I once worked for a defense subcontractor that produced a component for the cruise missile. Remember that the electronics in these things have to be nuclear hardened, which is tricky stuff. In addition, every component on any circuit board is tracked independently, testing is really brutal, and all electronics assembly is done under clean room conditions. I suppose it can be really inconvenient for a cruise missile to take a wrong turn just outside of Albuquerque

I suppose I should be pleased. My very local ISP gives me a consistent 15/15 for $40 - $60 when bundled with local phones.

Unfortunately with the military gets in the habit of bribing congressmen, and the congressmen get in the habit of receiving bribes the purpose is very rarely less war. We need a larger distance between our congressmen and our military, not smaller. For example, the congresses ability to specify that certain military money be spent in their home districts leads to some very noxious bedfellows; we will vote for a larger military-industrial complex as long as it helps me get re-elected.

Not to encourage article reading, but they cover 95% of the cost of tuition, up to a maximum of $2000 dollars a year. So if your tuition is $1000 per year ( yea, yea, I know, ridiculously low) they would reimburse you $950. If your tuition is $10,000 a year, you get $2000. What Amazon is willing to pay has nothing to do with what it actually costs. All of which reinforces the fact that this is more of a PR move than a real, viable help with a serious education. There are a number of low-end jobs (yes, even McDonald's) that offer tuition assistance to some degree or the other. This isn't looking like an especially fine deal.

I remember when I was a kid and they were testing the Enterprise out near Edwards air base. Periodically we would see it fly (glide) over on its way to a test landing during recess ( I was like 6 or 7 years old). My father was a fighter pilot and took me out to an open house at the air base. I was a huge Star Trek fan and seeing a real life Enterprise space shuttle was pretty amazing. I even got to sit in the pilots seat and generally look around. In terms of geektastic childhoods it doesn't get much better than that.

I just keep waiting for the spring cleaning notice for GWT.

Utah resident here, just over the freeway from the fire. The area in question, like all of the major Utah fires this season, is mostly grasslands. Annual grasses, small bushes, that sort of thing. There are some scrub oak and juniper further up the canyon, but these also are really bushy, barely up to the height of a man, and regrow pretty quickly. The idiocy here is not an idiocy of controlled burns. It is an idiocy of building on a hill that burns off every few years as grass lands in the west are prone to do. Without the target shooters in a dry year like this one it's almost certainly lightning would have done the trick later in the year; this hill has burnt off every few years for the last several decades I've been here. That being said, it seems really hard to justify target shooting at a random spot in the hills in these kinds of conditions.

In the mean time demand from Europe has fallen off a cliff, and demand from China has turned down. The US is not doing half the growth economists were predicting 6 months ago. All in all, it would be strange if we weren't seeing a significant drop in crude prices and the associated gas prices.

A closer translation: As he is worthy, trusts he his guests