They have to alter the docking ring, something that's scheduled to happen later this year. That hardware will, IIRC, go up in one of the upcoming Dragon CRS flights. It's not needed for just the Dragon, either. Orion and all of the other capsules under development will also use it.

Tapping Enter a couple of times is inserting a command?

I learn something new every day.

There's a probe called New Horizons on the way to Pluto right now, largely because we can't get decent pictures from here. Even with Hubble, the best we get is a fuzzy blob a few pixels in size.

Then there's the Cassini mission that provided information about Titan that could not have been obtained without dropping a probe into its atmosphere.

There was Galileo, which provided a wealth of knowledge about the Jovian moons that we could not have gotten by taking pictures from here.

Magellan provided radar mapping of the surface of Venus that is completely obscured from view in visible light due to permanent clouds.

And, of course, there is the science being done on Mars that requires a physical presence.

The pro-Moscow government in Georgia came about after Russia invaded it while Bush was in office. There's not really much we can do for non-NATO nations in Russia's backyard. There's a reason that Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia joined NATO, and why Ukraine has considered it so often.

Are you aware that federal income taxes were collected long before the case (Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust) that basically triggered the adoption of the 16th Amendment? They go back to 1861. The issue in Pollock was not that the income tax was unconstitutional (the income tax on wages was decided unanimously to be constitutional in 1880 and held to be an excise tax in Pollock), but that taxes on income derived from property (rental income, stock dividends, etc.) were direct taxes (as opposed to indirect taxes on wages) and so had to be apportioned by state populations. It then spent the next decade doing contortions trying to fit various taxes challenged after the Pollock ruling as excise taxes so as to not deprive the federal government of revenue from many other sources.

The 16th Amendment merely allows taxes collected on all income, whatever the source, to not be apportioned by state populations, taking the issue out of the courts' hands completely. Repealing the amendment wouldn't end the income tax or the IRS, but instead justify a larger bureaucracy to ensure that income from direct taxes was apportioned properly, or else a rush to the courts to challenge pretty much every tax and a resumption of the judicial contortions to keep them in place.

And you really should get up to date on your recent history. While I'm not sad to see Saddam Hussein gone, there were no unconventional weapons found, save for a few old artillery shells buried more than a decade before. He really had dismantled his programs, but tried to make it look like maybe he didn't in case Iran got the bright idea of starting a new fight.

The B-1 was used in Iraq first during Operation Desert Fox and later during the 2003 invasion, and was also used in Kosovo and Afghanistan. The B-52, while still a very good bomber, is showing its age. While the Air Force still has it in the plans for another 30 years or so, it's not what you want to use should you have to go up against any serious air defenses, as they have to be neutralized first. Boeing has proposed several modernization ideas including new engines that would improve fuel efficiency and reduce maintenance requirements, but the cost of that is more than the Air Force wants to pay. They're planning for a new bomber to replace all three existing bombers starting around 2030-2035.

And the B-1 never really scared the Soviets. Before the final one was delivered, the Air Force realized that it couldn't compete with Soviet air defenses.

You are assuming that the problems with the price of electric cars versus gasoline cars is economies of scale.

Elon Musk seems to think that's a very big part of it, and that's the reason he's building a Gigafactory (or two) to drive down the cost of batteries.

It's strung out to keep it in the news, lest it be forgotten about in a few months. There is a strategy to it that goes well beyond awards.

Assange, on the other hand, does it for his own benefit, primarily to his ego. A recent post on Twitter mentioned delaying "the identity of NSA 'SOMALGET' country X to another date for media cycle reasons." Less than two hours later, after several replies had said it was Afghanistan, Assange made another post announcing that Afghanistan was the other country. (I follow the Wikileaks feed in part because there's occasionally something interesting but mostly because the slow burn of Assange and his declining support base kind of intrigue me.)

You're right that there was little (not no) pretense of protecting the Afghan peoples. However, the government in Kabul (such as it was) refused to hand over bin Laden, claiming that bin Laden was their guest, and they could neither kick him out nor turn him over to others who would do him harm. After airstrikes began, they offered to discuss turning him over to a neutral country that would not extradite him to the US, but only if proof of bin Laden's complicity in the 9/11 attacks was presented and they accepted it. The US, of course, refused the deal.

