Russia would like for us to continue gifting them with cash for 40-year-old missle motors, it's our own government that doesn't want them any longer. For good reason. That did not cause SpaceX to enter the competitive process, they want the U.S. military as a customer. But it probably did make it go faster.

Also, ULA is flying 1960 technology, stuff that Mercury astronauts used, and only recently came up with concept drawings for something new due to competitive pressure from SpaceX. So, I am sure that folks within the Air Force wished for a better vendor but had no choice.

This ends a situation in which two companies that would otherwise have been competitive bidders decided that it would cost them less to be a monopoly, and created their own cartel. Since they were a sole provider, they persuaded the government to pay them a Billion dollars a year simply so that they would retain the capability to manufacture rockets to government requirements.

Yes, there will be at least that Billion in savings and SpaceX so far seems more than competitive with the prices United Launch Alliance was charging. There will be other bidders eventually, as well.

Even in California where we're paying $0.15 - $0.20 per kWh of electricity, electric vehicles save so much gas that they almost pay for themselves.

Only because you're getting ass-raped on gasoline as well. When I topped off the gas tank here in Vegas before driving down to LA last weekend to visit my nieces, I paid $3.04. I pulled over in Baker for a snack. The gas station next to the jerky place wanted somewhere around $4.50! Granted, Baker's never been the cheapest, but gas in Barstow was still around $3.70. I think it was $4.something around LA, and by the time I was running on fumes Sunday morning (driving down to San Diego to make everything worse), I ended up paying right at $4 per gallon ($3.999, if you want to be pedantic) for a full tank in Carlsbad.

Gasoline is sent to Las Vegas from California by pipeline, so how is it we're paying considerably less for the same fuel after it's been pumped through ~300 miles of pipe?

You are generally safe with Nexus devices, since you have the best chance of upgrading to the latest OS.

A device with an unlocked bootloader is also more likely to be more future-proof. I have a newer version of KitKat running on my Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 (4.4.4) than on my considerably newer Moto X (4.4). The tablet's running Cyanogenmod...have no idea if Samsung ever got around to spinning a KitKat build for it, and don't particularly care at this point as the only thing that doesn't work under Cyanogenmod is the IR blaster. My phone, OTOH? Motorola has pushed newer versions (maybe even Lollipop now), but the bootloader is locked and you can't even root newer firmware versions (rooting 4.4.4 requires an unlocked bootloader first).

That new phone that Asus introduced earlier this week sounds interesting, and there's already an unlock for it. The only downside is the ginormous, almost tablet-sized screen. The Moto X is barely larger than the iPhone 4 it replaced, but it seems hardly anybody wants to build a full-powered phone that'll still fit in your pocket anymore.

It is a clever trick to equivocate "insurance" and "access". It is possible to self-insure - a completely rational, actuarially-sound, choice for many young people.

QFT. There were a couple of time intervals in my 20s when I went without insurance, but that didn't stop me from hitting up the quick-care clinic and the pharmacy on the couple of occasions that a cold (or flu or whatever it was) wouldn't go away in a reasonable amount of time with OTC treatment.

Too bad 404care makes that illegal now. Perhaps some "Irish democracy" is warranted as a response.

Since when does Android run on iOS devices? It doesn't?

At risk of being pedantic, there was a project years ago that got Android kinda-sorta working on the iPhone 3G. It was sluggish and drained your battery at an alarming rate because it didn't have any hardware-acceleration or power-management support, and it didn't let you make calls IIRC, but it was Android on an iPhone. It even set itself up in a dual-boot environment, so you could switch between Android and iOS. AFAIK, it was never developed into something that was actually usable. It also never ran on anything newer than the iPhone 3G.

That being said, if Bernie Sanders ran with Elizabeth Warren, under any party, I would vote for them.

What kind of "libertarian" are you if you'd even entertain the notion of voting for either of those socialist jackwagons? You might as well turn in your guns, your money, and your freedom now, before they take them from you.

And they make the vast majority of the income and should pay the majority source of the income tax.

They already do:

Last week the Congressional Budget Office joined the IRS in releasing tax numbers for 2005, and part of the news is that the richest 1% paid about 39% of all income taxes that year. The richest 5% paid a tad less than 60%, and the richest 10% paid 70%. These tax shares are all up substantially since 1990, and even somewhat since 2000. Meanwhile, Americans with an income below the median -- half of all households -- paid a mere 3% of all income taxes in 2005. The richest 1.3 million tax-filers -- those Americans with adjusted gross incomes of more than $365,000 in 2005 -- paid more income tax than all of the 66 million American tax filers below the median in income. Ten times more.

How much more would you like them to pay?

It's a good article, but the pattern is an old one. Twenty (20) years ago, I wrote much the same thing about object-oriented technology. Since then, I've found that the same issues, the same pitfalls, pretty much apply to any new technology or methodology; here are some more generalized pitfalls (based on ones from the 1995 book) that I wrote up nearly a decade ago (2008):

-- Adopting a new technology or methodology for the wrong reason
-- Thinking a new technology or methodology comes for free
-- Thinking a new technology or methodology will solve all your problems
-- Betting the company on a given technology or methodology
-- Getting religious about the technology or methodology
-- Adopting a technology or methodology without well-defined objectives
-- Overselling the technology or methodology

These all apply to Agile -- but they also apply to just about every other 'silver bullet' technology or methodology that's come along. ..bruce..

No-fault is about taking money away from lawyers, who used to litigate each and every auto accident as a lawsuit in court before the insurers would pay. Eventually the insurers decided that they spent more on lawyers than accident payments, and they had no reason to do so.

If you want to go back to the way things were, you are welcome to spend lots of time and money in court for trivial things, and see how you like it. I will provide you with expert witness testimony for $7.50/minute plus expenses. The lawyers charge more.

In general your insurer can figure out for themselves if you were at fault or not, and AAA insurance usually tells me when they think I was, or wasn't, when they set rates.

If we don't have more than two children per couple, the human race would've died out a long time ago.

I think the proper way to state that is "If we didn't in the past", not "If we don't". If we were to have 2 children per couple (approximately, the real value is enough children to replace each individual but not more) from this day on, it would not be necessary to adjust the number upward to avoid a population bottleneck for tens of thousands of years.

The Northern California Amtrak is actually pretty good for commuting from Sacramento to the Bay Area and back because the right of way is 4 tracks wide in critical places and it has priority over other trains for much of the time.

Acela in the Boston/NY/DC corridor is also good, because the right of way is 4 tracks or more for most of the way, and it has a track to itself along a lot of the route. Other railroads run on parallel tracks.

For the most part, though, Amtrak suffers from not having exclusive track. It runs on freight lines that host cars so heavy that the rail bends an inch when the wheels are on top of it (I've seen this first hand).

And Germany is a nation the size of New Mexico with an economy the 5th largest in the world. Starting pretty much from zero 70 years ago.

Maybe having good trains is part of that.