For the same reason that "free market" is an oxymoron. Either the market is regulated by a central authority, or it is quickly captured by a dominant player(s) and ceases to function as a market. The one thing that you are not free to do is to impede others' freedom.

If a "tolerant society" allowed its members to be intolerant to one another, it would no longer be a tolerant society. The sole bit of uniformity we ask of our members is that they not judge us based on all our other nonuniformities. Is that so hard to understand?

And to save you the trouble of responding to my straight-man comeback, WHOOSH.

Well yes, it is, but that's not really the point--the Internet really has altered our fundamental concept of location and distance.

Right, because they know getting to Mars is impossible on the current budget. That way they don't have to worry about us actually doing anything at all.

The technologies we develop to live in space have consistently made life better here on "Spaceship Earth". But using the space program as a legislative distraction and throwing a few billion dollars at it here and there with no real results certainly doesn't do anyone any good.

The only political goal NASA ever achieved was the Apollo project. Every other piece of political grandstanding is just noise in the background to the scientists and engineers on the ground who are trying to advance the state of the art. The only projects that NASA ever finishes these days are either small enough to fly under the radar (pun intended) or involve international agreements which if we break them would make us look bad to our allies. The unmanned Mars program and many climatological satellites are examples of the first, and the International Space Station and James Webb Space Telescope are prime examples of the second. But arms trafficking regulations and "national pride" prevent us from collaborating internationally on any new manned launch vehicles or habitats, so those projects inevitably get cancelled when every new batch of congresscritters try to put their names on something.

The only way for NASA to finish a big manned project is to contract it out to companies with capital to keep development going between political catfights, or somehow block the legislature from changing its priorities or funding levels more frequently than every 5 or 10 years. Or cut the politically-motivated crap entirely and just give more money to research and development projects so that maybe by the time humanity comes up with some real priorities, we'll know how to build a friggin' warp drive.

It would have been more of a mistake if there was any hope his opponent would have been better on these issues. Frankly, the only reason any Republicans are speaking out against the NSA is because it's Obama's NSA. They were just as complicit as the rest of us when they rammed the Patriot Act through.

Summary is correct. The only way to stay off of Facebook is to not have any friends.

You're absolutely right! Sex education has been virtually outlawed in the USA by the religious right, witness the result.

I saturate my gigabit link all the time transferring videos from one SATA3 SSD to another. 10GBE would be cool, but not entirely necessary.

I hope they don't do this regularly. If I pay for a box seat at the ballet, I sure don't want to be sitting on somebody's lap!

They claim to have already designed and built the thing (and have some pictures of a plausible-looking prototype). They just need your hard-earned cash to actually put it into space and build the web portal, [sarcasm]because they forgot about that part in their original budget[/sarcasm]. I feel like the kickstarter page is a publicity stunt instead of a necessary fundraising tool. It's also terribly disingenuous of them to post Hubble images and say "you can take pictures of these" (which most people read as "like these"), implying that their 15cm "main optic" flying at the lowest possible orbit will get anywhere near that amount of pointing stability or resolution.

That said, anything that makes people think about space science, or even make them feel they have a financial stake in it is probably a good thing.

He meant Naked Supermodel Watching Day, which is in fact every day. A bunch of naked dudes in their basements watching supermodel videos on the internet.

The whole point of the TOS is to make everyone violate it so they can terminate anyone for any reason at any time.

This. You can enjoy FIOS and run a personal server without being a f**king data center. I have 150/65, bit torrent, netflix, ssh, ftp, minecraft, three techie roommates, but we rarely go over 2TB/month. Once I left a bunch of things seeding and my brother downloaded a ton of anime and we hit 4TB. Mostly I just love downloading the 300GB/month we use at 10 mega BYTES per second.

The only reason franchised dealers were created in the first place was so manufacturers could "shift the responsibility for providing the land, buildings and inventory to dealers". The whole point of the franchise model is so manufacturers can screw their dealers whenever they like.

From the link, this hilarious quote: "Even a small dealership requires an investment of between $12 million and $16 million. ... No successful auto manufacturer could or would want to assume the financial burden of taking over those operational." (He then goes on to claim that dealerships magically produce tax money and jobs that somehow wouldn't exist in a company store or end up back in the consumers' pockets.)

So when a manufacturer comes along with a product that actually makes it cost-effective to properly invest in their customer experience, they get cut out simply because previous companies were too cheap to do it themselves.