The United States Army does not punish people by sending them to the "Russian Front." Nor do they have Commisars, nor do they machine-gun anyone trying to retreat. This is nonsense.

There are no shortage of desk jobs in the US military. For every fighting man in the field there are three forklift drivers involved in moving the tons of supplies he consumes, and a desk jockey to do the paperwork for each.

We ar fighting in an age where entire warships can be disabled by computer failures and many enemies are slain by remote controlled drones. We can no longer afford to shut our best and brightest out of the military based on rumors, fear-mongering, pig-headed tradition or machismo.

Multiple American media outlets made this claim loudly and regularly until the "Fast and Furious" scandal you mentioned broke, which revealed that guns were only crossing the border because the BATFE wanted them to - they specifically forbade gun dealers who were reporting the obvious straw purchasers from refusing them sales so they could carry out their "tracking" scheme. Furthermore, the drugs that fuel the violence and corruption in Mexico come up from South America, and South American manufactured weapons - to say nothing of foreign-manufactured AK-47s and similar weapons - often come with them. Between Central/South America and the United States, which one do you think has a more porous border (by land and sea,) less effective law enforcement and more corrupt local governments?

Having an ample sample size to work with vis a vis idiotic comments, (viz. slashdot) I have been able to apply basic pattern recogniton to your prior comment in order to swiftly categorize it. Based on this most recent reply, which characterizes my prior assesment (which was supported by argument) as an "ad hominem" statement, I submit that my analysis withstands scrutiny.

You're an idiot. WWII-vintage firearms eventually wear out, and the SMLE is no exception. Even if you could source replacement springs and firing pins, there's no replacement barrels easily available - and once the rifling is finally shot out of them, their accuracy goes right to hell.

The civilian market is flooded with powerful, reliable, accurate bolt-action rifles every bit as good, if not better, than the SMLE/Enfield. The Remington 700, which served as the basis for two different US Army sniper rifles, was originally purchased off the shelf for use by snipers in Vietnam. If someone was looking to make money via a rigged competition, they picked a spectacularly poor target for replacement: something with a vast number of cheap, cost-effective and already extant competitors, to re-equip a very small rural force who will probably keep using the same rifles for fifty or sixty years until they shoot THOSE barrels out, too.

Lemme know when you find a science job that isn't in the US. You might have a while to wait.

Exactly.

The US has had plenty of trade - and even signed free trade agreements - with the government of Mexico for decades upon decades. It has gained us a massive and endemic influx of poor immigrants, violent drug gangs/drug trade incursions/violence and related evils. I am not aware of any abundance of "pro US" sentiment in Mexico, especially from their government; despite their eagerness to accept law enforcement training and other aid from us. Just because trade with Cuba would be good for Cuba, it does not follow that it will be good for us. The United States government has a responsibility and duty to its own citizens welfare and interests, and nobody else's.

Why don't we bring back Big Gemeni? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...

The teal dear: essentially an American Soyouz capsule, with a recoverable "capsule" put into orbit by a fully disposable launch system. Nobody seems to know just what the hell the SLS's orbital vehicle will be, or look like - a brief perusal of the wiki articles makes it look more like a desperate attempt to keep as much of the old shuttle program infastructure and supply chain alive as possible (big suprise.) Be it porkbarreling or SpaceX that wins out on the boost vehicle, what will be the orbital vehicle?

There's wide consensus that the Shuttle program was a costly underperformer, but despite its failures it did give us tremendous amounts of data and experience with recoverable, re-usable spacecraft. If we combined a rather large vehicle meant to return with a shuttle-type profile (ceramic heat shield and glide control) with a fully disposable launch and orbital engine system (instead of keeping a costly chunk of it on the vehicle and having to lug it about, like the orbiter's main engine) you could get the best of both worlds - a vehicle larger than what parachute landings and albative heat shields allow for, but small enough to fit on top of a disposable booster (and inside a fairing) and allow for a true launch escape system rather than the very dicey launch setup the shuttles used.

