With how much full brightness screen usage and 2+ GB/mo of data usage? Sure, if I leave my phone in my pocket all day, don't look at it, and set it to only check my email twice an hour, I get 10 hrs easy.
 
But when I'm away from home, I use it like a portable computer. I get on average 5 emails an hour, an unknown quantity of facebook updates, facebook messenger, google talk, steam, steam chat, 2-10 google queries an hour, plus standard stuff like voice and text messages. My 2600mAh battery (Nexus S) runs flat in about 2.5 hrs unless I'm tethered to the wall.
 
I consider the battery simply a backup in case I'm away from a wall outlet for more than 15 minutes.

Maybe it's intermittent where you live; if I could run my AC for free during the day here in Dallas, the house would probably be cold enough by the time the sun sets that I could coast through till dawn and still have it below 78F in here. The electronics I run during the night would still keep my bill hovering around $35/mo, but that's $200/mo I'd be saving.

It's also $1.5 billion net income for the winner. That's nothing to sneeze at. 100 scientist salaries @ $100,000/yr is an extra $10 million a year in to the local economy. They will have kids, drive new cars, pay local school taxes and send their kids to private schools, buy new clothes, buy the best food, etc etc. The people who sell them luxuries will be able to buy medium quality goods, who in turn will be able to buy walmart/low quality goods. I'm not sure what the total improvement is, but adding a bunch of high end jobs have a huge effect on the entire community and generally raises the quality of life for all involved. I'd fight like hell for that too; if I lost, I know I'd have let my community down, and tens, if not hundreds of kids would lose the chance to go to college.
 
Sure, it's just money. Money buys a lot of things though.

Sure, but we've already been to the moon. It's rather bland. There's a reason why 2001: a space Odyssey in 1968 was the last film or tv show to prominently feature the moon - it's gray, bland, and boring. Sadly, Mars is just slightly less monochromatic.

So in terms of harmful radiation, how is that split? 60/40 for solar/cosmic radiation? I would have guessed 80/20 or more.

Presumably, large portions of the lunar base would be underground. They've identified several areas on the moon that look like collapsed lava tunnels, which provide excellent radiation shielding. Also, a rather large amount of time is spent shielded by either the moon or the earth, roughly 50%. There are worse places to be irradiated.

Russia has something like 3x more manned spaceflight missions, and at least 3x more space stations than any other country. Hell, the ISS's primary module during it's infancy was quite literally MIR 2. They just had a spare space station lying around and decided to repurpose it.
 
It's also worth noting, that when China ramped up their manned spaceflight program, they modeled their space capsule after the diving-bell style Soyuz capsule, not the conical Mercury/Gemini/Apollo style that the US uses. There's something to be said for that.
 
Russia might have one of the worst income gaps in the world, but their space program is world class.

Sputnik was a hollowed out ICBM warhead. I can only guess the political reasoning behind doing what they did, besides national pride/one-upsmanship.

I wonder if the computer was waiting to see if the pressure subsided before the launch window closed.
 
In the Apollo era, I'm sure there were some automatic shutoffs, but I imagine a lot of data had to be monitored by humans, making these sorts of last half second aborts a lot less common.
 
It's also worth pointing out that SpaceX is developing a human rated rocket based on the same basic technology. It would be really hard to sell NASA, congress, and perhaps most importantly, the astronauts riding on top of the thing, if it blew up on the pad. An abort costs millions of dollars, but three days worth of delays is nothing compared to flushing six years worth of hard work down the drain just because they weren't overly cautious. Expect to see more delays more often in the future to avoid catastrophic failures during launch.

That's debatable, they didn't have an orbital rendezvous element, although there was a separation and docking stage after they had entered orbit together as a single unit. Docking in orbit with something that shares your exact orbit isn't terribly difficult; they sighted that with human eyes via a periscope and used manual thrusters. It's probably one of the last real example of pilots doing piloting in space. Everything since has been largely automated.

Right, but those dozen or two lines of code spit out your launch date/time. Sure, it's not hard for a computer, but your launch time is a fairly specific point that you can't stray from, which was my original point.
 
Once you have your launch time, you just give it a specific series of headings and specific impulse times and you'll be in the correct orbit; with final approach done separately once you've arrived in your parking orbit. If you launch 2-3 hours off from your computer-calculated launch time, you're going to burn up most/all of your reserve fuel trying to correct your orbit.

Go buy Kerbal Space Program, get a ship in orbit, then launch a second one to go chase after the first ship in orbit. Even if your launches are only a few hours apart, it's difficult to match orbit (speeding up to "catch up" with the ISS causes your orbit to go all egg shaped).
 
I've been playing that damn game for about 3 weeks now and I have yet to successfully complete an orbital rendezvous. Matching orbits is hard. Space is hard. If this shit were free and easy, North Korea would have a manned space station already.
 
NASA makes it look easy, but the fact of the matter is you've got objects zipping through low earth orbit at tens of thousands (17,500 mph generally), and if you're off by "only" 500mph, well, hope you're not on a collision course with the station. Imagine roughly the same result of your car hitting a brick wall at 500mph.
 
TL;DR you've got to launch that shit when you have to, no ifs, ands, or buts. Apollo moon missions don't have a rendezvous element so they had the option of launching during prime time.

I'm relatively sure that feature is only found in business class laptops, as well.

There's a reason why Texas' legislature only meets every other year (excepting emergency sessions)

I would really like to see smaller (32gb) ssd drives hard wired to the motherboard in laptops, with the option to add a second spinning drive in the open hd bay. Unfortunately two hard drives is only reserved for the upper most echelons of business laptops.