"I don't think taxpayer money should be invested in large Phase III trials (which can cost almost $1 billion) when they have a pretty low chance of succeeding. Moreover, you really do need teams of people to be competitive in today's research world - I work in a lab in academia, and there's no way you could do much drug development all by yourself."

Which is why Pharma companies are all bankrupt? No part of what I proposed involved taxpayer money or prevented working in teams. What I proposed are loans from the federal reserve on the same terms they are given to banks. The fed does not loan out tax payer money to banks, it loans out shiny newly created money at ridiculously low rates. We have an inflationary fiat currency and it actually depends on us putting new currency into circulation. Traditionally the finance industry gets all the benefits from this system. Advanced technology and especially medicine is certainly at least one obvious alternative place we could inject this money which benefits everyone in the nation.

"You absolutely shouldn't be allowed to make something that's going to go into people in a lab like you described"

I didn't actually describe a lab. Maybe you are mentally projecting your own assumption of some sort of inferior facility? Last I checked there is nothing magical about the pharma corps that makes them more capable than anyone else.

"I'm also not sure what you have against profits in general. For-profit companies aren't inherently bad, and non-profits aren't inherently good."

In general I agree. I just don't think healthcare and medicine is an appropriate for-profit industry. The costs are the same whether for-profit or non-profit. Profit has to come from somewhere and in the case of healthcare the result is higher costs which means less people benefit from the care. A for profit has an interest in maximizing profit and you maximize profit by providing as little as possible for as much as possible. This isn't in the interest of our nation. We all benefit if the health industries provide as much as possible at the lowest cost possible.

I don't propose blocking the for profit drug industry. I propose they shouldn't be allowed to use infrastructure that exists to provide an alternative to them and tie up those resources just to increase their own profits. Non-profits and partnerships still allow for teams to group together in a more established structure and work and allow for those people to profit from that work in the form of salaries in the case of a non-profit and in the system I proposed all the net profit derived from the fruits of their labor.

That's odd, that page says the E-4B flies as backup to the VC-25, I thought they used the second VC-25 as the shadow (perhaps if the second one is being worked on they use the E-4B, could be why the order for the VC-25 replacements is 3 instead of 2 airframes?)

The taxes collected are a redistribution of wealth from automobile drivers to truckers because trucks cause FAR MORE than four times the damage.

This is about the fourth time I've had to spell this out for you. Instead of reflexively reaching for your keyboard, start at the top of the previous paragraph and READ. IT. AGAIN. until it sinks in. If that's even possible for you.

You're also high if you think that the total tax and borrowed money spent on roads in this country is anywhere near covered by fuel taxes and fees.

Korean Air isn't going to scrap their 10 747-8's.

Plus it's probably easier to add to the 747 Missle defense and reuse the radiation hardened avionics

Yes to the first, no to the second. The 747-8 uses the 787 avionics suite which is an all digital setup, almost nothing is common between the old 747 and the 7474-8 from that perspective.

The only thing they're regulating is how government money is being handed out to telecom companies. You government is evil people are so odd.

Only four times as many fees so they can base their whole living off of socialist government entitlements is a joke.

And it's an established fact that trucks cause orders of magnitude as much damage as cars. Not four times. Face it, you're just wrong.

Uh, they changed the standard so that those who are milking on the USF can't continue to give their customers 1990's internet speeds with your money...

You can't stream HD video on 4Mbps, you can't get large patches is a reasonable time with 4Mbps, you can't Skype in HD with 1Mbps of upload, it takes forever to seed a cloud backup with 1Mbps (I put a few hundred GB in Crashplan and it took a month, I have more data than that but I had to pick the important data because my upload was so limited), etc.

Math: Can you even understand it?

Truck axle weight limit: 20,000 lb per axle.

Prius axle weight: 1600 lb per axle

Road damage is proportional to (20,000 / 1,600) ^ 4, or 24,400:1.

So the truck should pay $8,000,000 per year if the prius pays $328. Obviously, the Prius is getting overcharged and the truck undercharged.

No, it would appear that Foss's software is non-f/oss.

No, this is really an absurd profit, Standard Oil's net profit from 1882 to 1906 was $838,783,800 equal to roughly $22B today, so on an inflation adjusted basis Apple's quarterly profit was nearly equal to the majority of the lifetime profits of one of the classic robber baron trusts.

The problem is the previous build was visually different while being MORE functional, this build is less functional if you have 19+ years of Windows experience. The previous build had the Windows 7 Start Menu with the addition of a live tiles dock area to the right, it added new useful functionality to the familiar and functional paradigm, the new build is basically a shrunk version of the Start Screen with all the crap that entails and which the majority of users have derided as being less functional on desktops (still the VAST, VAST majority of Windows machines). We had actually started plans for a Windows 10 rollout to our enterprise based on earlier tech preview builds, but those are now on hold and will be cancelled if they don't reverse the insanity. We can just keep using Windows 7 for the next 5 years.

The other major problem I see is that this thing will have so many holes in it within months that there will be significant distortion to the image. Perhaps they'll use a self-healing material? In fact a quick google shows these students are working on testing such a material on a micro-sattelite.

According to this study reentry speeds are up to 9.5km/s so keeping relative speed to something in that range should not be hard at all.

A 2km spherical asteroid of average composition will have a mass of ~1.3 x 10^13kg, the energy of the B53 is ~3.8 × 10^16 Joules which for maths purposes we can assume is delivered in 1 second so an an imparted energy of 3.8*10^6N which gives an acceleration away from the blast site of ~2.9m/s^2 which should be easily sufficient to avoid impact if it's delivered with any time lead.