SpaceX happens to have another barge for the Vandenberg launches. It still is a big deal in terms of landing in a desert, as you have the option of either trying to fly laterally to Mexico (with some international arms control problems with ITAR) or overfly Los Angeles and/or San Diego with that rocket.

Vandenberg happens to be located at a point where California sort of turns off to the east, and is used for polar orbits explicitly because there is a whole lot of nothing except for ocean between Santa Barbara County and Antarctica. Try to look at a map sometime and answer this question: Which city is further west: Los Angeles or Reno?

There is a landing pad being constructed both at KSC (in Florida) as well as at Vandenberg. Right now both NASA and more significantly the USAF (for Vandenberg especially) are waiting to see the results of landing on the barge first before formal approval for landing at the pads is going to be authorized.

It should be pointed out too that SpaceX does have a landing pad with several dozen square miles of desert to work in at Spaceport America in New Mexico. There was some construction work going on there at least in the recent past, and so far as I know the tests to be conducted there haven't been canceled although most of the current effort seems to be work on the revenue flights like this CRS-6 flight rather than the proposed test flights in New Mexico that were to be suborbital flights mainly going up really high and then coming back to the Earth with possibly a flight over White Sands (which is adjacent to Spaceport America and is both restricted airspace and ground access due to it being a military base). Flight clearance at that location is such that they can go much higher there than they can at their Texas test facility.

As long the launches are at KSC or Vandenberg, however, the recovery at the moment will simply need to be at sea. Physics also plays a part as other than returning to the original launch site, down range from either launch site is simply ocean as far as you can go in the general flight path.

So, you're supporting the lowering of health care costs by creating worse healthcare system? That is quite an admission.

"allows more" means "not all of them" and means "veterans are still at the mercy of our decisions"

And it was in direct response to the outcry from the public after the politicians didn't do anything other than lip service to the problems being exposed.

The fact is, the VA system still sucks, still has inordinate wait times for those that do not have the "get out free" card outlined in the news account you gave.

My actual solution would be to require congress to use the VA as their sole service provider. THEN you'd see real improvement.

Do not put words in my mouth. Government can do things right. Just not nearly the amount of things people want government to do, even if it is the worst possible thing.

The whole VA thing can be fixed, simply, by allowing Veterans to get treatment in a normal hospital. But that doesn't allow our Politicians to "look" into the abuses and "fix" the problem with ... more legislation!

Which is why the municipality should own the last mile infrastructure, just like it owns roads. Building a COLO is like having a highway to the city, where UPS, USPS, FedEX and private taxis can all use the same roads.

Fiber isn't Telco. Comcast can't have it both ways, say it is Telco and not Telco at the same time.

I agree that fiber is not Telco, it is data network. A municipality that says "we're building our own infrastructure" and allow any service to run across that infrastructure (think Roads and trucks), would win. Just build the damn last mile out right and solve the problem.

Reality on the ground can change, if enough people actually want it to change, and there is leadership strong enough to walk it through to the end. I'm offering my solution, it is cookie cutter easy, it just takes one city to set it up to prove it works. And it will work, because it is simple fix. Build the fiber out to every home, to a COLO. The rest can be handled by fees of those that use the service, and the providers.

Last mile is not a natural monopoly. Last mile is just like streets and sewers (municipal), and solvable without Federal legislation. You bring fiber to the house, municipally, you solve the problem. Don't let a private enterprise have exclusive rights to the municipal infrastructure.

It is solvable. I have a plan that works. It is just that nobody wants to even try it.

No, when liberals want laws to prevent corporatation X from doing business thing Y, it is the start of the process that allows Corporation X to petition government to prevent Corporation Z from doing things that Corporation X doesn't like.

Libertarians realize that most of those laws, restricting otherwise legitimate business practices simply because "I don't like what they are doing" allows for all sorts of interference into the free and open marketplace.

Mind you, there is no need for Net Neutrality laws at all, if you solve the last mile problem, and give people a real choice. In addition, you're also opening up the market to new products and services we can't even imagine.

Solving the problem where it is, always works best. The problem isn't national problem, it is last mile (in this case)

Again, the problem is that you have people passing laws trying to solve problems at the Federal level that can easily be fixed with some foresight at the local level. Yeah, it isn't uniform there, but rather than having "one size fits all" that doesn't work the same in NYC as it does in Casper WY.

This is why Libertarian view of the world is best, because we don't get crappy laws that hurt everyone, simply because a few people want them. Bullshit laws are created by the same process that Net Neutrality laws were, and they interfere with businesses all the time. And often because someone said "I don't like what ________ company is doing*, we must have a law to stop them".

*Anti competitive Comcast vs Netflix

I don't like what Comcast did to Netflix anymore than the next guy. I just hate what government does in response worse. Fix the damn problem where it exists, in the last mile, and solve the problem forever, without a single federal law, rule or regulation being created. Laws that will remain on the books, long after their usefulness ends.

VA is symptomatic of government run healthcare, where the patients have no choice. The problems at the VA are not unique to the VA. It is what I call "Universally Bad Healthcare".

Um, that is exactly where the problem arises from, federal regulations. Have you looked at the diagnosis codes for things? There are millions and millions of them.

" V97.33XD: Sucked into jet engine, subsequent encounter. "

Yes, that is a diagnosis code. Seriously, they have one for every random act of god that has ever happened. If it happened once, it gets a code.

But here is the thing, they have these codes, so that the Feds can track EVERYTHING about you, already. This is nothing more that Metadata, and with enough Metadata you can figure out just about anything you want.

He's got the winning lottery ticket, there was a malfunction with the camera's. So far I haven't seen any 'evidence' that that person actually did it. He might have been in cahoots with his co-workers. Splitting the ticket 2-5-ways is still pretty lucrative.

If he did it, he was pretty dumb to think he could get away with it. He should've
1. Remained anonymous (if possible, some lotteries allow it, some don't), let his lawyer pick up the money
2. Gone for a lot lower number (winning low enough so you can get a cash payout at the shop (~$600/week is still a nice bonus))
3. Allowed enough time for the evidence to be destroyed (video camera's probably overwrite old stuff every n months) then played and collected. If you implement your own RNG, you could easily predict numbers in advance.

Sure, if we'll also agree that "[introducing] (un)loadable modules" to a monolithic kernel "to address maintainability and extendability" does not in the least make that kernel any closer to a microkernel (because, in fact, it doesn't).

In other other news, Felis catus and Loxodonta africana have nothing to do with each other, except that they have four legs and bear live young.

Srsly, "both are kernels" and "both let you load and unload stuff" isn't much of an ecological niche. True microkernels (not "hybrid kernels" like the NT kernel or XNU) and monolithic kernels (with our without loadable modules) are sufficiently different from one another than "you can add or remove stuff at run time" isn't much in the way of commonality.