Can you live in the Bay Area taking home 42k/year?

I did for years (also working for the state). I was living here for nearly a decade before I made more than that, in fact; as a grad student my stipend was less than $20k. I have no dependents or debts to pay off, no severe medical conditions, and my benefits were always sufficient, so it was actually very easy. I lived alone for the majority of that time, but even when I shared houses or apartments it was in relatively nice neighborhoods. (All rental, of course.) Until recently I was always living very close to where I worked. I usually had at least a little disposable income and by the time I was taking home more than $30K I was saving some of it.

That said, I live in the East Bay, not SF proper, so my rents are merely extortionate but not totally unaffordable. $42K won't go very far if you want to live in the Mission - and 10 years ago, it wasn't totally unrealistic for a (childless) grad student to have that ambition.

Honestly, from what I've seen I think senior government-employed or government-funded scientists in the Bay Area mostly get paid enough already (and I would include myself in that category until very recently). It's definitely more than we'd get in another part of the country, and we/they get to play with a lot of very cool (and very expensive) toys. But the cost of living is a huge problem for recruiting; a UC Berkeley professor of my acquaintance told me they were finding it increasingly difficult to hire new faculty because they'll never be able own a home anywhere close to Berkeley itself.

How about hiding them behind an icon?

Notably, this means (if all goes as promised) the elimination of cellphone roaming fees within the EU

No it doesn't. They're two different (albeit related) things that happened to be announced at the same time. One is not a consequence of the other.

Protip: learn to read before attempting to write.

dismissal from his stations

What?

jumped the gun too soon

"Jumping the gun" by its very definition implies acting too soon; it refers to a false start in athletics. Are you suggesting it isn't even loaded yet?

Dylann Roof.

I wonder if that's the root of the problem. If I had a name that stupid I'm not sure that I wouldn't get a haircut to match and shoot up some random group of unfortunates who've never done me any harm.

Er, no. That's just untrue. See the relevant regulations. Depending on the bird size, the engine has to either not explode or catch fire (for large birds), or continue to operate at 75% power for between 5 and 20 minutes (small and medium birds, flocks of smaller birds) before safe shutdown.

"Doesn't explode or require immediate shutdown" isn't the same as not "sustaining damage". And even though the aircraft would likely survive ingesting a drone doesn't mean it would be good to lose a firefighting aircraft for the time it would take to rebuild or replace the damaged engine.

If you'd read the article you linked to, you'd see it does work, but not 100%.

Protip: when comparing two things with a list of points, state - ideally just before the list - which way round your comparisons are phrased. Wrong: Blah blah Tiger yada T34 yada yad. Yada yada yada yada. Slower. Bigger gun. More complicated to build ... Correct: Although the Tiger had a bigger gun, it was slower than the T34, more complicated to build ...

Yea just like non-coding DNA is junk. Does every generation have to make the same hubristic errors?

You're grossly overstating the case here. The fact that non-coding DNA contains essential regulatory information has been known for many decades, long before the modern age of genomics. The label "junk" was applied because nobody knew what most of that DNA did, and it obviously has very low information content compared to genes. But this pejorative never stopped people from studying it or trying to figure out what role it played - of course it imposes a significant metabolic cost on the organism, so why keep it around? We just haven't had mature tools to study it until relatively recently. Despite some sensationalism to the contrary, it's still far from resolved whether and how much it is functional; the best-supported hypothesis that I'm aware of is that it's structurally important and facilitates the 3D organization of the genome in cells in such a way that enhances regulatory control. We certainly don't have any clue how to derive therapeutic applications from our knowledge, unlike coding DNA (i.e. translated into proteins that most drugs target).

The claim that "mainstream biologists assumed that noncoding DNA was junk, and therefore asked the wrong questions" is simplistic nonsense at best, and creationist propaganda at worst. Scientific investigation - especially biology - proceeds on the basis of incomplete evidence all the time, because we have no choice (among other lacunae, we still don't understand what half of all human genes actually do). And unexpected new discoveries or inventions shake up molecular biology on a fairly regular basis - 10-15 years ago, RNA interference was thought to be equally revolutionary. So we always hope for surprises (all research faculty at major universities fantasize about making discoveries like Crispr/Cas), but we have to concentrate on areas of study that we feel are most likely to yield actual results.

I sort of despise the idea of patenting features of nature

I'm not sure I would call the therapeutic applications of Crispr/Cas a "feature of nature". Any actual therapy is going to consist of, at a minimum, a combination of synthetic RNA and orthologously expressed Cas9 (probably heavily engineered). This isn't something that exists naturally in humans. I'm generally pretty conservative about what I would consider patentable (software, or "all drugs targeting this protein", are not included), and, frankly, I think it would be better for everyone if the patents around Crispr/Cas were limited to specific treatments rather than the general concept. But regardless, any useful therapies are going to involve a great deal of engineering and trial-and-error - and clinical testing, which is going to be the most expensive part. What's the incentive to spend money on this if China ends up copying it? Don't say "for the good of humanity" - if that were the primary goal, money would be far better spent curing various endemic infectious diseases.

Yes, the original poster's specification should have read, "...it should do something subtly evil on purpose ."

I went through the whole being transferred to HCL malarky a few years back and wrote about it in my journal (UK perspective): 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.

the per kilowatt-hour cost of nuclear energy

or

the per kilowatt cost of nuclear power

The plural of craft is crafts - when you're talking about embroidery, woodcarving & the like.

When you're talking about vessels, it's just craft.

Brilliant, until some idiot blabs about it.