Thank you. Republicans have become increasingly in favor of stripping first-amendment rights while screaming "tyranny" at even the most minor regulation of firearms. It's becoming pathological with them.

Seems like they’re aiming for sub-orbital hops with this version, not all the way to orbit. I also gained a lot of expertise in spaceplanes from KSP, I like to launch my plane vertically, head to Eden, then land, walk around, take off again and land somewhere else :-)

Reminds me a little of a sleeker (subscale) version of the XCOR Lynx  spaceplane that was sadly cancelled.  This Mk-II Aurora really looks almost like a futuristic business jet.  I guess it’s closest in goals (suborbital hops) to the Virgin Galactic SpaceShip 2.

I hope that Fox is found liable, and has to pay. But I also hope that - as part of any settlement - each of those lying sack-of-feces hosts is forced to record an apology to Dominion, along with a statement telling viewers that they intentionally misled them to boost their stock price, and that the video is played…

A similar technology was used to put a young Luke Skywalker's face into an episode of the mandalorian (onto the body of another actor).

Maybe the plane crashes off the coast of France?

Just fyi, Ukraine will receive at least two, and possibly as many as four Patriot missile batteries. Germany has pledged one (in addition to the U.S.), and the Netherlands have said they plan to provide two batteries:

The rich white guy who grew up in apartheid South Africa and moved to America, a country built in part on the backs of slaves, thinks the media is biased against white people.

This, 100%

That sound is his joke whooshing over your head.

You gotta love China’s pivot as more of these balloons are found and shot down.

Well, those were Huawei 5G cellphone towers, and we don’t actually know that China was collecting any SIGINT, and in any case, the fear was that the Huawei hardware could exfiltrate mobile-phone data or interfere with communications, not that it had radio receivers for collecting other SIGINT. I don’t recall if those…

The problem is getting sensors on the ground close to sensitive military installations would require breaching ground-based security. And you’d need to do it in multiple places to cover anything close to the same area as the balloon can cover, which puts your human operatives (spies) at high risk of being caught. That…

Not really - vans aren’t going to get close to missile silos, or other sensitive sites, and roads are monitored near those sites. Worse, the use of vans implies drivers, which implies Chinese spies operating in the U.S. That’s a terrible risk, since spies could be caught, and provide U.S. counter-intelligence with…

Balloons can loiter over an area for hours the way spy satellites cannot. They can also record ELINT that isn't detectable (or as easily detectable) from ~300 miles up. And balloons are far cheaper.

He almost certainly meant using the gun on the fighter plane. Downside being that the holes would potentially be small, so the balloon might take hours to descend.

Oh good grief, now you've given them the idea. The GQP will be covering the balloon-pox story on OAN tomorrow 🙄

Even on some current jumbo airliners, there are 12 seats in a row, and only two get a window. This doesn't seem like it would be such a huge difference for most people.

So, the X-29 didn’t have composite wings and fly-by-wire to make it more maneuverable - composite wings were necessary because metal wings would have been torn off, and fly by wire was necessary because the plane was unstable, and so the computer had to make hundreds of adjustments per second to the control surfaces…

So, a curated list of links to news stories, and the ability to discuss? I feel like one Reddit is enough...