Funny, when I here government inspectors, I always think incompetence. But maybe I've just been working on telescopes and dealing with th government types who can't spell telescope for too long.

It costs about half a billion to launch something that size into a Lagrange point. It costs maybe a billion dollars to make a telescope that big. It costs maybe another billion to make a telescope that big that you can fold up onto a rocket's nose cone and have it unfold into the right shape by itself. Add another half a billion for the cameras and instrumentation. That makes 4 billion, which was the original budget. Add another 50 percent to make it flight qualified and for the various surprises that happen at the coal face and aren't quite as evident when you're writing a grant proposal with all the rigor that I'm putting into writing this comment. That's 6billion. Where does the other 2 billion come from? Easy: when a project this big picks up another 2 billion and congress critters and the gao start to make shutting down noises it makes it hard to retain good people on a projectwithblood in the water, and it goes on with the next notch down in talent but no less stringent requirements. So you now make more mistakes, catch them, and are obligated to go back and redo work, since it's better to go over budget than to deliver a 6 billion dollar turkey that doesn't work as advertised. Bd

Literalism is such an unpleasant thing. By RF broadcasts I am specifically referring to the thing that the FCC asserts authority over: high power transmissions from large centrally located antennas operating in a one-to-many mode. While the FCC regulates siting, frequency allocation, and power levels over point-to-point and telephone transmitters, it has never asserted authority over the content of the transmissions and wouldn't dare try.

Why decommission at all? Design for refurbishment now and keep it running indefinitely to avoid that cost and politics later.

And more to your point, I (the collective manifestation of the citizenry) have leverage against a government that does as you suggest by keeping firearms in my possession, being proficient in their use, and advocating (through constitutionally protected peaceable means) for my right to do so. This is one of the functions of the second amendment: to act as a check on a government that overreaches. Tax-dodging nuts holed up in the mountains notwithstanding, governments need checks on their powers that have teeth in them. It's kind of like the British monarchy: on paper, the monarch is supreme. In practice, it's understood what would happen if he or she tried to assert that supremacy, so they don't.

I can be as obscene as I want with whomever I want that's of voting age and associates with me freely of his or her own volition. In print, online, and in person. Just not over RF broadcasts.

if there were some foundational document that codified your right to both military weapons and speech of all sorts, and prohibited the government from passing laws restricting either.

DBL_MAX+1.0

It would also help if it used GPS, INS, and/or visual odometry for the speed instead of tachometers on the wheels. More exact, verifiable, and not subject to the "we'll turn it up the gain on the speed display a little to be conservative" methodology reportedly used by all car companies to avoid liability ("I wasn't speeding, the speedometer said I was doing XX").

systemd will get an integrated text editor with emacs, vi and nano emulation modes...

My high school in the US had a single joint history/lit class for 9th and 10th graders in the late 90s. Seemed like a natural union: learn classical civilzation, read Homer; learn about the scramble for africa, read Achebe. Not sure math and physics would get an entirely fair shake this way, but at least weaving it into a story might provide some better motivation than the study of platonic ideals for their own sake does.

No, but only in the sense that bending space to travel faster than light is "overwhelmingly obvious"

Oh come on. You could have said Shroedinger's child and gotten modded way funnier.

If your government is crooked enough to order your death with a drone on a whim, not having the drone isn't going to improve the situation. Third world dictators and western despots, past and present, did and continue to do their killing and pillaging just fine without drones. The Khmer Rouge didn't need drones. Charles Taylor didn't need drones. Tech is like oxygen. It's only bad if there's already a fire burning.

Desktop share doesn't matter. Server share, supercomputer share, and embedded share matter. Why? Because that reflects the mindshare of the geeks and their bosses who pay for the stuff. That means it's not a hard sell to say a customer-facing stuff should be compatible with Mac and Linux, because it would be pretty silly to make software you can't test within its own box, even if you do need to test it with typical customer boxes and OSs before you release. Year windows dominates, but you still see billboards on the highways promising high paying tech jobs to people who can at least spell "Linux".