The submitter (mdsolar) may or may not have participated, but clearly has an axe to grind and the willingness to exploit the situation to peddle his ideology

mdsolar is, if you've followed nuclear and alternative power stories on /. for the past couple of years, seriously anti-nuclear - to the point of mendaciousness.

Kerbal Space Program (a bleeding edge physics sandbox game built in Unity that includes orbital space travel) had unofficial 64 bit support back in... February '14? And now has official 64-bit support.

And KSP is full of weird engine based bugs, and the "official" 64 bit version is even buggier and (per the dev team) essentially use-at-your-own-risk.

So no, it's not *quite* as simple as you would have it. (And yes, I do play KSP.)

Not since City of Heroes went dark.

But outside the big cities, which comprise less than 2% of the land area of the US, there are lots of use cases for a flying car.

If there are "lots of use cases", why can't you provide any? The energy cost of flying to your parent's house by air far exceeds that of driving. And unless you fly regularly (more than once a month), there's little economic sense in purchasing maintaining an expensive flying car in exchange for a modest gain in convenience in travel to either your parent's place or an airport. Neither use case makes any sense unless you've money to burn or an extremely high personal level of impatience - fringe cases both.

The OP is correct, there doesn't appear to be many use cases that justify the additional TCO.

Let's have the tech community, and then have the community that makes parking space auctioning apps, social websites, and "break-through" instant messaging apps

A yes... the old no true Scotsman fallacy once again makes it's rounds.

What's the point? If I'm innocent then 6 months in any prison is wrong.

The point? The great grandparent is wrong in his version of events and misleading in his statements of how the system works, probably deliberately so. The grandparent corrects him as to the facts of the situation.
 
And he wasn't innocent. (Something many people forget, or rather deliberately ignore.) He committed a crime and was offered a modest punishment - but he turned it down to engage in a high stakes game of chicken with the prosecutor because Swartz wanted to be The Hero and Fight Back Against The Man. He and lawyers forgot two important things however, first - don't bet what you can't afford to lose, second - don't bluff unless you're prepared to be called.

In other words, essentially no punishment at all. That's not reasonable in any sense of the words.

I don't think that people are wanting his actions to be totally legal so much as just having reasonable punishment.

Six months sounds more than reasonable - however Swartz and his lawyers decided that was unreasonable and decided to enage in a high stakes game of chicken with Swartz's freedom on the line because Swartz wanted to be The Hero and Fight Back Against The Man. He and lawyers forgot two important things however, first - don't bet what you can't afford to lose, second - don't bluff unless you're prepared to be called.

Right now it is stupid to have any incandescent bulbs in your house. Yet most people still do.

It's stupid to have incandescent bulbs in your house only if if you use enough of them to light your house up like a bloody football stadium for a night game. But most people don't. They have a handful of bulbs on at any given time, and then only for part of the day. They're poster children for electrical consumption because they're small and relatively easily exchanged, but they're not as meaningful overall as the many *other* consumers of electricity in the average house.

Social media helps keep you in a nice little bubble, where you're never exposed to information you might not like.

And that's different from Slashdot and it's all-to-often groupthink driven moderation system... how?

The modest benefit of being slightly closer to the equator is far outweighed by the additional logistics cost and complexity.

When did Slashdot become home to stupid FUD* spewing dweebs with little or no common sense?

'97? '98?
 
Seriously, Slashdot has always been like this - full of tech dweebs who don't know nearly as much about non-tech subjects as they think they do.

From TFS:

If it does work, it would eliminate the need for expendable fuel (just add electricity).

Always left out of these discussion is just how much electricity they need to produce useful thrust. While in theory, even a micro-Newton can eventually get you anywhere you want to go, practical considerations (E.G. the desire to not spend months in the Van Allen while spiraling outward, or the need to decelerate to enter planetary orbit) usually dictate a higher thrust level.

Power is, for example, a huge Achilles heel for the much vaunted VASIMIR - it requires much more than can currently be efficiently delivered in space.

The winning photo is very nice indeed.
Some of the runner-up images are okay-ish, but overall the runner-up images do not look like contest material to me.

That was my thought as well. The contest (which I'd never heard of until know) may well have "proved" that you can use a Rasberry Pi in photography, to the benefit (read:publicity) of the Pi... But the photographs themselves are generally much less than impressive in both technical and artistic quality.

You clearly have not read the appropriate NASA documents.

Actually, yes, I have.
 

Skylab was in very good condition and NASA wanted to use it in conjunction with the shuttle

NASA was (is) an organization of thousands of people - and cannot "want" anything. A small group of people, who had no funding, wanted to use Skylab in conjunction with the Shuttle, but that was just one of the dozens (hundreds?) of pie-in-the-sky ideas various groups within NASA generate on an annual basis. Very few space fanboys realize this and presume every single dammed one of those gotta-publish-something-to-keep-my-job studies and "plans" (was) is something "NASA wanted to do" no matter how ludicrous the idea was. Actually, the more ludicrous the idea the more the space fanboys love it, because it's just more ammo for their ignorant whinging about NASA's "failures". Ignorant because on top of not grasping the pie-in-the-sky nature of many of those "plans", they fail to realize that NASA is not an independent organism - but rather is a branch of the Executive Department and only does what the Executive approves and Congress fails.
 

Congress did not fund this cheap solution, so we ended-up dumping $100 Billion and ten years of construction time into building ISS to get a similar orbital capability (Skylab had 320 cubic meters pressurized volume, that's more than the US part of the ISS).

What's interesting here is you claim Skylab would provide similar capability - but then rather than comparing capability, you compare volume. Thus, probably inadvertently due to gross ignorance, you reveal the shallowness of your knowledge. In reality, Skylab didn't have a fraction of *any* of the capabilities of the ISS. It doesn't produce as much power, could only support a much smaller crew, and wasn't equipped with but a fraction of the scientific equipment, etc... (Even though Skylab and the ISS have a similar volume, the ISS has almost six times the mass. There's a reason for that.) Nor, given the small diameter of it's hatches, could it have been reasonably refitted to provide significant extended capability. Raw volume is impressive, but it's no more useful than an empty house. It's useful stuff that make a house or a space station useful, and Skylab was grossly lacking in that department.
 

The shuttle could have then flown additions to Skylab (which had a docking adapter for multiple visiting vehicles).

Yes, Skylab had a docking adapter for visiting vehicles. No, they weren't useful for adding additional modules. On top of lacking the structural strength, they had no provision for routing power, life support, data, etc. (Not without running cables through the already narrow docking tunnel - not that there was anywhere to hook them to on the Skylab end anyhow.)
 

When Skylab re-entered the atmosphere it did so under remote control from the ground, with its systems fully functioning until they were destroyed by the reentry.

No, they weren't "fully functioning". The third crew had to use a lashed up servicing system to replenish the freon loops in the air lock module (which were leaking). The also had to perform a spacewalk to install a back up set of rate gyros since the original set were failing. (Etc... etc...) Skylab was worn out, and it's equipment was beginning to fail even while the manned occupancy program was in progress.

A lot of people believe that Skylab was some lunar landing level program, and that in the same vein "tossing it aside" represented the loss of some grand capability. Nothing could be further from the truth. Skylab was a shoestring budget program subsisting on Apollo's leftovers and discards. (To the point where they had to take a hatch off an unused Gemini to provide an EVA hatch - they had no money to develop or build one of their own.) It had a minimal lifespan and modest scientific capability with no capacity for significant resupply, replenishment, refitting or extension.