Billions. http://www.spacex.com/press.php?page=20081223 "HAWTHORNE, CA – December 23, 2008 – NASA today announced its selection of the SpaceX Falcon 9 launch vehicle and Dragon spacecraft for the International Space Station (ISS) Cargo Resupply Services (CRS) contract award. The contract is for a guaranteed minimum of 20,000 kg to be carried to the International Space Station. The firm contracted value is $1.6 billion and NASA may elect to order additional missions for a cumulative total contract value of up to $3.1 billion."

The company would not exist without billions in NASA funding. SpaceX isn't any different than Rockwell, which built the Apollo capsules, or McDonnell-Douglas, which built the Mercury capsules. We've just gone full circle back to the '60s, is all.

From TA "Many prodigies like painter Van Gogh, author Jack Kerouac and mathematician John Nash had displayed self-destructive behaviors, and it is unclear as to why humans have evolved this trait. " Many people who *aren't* prodigies display self-destructive behaviors *all the time*.

Training with a purpose is more productive than "training to train", in any event.

I would have though Chianti and fava beans...

He had a youth. It just wasn't a typical youth. It doesn't say anywhere that he didn't have toys or exercise his imagination. In any event, a kid that smart isn't going to have a "normal" youth by any standard. How would he even relate to another teenager? When you are that smart you are, in a relative sense, surrounded by morons when you are in school. He'd have more in common with his teachers than the other students, even if he was lucky enough to be in a full-time gifted program. I suspect that this young man has a great life ahead of him, and I wager it won't be filled with regrets of a "robbed childhood".

Wegener presented plenty of evidence that drift had occurred in the past but didn't have a reasonable driving mechanism. His book "Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane" has remarkable detail, discussing isostasy in terms of mineral density, triple junctions (e.g. Red Sea region), and the boundaries of the plates. He just didn't have enough evidence (no fault of his own, it just wasn't available) to cause a major paradigm shift (ala Kuhn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions); instead, he laid some of the groundwork for future acceptance. The hypothesis was not dismissed out of hand or completely; instead, it was batted around with varying levels of interest until the 1950s, as evidenced by scholarly citations of his various pertinent articles and books. Scientists are typically occupationally conservative and require a preponderance of strong evidence to advance a hypothesis (Continental Drift) to a theory (Plate Tectonics); that Wegener was working out of his primary field of meteorology didn't help either. If Wegener had known about seafloor spreading, I think things would have turned out differently, but that had to wait for Harry Hess and his USN sonar.

http://www.thegreatcourses.com/

In my experience subways *pretty much* mirror the overlying infrastructure. They could have as easily studied the layout of streets, population densities, and zoning (industrial/commercial). You need one central location for maintenance. It really isn't rocket science.

University of Florida still has one http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UF_Training_Reactor.

That won't work if Pirates are stealing the briefcase...

...Rosey...

They aren't actually armed as they are not, in fact, law enforcement officers. That's why you still have *real* law enforcement (aka police) at the airport. All these TSA types can do is call the real cops if there's a problem. A Brink's driver or a Pinkerton detective have more training and authority than TSA.

Gene Roddenberry thought of that stuff in 1964.

A voxel is a 3D (volumetric) pixel.