edit: I'm an idiot. See @eric3579's comment.

How so? First up, a passenger car wouldn't be travelling nearly as fast (or at least, you'd hope not).

Second, many modern passenger cars have side impact beams and curtain airbags.

You'd probably get injured, but I think you'd have to be pretty unlucky to be "maimed or killed".

And that guardrail is functioning exactly as designed. The connections to the ground are designed to break, but the rail itself acts like a giant rubber band. *engineering

A snippet from Lord Beveridge's "Full Employment in a Free Society":

The proposition that there should always be more vacant jobs than unemployed men means that the labour market should always be a seller’s market rather than a buyer’s market. For this, on the view of society underlying this Report — that society exists for the individual — there is a decisive reason of principle. The reason is that difficulty in selling labour has consequences of a different order of harmfulness from those associated with difficulty in buying labour. A person who has difficulty in buying the labour he wants suffers inconvenience or reduction in profits. A person who cannot sell his labour is, in effect, told that he is of no use. The first difficulty causes annoyance or loss. The other is a personal catastrophe. This difference remains even if an adequate income is provided by insurance or otherwise, during unemployment; the idleness even on an income corrupts; the feeling of not being wanted demoralizes. The difference remains even if most people are unemployed only for relatively short periods. As long as there is any long-term unemployment not obviously due to personal deficiency, anybody who loses his job fears that he may be one of the unlucky ones who will not get another job quickly. The short-term unemployed do not know that they are short-term unemployed till their unemployment is over.

I'll save you all the pain of watching that.

Independent fact checkers found 55% of Trump's statements were false as opposed to 13% of Clinton's.

Obviously Clinton gamed the system to arrange for an 'unlucky' number, so you must vote Trump!

To be fair, it was the 80's when almost every car was still suffering from the oil crisis fallout. Handling wise, it still could run the track about as fast as a 3rd gen WRX. In a straightline run, it suffered even back then. A much cheaper 1985 Ford Mustang GT 5.0 HO was just ever so slightly faster than it in the 0-60 and 1/4 mile times.

God help you if you ran into a Buick Grand National though, those things ate other sports cars for breakfast back then. Of course, if you were unlucky enough to be racing your 85 in 87 and happened to see an all black Buick with a GNX badge, you might as well turn off your engine and park. Those things were as fast as the Countach Quattrovalvole and the Testarossa.

Wow. That's unlucky. I get those all the time, I probably pull down 15-20 nests a year around my house and garage, and I've never been stung by them.....yet. Granted, I do it at night or early in the morning so they're asleep/cold and can't react, and often just use a hose to spray them down from the overhangs, but they have seemed to be far less aggressive than even my bees, and almost domesticated compared to hornets.

PS: Is it possible your hippy neighbor gets upset not because of what you're poisoning, but because you're poisoning, period? Maybe he would be happy if you just squashed them or hosed the nests down? Many people are hyper sensitive to poisons, some for medical reasons, some for philosophical or ecological reasons. I grow a lot of my own produce at home, so I would be pretty upset if my neighbor started spraying poison on the fence line, because it would get all over my crops, and most insect poisons that cause instant death are not designed to wash off or be human safe. Just a thought.

Steve Irwin kept a safe distance from nature too, sometimes you get unlucky. The more times you take your chances the more opportunity to roll snake eyes and get the bad end of things.

LOL I can't be a pig and Sarah Palin at the same time. Make up your mind

Those are all valid criticisms, but nobody apart from the flight engineers and test pilots truly know whether this plane is a lemon or not. If it does everything it's supposed to do, then it's exactly what the military asked for, just 10 years too late....

Any suitability and fit for purpose criticism that anyone has ever come up with for the F-35 also applies to just about any piece of military equipment that has been created in the last 70 years. Engineering is a balancing act, and an iterative process. Almost every aircraft, and vehicle in the military today was built to fight a soviet army. Luckily that never happened. But that means that most aircraft and vehicles in the military today have been grossly modified to make them fit for a different purpose. The F-35 will probably go through this as well over the next 30 years, because it's a normal part of the life-cycle of military equipment. Almost every plane dropping bombs now was previously designed as a fighter. But nobody ever calls them out for being mutants like they do with the F-35, they call it additional capability. The F-35 was born with these capabilities instead of being added over time.


