Anyone have a suggestion of a dropbox/owncloud replacement that is NOT written in PHP? PHP projects tend to be "babby's first project" and riddled with issues, security holes etc. Owncloud has been out for a few years but I'd like to avoid PHP if at all possible in the age of Ruby, Python, etc.

Crowd-sourcing content is one aspect, but I'm very much looking forward to "subscribing" to a story and getting only updates after that -- as short as possible, whether they be corrections, links to related stories, or truly new information. I can fit a lot more news into my day if I don't have to hear/read the same context/intro information each time there's an update.

Less important to me is a "ask the author" system, by which readers can suggest directions for investigative journalists to take: how is this incident related to previous ones, what's the political context for this, does anyone have any proposed solutions to the problem, has anything changed since this story was posted 6 months ago, etc. I don't necessarily want to read opinions from fellow readers, nor post my own "facts" as a citizen-journalist, I just want to prod journalists into doing more of what they already do well.

The motherboard is a one piece unit with soldered on eMMC, RAM, CPU etc, battery is glued in, etc. Basically you have a plastic clamshell around the display, and a plastic clamshell around the keyboard/motherboard, and battery glued to the clamshell.

They're drop shipped directly from the manufacturer to the school district. Same as how enterprise computer sales work. There is no big box "chromebooks for schools!" retail outlet that superintendents and CIOs drive to once a year with their SUV to stock up on the latest school technology, and then drive home with it to wrap it up in christmas paper.

Generally when I come across cursive I just look for the d, b, p, g, t, y, i and j's (the letters with limbs or dots) and then piece together the word from the visual pattern they create. I'm pretty sure that's how your brain parses printed text as well.

We were the last class in our elementary school to learn it... in 1989 or 1990. This was up in washington, we were still playing Reader Rabbit on an Apple II that the 2nd grade classes all shared. Outside of my Grandmother's letters I can't remember the last time I used cursive, reading or writing. The Constitution is some illegible form of cursive and my signature these days on credit card receipts is an "X" to save time.

And meanwhile, states are pushing voter-ID laws to combat a problem of which there are only a handful of incidents in the past 12 years.

The rocket motor on the Zvezda module has only fired twice, the second time happening 7 years after the first time. Resupply ships dock with the ISS and just before they leave, they boost the orbit until they have just enough fuel left to deorbit. Since the ISS' orbit degrades approx 1-2 km/month they boost it anywhere from 50-100km using resupply ships. The ATV has boosted the ISS numerous times.

What's it like, being a former Enron accountant

Space-procured Palladium and Platinum has the potential to make space-based mining possible. If you could put an asteroid in earth orbit containing a couple of tons of platinum group metals and extract them (that's the tricky part) you would own the global market for those materials.

That was true in 2004, however with redundant systems installed since then, the US portion is capable of running on it's own today.

It was designed with a 10 year service life, then re-rated for 20 years. Current plan is 2024 but after that is really stretching things and major modules need to be replaced due to stressed placed on them by boosting the orbit (the ISS is actually in the upper atmosphere and loses about 2km (1 mile) altitude per month due to atmospheric drag. It gets reboosted by Soyuz and Progress spacecraft periodically.
 
Yes you could keep it going indefintiely but eventually the safety factor drops below an acceptable point. Based on what's there right now, that safe point is 2024-2030.
 
A next generation space station could possibly exceed a 25 year design life, but really, 25 years is pretty damn good given this was the first try since Space Lab for the US. For the Russians this is old hat, their segment(s) are just repurposed MIR 2 parts.

It's not like we had hundreds of years of heritage in designing these things. We have yet to have a satellite collide with a human-populated space station. I'm sure we'll learn a lot about what to do/not not do with space stations in the years after that first event. Designing a space station module to survive multiple tens of thousands of MPH impacts with space debris, satellites, micrometeorites, etc for not just 10 years but 100 years is asking a bit much, don't you think?
 
We've only been building "semi-permanent" space station modules for 10-15 years. It's not like you can just ship 3 tons of bricks, some cement, mortar and trowels and tell the astronauts to build something "roughly airtight and space station-y looking" and hope for the best for 100+ years.

Russia announced that they were planning to end their involvement with the ISS in 2009 or so. This is nothing new. They've been telegraphing their displeasure with the ISS program for half a decade or more, and their lack of willingness to continue with it past 2020. The portions they're sending up to the ISS will be detached and converted in to a separate space station shortly after 2020. This is not "news", this is "established fact". Maybe it's more noteworthy the second time that they publish this through official channels?
 
The ISS will be a 20 year old international experiment at that point, yes the US and Russian halves of the ISS share a common "atmosphere" but mechanically they're completely separate space stations capable of detaching at any time. Most of the Russian segment of the ISS is made from leftovers from their MIR 2 project. It's no surprise that they're wanting to separate from the ISS. Those space station modules have a finite lifespan and most of them will be nearing their operational limits around 2020, with a maximum lifespan of 2030. Either we replace them with new modules or deorbit the whole thing. Russia has decided to replace them with new modules and go their own separate way. They've been talking about this for a looong time. The ESA has been talking about teaming up with the Russians moving forward, rather than NASA on the next space station. China ended up building their own space station after being turned down by the Americans. We're not making a whole lot of friends in the aerospace field with the ISS these days. The New ISS may be everyone - (minus) America next time around, due to our overwhelming fear of sharing orbital technology with the Chinese (who aren't allowed inside NASA buildings, just ask any Chinese aerospace engineer).