Isn't it mostly the fins that are taken? The rest is of the shark is mostly worthless and gets dumped in the ocean... free market capitalism at it's finest. It is a pity that most sharks aren't as toxic to humans as the Greenland shark is. Greenland Shark can be eaten but the treatment required to make it edible makes it stink to high heaven.

For reliability assessments I found the following sites useful the last time I went shopping for a car:
http://www.anusedcar.com/
http://www.reliabilityindex.co...

The first one is run by TÜV in Germany (Technischer Überwachungs-Verein, Technical Inspection Association). The ratings are based on 500 car defect reports each, any less and a model does not make the list. The other site is run by Warranty Direct, a British insurance company that sells direct consumer warranties. This site breaks down the faults by components.The sites mostly concentrate on European brands but Ford and Chevrolet are included.

I'll take a meritocracy over a completely egaitarean society any time and I suppose that makes me in favor of inequality but I also reject the kind of society the USA has become where a few have risen to the top and roll boulders down on anybody else trying to rise by his own merit. Now feel free to color me radcal but any meritocracy will eventually become a plutocracy which is why bloody revolutions (pandemics like the black death also work wonders) are necessary at regular intervals to level the playing field. I'm not sure that's quite what Thomas Jefferson meant when he said: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants" but it's close.

What I liked about the B5 series was mostly the fact that it had Maciavellian politics and space battles where the fighters didn't fly like aircraft even though they were located in deep space. They made an honest attempt to respect Newtonian physics. I went off the Star Wars series after the "Battle of the Teddy Bears" in Return of the Jedi although I rather like the animated "Clone Wars" series. I never really watched much of the original Star Trek and the Star Trek NG series just bored me out of my scull. The Star Trek shows I watched the most of was Deep Space 9 and Voyager which I rather enjoyed and which is probably even more heretical than saying B5 is better than ST.

I know this is heresy but I liked B5 better than most of the Star Wars and Start Trek stuff.

It's no longer all about whether the F-35 can detect a Su-35, J-10, etc. with it's onboard radar first or not. Sure, being able to see the opponent on your onboard radar first is an advantage the F-35 has and it is an important one but modern fighters that operate in an integrated and networked air defense system, situational awareness can flow from many different sources these days other than just your fighter's onboard radar. The Su-35, J-10 (or whatever) can give the F-35 a very hard time if it carries IRTS, is connected to a battlefield networking system, backed by AWACS, ground radars and other sensors capable of seeing F-35s and is protected by modern SAMs. The resiliance of such a system is even greater if the missiles fired by the Su-35 can receive mid-course updates from systems other than the launcing aircraft. The Russians already have air to air missiles whose guidance can be handed over to a nother aircraft or a ground or air based sensor system which can be a long band radar since you only need to get the missile close enough to detect an F-35 with the missile's onboard sensor which is what the article is talking about, combining long band radar for situational awareness with short band radars and other sensors for terminal guidance.

No, the NSA is monitoring social media and bloggers, in Russia they have progressed from just monitoring to repressing them. I'm in no way in favor of what the NSA is doing but there is a difference between watcing bloggers and telling bloggers they have to register if they get a hitcount over 3000 or suffer the consequences, whatever they may be.

It's a bit more than that, Israel helped China with air to air missiles (as in license production of the Python-3 which was a quantum leap for the PLAAF) and other guided weapons and is also alleged to have helped the Chinese develop sophisticated fighter and AWACS radars, had a hand in the design of some of the latest generation of Chinese fighters and sold them a whole bunch of other technology to do with miniaturized cooling units, Electro-optics, UAVs, and sophisticate sighting systems. A lot of this technology originated in the USA and was paid for by John Q Taxpayer.

It depends on how you look at it. Iron Dome costs something like 20-30.000 dollars per shot. One of those home built Quassam rockets Hamas uses costs 5-800 dollars per shot, the Grad rockets probably a bit more. It's the same economy as dropping PGMs that start at 15-20.000 per unit (the Hellfire missiles used by the RQ-9 drones cost $110.000 per unit) on five man Taleban guerrilla groups carrying a grand total of 3-4000 dollars worth of equipment (tops). It adds up pretty quickly. If Hamas hoses off enough Quassam rockets the costs start to pile up for Israel but Israel can pay the monetary cost, the political cost of the slaughter happening in Gaza at the moment is another matter and we haven't even talked about the side effects. I was Hamas, now that they can reach Ben Gurion airport, I'd start hosing those rockets off at Ben Gurion in the biggest volleys I could manage. The rockets as such don't do much damage but the cessation of international flights into Israel does, the fact that Iron Dome would probably start to falter under such a load would be damaging to the politicos who sank all that money into it and the fact that Airlines aren't willing to allow their aircraft to fly though a rain of rocket fire to land at Ben Gurion is doing massive economic and political damage. All you need is to saturate Iron Dome and achieve enough accuracy to ensure that a few of rockets reach the airfield perimeter at regular intervals. If you can do that you have effectively obliged anybody flying in and out of Israel to make a stop-over in Cyprus until other arrangements can be made. It would seem increasingly more sensible to just stop this stupid fighting, get over the idea of Greater Israel and make peace with the Palestinians, but that won't happen until Netanyahu and Liberman have conclusively proven that some problems cannot be solved by bombing them and pretty much the same goes for Hamas and their idiotic obsession with destroying Israel. Not that I think that is likely to happen, both sides have been radicalized beyond recovery by their own fanaticism and intransigence.

Nixon presided over the slaughter that was Vietnam which included the Phoenix program of targeted killings and torture of suspected communists. Phoenix prisoners were subjected to rape, gang rape and they were murdered using some pretty bestial methods that included starvation and pounding dowels through prisoners heads. So even if you factor in drone assassinations and the torture allegation against them neither Obama nor GWB Jr can hold a candle to Nixon.

If anything they'd look cooler with feathers. It also explains a whole lot, like how they were able to survive in the Arctic.

Nah, with all the T-Rexes looking like chickens it just won't be the same... although... just imagine the Kentucky fired drumsticks.

This means we'll have to redraw 200 years worth of artwork...

I don't use music streaming and similar services at all, just don't like them.
I don't use Netflix and similar movie streaming services at all. I'd like to but can't a lot of the time because of stupid regional restrictions.
I watch a fair amount of YouTube stuff (and appreciate the complete lack of stupid regional restrictions).
I listen to quite a bit of recorded radio programs offered by local radio stations over 3G/4G on my iPhone.

That amounts to about 20-30% of my media consumption.

Additionally all of my TV is streamed over a TCP/IP connection to a set-top box so if that counts as streaming then it's closer to 80-90% or so. Techincally any cable or wireless TV connection is streaming but I don't think that most people don't think of that as streaming.

Does this thing acutally work or is it as bugridden as the rest of the F-35? I sure would not want to be sitting in an F-35 when the rendering software has a buffering issue or just plain segfaults in the middle of a dogfight.