OK, when you put it like that it sounds pretty awesome. And delicious.

I'll bring the sauce, aloe vera and skin graft kit.

"We are pleased Roscomos wants to continue full use of the International Space Station through 2024 -- a priority of ours -- and expressed interest in continuing international cooperation for human space exploration beyond that. The United States is planning to lead a human mission to Mars in the 2030s, and we have advanced that effort farther than at any point in NASA's history. We welcome international support for this ambitious undertaking.

Yeah, that's basically "Go F* yourselves" in diplomatic speech.

And as it should be.

I take it you don't use a charcoal barbecue

I'm not sure how you do it where you're from, but up here in the North we generally don't barbecue from 30 feet away.

Is anything legal in California these days?

Medical marijuana, gay marriage, conceal/carry.

Say you're not really pissed that fucking flamethrowers aren't legal there, are you? I don't know if you've gotten a look at your fellow man in the United States lately, but are these really people you want to be able to have flamethrowers? Geez, louise, there can't be more than maybe 1 in 100 that I think should be allowed to drive a car. Maybe 1 in 10 should be allowed to have shoelaces for chrissake.

Although I'm sure we can find someone reading this that believes "More flamethrowers = Less crime".

Having fun isn't necessarily stupid. Having fun with flamboyantly dangerous things isn't necessarily stupid. It's endangering unwilling bystanders that's stupid.

Some people like to build and shoot powerful crossbows, or even replicas of medieval siege weapons. These are extremely dangerous and useless things. The dangerous power of a trebuchet to throw an upright piano 150 yards is part of the charm.

But a trebuchet is something that takes certain amount of thought and sacrifice to obtain and use. This flamethrower thing is more like a powerful handgun. There's been a recent fad for ridiculously overpowered handguns, which pack superfluously fatal power into a convenient, affordable form factor. The recent brouhaha over "armor piercing" ammunition was a side effect of a manufacturer selling a cut-down semi-automatic carbine as a "handgun", even though if you look at videos of people using them they're obviously terrible as handguns. This raised the question of whether 5.56 NATO ammunition should be regulated as "handgun ammunition", and in the end I think the decision not to was reasonablee. These aren't cop-killing or military handguns. They're extremely dangerous toys designed to get your rocks off.

There are some who'd say that because these guns are dangerous and impractical they should be banned. But I don't agree. "Impractical" isn't the same as "useless" because getting your rocks off is a legitimate use for a thing. I think people should be able to enjoy their ridiculous firearms as long as they do it at some kind of appropriate range. I also think there's a real danger though from stupid people who will go plinking in the woods with the things like they were BB guns.

That's really the only problem I have with this flamethrower, whether it's gold, chrome, or gunmetal gray. Any idiot can buy one, but it'd take someone reasonably intelligent and determined to find a place where it can be used safely. I'm not against people buying them, but I am for coming down hard on people who use them where they're a danger or public nuisance.

Well, in the end you have to ask "did he get away with it?". Or, given that he turned himself in later, "did he have some purpose in escaping that he fulfilled?"

Intelligence is a multi-dimensional phenomenon. It includes things like thinking through unintended consequences before acting that quite clever people are sometimes bad at.

Well, no, I don't. That's why I asked. It sounds like the answer to my question is yes?

Considering how quickly SpaceX is leapfrogging the ULA, I'm inclined to suspect that a more open bidding process will end up saving the government a fair amount of money in the long run. It does seem that the ULA has been mostly sitting on their laurels sucking at the government teat for a long while now. Why should they improve efficiency when it will only reduce profits?
My own objection is that saving the government money is a *very* different thing than saving the taxpayer money. What's your bet, will we all get a 0.01% reduction in taxes, or will the government just find some other pork-barrel project to spend it on? Not that that's necessarily a bad thing - I'd much rather get more for my tax dollars than less, but lets not pretend it's going to actually save taxpayers money.

Right. Don't buy them. They specifically moved the Golf back to Wolfsberg. Be careful, though, because I think they moved it back to Mexico more recently. You can get e.g. a "VAG VIN Decoder" app for Android, or just memorize which place in the VIN to look at and a handful of plant codes. Then you'll know precisely where the vehicle was produced.

If that's all the variable is used for, won't the compiler optimize it out of existence anyway? Or is that too fancy yet?

Welcome to the party, it began several years ago.

Please tell me you already feel this way about Gawker.

Not because you were the most qualified applicant? That means the company you work for hired you not because they should have, but because they were strong-armed into it. In fact, they should not have had to have hired you, they should have been able to hire the best-qualified applicant.

The reality is that you are asking employers to pay for that, but making children isn't their business. If society needs children, then society should pay for children, through income redistribution. Oh wait, guess what? We already give people a tax break for having children. I've known people who made more than me but paid no taxes because of their children. Now you want employers to pay again?

Or you could argue that people who do have kids don't deserve to get paid for their time off. A person who doesn't have kids is worth more to their employer. If people can't afford to survive while they have kids (they can) and we need more people (we don't) then it would be worth it to pay people to have kids. Big problem with that is there are too many humans on this planet already, at least while we operate in our current mode. You want more people made, but that's the opposite of what we need.

The documentation I'm referring to has nothing to do with any competitive advantage. If anything, not doing it is a competitive disadvantage in their particular marketplace. The potential liability costs, warranty/service costs, reputation costs, etc easily outweigh the cost of the paperwork and structure. This particular company was badly structured and was actually incurring all sorts of needless costs and problems by not having their house in order. If anything the FDA will make them more competitive in the long run.

No, completely unlike those VWs built in Mexico, which are built like shit. The only thing more embarrassing to my heritage than how shit UAW puts together cars is how shit Mexico puts together cars. It's interesting that you mention Volkswagen because Mexicans are known to be particularly bad at that. When VW brought USDM Golf production to Mexico, reliability plummeted. When they took production back to Wolfsberg, it came right back up to the German standards that we know and love.

Anyone who buys a VW built in Mexico is a moron. All of my imports to date have been built in their designing nation, and came over here on a boat fully assembled. Started with imports with a 240SX, then I had an Impreza GC5, couple of 300SDs (still have one) and an A8. That last has electrical problems but the mechanicals are good, anyway. And there's the rub with VW; their electrical is a bit garbage, even out of Germany.