Then I suggest you not enter any races in which the loser will die.

I'm told that the F35 is the largest, heaviest fighter with an airframe that produces the most drag, that the US has ever produced...

And where did you hear it? According to wikipedia:

Wingspan:
F35: 35'
F14: 64' / 38' (swept)
F15: 42'
F16: 32'
F18 C/D: 40'

Empty Weight
F35: 29,000 lb
F14: 43,700 lb
F15: 28,000 lb
F16: 18,900 lb
F18: 23,000 lb

Combat radius (internal stores)
F35: 600 nm
F14: 500 nm
F15: 1000 nm
F16: 340 nm
F18: 400 nm

Of what can be verified, none of what you heard is correct...

I don't think any serious person thinks that Galileo woke up one morning and said lets do politics. No, he was at church, the story goes, say the chandeliers swinging, and ended up being persecuted by the politicians of the time.

Most scientists don't take political positions. They make observations, and when a consensus is reached, they sometimes take actions. For instance, when it became pretty clear that lead was dangerous, there was a movement to remove it from gasoline. This became political because some interests were only interested in quarterly profits, not long term costs to taxpayers. Fortunately the taxpayers won. For instance, there is really good science linking the buildup in the environment of lead to the increase in crime, and the decrease in crime of the past decade or so to the decrease in lead. It is not just correlation, cut actual causation.

Now, as far as NPR is concerned, compared to Fox News of course it looks biased. NPR is not going to invite John McCain on the air to talk about when he was a kid you could kill black people, and know he has to deal with a black man, as he has been saying this past week. But the thing about NPR is it probably does a better job of using the public air waves than other.

Here is the rub. Fox News can say and do whatever it wants because it does not use free public resources. This is the key. Free public resources, not funding by the government. The government funds lots of things, and that does not necessarily absolutely limit speech. For instance, many churches take money for schools, which frees up money that they then use to do stuff like encourage people to attack people going about their day to day business. For instance, one church in my area bought cameras so they could photograph people going into a gay club. But radio stations were given public bandwidth and were supposed to use it responsible ways. I think NPR is responsible and balanced compared to some of what I hear on the AM stations. AM stations are using free resources. We could take it back and make a great deal of money leasing it to other agents. We don't. They agree to use it, and should be more responsible.

The drug war is bad enough, but when the DEA waits until just before harvest to destroy fields they know about... really gripes my cookies. They let it consume all that water, *then* they destroy it. And of course they'll destroy small backyard grows that don't even push people into the next water usage tier. When Joe Sixplant's grow is pushed over, where does he buy weed? From big growers illegally diverting.

Is this the release that adds support for HiDPI on external displays? I was pretty disappointed when I got a 4k display to find that it was unusable under OS X 10.9.3. (You can drive it at 4k, but cannot scale the interface).

Someone who shall remain nameless once told me I looked so much better without glasses, I should get the surgery.

I place LASIK in the same category as nose-jobs, breast augmentation, etc. Unless you are truly freakish (e.g., Golf-ball shaped nose or something) I have a hard time justifying it. If you're normative in appearance, IMHO any ethical plastic surgeon should refer you to a psychiatrist but they generally don't because MONEY.

Anyway, totally not going to get a laser in my eye. Those ads for dry eye medicine you see? It's because of one of the most common complications. No thanks.

Glasses. Hundreds of years, reasonable outcomes. LASIK? Maybe it'll be proven as risk-free as glasses some day, but probably not until I'm long dead and buried. Vanity isn't worth the risk to me; but I understand others think differently.

I always thought "hipster" was used to describe someone who does something in an inferior way just to be different.

Yeah, the first thing I thought of was: how many people who graduate with any 4-year degree stay in their field of study? Without having anything to compare this to, how do we know that the numbers for STEM graduates are abnormal?

But everybody knows that people with degrees in Communications and Political Science aren't going to work in those fields (if they even exist). But to get a job that requires "a degree" (of any type), going through an EE or physics program is hardly the most efficient route.

I've long said that the computing field is one where you can make decent money without a degree.

That also used to be more true of the economy as a whole, but I think that would be a super-risky plan for a young person starting out today. An ever-higher percentage of applicants have a degree, raising the bar.

A few radical republicans fantasize about impeachment. But when they realize who'd replace Barak, they'll come to their senses.

Unifying the UI is less important and desirable than unifying the underlying OS. I can understand having to re-write a more restricted UI for small displays - but the core of the application? In a different language even? That should not be necessary. Granted it was justified in the past, but mobile devices are powerful enough to run a real operating system now.

"Pollution" is by definition a bit of spin on top of the science, since it is a socially-defined term. (Just as a botanist would never hope to find a gene that is found in all weeds, and only in weeds). But expanding the list of compositions that are best explained by the existence of life is still a useful exercise.

Your analogy is unacceptable. You should have written it in Esperanto. Esperanto is the new standard for analogies from corporate. Also, you should have simultaneously posted it to your FaceBook account which you are required to have if you wish to perform analogy services on this network. Furthermore, you did not submit your prose to the grammar nazi trolls, or allocate time for analogy review in the scheduling program. Please rectify these discrepancies and I will get back to you during my appointed window for analogy review, Tuesdays from 2 to 4:20PM.

That the parent was most likely right in surmising the intended use as a laser weapon.