" simply because it was a sucky boondoggle"

The question is was it a sucky boondoggle for technical reasons, or political reasons. Technically the shuttle had a lot going for it, pretty hefty re-usability, high performance, major cargo capacity up and down. I think its major issues came from the political side rather than a fundamental issue with the technology. Funneling massive amounts of money to various constituencies, relying on defense contractors & no bid contracts. With some relatively minor design changes, an open and fair bidding/contract process & treating the shuttle more like a transportation system and less like a "can't fail" program to which you could attach your every pork project it could have become a VERY successful launch system. Instead we now have SLS, estimate to be greater than $4 billion per launch, even more than the shuttle, with the same contractors that made the shuttle program so expensive so expect those numbers to climb. This coming on the heals of the failed Constellation program, $11 Billion down the drain for one PR launch of a "spacecraft demonstrator" cobbled together from various pieces of old spacecraft hardware.

"the NSA using whatever power they have to get the companies shut down if they didn't follow suit."

Kind of reminds me of Qwest, the one major communications provider to tell the NSA to take a hike when they started their domestic spying program. Not long after they were loosing contracts left and right and under investigation by the SEC.

I hope they have a camera to take a picture of the face of the first officer that makes a "mistake" and tries to write one of these driverless cars a speeding ticket. With suites of sensors, accelerometers, LiDAR, radar, GPS there will be no doubt what the actual speed of the car was. Maybe we'll even get lucky and that whole "educated guess" court decision will get thrown out when an officer claims that a car was going 60 MPH when evidence from a dozen sensors prove it was actually going 35.

A Billion dollars a year just to "keep the lights on" at the site? And only one of the four superfund sites there in 1989 has been fully cleaned & removed from the list? Even assuming that there are no more delays or unexpected challenges it is estimated to cost an additional $113 Billion to finish cleanup. Something is definitely wrong here, I realize that dealing with nuclear materials is difficult but this is obscene.

That's one possible interpretation, another might be that there was a massive market (online distribution) that the studios were purposely not utilizing to prop up their DVD/Blue Ray sales. Others sought to fill that demand. I know I'd happily pay a few bucks for a digital copy (DRM free, unrestricted, no specialized player) from an official source over one from some distribution site riddled with poor/limited/malicious copies. Unfortunately there still is not such an option, though online rental services (Netflix, Amazon Instant Videos, etc) fill part of the demand. There have also been studies indicating a significant number of those who do pirate also have a tendency to purchase more DVD/Blue Ray then the average person.

"ammo ages"

Rifle ammo can last a LONG TIME assuming it is stored correctly. I shoot surplus ammo through my 7.62 x 51 (308) pretty often that from what I understand is German ammo from the 50s-70s and I've yet to ever run into a dud round.

Thousands of rounds of ammunition is a little more than "a few rounds". Its true that you're not going to stop a large, determined band of marauders with a a few firearms. However early on most marauder groups are probably going to be poorly organized rabbles looking for easy prey, they're going to turn and run after they watch a few of their number get softball size chunks blown out of them by 7.62 x 54r. Later on you're probably going to have to form larger communities to protect from the now larger & better organized marauder groups, but surviving the first few months to a year after a major calamity is going to be the first hurtle.

There are several precedents in the insect world, several forms of fungus & several small insects use other insects as a form of propagation. Ophiocordyceps unilateralis will infect several species of ants & force them to climb to areas above ant activity so they can spread their spoors and infect more ants. I can't remember what its called but there is another case of an insect laying its egg inside an ant species, then after the egg hatches it begins eating the ant from the inside, eventually working its way up to the head where it pops it off and then drives it around like a car until its mature when it repeats the cycle. In the animal kingdom its far more rare, the nearest thing would be rabies. Which of course infects its host, causes inflammation in its brain resulting in violent behavior, that violence results in bites which carry the virus. A fast acting human strain of rabies, or some kind of parasite inducing violent behavior to spread itself is not outside the realm of possibility, though of course the virulence seen in most film & literature is highly unlikely.

Because the US "justice" system is such a shining example for the world. Threatening college students with decades of prison for "stealing" public research papers. Approving no-knock warrants resulting in hundreds if not thousands of innocent deaths. Militarization of police forces and the use of SWAT teams for even the most benign crimes. Crushing people pirating a few songs/movies with hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. Yes, the rest of the world would do well to emulate us.

I hang around in survivalists circles a little bit and there's a little bit of a saying there "If you can survive a zombie apocalypse you can survive almost anything" The idea of walking undead creatures with a taste for human flesh is very unlikely (not impossible, but unlikely), but the skills & tools for surviving one will prepare you for a variety of situations (natural disaster, civil unrest, economic collapse, etc). The idea of the military preparing for mass numbers of "zombies" (civilians) rising up and assaulting them is not very settling. There are not many situations in which this kind of training would be necessary except for a civilian uprising, save for some of the aspects of dealing with an defending from assault with limited resources, a breakdown of communications & no backup.

I think Boeing needs to focus a little more on getting people/materials to space and a little less on the aesthetics of their cabin design. From what I gather the already high costs of their United Launch Alliance rockets for the DoD have increased 60% in the last few years. Some estimates put their launches at $380 Million each not including some of the fixed production/facilities maintenance (~$1B). SpaceX can launch the same payloads in the $56 - 90 Million per launch range.

This is hardly new, scientists have been playing around with plasma windows & fields for quite some time. They're currently only a few inches in size but could be scaled up to larger dimensions, the problem is power and the pretty powerful magnetic & electrical fields needed to create them.

This entire article is one long buzzword, I feel like I'm sitting in a motivational seminar just reading it. I like the general idea of giving everyday objects an ability to query and be queried, but to be any more than a novelty you'd need to automate the query code somehow (OCR, Bar code/reader, RFID, etc). But you've also got a pretty big cataloging & logistical issue, you have to code & catalog everything you might use (lamp posts, manhole covers, post boxes, stores, etc) and maintain that database. The next big problem is keeping it going over the long term, I work in local government and given the history in my field (mapping) I can tell you that there is a tendency for the interest in maintaining a project to ebb and flow quite significantly. Back in the 80s a massive amount of money was spent (at the state/federal level) to create some pretty detailed mapping, most of which was put on a shelf and forgot about, then in the 90s interest returned and tens of thousands of dollars were spent to digitize our information (local), then it sat on some hard drives for a decade and a half gathering dust, then interest returned & I was brought in to, convert, update & maintain the information. Each time the data had to basically be completely redone due to changes in format, methodology and/or technology. And each time significant amounts of money, time & resources were lost. Its all fine and dandy to create this kind of information/interactivity, but you have to make sure that its kept current, useful & active. Otherwise it is doomed to failure.

Isn't this the same department that crashed a drone into their own armored vehicle full of SWAT personnel during a photo op? This seems a lot less like mechanical difficulties and more like inexperienced/inept officers who are blaming everything on their new, expensive, unnecessary toys.

http://gizmodo.com/5890507/pol...

The New York Post one is my favorite, and a prime example of how idiotic this belief that "if you were arrested the police must have had a reason" mindset. The officers hit a parked car with a guy in passenger seat going the wrong way and they blame it on him! And without video evidence he likely would have been convicted of destruction of public property, resisting arrest & disorderly conduct.