Hadfield is a NASA PR guy (as well as an astronaut), so he is obligated to say all of the political talking points. Even though Dragon will remove US dependence on Soyuz for all LEO astronaut needs, that won't be for a couple of years yet, and in the mean time we can't afford to piss the Russians off to much lest they say 'nyet' and screw us out of access to the ISS before then. Note that he also was sure to cover the talking point of how awesome the Shuttle was. NASA is politically obligated to not admit it sucked even though the shuttle program was cancelled simply because it was a sucky boondoggle, because their funding comes from congresscritters whose constituencies greatly benefited from the shuttle's existence.

Somewhat of an oversimplification, but useful as far as a counterpoint example to the AGW crowd claiming that increased sea ice must disprove climate change.

Not exactly fair to call out how an attack on Americans, done on American soil, which has become culturally and politically significant to Americans is generally referred to by the American format, as an argument that the American format has universal appeal.

You don't think SpaceX has already done the math on return flight requirements? That was the whole point of the Falcon 9 1.1 redesign which has now successfully launched twice. It has an increased size in order to launch the same payload as 1.0 with enough fuel left over to fly the legged booster back to land. I don't know if the fully loaded Dragon spacecraft counts as a 'small payload', but the most recent Falcon 9 launch was an ISS resupply mission that included a successful 'landing' of the first stage in the ocean to check out the legs and landing capabilities.

It takes a lot less fuel to fly an almost empty first stage with no payload from the stage-sep point back to the pad than it does to push the full second stage and payload from the pad to stage-sep. So over 90% of the first stage fuel is used in accelerating the second stage and payload, and the remainder is all that is necessary to turn the stage around and land it.

Try adding new features to your existing simple projects. If for example you are a musician, your beginner project might have been a simple metronome app. You could then hone your UI skills by creating a new interface for easier dialing in a tempo rather than the simple text field widget you used initially. Or you could try enhancing it to accent the downbeat for various time signatures (for which you will also need to come up with more advanced UIs). Then you can enhance the beat generation code even further to play custom rhythms rather than a constant beat. Poke around in the audio APIs a bit to allow a choice of what sound is played for each beat. Before you know it, you have built a beatbox app.

I wouldn't recommend that sort of tinkering on a production app, but for personal projects coming up with new features for existing projects is a great way to hone your skills as you can make each step as big (today I will explore the MIDI APIs) or as little (today I will learn how to use a number spinner widget) as you want.

Apple "famously" didn't pay dividends under Steve Jobs, but they most certainly do now under Cook.

False dichotomy. If you just expect to get a trade job, then yes a degree is worthless. But there are many fields that require advanced degrees because the knowledge required for those fields is only obtainable through years of education, such as medicine and engineering.

Not everybody who counts is a slashdot geek. My in-laws regularly print off crosswords from the internet so they can do them wherever, and still routinely print off directions from google maps. My parents who are incredibly tech savvy often print off emails and such for my elderly grandmother who will go to her grave having never owned anything with a general purpose CPU in it. This Christmas, we printed nice "to/from" labels for all of the Christmas presents we gave. Yes, the necessity of a 2D printer is decreasing every year, but it I don't think it has decreased as much as you think it has, especially among the non-tech-savvy regular Joe and Jane.

But even as the necessity of the 2D printer decreases over the coming years, the point still stands that 2D printers were/are still incredibly useful to non-professionals, and an inexpensive, easy to use 3D printer certainly can be as well.

Most people are not authors or graphics designers, yet nearly everyone with a computer has a need for a traditional 2D paper-and-ink printer. There is already a large library of downloadable 3D printable content, and if 3D printing becomes mainstream there will surely be 3D modeling software made along the lines of Word or Paint that is easy to use and good enough for Joe Homeowner to make that plastic widget he needs for that DIY project rather than going to the hardware store, or to make themed decorations and favors for Timmy's 12th birthday party, or countless other scenarios like that. Most people aren't 'professional makers', but plenty of people out there are casual hobbyist or home 'makers'.

It seems as though while smoking any plant creates a risk for lung cancer as all smoke contains known carcinogens, smoking a particular plant high in cannabinoids has shown to result in a near negligible real-world incidence of cancer, suggesting that while cannabis smoke contains carcinogens, it must also contain substances that have an anti-carcinogenic effect.

Yes, Apple may be a bit over-represented. (MacBook Air? Sure its form factor sparked a slew of of copycats known as 'ultrabooks', but it didn't exactly change the UX or how the general public used computers) But to use 'software libre' as the reason why they shouldn't be in this list at all is just stupid. For all that FOSS has done, it has been almost nonexistent as far as influence in general personal computing, largely because FOSS for the most part has still not figured out how to make UX not suck. And that is what this list is about - those products that have caused a watershed in how the general public does computing.

"Schooling" is mandatory. "Education" on the other hand often seems to be actively discouraged.

Just because one high speed happens to be slower than another high speed doesn't mean it is not high speed. In this case, as we are talking about collisions, high speed means significantly faster than the average 35-40mph that crash tests are generally done at. 70mph, 80mph and 155mph all satisfy that definition of "significantly faster than 40mph" and therefore all can be considered high speed when discussing collisions.

Part of the problem is that much of math education is based on rote memorization rather than problem solving, and writing a program to do your homework for you is frowned upon and often considered cheating. If writing programs to solve your math homework was generally accepted as legitimate, we would have both fewer kids flunk out of math and more kids going into programming, as those kids would be actually learning how both math and programming are used in the real world.

The only thing that's "hurting" iPhone 5c sales is that unexpectedly more consumers are choosing the faster, better designed, and more capable iPhone 5s, despite it being a higher cost & higher margin product. That's certainly a problem I wouldn't mind having.