With kid gloves?

Seriously, dude, you have no fucking clue what you're talking about. The extent to which the US will go to avoid civilian casualties and avoid violating local customs and sensibilities is astounding. This is a fairly new thing in combat - previous wars were butchery by comparison - yet the US takes more flack for it now than it ever has before.

Of course it did. You had local warlords slaughtering anyone who cooperated with western forces, and terrorizing the rest into submission. You had the same warlords plus related propaganda outlets spewing nonsense about how the horrible crusaders were raping women and eating children for breakfast. You even had lovely useful-idiots (you can guess where my finger is pointing) in the west repeating the same lies and jizzing themselves with glee every time they got to post online about some innocent getting killed or some detainees being abused. And you had 90% of the western population repeating the lie that "we were lied to about the reasons for the war", and claiming nobody gives a shit about the Iraqis and we're only there for the oil. In such an atmosphere I'm surprised that support for the US presence stayed as strong as it did.

The Germans and Japanese in WW2 got treated far worse than the Iraqis ever did, but in those wars we didn't have to contend with an organized resistance, or a grassroots propaganda machine within our own borders working against our interests.

Oh yeah, shooting at American aircraft is like totally not a big deal.

I should try that line of defence in court though. "Your honour, it's true that I violated my parole conditions, but I didn't do it in any way that matters to your interests. Ya gonna let me go, right?"

This has always been the case; the reason you notice it now is:

1. It's gotten a bit more blatant with the advent of the 24-hour-news-cycle.
2. As you grow up you tend to develop a better sense of whether or not someone is trying to manipulate you. Go back and watch some news from the past which you thought was "balanced", and you'll be surprised by how poorly your memory of it stands up to the reality.

That's just weird. My coffee is still as black as ever. Maybe you should stop buying your coffee from the syrup factory?

This is fractally wrong. Even if that were my position, it would arguably still be more valid since nothing we've observed even hints at the existence of some objective universal purpose. However, you've also managed to construct a complete strawman of my position, which makes you even more wrong.

For the record, the only position I have on the topic is that before you can ask what the purpose of something is, you first have to have some relatively solid reason to suspect that a purpose exists. Otherwise you're simply engaging in a guessing game based on hunches, feelings, and paranoid delusions. "Why did we have a drought which killed all our crops? Must be because we haven't sacrificed enough virgins."

To the Indian government though, I suggest the next project be here on planet earth:

That is, to make public toilets as easily available as every other space power.

1) China is a space power. Not exactly know for the quality & quantity of rural public toilets.

2) If everyone waited to solve every domestic issue before becoming a space power, noone would have developed rockets yet. I think you would be astonished by the poverty that existed in Appalachia or other rural isolated areas in the US when their space program started. Ditto for Europe (portugal / greece) and Russia (almost everywhere).

Oh I understand the issue just fine: the issue here is that you're asking for an objective process to agree with your personal preference; essentially a request for reality to adhere to your opinions rather than the other way around. And you think this is an intelligent request.

The Golden Compass is considered as dangerous by Christian parents as Narnia is by Atheist parents

So... not dangerous at all then? I'm an Athiest. I loved the Narnia series aged 7-11. I'll get my kids to read them. I know many Athiest parents who have allready bought The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe for their bubs before they can read.

I want my kids to be as wideley read as possible Most Athiest Parents I know feel the same way. Knowledge is something to be embraced. Not feared.

That's easy then; I'll define "best" as "most records sold", look up the figures, and have an answer for you in no time.

What, that's not the kind of "best" you meant? Well then rephrase the goddamn question instead of telling me that I have to define what you're asing for.

First define "best".

If you think science can't give you the answer to something, it's only because you don't know how to ask the question.

Bullshit. Science has plenty of heroes, and their stories serve to fascinate and inspire future generations. What science doesn't have is the mindless fanboi-ish worship of heroes. Anyone who actually understands the first thing about science knows that even our heroes can be wrong; and most of them HAVE been wrong about at least a few things. That doesn't stop them from being heroes, it just makes them human.

No, it's not. The question "why" in this case presuposes some kind of purpose, without any reason to believe that such a purpose exists. Just because you can phrase something in the form of a question doesn't mean that your "question" makes any sense.

Say what?

Dude, either you haven't been paying attention, or you don't know how to use teh intertubes. Every movie is available as a torrent in full 1080p pretty much the day the blueray disks hit the store shelves. Many are available even earlier.

If by "race" you mean that the various release groups are tripping over each other in order to see which one can get theirs up in the shortest amount of time, then yes. "X-Men Days of Future Past" won't be available for purchase for another 3 weeks, but there's already a 720p blueray rip available on the torrent sites, and the 1080p version should follow in the next few days.

Got you one better: in this day and age it's pretty much inconceivable that they would disable bleutooth functionality. If you can pair your fancy unpiratable player to a PC rigged to copy the incoming audio stream to disk, you've got yourself a digital copy with essentially no quality loss.

I keep hearing this complaint - that there are devices out there which are "designed to be harder to repair" - but, at least in my experience, that's incredibly rare. More often devices are designed to be difficult to open due to concerns about warranty claims on modified items, and even THAT is pretty rare. Every electronic gizmo which I currently own can be opened with relative ease. Most of them I would be able to perform SOME repairs on, as long as it doesn't involve having to replace chips or capacitors.

There are some things that bug me - such as my Nexus 5 not having a (easily) replaceable battery. However, while I may not be happy about them, they're all design choices which the manufacturer made for reasons that have nothing to do with repairability. And, for the most part, they're things that don't really effect me (eg. it is highly unlikely that I will keep my Nexus 5 long enough to actually need a battery replacement).

If it were well supported by the data I wouldn't have said that it keeps being repeated without any good evidence. In reality, all of these claims are only supported by the "research" of S.A. Marshall, and there's no evidence that the guy ever actually did the research that he claims he did. There's certainly no replication of his results. But there is evidence that he had a habit of making up data to support his narratives.

This is like saying that the reason professional basketball teams are so good is because they actually try to score points. Silly, at best.

The actual reason veteran units are so dangerous is because:

1. They're experienced.
2. They're a (literal) example of the survivor bias; most of their crappy soldiers die off, shifting the bell-curve to the right.