> Anyone who has thought about trying to combine a Corvette with a pickup truck with a front loader understands what an utterly ridiculous idea

In some ways, it makes sense to have dedicated equipment designed for each job. If you're designing a truck for construction industry, build it like a Ford F-350. If you're designing a car to drive to work and back, a Honda Civic. On the other hand, the Ford F-150 is incredibly popular. It's small enough to have reasonable gas mileage as a daily driver AND you can stop at the hardware store on the way home and pick up some 2X4s or plywood. Versatility can be a very good thing.

Many wars have been lost by the side who had prepared to fight the previous war. Jets like this are a long term proposition and the F-35 will probably be flying in 2045. Are you sure that in 2045, (or 2025) you'll want a plane narrowly optimized for the role you needed to fill in the Gulf War of the 1990s? A more generalist platform may well be better suited for the unknown conditions of the next three wars.

For clarity, its RANGE is 1300 miles. Its COMBAT RADIUS is 600 on internal fuel. Which means it can fly 600 miles, maneuver around a a target for a short while, turn around, and fly 600 miles back. Alternatively, it can fly 900 miles to a target, turn, and fly 400 miles to a friendly area to refuel or land.

That's a BS excuse. Obama could fire the people responsible for this, or just order them to release the records. There ARE jbts in the US government, and as head of the government, Obama is head of the jack booted thugs.

> If you can't see how a physical connection to shared infrastructure is different to two grocery stores or two cell companies you might want to take some time to acquaint yourself with the differences,

Roads are infrastructure, my friend. In my case , one road, called WJB Parkway, connects me to the Kroger grocery store. Another road, hwy 6, connects me to the Walmart store. Yet another, Villa Maria, connects me to the HEB grocery store. It would be more efficient to have one road, going to one store. That store could then sell rotten bananas for $6/pound since there would be no competition.

Lol. Try filtering red, blue, and green while making a post. You'll notice that you can't, because you couldn't see anythind. Red is at one end of the spectrum, so you can filter it and everything just looks a little blue, because you've filtered out the low end of the spectrum. You can filter out blue by filtering the high end of the spectrum. You can filter green by filtering the middle of the spectrum.

If you block the low end (red), the middle (green) and the high end (blue), you've just blocked ALL light.

Ps - the local FAA field office can approve unterminated (or terminated) laser effects outdoors, so it IS possible to do it safely and legally. The FAA might just tell the operator to point the laser this direction, not that direction (such as not toward the approach corridor for a local airport).

Absolutely they can and it's not unusual. I'd you operate a laser more powerful than a handheld pointer, you ccarb easily get busted for pointing skyward whether aircraft fly by or not. Any decent DJ or light jockey knows not to point lighting upward outdoors.

You may have noticed in the last few years club lasers have almost universally switched to scatter effects, where there are two hundred weak beams rather than one strong beam. That's largely because a strong beam can get you in trouble in several ways. Heck, just having an overpower laser at a show without a permit is a big fine - even if it is pointed at the ceiling.

> History has proven that privatisation universally results in increase of charges to the individual and major reductions in the provisions of services.

You are far to the left and Al Gore and Bill Clinton on that one. They made a big deal about reducing bureaucratic waste and getting things done faster by hiring the private companies that did the same job for half the price and in half the time. I think Gore even wrote a book about it.

> It is logical, governments attempts to provide the maximum possible service

They better not, not in the US. In the US they are supposed to provide the FAIREST possible service, with the most possible input from the taxpayers who are paying for it. If my (govt service) is better than yours, that's unfair and wrong. If I live in the boonies and are therefore limited to 1 mbps, everyone else should be limited to 1 mbps too.

> Private industry attempts to provide the least possible service for the maximum possible cha rge, for fuck sake they publicly brag about, it's called profit.

Please look up the definitionbof profit. Profit = the value generated minus the cost incurred. Maximum profit, therefore, is when you have the best service (therefore most sales) at the lowest cost.

