We have that. It doesn't seem worth the trouble just to tell them off, when the ballot just gets chucked in the round file anyway.

No one actually cares whether I register a ballot or not, this whole campaign is just a scare tactic to drive their party to the polls. Whoever wins, I know I'm fucked (and no, third parties aren't a valid solution to systemic failure), so yeah... no point in jumping through hoops.

I already read that article. But your grammar is kind of ambiguous so I'm not sure what you're trying to say about it.

I used to do that, but then my district went electronic, so I couldn't scrawl "Eat a dick" over the ballot anymore. Decided to do my civic duty by saving gas instead, after that.

My mother got one of these here in Florida, from some Republican-aligned group with a bullshit name I couldn't bother committing to memory. Along with a pile of crap for Scott(R) for Governor.

So it's not just the D-team.

Neither. I'm trying to point out that, in certain social circles, it is perfectly acceptable to physically gay bash. Sodomy was even illegal, so even the state was in on the game. Fortunately, those social circles are becoming smaller and less common - at least in the Western world. Some countries are passing laws that codify gay bashing.

People in Kentucky are receiving "ELECTION VIOLATION NOTICE" mailers from Mitch McConnell's campaign that appear to be from the board of elections. "You are at risk of acting on fraudulent information that has been targeted for citizens living in $COUNTY_NAME". You have to open it and read the fine print to realize you won't be arrested for voting.

There are also (far less expensive) anti-satellite missiles that a fighter can launch from high altitude to kill sats in low orbits. Geosync orbit is pretty safe, but GPS sats orbit much lower.

There you go, applying rationality where it isn't wanted. Did you know that in the US there was a case where a man with a large prescription for painkillers had many friends come to his home to visit him regularly. The police documented all this, arrested him for selling prescription drugs, and he was found guilty and went to jail, all without any evidence of any actual sale.

How so? The day a judge can punish the members of a jury for finding the wrong verdict is the day trial by jury is over.

I'm amazed everyone has forgotten Myst. Myst was a HyperCard stack with QuickTime movies - and amazing demonstration of with you could do with it.

Python's a bit of a mess if you've never programmed before. Admittedly, I don't know much about 3.x, but Python has a very "evolved" feel, with a lot of inconsistencies and evident history of changes to the language, plus classes are such a hack.

Maybe that's all smoothed out in 3.x? Does Python look like it was designed on purpose now?

The current Visual Basic is no harder to learn than the old VB6. It's different in some ways, which was jarring to anyone who knew VB6 (one of MS's stupider moves), but it's not worse. And VB.Net has the advantage that switching from it to C# is much easier than switching from VB to C++ was.

But I admit I have no idea what the new DB interface stuff is like (or the old) - the free version of VS comes with a free version of MS SQL, right? Anyone ever tried using that from VB.NET?

As I have been coming to understand, you have a good point. What I don't know is if these components have well-documented interfaces so that they can be swapped out.

One of the common problems with any aircraft design is that you can't have backups for everything. There simply isn't the capacity, unless you double the size of the aircraft and thus eliminate all of the benefits of having a backup engine (perhaps the most critical system to have a backup of). Thus, some level of failure is inevitable.

(Even if you have backups, that won't necessarily save your skin. The DH98 Mosquito could fly perfectly fine on one engine, but crashes from engine failure still happened. The Space Shuttle, on at least one occasion, lost two or more of the five onboard computers. There's a limit to what you can do in these sorts of cases.)

All flight is, inherently, dangerous. That's the nature of the beast. You can improve safety, which is always a good thing to do, but improvements will be asymptotic to a value below perfectly safe. How much below is unclear, I don't think anyone has really done that calculation. Nonetheless, whatever it is, there's declining returns after a given point. Commercial manufacturers tend to put a ballpark figure on what's an acceptable number of deaths per thousand (miles|hours) of flight and will invest to around that level of safety. Understandable - more than that gets very expensive very quickly but won't affect sales, aircraft usage or aircraft reputation.

Now, high atmospheric/suborbital/orbital/space travel is a great deal worse. Engines have to cope with vastly higher pressures, which means that much smaller defects can be disastrous. You've far worse radiation to contend with, so control circuits have to be better screened and radiation-hardened. They also have to cope with far greater G forces, vibrations from hell, variations in temperature that they're not going to like, and (since atmospherics can be nasty) survive (without producing erroneous signals) plasmas and electrical discharges that aren't always predictable and not always that well understood.

In this particular case, it looks from the amateur footage that claims to be of the accident (you can never be sure) that the engine ruptured. The engine, as I understand it, was a new type. Probably smarter to do the first flight unmanned for that, but that's easy to say now. My guess would be that the engine casing had not been properly made and failed. Not enough to total the aircraft at high altitude, but enough to make a complete mess of things. Again, it's only a guess, but that sounds like the engine wasn't yet full power. If it had been, I doubt there'd have been anything large enough for the video cameras to film.

Engine casings are tough to make flawlessly. You can do limited testing with ultrasonics and assorted remote sensors, and those'll find a lot of flaws, but the only known way to test if an engine is working perfectly is to fire it up to maximum power and hold it there until the fuel runs out or it explodes. If it's still intact, it was fine. It probably isn't now, though.

Almost no one will get tenure these days. The politics is therefore intense for the limited slots. And tenure is no sort of guarantee of a job - it only means you can't be fired "at will". You bet you need to publish, and bring in those grants. (And if you think "academic freedom" is common on campus these days, you really haven't been paying attention.)