Beware of Donkey Man! I have no idea what power he possesses, but he's still way cooler than Puma Man!

You'd think that mentioning who is in charge of fixing it should be mentioned. That's just a quick google away and his name is Jeffrey Zientz. There's not a lot of information out there, but what is there seems reasonably positive. Here's npr's article: http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2013/10/23/240283860/white-house-turns-to-rock-star-manager-for-obamacare-fix

Here's Washington Posts: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/wp/2013/10/24/who-is-jeffrey-zients-and-why-is-he-qualified-to-fix-healthcare-gov/

There are lots of benefits to cops driving their cruisers home. Most simply is that the city/state or whatever doesn't have to pay for a massive parking lot in what is often prime real-estate areas. It also helps them be able to respond immediately to a crisis when necessary. It may help somewhat to make neighborhoods feel safer if they know an officer lives nearby. This is one privilege cops have that I think makes a lot of sense.

There are no more individual assessments under the ACA either. You sign up for the exchange and with very basic information (age and whether you smoke I believe) you get the prices. No inquiry as to existing problems, past problems or family history. Everyone is buying into one big group plan. There's a similar process being worked on for small businesses to join them into one large risk pool so they get the same prices as the big employers. I actually consider it one of the best parts of the ACA. It has been delayed due to technical difficulties, but it will come around sooner or later.

I bought my latest color ink-jet 2 years ago and color lasers were getting very close to reasonable then. I just checked Amazon and there are HP, Ricoh, Brother, Dell and other decent brands for less than $200. That seems like an extremely reasonable price.

They are somewhat bigger though, so you're right about the space issue.

I think you have a great idea for a T-Shirt or Bumper Sticker there.

If you're not opposed to mult-player space combat I strongly recommend freeallegiance - www.freeallegiance.org. It's an impressive blend of space combat with RTS, and is completely free.

"not as efficient?" These seem a whole lot more efficient than wings to me. A single one-time expenditure of energy and they go for miles. There are downsides to this method of course, most obviously that they don't have any control of where they go. But if you accept that limitation this seems to be a nearly optimal method of flight.

While it's not entirely clear, the discussion in the link appears to be entirely about a Mars Colony, which I do tend to think is going to be non-profitable for a long time. He may be more open to asteroid mining.

So I should play soccer with my daughter occasionally because there's no profit in it??? I do things for profit (my paycheck) so I can do the things that are truly worth doing.

#2 is why I think Tyson is both right and wrong. I don't think it's even close to being commercially profitable, and probably won't be for at least a century, but on occasion we do things for other reasons. Going to the moon wasn't profitable, but a huge group of people (The US) decided to do it anyway. This is just a different group of people deciding to do something similar that will also not be profitable. One group being "public" and the other "private" isn't actually that big a difference.

There is a definite short-term advantage though. If you don't anticipate living in an area for at least 5 years buying a house is not generally the best idea. Buying a house ties you down. There are both positives and negatives to that.

I certainly don't think EVERY ASPECT of it was a failure. Much of the physical design was very nice. the kickstand seemed well designed and that keyboard/cover thing wasn't perfect but was clever and from what I read did the job quite well. The hardware in general was good, if not great. It's the software part of things that sucked, which doesn't bode well for the biggest software company in the world.

Thankfully the fine folks over at xkcd pointed the way to the solution yesterday: http://what-if.xkcd.com/53/

All we need is a portal to... anywhere not in Earths gravitational influence I guess, and we'll be set!

I just discovered something that may or may not apply to you. Apparently if the cost of private insurance would be more than 8% of your taxable income you can be exempt from the individual mandate. I didn't know this.

Link: http://money.usnews.com/money/blogs/the-best-life/2012/07/13/how-the-health-insurance-mandate-penalty-will-work

If your insurance company is just raising premiums then they're lying through their teeth and I recommend reporting that to your states insurance regulator. If they're also increasing coverage to meet bronze plan standards they're still being a bit deceptive, but that's more understandable as giving a full explanation would probably be incomprehensible to most people, but I'd expect they'd include more information about your new coverage (or maybe not since they certainly don't want you actually using it).