History has also shown that higher taxes != higher revenue, but that's not your point, is it?

Yeah, people like DeltaHawk who spent 20 years building a diesel aircraft engine in order to reduce fuel consumption and lead particulate without ever making a single sale sure are short sighted SOBs. Or perhaps you're thinking of those shortsighted morons in the Innovation 1000 study who spent $550B on R&D in 2010. Thank goodness we have /. to put a lid on hyperbole.

We could take a page from the military on this one. If you use a government-backed student loan to get your degree in a STEM subject, you are required to spend a minimum number of years "paying back" as a teacher. You would be salaried at the same rate as any other teacher of the same experience. The difference is that you took a Government loan to get your degree, so you should pay back the nice taxpayers by teaching that subject for X years.

Assuming the loan is for $80k to begin with, we can give those out "gratis" up front with the understanding that the payback is in teaching time. That would cost the same as what is proposed, but anyone who takes the loan would be under contract to teach for X years. In the end, you're addressing the availability of STEM degrees, availability of student loans, and STEM teacher supply all in one program for probably the cost of just the proposed program. It's just as voluntary, and has the added bonus of (possibly) increasing the number of students going into STEM fields. Throw in merit-based granting and you've got people competing to get a "free" education in STEM, so you know the teachers on the back end should be decent too.

Of course, the carrot has to have a stick. Something like, if you take the loan and switch degrees out of a STEM field, then you're on the hook for repaying the full cost of the loan. If you can't do the full x years of payback teaching, then you have to repay the loan on a pro-rata basis, etc. This is how military scholarships work, why not do it with STEM as well?

If I only had mod points.

The problem isn't with which party is in charge, it's with how much whoever is in charge can do. I'm not calling for anarchy, but an awful lot of our problems stem from too much centralized control, not too little.

For those of you cheering the health care act's penalty, just think what you would say if the other side had exercised such power. For all of these executive orders, what if it were the other side? Just a hypothetical for you: now that Obama has successfully issued an executive order to DHS to not process certain illegal aliens, and that executive order has been defended by a large number of partisans, will those same partisans defend a Romney executive order that directs the IRS to simply not collect any penalties levied by the ACA? How about a Republican "tax" on abortion procedures? Would you be ok with that since you recognize the Supreme Court's decision to uphold the individual mandate as a tax under the taxing power of Congress? Would those pundits who cheered the decision still feel the same when its precedent is used on a subject contrary to their ideology? What about an individual mandate to purchase a gun or pay a penalty if you don't? After all, crime costs us just as much as those free riders at the emergency room. If you're worried about guns being used irresponsibly, we'll just create a mandate for all employers to provide safe gun ownership training and one hour a month at the shooting range. Feeling better about those ACA precedents yet?

Regardless of sides, the last 8 years have seen an unprecedented consolidation of power that can and will be abused by either side. The only fix is to get involved in your local politics and start getting people into office who will vote to cut back federal (and state) powers. The more demand there is for that kind of politician, the more of that kind of politician we will see. If you disagree with the Tea Party (who is for smaller government, but maybe not the parts you would like to see shrink), then get out and start your own movement (no, Occupy doesn't count - it's a failure as a political movement). No matter what, the future of America rests in its ability to walk back these power grabs and reestablish a constrained government with narrowly defined powers.

Yeah, those morons

Please drop the auto insurance argument. You don't have to buy a car, you don't have to drive a car, and you only have to get insurance if you do one of those two things. This is very different in that your existence is the necessary and sufficient condition of being eligible for the mandate.

Sorry, I don't think I'm understanding you. The assertion is: "voter participation of those between 18 and 34 (what I would consider to be the net generation) has increased, in many cases markedly". The numbers then show that the voter participation among those age groups has increased. What "controlling for any other contributing factor" is needed to reach the conclusion that the thesis is correct based on the data?

If you're referring to the next paragraph, he clearly starts with "One could argue". Not even remotely the same as claiming statistical correlation of any kind, just another thesis presented based on the (successful) validation of the original thesis.

I'm running smokeping on my home computer in order to show Comcast that their service actually does drop out at regular daily intervals and that it is not internal. The interesting trend that I see is in pinging the DNS servers. A ping to the comcast DNS server, presumably internal to their network, has a rtt of ~50ms. A ping to a Google server, presumably external to their network has a rtt of ~20ms. This has been consistent for about four months now. So how can they claim internal is easier?

I think your premise is right, but for the wrong reasons. Driver-less cars likely will eliminate car ownership, however, it will be in the form of a public commodity. Instead of hopping in my car to drive to the nearest mega-shopping extravaganza, followed by a restaurant, then a movie, I would just hop in the nearest available car, have it drive me to the first destination, then repeat for each subsequent destination. There's no need for the car to park, it can simply join a queue nearby, or head off to the next waiting passenger. You could keep a large portion of the fleet on the road with no reason to ever park anyway. The roads become your vehicle storage area and parking lots go away.

Driverless car = no need to park and wait for me = why not give a ride to someone else originating from my destination = on-demand carriage = very few personal cars.

Driverless is safer = politicians mandate use = no driving for you anyway = why own a car if I can't drive it? = no ownership

There's always the desire to be able to hop in a car and go with no pre-planning, no waiting, no calling for a car to come and waiting until the next available one can arrive, but we're already seeing strong social pressure to forgo some of those conveniences for the sake of reducing emissions and fuel usage. Given the rather large profit motive of being able to effectively charge per mile, the ease of scheduling cars to congregate in areas of high demand at proper times (a lot of cool statistical data modeling that Google is pretty good at doing), and the necessary communications infrastructure to make it all work, it seems the commercial application will be to provide fleet vehicles equivalent to taxi cabs. Taken to a logical conclusion, laws will eventually be passed that prohibit human drivers (since it's the human that adds most of the uncertainty to the equation), and it will become easier and cheaper to simply summon a driverless cab to go anywhere you want to go.

Cross country road trips can also work on the same principle. The logistics become interesting, but not insurmountable. Considering the cars can always drive themselves back to their origin if they aren't needed in the destination city, and you have a simple one-way rental method that simply includes the cost of the return trip as well.

Of course, this entire scheme will have to be nationalized at some point and fully regulated. That would allow cars to be shuttled from city to city and state to state as demand requires. What politician wouldn't love to be able to control how the entire country transports itself? I could see them outlawing "dumb" cars simply so they can hand out goodies in the form of more cars for cities that will vote for them. Imagine the politics then.

I leave it to the reader to decide if this is utopian or dystopian.

I stand corrected. Here's more discussion to include some FAR references since the parent relies on his own authority.

Unfortunately, that's true of almost any certified 4 seat airplane.

Not true. If you build the aircraft yourself (51% rule), and you apply for and hold the aircraft repairman certificate, then you can do whatever you want to that plane. If you buy it from someone else, you cannot obtain the repairman certificate for it, and any maintenance that would require an A&P on a certified aircraft would require that same A&P on your experimental aircraft.

You go on to say that in the next few sentences, but I thought it was important to be very clear on the difference since most of the people reading this thread don't know the difference between a C-150 and 747.

Give it a day....