Also because of coal. Honestly, more as a result of coal, though they certainly have built a lot of solar. But the reason they've been building coal plants like crazy, so much so that many of them are idled from the day they go into service, is because it was their insurance against problems with the oil supply.

I'm a fan of solar power and happy to see the world is building a lot of it, but intellectual integrity demands that we also acknowledge China's investment in coal generation capacity.

There actually was a push in the UK a few years ago to outlaw pointy kitchen knives, but it met with great resistance and was dropped.

However, the point remains that stabbings in the UK are actually less common that stabbings in the US. This points out that while many think that guns are the cause of the US' violence problem, the real problem is deeper: US culture is just more violent.

That sounds nice and all, but there's really no legal way to do that. The money was collected illegally, so it has to be returned (with interest) to the people it was collected from -- the importers.

It's going to take years to find out just how corrupt, and we'll never get the full story. What we can see isn't even the tip of the iceberg.

Heh. The usual metric is "mission success". For a manned flight, that includes getting the people down safely. For a typical unmanned flight the mission is "get the payload to the right orbit". If you manage to land the rocket after that, that's gravy.

Zipline is still around, still making deliveries in Africa and some other places, and also doing some in the US, for Wal-mart.

Rating the truth as "troll?" Wow. really classy.

There isn't any launch platform with no failures, ever, that's not how you measure reliability. Reliability is measured on percentage of successful launches (payload reached target orbit), and Falcon 9 is, indeed, the most reliable orbital launch vehicle ever, by a wide margin. Here are the platforms with >= 100 launches (the 100-launch line is kind of arbitrary, but you have to draw a line somewhere and platforms with very few launches don't have meaningful statistics):

#1 Falcon 9 (including Falcon Heavy): 637 successes of 640 launches, 99.5% success rate. If you focus only on the block 5 variant (most-flown version, currently flying), it's 572 out of 573, 99.8%.
#2 Atlas V: 106 of 107, 99.1%
#3 Delta II: 153 of 155, 98.7%
#4 Space Shuttle: 133 of 135, 98.5%
#5 Long March 2/3/4: 503/521, 96.5%
#6 Ariane 5: 112 of 117, 95.7%
#7 Soyuz: 1889 of 2014, 93.8%
#8 Kosmos: 559 of 610, 91.6%
#9 Proton: 382 of 431, 88.6%

Soyuz has to get props for the sheer number of launches, of course, though that's probably mostly because the Russians couldn't afford to build another platform. Soyuz isn't a particularly great rocket in any way -- smallish payload, good but not great reliability -- but they kept using what they had. It's also worth noting that assuming Falcon 9 maintains its current launch cadence (which it won't; Starship will probably start taking its launches eventually, and if that doesn't happen, the cadence seems likely to increase), it will match Soyuz' launch count around 2033.

Most computers didn't have scsi at the time. This was before USB so Parallel port it was. And on those days most people had parallel port printers. So you plugged the printer into the zip drive. I can't remember what the limitations where. I'm sure you couldn't print at the same time as accessing the drive. Linux even supported it.

Sure but those bad people are democrats, or probably illegals anyway though. If they are US citizens they really shouldn't be. Seriously voter fraud in the US is very easy to define. Any vote that's not for a republican (Trump really) is fraudulent. And those casting such contrary votes are illegal aliens. Because we all know that true Americans vote Trump. It's that simple.

As for our kind of people, we wouldn't want a true patriot's freedom to organize an insurrection to be infringed on with domestic spying.

If cars are basically just phones now, they should at least provide a factory reset button!

As does using Windows.

Really? I don't think I've ever used NTFS on any machine I've owned.

And yet their humorous take on the news was very much appreciated. I count myself among those who once considered themselves well informed, and I was a regularly Daily Show viewer. I also loved the various Canadian comedies over the years such as Double Exposure, Royal Canadian Air Farce, etc. And I still listen to BBC's the News Quiz when it is available. And Dead Ringers.

You can think what you like about comedians, but humor is always a good thing and the ability to poke fun at everyone (left and right) brings more balance to the news than a lot of news sources out there.

Humor is very much missing from public discourse these days, especially among the current crop of right-wing politicians. I judge a person on their sense of humor. The ability to not take one's self so seriously is as important as the ability to think critically. A genuine warmth of character. I remember back during the Bush days although he was a polarizing figure, he had a personal warmth that is completely gone today. He could even make fun of his own (many) gaffes.

These characteristics are completely missing in the present administration but are present among some of our more "liberal" entertainers. Hence I listen to them, and more often than not I learn from them, even if my personal views differ greatly from theirs.

It's a good thing for you that most people do. Those ads your'e avoiding fund most of the content you consume. You can only freeride as long as enough others are paying the toll to subsidize you. I do the same, but I won't be surprised or angry if it becomes impossible.