I would suspect that when Putin's involved... there's not such thing as free money... Also Russia isn't exactly soaking in cash at the moment. Ukraine's infrastructure is a mess and it's going to take a lot of money to fix it. Once your average Russian citizen sees how much it's going to cost in actual Rubles, they'll be pissed about it. There won't be anything they can do about it, not even complain, but they can be pissed about it.

If Russia decides to not fix up Ukraine just take the territory, that's going to look *really* bad too.

I'm going to set aside for a moment what Ukraine becoming part of Russia would mean for the Ukrainian people.

From a smash mouth point of view, I think it would be hilarious to watch Putin choke on the chicken bone that's Ukraine. He backed a leader that for more than 10 years bled the country dry and left it in financial ruins. The Russian minister of finance has already been bitching about how much it's going to cost to fix up Crimea's infrastructure.... Just wait until he gets the bill for Ukraine. With the west financially pulling out of Russia not to mention their dwindling tax base, combined with the 50B that Russia just spend on the Olympics... They're not in a great financial position to suddenly start pouring 10B+ a year into Ukraine. The Ukraine government is still trying to get it's hands on the 15B from the EU/US... Let Russia pick up that bill.

Now, with that all said, Russia taking over Ukraine would be ruinous for the Ukrainian people.

This is somewhat endemic of PCs at this point. We are not in the dark ages anymore... unless you're playing the latest and greatest FPS, even a 5 year old PC works just fine... At this point your OS is likely to wear out before your hardware!

I think the same can be said with tablets. My iPad 2 works just great. I have NO incentive to buy an iPad X (where X > 2). Hardware has gotten so good at this point that every "old" (i.e. ipad2) is still great.

I could be wrong on this, but I thought Pratt was going to be building the RD Amross (which is the american version of the RD-180) starting a couple of years ago. If that's the case then the RD-180's being used on the Atlas V are completely domestic.

With that all said, no bid contracts are shit. The price delta between SpaceX and ULA are large enough that provided SpaceX can demonstrate the same reliability as the the Atlas 5 (so far it has) and the same capabilities (it has) then why not go with the cheaper of the two.

Also, if my assertion in the first paragraph is wrong, then all the more reason to go with SpaceX.

Yeah... considering *everything* has a processor in it and it not protected against EMP... Yeah. It would be a shit show.

Honestly, his insufferable personality is tolerable because on most accounts he's right. Being insufferable and consistently wrong is truly obnoxious.

So I'm in the market for a new car and I've been thinking of getting a volt... I have a couple of questions...
1. How did the battery do this winter?
2. Did you buy the optional 220v charger?

Overall likes/dislikes?
I suspect if I buy one, I'll end up getting one with all the bells and whistles, etc.

Likely the stripes give the animal multiple advantages. Predators and biting insects. Possibly the long hair might also confer some negatives in terms of being able to disparate heat, etc.

I'm not disagreeing with that. I think it's been a positive for the linux kernel as well, making linux a much more secure platform. I just thought it was funny that the Russians swapped their hardware for something that ostensibly the NSA has had more access to.

If they're worried about the NSA having code running on their tablets.... why did they swap their mach/freebsd running tablets for ones running and OS that's had heavy development from the NSA?

More than a decade ago the NSA got involved in linux development and never left. Is it possible that their security people have poured over the millions of lines of C and assembly that make up the linux kernel and all the drivers that are running on their tablets? Possibly, but highly doubtful.

Finally somebody else who agrees with me! I have long advocated that we should have bases on the moon and mars just in case something bad happens on Earth.

I think it would be a noble goal to not only put a base on the Moon and Mars but to make them self sufficient. Beyond having a self sufficient base it should also have a repository of our institutional knowledge just in case something cataclysmic should happen on Earth. Speaking of eggs... I think that something that should go to these bases as well is a chunk of the eggs and sperm we currently have in cold storage that'll never get used. This would provide a safety net for genetic diversity and provide a starting place in case something bad happens on Earth.

So what happens when I pull up in my model S with a relatively new battery and it gets swapped for a battery that's been to hell and back and can barely hold a charge?

I know my relatives up in Minnesota despite their bitching about it being -60 are glad that it's decimated the ash bore beetle infestation. Up here in the north east we're hoping it'll have the same effect on the Asian longhorn beetle as well.

Though evolution being what it is, enough of these really cold winters and we'll just have populations of these insects that can winter over these temperatures.

I wasn't disappointed! On a serious note, I thought they were building the godzilla of ice walls to fix this?

Please describe a "rational discussion of the message of the bible." As the saying goes the devil's in the details. In order to make any sense of the bible in any rational sense means doing a hell of a lot of cherry picking. Unless you're advocating that stoning your wife on her fathers doorstep because she's not a virgin on her wedding night is a rational position to hold. (Deutorotomy 22:22)

So right away there's whole chunks of the bible that you're choosing to ignore. What do you keep then? I hope that the pieces you decide are relevant are the same pieces other people find relevant...

The four gospels we NOT written by people named Matthew, Luke Mark and John. Moreover the first three gospels suffer from major synoptic problems. John's gospel is an acid tripping roller coaster ride compared to the first three but in places still has bits and pieces copied from the first three. Six of the thirteen letters attributed to Paul and now considered complete forgeries. The whole thing is a literary train wreck.

I'll now stop whipping this horse and turn my attention to other horses... The ten commandments.
Ask yourself this simple question... Imagine you're all all seeing all powerful entity and you have the opportunity to distill your vast knowledge of everything into ten rules... Now looking at the ten commandments, there seems to be some serious room for improvement. Just imagine how many people would have been saved from dying of water borne diseases had one of those commandments had been "If the water is not of the purest mountain stream, boil it." I could belabor this but you get the idea.