... some of whom have several ex-wives they'd like to send far, far away.

As Freeman Dyson points out it's very easy to over-use the "do no harm" argument. Given the way ocean waters mix and move over time, I tend to doubt that anything smaller in scale would give us data, and indeed this may not. I'm sad to say that real scientists will now feel pressure either to refrain from studying this "natural experiment" or to report only the negative effects (of which there probably will be one or two) and play down the positive.

The question that makes most of the others irrelevant is, what are they averaging? Miles per gallon, or gallons per mile? Let me explain.

Averaging mpg, if they sell five 10 mpg vehicles and five 100 mpg vehicles, then (10+100)/2=55 mpg and they can say they're ahead of the average. But driving each of those vehicles 100 miles will consume 55 gallons (for an average of 0.055 gpm that equates to about 18 mpg), whereas driving ten 55 mpg vehicles 100 miles will consume 1000/55=18.18... gallons. Biiiiiiiig difference.

Averaging gpm, well, 54.5 mpg is about 0.01835 gpm, and a company that sells just one vehicle getting 0.1 gpm will have to sell roughly ten vehicles at 0.01gpm to get an average of, hmm, 0.01818... gpm and beat the average. If you drove each of those cars 100 miles, you would get roughly the same total consumption as driving eleven cars that got 0.01835 gpm.

I'm fairly sure I know which averaging method the US is using.

Note that XCOR (disclosure: I own shares in it) is also developing a suborbital craft and plans to make it available for science missions, at prices substantially lower than what scientists now pay for expendable rockets. The kind of science you can do with a few minutes up around 100km is not as glamourous as the Hubble, but still useful. NASA will pay for some of it: https://flightopportunities.nasa.gov/platforms/ in fact, NASA will even pay for science missions aboard SpaceShip Two.

Naw, it was just one of Jerry Brown's campaign speeches from the 1970s that Ms. Alvarez had somehow never forgotten. Let this be a warning to everyone who pays too much attention to politicians.

Fortunately for her, Jerry Brown's speeches rarely lodge in the heart or liver.

... except for the people who vote for the Congresscritters who pass laws that prevent all but a tiny amount of legal immigration (other than by people who already have family ties in the US).

Given that those laws are actually on the books, that must be a hefty number of voters.

Wall Street should have just about no crime, then.

Before deciding that a song is worth owning, I want to hear it, in full, several times. Streaming services like psonar.com (no, I don't work for them) let me do that easily and cheaply. I've wasted far more money on music that turned out not to be worth owning than I shall spend in several years' worth of streaming. What's not to like?

Actually the existing pioneers, including Armadillo Aerospace, XCOR, and some others of whom you (should) have heard, are already working with the FAA and they report that the experience has not been too painful. I can't help worrying when NASA wants to get in on the act, though. NASA's main product is paper, with a few space vehicles as unintentional by-products, and they won't want to disappoint anyone ....

Unless the aforementioned lousy administrators have underfunded the pension plan. Which roughly everyone has done.

+1 for teaching at private schools. The school where my kids go has recently hired a part-time math specialist, and I've been filling in myself, volunteering one lesson a week. Any discipline problems, I just sic my elder boy on them :-)

Hmm, it seems that /.ers don't have children (even the ones who can remember back to the '80s). In the school where my kids go, a local robotics nerd is teaching programming to grades 3 and onwards using Scratch and they're loving it. Yes, Scratch has a colourful GUI for junior programmers and doesn't let you edit your code in vi, but it has loops, objects, methods, variables, and most of the constructs that older programmers use.

Now if I could only get my 6th grader to stop fixing bugs in his maze and start watching his TV like he's supposed to ....

I'm not from Europe, I'm from the country that invented rugby :-) and I played it as a kid.

First, in rugby you're not allowed to run into any player who isn't carrying the ball, which cut down the number of impacts relative to American football.

Secondly, we were trained to take down an opposing player with our shoulders and arms (sweep his knees out form under him) in the run-and-strike part of the game. Hitting with your head, or hitting his head, was so obviously a bad idea that I don't think it was even mentioned.

Third, the wrestling part of the game (the "scrum") begins with players already in contact, so there's no impact -- and the contact is shoulder-to-shoulder. This contrasts vividly with the American face-off where players seem to start about a yard apart, so the first thing they do is crash into each other.

Fourth, as my mother used to say, "[soccer] is a gentle game for rough people, rugby is a rough game for gentle people."

How about we get kids who want to be able to write a piece of English that explains something, and let them review each others' work while the algorithm helps them with punctuation and spelling. The teacher can review a semi-finished product from each group of, say, four kids.

How do we motivate the little monsters? Once kids have been shown a piece of bad writing and asked to make sense of it, then a day or two later been shown a piece of good writing, they'll be merciless critics, and other kids may listen better to their peers than to a teacher who doesn't really have time to talk to them anyway. We might even let them take the work home and show it to their parents, who could provide feedback. Bottom line: school is a place to learn how to do things well, not a place to be told how badly you do them.

To prevent the obvious abuses, and to make some room to assess individual contributions, rotate the kinds through different combinations of groups. Other refinements are left as an exercise to the reader.