MAVEN's going to arrive around the same time as Mangalyaan, assuming both do arrive. The arrival rate at Mars is pretty low (with NASA having the best one, 70%). It's going to study the upper atmosphere, just as Mangalyaan plans to. This cost NASA $670 M, at a time when Congress is cutting everything like it (Comments about republicans and science withheld - Editor).

I really hope these guys talk. I understand descriptions in popular media blur the details, but there seems to be a lot over overlap here.

I think the local police are there anyway, maybe they can have a TSA detail, and compensated by the TSA. Bring some fresh eyes into the table.

There was never any doubt the gun nuts and anti-government types (= all of /.?) would be all over this one, but c'mon, at least use an analogy that fits. The TSA union wants armed guards to protect itself from nutsos with guns. Just like the TSA protects us from having to face people with weapons on planes. It is quite consistent.

IMO, they should use local police. No need to bloat the payroll ad nauseum.

Stop signs work equally well for cyclists and drivers. How many cyclists stop at a stop sign? I for one, don't, unless there's contention (motor vehicles at the stop sign); usually motorists wave cyclists across.

If you're going to get all technical about cyclists being legal users, then they break the law a lot.

There are so many angles involved (windshield rake, glancing angle of impact, trajectory angle of body center of mass) and other variables, that it seems likely that there will be twisting force on the neck. Which a helmet doesn't do anything about (moreover, it may increase this by increasing the radius, hence torque) and acting as a smooth surface that will deflect off another smooth surface.

For the meme to be true to itself, it should die when the last phone ISP dies. Has the last phone ISP died?

The sections you quote are for music. Calls are far more important to me, and for this:
      LG G2 65.7 62.2 66.2 Below Average

I hope it isn't a mildly revamped G2! The G@ has a below-average loudspeaker, and call me odd, but I consider a loud speaker to be essential in a phone. I find most reviews of smartphones useless, because they spend over half the time on the camera, software features, plastic vs metal, etc. and maybe one if that, on call quality, and except for 1 or 2 publications, never bother to put a sound meter near the thing. FYI, GSMArena, for one, actually measure the volume.

The rumor about having a MEMS camera was based on someone checking the leaked phone logs, and seeing that the Sony sensor used by the camera was the same sensor used by the company that builds MEMS cameras. In other words, a leap of hope.

You do know that Social Security is completely paid for, has always been, through the soc sec trust fund (simplifying here)? The government borrows from social security! Not is it not " financially unfeasible" as you seem to think, but is't been (very) solvent for over 60 years, and with some relatively small adjustments, will be that way for ever.

But I read the rest of your nonsense, and it wouldn't surprise me if you didn't know this.

Or maybe they want to ape Macs. The problem with that is given a choice between pretend-MacOS and real MacOS, people will choose the real one.

Found that out years ago. Got my HDHomerun box, put it on the wi-fi, and no worky. The "54 Mb/s" wi-fi couldn't do 12 Mb/s (or whatever 1080p over-the-air channel puts out) sustained through a wall.

Theoretically speaking, sure, just like you said.

But in this case, land is far less cheap today (no Native Americans to take it from, for starters). Railways were the enabling technology upon which the US was built then, now they hyperthingie just gets people from A to B - no freight, nothing radically new added to the transportation options already available. It would be a great make-work project, except there are millions of much better such projects available - crumbling bridges, for instance.

And really, is this a viable future technology, let alone a "futuristic" one?

The cheapest way to move people intercity is steel wheel on steel rail. Any transport expert worth his salt should know that. Why, in Japan, Europe, and China, they're already moving people at over 200 mph average. Today.

But if you can ignore practical considerations (like "visionary" businessmen can do) because the people (read governments) are willing to let you externalize costs such as land, hazard insurance, accident clean-up costs, etc. then sure, hyper-my-loop away.

The drugs are expensive because of the patents on them that allow big pharma to monopolize them. In this case, the people who develop the genes will then be poached by big pharma, or will form their own company, or the university will sell the patents to an IP shop, which will leave us exactly where we were before. But we will have glowing rabbits.

So spare me the homilies about poor people and drugs, and just say "shiny glowing rabbits!!! FTW!!!"