There's certainly purposes for which remote-control animals are acceptable, if the benefit is great enough to justify the ethical cost. For a creature as low as a cockroach I'd say children's education qualifies, but children's entertainment doesn't.

As for killing vs harming, it basically comes down to quality of life, at some point quality of life is negative at which point it's a greater moral cost than killing. Where this point is we don't really know, but we seem to establish negative quality of life at a somewhat sooner point when it comes to animals.

The difference is the dissected animal is killed in a way to minimize suffering (the ice pick probably qualified). The remote control cockroach is arguably going through an extended period of suffering, how would you feel about someone making a remote control frog or cat?

Killing and dissecting for educational purposes yes, performing harmful experiments on living creatures? Not so much.

I can see the value, using technology to control the behaviour of a cockroach is cool and teaches you about how the creature works, I think this could be a valuable tool in a biology class. But take it outside the class and you're turning a living creature into a toy.

I think it overstates things to say it's turning kids into psychopaths, but you can't deny it isn't a bit creepy.

Antarctica is one of the major feedbacks:

The protective covering of floating ice that has shielded the Arctic Ocean from solar heating for so long is now going fast, and we will probably see an ice-free Arctic Ocean in the August-September period as early as the 2020s. Mercifully, this is the smallest of the three major feedbacks in terms of its impact – but it triggers a bigger one.

The warmer air and water in the Arctic then starts to melt the permanently frozen ground and coastal seabed (permafrost) that extends over more than ten million square km. (3 million sq. mi.) of territory, a considerably larger area than Australia. This melting releases a huge amount of methane that has been locked into the ground for millions of years. Methane is a far more effective warming agent than carbon dioxide, and so we spin closer to runaway.

[...]

Those are the killer feedbacks. Earth has lurched suddenly into a climate 5-6 degrees C higher than now a number of times in the past. The original warming usually came from massive, long-lasting volcanic eruptions that put a large amount of CO2 into the atmosphere – but in every case it was feedbacks like these that carried the planet up into a temperature regime where there was a massive dieback of animals and plants.

Considering we're already experiencing major extinctions I'm not sure I want to stack ecological disasters.

A better metaphor would be Cuban commandos entering the US to arrest Luis Posada Carriles who committed a bunch of terrorist bombings in Cuba with support from the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) and had some interactions with the CIA.

No one claims that Abu Anas ab Libi was a past or present member of the Libyan government, but he did have supporters in the Government and it's not certain how anxious they were to arrest him themselves.

The Somalia situation is a little different as I think the Somalia government still has trouble controlling portions of the country so foreign countries get a little more latitude in going in and carrying out policing operations within their borders, however the US probably has some kind of understanding with Somalia.

According to the article the project has been behind schedule for a while:

Earlier this year the U.S. Government Accountability Office criticized the pace of development and testing for Healthcare.gov.'s IT system and noted that it was missing important milestone deadlines.

This is worrying as it suggests this isn't the case of a few glitches and poor load testing, the project might simply not be done.

In defence of CGI (since I'm Canadian and will reflexively look for excuses for my cultural brethren) it's not uncommon for software projects to miss launch dates, they just seem to be in the unfortunate position of having to launch anyways. The other excuse is that their requirements exploded when 34 states refused to join ObamaCare and had to be handled by the Federal exchange.

"Sure he shouldn't have strapped a bomb to his chest. But the hostage negotiator should have worked harder to get him the money in the vault, so really they're both to blame for the explosion."

They might end up overrating shows like Honey BooBoo or Jersey Shore that end up as targets for mockery, but in general people just ignore shows they don't watch.

I think the risk with this system is they need a very good understanding of the show's demographic to understand the numbers since a lot of people post nothing about the shows they watch while others blab about everything.

They also need to understand why people are posting. People talked about Breaking Bad a lot because it was so good, and they also talked about Dexter because it got so bad. When good shows drop in quality hard core fans stick around but start to complain. So you could conceivably get an uptick in chatter that instead of signalling a rise in ratings actually precedes a drop in ratings.

:( I'm getting the sad feeling you get when you try to make a joke and people respond in a serious manner.

First rule is get rid of the midichlorians and get an alternate explanation for the Force. That's something that could actually be explored in the first movie.

Han Solo finds a strange artifact that turns out to be a communication device which puts him in contact with an enigmatic race of time travellers. These time travellers lead Han Solo and a group of adventurers to a distant planet from far in the future. But during the time jump the Millennium Falcon is severely damaged and starts to plummet towards the planet below. But as they fall Luke Skywalker senses an extraordinary Force presence, and the Millennium Falcon is no longer falling but is being pulled, pulled by a mysterious large figure standing on the beach of an island...

I'm not sure how that's relevant. Dzamba invented the cricket reactor and created a business plan using it.

What the Hult team did is take that invention (and probably parts of the business plan), make some additions and/or changes, and entered it into the competition. No one claims they had any part in inventing the original cricket reactor.

What we don't know is how much of the prize was due to the work they did on the business plan, I think the product is the important thing but like everyone else here I'm a tech person. You can't just walk into a famine with an invention and help people, you need a business plan to make the idea do something. Perhaps these guys really did an amazing job and could have won with almost any idea in the competition instead of the reactor.

Of course, even if they did legitimately deserve the credit for the prize they still broke their agreement to include him as a partner.

If insurance companies were talking up global warming but not raising rates you'd have a point.

But they are raising rates, which means they do believe AGW, because if they didn't they'd charge less to undercut by the other insurance companies and make more profit. It's the absolutely most trivial application of economics.

Is anyone else basking in the irony of all these pro-business AGW denialists suddenly trying to come up with excuses for why the market disagrees with them?

You don't need regulation for anything, market forces keep companies honest and well behaved!! Except now... because insurance companies are somehow able to charge unnecessarily high premiums without being undercut by a competitor, or the government is making them overcharge or something...

The market is right, unless is disagrees with you, and then it's wrong.

To what extent did people know a major announcement would be made at 2pm?

2pm is a nice round number, so it's plausible that someone already had a big bet scheduled to go off at that time.

But if people knew a potentially major announcement would be made at 2pm having a prescheduled bet go off at that time is just ludicrous.

Problem is prescription drugs aren't safe. More people OD on prescription drugs than street drugs, or course there's probably more opioid prescription drug users than street drug users but it's still a major issue.

I'm not sure I like the DEA doing this but prescription drug abuse is definitely a legitimate problem.