Expensive: I'll agree. Could the money have been spent better else where? Definitely. You could argue that the cost is tiny compared to that of a full scale war, maybe F-35 is a good deterrent. Air superiority is the key to winning a war. If you're going to spend money then that's where it should be spent. When the oceans rise enough, is a country like Indonesia going to lash out and try to take land and resources for their civilians? Maybe. I doubt all 200 million of them will just stand there and starve. (Ok I'll concede, this does make me sound a bit like Palin. But hopefully not as dumb )
They could have probably made 3 different stealth planes for 1/2 the cost, but that has it's own strategic downsides. You have to have the right assets in the right places or you have to spread them quite thinly. With a multi-role plane you have all of the capabilities everywhere. Just a matter of a loading it with different weapons.

Not needed: Time will tell whether this is the right plane, but new planes are needed. And they absolutely must have stealth. Within 10 years, weapon systems will be so advanced that if you are spotted, you're as good as dead. We are currently dropping bombs on fairly unsophisticated enemies, but wars tend to escalate quickly. You just never know either way, and it's better to be prepared for the worst. There are plenty of countries with very good planes and pilots that could get sucked into a conflict. If you're really unlucky you could be fighting US made planes with pilots trained in the same way, and you don't want to be fighting a fair fight.
Further still, Russia, China and Japan are developing their own stealth planes, which pretty much forces everyone else to do the same thing.
Especially if Donald Trump gets elected. You never know who that crazy asshole is going to provoke into a war

Doesn't work: It's still in development and testing.

Overtasked: It does the same stuff the aging multi-role planes (that were originally built as fighters) do. With the addition of stealth, and better weapons/sensors/comms. Small performance variables don't win wars, superior tactics and situational awareness does.

Underpowered: Almost every plane ever built has had it's engines upgraded to give it more thrust through it's life. And engines on planes are almost a disposable item, they're constantly being replaced throughout the life-cycle of the plane. Like a formula one car.
The current engine, is already the most powerful engine ever in a jet fighter. It is good enough to fly super sonic without an afterburner, which none of the planes it's replacing are capable of.

Piloted: Agreed. But who knows, maybe a Boston Dynamics robot will be flying it soon

Test Failing: That's only a good thing. You want things to fail during tests, and not in the real world. Testing and finding flaws is a normal part of developing anything.

Fragile: That can be said for all US aircraft. They all need to have the runway checked for FOD, because one little rock can destroy even the best plane. Russian aircraft on the other hand are designed to be rugged though, because they're runways are in terrible condition. But in reality, all sophisticated equipment needs constant maintenance, especially when even a simple failure at 40,000 feet becomes an emergency.

Quickly Obsolete: Time will tell. Perhaps it would have been better to keep upgrading current planes with more technology like plasma stealth gas that make then partially stealthy, better sensors and more computing power. But by the time you've done that you've got a plane that's as heavy as F-35 anyway, and not as capable. Although it might have been cheaper in the long run.

Like I said in my previous comment. All of this doesn't make an interesting story so you'll only ever hear the two extremes which are "the plane sux" vs "it's invicible!!11" depending on your media source.

Not that I think shooting into the air for minor reasons is a *good* idea, but the chances of it being dangerous to the point of killing (or even injuring) someone are really really low. See for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebratory_gunfire

First of all, even in a densely populated city, the ratio of square meters of human-occupied space to unoccupied space is really low. So, you gotta be quite unlucky to have a bullet fired up land on a human instead of house / dirt / concrete / whatever.

Second, when the bullet comes down it won't be traveling at its muzzle velocity, but at its terminal falling velocity. Mythbusters did a test on that, as have various other sources, and most find that a bullet falling at terminal velocity isn't fast enough to kill unless you're outstandingly unlucky. Deaths have been recorded, but at a lower rate than, say, Hippos, pulling a Carradine, or having an icicle fall on your head.


I guess it is sorta like hailstones, which could potentially have relatively comparable mass, aerodynamic properties, and terminal velocities as bullets in some cases. I've been caught in a hailstorm before, and while it was enough to sting and be rather painful, it wasn't near strong enough to break the skin.


So, given all of that, IF it came down to a situation where a policeman has to show a dangerous assailant that they mean business and are willing to fire their weapon to resolve it, firing straight up into the air might potentially be a good way to accomplish that without immediately shooting to kill / injure the assailant. In some scenarios, possibly. NOT that a stopped car trying to dump drugs (via balloon or whatever else) is an example of such a scenario.

Invisible Inc didn't always include the rewind mechanic and I don't think it was actually a planned feature. Later iterations probably balanced the game more around it, but I still think it is kinda amazing how well it works given it wasn't in the game until relatively late into development.

