Now fully out of fuel, the spacecraft smashed into a region near Mercury's north pole, out of sight from Earth, at about 20:00 GMT on Thursday.

That, to me, is the really sad part. They should have reserved enough fuel to deliberately crash it so that the impact could be seen and analyzed.

Save it for what? So it could spend three or four years STUDYING NOTHING before running out of fuel?

Blast it away from Mercury for what purpose? What else are you going to study out there? Mercury doesn't have any moons. There's nothing Sunward, and not enough thrust do climb away from the Sun to anywhere else - even if you could break out of Mercury's gravitational pull. The instruments were purpose built to study the surface of Mercury, so they're not going to register anything meaningful if you do break out of orbit.

So I ask you, why blast away from Mercury? What are you going to accomplish?

I believe the conversation goes more like:

"Honey, should we have another kid?"
"No."
"But..."
"No! No! No"
[dejected] "Alright".
"Oh! Come on Ref! That was blatant interference. How could you not call that?... Um... Did you say something Sweetie?"

No. Having families is what happens when there's nothing better to do. That's why the population booms whenever there is a power outage. You want to reduce the population growth? Give everyone a TV, and internet access.

Yeah, but the request for bids specifically required the organization have 8 years of experience with Microsoft Office 2010, and they couldn't find any American companies that did.

I hear they switched IT providers to the "Permanent Assurance Company." AHOY!

Adverb clause, independent clause conjunction independent clause dependent clause. Subject, adjective clause, verb prepositional phrase? Participle phrase subject verb conjunction dependent clause!

Emoticon.

They also need to evaluate the qualifications stated, have a competent technical person who can determine if the stated qualifications are reasonable, and review the qualifications of the person who eventually gets the job.

Otherwise they do they old "Requires 8 years experience in SQL Server 2014" shuffle. It's an impossible requirement, so no American can claim to "meet the requirements." If you say on your resume you do have 8 years experience in SQL Server 2014 (because it's not that different from previous versions) they reject you for "lying" and say "ugh, see, we really can't find any Americans to fill this position! They're not even honest, lying about their qualifications!" Then they hire the H1-B and ignore the stated requirement.

None of this will ever happen, of course.

"Sir? Sir, no, no, you're not allowed to whip the office staff, sir."

"Oh, right, right. Ugh, who can keep all these obscure rules straight?!"

The Church's teachings do not fit neatly into a red/blue box, on moral or economic issues. For instance the Church is opposed to abortion (red!) and the death penalty (blue!). The Church teaches against both the greed inherent in "unfettered capitalism" and the soul-crushing nature of an all-powerful State enforcing communism. The best description of the Church's preferred economic ideology is Distributism.

To be fair, politics would be a lot more entertaining and would reach more people if it were conducted in the Wrestlemania format.

Bruno was a mystic who thought the stars and planets had souls, and wrote books on magic. He was right about the infinite nature of the universe the way a broken clock is right twice a day.

No one should be persecuted for their religious beliefs. But, to hold Bruno up as an example of the Church's "anti-science attitude" (if you believe it has one) is false, as while yes he was persecuted, he was persecuted for his religious ideas (like denying the divinity of Christ, magic, etc) and not his scientific ideas.

His ideas were also not particularly scientific, as they derived from reason, not observation and experiment. More Aristotle than Democritus.

Good for you. Congratulations on your degree, and I hope you have good luck building cool stuff.

I think that's kind of the point. Right now many programs are geared towards the idea of just "study this thing because you're interested in this thing, and whatever you do with that afterwards...shrug." Or "study this thing to get a job as a civil engineer."

What this lady is saying is instead make a program like: "want to help people in developing nations (and soon, everybody...) have access to clean drinking water? Come here and follow the 'Clean Water Engineering Program.'" At the end you're a civil engineer...you still had to take all the same boring math and slumping concrete classes everybody else did. But you shaped your technical electives and gen ed requirements around a specialty in solving water problems.

It's not a different degree. It's not different course content. It's a different selection of optional courses for a different motivation. Some are motivated by employment opportunity. Other people are motivated by just the study of something itself. That's me, basically. I didn't care so much about getting a job in engineering, I just wanted to know how the inside of a microprocessor works. And this idea is to motivate instead with a desire to improve social welfare.

And I think that's great. Instead of posting on fucking FaceBook and twitter about "12 trillion people don't have #CleanWater," go get a fucking engineering degree and solve the damn problem.

I don't see what there is to complain about, but, well, it's /., and it has the words "female engineer" in the title, so it's an excuse for another 500 comment thread of the same old circle jerk. Mmmmmmm delicious pageviews...