Great writeup as usual Tyler, it seems like things are heating up in a big way in the world of classified aircraft projects.

Great read, I'm endlessly fascinated by precision navigational systems of pretty much every sort.

Saying you could get "nearly every part" of the FR500 from the parts catalog when that didn't include the body kit or the special-sauce front suspension revamp is like saying the XJ220 came with "nearly every part" from the concept while omitting the crucial V12.

If we're talking SAABs, it's a wash for me between the Phoenix 9-3-that-never-was and the Alfa 159-based 9-5 that was supposed to have hit the dealerships in 2004-05.

Nowhere can the words "blue balls" and "fox Mustang" be mentioned in the same sentence without discussing the FR500 concept.

It's better than what we have in Boston, with a functional, usefully laid out rapid transit network that's completely hamstrung by underfunding, neglect, and utter apathy on the part of MBTA administrators.

I'm not law enforcement, but I'm on the medical end of first response and I work pretty closely with them. I can tell you outright that it's not some grand Farrakhan-esque conspiracy of black arrests to fill private prisons that many people here think it is.

It's easy, go the Spiderman 2 route and make a film about how much of a head case you would end up as if the whole world relied on you to fix everything all of the time. Focus on how Superman, the man; the part of him that would like nothing more than to live out life as Clark Kent with a wife and kids would react to…

That seems to be exactly the kind of icky shit that this policy was probably put in place to prevent. Damned if you do, damned if you don't, I guess...

I covet this. My god, do I covet this...

I covet this. My god, do I covet this...

It's the same god-complex that you see with other professions where your life and the lives of others hang by a thread based on your ability to trust your instincts and make good decisions quickly and without thinking. See: surgeons, paramedics, race car drivers, etc

I don't think it was ever about the oil, I think it was half a vendetta on the part of Rumsfeld, Cheney, et al, and half the result of goading from both the wealthy Gulf states (who hated Saddam because he was a bully who invaded Kuwait and destabilized the region) as well as from AIPAC/the Israel lobby (who hated…

Let's ditch that "Licensed and regulated industry with driver safeguards versus any yahoo with a car and a smartphone" BS once and for all.

As long as we're talking about the US, the "Licensed and regulated professional versus unregulated yahoos" argument is at best a pathetic red herring and at worst a bold-faced lie put forth by the cab industry.

If we're talking US brands, I vote for Packard, the closest thing that the US ever had to Bentley, and the only company that was badass enough to license-build the mighty Merlin in WWII.

Fine arts major here, and my feeling is that these "X degree has the worst ROI" are a little misleading and don't do nearly enough to address the fact that its not just what you study, but where you study it that will determine what you can do with a given major.

England is the big one you're missing, with even more giant stadiums per capita than the US has (we're talking Cup-ready pro-level stadiums with the amenities to justify the $500 bleacher seats, not just acres of aluminum benches fit only for drunken freshmen)

The more you read about submarines, the more fascinating they get. Between the exotic propulsion systems, the insane sonar arrays, the gravimetric-assisted inertial navigation systems, and all of their low-observable technologies, they're the closest things in existence to the starship enterprise, and they make the…

It was the same up near my neck of the woods. My family used to go on vacation to Brunswick ME in the summers and I remember vividly how as a little kid I'd see the P-3 subchasers from the Brunswick NAS taking off and landing every 20 minutes or so to go scour the North Atlantic for boomers.