If you get the real thing, get rock salt load. Stings like the dickens- has a usually non lethal but the stopping power of a .45 unless the guy's on meth or angel dust and then you ain't going to stop him without a submachine gun anyway. There's a reason why ranchers trust a rock salt load to get rid of the occasional wolf. Plus- it won't penetrate walls.

BTW, with any pump action shotgun (even a BB one) their only warning should be "Ker Chunk". Everybody knows that sound, and they know what comes next is pain.

That's a bit backwards, however. If the Right to Life isn't how we interpret the Constitution (sure doesn't seem to be how the Supreme Court interprets the Constitution) then all we have is specific versions of the Right to Life handed out to groups as we see fit, and the Constitution, not respect for human life, is the foundation of law.

Health care is a natural right because life is a natural right, not because the 14th Amendment should be used to grant it to [women, blacks, Jews, Catholics, the unborn, etc]

Probably one of the best things NASA could do at this point is abandon ISS, stop paying for it, and tell the Russians its all theirs. There is a fair chance they would fly Americans to it for free rather than get saddled with that boat anchor.

If the Russians don't want it either its time to deorbit it. It would free up a LOT of money for more useful endeavors. Its never been good for much of anything, certainly nothing to justify the staggering price tag

SpaceX will have the ability to put astronauts in to LEO in a few years. Its not like its a crisis, there is very little for people to do in LEO at the moment other than to be lab rats for zero G physiology studies. You would think they would have done most of that work by now.

About the only point in putting people in space at all is as colonists, persumably on Mars. You can do just about everything else way better and cheaper with robots.

So until you are ready to fly people to Mars to stay, stop getting your panties in a bunch about getting them to LEO.

"And maybe it's time to think about getting my first firearm. (And some lessons some where, having only ever shot a BB gun before.) I live in a nice neighborhood, but maybe that makes us a target."

A pump action BB Gun makes the same Ker-Chunk as a 12 gauge; the sound alone can make a burglar who knows what it is run. 12 pumps, and you have the equivalent of rock salt load in a 12 gauge.

At which point we get the steaming pile that is Cover Oregon, in which any subsidy you might get is swallowed up by the 10x increase in expense for the insurance.

I submit that before *any* right, are the needs indelible to the Right to Life, and until those are fulfilled for every citizen, all other rights are merely privileges granted to cronies in proportion to their usefulness to the oligarchy; nothing more, nothing less. Even the right of private property is worthless without protection of the basic needs.

Just because the market wants it and would pay for it doesn't mean it would be profitable.

They presume it won't be, so they don't try it. I worked for a cable company once. I ran the numbers. It worked to make money a la carte.

The problem was "everyone else is doing it the package way" so risk was avoided. It is profitable to provide channels a la carte. It's just confusing to the cable companies, if not the customers. But I imagine most customers wouldn't mind or get confused by "order the base package, and check all the optional channels you want". Also, Starz and others ran "free weekend" promotions every few years. The cable company could open everything up and let people see what the other choices are.

Of course, as the guy that oversaw the build of the delivery of content, and not the buying of content or marketing side, nobody listened. But the numbers were sound. Unless the people who said what they' pay for a la carte channels were lying.

The real reason it would never work is that consumers are dumb. Would you pay $30 for your favorite 30 channels, where you spend 99%+ of your watching time, when you could get 200 channels for $50? Sure, you've never watched 150 of them, and another 20 had a show on it that you watched that was on one of the remaining 30 channels, but is being re run. But you "need" 200+ channels.

I am nearly speechless that you would try to use the ISS as an example of a "success story". It was mind boggling behind schedule and over budget, though turning it in to an international project is partially to blame. The core is based on existing Russian design. If they had just launched that and kept it simple it would have cost a tiny fraction of what it did and accomplished nearly all the science ISS has done.

The fundamental problem with the ISS is its bled NASA and the manned space program white. NASA hasn't done ANYTHING useful, in its manned program since Skylab, other than maybe Hubble. They built Shuttle to fly to the ISS and the ISS so the Shuttle would have a place to fly. It resulted in NO breakthroughs or progress worth the price tag.

So what is your point on Falcon. I think you just agreed with me SLS is hopelessly uncompetitive and SpaceX approach is really smart.

SpaceX is trying to get to space cheaply, safely and with a very high launch rate.

SLS seems to be trying to come up with the most expensive, impractical and dangerous solution possible, just to keep funneling money to Lockheed, Boeing, ATK, etc. Its as if they are TRYING to develop a system that is sure to fail or be cancelled.

Note the proposed launch date, 2017, just long enough after the 2016 election so the next president can cancel it and start over.

The *only* reason we don't have a la carte pricing is that the carriers refuse to provide it. The carrier may be required to "buy" ESPN 2-54 if a subscriber has ESPN 1, but I've never seen where the subscriber must "pay" for ESPN 2-54. They could still be a la carted with the prices proportional to the cost. The carriers suspect it would be a poor model, but nobody actually knows, they just refuse to try.