Once the basics of supersonic flight were understood and the materials science behind the engine tech was perfected, it was easy to produce an aircraft that went Mach 2, so the F-104 isn't something to really be compared to the F-35.

I'm not sure what the point of your post is other than a typical bitching about Microsofts past.

Go on, show us those rules which agree with you.

Airlines can't leave a minor unattended on a flight through upgrades or moving the seating allocations around, but there's nothing requiring them to allow minors with different ticketing groups to their parents to board with the highest ticketing group on flights with non-allocated seating. Boarding priority is all down to the airline, so in this case the airline was correct - the bloke could board with the lower ticketing group because that would be his choice, but he couldn't bump the lower ticketing group members up to his group.

So in other words, the airline already allows for the minors to be attended by their parents, its the parents choice as to whether they accept it or not.

In the past Microsoft may have had an NIH approach, but over the past few years they have significantly changed from that in the developer area - switching from the Microsoft Ajax tools to jQuery, using Json.Net etc etc etc.

Taiwan had various degrees of local democratic reform culminating in the first presidential election in 1996, but it wasnt until 2000 that the Kuomintang party actually lost power in an election.

It depends what they are vetting - the security of a third party service is probably something they care little about.

Every country has make-work projects, some of them even have additional benefits - the EU is currently reviewing a energy savings plan where one of the main points is "costs will be offset by the jobs created to implement this directive". Make-work.

In reality, the Chinese project is definitely not make-work if they plan to do actual research. The "ghost cities" you talk about are actually gradually filling up as more population moves from rural settings into the cities - this has been a long term goal of the Chinese government, but their "long terms" are a fair longer than the "around next election time" terms that westerners tend to think in.

If you want to see some real "ghost cities" there are plenty in Spain, entire towns and cities, with airports, which were built to sustain the Spanish building industry during the 2008-2013 period, and the properties have never been put on the market.

Welcome to the party, except you are many years behind the 'crowd' - a lot of people (but fairly insignificant in the grand scheme of things) abandoned Firefox over the "Awesome Bar" debacle, where you couldn't even go back to the old functionality at all (yeah yeah, loads of people posted "fixes" which did nothing more than change the skin, while doing nothing to revert the underlying behaviour), so the current situation is nothing new.

The way the Awesome Bar was dumped on us pushed Firefox way down on my list of browsers to use, and even today I only fire it up to check website functionality when I'm developing.

Transmission over anything further than a few dozen metres.

Your privacy is indeed worthless if you aren't doing anything to protect it yourself - if you are expecting everyone else to protect your privacy for you when you don't take even basic steps to protect it yourself then I have no sympathy.

At some point you need to take some responsibility for your own privacy.

How does this differ from a typical search warrant for a premises? While you can get a search warrant to search "room X at property Y", more often than not the search warrant is for "property Y", which is exactly the same as a gmail account in entirety.

Actually most get a token from their payment provider and store that for future use - only the very large sites which have their own merchant accounts and card provider systems will store the card details.

In the UK, most card providers require you to enrol into something called "3D Authentication", which sets up a password for your card - when you make a payment online, you put in your card details, billing address etc, and then you are asked for three digits from your 3D Authentication password. The way in which this works is its handled directly by the bank, not the payment provider or the vendor website - the payment provider returns a response saying "3D Auth required, go here to complete..." and you redirect your user to that website, they do the additional authentication, the bank then sends a result back to you, and you send that on to your payment provider.

If you are pointing out how clear Ukrainian airspace is, try looking at the same map from two weeks ago, or even earlier on the day of the shoot down - Ukrainian airspace was being used by most airlines on that route, it was only afterward that airlines started avoiding it as a matter of course.

Which democracy is that, the one before or after the overthrow of the democratically elected government?