Keep that pack of rabid data slurpers off my carrier! (and get the kids off my lawn while you're at it)

Well regardless of what "should" be the case, SpaceX builds rockets much more cheaply than NASA does according to NASA itself.

Currently, SpaceX launches from Cape Carnaveral. That's also where NASA launches. These are the same. But clearly SpaceX could build their launch site anywhere it wanted to, and if it was paying for insurance it would surely choose a location to minimize its liability.

If the government is so good at insurance, why doesn't it offer insurance to its contractors? In any case, the choice of insurance is independent of the choice whether to build your rocket yourself or have someone else do it for you.

As I've said, it is much cheaper for the government to contract out SpaceX than to launch its own rockets, that's why everybody is so excited about SpaceX.

I think you've misinterpreted this. The insurance costs for the private and public sectors are the same. If the government insures a private launch, that's not any more expensive than insuring its own launch, so this won't end up making a difference if, say, the government is deciding whether to launch a rocket itself or hire SpaceX to do it. I think the issue here is actually whether other launch customers (e.g. companies paying to have a satellite launched) will end up on the hook for the cost of insurance, or if US taxpayers will pick up the tab for every launch. However, if they decide that the customers have to pay, that may reduce the size of the space market sufficiently that private space launch companies like SpaceX are no longer viable, and that is the sense in which this would hurt SpaceX.

If it really is true that they're considering making it a choice between private contractors + private insurance OR a public launch with free government-provided insurance, that's pretty much horrible policy and it would make me very sad. But TFA seems to focus more on foreign competitors using this to undercut SpaceX pricewise.

Insurance for NASA rocket launches isn't and cheaper than for private launches, so this isn't an issue of private vs. public efficiency, it's just a question of who bears the risk: the feds or the organization launching the rocket. Since those used to always be the same organization, it wasn't a complicated question in the past. It is now.

It's a nudge. The law will induce people to drink less soda even though people are allowed to drink as much soda as they want. A variety of studies have shown that people's eating behavior are highly impacted by serving size.

This Ruby/Python thing has gone on long enough. Here we have two languages with identical use cases, identical advantages/disadvantages, and (in the grand scheme of things) almost identical properties in every way. The practical differences between them stem almost entirely from the fact that they happen to be used by different communities, so certain modules in each are much better developed than in the other.

The fact that they both exist has split development effort to the detriment of both. For example, the people that made this package for Ruby are just reimplementing NumPy, providing no advantage whatsoever over NumPy except for the ability to import Ruby packages. Which Ruby packages these people want to import for their scientific computing project that don't have Python equivalents, I have no idea, but maybe they should have implemented or improved those in Python?

Likewise, mod me troll, but I'm guessing Django wouldn't exist if Rails was a Python module. Tons of effort was duplicated there.

Can we just friggin' pick one and leave the other one to die? I don't care which, I'm not taking sides, it just seems to be a really silly duopoly.

Rating space is actually highly non-linear at the ends, because of the ceiling effect. To simplify, assume everyone only gives 1 star or 5 stars. You need a 7:1 ratio of 5-stars to 1-star to get a 4.5. But 4.8 requires a 19:1 ratio, suggesting more than double the proportion of 5-star ratings. So yes, 4.8 is vastly better performance than 4.5.

The whole point of a hash is that it's supposed to offer last-ditch security if it's compromised. Otherwise why not just store in plaintext? I don't want any sysadmin near a server holding my information if they take the attitude that the server will never be compromised. Assume the server will be compromised, and take measures to minimize the damage when that unholy day comes.

I use 12-character passwords. http://howsecureismypassword.net/ estimates that my root password would take 25 million years to hack. I'll put the hash right here: f1593fdf843f6161b377d5d8adf7ad03 ... let me know when you've cracked it.

I don't even get whether a tilling window manager is a GUI... I guess probably not? It seems like this question really meant to ask about your window manager.

My understanding is that they are describing a fast breeder reactor, one of the two major types of breeder reactor. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wik/Breeder_reactor

Breeder reactors are not a mature technology and have not been put to widespread commercial use, so the field is pretty much wide open as far as which design should be adopted on a large scale. As far as I can tell, they are simply pushing this particular design as a way to get the ball rolling on wider adoption of breeder technology.

Vimium really sucks. It has almost no features. It cannot take over your whole browser like vimperator/pentadactyl. It doesn't even work on the new tab page, so it's worthless as an alternative interface. And I'm told that that last point is basically baked into Chrome, extensions basically just can't work on the newtab page. So unless someone forks Chrome and replaces its whole UI with a vim clone, there's no way around this.