I'll wait for the final report thank you very much.

And you are basing this on what? A few low resolution pictures in some news reports?

Because this is is an really strange story that does not make sense on any level. I would have expected better fiction, even from a conspiracy theorist. The fighter in that picture looks like a MiG-29 or a Su-27 to me. The UkAF has both of these fighters and they can fire BVR missiles. BVR missiles are big fat 3.5-4 meter long monsters with a massive range and a large warhead intented for air to air use for anything up to bomber and large transport sized aircraft. The main BVR missile variants used by the RuAF and the UkAF are the R-27 (Nato code: AA-10) and the newer R-77 (Nato code: AA-12). The range of the AA-10 and AA-12 BVR missiles is something like 80-110 kilometers. I'm not sure if the Ukrainians have any AA-12s but they definitely have the older AA-10 whose seekers they have extensively upgraded to the point where they are still able to sell the AA-10 abroad for use on modernized MiG-29s and SU-27/30s with other air forces. So why the hell would a Ukrainian air force fighter have had to shut up the crew of MH17 with gunfire before downing the airliner with a WVR missile (presumably an AA-11, 7kg fragmenting warhead) when they could have picked MH17 off with a more powerful AA-10 radar guided missile (which has a 39 kg fragmenting warhead) that more closely mimics a BUK? I'm pretty sure that even if a UkAF fighter had fired a BVR missile from a 60 degree cone behind MH17 to make sure the crew did not see it coming (a more realistic scenario), they could still have fired it from about 25 km away and that missile would have come like a bat out of hell for the crew of MH17. They wouldn't have known what hit them, i.e. no need for gunfire and with a 39 kg warhead... you can imagine the rest.

Word! Here's another similar conundrum: Is it OK to teach people how to manipulate a ouija board session until you teach people how to manipulate the outcome of a ouija board session being run by the government for the purpose of contacting the spirit of a murder victim in order to solve that person's murder? This is a completely ridiculous situation no matter how you look at it. Polygraphs are pseudo science and as such a completely unreliable metric for determining truthfulness. It's not the people who teach others to beat these gizmos who should be answering to a judge. The ones who should be in deep trouble with the law are the government officials who use polygraphs despite their glaring shortcomings as investigative tools, who pressure people into taking polygraph tests and who convince juries that refusal to take a pseudoscientific test is equivalent to an admission of guilt.

... a former police officer has been dragged into court by the U.S. Department of Justice for teaching people how to beat a pseudoscientific method of detecting whether somebody is lying, a method that itself isn't even admissible as evidence courts in most parts of the world? What's next? Will the surgeon general drag people into court for pointing out that when consuming a homeopathic remedy with 30C dilution, one would need to swallow a volume greater than all the water present in all the oceans of our entire planet in order to stand a good chance of swallowing just one molecule of the original substance?

True, it's easy to throw snide comments at the people who designed this mission but until now nobody really even knew any details of what the surface of a comet looks like. Furthermore landing on Mars is difficult enough, the success rate for landings on the Martian surface is something like 30%. Getting a probe to rendezvous with a comet and land on the surface is a way bigger achievement. Finally I'm not exactly surprised that some systems failed after almost a decade in space. I just hope they manage to milk the maximum amount of data out of this probe.

I've been watching this mission with a certain degree of anticipation for a while but I'm no space/physics nerd so I have two questions for those who are:

1) How likely is it that anything will come of the drilling now that the harpoons that were supposed to hold the probe down have failed given the low gravity?
2) Will the comet ever again come into a position that might cause the probe to get enough sunlight to do any worthwhile science?

Mmmmmm..... chocolate.....

You guys can cack as many jokes as you want but being able to navigate in pitch darkness using echolocation is a pretty awesome skill to have.

