This ends a situation in which two companies that would otherwise have been competitive bidders decided that it would cost them less to be a monopoly, and created their own cartel. Since they were a sole provider, they persuaded the government to pay them a Billion dollars a year simply so that they would retain the capability to manufacture rockets to government requirements.

Yes, there will be at least that Billion in savings and SpaceX so far seems more than competitive with the prices United Launch Alliance was charging. There will be other bidders eventually, as well.

The real problem is, in an infinite, probabilistic universe, even the smallest chance that God exists is a certainty.

Not any god that a christian would accept. Their god is outside the universe, and created it.

Well, he worked on the Tesla battery technology for years, and then open sourced the patents.

I expect that as soon as he's satisfied it's tweaked to the point it's working as intended, he will open source the curriculum for the school.

I suspect that, should this happen, it's not going to change much about education, since really public education is how to get promoted to the point you are an administrator, and can start raking in the 6 figure salaries, and really has dick-alll to do with teaching kids these days.

Actually, it's closer to Montessori.

There's nine Montessori schools in the Los Angeles County area, so it's not like he couldn't have just paid for the kids to go to one of those.

There's not a lot of public Montessori's, however they are becoming more common (e.g. North Shoreview and ParkSide Elementary in San Mateo), but they tend to be Magnet schools, and there tends to be a lottery to get in because everyone wants their kid to get in. On the plus side, if you have multiple kids, once the older one gets in, there's a bump in the lottery for your remaining kids, and (A) once in, a kid generally gets to stay as long as the parent remains in the area, and (B) they don't totally screw up.

Frankly, if it's a choice between sending the kids to a private school, and building your own, and it's going to pretty much cost your the same for tuition either way, it's a hell of a benefit he's giving his employees (IMO).

Having spent part of my time in a system set up like you describe... it's the *ABSOLUTELY WORST* thing you can do to a high achieving kid: take away their opportunity to reach even greater heights, in exchange for keeping them busy by becoming an unpaid teaching assistant.

Thankfully, it really didn't work out (having a 4th grader teach 6th graders math just gets that 4th grader beat up during lunch and after school), and they backed off eventually. Which was fine with me, because I was already working on calculus, organic chemistry, and college level reading that the bookmobile lady snuck me after doubling my number of books checked out quota over everyone elses.

If you want to go back to the "Little House On The Prairie"-style one room schoolhouse, good on you, but please do not drag high achieving kids back there with you, or worse try to "socialize them at their grade level", because I'm telling you, you might as well buy them a T-Shirt with a target on it.

Musk may not being anything new -- and he's really, reading the 3 articles, just describing Montessori with a couple of tweaks, like taking the grade level away -- but at least at his school I don't think you'd be holding back those who are able to vastly outpace the slower learners.

Charter is not. The vertical integration is thus not an issue here.

HMD's have been around since LONG before there were 3D graphics on the PC at all. They'd been used (for example) on military flight simulator back when you'd need a million dollars of mainframe hardware to generate a 3D image. I very much doubt that any of this tech is actually new. Probably someone like Evans & Sutherland were the first to do it - and they had 3D graphics back in the late 1970's. I doubt that much of the general concept is still patentable - so this argument is probably over some kind of small feature.

It has DTMF, but there's a switch to make it pulse dial instead of using tones.

PS: Do you perhaps live in St. George Utah? I know for a fact they installed an exchange with stepper relays instead of DTMF decoders a while back, and since they amortize equipment over 20 years, the thing's still inservice.

My preferred method is "the heat death of the universe".

No one said that they always lied.

No one even said that they lied, only that they were not credible.

For instance, if I said that the advice of financial advisers was not credible because it was no better than a bunch of monkeys randomly throwing darts at a list of mutual funds. It wouldn't necessarily mean that those financial advisers purposefully lied with their advice.

For instance, it could mean that they have a bias of some kind, known or unknown. It could mean that they prefer to choose funds that sound cool and trendy, so that themselves sound cool and trendy when speaking to clients. It could mean that the person who hired them or the person who owned their company had a bias of their own and selected financial advisers that followed the same financial schools of thoughts that he did. It could mean a number of other things too.

You really do *not* want the honest answer to this question, but I will give it to you anyway: So people who would otherwise be employed asking "Would you like fries with that?" can get non-performance critical programming jobs.

You *always* have to be closer to the hardware:

#1: Almost everything is a mobile device these days; people buy laptops instead of desktops, cell phones music players, etc.. The closer you are to the hardware, the better your battery life, the lower power your processor can be to do the same amount of work, the cheaper the unit price for the lower powered hardware and smaller battery, the lower the cooling system costs (mostly, you can go without them, or operate them on "low"), etc., etc..

#2: Being closer to the hardware lets you reduce the number of blades/servers/PaaS instances that you require in your data center or cloud. This reduces costs, again in terms of cooling, but also in rack space, and power requirements. Facebook rewrote their PHP code to be compiled to binary code, and it saved them over 50% in servers. When you are a startup, and have tons of VC money to throw hardware at a problem, you can get away with not having to worry about those things, but when it's time to get to scale, they start to become major issues.

You can *get away* with not being closer to the hardware... for a *short time*, when you are engaged in rapid churn (e.g. new web UI ever 2 hours), or doing a lot of rewrites or running on hardware that better than the hardware you intend to deploy on, but after that being closer to the hardware is *the overriding thing*.

Answer to the related question... "What smart phones out now are (or can be reasonably outfitted to be) closest to a dumb phone, considering reliability, simplicity, and battery life?".

That's easy: any of them that you don't install all of those crappy, battery-sucking Apps on, and turn off polling for push notifications from Facebook, email, and so on, so they they aren't constantly running the battery down because then they can actually get the application processor into sleep state once in a while without some stupid polling interval waking them up to use more battery every few picoseconds.

AT&T 210M Trimline; no battery needed, it gets it's power from your landline so it works in a power outage, never has reception issues.

Hey, if you are going to be retro-technology boy for no good reason, might as well plug your phone into the wall while you are at it.

A swiping keyboard requires capacitive touch. Capacitive touch requires more energy than just a hardware keyboard. There are Android phones without touch capabilities and only hardware keyboards, especially in developing countries, but I do not think that's what you want. Also, those phones do get security updates, but they will never go above Android 2.3x because they only have a single core processor.

An FM radio requires a wired earbuds/headset to act as an FM antenna. Phones in developing countries have that functionality enabled as well, since data connections can be very expensive otherwise. Camera, don't aim higher than 2MP or 3MP, if you want something better, you'll need to carry an extra standalone camera with you (or actually buy a better phone). Podcast playback implies longer battery usage. You'll be able to do it, but you shouldn't do it if you really want to conserve battery power.

You'll also need to keep your data turned off, buy yourself an extended battery with good reviews, and live near a cell phone tower if you want to get yourself closer to your goal of multiple days without a single charge. By the way 5 days may be pushing it, if your battery is the size of a briefcase, like in the olden days of early cell phones, then may be you have a shot at lasting 5 days, but then you'll have to carry a very heavy briefcase everywhere you go. Also, I mentioned that you needed to be near a cell tower, because if you live near a cell tower, your phone doesn't keep retrying the connection every few seconds, your phone wastes less battery energy, and your phone actually irradiates you less.