The conditions species live in aren't constant. Advantages of A and/or B fluctuate over time. If an animal has A, and the environment suddenly favors B, those closer to B win. For a while some animals will have both.

However, every feature comes at an energy cost, so animals quickly let what they don't need atrophy. If in the current environment B beats out A+B minus extra energy to generate both, then they will settle at B only.

At any rate, every organism is a mixture of thousands of features, from A0 to Z99999, many of which get added and deleted all the time, so your whole argument is bogus to begin with.

Look at today's flying squirrels. It's not hard to figure out how you get from walking mammals to this species, nor from flying squirrels to fully winged creatures. Why would it be any harder for insects to follow the same path?

It's not random. The ability for adult insects to fly evolved gradually. That has nothing to do with the fact that insects go through metamorphosis, which most likely evolved independently and prior to the capability of flight

Your argument makes as much sense as saying: "I don't believe evolution because people can talk using air even though they spend 9 months sealed up in a bag of water."

One o the best ways to stay comfortable is to not get your home destroyed by the crazy weather created by your cheap electricity rates.

Yes, it does matter.

Would you care to enlighten us with an example of a popular real-world language that has not had problems with backwards compatiblity?

I can maybe see the life evolving in one of these solar systems after it leaves the black hole area, presuming the atmospheres of planets aren't scoured away by high-speed interactions with the interstellar medium.

However, how could this life "spread"? I don't see how you slow down any complex molecules from these speeds without totally incinerating them.

It's astonishing that all communication is not encrypted. If you are sharing information over a common carrier, you should expect that somebody is going to be grabbing and examining the bytes.

So, somehow, it is just not the norm to encrypt communication. One reason might be that during the eighties and nineties as the internet was going wide, ITAR and patents on systems like RSA made people and companies nervous and unwilling to go there; that was definitely a missed opportunity.

Perhaps another problem is that there's no money to be made in encryption; and there are real (small, but real) costs in establishing it.

Still, though...

Why is there no encrypted "WhatsApp"? It would not be hard, it would be trivial to deliver through Google Play, and there would be a immediate market. If the connections were truly peer-to-peer, the infrastructure to support it would be almost zero.

How has the world convinced people not to encrypt all communication?

True, but only as long as all your purposes are restricted to cracking the codes from a particular model of Nazi mechanical encryption device.

It's because Republicans know a WMD proliferation risk when they see it. They just don't want to talk about it because that would make it look like they agree with the smelly hippie environmentalists.

If fission power were a viable solution to the world's energy needs, we'd already be selling centrifuges to Iran.

Those animals got all of their carbon from the fields they were standing in. If the animals hadn't been there, that same carbon would have been turned into CO2 by organisms like insects or fungi. The overall amount of CO2 released would have remained almost exactly the same.

Sadly, while the "weight" is very small on the comet, it's mass (and therefore inertia) is substantial. You're not going to blow it over.

It wouldn't surprise me if they land Rosetta on the comet toward the end of the mission.

Yet by my calculations, the train has enough kinetic energy to lift itself over 3100 feet up into the air. So the depth of any ditch isn't really going to help.

I assume it's "locked" into the track, but at these speeds the entire train could probably disintegrate into confetti if it hit a solid enough obstacle, so it's not impossible for the majority of the mass of train to come off the rails.

Hardly. Cosmonauts returning from Mir after only one year in space could barely function once they returned to earth. I kind of doubt that anybody would physically survive 10 years in zero-G, even assuming they've survived the long-shot odds of no fatal spacecraft malfunctions in 10 years.

Not to mention that they would gone bat-shit insane by that time, after they realized that they've sat in a tiny tin can eating stale cat food and being blasted by cosmic rays for over a decade just so they get a sample of some crappy small-time comet; a job that could be easily done by a robot.