I've got my TI-36 Solar sitting on my desk here right now. I use it almost daily. The top cover of the vinyl case ripped off just last year.
I have my late 70's vintage TI SR-50 working at home. I had to replace the original Ni-Cad batteries but it still works fine with that 10 digit red LED display. It isn't as rugged as the TI-36, though, the slide switches for On-Off and Deg-Rad are feeling soft.

Dumbass? Is that a dialect of Brainfuck?

Contradiction in terms.

"No state will ever give up land willingly" Two counterexamples: The USA found itself in possession of several previously Japanese territories after WWII, most notably Okinawa; it was returned to Japan in 1972, 27 years after the war ended.
The USA found itself in possession of Cuba and the Philippines after the Spanish-American War; both were granted independence sometime afterward (Philippine independence took a long time and was interrupted by Japanese occupation of WWII).

There are at least two reasons for his opinions.
1. Corrupt or power-tripping cops.
2. The rest of the cops that protect them.

I teach my kids to always be polite to policemen, but try to avoid any contact with them if possible.
Mostly because they are the most dangerous gang around.

And please forgive me for being skeptical about your claims.

Will you ticket a fellow police officer if you observe them break the law? (Say, speeding without having their flashing lights and/or siren on)
And if so, will the ticket stick?

And yet, some people go around proclaiming that they know all about The Programmer's goals, motivations and rules just because somebody handed them a "programming for dummies" book.

If physicists don't have a proper answer to "Why is there something rather than nothing" then they should stop pretending they do by the deceit of changing the definition of "nothing".

The issue of whether anyone has a "proper" answer -- indeed, if there is a "proper" answer -- turns on the ambiguity of the word "why". We use that word in three very different senses.

When we ask, "why is the sky blue?", we are asking "by what lower-level phenomena is the sky seen as blue?" We want a causal sequence of explanations that is static (or very short duration) in time and varies over the reductionist depth of phenomena: photons are scattered by air molecules, some of them enter your eye, trigger certain receptors in the retina, this is processed by the nervous system causing a sensation that your brain has been culturally trained to associate with the symbol "blue".

When we ask, "why did the Challenger explode?", we are asking "by what causal chain of events, one after the other, did the Challenger explode?" We want a causal sequence of explanations that extends over time and is fairly static in reductionist depth: politics prompted a launch in cold weather, cold weather caused the O-ring to warp, the warped O-ring caused hot gas to leak, boom. We want a time sequence that (in this instance) stays at the level of everyday experience, doesn't go in to the quantum mechanics of the O-ring or the grand historical narrative of humanity's existence.

When we ask, "why did Alice go the dance with Bob?", we are asking "what motives and values prompted Alice's decision?" We want an explanation of the desires and actions of intelligent agents, not a story about the atoms that make up her body.

When we ask "why is there something rather than nothing?", some people are looking for "God did it" -- the third type of answer. But there can't be an intelligent agent before there is something, so the question in that sense is contradictory and meaningless.

Some people are looking for the second type of answer: they want some cosmological causal chain of events as to how space and energy came to be. But any causal chain of events would be a thing, not nothing, so again the question in that sense is contradictory and meaningless.

What we have here is a proposed answer in the first sense, lower-level phenomena.

If you're looking for cause-over-time or motive as an answer to "why is there something rather than nothing", you've fallen into a linguistic trap around the ambiguity of the word "why".

You are supposed to read it and think "people should act this way",

Yes, with the genocide and the slavery and the misogyny and the mock executions of sons by their fathers, what a fine world it would be if we followed the moral example of the Bible.

Colbert noted. "I see the Norwegians gave Snowden 30 Nobel Prize nominations. The guy's practically a war criminal - I don't understand how they could put him up for the same prize they once gave to Henry Kissinger."

That whooshing sound you hear? That's Colbert's satire going right over your head. If the Kissinger/peace prize reference didn't tip you off, consider that he said it at the same event that he said "I'm sure that under enhanced liberty you can have all the privacy that you want, just like under enhanced interrogation you can breathe all the water you want."

There have been a small handful of truly major revolutions in the history of medicine (aseptic surgery, vaccines, antibiotics) and clinical genome sequencing will be such a revolution.

Clinical medicine is useful and all, but not great basic science.

Many Americans don't even accept evolution or global warming yet.

No germane to the point.

Pretending that where we are is the furthest we'll ever get is not constructive and not correct.

A curve which approaches a line asymptotically will make its big progress early (taking t as the horizontal axis) and small gains afterward. It will still get closer, but not in a way that makes a big change. It's a reasonable hypothesis that science will approach the maximum possible knowledge of the world in the same fashion.

There is a limit on how much human beings will ever be able to observe, and how much human beings will be ever to able to calculate. (If we blow it and ruin our spaceship and die off in the next century or two, which is quite possible, we may be close to that limit already.) If science is not approaching this maximum possible knowledge, it's a failure; if it is approaching this maximum possible knowledge, then there is less and less left to possibly know. The amount of possible knowledge is not infinite.

No. She didn't win a lawsuit.

She filed a lawsuit, "a case where two or more people disagree and one or more of the parties take the case to a court for resolution", an "attempt to gain an end by legal process; a process instituted in a court of law for the recovery of a right or claim". She got what she wanted. How is that not winning a lawsuit?

The actual Kozinski ruling suggests that actors HAVE a copyright in the final work despite decades of copyright law to the contrary.

That's sensible. A film actor is a co-creator of a work; if musicians covering a song have a copyright interest in a sound recording, it is inconsistent for film actors playing a scripted role to not have a copyright interest in a video recording.

This could finally establish the principle that people have a copyright interest in photographs of them in any but the most mundane situations; that's a principle that could resolve issues around "revenge porn" and around people getting upset around photos of them being posted on social media without their consent (see the hostility around Google Glass).

How do use mycomputer.mydomain.example on afraid.org where mydomain.example is a domain I own, without advertising the domain on their system?
The "stealth" option is not available for free.

I'm aware of JUICE and wish them well. I wish I had thought of Rosetta and would have given ESA credit for that one in my original post. I was also aware of Cassini-Huygens but finessed that by saying only NASA had "launched" outer planet missions. So let me apologize for not giving the Europeans full credit for what they have done/are planning, caveated with a big, "It's about time!". Europe has had an economy larger than that of the US for a while now, and always bigger than Russia's -- why have they been such slackers in space exploration? Obviously, the cold war competition between the USA and the Soviets gave space exploration its initial kick, but I'm still disappointed that Europe and Japan didn't come along stronger over the last 30 years. And since the late 90's there hasn't been any cold war space race, but the US planetary program has been as strong as ever. Any Europeans or Japanese want to weigh in? Is it that without the national pride/competition thing the US and Russians had, space just isn't considered worth the Euros and Yen?