  > PR=B$ types to run around spreading the delusion that corporations love you, the really, really do).

They love your money. They can get your money in either of two ways. A) you choose to give them your money in exchange for their service, because theirs is the best or B) the local government essentially forces you to give them your money because they don't allow you to have any choice. In the US, internet service is mostly b. Thelocal governments grant monopolies to one cable provider and one phone provider. Coincidentally, the same company that government grants monopoly power so they overcharge you also turns around and donates the money they got from you to the politicians. So the politicians force you to give Comcast too much money, then Comcast gives that money to the politicians who helped set the thing up. Here's a great solution - get MORE politicians involved!

> It doesn't make sense to install multiple fibers.

In the same way that it doesn't "make sense" to have multiple cell towers covering the same area. Thing is, there used to be one company with cell towers in this area. The company with the towers charged $85 / month. Another company came in and offered unlimited everything for $45 / month. Now there are three or four and I pay $30 / month.

Competition is inefficient in a way, but it's how you go from $85 2G to $30 4G.

It doesn't "make sense" to have multiple grocery stores servicing the same area, the duplication is wasteful. Why have two barbershops servicing Ive neighborhood? It would be more efficient to have one. Theoretically, communism would be more efficient - if people were perfect. If people weren't lazy, if tbthey were perfectly charitable, if people didn't want to earn money to buy nice things, you'd
  have one service provider per neighborhood. When dealing with actual humans - well ask the Soviets or the Cubans how well that worked.

You wouldn't run Linux on Mac hardware, of course. If you like Linux, but Linux isn't appropriate / available in a particular situation, OSX is well worth looking at. Examples would be if you need to run specific software that is available for Windows and Mac but not Linux, or if your large organization supports Windows and Mac but not Linux. That would include any of the Adobe tools, AutoCAD, etc. Most of the time, probably 99.9% of the time, Linux has software that does what you need. However, if you actually have to run Adobe Flash CS6, Mac will run that along with whatever free software you're accustomed to from Linux.

In my case, the agency I work for provides employees with Windows or Mac desktops. Linux isn't an option. Since I much prefer Linux but it wasn't an available choice, I chose Mac and I have no regrets. I pop open a bash shell and work just exactly as I do on Linux.

> so I won't be caught dead with a mac or iphone or ipad.

Pretty much anything that runs on Linux will run equally well on a Mac. OSX isn't locked down like iOS is.

I found this part interesting, as it is a question I've been wondering about. It may directly affect my career - soon.

TFA said:
> a large number of publications in low-ranking journals can be just as good as a few in the big ones. That’s “perhaps the most interesting finding,”

That is indeed interesting. I work on the fringes of academia, where most people don't publish at all, but the boss certainly wants people to. So I'm just starting to learn about how to get my work out there. Number if citations matters, I've read, so now I need to find out how one goes about getting exposure so that people might cite my work.

I guess it IS worthwhile for me to submit lower-impact journals related to my field, information security.

>, Apple runs the apps I need. (If Linux did, I'd use that instead, but they don't yet.)

I used Linux exclusively for many years. I was pleasantly surprised how natural OSX felt when I started using it. I knew that OSX is certified Unix, but I expected it to feel at least as different as FreeBSD. I certainly recommend OSX (not iOS) for people who like Linux.

I'd wager that the judge is fully aware of that and has issued appropriate orders freezing assets until such time as it is determined which assets should actually be seized permanently. This judge DID just rule that Lumen View is a patent troll who is abusing the court system. Judges don't like it when you do that. Three years from now, the people involved might ultimately get their bank accounts released, but the judge knows how to make it an expensive pita to get the order overturned.

> > "A remarkably higher frequency of acute alcohol intoxication"

> Which says ZERO about addiction.

Let me translate for you. "a high frequency of acute alcohol intoxication" means "getting shitfaced drunk all the time". If you don't think that getting shitfaced all the time has anything to do with being a drunk, well that's your issue.