Well, not really only that. It's a balance. If less people would give value to being the first owner, then either price of new cars would drop (but I don't think there's much margin for it to drop), or price of used cars would go up to match the higher demand.

No doubt the average lifespan of a car would also go up, so there would be a temporary (might last up to a decade if everything else stayed the same, but still temporary) lump in the sales of new cars. Still, after a time these now more popular used cars would be so old that maintaining them would no longer be economically sensible, and sales of new cars would pick up again to replace those.

Also, new cars might not be as tough or as cheap to maintain as the existing old cars (because old crap gets scrapped, there's selection...), but they certainly are better in many ways: quieter, more economical, more silent, safer, better equipped even with the entry level model, etc.

Well, no. As TFA suggests, "electrons created in the subatomic process known as beta decay are always 'left-handed'. ". It could also be some other influence, but the point I'm trying to make is, even though life would work equally well with both directions, it always gets started with DNA twisted the same way.

Sort of like, all life on Earth can withstand the atmospheric pressure, all life in this universe could have DNA twisting certain way to better withstand beta decay electrons.

I'm not sure if this is related to /. beta, but I would not be surprised.

Uh... A program interprets text which is not command as a command. Not a bug? Are you trolling?

Yeah, they'd need full negotiations of course, but being denied EU membership is, to me, unthinkable. It's a western country with laws already aligned with EU, and economy tightly tied with that of EU. Just because for example Spain might not be happy about it, vetoing them from joining would be a step towards breaking the whole EU.

Scottish people is not one entity, it is composed of individuals. There are many of them who would really like to choose their own destiny to be part of GB still.

Anyway, for a major change like this, if it is tight vote, and not everybody votes, then actually it'll be that actually a minority of the people decide to change the destiny for everyone. I think for a big thing like this, the change should require at least like 3/5 or 2/3 of the total votes cast.

Um, Thunderbird has not been killed. Release notes for current version, released last week: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/31.1.1/releasenotes/

It may not get new features any more, but that's not same as killed. In fact, many people would argue that this is a good thing. There's need for stable software too, and for mail clients, Thunderbird is that. Don't dis it just because you may want something more cutting-edge.

Last winter was totally crappy here, not a real winter, no proper snow cover, dark and depressing. So I certainly hope next winter will be more "severe", maybe even so severe that it would be a normal winter!

And this is different from justifying a value system purely from a religious perspecive... how? Just because someone says their value system is 100% based on their religious canon, does not make it so. Every religion needs to... interpret some things to make them palatable, and just throw out other things as patently absurd.

Furthermore, how is that a problem?

Not just any dog through, it's a space-dog. And it has lasers, that has to count for something, too.

Actually, the coffee addicts will not do that. When they need a fix, they'll just drink from the bottom of the pot, whatever is left there from yesterday, no matter how it tastes.

I know I do.

Of course that wouldn't really work, since most, if not all, of the effect is based on the civets selecting the beans they eat (as a side note, if you buy cheap Kopi Luvak beans, you're buying unselected force-fed crap beans, both literally and figuratively, and if you buy expensive ones, then most likely you're still buying the same beans, just paying more for the fake label...).

So you'd actually need to genetically engineer the pickers, turn them into cat people. Then they would pick the good beans with their mighty cat powers, which would be force fed to the caged civets, for mass producing the real thing.

Closer sure, but not much closer. The speed of the missile might be 4 times the speed of the passenger plane, so for example 20 km becomes 15 km. The missiles are designed to hit supersonic military aircraft, after all.

No, I think you are actually wrong there. If you don't find some subset (different for different people, but still a sizeable subset) smart, you do not really fit what is considered "a nerd". You can still be intelligent, smart, interested in technology,whatever, but not a "nerd".

Note that "smart" and "genius" are two different things. Also "smart" does not necessarily mean "intelligent". The comics he creates regularly are very smart, and to regularly create smart comics requires genius of some kind.

And if you don't think many XKCD "strips" are rather smart... what are you doing at a "New for Nerd" website?

You mean, the same way as asteroids of various sizes have impacted into the Earth throughout the history of the planet, and "Damage" is only relevant to those affected by it?

Yes, I agree.