Republican states, almost invariably, pay less to the federal kitty than the federal kitty pays back. They've great roads because they're on federal road welfare.

We've too many roads going to too many places that don't justify the expense of dropping 40 million a mile. And it is about aging.

It's a rolling problem. We started out with town roads, then county roads, then state roads, then interstates. And we happily kept building more. But the roads fall apart on a steady schedule even as we merrily throw down more. What happens is you spend more every year just to keep up what your great-grandfather made, your grandfather made, your father made, and eventually the backlog of the rebuilding costs more than you can pay - and your infrastructure falls apart, slowly at first, then the process accelerates.

You can either let it die, or raise taxes, and of course lower costs by eliminating unions, using immigrant labor, removing health benefits from labor and taking advantage of new road-laying tech. But it's obvious by gross evidence that we can't keep up. We don't want to be taxed enough to maintain the backlog.

Question about this glass isn't about how much it costs - the first part of the cost accounting problem - but how much it saves over time. If the glass wears longer and as a grid produces three times more power than the entire nation requires, then it is worth more than the asphalt roads made of oil.

The road lasts longer. It self-lights. New energy grid. More power than we need, with over-production used to melt snow. Acts as a information highway, literally. Needs no new land. Could self-plow. Hell, it could power electric vehicles by induction. Remember, a stretch of highway can use more power than it produces because is part of a grid of all roads, some of which overproduce electricity.

Rain.

Glass is a lot tougher than people think. This glass especially - it takes a quarter million tons to crack it. They broke the testing machine.

Any commissioner with backbone will be fired by a, sorry to point out the obvious, Republican president in less than two years, probably. And then, poof! goes the man with the backbone, a new commissioner with more Comcastic ideas will be appointed, and all will be for nothing. Democracy sucks when one party is insane. Nothing remotely good can last for more than a decade or so. And we don't even have remotely good at this time. Image how much worse it will be.

He understands it just fine. They are re-setting up the groundwork to steal every penny they can, once again.

Consider: radio interference is not a physical phenomenon, but a result of our limited abilities to process signals. Interference can be beaten with the right algorithms and fast signal processors.

We could, in theory, broadcast different streams on the same frequencies, and so open up the entire spectrum to anyone who wants to use it. Money, brains, and time, and it can be done. Channel 2 can broadcast on the same frequency as channel 7. All the TV channels can broadcast on one frequency. We are not limited by the problems of 1950.

What if that could be done? It means hundreds of TV channels on the air. Thousands. It means you don't need a wire to watch TV, or surf the internet. "New radio" could blow this monopoly straight to hell. And happily, we wouldn't need megacorporations anymore - it could be done locally. Bring back the towers.

Canada has freemarketitis, courtesy of a parliamentary system that invests a man with 15% of the popular vote to maintain an iron grip on the federal government for the foreseeable future. The damage that bastard and his neocon friends are doing. Damn.

As I used to proclaim on Slashdot: don't let the people who own the pipes also sell you the water.

We know. And we kinda are copying their module.

Yes, but we need a manned launcher next week. We're dead out. We've no manned spacecraft launchers, reusable or otherwise, because we're cheap. Three trillion dollars for Iraq and its aftermath, but tossing NASA 20 billion to build a real launch system is politically impossible. One may cry "politics", but "politics" only means "people". Americans don't want to do it, and their elected politicians thus will not. We should be building a electromagnetic launch rail for first-stage emulation, a spaceplane, a cargo rocket, a reusable SSTO prototype AND funding an elevator project simultaneously. Private enterprise is too slow and really never will have a business model to do all that. The only real customer is the government and its deep pockets if you're talking about manned space flight. To get a place-to-go, you need to spend government cash. Then private enterprise can build the transports for its own use.

Budget cuts would have happened regardless, unless the President, like Bush, didn't give a damn about the debt. Cut taxes, increase spending, like he did (and Reagan did) and the debt shoots from 3 trillion to 16 trillion - and then, after all that money floats down on the wealthy and warriors, demand spending cuts. Space dies. The democratic presidents get to clean up the spilled booze after the republicans party.

I left off a LOT. I've been watching for something like forty years. The space program has always been at risk from a citizenry that believes the world is ending soon, is six thousand years old and was flooded a few thousand years ago. We're anti-reality; most people think we go to "space", rather than low earth orbit. The US is not a space-faring nation. We don't have the mindspace for it, and I think that the flags-and-boots on the moon pretty much ruined what space travel means to both the country and NASA. Stunts, science exploration and national prestige aren't nearly enough. We needed to open it up to travel, mining, solar power sats and the terraria settlements needed to really pull off migration off-planet. Mars? It's a international wilderness park, not a business opportunity. O'Neill et al nailed the real purpose: get off this rock and into zero g to make places to live and pots of money and transmit enormous amounts of power to the home base. Anything else is just a stunt.

Using computers to register, count, transfer, and archive vote tallies is impossible to do without an almost certain effort to alter the vote totals by parties interior to the project (people creating and maintaining the systems and the show runners) and outside the project ("hackers"). Of the two, the insiders are far more likely.

This is not a failure of tech or of implementation. This is a human thing: those disposed to alter election tallies have infinite motivation to find a way to do it. They can either slip in during the coding phase or the implementation phase, or even during the elections. Like rats, they will find a way.

The difference between paper and electronic is basic: paper leaves a physical trail. E-voting can be rigged to leave NO trace. IS rigged to leave no trace. No audit is possible: all audits are predicated that the datasets and code are correct to begin with. If someone slips in backdoors, they can alter vote totals in real time and therefore all recounts will be "accurate". Paper receipts are useless, because what is printed is not necessarily what actually happened. Paper printouts that are reviewed by the voter on site for accuracy and then stored in boxes by the voting agents *can* be a valuable check, for the paper should match the e-count. But why then the extra step of the computer? Just use paper to begin with. Canada does it (I hope still does) and they count elections by hand in three hours, no matter what the size, local or national, because human counting easily scales.

Source code is worthless as a trace. One never knows what the machine is actually doing from microsecond to microsecond; the code executed need not match what you see on the source. This makes coders heads explode, but it is true. The machine can be programmed to lie. I know this, because I have done it, on orders from my bosses, in the past, to make a bit more money for my company. Cheating is easy and it is undetectable if you are even marginally clever about it. The count can also be altered far from the source tabulating machine and local system, at other levels. Such malignancy will not be accounted for by the counting company; their rep is on the line, they don't believe it is possible and further they don't want to know.

Use e-voting and you will see the powerful grab control, one way or another. Use paper.

Apple is not "declining". They are growing. (They also make most of the profit.) Android is growing fast, Apple is growing fast. Both statements can be true at the same time. Both can win. This is not a zero-sum game. Your opponent doesn't have to die so that you can live.