I never understood the sophistry involved in the quest for a "humane" execution. You are depriving someone of their LIFE. How humane can that be?

OK, I can hear you guys before the chorus starts. "But, but, suffering!" I'm not sure why that bothers certain people so much in this particular context, but rather than going down a long path of logic against deaf ears, I'm perfectly willing to concede it. There are methods that are guaranteed to involve no physical suffering or discomfort whatsoever. Inhalation of 99.995% helium or nitrogen is one. A fully encirling explosive helmet would be another. Just a hand grenade under the chin is pretty goddam instant and sure.

I'll give you another one. You know all those amps in a electric chair? Skull sizzling; eyes popping out; convulsions? It's utterly pointless horseshit. You don't need that. Two tiny needles with a local anesthetic, insertied to touch the heart, with an AC current of literally microamps will cause instant fibrillation and consciousness will be lost in a few seconds with no drama whatsoever. Lights out, baby.

The death penalty should only be used when there is absolutely no doubt of guilt.

It's a coward's way out, and I'll tell you why. Guilt is never 100% certain. I mean that literally. NEVER. Not ever. Eyewitnesses can be deceived or malicious. DNA tests can be in error (that has happened). There are situations where the probability of guilt is very, very high. Close to 100%. So close that the uncertainty approaches zero. But it will never BE zero.

This is why the concept of "beyond a reasonable doubt" evolved. It is a high standard, but there is no metric. It is by definition a judgement. If "beyond a reasonable doubt" isn't good enough, the only honorable decision is that you don't favor capital punishment, period, end of story.

I can respect both the viewpoint favoring capital punishment for heinous crimes, and the viewpoint that capital punishment is NEVER justified. But I could never respect the concept of "capital punishment, but only when guilt is magically certain". It is a dodge.

I can serve up lots of links on how poorly the economies are doing.

You didn't make a single link, you lazy bum.

Also, Iridium was built for voice communications only. It will only get data support in a couple of years when they will literally send up a completely new full set of satellites.

Data has been sent via Iridium as a matter of course for years. I know from experience with floats and autonomous underwater vehicles that modems are commercially available and used every day. We got usable throughput on the order of a couple of hundred bits per second with a very unfavorable antenna location inches above the sea surface.

Here is such a modem.

Thousands separators in numbers are your friend.

Yeah, um, all you gotta do is take off the spurious / after the .php

There may be no such thing as a truly winnable war, but there sure as hell are losers in war. The Nazis, Italian fascists, and Japanese militarists LOST. They lost up the wazoo. They lost everything. Had the US and USSR (as examples) lost WW2 in that way, they never would have had 45 subsequent years of burgeoning influence before history finally well and truly caught up to them.

I haven't seen anyone mention yet that this "bill" is pure horse shit. Legislation can't just declare that power which the FCC already has (given to them by the 1934 act and by follow-on legislation) doesn't count, and they can't do such-and-such. To accomplish what they claim to want to accomplish, they have to frame new legislation that changes the FCC's authorization. Of course they know this. They have lawyers; hell, they ARE lawyers.

This piece of shit is just kabuki theater. Nothing to see here.

One wing is smashed. I'd be surprised to see it fly again.

Problem is this NUC with a quad i7, 16gb ram and 256gb SSD costs a lot more than the mac mini in the same configuration.

Citation? A Mac Mini configured with an i7 and 16GB and a 256GB SSD is $1399 (I just went to store.apple.com to find out). The equivalent NUC is not going to be "a lot more" than that. In fact I will bet it will be not more at all. It will be less. But we're going to have to wait for the thing to actually be stocked anywhere so we can see the actual selling price.

The Mac Mini in its current incarnation is also GIGANTIC. Check it out. 19.7x19.7cm compared to the NUC at 11.5x11.1cm. That is THREE TIMES the area.

Except the Mac Mini includes a built-in power supply, while the NUC needs an external power brick half as big as the computer.

Please sell Apple's stupid somewhere else. When they went to the built-in power supply, they dropped completely off my radar. Dumb. Do not want. So there is a big power cord leading to the wall instead of a small, light DC power cord leading to a small enclosed fanless brick lying on the floor where no one sees it and it doesn't take up any desk space, plugged into the wall. GIANT REGRESSION! Would you buy a laptop with such a stupid design?

If you study even high school economics for a single term, you will find that you can't just divide initial cost by operating lifetime to amortize it. There is this little thing called TIME VALUE OF MONEY. A few percent per year, carried over 40-60 years, really adds up.

You also have to count insurance. Even if it is partially or wholly subsidized by the government, SOMEBODY is paying. The worst disaster (leaving aside normal environmental pollution) that could possibly happen at a coal or oil or gas or solar plant is pretty much limited to the plant premises. I'll grant you that hydropower is capable of making vast areas wasteland and killing untold thousands if a big dam bursts. Otherwise, nuclear has a downside potentially thousands of times more devastating than the others. Insurance, fairly accounted, has to cover this.

It would take me hours to decide if the study you reference really accounts for all costs. Just at a glance, it LOOKS like they are properly accounting for amortization, but I see no mention of insurance. I do see the notation for nuclear: "does not reflect decommissioning costs or potential economic impact of federal loan guarantees or other subsidies".

Bryan Singer? Heinlein source material?
Oh yeah, this will be a success...

Producing and directing Valkyrie got me as a big admirer.

the story takes place over a multi-month or year-long period, which never comes across well in a movie

[In no particular order] - ever seen a little thing called Gone With the Wind? Lawrence of Arabia? Doctor Zhivago?

There were sequels to starship troopers

If you mean a couple of completely unknown movies, those were not sequels. Those were lazy cash-in attempts with no talent.