"touting the benefits of dealer franchises"

Then let them compete with other sales methodologies in a free market basis. Creating an artificial market environment usually only exists to maintain an unsustainable market for a select group of people who have influence with those in power.

"someone used a small unmanned aircraft to spy on the team's training camp"

A 410 loaded with some bird shot and choked right would solve that problem real easy for you and be of no real danger (except for the drone).

Seems a bit overly paranoid. I've never had a device that I couldn't get it to switch languages, adjust the volume or disable/reset a function (house telling you to exercise). I have no interest in networking the houses primary utilities (door locks, dish/cloths washer, lights, electricity, fridge, HVAC, etc) but some secondary functions (exterior security cameras, temperature/water sensors, etc) would be fine as long as they are not in any way connected to the primaries. Technology is great, but until we figure out device security it shouldn't be integrated too deeply into our lives.

" 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.