Um, no. The Air Force gave Russia the contract with zero bidding process. SpaceX literally never had a chance. They're suing for a level playing field where they could bid against Russia in an open process.

The rest of your post is...... well.

You can't print stamps using that service. You need to actually purchase stamps, or have an account from somewhere like Stamps.com or Pitney Bowes.

There are a number of things that require it. For me the big ones are MLB At Bat, WatchESPN, Hulu, and HBO Go.

"I've never seen a floppy that big!"

"Wait til you see it spinning."

If the IRS does decide to pay Microsoft for continued support of XP, the chances of it paying the standard $200 per PC rate is effectively zero.

The numbers in the summary are total fantasy.

It costs a lot more than a new PC to upgrade thousands of PCs. Imaging, deployment, backup/restore processes for the end users is just the beginning. Upgrading dozens, hundreds, or thousands of individual customized applications to be compatible with Windows 7 is an absolute nightmare. I know all about this just from upgrading my relatively small workplace from XP to 7. It was a fight just to get core, mission critical apps to work with IE 9; 10 and 11 are out of the question. Lots of cash to vendors and app support folks, lots of cash to deployment specialists, lots of overtime. Adds up to a LOT of money.

By the way: $9 million over 680,000 PCs is $13 per PC. That's less than we paid per PC to have a contractor come in and physically install new machines at desks, and completely ignores the cost of OS licensing, hardware, support, and the thousands and thousands of man hours the IT department spent with associated tasks.

... as I read this at 1 AM when I have to be up at 6:30 tomorrow. Heh. "Tomorrow."

I'm sure that they don't. But we understand that roadways isolate areas and cut up habitats. We never really thought power lines would do that. But now maybe we do.

Nature doesn't "consider" anything. Your argument is basically that nature will adapt around us. Yes, it will..... but it might "adapt" in ways that eliminate important species, destroy biodiversity, and generally ravage the environment around us. Nature may "adapt" in ways that suck total ass for both us and millions of other species.

Because we have power lines everywhere and as far as I know we haven't really spent a lot of time considering the possibility that a simple power line is a de facto boundary to an animal's habitat. It's kind of a big deal when there are serious, important aspects of land use planning and environmental conservation that absolutely rely on accurately predicting and knowing an animal's range and habitat.

Do some reading on "clinical equipoise" and you'll start to get it.

The control group in a drug study would not place someone currently on strong medication onto no medication. That would violate the ethical principle of equipoise. The subjects in the control group wouldn't be given a placebo; that would be horrendously unethical. They would be given either the current gold standard of care or the new drug/procedure being tested. The researchers and subjects would both be blinded to which they were receiving. For instance, an RCT comparing hydrocodone to a new med would have both arms take a new pill, but both pills look identical. One would contain the medication they've been taking and the other would contain the new drug. That's not what the OP is talking about though.

I'm not super experienced in clincal trials, but the study the OP was a part of doesn't sound like a double-blinded RCT; it sounds more like a limited-rollout experimental kind of clinical trial, where certain people are allowed to elect to try out the drug. This is not really a scientific experiment that would have a control group, but a limited opt-in rollout of the drug.

I don't think there area any areas where both TW and Comcast operate. So it won't change the number of choices for anyone.

The beta is bad. It's so bad. The comments are reduced in screen width about 50%. Subject lines are deemphasized, scores are minimized, etc.

The discussions are the reason to come to Slashdot, and the beta trivializes them entirely. It looks like the comment section on a generic news site.

The comments now look like an afterthought, whereas they used to be the primary focus of the site.

What Facebook wants to do is send a text message with a special code to your phone. Letting the app read your text messages allows the app to read the code automatically so you don't have to copy and paste from the messages app.