Right!! And Google would never record your searches in a non ananomized history which you have to explicitly turn off in your google account.

Not really, all those late 19th century bolt action rifles were extremely reliable, that's why the bolt action is still the most popular rifle action in use today which says something about the soundness of Nikolaus von Dreyse's original design that first saw the light of day back in 1824. This type of gun has been used in the high Andes in S-America, jungles in Africa/America/Asia and deserts around the world. The German Mausers and Russian Mosin Nagants operated just as reliably in those places as the Lee Enfield and long as you had proper gun oil that didn't sieze the gun up in extreme cold they did well in the extreme Arctic too. Bolt action Enfields and Russian Mosin Nagants are still in widespread use by the Taleban in Afghanistan and Pakistan and througout the Middle East. I've seen these old guns in the hands of Hamas guerillas in the Gaza strip (At least one was a WWI Turkish Mauser by the look of it) and by rebels fighters in Arabia. People may think that's comical but in the hands of a decent marksman some of these old war horses will still out shoot a Government trooper armed with a brand spanking new M4 Carbine, G-36 or AK-47.

Not trying to be condascending here, I'm just curious. How well do fiber glass stocks do at -40 C? I notice the only rifle you listed as cold weather proven still has a wood laminate stock. Personally I'm generally pretty liberal and open to new ideas but when it comes to guns I pretty much won't touch anything that doesn't have a wooden stock. It's partly because I detest plastic and partly because experience has taught me that plastics tend to get brittle at extremely low temperatures but I've never really taken a close look at fiberglass in that context.

More to the point how does changing from Lucida to Helvetica impede legibility, require more screen space, and make the GUI appear fuzzy? I can't say that I have noticed any of these world ending problems in decades of using the Helvetica font.

I agree, having used iPads with a bluetooth keyboard and regular Windows Laptops with a touch screen as well as regular laptops I have to say I prefer the old fashioned keyboard+touchpad combination when using any laptop irrespective of whether it runs Windows, Linux or OS X because I can keep my hands on the keyboard most of the time and move the cursor with my thumb or index finger. I find that browsing, for example, goes significantly faster on OS X than it goes on iOS even with a BT keyboard because the arrow keys don't work on iOS and I have to constantly move my hand from the keyboard to do stuff like pick an item from a drop-down list or scroll down a page because the arrow keys don't work for this stuff in iOS. Touch screen devices have their uses, they are great for reading, gaming, watching movies, etc. but touch screens are no substitute for a touchpad, at least not yet.

You can already observe the effects of that one in India and China where female infanticide and selective abortion is practiced for all kinds of reasons such as the need to pay excessive dowries, inheritance traditions and religious beliefs. The problem of ending up with too many single men is usually solved by kidnapping women in other parts of the country or in neighboring countries where people are less obsessed with stupid traditions that lead them to have nothing but male offspring and force-marrying the unfortunate women to their precious sons. In some regions of India like Bengal and Assam, for example, where the gender imbalance is fairly small the kidnapping problem is so severe that girls and young women cannot go anywhere unescorted for fear of being kidnapped by bridal procurement possies from neighboring regions where they have a large surplus of sons.

The current gridlock in congress and the divide between conservatives and liberals will degenerate into a thermonuclear civil war?

One can dump on the Germans as much as one wants but both during WWI and WWII they matched and in some fields outdid the allies in technology and scientific research despite these boycotts, despite the isolation and despite the stultifying effect that the Nazi regime had on parts of the German tech sector which says something about the caliber of German science, scientists and engineers. As late as the 1950s the chief designer of North American Aviation went to night school in order to learn German so that he might study German aerodynamics research more in more detail. This resulted in the complete redesign of the aircraft that was to be come the world beating North American F-86.

Relax, you only have to start worrying when the tech support "guys" start sounding like HAL 9000.

Spell checkers? Dang, it's not every day one gets Nazi'd by a Hogwarts graduate...

Read the article? You must be new here...

Obligatory:
http://xkcd.com/504/

True enough, but what you can do is use airpower to knock out every tank, armored car, APC, artillery piece, truck and jeep that ISIS has destory their infrastrucutre and with it their economy. Then equip their enemies with heavy weapons train them in tactics likely to work against an ISIS whose arsenal has been reduced to AK-47s, SAWs, RPGs and mortars. With the way ISIS has been behaving I'm pretty sure the locals people in places like Syria, Iraq and Kurdistan can be relied upon to grab these ISIS assholes wherever they can be found the moment they get the chance to do so and kill them in way's that would make you regurgetate your dinner if you witnessed it. Pretty much everybody from Washington through the capitals of Europe, Amman, Damascus, Erbil and Baghdad to Teheran hates these assholes worse than the black plague.

So what was the crew of the Cole supposed to do? Blast every speedboat that came within 300 meters of their ship with a 20mm cannon? ...and before you say yes, consider the amount of shit that would hit the fan if some foreign warship blew a speedboat out of the water in New York harbor because, and I quote: 'Well Admiral sir, it looked uuuhhh.... threatening' ? Unpopular as the notion may be with some people, you can't just sail into a harbor in a foreign country and start shooting up speedbaots that you feel _might_ be a threat. Harbors in Asia and the Middle East are crawling with all kinds of boats and collateral damage is a certainty. By the sound of it that admiral is planning to field a swarm of small autonomous boats that can be deployed by a warship to patrol around it, surround any intruder and block him, allowing the warship to escape, prevent the intdruder from escaping or just destroy him depending on the ROE in that particular location. What precisely is ididotic about that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.... no matter how hard you try to make Aspartame look more innocent than bunny rabbits and fluffy kittens It still creeps me out that Donald Rumsfeld had a hand in getting it FDA approved and bringing it to market.