Ok, the LEGO set is independent of this prototype. But it's available this month. Here is the original proposal on Lego Ideas. Buy your own minifig exosuit! You know you want to.

I was going to keep quiet in this thread, but I couldn't let this pass.

No, they don't. They really really REALLY don't. This has been empirically proven. They vote for the guy with the best hair. They vote for the guy with the best smile. They vote for the guy with the best handshake. They vote for the guy with the "right" tag after his name. They vote for the guy who says all the correct trigger phrases they've been conditioned to respond to. The very LAST thing they do is vote for the person they believe will best represent their interests. That literally isn't a criteria. And yes, I included the "they believe" phrase on purpose. Anybody who can do arithmetic can prove that the vast majority of the country has been voting for people who do not actually represent their interests. It's worse than that. They don't even vote for people they (erroneously) believe will represent their interests. The hair and the smile and the square jaw get the vote, and if asked why, the answer is, "Because I just liked him. He seemed nice. Trustworthy."

More often than not, they don't really understand what would be in their own interests. Most of them have been continuously exposed to a giant propaganda machine literally since birth (young adults vote in line with their parents, almost universally). Most of them are unable to see through the most basic levels of the propaganda machine, the parts that say, "Do this because if you do, you will be a good person." Only a few of them have to be convinced by the more sophisticated modes of the propaganda machine, the parts that get all tricky and use reverse psychology. (That would be the mode that works on Slashdot. You rebels you.) Interests? Interests run in last place in terms of what people vote for. People vote for image and for their hot button single issues and that's all.

The only one that manufacturers capacitors worth a damn?

Wait, what? Snopes severely overstated that one.

Bra burning was quite real. Perhaps the origin is mythological, but if that's the case, life imitated art in a hurry, and kept at it for quite some time. My mother has personal memories of protests where bras were burned at the University of Chicago, and two different family friends the same age have similar memories from other places. It was quite real. It made the nightly news. Video exists. Yes some of that video is Hollywood depictions of fictional feminists, but not all of it. Not by a long shot.

Yeah, the other guy has it well in hand.

Of course I didn't. I don't live in China. I live in a country that enforces air purity laws. It's a blindingly obvious solution to a problem I don't have.

Because national security.

Thiokol makes the solid fuel for the Shuttle and SLS solid fueled boosters. They make that same fuel for ICBMs. ICBMs have to be periodically replaced. Using NASA's budget is a way to hide some defense spending by paying Thiokol to work on civilian space, when really the point is to maintain the active skill in chemistry and manufacturing to be able to make new ICBMs. ICBMs don't have to be replaced often enough. Thiokol did their work too well, and met the Air Force requirements for shelf life. Shuttle and SLS make sure people who know how to make ICBM fuel don't wander off.

These are devout Muslims we're talking about here. You didn't have to write the politically correct updated version of the phrase. The classic version is much more precise: one man, one vote, one time.

Fucking rabbit sleigh ride. That was unconscionable.

I'll take the Battle of Five Armies, and I'll take the Extended Super Collector's Director's Edition WTF 95 Hour version too. It's all fine. Peter Jackson can knock himself out.

And then I will download the Kerr fanedit that takes all that footage and makes it reasonably match the book. No pathetic attempt at elf-dwarf romance, no whacky dragon chase scenes, no orc invasion of Lake Town, no running fight down the river, no motherfucking rabbit sleighs. And no whatever stupid shit they feel obliged to stick into Battle of the Five Armies.

There will probably be an hour and forty five minutes of footage left. One solid Tolkein movie. And that's how it should be.

Bennett thinks being long-winded makes it better because he still writes like a middle school kid. Gotta make that page count requirement!

It bodes quite well. It was the end of a review period and it was less than 5% of the work force. Specifically, the ones who really weren't cutting it. SpaceX has stated they expect to end the year with a 20% increase in head count, even after this week's trimming. In other words, they're choosy about who works for them. Not especially news. They wouldn't be doing what they're doing if their hiring practices worked any other way.

Probably because you're a bloviating idiot who thought the death blow of your argument was 1/3, which is rational. Yes, I CAN produce a formula which is precisely and exactly pi: C/D. Having an infinite number of decimal digits does not make pi infinite. Represent it any of several other ways and no infinite series appears.

I suggest you listen to and watch a musician's description.

Done and done.

Because no one has figured out how to get the equations of quantum mechanics to work in only one direction without breaking them. And those equations are on really solid ground at this point, or your CPU wouldn't work.

If we're exceptionally lucky, rationalizing quantum mechanics and general relativity will finally reveal what time is and why everything in the universe appears to only proceed in one 'direction' in time. Don't hold your breath though. It's going to take a very strange kind of mind to figure that out, and such minds that are still in contact with reality are difficult to come by.

The equations of quantum mechanics work really well. The equations of relativity work really well. Plug either into the other and you get nonsense.

Anybody paying attention could conclude the universe doesn't work in a certain rational logical way.

You got that backwards. A perfect circle is perfectly described with pi, which is irrational, not infinite. It's something you can model perfectly, because you can use this creature called pi in your equation, but it's not something you can manufacture perfectly since even if you're capable of Planck-scale manufacturing, you can't do sub-Planck-scale manufacturing, and there ends your quest for perfection.

Generally speaking the models are much more perfect than reality.

Oh what a wonderful fantasy world you live in. Where is this mythical responsible shareholder holding the feet of executives to the fire?

*crickets*

Fund managers are the only shareholders that get a seat at the table. YOU are not invited. YOU won't make it through the door, with your 150 shares. YOU would be mistaken for the hired help if you dared show up, and told to bring the coffee, because you're obviously not wearing a $3000 suit.

Meanwhile those wearing those suits are very best buds with the executives you would like to dismiss. They all went to the same schools together. They all played on the same sports teams together. They all raped the same cheerleaders together. It's a tight little club, and you aren't in it, so your opinion of executive performance amounts to a hill of beans.