Actually, that was the case of Hubble. NASA paid for the first one, and the second generation of it went to NRO.

I should mod you down, but I have to speak up.
First off, Musk had this in mind back in 2002 when he started this. IOW, he has 12 years into it.
Secondly, Musk HAS SPENT BILLIONS on this. Some of his money. Some of others. Some of NASA. Some of future contracts. All in all, he has spent billions to get to this point.
Third, NASA builds prototypes, but all of the rest is done by private companies, otherwise known as PRIVATE SPACE.

Chad, what I find interesting is that ALL OF NEW PRIVATE SPACE will tell you that they NEED NASA. Why? Because NASA knows this stuff inside and out. Heck, Elon did F1 on his own all the way through to his first launch. Remember how that turned out? SPECTACULAR.
After that, he swallowed his pride and worked closely with NASA and their QA. And while F1 underwent a re-design, what really changed was that SpaceX learned how to do decent QA. They put into place repeatable processes.

So, while you can continue to knock SpaceX, bear in mind that Musk, top ppl from SpaceX, Bigelow, top ppl from BA, Bezos, top ppl from BO, Ozmen, top ppl of SNC, will all tell you that they cound heavily on NASA. And they will tell you that they count on NASA for experience and help far more, than on their money.

It is long past time to put aside your politics and focus on facts.

They and lego are 2 of the most evil companies in the toy industry.
I can not stand either one and CRINGE every time that one of my kids want something from them.

Because you want to use a socially-provided asset, ie the road network, so please respect your co-users and co-funders of it.

What you do on your own land may be a different matter, but is not part of this discussion.

Rgds

Damon

Don't buy in to 'peak' anything if you can avoid it; nicer for you and nicer for (and cheaper for) infrastructure.

I pick my work hours (when I have a day job) so that I avoid peaks since I loathe them even more than getting up early which I then do instead.

And now I'm full time on my start-up I need not generally join the peaks either (nor travel nearly so much nor so regularly).

I disagree similarly with the rest of your assertions as being necessary at all. You assume them to be so, but they are clearly not so for everyone, and probably not so even for you. And we do NOT have to solve the problem for everyone with a single solution anyway.

Rgds

Damon

Yes, same here. If I actually need a car journey I rent. There's even a Zipcar bay very close to me though I've not had reason to use it yet. I save myself the expense and trouble of owning, insuring and maintaining a car. I also have a much cheaper house from not having to pay for parking space nor even being right next to a road; I may have saved as much as £100k on my house purchase in fact, which on top of not paying for a car all that time seems like a huge bargain.

Rgds

Damon

Before everyone jumps on the low-carb bandwagon there are a few caveats to note:

1) All the participants had metabolic syndrome so the results might not be generally applicable.

2) The meals were fixed portions, so we don't know how it affected appetite or how it compared to previous eating habits.

3) We don't know what would happen long term. For instance all the participants followed the same pattern of steadily increasing carbs and decreasing fat, so it could be the body reacting to the delta.

I just mention because most people are really interested in the question "if I want to lose weight and/or reduce my risk of heart disease should I eat more/less fat and more/less carbs". But that question is incredibly specific to one person and very poorly defined beyond that. This study says in these very specific circumstances the answer is more fat and less carbs, but that's not necessarily true in general. To think it does give the general answer only sets one up for a future accusation that science is always wrong when a future study with slightly different parameters seems to reach a different conclusion.

And what messes would that be?

H1B is about giving a company a slave. These ppl are basically unable to shift to a different company until they get a green card. As such, companies pay these ppl well below average, and then block the green cards.
BUT, if we change how we do green cards and go back to priority for those that we need, as opposed to saying that somebody has family here (which rarely helps), then we bring good ppl here that will work hard and be allowed to participate in real competition.

More than that. Why isn't this criminal?

I understand why you may not want to criminalize every dubious business practise, but these folks were literally telling straightforward lies to consumers to make the sale. Why isn't that fraud?

From what I can tell they get misled by the holes in reality.

For instance with 9/11 there are things that legitimately sound weird like WTC 7 supposedly being the only highrise to collapse from fire. If that is the case I'm guessing it was just a combination of weird coincidence and the fact that massive highrise fires are extremely rare, but that's not really why those conspiracy theories pop up.

I think the root cause of 9/11 style conspiracy theories is that 9/11 was such a big event that it was documented in extreme detail. That creates a very complex story, and like any complex story there's going to be plot holes due to unlikely events or because people screwed up writing it down.

Instead some people see that a few pieces of the puzzle don't make sense and conclude the entire puzzle is a lie exposed by those ill-fitting pieces. The story they write so the puzzle fits seamlessly is a conspiracy theory.

I'm guessing a high percentage of the people you discuss issues with are coders.

A high percentage of people are conspiracy nuts and/or egomaniac (wo?)manchildren.

If they knew it would fail and it was just done for good PR then why wouldn't they do the vote before the election? Seems to me that good PR is kinda wasted at this point.

If I'd read anything into scheduling something as a lame-duck vote it would be that they think it's bad PR.

Seems legit. I could see the rationale for requiring a higher safety standard, and perticularly better insurance. This also seems like something Uber could accomodate.

So they want to stop Uber both because it results in too many new taxis... and because it reduces the number of Taxis? This argument sounds pretty dubious/protectionist.

Predatory pricing is a concern but for a big company like Uber it's generally something that consumers figure out.

Again this is defensible and could be fixed by Uber.

It seems like Uber has an ability to seek a regulatory middle ground with some basic driver training, safety inspections, and insurance standards. I'm not sure I understand their strategy of no accomodations.

I'm guessing a couple things happened.

First I don't know how obvious it is when you're doing an investigation, I wonder if a lot of people probably simply thought it was part of something else.

The second problem might be overspecialization, everyone focuses on their little section of the brain, and people aren't really doing the dissections poking at physical structures anymore. If it isn't even labelled no one even knows to look for it.

Still you'd expect people working on surrounding structures to notice something was missing in the neighbourhood. I'm really curious to know what other researchers thought when they looked at the structure.