Of course, when you do take the Ideal Gas Law into account, you'll discover that unless the Patriots clubhouse is routinely heated to 125F, it's not enough to explain the deflation. So Bill Nye is still correct, and the Patriots are still cheating cheaters.

That's actually what it's like at "Mojave Spaceport". Hangers of small aviation practicioners and their junk. Gary Hudson, Burt Rutan, etc. Old aircraft and parts strewn about. Left-over facilities from Rotary Rocket used by flight schools. A medium-sized facility for Orbital. Some big facilities for BAE, etc. An aircraft graveyard next door.

SS2 has not completed testing and it is probable that there will be a need for redesign of one or more components. So, this is a really bad time to have the hand-off. Publicity isn't a good reason.

The M3 I drove last year begs to differ. As did the SLK the year before. :-)

Maybe they have problems, I don't know, I don't own a car, I just rent them pretty often, and I'll take one of those every day over almost any brand. At least until my car rental company gets Teslas.

The school that put its children on the fucking Autobahn, a high-speed road that is by law off-limits to pedestrians, bicycles and anything else that can't reach and maintain the minimum speed of 60 km/h.

Are are aware that VW is our low-end brand, yes?

BMW and Mercedes are the high-end brands, as is Porsche.

I'm glad to hear that as I'm sure everyone else is.

Now if you could give up trying to spy on all the other guys, we could become friends. You see, the problem is your "kill 'em all, let god sort 'em out" approach of just vacuuming everything in and leaving the decision about who the bad guys actually are until later.

I never said that inflation was 1.4%. I said if you had to suddenly pay 1.4% more for every purchase you'd not be happy. That includes taxes, fees, etc.

This and more. There's also a massive difference between actually abusing a child and trading pictures of nude kids on the beach. And many more details.

That's the main problem with the public court of opinion - our own and the medias tendency to simplify. To replace details with labels.

Every witch hunt in history has this problem. They all start with something arguably reasonable. You want to get rid of the witch because she poisoned your cows. You want to kick out jews because they steal money from the people. You want to drive the heathen out of the community because he erodes moral values. You want to put the paedophile behind bars because he abuses children. More or less reasonable arguments, maybe not true but there's a causality in the thinking that we can relate to. But a few steps further the cause is lost or abstracted and the individual becomes a group, and the causality is not even assumed anymore, just implicit in the group attribution. Now you want to burn all witches, kill all jews, slaughter all heathen or castrate all paedophiles. Not because they've one anything, only because they belong to a group that you've given the "evil" label.

Which is not a conspiracy. The first rule of searching for the truth is to call things by their proper names. A conspiracy, by both legal and colloquial definition, requires agreement between the parties. Agreement requires communication (not necessarily verbal, but explicit).
If everyone on the highway drives too fast, you can argue about "everyone sharing [fundamental values] leads to effectively coordinated flock behaviour", but that still only makes it a lot of speeding tickets and not a conspiracy.

It's important to make the distinction because it changes how to approach the problem. A conspiracy you would try to shatter in a different way than you would tackle a culture problem.

None of which is validation of the information.

It'll be interesting to watch how much of this is going to end up being disclosure, how much a witch hunt and how much targeted disinformation. It's already far too popular to destroy peoples' lives by accusing them of kiddie porn, now you can make an anonymous account on Github and add your enemies.

We seem to forget too often that the more vile the crime, the more sure you need to be that you actually have the guilty party. Falsely accusing someone of a petty theft is bad, but it will be forgotten. Falsely accusing someone of murder, rape or kiddie porn, not so much.

Pascal is one of those languages like Powerbuilder and even Java that people learn the one language and then drag it through the decades kicking and screaming. At least with Java the language is being kept somewhat fresh but I don't think there is much I respect less in the computer world than a one language programmer.

Meh. I took two years of chemistry in high school (second was AP). It was okay, and I suppose it's been marginally useful. I'm not sure everyone needs more chemistry than is taught in seventh and eighth grade science class, though... atoms and molecules, a bit about chemical reactions, an overview of the periodic table, including a basic notion of what the columns mean, a brief discussion of the ideal gas law, etc. I think that's sufficient for most. Stoichiometry, understanding valence shells, etc... not so much. The general structure is crucial. The details, including the construction of chemical names, really isn't.

What's more important, and not taught very well at all, is the theory and operation of the scientific method as a whole. I discovered a while ago that my wife -- who has a BS in biology and taught junior and high school science -- didn't really understand the scientific method. Specifically, she didn't understand the distinction between hypothesis and prediction, or why it matters, and didn't fully understand the critical nature of falsifiability and its implication that science is and always will be a series of successive approximations to the truth, never achieving perfect truth, yet being by far the most effective tool we have for getting ever closer to it.

The AC addressed this point quite well, so I'll let his comment stand.

Your reading comprehension needs work, then. But I'll summarize: I was agreeing with you.