It's not a matter of whether Boeing deserves the extra cash or not. Deserve has nothing to do with it.

Boeing simply cannot (and will not) do it for less than the $4.2 billion, otherwise they'd be losing money. But SpaceX can do the same job for less, at $2.6 billion. So you could say SpaceX is much more efficient than Boeing.

So why didn't NASA just give the whole thing to SpaceX and save money? Redundancy, hedging your bets, not putting all your eggs in one basket, etc.

Multiplayer can be and often is what you describe. But it depends on the community.

Some of the best online gaming experiences can be found on private servers (for those games that have them). Since anyone with moderate knowledge and resources can run a private server, there are many of them. A server's community tends to reflect the values of the owner, so just browse GTOP100 or other similar sites and look for well-policed friendly ones.

Most private servers have a very high GM to player ratio compared to official servers. On a friendly private server, the 8-year-old you describe that tells people he fucked their mother in the ass will get banned before his first day is over. It will have clear Terms of Use that outlines what is acceptable behavior and what's not, and how to report abuse to GM. The good ones actually care about your gaming experience and will take griefing seriously.

Also look for one with an active forum. Since the PS community tends to be small, you'll get to know most of the active players after a while. Browsing the forum will give you the flavor of the community.

Clearly you've never heard of Star Trek.

That's a good attitude to take. Even though I am on the other side of the AGW debate, I'll agree with you there.

Small change I might suggest is that some of the beachfront homes in Malibu are getting hammered now due to erosion (nothing to do with sea levels or AGW, just plain beach erosion). So let's just say a coastal city such as LA or New York. I'll stay in NYC, you move inland.

let all the texting/tweeting drivers go into a special lane just for them.

Build concrete dividers between that and regular lanes. With titanium reinforcements.

I am not bound by treaty. I am bound only by the laws of my country.

If Congress says I can keep the gold I just mined off Ceres, it's mine. Would the Russian government come after me for their share? Good luck to them.

There is no maybe, every study that has ever looked into this since the dawn of science has confirmed this. Hell you don't even have to ask science, every average Joe on the street knows this already from life experience.

It's just in the last ~20 years that political correctness mass hysteria has gripped academia and the media to where it's become a thoughtcrime to think any other thought than that all races are exactly equal in every aspect except maybe skin melanin level.

And it's just the United States and a couple of other Western European countries afflicted with this weirdness. If you were to go to, say, Japan or Russia and say to a scientist, "Some races have higher genetic disposition for intelligence than others", he will most likely shrug and say "Yeah, so what?"

But just in case you're young and everything you've ever read has been sanitized by the Academic Department of Purethought: the highest average IQ of any human race/group belongs to Ashkenazi Jews.

The amount of money that Exxon spends -- actually the amount of money that the entire oil industry spends on climate research -- is dwarfed by government funding. By an order of magnitude. These are easily obtained figures, just look them up.

If you are a climate researcher and you need funding for your project or lab (or your very existence), what's the logical place to turn to? Answer: where the money is... the gov't.

Assuming that oil companies fund studies that disprove man-made global warming and governments fund studies that prove it, you would expect to see a 10-to-1 ratio in the number of studies published for AGW versus against. And that's pretty much what you see out there.

Yes, only the priests at the Holy Temple of Algore are allowed to evaluate climate evidence.

Let the really smart kids (IQ > 130) take traditional CS. They can deal with the theory and advanced math.

The kinda bright kids (IQ 100 - 120ish) can take Computer Programming where they learn to code in the real world. Teach some business-y stuff too while they're at it. Only math required would be high school algebra and geometry. Maybe some trig but that's it.

As anyone who has done VR panorama stitching can tell you, software can only do so much. The output will have some issues, like things not lining up quite correctly or colors being off in one section, etc. So you have do some Photoshop work to make it look good.

Kind of like the raw data vs. adjusted data issue. If they show you the massaged data to back up a claim, but then say they accidentally lost the raw data (or outright refuse to release it, as in some cases)... well then you know they're no longer in the realm of science but a religious crusade.

Question: can I repackage Firefox binaries and distribute it along with my other files? I made a php application and wanna make it a turnkey WAMP stack. It will be called "MyCool PHP App" and the word Firefox won't appear anywhere.

aside from artificial gravity, nothing. No amount of exercise bike pedaling will save your optic nerves from being in zero G too long.

There isn't really any good reason to put people in orbit for 6 months+. Rotate them out every couple of months. Yes we needed data on long-term microgravity effects on the human body. We have them now, zero G does bad things to your body. So don't do it for extended periods.

Fly in the ointment is the expected trip to Mars, which will take 9 months to a year. Fortunately people like Zubrin have developed advanced technologies to deal with this. It's called a rope. Attach the Mars spacecraft to a ballast via a rope (they call it tether) and spin it until you get 1/3rd G. Problem solved.

Actually the newest version of RHEL comes with MariaDB 5.5 as default, not mysql. But MariaDB is more "open" than MySQL, so your point stands.

But but... in the USA, everyone is above average and everyone is equally talented. Kumbayah and flower power.

Funny how an entire nation can delude itself into thinking weird thoughts that, to an impartial outsider would seem utter madness. I blame the 60's unicorn liberals who are now firmly in charge (they're in their 50's and 60's now in positions of power).