Note: I'm a very happy Volt owner...

However, GM is a publicly traded company... What else could they say? "Wow, the Tesla's a really great car..." How does that help their stock price? GM is in the business of selling cars and in doing so making their stock worth more. You're finding fault when someone is merely towing the party line and confusing a news story for a press blurb.

I agree, now that we've got the shuttle out of the way we should start investing money in reliable, reuseable man rated launch systems. Maybe we could get that guy whose making those fancy electric cars to do it!

Maybe we should build a space station and man it continuously and learn tons about spending months at a time in space. I know, we'll talk to the Russians! We'll call it the "International Space Station!" It'll be awesome!

You know what would be really awesome? We should send a bunch of rovers to Mars to learn about it's geology and ecology, maybe figure out why it doesn't have an atmosphere. We could learn all about the long term effects of materials on Mars so when we want to send people we'll know what to build the habitats out of.

On a serious note, we've got a HUGE jump on everybody else. The Chinese are easily 20 years behind us, the Russians are quickly falling behind. In the near future we're going to have at least one totally man rated launch system (Dragon) with another CST-100 coming along behind them. NASA has plans for the HLV as does SpaceX. My money is on SpaceX actually launching a HLV first.

As for the moon, the question is why would we go there? The argument is that setting up a long term settlement on the moon would require that we engineer materials and technologies to shield humans from cosmic rays and figure out food production, long term habitation, etc. with the safety net of being able to bail back to Earth.

My feeling is that if we were to settle the moon it would be merely as a stepping stone to Mars and then outward to Ganymede, etc.

I *think* this was the first use of the F-22 in combat. It's also on Slashdot because these people are anti education, anti enlightenment, etc.

tl;dr: If war planes have a purpose it's to bomb assholes like them.

I'm already blocking *.ru and entire IP blocks assigned to russia at the firewall.

If they want to have their own internet with hookers and blackjack... have at it!

I don't disagree on the first two points.

As for the third point... The US is now a net energy producer. As for oil imports we get most of our oil from CA and are drastically reducing our reliance on oil from the middle east. It dropped to something like 33% of our net need last year. Needless to say this is going to have serious long term consequences for the oil dependent economies in these countries. Their capacity to spread their radical form of Islam is going to be highly curtailed when the money runs out and their own crazies turn on them.

As for the fourth point. The bigoted paranoid demagogues aren't really mass marketable. Someone like that wouldn't get out of a primary here in Massachusetts. Maybe in some other state, but I won't disparage.

However, at some point you need to acknowledge that these people are specifically deranged because of their radicalized religious beliefs. These unhinged beliefs are a direct result of their (mis)education. So many people try to turn this into a political or economic conversation... it isn't.

I think you're mistaken here... Odin is clearly the one true God. Not one of your false Greek or christian gods.

Quite likely spaceX didn't know how much money was on the table. They worked up a proposal to get the DragonRider completely flight ready and said "This is how much we think we'll need plus some padding." I'm sure if you went digging for the RFP you'd see that these milestones were set out by NASA with the percentages attached to each milestone.

SpaceX has been building, flying and recovering Dragon modules for a couple of years now. Boeing has not. That extra couple of billion dollars that Boeing got was to get their program off the ground. Considering that SpaceX has a current contract to send cargo to the ISS that seed money was already given to SpaceX.

I'm glad that both companies got a contract. Currently we've got 3 non man rated launch systems and hopefully soon 2 man rated launch systems.

Don't get me started on the HLV Frankensteinian monster thing NASA is building out of left over shuttle and Orion parts... I think that is a boondoggle.

Knowing that Musk is going ahead anyway, you'd have to imagine there's a pullout/cancel clause in the Boeing contract.

When Boeing completely goes overbudget and out of time frame NASA will jump ship to SpaceX.

OR...

NASA will chose SpaceX since they've already got a good partnership going with them. SpaceX people are already down in FL modifying the ground systems for Falcon rockets, etc.

Which means, very quickly ISIS won't have any M1A1's for anything other than stationary artillery. I doubt they've got the people to keep these systems maintained. The Abrams is amazing but it needs serious TLC...

Telsa should be able to operate showrooms where it wants and their competitors will either improve their business practices or perish, period. Let the free market sort this out.

Whenever I see a dealership invoking some obscure franchise law, what I hear is: "We're a dinosaur that can't compete against Telsa."

Let me be the first to let you in on a secret... Rocket science is hard. Last time I checked, the Falcon9 is racking up an impressive reliability record. Yeah, he wants to launch lots of them... which would you rather have, a ramshackle build an launch as fast as you can damn the torpedoes, oh well if a couple blow up or a systematic engineering driven approach to build a simple, ultra reliable, reuseable launch system.

I don't know of a single launch system that's <i>ever</i> been on time. When managers sit down with powerpoint and make up launch schedules and total tons lofted, they're just blowing smoke.

The only evidence they've provided is the fact that they've been modifying the stannis testing facility to test their mega rocket engine. Oh and that they've been building parts and testing them... you know doing engineering things.

This is a natural progression. They started with the Falcon1, then the Falcon9, now this. Yeah, it's going to be a long road, but Musk has proven himself capable of getting shit done. Not at your unrealistic speed.

Do I think SpaceX will launch a HLV? Yes. Will it be on schedule. Yes, because SpaceX won't commit to a schedule until they've got something tested. Will it require some serious engineering? Yes.

Now, how will this effect the thing Nasa is working on? Who knows. I wish NASA would get out of the business of launching things and focus more on the things being launched.

While I could see this as a viable (mis)use of the technology, I still think having every officer wearing a camera that they can not turn off or disable and records every interaction they have with the public as a good thing.

Provided that the laws are written so that the footage is automatically admissible in court. This puts everybody on a level playing field.

It would be interesting to see who'd oppose this. My friends who are cops are the first to say that asshole cops make their jobs harder.

I can only imagine in some weird way, Google/Android would be against this though. I think Android wants to think of its self as an equal or better to iOS not a VHS.

Don't forget that before this whole mess, the Ukrainian president was going to the EU hat in hand asking for 15 Billion Euros to pay off debts paid to Russia and to fix its infrastructure. Speaking of which, their infrastructure is in complete shambles. When Russia first took Crimea a couple days later the Russian minister of fiance was bitching about how much is was going to cost to fix Crimea (something like 15 Billion over 3 years).

So by all means, if Russia wants to take over Ukraine an incur the expense of actually fixing Ukraine... excellent, I suspect very quickly the whole thing will be a pyrrhic victory.

Also, while they're expending their military forces trying to keep the Ukrainians from engaging in an insurgency against them, we're going to keep putting the screws to them on the global market, causing their currency to go into an inflationary spiral.

As of right now, the Europeans have been hesitant about criticizing Russia too heavy because of fears about their gas supply. However, I can't imagine the Europeans will say nothing if Russia rolls in the tanks. Possibly we'll start shipping NG to the Europeans to further undercut the Russians? Who knows.

However, now that Russia has banned food imports from the EU and the US. How long before the standard of living starts spiraling downwards? I don't imagine that Putin would starve his own people, but who knows?

I saw what you did there...