Do Not Track was always useless.

Why the fuck are we still talking about it years later? And why the fuck have browsers taken it even semi-seriously?

It's the "evil bit" for the Internet - nothing more than a joke. Let's treat it like that.

So it seems the branches have different needs, and really need three different variants of the same aircraft, so their necessary differences aren't all trying to compete. Perhaps we could have one with room for an internal cannon, one with STOVL capability, and one with folding wings and an arresting hook. I wonder where we could find such a craft?

I'm going to have to defer to the Pentagon, who clearly believe the A-10 is not what's needed for the future, rather than an armchair commander who thinks that the 1970s were good enough.

I'm not privy to the discussion behind changing deadlines, but in two decades as a software developer, I've never seen a project that was at deliverable quality prior to the main testing cycle.

As planned, though, the first software version to deliver basic air-to-air and air-to-ground capability will be Block 2B in mid-2015. Full capability won't be supported until Block 3F in mid-2017. In short, software development is a difficult problem for a plane that is significantly computer-controlled. Go figure.

The total program cost is estimated at $400 billion. Spread that out over the 18 years it's been running, and you end up with less than 1% of the federal government's annual budget. That's hardly enough to cause noticeable disruption, let alone bankruptcy.

I take photographs each year at SXSW, just walking the street and looking for interesting people. Many of those people pose for me when they see the camera. Facebook picked one of those pictures for the cover of my album, so apparently they think my year is summed up by a group of people I don't know, one of which is giving a fake blowjob to a green balloon dildo.

I didn't share the album with my friends and family - or open it at all.

Very little useful learning goes on in school. And the top students need time outside of school to visit libraries, pursue intellectual hobbies, do independent reading, and generally do all the academic stuff that will actually matter in their lives later on (and matter to society later on).

By continually extending the school day and the school year, we increasingly ensure that we lock our best and brightest into mediocrity by tying up all of their time in institutionally managed busywork designed to ensure they don't deviate from the mean, which is pretty piss-poor.

I have a sneaking suspicion you don't actually want answers to your questions, but I'll provide them anyway.

Not really. A-10 development took 10 years, F-18 took 8, and the F-15 took 13, all measured from program start to initial production. The F-35 began its production run in 2008, 12 years after its program started. I haven't found timelines for the earlier planes' IOC milestones, but I'm under the impression that they followed similar schedules, with production running for a few years before pushing the planes out into use. Yes, the F-35's timeline is drawn out because they're trying to design three planes at once, but that was also expected from the start.

Because it's not required to work until next year, at the earliest. What's in use now would be good enough to fly and work out other problems, but it's not suitable for combat use.

Rain isn't the problem. It's actually lightning that the F-35 isn't currently allowed to fly near, because the initial production run did not have the lightning protection applied, as it would interfere with testing. That'd be another thing to be added for IOC.

Because the A-10 is an expensive one-trick pony. You call it a "Swiss Army knife", but that's really just because its one trick is very useful. The A-10 only does close air support in an area-denial situation where the most recent anti-aircraft threat was built by the Soviet Union. It takes far more training and maintenance support to operate, and that training and logistics expense is only applicable to that one aircraft.

In comparison, the bulk of the support for an F-35 is shared across the three variants, so the total cost to run the fleet is greatly reduced. A maintainer can switch variants with minimal additional training, and a single base can support any F-35 that stops by. We're also not going to be dealing with Soviet-era defenses for much longer, with China and Russia making gestures that they're willing to sell modern SAMs to anyone who opposes Western interests.

...After only 36 years, for the US. The F-4 is still in service in other countries, primarily those that don't need to worry about modern SAMs. The F-4 was originally not a multi-role fighter. It was designed as a fighter-bomber, reworked to be an interceptor, and finally upgraded to do close-air support almost a decade later.

Just well enough to get the job done. What we've learned since the Gulf War is that fighting is expensive and complicated. To support the dozens of different single-role planes, we have to mobilize thousands of support crew to ensure that we can support any kind of mission we need. A multi-role fighter, designed to meet the potential needs, will still be able to handle lesser threats. The F-35 is being built to handle anything China or Russia might produce, but it will be perfectly capable of supporting campaigns in Africa, the Middle East, or North Korea.

Translation: "I am ignorant of what this term means to physicists, and I declare my ignorance trumps their knowledge."

This is a scientific paper being written for the author's peers, none of whom would ever misinterpret it. I've seen this issue come up in a couple of places where laypeople are confused by the language of physics.

This is not a problem with the language of physics: it is a problem with laypeople.

I'm all for clear scientific communication, but at the end of the day, communication is hard and worrying about how some random person on the 'Net might misinterpret a term you use every day in your professional work is just not a good use of anyone's precious attention.

When I write poetry I do so in a pretty technical way. If people don't appreciate that, sucks to be them, because they are not my audience. I'm the same way in scientific communication: I write for my peers, and everyone else does the same. Let the popular science authors do the translation. They need the work.

I had the same thought, but it turns out not to be the case. Given the model he's working with, the neutrinos will be as much above the speed of light as they would have been below it if they had the same real mass (0.3 eV or something like that.)

For ~10 MeV neutrinos this gives gamma absurdly close to unity, and it's as impossible to distinguish neutrinos traveling just over c from ones traveling at c from ones traveling just under c.

The paper actually mentions SN1987A and talks a bit about the time resolution required.

Ted, more likely a Libertarian, the Right's useful idiots.

And "righties" only know one tired stupid joke they keep saying over and over again.

"Lefty lefty lefty lefty." All... Fucking... Day... Long...

Because you can't check alternative media sources in the United States. No sirree, there's only one state broadcaster that plays nothing but pro-US government material all year long...

Fucking hell, you fucking moron. There's lots to condemn the US over, but I'd say it would be hard to think of a country with more diversity of voices, to the point of a loud braying cacophony.

The real highlight came with the "I'm gay" Eminem interview at the beginning. My hats off to Marshall Mathers.

The next 105 minutes was a bit of a let down.

After the hype it seems that story was overblown -- looked like less than 1% were compromised

That's good. I haven't been able to keep up on the story with the holidays and all.

I'm thinking that services like TOR (and others) are the one hope for having an internet in the future that is worth having.

It's North Korea. They spend half their time proclaiming how they're going to wipe out their enemies. They're media is in a constant state of hysteria.

That's utter BS. The UN released a report on human rights violations months before The Interview became a big issue. You should read it. The treatment of political prisoners (and christ, even unlucky bastards who happen to be distaff kin) is so harrowing that the only thing that really does come close was the Nazi death camps.