I suspect that the ATM won't recognize your personally unless you have your mouth open and your eyes closed.

Since copyright is dead I just created an new web site called slashdot.com. It copies all the content from slashdot.org and uses that site as its backend. I just replace the ads with my own, but you won't notice any difference really. Oh and it also deletes all the Dice Astroturf articles for added value to you my viewers. So please start using my new site instead of the old one. You can check it out while you are pirating some music or videos in this age of copyright nullity.

Subsidies are policy implementation devices. When people take the subsidies under the condition the subsidies are offered the result is that something the government wants to happen happens. Theoretically its an inexpensive way to get things done without the government doing it and assuring private investment in the outcome. (so there's vested interest in successes and usually commercialization).

Just because one guy happens to feed at the trough isn't a problem neccessarily. It could be. But that's why you have oversight.

I heard a story about a nun who had anorgasmia- meaning she couldn't experience pleasure of any sort (not just sexual). Someone did VNS surgery on her and had the implant send pulses to her pleasure center. That produced major changes- she was super happy, quit being a nun, decided to become a prostitute, and went to Venezuela(?). Eventually her pleasure center couldn't take being hammered by electricity anymore and she started to find it annoying. Eventually she had them remove it.

You misspelled "armature".

sure it does: you can travel 100 light years in less than 100 years. that's the only thing that is meaningful. Arguing about whether you can go faster than light is not meaningful.

Wrong. But you illustrate perfectly what I meant when I said the way relativity is taught confuses people. You are actually a member of the vast majority of people that think you can't travel to a destination in less time than it would take light. You can!

I think you are making apple's point about fragmentation for them. Apple does not offer craptastic products. If you buy apple you know you are getting a fine product. THere used to be a saying that No one ever got fired for buying IBM. It means that even if you don't or cant do the due dilligence to become an expert there's one company you can trust not to give you a bad experience. Most people don't have your power of perception so that can't discriminate what's really different about the cheap android, the poorly thought out androiud and the perfect android. You can. But for everyone else it's much simpler and even less costly to just buy an apple and not have to spend the time and money it takes to become the expert. You also know that apple will always give you a path forward to the next iphone. When your uber phone becomes obsolete you have to do the research again to find its replacement. There's a lot of peace of mind in going apple. Fragmentation has hidden costs. that's why people get mad about it.

well yes that too.

It's very easy to travel 100 light years in less than 100 years. Thus for all intents and purposes, one can travel distances at faster than the speed of light. The theory of relativity does not prevent this. You can without violating any laws accelerate a rocket ship at a comfortable 1g for as long as your fuel holds out. You will not get more massive. It will not take increasing amounts of fuel to maintain the 1g acceleration. If you accelerate for 1 year at 1g then you will know that you covering the distance to your destination at faster than the speed of light.

What is true about relativity is this: and OUTSIDE observer will see you traveling at less than the speed of light. But from your perspective you can travel across galaxies in your lifespan with ease. So for all intents and purposes, you can go faster than the speed of light provided we everything from your point of view (which is all that matters). We define speed as the distance to your destination measured in an inertia frame, divided by the time it takes you to get there, all measurements from your perspective.

the way reletivity is taught totally confuses people on this point: A HUMAN COULD EASILY TRAVEL ANYPLACE IN THE MILYWAY WITHIN THEIR LIFETIME WITH EXISTING TECHNOLOGY, except for the part about bringing your own fuel. we just don't know how to bring enough fuel to maintain a 1g acceleration for 50 years. This is why these new reactionless EM drives that NASA and others are toying with are really interesting. No doubt they are bullshit since they seem to defy newtons laws, but if it turns out they work.... see you on on the other side of the galaxy baby.

Russia would like for us to continue gifting them with cash for 40-year-old missle motors, it's our own government that doesn't want them any longer. For good reason. That did not cause SpaceX to enter the competitive process, they want the U.S. military as a customer. But it probably did make it go faster.

Also, ULA is flying 1960 technology, stuff that Mercury astronauts used, and only recently came up with concept drawings for something new due to competitive pressure from SpaceX. So, I am sure that folks within the Air Force wished for a better vendor but had no choice.

Microsoft will no doubt partner with Monster Cable to come up with a new IP Layer for transporting web pages with perfect fidelity, much the way that Monster Cable CAT-5 provides perfect Ethernet.

Dolby means zip in the age of AAC et al. In the 80's dolby was a useful compander for your cassette tapes. Anyone could make a compander, but there had to be a standard. Dolby did the research, came out with a good one, and there ya go. Way better than no compander because of the physics of writing audio to magnetic media. In the 90s when the world had moved onto CDs and no compander was needed, They kept the name alive by introducing multi-channel stereo and big base to movie theaters. Again it was a standard and backed by research so it worked great. The shaking big base sound was novel too. So we got all the disaster movies, like who can forget Towering Inferno?
But we've been in the digital age since the 2000s and there's just nothing left for them to add. There's all sorts of formats for pristine audio (PONO) or streamed audio or 1000 songs in your pocket (AAC). these days your headphones matter more than the avialability of a good sound storage algorithm.
Dolby is just a name that people of a certain age will buy because if it's reputation from the days of Cassettes.

Thank you both for putting some actual discussion in this otherwise really noisy pile of ... comments. Not sure where the moderators are.

I love it that the Military is making this a level playing field. In the past there have been instances where the Military industrial complex promised jobs to retiring Majors close to the purchase reccomendation process, tilting things. Then there's the stockholm syndrome and the nobody-ever-got-fired for buying IBM decision.
But for the past decade the military has gone very pragmatic. It's all about what protects the warfighter. What works. It even tells congress it doesn't actually want a lot of the boondoggles congress shoves down its throat. Not that it's in any way perfect or there aren't some empire builders left in the system. But it's really nice to see evidence of this in things like Space-X cutting in on these dance partners.