Nah, it's the insurance rates that really killed that project.

Apparently the videos were CC, so they should be available elsewhere. MIT just doesn't want their name associated with him anymore.

"[I am] inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa [because] all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really."

"[There is a natural desire that all human beings should be equal but] people who have to deal with black employees find this not true"

He never specified which tests he was referring to in the first quote - I for one have not seen any studies of intelligence that showed any statistically significant link between race and intelligence, only between education and intelligence, or wealth and intelligence (unfortunately race and wealth are linked for historical reasons - given our low large-scale class mobility, it will be centuries before we can study one without concern for the effects of the other).

The constant pressure isn't what produces the heat, it's the act of compression. You compress it, it heats up, you remove that heat, and now you have high pressure and low temperature.

Last I'd heard, the Long March 9 was so early in development that they hadn't yet decided on two options: either a LOX+RP1 first stage with liquid boosters, or a LOX+LH2 first stage with more powerful solid boosters.

Current Long March rockets, by the way, use N2O4+UDMH exclusively (save for the very first few, which used RFNA+UDMH). Very military design.

If you're not into rocket science, those are different enough that you can't just swap out the fuels. You'd be changing the engines, the fuel pumps, the tankage, the whole frame, pretty much everything. Normally this is one of the first things you settle. Car analogy: this is like deciding how many wheels to have when building a car. You can't really just throw another pair on there.

Then again, China's got the budget, they could design and even test both, then decide which is better and declare that CZ-9.

Also significant: of the last three virus infections I've had, all originated from malicious ads, two of them on sites that I considered trustworthy (one I had specifically exempted from Adblock).

I think they're claiming it's extortion, since you can pay to be removed from the block list. That might actually work (depending on how French law is), but might also be a good thing since it would mean adblockers just block everything (which would still presumably be legal).

There's not much left that can be done to North Korea, but there are some options.

South Korea could shut down their part of Kaesong, and the handful of other cross-border joint ventures. That would mildly inconvenience the South Korean companies, but would seriously hurt the North Korean economy. South Korea doesn't really have any dogs in this fight, though, so unlikely.

China could stop their trade. It's a drop in the bucket for them, but would basically destroy North Korea (particularly if they have farm problems again). But again, if all the other shit North Korea has done hasn't made them stop propping them up, I doubt this will.

And of course, military action is always an option. North Korea's army is massive, but they're almost all just cannon fodder. Some analyses I've read of a hypothetical Korean war have South Korea annihilating the North before any of its allies can even get political approval. Again, though: disproportionate response to this incident, and it ignores the entire reason *why* China is propping them up - they want a buffer between them and South Korea (and the American armies stationed there). So any war attacking North Korea implicitly means attacking China, which is very much a bad idea. China's got a big army, generally well-equipped. Their only real weakness is an inability to project power, and when you're fighting on their doorstep, that's not a hindrance.

If you're not experiencing brain damage from excessive *headdesk* in D&D, your players are doing something horribly wrong.

Or horribly right. Hard to tell in most games.

The 501st Legion started as the costume group, the nerds who dress up in Stormtrooper costumes for fun. They were later incorporated into canon, starting with a Zahn novel I can't remember the name of, and later with Episode 3 (not mentioned in the movie, but the Clone Troopers Anikin led into the Jedi temple became the core of the 501st Legion), the Clone Wars TV series, and the game Battlefront II.

My biggest hope for this new series is that it acts as a condensation of the best of the Expanded Universe, sort of like how the Marvel and TDK movies take the best storylines and elements from the decades of comics, and condenses it into a handful of cohesive stories. The EU had a lot of bad and even just mediocre shit in it, but it also had a ton of good stuff. Disney would be foolish to slavishly follow continuity, yes, but they'd also be foolish to completely ignore the best stories of it. Sure, nobody outside the hardcode Star Wars nerds know who Thrawn is or why we should be excited for his movie, but nobody outside the hardcore comic nerds knew who Rocket Raccoon was, and how much money did GotG make? Take Thrawn, X-Wing, Corellia, the two Han Solo trilogies, maybe some of the New Jedi Order (it was a good idea, just unevenly executed and too continuity-laden), and distill those down to a decade's worth of movies. Mix in some original stuff, and you'll be printing money.

My biggest fear is that this turns out like Abram's Star Trek reboot - it copies the superficial elements, ticks off all the checkboxes for the series, but completely misses the point.

For Star Trek, it was the optimism and the science. Roddenberry genuinely believed the future was going to be good, and the best Trek showed us a future that had its problems, but was overall optimistic. The science was often laughable, but they at least *tried* to figure out where the future might go. The reboots had Kirk and Spock, they had the Enterprise, they had Klingons, they had time travel and warp drives, but it didn't have optimism (just lens flare), and didn't have either a retro-futurist science, or a modern scientific outlook (either of which would have been acceptable).

For Star Wars, it's the heroism. Clear-cut bad guys, archetypal Hero's Journey, and a heavy dose of fantasy on top of the sci-fi foundation. Other than the zweihander-esque lightsaber, I didn't see any of that - although such a short trailer can hardly be expected to. So my fears were neither proven valid, not assuaged. We'll have to wait and see.

Have you tried version 2.0 yet? It replaced those with loaves and fishes. Has a recurring 3-day downtime though.

However, this should have been a very easy case for the jury.

This was the indictment, not the trial proper. They could easily have just passed the buck upward - indict him, let another jury sort it out, and hopefully the mob will have died down in the year or two it takes to try him. Even if they thought he was innocent, that would probably have been for the greater good. As it is now, I expect the jurors will have to flee town if their identities are ever leaked.