That's great, right up to the point where you don't have the train routes and capacity to handle the loads we currently carry. I can promise you that if it was cheaper to send cargo by train, we would already do it. There is already too much train traffic on the rails, especially on oil/coal routes and along the high-traffic metro corridors.

Given the cost of time and the cost of last mile (or in many cases, the cost of the last 200-500 miles), and the cost to install new track, trucking will be with us for much longer than it will take to make fully automated vehicles.

Not really. I've been on a commercial crew, and this has effectively zero impact on the safety of the show. The only danger would be the kind discussed by lawyers and insurance companies, neither of which would impact the actual firing safety of a show like this. It was shot over water, and even if this was knocked out of commission and landed on a barge, the weight would be insufficient to damage or misalign any but the smallest (3" or 4" mortar - and those are racked for stability.

While I cannot disagree that this is not the way I'd choose to solve the heavy lift problem, to worry that $2.8 Billion (or even 26 Billion) is going to be the lie item that bankrupts the country seems to be missing the 3000 Billion we've spent over the last 13 years to avenge the loss of a pair of buildings costing less than $2.3B in today's dollars and fewer lives than the number lost in motorcycle accidents ever year.

The stupid is much deeper than this minor boondoggle.

Um, no. The "huge rocket" is just to get the major pieces into space. Space assembly makes the outrageous cost of ground assembly seem like pennies.

Also, that "gentle nudge" is anything but, with escape velocity for earth being half again the speed of low earth orbit.

We need a heavy lift vehicle that can get pre-assembled major components into space for the foreseeable future. I sincerely doubt this is the right way to do it, but when you ask the former executives of the current big space corporations and politicians to come up with a solution, this is what it will look like every time.

Which brings you to the logical logistics solution: build your engines where you launch them. If only we could figure out a way to put 268 congressional districts in northern Florida and the other 267 near Vandenburg AFB, we'd have it made. The only reason any of the other NASA centers - and most of the "inclusionary" contractors exist are for congressional pork (the possible exception being Goddard/Wallops, due to proximity to DC).

Corporate America brought the pension, and Corporate America took it away, all in the span of 80 years - tops. It's certainly comfortable to have one, but it's not in any way some historic bedrock of society.

Before the industrialists of the 20th century there were no corporate pensions, no lifetime employees (except for slaves). Then corporations came and exploited workers (because they could), and unions formed and grew large and powerful enough to exploit the corporations (because they could), then corporations outsourced and contracted to avoid unions (because they could), and now it looks like a free for all. Except that there will always be more workers than jobs - a fact born of globalization and the ongoing industrial (and information) revolution. The only exception is areas of protectionism where outsiders are not allowed to work, but those are dwindling. The result is that the people at the top have the pick of the mediocre to work at nearly any wage they choose, and only the brilliant workers will have true mobility and negotiating power. And the line between brilliant and mediocrity will shift to a smaller slice each year as the industrial revolution obsoletes more and more jobs each year.

Simple: install hydraulic bollards in the road timed to match the auto signals. Bollards at the crossing start/stop can be closely spaced or electrified to keep back pedestrians. Bollards at the stop line should be capable of stopping a 3T vehicle at 60MPH without damage, though a set of raised tire-spikes might be sufficient deterrent.

At that distance, your nose is closer than your fingers.

They are, but phones vary in width and length depending on hard buttons and bezel sizes even for the same display size.

You appear not to have bothered to read about the new battery results
http://bgr.com/2014/06/09/lg-g...

Screen contrast is down, indeed, though it went from the brightest smart phone to merely middle of the pack, which is a shame.
http://www.gsmarena.com/lg_g3-...
I'll admit I never really worry about black levels on a phone as long as they are dark-enough, though, since I never use it for critical cinematic viewing and suspect most of the population is with me on that. The loss of max brightness is, imho, the biggest downgrade, though the minimum brightness is lower, which is nice for night-time viewing.

Can't argue about too many pixels, though as long as it doesn't kill the battery life I'm okay with it. It could be 8k if it didn't slow the phone down or deplete the battery - who cares?

Hard to believe that a faster CPU and faster GPU is a "downgrade", but I guess if "faster" means "slower" to you...

It is bigger, though less so than the increase in screen size would suggest. Size is a personal thing for a phone. At least with the G3 you can carry a spare battery (or two) if you need exceptional endurance and can't stand external batteries.

Just once, I'd love to see some side by side comparisons of the end-to-end RF ability of these new phones. While voice calls, the kids tell me, are a thing of the past we are getting more and more dependent on data connections. And how you get data is via RF link. And yet I haven't even seen link quality mentioned in a single review for at least two generations of smart phones.

Indeed. I do architectural work, including taking measurements of existing buildings. If I could use this to get a point cloud of a room it would be amazing. I'd be willing to start programming again if it meant being able to access even rudimentary data. While high accuracy is probably not in this, even +/-3" would be good for small places (up to, say 20-25 feet).

I'm curious how a SWAT team managed to even get a tax exempt status for "Religious, Educational, Charitable, Scientific, Literary, Testing for Public Safety, to Foster National or International Amateur Sports Competition, or Prevention of Cruelty to Children or Animals Organizations," unless they somehow claimed they were addressing child abduction.

The ACLU may not be specifically whining about the 501(c)(3) status, but rather that the corporation is claiming that they don't have to disclose anything about their non-charitable work because of their status. Which is, as you say, bullshit.

I'd say the first stop would to contact the IRS department which oversees the 501 groups, but I understand that their email service is less than reliable, and they're all a bit touchy about in-person interviews lately.

If they're not exceptionally careful there could be a case where the corporate veil is pierced and result in personal liability applied to the corporate officers. That would be far more chilling to this kind of bogus operation than merely ruling that they cannot hide behind corporate law to shield them from public transparency requirements.

Really? The whole point of the GP post was that nearly all of the technological underpinnings of our modern, leisure-infested lifestyle are the result of governmental (and much of it military) research. I hate war as much as the next liberal, but it seems that the efforts of short-sighted humans are focused by the desire to be able to kill as many people as possible as easily as possible. Without it, we'd still be monkeys. Now if we could just quit the actual killing of people we'd be making some progress.