Actually, by what I have been hearing lately they want to have a British operation doing their European business so they'll be in the EU common market, then they want to route all their $10 million of product sales though a shell company in Luxembourg where they make a secret tax agreement with the authorities to pay taxes of less than 1% while nominally paying the much higher Luxembourg corporate tax and VAT. There are many other variations on this, licence fees, internal loans, etc... but they all boil down to the same thing: you pay no tax. Eric Schmidt may claimed to be very proud of his companies tax structure, IIRC he even called tax avoidance 'capitalism'. I understand the desire of companies and private individuals to minimise their tax bills and that you can over-tax both companies as well as the unwashed masses. However, it pisses me off in a big way how these corporate bozos like Schmidt consider themselves entitled to using infrastructure and services bought and paid for by tax revenue but also consider themselves entitled to not contribute a dime to this infrastructure and the services that enable them to do business in the first place. The state confiscates over a third of my income as taxes and every time I buy something, import something or use a public service they leech some more with VAT, customs fees and miscellaneous other charges while Eric Schmidt and his company hardly pay anything at all. I do not have the option of doing a Irish Sandwich, a Double Dutch or a Luxembourg Flip to reduce my tax bill to zero and if the blood hounds at the tax office want to roast these corporate weasels on a rotisserie over an open flame then all I have to say to that is 'do you guys need any more wood'???'

The Pod race? Is that really the worst way you can think of that they ruined Star Wars? They ruined Star Wars for me with the battle of Endor, Awwww ... cute little teddybears. I would not shed any tears if they reshot that entire part of the original trilogy with Wookies like was originally intended (or so some SW fanboy told me). Then they threw in Jar Jar Binks... and that asinine battle between the Gungans and the Droids. A civilisation that can produce shield generators is tossing stuff at the enemy with catapults and throwing cavalry at tanks? Really? I can't decide which is worse. And then there is the scene where Yoda stumbles onto that landing pad with his cane and alluvasudden is he bouncing off the walls like a rubber ball as he duels Count Dooku. The list goes on, and on, and on... The whole movie theatre burst out in hearty laughter when that Yoda/Dooku duel scene came up. For a moment I felt like I was watching a Monty Python movie. I rather like the animated Clone Wars/Rebels series though, since there is a bit less braindead slapstick in it and once in a while you are treated to a scene where the clone troopers and commando droids are behaving in a way that vaguely (emphasise vaguely) resembles the way real soldiers would behave (the regular of the Droids are so stupid even the kids think it's unrealistic). It's really a pity how Lucas and the studio marketing and management monkeys have managed to screw up Star Wars, it's an awesome fantasy universe in many ways. It's also remarkable how popular Star Wars is despite all the ways they have FUBAR'ed it.

We are the Borg. Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own. Resistance is futile ...

Wouldn't it be great fun if Star Trek invaded Star Wars?

You mean a free market capitalist democracy where wealth steadily gathers into the hands of an elite clique of super wealthy individuals with the result that the free market capitalist democracy inevitably evolves into a plutocracy where the clique of hereditary plutocrats (aka. the 1%) step on anybody who seeks to rise by his own merit while the underclasses become steadily impoverished. This is usually followed by a revolution of the underclasses and the free market capitalist democracy is replaced by some form of more socialist order with many of the shortcomings you mentioned. Lather, rinse and repeat at nauseam.

More like simplified. The people whose money was lost were bank customers, the ones who lost it were bank employees. All the customer can do is choose a bank as best he can based on the bank's reputation. It is his money that is lost because the bank handed control of it's money to a bunch of morons. So the market punishes the customer not the moron who made the bad decision. It is the law that is supposed to punish the bank employee. However, in view of the fact that not a single bankster seems to have been put on trial as a result of the 2008 mortgage crisis we can rest assured that the worst that is likely to happen to the bank employee is that his bonus will be reduced that quarter and his career prospects may be dampened for a while. Now one may still criticize the customer for picking a lousy bank to do business with but let's face it, when it comes to finding a honest bank to handle your finances, the average capital owner is not exactly spoiled for choice these days. The best he can do is choose the least scummy bank. Ether that or invest his money in guns, ammo, canned goods and a heavily fortified dwelling with a built in water source.

You could say the same about the OS X/iOS and Linux-Desktop/Android combinations. Put a desktop OS in a tablet and it's a bitch to use, put a tablet OS in a tablet and you can't do half the things you could do on a laptop and a significant portion of what you can do on both platforms is more clumsy and time consuming to accomplish on the tablet. Which is also why I've bought a phablet left my iPad at home andy only use it for reading, watching videos and playing games and drag my laptop with me to do real work on the road.