I'd actually very much like the game to penalise you for not using rewind. Or rather I'd like the game to be balanced with assumption you will use it. I like that rewind creates a nice middle ground between quick save scumming and iron mode. I think it allows for a more challenging game in other respects and that doesn't feel frustrating when a miss click puts your main girl in open ground surrounded by cyberdisks (especially when the UI was pretty bad when it came to different elevations...). It smooths the transition from too easy to too hard.

That said, there are a number of changes from Enemy Unknown that I'd like to have more priority. Borrowing from Invisible Inc again, the ever raising alarm level in that creates a sense of urgency that I never felt in XCOM, even in the bomb missions and with the meld resource. I never lost a soldier because I forced them to take an incredible risk for the sake of the mission, I really only lost people because an unlucky shot dinked them in head across the map when they were in heavy cover. It looks like they are perhaps addressing urgency with the threat of reinforcements, which is cool. The other frustration I had with XCOM:EU/EW is that it always seemed to punish scouting. You'd effectively "wake up" the aliens by finding them which really disincentivised spreading out to cover more ground. It was simply safer to move as ball and let the enemies run into you (with the possible exception of the terror missions). it looks like they might be addressing that by making you the insurgent force with ambush tactics etc.

So yeah. I'm hyped.

I agree with lucky760 here. This guy was not a compliant person shot for no reason.

I'm someone who thinks cops should be held to extremely high standards and I've commented such on other cop videos on videosift. But in this case I'm not really sure what else the cop could have done. He needed to engage the guy physically. He was walking toward him. That might sound innocent enough but the closer he got to the cop the more dangerous he became.

Even if there was a real language barrier and the guy didn't understand what he was being told this is just obviously not OK. He wasn't behaving right, maybe he was high or whatever but he was a physical threat to the officer.

Portraying him as just a person shuffling around being shot for no reason ignores the fact that he was shuffling right up to an officer who had his weapon drawn. If the officer allowed him to get too close he could have attacked the officer. Even if the officer got a clean shot adrenaline could have driven the guy on a step or two and he could have stabbed or shot the officer. That distance separating them is important. Moving toward the officer in this situation is a threatening act, regardless of where your hands are.

The officer did not shoot on numerous occasions when the guy put his hands down, an act which under the circumstances could legitimately be seen as a threat to his safety. He waited until the guy had gone way too far and got way too close. This wasn't a trigger happy cop out to back a Mexican, it was an unlucky cop in the wrong place.

I think every kid needs to go through something like that.

I used to shoot pest rabbits around our house (in the country, far from any neighbors) with a BB rifle. Went through safety training, was always very careful, etc. etc.

One day I saw a rabbit hiding under a row of trees between myself and the back side of my house. I never shot towards the house / people / whatever, always away from. But, the rabbit was there. I could have walked around the trees, but the rabbit probably wouldn't have been visible from the other side. Plus, the land sloped up so there was a bit of a hill/grade between me and the house, not to mention the thick tree branches and underbrush. BBs almost never went clean through a rabbit, they'd get lodged in the body.

So, I rationalized all that. Five pumps instead of ten, make sure I hit the rabbit so the BB doesn't go through, plus I'm aiming down into the ground so even if I miss the BB will probably lodge in the ground or hit a tree or brush. Should be fine. Do it.

I pull the trigger, rabbit runs away, and I hear a really loud "thump". The BB had ricocheted off the ground and hit right in the dead center of a huge sliding glass door on the back of the house. Safety glass, so I saw it spread out in little spiderweb patterns from the impact point in the center over the course of about 30 seconds or so, and then all fall into a pile of glass bits.


So of course I run to my dad and said "no, I was totally aiming *away* from the house -- must have had a really unlucky ricochet off of the flagpole or something!" He just smiled and said "really?" and then explained that I'd be doing chores and mowing the lawn to help pay to replace the glass door -- which ended up being about $800.

But you can bet your ass that I never aimed even remotely in the direction of a house, car, or anything else that I didn't want to shoot after that...

I couldn't tell if I would feel incredibly lucky or incredibly unlucky if I were him. YOINKS!

Bollocks. Complete and utter nonsense.

There is no dietary cure for cancer. You can certainly lessen your chances of getting cancer by eating well, not drinking to excess, not smoking etc, but that you can live the healthiest life in the world and still just be unlucky.

And once you have it, no amount of vegetable enemas or crystals or homoeopathic woo will cure it.