It's not vapor. They have working examples of the tech and it's evolutionary rather than revolutionary anyway so it's not like there'd be any real doubt that it could be done even if they didn't have stations up and running already. At this point the big barriers are getting different automakers to agree to a unified standard on swappable batteries and getting cars and stations built that follow that standard. Admittedly that's not trivial, but it's hardly to the point that I'd call the concept 'vapor'.

The point of bicycle lights isn't for when you're riding on the sidewalk, it's for when you're riding on the road and don't wanna get squashed by a car cause they can't see you.

Oh certainly, that can probably solve things for a year or two, depending on just how they were gonna allocate that 500k, but long term you have to remember that FreeBSD is a community project and, in the long term, sponsoring those things is part of how you make the community grow and thrive.

Actually Gorillas have a very tiny penis for their body size (~1.5 inches long) so as far as being forcibly fucked in the ass by an animal goes they certainly wouldn't be the worst possible option there.

Because the corporate media does such a good job reporting on all the illegal shit our military gets up to...

You can't just "decide to master faster than light travel" because it's probably not possible. See, as far as we can tell right now, any two of the following can coexist (but not all three): faster than light travel, relativity and causality. Relativity has been experimentally verified to the best of our ability and hasn't come up wrong yet, and if causality can be broken you can get all sorts of weird shenanigans and paradoxes happening. That's not to say it's 100% impossible that there are ways around that, but it's nothing I'd bet the farm on...

My understanding of the problem is that, in our current models, causality only propagates at the speed of light...

Gauss rifles had been around since the star league, as with most things the Clan versions were just better than their IS equivalents.

posting to remove accidental moderation, sorry

PC stands for personal computer. It has nothing to do with having a specific cpu architecture...

Yes but you can reuse that USB stick a lot more than 20 times...

Either A) a compost heap or B) a landfill, neither one of which should see anything going into the ocean unless something's gone very wrong with the whole process. Assuming you dump your coffee grounds into a garbage disposal or flush them down your toilet or whatever asinine thing that still shouldn't lead to much of anything making it into the ocean unless we're dumping raw sewage into the Pacific now...

I think a big part of the problem is that eduction is still a state by state affair. People bitch and moan about the feds but if you'd ever dealt intimately with a state or local government they rapidly start looking like incorruptible beacons of virtue and competence by comparison...

The system would almost certainly have remained solvent while this structural issue sorted itself out (read:the baby boomers all died off) if the congress-critters were able to resist keeping their greedy little fingers out of it's fund for more than five minutes.

In any event though, anti-senescence research could actually fix this in the long term. If we can start eliminating the negative effects of aging people won't need to retire as early.

Oh boy do they ever. The local school district is cutting everything they can and still in danger of going under for lack of funds. Part of that is because no one wants to raise property taxes but largely it's because every year or three for as long as I can remember they've basically been digging ditches just to fill them back in again. Repave a parking lot then almost immediately tear it up to build a new extension, destroy and remake 3 or 4 perfectly good tennis courts in less than a decade (despite not even having a tennis team), refurbishing the auditorium then tearing it down again. The fools couldn't waste more money if they were trying and then they wonder why no one wants to vote for a tax hike to pay for everything!

Of course, the ones to suffer are the kids. This district used to have all sorts of vocational training, an amazing arts department and one of the best music programs in the state. That's all getting cut, the combined district is merging with another and if the combined district manages to stay afloat for more than a few years it'll be a miracle...