Those tax breaks and subsidies were set up to encourage advancement in those areas by offering an economic incentive. Musk just did exactly what the government was handing out money for people to do... advance those areas.

Well, not YOUR actions. YOUR actions kill kittens.

Some reptiles had fur (see Synapsids) and only one branch of dinosaurs developed feathers at some point (Therapods). Obviously not all dinosaurs had feathers (for example, a large portion of them were aquatic, filling the same roles as modern whales), so it is hardly a stretch to think that many of them looked like reptiles.

Especially since the appearance of reptiles then could have been mammalian for some values of reptiles.

And by American, you meant Australian. I can see how you got those two confused, being that they are almost on the opposite sides of the world and are near polar opposites in every other way.

I see no evidence to suggest they would have survived had they worn seatbelts. Couch victim blaming aside, the chances of two fragile elderly people surviving getting T-Boned is pretty slim.

"A goat cannot willingly enter into a contract (lack of comprehension. etc)"

It could be argued that is true of 50%+ of couples that got divorced as well.

And marriages happen all the time between unwilling parties if the culture standards dictate that marriages are to be arranged.

Banning mentally unstable people from owning an AW != banning AWs. The first is sensible, the second was what was proposed and what I stated that I was referring to.

There are 7m+ motorcycle riders on the road. There are 115,000 major motorcycle accidents per year. Assuming everyone only has one major accident, a person, on average, would have to be riding for 60 years before they have their first motorcycle accident. The average motorcyclist rides for 6 years.

Therefore, the vast majority (something close to 80-90% of riders) never have a major accident and never will have a major accident.

Sure, most motorcyclists know other motorcyclists that have had major accidents, but the idea that "there are only two types of riders, those that have had a major accident and those that will have a major accident" is just FUD and bullshit.

You are about 4x more likely to be killed by a cow, per year, than you are to be killed in a mass shooting with an assault weapon in the U.S. But look at the mouth-frothing AW ban insanity after Newtown.

I'm much more concerned about things like society's inability to cope with resource loss and our exploding population, and things we know will happen like Yellowstone going up sometime in the next who knows and the next worldwide plague (see Spanish flu v2 with Fox News doomsday panic), than I have been by asteroids.

Most riders never ever get in a real wreck.

Either that or be open about it. It is hard to blackmail someone over something that is public knowledge.

That suits me just fine. The response is to compete, not fudge the rules of the game to give handicaps.

The problem isn't that punitive damages are high, the problem is that punitive damages are high AND the plaintiff+lawyers get to keep it. There are lots of ways to financially punish without awarding obscene amounts of money to the one filing the suit. The latter behavior is what causes the trolling behavior.

If instead, that money went to pay legal expenses and reasonably compensated the person, and then the vast majority of the remainder went to some other cause, this would be a non-issue. Preferably something still tax payer funded, like transportation or education, so it isn't taxpayers getting screwed in the end.

"The complaint seeks a federal investigation and demands Harvard "immediately cease and desist from using stereotypes, racial biases and other discriminatory means in evaluating Asian-American applicants.""

OR... we could just evaluate students on their merits, rather than their skin color. Remove the race/ethnicity indicators from the application forms altogether and don't make them a factor during interviews.

I sincerely doubt you could tell the difference between utilisation from malware and... say... the Windows Aero interface.