"Moral Decisions", such as whether it's right to shoot up a school or not.

There have been 3 Slashdot stories about specific cases that I remember. (This isn't about "anti-child porn laws", but about very specific "block this list of sites at all ISPs" laws). I remember the UK for sure, the other 2 my memory fades on the details: it had become "oh, this shit again" by then. Give a crooked politician a tool like a blocklist and it will be abused.

WTF is wrong with people these days? Any comments about "maybe a tiny bit less overwhelming government power" are always met with this "but anarchy is bad!" BS. Neither extreme is good, OK? "Regulate nothing" and "regulate everything" are both dystopian ideas.

Oh? Familiar with safe spaces? "Triggering"? Colleges in the US are fraught with students claiming emotional distress over a speaker whose politics don't match the groupthink exactly. (This really happens). I can only hope this problem is contained to the US, but we've raised a large group of people so fragile that ideas contrary to their beliefs are considered emotional distress.

But what does it matter if the government is dishonest? Give a government any tool which allows them to jail someone for speech, and it can be twisted far enough to fit the government's needs.

Not to mention that each piece of hardware is built with the assumption of there being extant suppliers for its component parts. For Apollo hardware, this is rarely true, so you'd have to retool and test for each part. The sad thing is it'd actually be cheaper to build a brand new Saturn-V equivalent than to make an exact duplicate.

This is actually one of the sorts of cases where 3d printing (no, generally not things like plastic filament extruders... meaningful printing, like laser sintering, laser spraying, etc, as well as CNC milling, hybrid manufacture techniques and lost wax casting on a 3d-printed moulds) has the potential to really come into its own: all of these sort of parts that you only ever need half a dozen of them made but might some day suddenly want some more a couple decades down the road. Another interesting advantage on this front is also that of incremental testing - I know of one small rocketry startup that has set themselves up to sinter out aerospikes in an evolutionary fashion - they print one out, connect it straight to test, measure its performance, scrap it and feed that performance data back into the generation of the next printout, in a constant model-refining process. Combustion simulations can be tricky to get right, but real-world testing data doesn't lie ;)

Whoops, I was wrong - it's nearly 2 kilograms per person here, not 1. But you've still got us beat :) (Also, it looks like America is up to 207 million pounds of fireworks per year, a big increase... so 285 grams per capita per year).

I just think it's really weird how Americans see themselves as a major-fireworks nation when they set off so few.

Oh come on, what's New Years without an ER visit? ;) But yeah, I know some of your places have fireworks bans due to drought and the like.

In case you're curious, here's what New Years looks like here. It goes on at that intensity for at least half an hour, half intensity for maybe an additional hour or so, quarter intensity for another hour, etc. All this comes after the "brennur", which is about a dozen house-sized bonfires scattered all over town.

Basically, if one can make it burn or explode and there's nobody who objects, we'll set it on fire. Often while drinking heavily ;)

Our Federal Government is invested with tens of thousands of people who's job is to suck the fun out of everything.

New York City for example usually sets off 20-25 tonnes of fireworks on the 4th of July. Meanwhile, little Reykjavík sets off about 300 tonnes on New Years' Eve. Americans average shooting off about 200 grams of Fireworks each over the course of the entire year, combining fireworks shows, personal usage, etc. Icelanders average about a kilogram per person just on New Years'.

And I know it's not just Iceland. I had a friend from Peru who moved to America and was terribly disappointed by what passed for a fireworks display there versus in her home country. Seriously, aren't you guys supposed to be the ones who enjoy blowing everything up? ;) Or do you get it out of your systems in the Middle East? ;)

(Note: not meant as an insult :) )

It always starts that way, and usually ends at "say anything that offends the ruling party and they throw your ass in jail". On the internet this seems to happen at internet speed, to. Most countries that forced ISPs to block a list of "child abuse/exploitation" IP addresses or site, which of course were not made public, only took 3 years or so before opposition party's material mysteriously was being blocked. Funny how that works.

The only real way to protect speech critical of the ruling party is to protect all speech (we're talking at the criminal level here, not torts for libel etc). Anything else is the camel's nose under the tent.

The metal bits aren't what go obsolete. The tooling to produce the engines, the frames, the aerodynamic surfaces were destroyed only after the planes were retired. 3D printing doesn't help build microchips, wiring boards, etc.

Could some of those parts have been produced better with 3D printing? Sure. Particularly inside the engines, there are very complex forms that are difficult to make subtractively. But the whole plane? Big simple forms are far stronger and consistent when stamped from rolled stock than sintered up from powder.

The reason those planes were retired is that new requirements emerged, and it was decided (rightly or wrongly) that a new design was the right way to meet them.

Taxation of Illegal Income in the United States

At least in the US, tax collection agencies have never balked at collecting their share of your ill-gotten gains. In fact, it's a worse tax situation than legitimate business, because there are classes of expense, such as bribes, which cannot be deducted.

The irony is that it could be seen as "karma" that Jobs basically committed "suicide by woo", refusing to treat his cancer with any recognized scientific technique for most of a year and instead trying pretty much every technique in the book popular among the sort of person who typically believes in karma.

So perhaps all of the woo stuff actually works, but it plays in with the laws of karma ;)

You have intrigue, a second act, and an untimely death to the lead role.

This is likely not even the final rendition.

the FBI might also be investigating thieves seeking copper.

Go figure.

Really? Sliden'Joy?

Their first action should be hire a marketing guy who will probably have them change the name lest it be automatically banned by various internet filters as a sex toy.