I have two people interviewing for a programming job right out of college.
1. Has a degree in CS.
2. Has a degree in English Lit.
Hummm.......
Yea right.
Or turn it around.
You are looking for a fiction book editor.
1. Has a degree in CS.
2. Has a degree in English Lit.
Yes still works.

Not Bribes but jobs. The simple truth is that a government program like this is often driven by requirements and job creation. If you have two systems and one is going to make more jobs in the area that you happen to represent than the other a senator will support the one from his area. That is just common sense.
I do believe that the Boeing proposal had two advantages over the SpaceX and DreamChaser.
Lower risk and more political clout. Not bribes but congress people that will support it for job creation in their areas.

Are the drivers reneterent? If so you could in theory clear the data pages and restart the code instead of any type of reload.
Over all I am very excited by this news. Minix 3.0 has been very interesting but lacked apps. Being BSD compatible really helps with that issue.

Ahh the pro drug supporter.... Simple work to change the law it has happened in a few states so far. The self loathing pity and show of emotion is now even more into the range of ridiculous.

The KC-135 from the 1950s and still in service?
The F-22 is from Lockheed Martin btw not Boeing and while it did go over budget it did not under deliever as far as anyone can tell.

A lot of AM stations are automated these days also, syndicating popular national talk-radio programs. Any idea how to find out which ones aren't?

Yet you are not in jail for refusing to pay your taxes or protesting.....
So you parade you self loathing for all to see to try feel morally superior yet will not risk anything much less your physical life to stop it.
Please keep your emotional self loathing, self righteousness, and your facade of moral superiority to yourself or put yourself on the line and do something about it.

Frankly I have studied enough history that I believe that the way to security and frankly the least suffering it to fight the small war before you have no choice but to fight the big, morally clear cut war. That is my take on history.

Sorry but the "Peace" movement lost any legitimacy when they protested at the former republican vice presidents home after President Obama got elected. Their silence on the bombing of ISIL and the moving of troops to Iraq and the future bombing of Syria, the bombing of Libya, and drone strikes in Somalia just proves that they are nothing but a PR arm for the Democratic party wrapped in false morality. In fact I have seen almost no peace protests for a few years now.

"Long-time government contractor with a history of blowing budgets and under-delivering gets new"
???
Long-time government contractor with a history of delivering working system.
B-B2, E-3, KC,RC,C-135, P-8, and on and on.

The new powered landing Dragon is a "high risk" design. The Dreamchaser is also a "high risk" design plus you have all the "Shuttle was flawed" group that wants nothing to do with wings in space.
Boeing vs SpaceX? without doing all the number crunching it is hard to make an educated judgment.
As to the Politics SpaceX is in Ca, Tx, and FL. Boeing in in Ca, Tx, Fl, Washington, and Ks but the killer is that there headquarters is in... Chicago.

So delete it. The rest is just posturing even if I got the vile rappers album I would just delete it. Sure offering it for free might have been the best option but to be honest the amount of time wasted and frankly chest pounding is to the point of silliness. Probably 99.9% of Apple users will be happy with getting the free album or just not care while a tiny minority will jump up and down and pound their chest over the purity of their iTunes library. Do people show off their library to show how cool and hard core and or indie they are?
Implying that you made a choice... It is an album not a vote in an election ,a religious affiliation, or political party, it is not a big thing and if you feel that it is you need to put it in perspective.
 

I think you are entirely correct about the difficulty in predicting disruptive technologies. But there's an angle here I think you may not have considered: the possibility that just the cultural values and norms of the distant future might be so alien to us that readers wouldn't identify with future people or want to read about them and their problems.

Imagine a reader in 1940 reading a science fiction story which accurately predicted 2014. The idea that there would be women working who aren't just trolling for husbands would strike him as bizarre and not very credible. An openly transgendered character who wasn't immediately arrested or put into a mental hospital would be beyond belief.

