Yeah, this isn't so much encouraging news for net neutrality as it is a discouraging illustration of our willingness to censor. Though, as I recall, a large number of the breast complaints were form letters sent by a single organization.

In some countries this wouldn't fly, but the US has pretty weak anti-trust laws and Microsoft is not in a dominant position in the tablet market anyway.

There's no blanket prohibition against giving away your product to achieve marketshare (in the US) - this is the Gillette model, after all.

This is on the nose. I'd love decaffeinated coffee without the additional costs and loss in flavor from the decaffeination process, and it's not as though this would impact caffeine seekers in any way - caffeine can be added back in whatever proportion you'd like. They already do something like this with many products: all milk is skimmed, for example, then some of the fat is added back to make 1%, 2%, and "whole" (3.25%) variants.

How about a British prince then? They're basically just celebrities.

I think the point he was making, a well-trodden point, is that wealthy / famous people have more privileges, including legal privileges, than normals. From the bizarre amount of attention this has gotten you'd think this was new and shocking ("What?! Pornography?! On the internet?!?!") as opposed to an everyday occurrence.

It's certainly a valid point, and it's important to keep bringing it up when something like this happens, but it isn't exactly new or insightful. I don't know why he did the stupid karma disclaimer.

That's a reasonable point, Russell Edwards doesn't matter to this story. Though it's easy to guess why he was mentioned - he likely wants a little fame / notoriety / credit for his part in this. A journalist can get further by stroking egos than not.

That's likely true - just throw in whatever facts you know in order to flesh out the story a little. I wonder a bit about the interview though which would lead to that question.

This is slightly off-topic, but why this?

Why do they throw his age in there? Why does it matter? Is that in any possible way related to the story? I'm not calling out this story in particular, I see this all the time. I'd like to know the motivation behind the trend.

"Scarce" is accurate - the drug is derived from genetically modified tobacco plants of which there are only a very limited number. Obviously they're working on producing more, but the plants don't grow overnight.

Are you seriously trying to imply that the only reason to address an ebola outbreak is to score popularity points? Or are you saying that your personal bias is so strong that if Obama's name is on it, it must be bad? Even when it's as no-brain obvious as this?

Reporter: "Thousands of people are dying from a massive outbreak of a terrible disease."
Reporter: "Libya's health infrastructure has been completely overwhelmed. A number of hospitals, including their largest, have been closed and quarantined."
Obama: "Yeah, we should do something about that."
Mr D from 63: "Oh ho! Look who's jumping on the bandwagon!"

There were skilled slaves too, that's not the why it's believed that the pyramids were built by free labor. There are two reasons that I know of: first, there is some writing on the side of one of the pyramids talking about their construction and, in particular, what the workers were fed. This was considerably more generous (more meat) than slaves would have received. The second reason is that tens of thousands of people worked on the pyramids and is just isn't possible to manage that many slaves when your most advanced weapon is a bronze sword (the chariot wasn't introduced to Egypt until after pyramids were no longer being constructed).

The X-15 was a manned rocket-propelled aircraft that hit mach 6.7 in 1964. If you ever see it in the National Air and Space Museum it's not nearly as big as you'd think - smaller than most fighter aircraft. Comparing it to a Saturn V is a huge exaggeration. If they're using RAM jets in missiles it's all about range and not about speed.

I don't know anything about the specifications of the missiles that the military currently uses. I do know that a rocket has a vastly higher thrust to weight ratio than even the most idealized SCRAM jet - if current missiles are slow then it's not because they're incapable of going faster. I expect it has more to do with turning radius and the fact that cruise missiles are supposed to stay very close to the ground / sea to minimize their chances of detection.

The only thing that hypersonic cruise missiles offer over conventional rocket-propelled missiles is fuel efficiency, i.e.: additional range. The ballistic ones would at least be cheaper than their rocket-based counterparts... Would the cruise missiles be cheaper? I don't know, probably not.

Let's be clear what we're talking about here: hypersonic missiles are just missiles that use a SCRAM jet instead of a rocket. That's it. Despite the fancy name, they're slower than rocket-propelled missiles. The advantage is that a rocket is entirely self contained while a SCRAM jet pulls part of its fuel from the oxygen in the atmosphere - this makes it more fuel efficient.

No one else is willing to blow that much money on their military. Missiles are the cheap counter to giant expensive ships.

However, it's not accurate to say that hypersonic missiles are the only weapons that can take down carriers. In fact, this has nothing to do with anti-ship weapons - these are ballistic missiles. The argument against them is first that they make a nuclear first strike easier and second that they don't offer any sort of non-military functionality. Hypersonic airliners, for example, are probably a pipe dream, but even if they are realized any technological overlap between an airliner and a missile would be extremely small.

I have not, much appreciated. This whole thread has been edifying - all I'd previously heard of for open source video editing was Avidemux, which no one's even mentioned here. Seems that options are much broader than I'd realized.