrifuges from stuff bought on Alibaba. There are plenty of simpler, cheaper and easier accessible methods to wreak havoc than trying to build a nuke that even countries like Iran didn't succeed in so far, despite vastly bigger resources than some lunatics in a cave possess.

Telepresence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telepresence)?

Why do I feel that whenever Oculus Rift is mentioned, the project has to be new and ground breaking, something that has never been done before, right? Never mind the decades of previous work and existing industrial applications (like telesurgery or underwater ROV operation ...).

I am from EU, however this situation around the H-1B visa is why I am not even remotely interested in most of the job offers from the US that I am getting.

I have been in a similar situation in Europe before my country entered the EU and it is a lot of "fun" when you have to go every year to the immigration office, apply for a work permit renewal and pray that some clerk didn't get off the bed with the wrong foot and won't deny your application because of some bizarre reason - forcing you to lose the job and to leave the country, potentially incurring catastrophic financial losses (relocating abroad/overseas is one heck expensive, especially on a short notice!). On top of that, there is the inevitable "second class" treatment of the foreign employees, because the company knows that if the guy decides to leave, his or her permit is cancelled and they would have to leave the country on a short notice. The alternative is to have their new employer re-apply for the visa/permit again, but that must be done while the applicant lives outside of the country (yay, Switzerland ...), waiting another 6+ months for the paperwork to go through, with no guarantee of success ...

Sorry, but this is not how you treat skilled workers that you are ostensibly so interested in.

The US is doing itself a lot of disservice with this, because apart from the horrid H-1B regime, there is little else available for foreign workers (good luck trying to get the "green card" ...). I am sure there are many companies that use the visa responsibly and treat their foreign employees decently, but it is still a pretty big sword hanging over one's head.

I am certainly not expecting any entitlement to have a job in the US as a foreigner, but right now if someone wanted to hire me, they would have to offer a very sweet deal for it to be worth the gamble with the visas for me.

Not like banks have any profit-robbing security measures in place. If there weren't laws in place forcing them to indemnify/limit the customer exposer against fraud, do you think they would bother?

When banks started to issue VISA/MasterCard credit cards in my country (one of the ex-commie countries) some 15 years ago, they had no clue about what they were doing - when I asked how it works in case of fraud, the clerk told me with a straight face that I have to bring a receipt from the sale and they will claim the money back from the seller. Yeah right, someone who swipes my cc number is going to give me a receipt ... The clerk couldn't fathom that such situation could occur, because nobody ever uses the card outside of an ATM or a POS terminal, right? (and those cannot be tampered with, right?)

Basically, if someone swiped your card, you were screwed - hopefully you had a sufficiently low withdrawal/payment limit on the card, otherwise your account could have been completely emptied.

Not defending CurrentC here (can be pretty much even worse), but the illusion that a credit card is somehow more secure is really that - an illusion ...

Enough said ...

Kids really don't need to learn to "code". Only trained monkeys working for few bucks/hour "code". Of course, Facebooks and Microsofts need such people too, but that really isn't what we should be teaching to kids.

Have them learn mathematics, abstract and analytical thinking, let them do actual science, experiments, let them tinker (and fail!), expose them to the computers and computer science too. That is much more important.

Whether the little Johnny or Susan can write a program for adding up a few numbers or make a web page when they can barely read and write yet doesn't matter - perhaps they will become an excellent physicists or chemists instead. Or perhaps get a Nobel for curing cancer, who knows. We will need all kinds of engineers and scientists, not only cubicle monkeys slaving for Microsofts of the future. Schools shouldn't serve only one industry - if the kids are prepared and interested, they will go in the computer science themselves, without having to "spoon-feed" them with it.

I simply wonder why these behemoths of companies sitting on so much cash don't run their own re-qualification/education programs? That would be a win-win situation for everyone. And it not some silly commie invention - Tomas Bata (the shoe tycoon from before the WWII) was doing exactly that - taking kids from the street and offering them education - and gaining qualified and loyal workers in the process. Of course, it is cheaper to whine about the lack of visas for foreign labour and poor school systems and demand that someone else solves your problems ...

Unfortunately, the whole thing is again more BS.

The paper and the "independent researchers" (who are in fact working with Rossi) are quite well debunked here:
  http://shutdownrossi.com/e-cat...
  http://news.newenergytimes.net...

Arxiv is *not* a peer-reviewed publication - anyone can submit anything there. So having a paper on Arxiv doesn't mean that it is any good.

Sorry, even $2300 isn't enough for a device of this complexity. And anyway, they don't have that money - the backers paid only $500, so they have to fund the work from that, not from the $2300 that they may hope to get at the end.

Also check out how much a commercially produced (including all economy of scale discounts!) camera components costs: http://www.red.com/store/camer... Believe me, that isn't 100-200%+ of margin there.

And the team lacking any engineers or anyone with a verifiable experience in building projects of similar size?

Oh and check out their team - "new media artistst", "filmmaker", "3D artist", "software developer" ... I don't see any electrical engineers, FPGA/signal processing experts, mechanical engineers ... Who is actually going to BUILD this camera?

This looks very much like CLANG (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/260688528/clang) 2.0 ...