Now send that story back another 100 years, to 1840. The idea that blacks should be treated equally and even supervise whites would be shocking. Go back to 1740. The irrelevance of the hereditary aristocracy would be difficult to accept. In 1640, the secularism of 2014 society and would be distasteful, and the relative lack of censorship would be seen as radical (Milton wouldn't publish his landmark essay Aereopagitica for another four years). Hop back to 1340. A society in which the majority of the population is not tied to the land would be viewed as chaos, positively diseased. But in seven years the BLack Death will arrive in Western Europe. Displaced serfs will wander the land, taking wage work for the first time in places where the find labor shortages. This is a shocking change that will resist all attempts at reversal.

This is all quite apart from the changes in values that have been forced upon us by scientific and technological advancement. The ethical issues discussed in a modern text on medical ethics would probably have frozen Edgar Allen Poe's blood.

I think it's just as hard to predict how the values and norms of society will change in five hundred years as it is to accurately predict future technology. My guess is that while we'd find things to admire in that future society, overall we would find it disturbing, possibly even evil according to our values. I say this not out of pessimism, but out my observation that we're historically parochial. We think implicitly like Karl Marx -- that there's a point where history comes to an end. Only we happen to think that point is *now*. Yes, we understand that our technology will change radically, but we assume our culture will not.

The pessimism and dystopia in sci-fi doesn't come from a lack of research resources on engineering and science. It mainly comes from literary fashion.

If the fashion with editors is bleak, pessimistic, dystopian stories, then that's what readers will see on the bookshelves and in the magazines, and authors who want to see their work in print will color their stories accordingly. If you want to see more stories with a can-do, optimistic spirit, then you need to start a magazine or publisher with a policy of favoring such manuscripts. If there's an audience for such stories it's bound to be feasible. There a thousand serious sci-fi writers for every published one; most of them dreadful it is true, but there are sure to be a handful who write the good old stuff, and write it reasonably well.

A secondary problem is that misery provides many things that a writer needs in a story. Tolstoy once famously wrote, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." I actually Tolstoy had it backwards; there are many kinds of happy families. Dysfunctions on the other hand tends to fall into a small number of depressingly recognizable patterns. The problem with functional families from an author's standpoint is that they don't automatically provide something that he needs for his stories: conflict. Similarly a dystopian society is a rich source of conflicts, obstacles and color, as the author of Snow Crash must surely realize. Miserable people in a miserable setting are simply easier to write about.

I recently went on a reading jag of sci-fi from the 30s and 40s, and when I happened to watch a screwball comedy movie ("His Girl Friday") from the same era, I had an epiphany: the worlds of the sci-fi story and the 1940s comedy were more like each other than they were like our present world. The role of women and men; the prevalence of religious belief, the kinds of jobs people did, what they did in their spare time, the future of 1940 looked an awful lot like 1940.

When we write about the future, we don't write about a *plausible* future. We write about a future world which is like the present or some familiar historical epoch (e.g. Roman Empire), with conscious additions and deletions. I think a third reason may be our pessimism about our present and cynicism about the past. Which brings us right back to literary fashion.

I call it fraud, but the contract says "up to" some speed or other, so technically they're only breaking the contract if they provide you faster service than you paid for.

I still call it fraud. And a contract of adhesion.

That's why you use a "google glass" like thing. You don't use welding goggles, you use something totally opaque, and look at the world through a video camera.

But it only works after you're expecting it.

If you don't see, it's because you aren't looking.

OTOH, I will agree that not anything like all of the protestors of the 1960s & 70s were basically idealistic. Many just didn't want to die in a war they could see no justification for. How terrible.

Perhaps the worst thing to come out of the Vietnam War was the abolition of the draft. Now nobody with power has to even notice that unjust wars are being perpetrated, and certainly they don't feel a direct affect on their children. Perhaps if they did things would be different. OTOH, the government has gotten very good at ignoring opinions that it doesn't want to hear, so it might not have made any difference.