Well take off and landing is one thing (Not needing an airport infrastructure), but for actual battle in an atmosphere, I would expect wings would give you an advantage. Save power on lift and more power towards forward speed. Otherwise you will need the thrust shooting at an angle to keep the ship in the air. Also banking and and turning would be easier too. In space you wouldn't need wings, but stabilizers... however the wings on an X-Wing would be huge for what is needed.

I am surprised that the lego pieces at the bottom don't get crushed from the weight.

Most software you need to do the following.

Create Date
Read Data
Update Data
Delete Data.

CRUD for short. However in terms of the UI
you need to change the order to RCUD Read, Create, Update, Delete. As those are in the order of damage you can create from low to high.

So Reading data should be the easiest to do on your system, as most people should just be reading data.
Secondly create new data, should be the next step, as if you created something wrong typically it is the easiest to remove.
Updating data can cause more problems as you could change correct data to bad data, and often most systems you will not know what happened after you changed it.
Then Delete data, which is obviously could be bad if it was too easy.

If you are a rock climber, do you buy a rope that is rated for your body weight, or do you get one rated for multiple times your body weight?

As a home user, having the throughput is useful for the occasional splurge. Say backup your PC to a friends PC, while watching movies. However that is different then a constant load of data on the network.

The pricing of your internet connection is based on the idea you will not use it all. So you can share with others. If you just go nuts on it you will get a call because you are just being greedy.

Not if people will not buy the games at that price.
Games are controlled by market forces. And unlike say Windows of Office where you are more or less need the product, or suffer the pain of using 3rd party alternatives (Please no LibreOffice works for me and my business examples, I get it!, I am talking broadly here). Games people can get by without it if they are too expensive.
You do not need to play video games.
Not playing a video game will not negatively affect your life, in any grand scheme of things.

So if you don't like the price don't buy it. So if makers start raising the prices in dollars, while also raising the price in loss of freedom. You can choose not to buy it.
Chances are if you lose your freedom, you can buy the product for a cheaper price, because you are choosing to give up say reselling your game for the ability to get it for a lower price.

They are for any non sexual species, like most microorganisms. Bacteria don't interbreed.

They are for many geographical species whose only reason of non-interbreeding is that they don't meet.

They are for species with a somewhat more complex live cycle than "parents generate offspring". My pet example is the common dandelion, whose generational cycle can span hundreds of generations, and where most individuals can't interbreed at all.

This was another one of the issues, yes.

"Or, even by cutting off welfare for people that ARE able bodied and can work. "

Ageed, When do we start cutting the pay to Congress?

Yet if 1/2 the money spent in the past 13 years killing brown people in the middle east was spent at NASA and NOAA, we would be living on mars.

Except that we have plenty of other birds giving us imagaes. just not high enough resolution to see if it's raining on the left side of a street.

Hell there are ancient WEFAX birds still up there that make a pass every 4 hours.

Right. It's part of the "stockpile stewardship" program, or the Livermore Senior Activity Center for Retired Physicists. Nobody in the US has built a nuclear weapon in decades, and everybody who knew how is dying off. DoD/DoE is trying to hang onto the expertise and recruit some new people to at least maintain the ones already built. So they have to have something for them to do.

Mod parent up. Bear in mind how this thing works. There's a resistance heater inside, and it is never completely off for long periods. The claim is that the heat given off by the device is greater than that being pumped in by the resistance heater. The heater is fed with a "proprietary waveform" from a control box the watchers were not allowed to examine. All they could do was put clamp-around current sensors on the leads to the device, voltage probes on the inputs, and feed those to a current meter. I strongly suspect problems with the current measurement.

Most of the time when a picture or video has been faked or photoshopped, you can probably tell if you look at it carefully. Their usually isn't something quite right, about it, that most people will miss.

For example odd lighting. If you superimpose an image chances are you do not have the lighting just right.

Picture Fragments. Sometimes if you look at photoshopped pics (Even professional ones) you might find extra or removed limbs or fingers. Or some impossible feat of a part of the body that somehow is in front of something that couldn't possible be.

Extra Sharp or Blurry: Sometimes thing of interest that is added in later is taken with better skills than the background so you will see a blurry picture with a sharp object. Or they will cover up the whole picture by making everything blurry. If the image seems like it was taken from an iPhone but it was super blurry more than what the device does you can probably expect it has been altered somehow.

Dithering/Anti-Alias methods: Most digital cameras on full resolution tend to have some dithering to the colors (Those sparkly bits that don't seem to exist in real life) Then some equipment scales it down a bit and adds some Anti-Aliasing to make the colors more smooth and natural looking. If you add a fake element chances are those methods will be different. Say a smooth well anti-aliased pipe, with a dithered person.

Fear is our biggest problem right now.

Why aren't we going to the Gym to get in shape? Fear of going into a gym out of shape and being judged by others. (I will go to the Gym after I lose 20 lbs)
Why aren't we starting our own businesses but dealing with the lower reward working for a company? Fear that our ideas will get sued by patent trools or other companies. Or if the case your product did fail in some way you are responsible for a problem that is much bigger than you.
Why are Religious Fundamentalists going nuts about evolution and gay rights? They are afraid these changes will cause our culture to reject religion and have society force them to be atheist.
Why are businesses not expanding? They are afraid that new regulations will make it impossible for them to work. ...
Our culture has been poisoned with fear. But there isn't anything really about the facts to be afraid of, but because off all the fear we are paralyzed into doing the best thing for ourselves and our culture.

Politically is isn't about right vs left. It is about most of our leaders are or were Lawyers, They think in terms of a Lawyers, our leaders are not made up of peers of different skills. Except for adding a new law, perhaps we can change a process. Instead of trying a way to prosecute people who do things that are negative culturally lets try ways that will change their behaviors proactively, as well rehabilitate post incident.

For example I got into a car accident. I rear ended a car, however I did help prevent the car behind me from rear ending me, and the car in front of me got very little damage, while my car got the brunt of it. I never got in such an accident before. However the police at the scene figure they had to give me a ticket because in my state I am legally responsible. Except for the fact that I am now without my favorite car and have to pay a good insurance deductible, they felt like to rub some salt into my wound by adding a $100 ticket. The system is setup to try to discourage people from committing the crimes, they figure if you get punished for it you will learn your lesson. Except for slightly modifying the roads so these things wouldn't happen, or just realizing the person is already in enough pain. But our leaders are lawyers, every law that is broken and caught needs a punishment. So people will live in fear of breaking the laws.