Not at all. I merely pointed out that a piece of one's body can be gender-specific (sexual), no matter what function it has.

So, let's see, what's better: a Linux kernel or some barely working "micro" TCP implementation on a microcontroller of some sort? I'll take linux any day, thank you.

I think that's just nitpicking. As far as everyday language use is concerned, men don't normally have breasts. It's as simple as that. Yeah, there's enough gland tissue there that can be made to grow etc., but it's mostly immaterial other than men getting breast cancer. Still, in normal, everyday use of the language, we all know that women have breasts, and men don't.

OK, I didn't notice that. I think Yahoo is simply overzealous and they treat all Comcast subscriber IPs as spammy.

Yahoo isn't looking at whether one person is rejecting the mail, the yahoo blacklisting is an aggregate process. Most likely your IPs were used by a spammer or an open relay or an owned host before, and were source of spam reported by multiple Yahoo users. Now you've got the broken goods.

There's psychology, then there's psychology. The kind of neuropsychology I've seen done produces rather decent, reproducible results, not subject to a whole lot of interpretation...

One thing has to be said: Bennett is a cheapskate. $25 to pay the survey takers? Gimme a break.

I do know plenty of married couples that decided not to wear jewelry related to their marital status. They occasionally got dirty stares when they were young. They were cool enough not to give two shits about it, though.

Having had welded my first wedding ring to a bunch of initially charged capacitors in a UPS unit that sat offline, disconnected from batteries, for a week, I concur. I've had a nice round burn mark on my ring finger for months afterwards. It took 2 years for it to completely fade. I still wear the band #2, but I have a special ritual before I ever work on things that have more than a few tenths of a Joule stored in them, or have short circuit current ratings over 5A, or voltages over 48V.

P.S. The cap discharge resistor circuit had a hairline crack on a trace - apparently wide enough that the cap voltage wouldn't break down the gap. The design had redundant traces leading to an unpopulated location for a redundant cap discharge resistor. I replaced the failed one, and added the redundant buddy as was the original intent (presumably before the beancounters took over the engineering dept.).

Apart from pissing outside of restrooms being unsanitary, I do agree that we're a bit oversensitive about the so-called privates. It's a cultural thing, there's no rational reason for it, not even a moral one if one were to separate rationality and morality.

Lolwut? They play no role whatsoever in reproduction. They are only useful, optionally, to nourish the newborn - long after the reproduction is a done. The optional part is kinda important: you can feed a newborn quite well using nothing but plant-derived stuff, for example. If I were ever to hear a medical doctor call breasts "reproductive organs", I'd be looking for a different one, you know. Where you got that crazy idea I can't fathom.

Sexual here is used to mean "to do with the sex or gender of the person in question". DUH that they are sexual as only the female sex has them.

There's nothing colorful on a comet. It's just shades of gray. Seriously. It's literally dirty ice.

It's real easy. It's not a big company that can't do it, because companies aren't living things and can't do anything, they are just ideas. It's their employees who don't care, but more often, simply aren't empowered to do the right thing. The marketing department can't will things to happen just so. If the people who have an influence on this process can't or won't make it happen, it doesn't happen. It's as simple as that. Corporate HR has lost the human touch long time ago.

At the moment, the Philae mission is a partial, or qualified, success. They'll be receiving the passive science data and imagery, but let's be realistic: they have no way of anchoring Philae to the comet, they can't drill, and any attempts at "bouncing" it are at the mercy of how much gyro range is available to keep it stable while it follows the ballistic arc - and whether it'll come down anywhere safe enough to keep itself upright. The gravity is so small that the lander could "impact" the comet upside down and it wouldn't damage it, it'd just make its orientation useless for the deployment of drilling instruments. Heck, it may be that the gyros have enough oomph to roll the Philae if it ends up upside-down, although it'd probably tumble for a while before setting in some other random orientation, possibly still a wrong one.

They have to weigh the battery life against science returns - and right now there's no battery recharging to speak of. That's the hard part of rocket science - it's not through any fault of mission design, it's simply a bad luck. So, I bet they'll keep Philae where it is up to say 48-50hr mark, and then they'll re-enable the gyros and attempt a bounce, and they'll get one shot at it due to the time the bounce will take, and the link availability constraints due to Rosetta's orbit. I really wonder if the harpoons didn't work due to insufficient contact forces and a sequencer step to shoot the harpoon not being triggered, or if it's due to a failure of the harpoon deployment mechanism itself. It wouldn't hurt to reattempt a harpoon firing once the bounce ends with a recontact.

I'm still wondering why they couldn't get the Rosetta spacecraft itself to be the lander. It's a much bigger platform, it has a proper RCS system and could easily land and take off to scout multiple locations on the comet. Not having a stand-alone lander would give enough available weight to put the instruments on Rosetta itself, and take the extra fuel to do repeated landings and take-offs. That's at least according to my back-of-the-envelope fuel budgeting, I may be way off, though...

Overall, the biggest lessons learned are about things didn't work. Any further low-gravity comet lander designs will need to use designs that include fixes for whatever didn't work this time. I really wish they did, for example, store a duplicate thruster fuel supply system on Earth, in cryogenic conditions, for the decade Rosetta was out there - I bet it'd fail on Earth just as it failed out there, and it'd be an easy thing to post-mortem. But that time has passed, so we may never know what went caused the failure of the puncture pin system...