I have a few toys saved. Because my parents lost their home when I was in my early teens, and I was effectively homeless through my high school years, what I managed to save has a bit of sentimental value. Some items represent connections to people and/or places. Some represent what I valued before and are a symbol of lost innocence. Basically, what I saved fits into one or two document boxes...

Having lived through that, I know it's all just "stuff" and ultimately is unimportant. I could lose everything tomorrow, and would spend no more than a few minutes mourning the loss.

Silly people, don't they know the Zombie Apocalypse begins with an accidental release from a Government lab? It's not from a university lab. Politicians apparently don't watch enough of the right movies.

If your focus is on the month's returns, or the quarter's returns, you're not looking at the big picture. Long term investment and the ability to make decisions that may not show positive returns for 6 months or more, are easier to make if you're not having to report negative numbers and monitor your stock price.

If you're looking for a job coding with a PhD, you're looking for the wrong kind of job. Sure, I would expect you to be able to write code. Our PhD's write code all the time. That is, however, not their primary function. They're managing design. They're directing R&D projects. You should be targeting something that more closely matches your PhD area, interests and management.

You haven't paid for anything yet... The 4 billion is for development and infrastructure. You're paying for the pad modification/construction, manufacturing of first articles, flight certification and testing. Normally, if this were a commercial airliner, Boeing would pay for this themselves. They would recoup the cost over the couple hundred planes they constructed and sold. Since there is no business case with and end result allowing them to recoup the cost, they're having the primary customer (NASA) pay the Non Recoverable Engineering costs (NRE). This is standard practice in industry (any and all industry).

Once certified, NASA, as a customer, will be buying seats on the CST-100, as a service. They're not buying the rocket for their exclusive use; think of it as buying seats on a commercial airliner. NASA will be the primary customer initially; but, not the only customer. Same thing happened with the commercial airliner industry -- in the very early days, one of the major customers was the government and a buyer of cargo space was the U.S. Mail service.

ISS is not going to be the only destination in the future. Bigelow Aerospace plans to launch a habitation module or two in the next few years. They already have a contract with Boeing to use CST-100 as a transport. It's just the beginning...

Although NASA is helping fund the development of the vehicle, to meet their safety specifications, NASA is buying seats on a CST-100, as a service, not buying CST-100s. Think of it as NASA buying seats on a commercial airliner. The vehicle has 7 seats. The way I read the story, NASA is requiring 1 seat for a NASA pilot on the test flight and 4+ seats per launch to ISS. That leaves empty seats...

Any encryption can be broken with enough processor power and time.

Intel is selling an awful lot of Atoms, for a processor who's market supposedly disappeared. FYI, they're embedded in all kinds of equipment.

Because of the architecture, you have to implement a timer using the processor's built in precision timer/counter. There's one there... You can get sub-microsecond control resolution if you implement it right. The risk is that if you're running a multitasking operating system your timer might get interrupted. Of course, another way to go is to have a secondary I/O processor handle the task and act as the interface -- this is very common when dealing with Intel processor platforms.

Too many kids show up with nothing, or nothing of any nutritional value, because the parent can't or won't prepare a lunch..

Then you risk having two copies...

Scan you, destroy the original, transmit scan data, reassemble you at the other end. That's the only way to be sure... and would explain all the "transporter accidents"

Yes, maybe they're all genetically modified self absorbed drug addicts... Eventually they'd get bored and come on over to see if we had better drugs here than they had; something they hadn't tried before. Or maybe they'd just get the munchies and come here looking for better snack food. Or get tired of us bringing down their high with all our fighting; and come by to tell us to "mellow out, man."

Yes, yes it is. The retina does the edge detection and detects changes in intensity. What the brain gets is not full streaming video.... It's more like lossy, high compression data. The brain fills in all the missing data as needed.

Of course I know where it comes from... It's extracted from natural gas as a byproduct and initially helium comes from alpha decay of radioactives, as you say. Producing it through radioactive decay, that's the slow way. Helium is produces in a number of fusion reactions. They don't have to be energetically favorable to produce helium. Now... if you want cost effective, then that's another problem.

No... but a big CME, as it interacts with the Earth's magnetosphere, can generate an EMP. That's what actually causes the overload in electrical systems, not the charged particles.