Except that Phoenix is literally under 3 cubic miles of water from the reservoirs in the mountains. Arizona has a 100 year water plan that they have to keep up to date so that it doesn't turn into California, not to mention various water recycling systems throughout the valley. There's plenty of reason to have a city where Phoenix is, mainly in that water runs downhill. There's a lot of dumber places to build a city, like say in hurricane/tornado areas, flood plains, below sea level next to the ocean, a swamp next to the ocean, Texas(kidding), some place where for months on end the roads don't work, etc. California wouldn't have a problem if it was just the city. Instead, they decided to build and industry that depends on one thing that they don't have a lot of - water. It takes incredibly huge balls to look at a giant swath of dry nothing and go, "We should totally farm here and make our economy dependent on it. Nothing native though. We should grow expensive stuff that can't exist in this environment without a lot of work."

You're spot on. A lot of these grants set the goal and let the researchers figure out how to get there. They know there are fundamental problems, and that's what they are paying for solving. Actually making the device is a small part of solving all of the fundamental problems. If it went the other way, with small grants to solve small problems, we'd have a serious problem. How do you manage a decent research group if you only get small grants for small problems? Sure, with the system as it is you have many different groups working on one large problem, and there is a lot of redundancy, but you also gets different attempts and solutions, with everyone working on the final project and not just the tiny pieces. It's significantly better this way. If you've ever been to a DARPA conference you can really appreciate how everyone is working on the same thing and how many different solutions there are... and how angry people get at each other or thinking differently.

The problem is that they have the system rigged so that you can't just cut defense spending. Defense spending isn't just boots on the ground, it's a lot of research jobs and grants. Those are the programs that would get cut long before you starved the contractors. Not to mention entire towns that depend on whatever military base is nearby or the Boeing/Lockheed plant. Cutting back on military spending has been made to be near completely impossible. You can't just cut the funding and hope they spend the rest responsibly.

If it's wasn't for these grants there would be no fundamental research done. You get work on a very big problem, and yes you generally fail, but in the process countless publications and fundamental problems are solved. Those problems would never get funding on their own. Hell, without DARPA and the like half of our college research groups wouldn't exist.

I still think that well trained people are harder to hack than software, currently. The main issue is that if you manage to hack a person into wrecking a plane, that just works on the one person. If you hack the software for a plane you can hack all of the planes. That's really my only concern about self driving cars. If a car or two here and there freak out and crash it's still safer than people, but if you can somehow manage to freak them all out...

The trouble is, usually people that communicate like you do are the ones that really think they understand, but in reality they don't. Then they start explaining nonsense to other people that just listen because they actually want to learn something instead of assuming they already know everything.

But we were talking about buying insurance for the structure. If the quake is bad enough that it broke your fancy up to date house, then there's probably some significant damage to the surrounding infrastructure.

Could you get insurance that would cover wage loss in an event like that? Having a standing house may not mean so much if the infrastructure and economy are crippled.

Seriously. Sluts are awesome.

Who would even replace him if they keep the same format? That poor guy is going to get sooooo much hate. Unless... unless it's a lady.

Lots and lots of buttons. The mechanics of my G600 aren't the best, but not having to jump across the keyboard is the best.

It's such a better name for a contest that uses robots to perform monotonous jobs currently done by hand.