I really hate when people take that "Why build one when you can build two for twice the price" quote from the film adaptation of Contact and try to be clever by quoting it as if it had any bearing on reality. In the real world, the per-unit cost of building multiples of the same thing in parallel costs considerably less than building a one-off.

Android 4.1 (Jellybean) has a "liveness check" which requires an eyeblink to unlock:

http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/06/29/jelly-beans-face-unlock-asks-you-to-blink-for-the-camera-locks-out-after-several-failed-attempts/

Although I'm hopeful about the concept, I'm suspicious until the full text of the bill is released. Considering the proponents of the bill, I wouldn't be surprised if this ends up being a thinly-veiled way to protect particular pork projects, worded in such a way that it could only be used to keep projects like SLS from being cancelled while being of limited applicability to other NASA projects. After all, after the Falcon Heavy starts launching, locking SLS into a multi-year procurement contract is probably going to be the only way to keep money funneling towards SLS contractors.

Also, from what I've been able to read online so far, NASA (along with the DOD and Coast Guard) already have some multi-year procurement capability, bit can't use it where there's significant technical risk. With NASA technical risk usually means cost-plus contracts, and cost-plus contracts combined with multi-year procurement is potentially very bad, depending on how the bill is worded.

Sometimes NASA needs the flexibility to cancel contracts though, especially when a project goes drastically overbudget or is realized to be a bad investment. If this bill had been passed a few years ago, NASA would quite likely still be wasting a large chunk of its budget trying to get the Ares 1 rocket ready to launch in ~2014.

Just to be clear, you do realize that it's predominantly the right-wingers in Congress who've been most opposed to NASA's commercial crew program, and the left-wingers who've been in favor of it?

For anybody who wants to read the actual interview article with Bolden instead of just relying on MarkWhittington's distorted Yahoo summary, you can find the interview here:

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/story/2012-08-01/NASA-mars-rover/56656270/1

6th victim, driver in Dutch parade attack die

The submission and at least one of the linked articles are just silly "OMG CHINA" rabble-rousing in an attempt to justify the diversion of NASA resources from commercial providers like SpaceX towards giant white elephants like the SLS heavy-lift rocket (and the legacy contractors behind it). I've yet to see any evidence that China's supposed plans for a heavy-lift rocket are anything more than sketches from dreamy engineers, without any actual funding behind them; if anything other non-existent heavy-lift rockets like SpaceX's Falcon XX have more progress behind them.

If anything, indications so far suggest that China's space exploration plans involve the more sensible approach of assembling exploration modules in space, instead of building rarely-used mega-rockets that launch everything up at once.

Yup, the head of the House Appropriations CJS subcommittee in charge of NASA, Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va) actually attached a clause to NASA's funding bill last year that explicitly prohibits any NASA collaboration with China. Of course, this was the same Rep. Wolf who raised a media ruckus back in 1995 when he demanded that the Clinton administration investigate claims that human fetuses were being sold in China as a health food.

That's some pretty impressive fearmongering on the part of the Environment Texas group, but if you read the actual letter from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department you'll see their supposed "objections" are actually fairly minor concerns and recommendations that they'd like SpaceX to address. If anything they're as concerned or more concerned about litter from the up to 10,000 spectators that might go to see launches than they are about the complex itself.

It isn't apparent from this snippet, but the Rio Grande Valley isn't some tiny valley that will be entirely dominated by SpaceX moving there. The Rio Grande Valley is actually a gigantic area composed of 4 entire counties and over 20,000 square miles. SpaceX is interested in a plot of land on the edge of that valley that occupies much less than a square mile, and will be firing its rockets (powered by oxygen and kerosene) out over the ocean.

Brownsville itself is super excited about SpaceX potentially moving there, and I suspect few if any of the people involved with this "Environment Texas" group actually live in Brownsville.

"All models are wrong, but some are useful. -- George E. P. Box

I thought this comment from Buzz Aldrin was pretty cool:

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/05/25/11881043-space-milestone-sparks-high-praise?lite

SpaceX intends to replace NASA in the "Moving stuff into space" department, AFAIK. I have never heard that SpaceX has any interest in building and running science probes to Pluto, or gamma ray telescopes or climate monitoring satellites

That said, SpaceX is actually collaborating with NASA Ames to potentially Dragon as a low-cost means of delivering science payloads to Mars:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dragon_mission

Henry Ford didn't invent the automobile, he just made it cost-effective.