Would be perfect for an advanced hybrid vehicle using all-electric drive. The combustion engine is there just to keep the battery pack charged, a 30 second warm-up (for a 3 minute warm-up for that matter) would be fine.

Even I, no fan of Reagan, agree that this is a reasonably fair statement (though it gives short shrift to GHW Bush who actually negotiated its final end). But the "bullshit responses" were just overstatement refutations to the original bullshit claim that Reagan and SDI defeated the Soviet Union.

Well, lets see. The last year Bush was in office (Jan. 20, 2008 to Jan. 19 2009) he packed on $1.435 trillion dollars in debt due to the colossal economic crash he presided over. This was the first trillion dollar deficit in U.S. history, and even after the adjusting for inflation, was by far the largest deficit in U.S. history up to that time (twice the peak deficit of WWII), and he left office with the U.S running regular monthly deficits in excess of $200 billion.

Currently the monthly deficit (from Oct. 31 to today) is just $45.2 billion (check the link below to verify this for yourself), so I'm guessing that without another similar huge deficit assist from the Republicans like he got from Bush, the answer is "no".

Check out how the debt was incurred on a day by day basis: http://www.treasurydirect.gov/NP/BPDLogin?application=np. The closer you examine how the deficit exploded under Bush, and how it turned around under Obama, the worse the Republican record looks.

NB: since there is an unavoidable lag between any action or policy a President takes or proposes and its effect on the Federal budget or economy it is not reasonable to attribute economic performance and deficits for any newly seated President for some period of time after they take office, the duration of this period is up for debate, but this is an indisputable fact. I am willing, just for the sake of this one post to play the unserious political charade of pretending Obama "caused" the deficit incurred on Jan. 20, 2008 - the day he took office. In fact of course the Bush Crash underlies all of the very high (but steadily improving) deficits we have seen, just as the Hoover Depression under-laid the poor (but improving) economic performance for the remainder of the 1930s. Every month you shift the "window of responsibility" forward from Inauguration Day, the worse Bush looks and the better Obama looks.

If this "feel good" legislation Republican style? I'm sorry. Absurd and obviously harmful laws do not get a "reasonable spirit" exemption. A bad law is a bad law and should be repealed.

His point is that the absence of a reliable postal system in Africa makes one appreciate the benefit of having one here.

The lead-in sentence is certainly incorrect in its current, broad brush form. Immediately after a nuclear explosion the decay of short lived isotopes creates levels of radioactivity astronomically higher than a leaking civilian power plant. But those short lived isotopes rapidly disappear. Eventually you just have long-lived isotopes with half-lives of decades or longer.

Nuclear power reactors burn-up an astonishing large amount of fuel. The biggest fission yield of any nuclear test was no more than 15 megatons, which is the energy equivalent of 880 gigawatt-days (thermal) of nuclear reactor operation. Fukushima Da-ichi produced 29,891 gigawatt-days of power a year, a number 35 times larger. The amount of long-lived radioactivity (i.e. what you have left after several weeks) in Fukushima far exceeded any nuclear weapon.

This claim is trotted out every time election by popular vote is discusses but it is not true in any close election (like all recent elections). If the popular vote is closely split, then every vote counts equally where ever it is located, and campaigns have incentive to go after them.

Which is why, of course, that Bush was so prominent on the campaign trail for both McCain and Romney. Indeed his endorsement speeches at both Republican National Conventions were the stuff of legend.

Or was that "fantasy"?

Actually that would be 99 for 100, the electoral college result for each individual state. And the one he missed was very close, and under-polled.

It was Megyn Kelly's finest hour. It really says something when even SHE gets fed up with right-wing BS and insists on looking at the facts!

While this may be true, a once only invention in the Old World is only a plausible guess, because there are several ancient writing systems that show no commonality in origin: Mespotamia, Egypt, Indus Valley, and China. None of these writing systems are derived from the others (linear-b is demonstrably derived from Mesopotamian writing however).

The main reason why the guess is plausible is that the writing systems were invented at different times, and the farther they were from Mesopotamia (the first) the later they appeared, so we guess this is the result of cultural diffusion of an idea, but not a system.

Worse still - this is a formula tailored to create lethal crowd-crush ("stampede") catastrophes, like the Baghdad Bridge Stampede which killed 953:

Real asteroid detection systems employ infrared space-based telescopes, since asteroids of all types glow brightly in the infrared.

But where a radar would come in handy is accurately determining the orbital elements of an asteroid once detected. With infrared telescopes all you get with a detection is the brightness and direction. Successive observations as the asteroid and satellite move over the course of months is required to develop enough data for decent orbit, and if it is one that will come close to Earth it can take years to get enough data to tell that it will not hit the Earth.

A specially designed radar to fire pulses at asteroids to get accurate ranges and velocity along the line of sight would make generating accurate orbits much faster. That is what I was hoping this article would describe.

The ESA radar systems are for tracking space debris orbiting the Earth not for tracking asteroids.

Sheesh - can't the summary writer at least read TFA? (I know, I know, this is /.)