It would be a bit cheaper to just reconfigure and re-paint a few existing USAF C-5 Galaxies, no? It would have the bonus of having more interior room, yet able to land on the same runways as the existing 747.

If only I had mod points...

The closest any third party has come to a presidential election was Ross Perot, in 1993. He had a very well-oiled hype machine and a shitload of money, which is why he got as far as he did. Even after he began stumbling and his campaign imploded (hard), he still got 13% of the vote... pretty impressive by most standards of the modern era.

On lower levels, Bernie Sanders (nominally a member of the Socialist party, but caucuses with the Democrats 99% of the time) is the only national candidate period to have made a national office since what, the 1950's?

It's going to take a radical change in attitudes, a really rotten national situation overall, and an even more radical amount of disgust with the current system before folks wander off to vote for a third party. Even when some ideological icon does run on his own (e.g. Ralph Nader), you will see the immediate (and dishearteningly effective) rallying cry of the threatened major party (in Nader's case, the Democrat party immediately started screaming "OMG you'll split the vote and then they will win!")

It'll take a lot to get a third party off the ground. Not impossible, but it'll take a lot to happen nonetheless.

Ask these questions:

How much competition is allowed for providing Internet access in any given US locale?

Why can we not have municipalities plant/string and own the local fiber/cable/POTS lines, then rent them out to competing ISPs for residential access purposes (see also Utah's UTOPIA initiative)?

Find the answers to those questions, and you'll find the root cause of the non-logistics problems that broadband faces in the US.

Nope - instead it'll milk the (soon to be announced) 'broadband improvement initiative' tax incentive cow for all that's worth.

Silly rabbit, corporate tax loopholes can be found wherever your lobbyists can dig them. ;)

Maybe he wanted to be fired in a most spectacular way?

Then again, due to the federal workers' union I hear that it takes a *lot* to get fired as a federal employee... I mean, you practically have to murder some senator's kids or something.

That kind of depends on the stylesheets, pre-compiler style enforcement routines, and the fact that a shit-ton of corporate code is often improved incrementally by multiple authors.

'course, there's still the comments that you could use, but who does that?

That's what "git blame" is for...

/me ducks and runs like hell...

Agreed - parts of downtown Portland were a huge clusterfsck for months after the first protests.

It started with somewhat of a goal - a protest against "the rich", and against a laundry list of financial predations against the masses. Then, it quickly devolved into one massive slack-fest/camp-out, with the last holdouts finally leaving months later.

No kidding... none of the mainline Linux distros use X11 anymore (that I know of), and they don't mention XOrg (X11's descendant) in TFA anywhere.

It's still a raping, but satellite Internet is miles cheaper overall than cell, and there's some actual competition for it other than Hughes.

I suspect it would depend on the star in question. A monster (e.g. Betelgeuse) likely has a gravity well strong enough to make 'em in larger quantities than our star does.

Also, neutron stars and other near-black-hole masses could likely crank out heavy elements in shorter order.

...could be worse; the kids could be asking "Who's this Hubble guy and where did he get that badass camera?"

Doesn't matter - she doesn't work, I do.

One state at a time. Once all states (or at least a majority) have it legal, then the feds will have to either re-evaluate, or double-down on their stance. Considering that the foundation for the relevant laws are tenuous at best, they'll become pretty much useless anyway.

(I live in Oregon... come July, it'll be perfectly legal here. It's already legal for all uses just over the river in Washington. I don't partake, and haven't for 23 years; OTOH, my wife has a medical license, and it works far better for her than the Oxycodone did. After seeing the improvements it's made in her life, well, the DEA can go fuck itself.)

Consider that Local Motors most likely found and are exploiting loopholes (e.g. hobbyist car-building from scratch, which is still quite active.) Consider further that they wouldn't have attracted a dime of venture funding without at least some plan to exploit existing legal loopholes.

So - you made the assertion, you get to prove it by naming at least one existing rule or law that could be used to slap them down.