How much energy will be required to power mag-lev rails that cross the vast distances of the American midwest/breadbasket, and all the branch lines required to provide service to the largely distributed population of the US? I'm not saying it's infeasible, but "high speed rail" gets thrown around a lot as some kind of magic bullet, as well as characterizing the most energy-dense, easily-utilizable energy source available as a "bad habit" that we're "addicted to," as if it's only willpower and not the stark realities of changing an entire nation's power and transit architecture that stymie us.

As an evil seal-clubbing conservative, the issue of AGW has never been whether it's happening (it is,) or what's causing it (its us.) It's all about what we're supposed to do about it. This is where all the politics and shady buisness comes into it; the oft-exaggerated consequences, the billions of federal dollars poured into startup grants and tax credits for alternative energy (which will, at BEST, slightly supplement the existing grid) and above all, insane proposed laws and penalties that would beggar entire economies: all to affect a laughably insignificant reduction in emissions even as China and third-world slash/burn farmers (who have no choice, lest they starve,) keep pumping carbon into the air at a tremendous rate.

It is refreshing to see some scientists recognizing that a practical, significant counter to global warming that is feasible within the economic and political world we live in will require bigger thinking and more drastic measures. This is of course anathema to the enviromentalist movements behind much of the AGW awareness push, who view enviromental quality as an end unto itself, people be damned.

Exactly. NASA should be free to pursue science for science's sake, to do the big, amazing things like landing a big rover on Mars with a sky-crane. Private contractors shoud be utilized to do what the private sector does best; iterative improvements in cost-effective service delivery; i.e. routine booster launches, ISS supply deliveries, etc. SpaceX rockets for cost efficiency to put more NASA science in orbit for your dollar spent!

Unfortunately, this isn't happening. Its JPL and SpaceX that are breaking new ground making all the significant progress in space technologies while the government races to shut them down because of district-based porkbarreling and similar bullshit. I don't think NASA can ever become what it once was; a military/civilian/industrial complex with funding and drive provided by the macropolitical situation. Now space is a vauled economic and strategic commodity; anyone with interest in it (the Air Force and private buisnesses both) will find and develop their own reliable access, with or without NASA. I doubt there are many more Elon Musk's out there willing to fight costly political and PR battles to get NASA using their systems when so many other clients, intelligent ones with cash and launch-ready payloads are lining up - and unlike NASA their coffers and need for services aren't declining steadily.

THANK YOU. So many people fail to understand that "stealth" tech as incorporated into next-gen fighters isn't for evading detection, but for evading weapons fire from people who very much know where you are.

I remember being fascinated by the initial reports of the EmDrive years ago, and I was very, very frustrated that so-called "scientists" preferred to sneer at it and declare it impossible rather than pursuing such a fascinating possibility with, you know, those things they call experiments. I thought that's what scientists did - explore new things, chase the frontier - and that the potential to learn something new, the potential that there was a previously overlooked mystery right under their noses, would be unbearably exciting for them.

How hard is it to build one of these damn things, strap it to a lab bench, and test it? And then test it in a vacuum, underwater, upside down, in a house, with a mouse, with green eggs and ham, etc? Isn't that what scientists are paid to do? Test things? Over and over, under every conceivable scenario? The test these fellows did is great and all, but it should have been done years ago. If the EmDrive and its permutation(s) are bullshit, then why wasn't it killed and buried years ago, with the inescapable power of repeatable experiments and test results? We spend millions trying to detect cosmic particles that aren't there, and then spend MORE millions to NOT detect those cosmic particles to a greater degree of accuracy, but nobody can be fucking arsed to strap a microwave gizmo to a lab bench, flip a switch, and see if this is a world-shaking breakthrough or just another sad data mistake? Thanks for nothing, poindexters.

Even John Stuart Mill closed the door on Jehovah's Witness.

Everyone does. It's called Java.