As someone who has had a family member who died in a car accident, (my mother, Buffalo, icy February roads, in a hurry, her Escort crushed under an SUV, thanks for asking) I will stand up and say in a clear voice that it is reasonable for the government to invest money in safer roads, cars, and automation. Government is one way we organize those tasks we agree everyone in the country has an interest in. I think it's great that private companies are working in this also, but I think there's often an incentive for competitive entities to create several disparate systems that have complicated, sometimes incompatible interactions (just like computers.)

This, a million times this. Please upmod the parent post. If Amazon, B&N and (name your favorite other reader) had all standardized on a single format, without the DRM, I would be glad to have an eReader device surgically grafted to the end of my arm. But the books I buy in "book" format stay on my shelves, regardless of whose stock is up or down, while the proprietary readers and single-company DRM schemes could all evaporate in a minute. I just ordered a new set of hardwood shelves, to clean up the gigantic pile of "books" near my bed. It's being delivered next week.

> The obvious correlation is that more guns means FEWER gun deaths. If this were true, then there must be some number of guns in America above which NO gun crimes could happen. How many do you think that would be? 600 million guns? 900 million? Three guns for every man, woman, and child in America? Five? Tell the what the number is. I really want to know. At what point does it dawn on you that you're a sucker for another industry that doesn't give a shit whether the product sold to you actually provides the benefits you think you're getting from it?

I feel like the parent is spot-on and should be modded up. This is (nearly) the dumbest idea ever - and very much akin to 'Oh if everybody carried handguns, there'd be no mass shootings.' This will surely spiral inexorably into layered, iterated, endlessly complexified claims and counterclaims of who-hacked-who first. This is just encouraging more and more hacking, and its and admission that we don't know how to build and maintain a secure infrastructure.

The data rate for sending images and other science data is really low. That's because of the extreme distance and because New Horizons has limited power (produced by its RTG). The images, once they get home, are going to be great, but it's going to take a while to get it all back.

"Everything at NASA is always overbudget and behind schedule." This is simply not true. Some programs at NASA are on time and under budget. Take a look at New Horizons or the Van Allen Probes. http://www.nasa.gov/news/budge... "made billions raping us of our tax dollars" is offensive to me. I think it's excessive language and it's not realistic. NASA's budget has remained 0.5% of the federal budget for decades, and NASA's results compare very favorably to those of other countries' space programs and with commercial efforts. I invite you to work in the space industry for a few years and then come back and tell us all how much more efficiently and accountably it could be working.

> Why do you need a $80-100k professor to repeat the same words over and over for 10 or 20 years? ----They shouldn't be "the same words over and over". Do you think electrical circuits, or even Chaucer, is taught the same way now it was taught twenty years ago?

Payola was and is a clearly illegal practice. If corporations are choosing to perpetrate something like payola and say its "because of net neutrality", that would be their rationalization for having broken the law, rather than evidence of a bad law. If there were no payola in radio, God forbid, then DJs would themselves have to choose music based on how cool or groovy or mellifluous it is, rather than on who was kicking them back the most.

I think one thing that is clouding the discussion A LOT is a bulk of commenters who are willing to draw conclusions without having read the actual stories. This is not college football, where you might feel obliged to root for the team wearing your college's colors. The stories can be read and judged on their own merits. Substantial contributions to the discussion almost require as a prereq that you have read or at least attempted to read the stories you're referencing. One of the charges levelled against the Sad Puppies is that they went out and rounded up a lot of people to vote, who had not read the actual material they were voting for. The Sad Puppies group has put forward a slate of stories that, by their own admission, use the 'science' in science fiction as window dressing around what would otherwise be conventional adventure stories (e.g. spaceships and aliens and explosions, rescuing the alien princess). Right from that one piece of data, I would have to conclude that they are not using the full descriptive power of the genre. Disclaimer - I have not read the Dinosaur story you're referencing here. So, take that for what it's worth.

They're sharing gists? What's a gist?

I wish the parent were modded up. It's the loss of trust that's the bottom line. The constants may well not be back-doored. Or they may be. But once the trust is gone, and there's no verification of how the numbers arose in the first place, it's already too late.

Come on you apes, you wanna live forever?