"What calculations did you use to get 1000 years anyway?"

I'd always heard 100-150 years for an Orion craft to get to a Alpha Centauri, a lot of those calculations don't include the energy required to slow down for some reason (I think) so I multiplied the estimate by two (200-300 years). Alpha Centauri is about 4.3 ly from us so I divided 16 by 4.3 and multiplied that (3.7) by the 200-300 estimate to come up with 744-1116 years. Of course all of these numbers are probably based on the original 1960s Orion so with modern tech it might very well be possible to bring the time down quite a ways. And with research into more advanced propulsion it might be possible to bring it down even more (spiked fusion, antimatter, Bussard ramjet). But a major design consideration no matter what the technology (unless its some FTL tech) is going to be time. Any materials/technology that you have on board is going to have to be repairable, manufacture-able and recyclable on board. Sure you could make some ships components out of carbon fiber, but you wouldn't be able to replace them so your probably going to use aluminum. Sure you could use top of the line computer processors, but if they fried you'd have to have replacements (and hope age hadn't killed them) so you'll probably go with an older design that can be built on board. Any of these would of course require a massive ship be built, but even that isn't all that improbable, for the likely final cost of SLS alone we could launch the mass of a WWII aircraft carrier into orbit on today's commercial launchers. Times that by 10 and you've reached the mass of a moderate sized Orion (or about the initial cost of the Iraq War).

You're half correct, it would take several times as long, but this is space travel, you don't need several times the fuel. The smaller Orion designs only have the craft accelerating for about 10 days. Any craft that can last a hundred years is in all likelihood going to have all of the capacities (long term energy source, on-board fabrication of replacement parts, crew replacement, etc) to last much longer with only moderate modifications. No doubt that the level of danger increases with the distance, but if a civilization is willing to wait several hundred thousand years to send an expedition to another star system I doubt some extra risk to send an expedition now with a longer trip is going to make them even bat an eye.

If you've got the technology to make a 3 light year journey you're not going to wait hundreds of thousands of years when you could make the 16 ly trip in a fraction of the time. Even with current technology we could theoretically make a 16 ly journey in somewhere around 1,000 years.

"It's why a ~$350 million test stand was built"

I think you forgot your sarcasm tag, the test stand in Mississippi is widely believed to be an egregious example of runaway federal government pork spending. Built for a rocket engine being designed for a launch system that no longer exists. The rocket motor itself was idled long before the test stand was completed but politically connected individuals continued to get money funneled to it even after it exceeded its original estimates by a factor of three.
http://www.popularmechanics.co...

"If it were a muslim that made a comment online"

Maybe if they had a bunch of extremest literature, a plane ticket, some weapons, etc. But not if they had none of those and and had never been to an airport in their life. Despite his ranting online Carter had no weapons, no hateful literature and no history of violence.

There have been great advances in technology, for the manufacturers. Its called "planned obsolescence", now they can cheaply and reliably build an appliance that will last 3-5 years. At point at which it is no longer their problem. And then shortly thereafter it will fail, meaning that you have to purchase a new one. Its a win win for them.

Bail is great in theory, but I think it is abused a lot these days. There was a case not long ago where a teen ranted on an internet board about a video game and was arrested for "terrorist threats". He was given a $500,000 "bail" amount and left to rot in a cell (an anonymous donor put up the money after about 4 months when the media got a hold of the story). Your average person has no chance of putting up bails like that, like a lot of things unfortunately in our society these days they put "common sense regulations" in place that don't make something outright illegal/impossible but that your average person has no way of attaining. By the way it looks like they still haven't went to trial or dropped the charges, almost 2 years later and he still has that $500K bail over his head.

We can barely build devices that can navigate a house at a crawl (stairs, furniture, etc) and they want to create something that can navigate thousands of random obstacles at high speed? Real world environments (changing light levels, leafs, webs, wind, etc) are going to play havoc with anything that they do build.

I love the idea of steadily increasing NASA's budget, but how many strings are attached? Getting rid of bureaucratic red tape is a good thing, but handing over full control of NASA to congress? Congress is much of the reason why NASA is in such a bad position, forcing them to use a network of politically located/connected facilities and defense contractors that create a VAST amount of waste and pork spending. Congress should only create objectives, provide the funds and appoint the heads of NASA. Leave the fulfillment of those goals up to NASA within their budget. The Next gen launcher is a perfect example of Congresses meddling, requiring that NASA use the old shuttle contractors ballooned costs by tens of billions of dollars, before they canceled it Constellation was ballooning by closer to a hundred billion.

Really? You do comprehend that one of the central tenets of these battery swap stations is to keep a number of pre-charged batteries on hand to swap out with customers dead batteries, if they were going to just charge up the EVs own battery why would they bother removing it? And even if they had both wind and solar on premises to charge batteries a large power line would also undoubtedly lead to the site to charge batteries in times of higher demand/lack of renewables. I don't know if the economics of it work out but the basic design of such a station is very reasonable and from a technical standpoint relatively easy.

There may be only one bay, but it is ran by professionals/automated equipment who can do the job much quicker than some soccer mom or business exec fumbling around with their keys, cash payments, pocket change and their phone for 10-15 minutes at a pump. I imagine that they can push people through pretty quickly, at most if they are paying at the station you may want to have multiple entry kiosks so if someone is blocking one you can simply use another.

Just because it doesn't have cameras doesn't necessarily mean that it has no privacy implications. I have seen LiDAR demonstrations that can give scary accurate depictions of an area showing the locations of bolts in a bridge structure. I don't know if this "high resolution" radar can do anything like that but even if it can only provide basic sizes since it is up 24/7 (except for bad weather & maintenance) it could provide a disturbingly complete picture of peoples movements by simply tracking where they start from and where they go from there over tens of thousands of square miles.

Maybe they should patent the pill then, but chances are that even its "design" is either non-patentable or not owned by them. The drug is still exactly the same compound. This sounds a little like patenting a "new" battery technology by gluing an LED to the side of your old batteries that glows if the battery is low. You can't (or shouldn't be able to) take two non-patentable items a stick them together and re-patent it.

Memantine (AKA Axura, Akatinol, Namenda, Ebixa, Abixa and Memox) has been around since 1968, why in the world is it still under patent? I fully understand why individuals/companies should be GRANTED LIMITED patents, and even why those patents should be longer for medical applications, but 46 years? From what I can understand the patent on this drug has been sold so many times its nowhere near the original developers, the constitution seems pretty clear that patents apply "to AUTHORS AND INVENTORS the exclusive right to THEIR respective writings and discoveries".

"US government supporting SpaceX:"

NASA may be partially supporting SpaceX through technical assistance and attempting to purchase launch services from them, but I would hardly say that the "US Government" is propping them up. In fact there have been several attempts to force NASA to abandon/limit their dealings with SpaceX in favor of several large defense contractors (Thiokol, Lockheed Martin and Boeing) and they have been excluded from several major launch contract RFPs based on questionable requirements. I can understand a country wanting to keep some level of launch services in country, but that has to be tempered with whether or not their services are effective (both in terms of cost and reliability). SpaceX definitely has a ways to go before they prove themselves to be a major player in commercial launch services, but there is good reason to have an optimistic view of their future (low cost, reliability, moving towards re-usability).