Competitions like that can help. However, funding of basic research that can then lead to big breakthroughs later is also a good idea.

Here's a proposal: stop granting hugely profitable exclusive patents on university research funded by the federal government. Give the government a right to license broadly patents it helped fund and share the proceeds with the discovering professors and students. That way the cost to the pharma companies would be smaller.

Use the government's proceeds from licensing said patent to fund the FDA's evaluation of any drugs based on the research. This further cuts down on the costs to the drug company.

Make it a term in the research's patents that final drug patents based on it must be similarly licensed. Use those proceeds to subsidize Medicare and Medicaid.

Then, the drug research is more widely spread, the benefits and risks of the research are more widely spread, the risks are lower per company, the costs of the drugs are lower to bring to market. The market prices may even follow suit.

Then, tie the research funding to a certain amount of the funds across the country being used for classes of drugs the public really needs but are being underrepresented, like antibiotics.

Right now this oil moves via rail, which is far riskier than a pipeline.

Hardware by Intel, code by Escher.

There's no revenue stream for the prison from Facebook posts, and apparently they also haven't figured out a great way to monitor the posts.

There's no money for the prison vendors when an inmate uses Facebook. Those calls aren't cheap, and neither are letters. Count on these folks being able to use social media when there's an app to give the state and some contractor a cut of a fee for each post collected from the family of the incarcerated.

This is the ideal, yes. Possibly with a lower bandwidth point-to-tower connection for sideband and failover.

Typically the homeowners and business owners own the land, the government demands a right of way through it or above it (for pole-hung services), then leases that right-of-way to too few companies.

Giving away basic cable, which for buildings already wired has a marginal per-unit cost approximating zero, in exchange for a quid-pro-quo from a political entity sounds like public corruption to me.

What the fuck part of " A pat-down of someone who's being detained for probable cause is okay" did you manage to misread?

A firefighter has a reason to be there if there is a fire to fight. As the SCOTUS already said, police using this sort of thing without a warrant is an illegal search.

If you're talking about "stop and frisk" then the courts are certainly not okay with that. A pat-down of someone who's being detained for probable cause is okay. Being black, young, or poor is not probable cause.

Not every computing task needs 10 TB of common RAM. Mainframes have their place, but it's not in doing every task.

How about some of that transparency we were promised? Where's the American people's backdoor into Obama's communications?

Oh, that's right... All people are created equally until one of them is working for the government.

Fuck Obama and his spooks.

Scotland should have seceded with the UK willing to have such a daft demagogue in charge. Now he's trying to turn the UK and the rest of the world into even more of a surveillance nightmare than the street cameras London already has.

He can piss up a rope and then hang himself from it.

Nobody expects a single desktop PC to do the job of a mainframe. It's true, too, that mainframes have their place for certain types of work. Don't claim, though, that a rack full of blades can't be clustered to do a similar job. It happens all the time.