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.

This ends a situation in which two companies that would otherwise have been competitive bidders decided that it would cost them less to be a monopoly, and created their own cartel. Since they were a sole provider, they persuaded the government to pay them a Billion dollars a year simply so that they would retain the capability to manufacture rockets to government requirements.

Yes, there will be at least that Billion in savings and SpaceX so far seems more than competitive with the prices United Launch Alliance was charging. There will be other bidders eventually, as well.

When's the last time it was every six months?

Hint: It was probably sometime back when the release was two CDs, and not 6 CDs and 2 double-sided DVDs.

So, when do we start testing every politician?

You are TOTALLY right. Black people in America were equal the SECOND slavery was repealed. Great insight.

"CEOs get their bonus by raising the stock price."

Even if everyone below them knows that in order to achieve the sudden increase they have destroyed the ability for the company to operate for more than another 5 years.

The usual approach by American MBA CEOs is to cut every conceivable operational expense that isn't required in the short term of their contract's huge bonus conditions (like stop maintaining equipment, getting rid of staff who work on future products or research etc.).

Because of the limited scope (doesn't need to be able to open network sockets, access files etc.) the browser can sandbox it more effectively.

There is one thing the vSphere Web Client does exceedingly better than the (thick) vSphere Client: allows vSphere admins who don't use Windows on their laptops to work more effectively.

While there are some differences in functionality and where features reside, vSphere Web Client is fantastic (except that on Linux it only works on Chrome due to requiring a newer version of Flash than is available as a NPAPI plugin). The fact that the vCenter appliance supports bigger environments now actually allows one to run a non-Windows vSphere shop.

Red Hat's RHEV (vSphere competitor) only has a web app, and this has counted in its favour in the past when vSphere was limited to Windows only. We will be migrating to RHEV for other reasons though ...

No-fault is about taking money away from lawyers, who used to litigate each and every auto accident as a lawsuit in court before the insurers would pay. Eventually the insurers decided that they spent more on lawyers than accident payments, and they had no reason to do so.

If you want to go back to the way things were, you are welcome to spend lots of time and money in court for trivial things, and see how you like it. I will provide you with expert witness testimony for $7.50/minute plus expenses. The lawyers charge more.

In general your insurer can figure out for themselves if you were at fault or not, and AAA insurance usually tells me when they think I was, or wasn't, when they set rates.

If we don't have more than two children per couple, the human race would've died out a long time ago.

I think the proper way to state that is "If we didn't in the past", not "If we don't". If we were to have 2 children per couple (approximately, the real value is enough children to replace each individual but not more) from this day on, it would not be necessary to adjust the number upward to avoid a population bottleneck for tens of thousands of years.

The Northern California Amtrak is actually pretty good for commuting from Sacramento to the Bay Area and back because the right of way is 4 tracks wide in critical places and it has priority over other trains for much of the time.

Acela in the Boston/NY/DC corridor is also good, because the right of way is 4 tracks or more for most of the way, and it has a track to itself along a lot of the route. Other railroads run on parallel tracks.

For the most part, though, Amtrak suffers from not having exclusive track. It runs on freight lines that host cars so heavy that the rail bends an inch when the wheels are on top of it (I've seen this first hand).

And Germany is a nation the size of New Mexico with an economy the 5th largest in the world. Starting pretty much from zero 70 years ago.

Maybe having good trains is part of that.

No. If anything, I assert that good trains are a hallmark of the set of good economic policies that lead to the general well-being of the citizenship.

Poor people are poor because they can't get jobs. One of the reasons is that they can't get to jobs. Can't afford a reliable car and insurance and gas in the US? Can't work! Too often, that's the equation.

The other reasons they are poor are that we were equally bad in investing in other things we should have spent more upon publicly, like good primary education. This is caused by more wealthy folks not wanting to pay the necessary taxes.