Shutting down a route temporarily to change all the buses that are running along that route, then starting up the route again will cause tremendous disruption, not to mention the loss of business while the route is not operating. The (very) few transit systems that do this use live vehicle swaps. That is, they replace one vehicle with another at an end point of the route. This avoids the need to shut down the route,a and means that passengers do not have to transfer from one bus to another.

This depends where you are. In many cities buses run full regardless of the time of day. Even when ridership does decrease the reason that bus companies do not switch to minivans is that the most expensive part of operating a bus is the driver. Switching to smaller vehicles does not save a transit authority enough money to justify the logistical nightmare involved in changing vehicles while a route is in operation.

No, the US and the Saudis are trying to put ISIL out of business. Most of ISIL's income comes from illegal oil sales. Flooding the market with cheap crude has pulled the rug out from under them.

Of course the Japanese did not bomb Pearl Harbour. Teddy Roosevelt did it, after FDR released him from cryosleep.

Grow up Florida.

It takes a lot of energy to change the weather. Some of it must have leaked.

Aliens.

Only a violent and deranged mind would participate in the fraud perpetuated upon the world by the people who pretend that the Moon landings did not happen.

Military launches are where the money is. It would not surprise me if SpaceX's long-term goal has always been do business into the US department of defence with the talk of manned missions being primarily a way of getting media attention. Even if Elon Musk really does want to send people to Mars military launches are a good way to raise the funds to do so.

NASA does not have the funds to build instruments, or to run them once they have been launched. One of the telescopes is being used for the WFIRST mission (http://wfirst.gsfc.nasa.gov/science/). The other is waiting for money.

Someone found and posted a security home in the official North Korean OS? I suspect that one of the OS's developers (and his family) is about the receive a free lifetime stay at Klub Kim.

I would like to see a reliable app that identifies a piece of music from various forms of user input such as lyrics; whistling, humming, or bad singing; or other fuzzy information. Google does a reasonable job with partial lyrics, but it good luck identifying instrumental pieces.

And Linux stole unix. Linux also stole all the command names from unix. They also stole much of the underlying mathematical concepts from boolean algebra.

According the the CIA's Web site (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/kn.html) the literacy rate in North Korea is 100%. Dropping pamphlets would make much more sense than dropping DVDs & USB sticks. This seems to be a publicity stunt, or an ego trip, more than a real attempt to sow dissatisfaction within North Korea.

Yes, the dec should be -73:30:51. Sorry about the cut-and-paste error. The southern sky seems to have all of the good galaxies.