I don't believe that Orbital Sciences (now Orbital ATK as of last week) has any near-term plans for carrying people. Orbital's Antares rocket, which is what they use for the commercial cargo program for ISS, was only ever planned for cargo (And incidentally also uses Russian engines, the NK-33).

The Sierra Nevada Corporation is making their Dream Chaser spacecraft for manned flight, but it relies on the Atlas V as a launch vehicle.

So the only way we are going to get people into space without the Russians, before the SLS is done, is getting the Delta IV heavy human rated, or, SpaceX.

I think you're overselling StarTrek a bit. It was a silly action/adventure show with regular goofy fight scenes. It was though, a show that was written by people with an interest in core questions of humanity. On the good episodes that humanity shone through in a way that was novel for television. On the bad.. well, not so much.

I do agree that the show lost something in it's newest franchise and has become something else that I find isn't for me. Lets not kid ourselves on the source material though.

My grandmother has a petal operated singer sewing machine from the early 1930s that still works beautifully.

Sewing machines were a Victorian era household marvel, and really one of the first pieces of modern engineering technology that came into the home. Many were so well built it's not at all uncommon to find them still in great operating condition. You can easily find operating models from the 1800s in any antique store.

It depends on what your metric is. I'd be willing to bet that these kinds of companies cause more direct, day to day anger and frustration for a large number of people. Rather then the much more indirect activities of banks.

Yes, because clearly the only reason we are concerned about the climate is how much we are complaining and not little things like agriculture and fresh water supply.

Those 'minutiae' that would have been lost in the static to other generations sometimes became trends that became drought and famine.

These kinds of things can and do still happen in many parts in the world, and the first-world may not be immune to major shifts

He must be the only developer working on it because google voice has been about exactly the same for what, 5 years? I really liked Google voice, it's amazing for someone who travels internationally and a great way to interact with people using SMS. But it's had these problems for years, and hasn't changed more then slightly in all these years.

I mean, just as an example, when Google came out with IP calling from the web, they added it to gmail and not voice, even though it uses your voice phone number. They -still- haven't added those features into the Google voice portion of the app/webpage.

Considering each one costs $300k I think there would be better environmental pay back just buying 5 random commuters with badly polluting cars a new Tesla.

That plan has worked so well for the US so far.