As to the others, the vote in Crimea that was allegedly 97% in favor of annexation with an 85% turnout rate was a sham: the Russian Council on Civil Society and Human Rights (accidentally?) posted the true results briefly: 30% turnout and only half voted in favor of annexation. The deposing of Morsi was condemned by the United States several times, though it admittedly didn't do much more. And Thailand has had 18 attempted coups, 11 of which were successful. It is, for better or for worse, an almost natural state of affairs there.

There's nothing illegal about it. Most states have alternate regulations for certain jobs. For example, if you're the one and only person working a shift, and someone must be there all the time, an exception can be made requiring you to remain at your work location even through your meal breaks, though both you and the employer must agree to this and you have to be paid for the time. They also generally allow for alternate schedules for union members provided a majority of the union members vote in favor of that schedule.

Meanwhile, Spain managed not to lose any in accidents, primarily by using them in the interceptor role for which they were originally designed and not as the fighter-bombers that Lockheed tried to turn them into.

Besides, by the time the F-104G came around, Johnson was working on the U-2 and the SR-71.

When? The U-2 was designed by Kelly Johnson, a man who enforced simplicity wherever possible and valued the lives of everyone around his planes. Having anyone run up to it or chase it in a truck to install pogos while it was moving would risk a collision or injury, or both. Besides, the entire aircraft is only 16 feet tall, and the wings are maybe a third of that off the ground.

As far as I know, the plane has always landed like that, and Kelly Johnson knew it would. That kind of practice doesn't start showing up decades or even years later.

No one does that. When it comes to a stop, it tips gently over to rest on the wingtip, which has a reinforced titanium strip on the bottom. Because of the wingspan, the tip is only a few degrees. Ground crews then go to the stationary aircraft to reinstall the pogos so it can taxi back.

It wasn't in LAX airspace (that caps out at 10,000 feet), but in LA Center's coverage area, which oversees airspace in Southern and Central California and parts of Nevada, Utah, and Arizona that isn't controlled by airports or by approach/departure controllers. The entire system is tied together to handle transitions from one controlling agency (or controller within an agency) to another.

As an aside, LAX's airspace extends various distances from the airport with the most distant point about 25 miles to the east, depending on the altitude. At any given time, there may be dozens of aircraft within its airspace on approach or departure, or transitioning through to other destinations.

I just went and checked on a number of search engines to see who does this. I used the Top 15 engines (the site draws from Alexa's rankings, which I know are borderline useless but they seem to suffice for this). In each case, I searched for "slashdot" and checked the results by right-clicking on the appropriate link, copying, and pasting into the URL bar to inspect the results. (I substituted Baidu for Contenko since the latter didn't return any results and Baidu is pretty popular, and added Yandex and IxQuick for popularity reasons as well.)

Search engines that use hidden redirects:
-- Alhea (does not hide URLs displayed at the bottom of the page, but also appears to be part of InfoSpace)
-- Baidu
-- Dogpile
-- Google
-- Info.com (does not hide URLs displayed at the bottom of the page, but also appears to be part of InfoSpace)
-- InfoSpace (does not hide URLs displayed at the bottom of the page)
-- MyWebSearch (does not hide URLs displayed at the bottom of the page)
-- Webcrawler
-- Yahoo
-- Yandex

Search engines that do not use hidden redirects and link directly to result:
-- AOL (has JavaScript onclick action)
-- Ask (has JavaScript onmousedown action)
-- Bing (sends information on link click to www.bing.com/fd/ls/GLinkPing.aspx)
-- Blekko
-- DuckDuckGo (sends information on link click to r.duckduckgo.com/l/)
-- IxQuick (has JavaScript onClick action)
-- Wow (has JavaScript onclick action)

Blekko appears to be the only one that doesn't send anything in any fashion back to the server. That doesn't mean they don't log your IP address or your search terms, of course. And their display method leaves much to be desired.

So which is worse? Using a hidden redirect that can be detected if you right-click on the link and paste it somewhere? Or sending back where you go by JavaScript that is sometimes visible to someone with a modicum of code knowledge and sometimes requires either much deeper analysis or watching the URLs that are called?

As ultranova said, you're getting upset over something that search engines have very solid reasons to do so they can rate the pages and return better results for the searcher.