Silver's a better bet at this point, anyway--not nearly as expensive as gold, the decline of the dollar against it is about as strong as against gold, and you can actually use it in the event of an EMP attack.

I hope none of the crew are whistleblowers... Also, technically, the Atlas V does not have 100% success. 98/99 have been successful. A failure "occurred on 15 June 2007, when the engine in the Centaur upper stage of an Atlas V shut down early, leaving its payload – a pair of NROL-30 ocean surveillance satellites – in a lower than intended orbit. The cause of the anomaly was traced to a leaky valve, which allowed fuel to leak during the coast between the first and second burns. The resulting lack of fuel caused the second burn to terminate 4 seconds early. Replacing the valve led to a delay in the next Atlas V launch. However, the customer (the National Reconnaissance Office) categorized the mission as a success." Looks like the customer was just being nice--or they were paid off and gave a message of success; they were compensated for the loss. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

What are their margins? According to Wikipedia, SpaceX has negative revenue...accurate?

You can thank Bush and Obama for that--no solid plan for replacing the space shuttle, and a long time period with lack of direction in program. In the end, price per astronaut to orbit (with inflation taken into account) has purportedly been far more affordable with SpaceX. Price per astronaut on shuttle was $170M. Price per astronaut with SpaceX has been $55M--which also saves money compared to Russia, who charges $80M/astronaut.

Hence, this stupid notion of fixed minimum wages needs to stop; come up with a legislative baseline. Have that baseline increase (or decrease) every year based on indicies such as inflation and CoL. Then we won't have to deal with this every damn few years and we can move on to more important matters, like geeking.

What if your explanation is "a wizard did it", and science is merely the exploration of how it was done?

The mobile site is still active and usable. I would hardly call it a "full" outage.

More like a long and arduous process of developing dumbass manufacturer interface overlays and bloatware.

The ISS is a modular structure; the habitats were designed in such a way that they fit together, and extend each other. Why on earth give it a static lifecycle, when you can replace those modular habitats and other components as required? It seems an unintelligent and short-sighted notion to give it such an abbreviated life when it's technically not necessary. I guess the decision is all political...funny how politics is nearly always the mechanism which needlessly destroys cool and useful things :P

Given the general lack of AV, maybe there is. Right now ;)

Well, being the cooler sheep is obviously far more preferable ;)

This notion that Macs are more secure can last only for so long, particularly if Apple gains more market share. It works for now, but the confidence of security will only go down with any associated increase. If anything, the Mac is the easier target--the best OS X has built-in, at this point, is a firewall. Windows has at least the appearance of malware defense. Also, Windows has a firewall plus it warns you if you don't have any kind of virus protection. And I know of few who own a Mac who run AV of any kind.

So, if an appreciable increase does come such that the hacker community out there sees more value in targeting that platform, there is going to be a rather large rude awakening for the Mac user base up front.

That being said, Apple is awesome at marketing; doesn't matter how well-represented the truth is, they just make things look good.

They gained rep with the iPhone, and it grew from there. That's why we're not carrying Newtons these days...Apple didn't have the rep back in those days. Mac OS, in the 90s, was far from awesome in terms of stability. People had prejudices against their platforms because of that, I'm sure. Perhaps that's also part of why Palm took off as it did. It's also part of why so many flocked to the Windows platform, and why Windows (at least in the PC realm) has such a huge share today.

I could see a gigantic consequence of this being that people go online for the quick answer and people start losing the ability to conceptualize exactly what that answer means--they'll be so wrapped up in finding the right and narrow answer that their point of view in the subject matter will be greatly narrowed. I think we've seen it manifest itself already in the past couple of decades.

A great concept, this notion of mass cheating on an overwhelming level (or so it seems) when you're talking about passing a test or turning in a paper. But, in the long term, I could see this concept as being a tool to humanity's intellectual demise.

Not that there's any way you can stop it, I suppose. It's like a train that you see coming in the distance, and you're entranced by it like a deer in headlights and it seems there's nothing you can do to move out of the way.

I don't think for an instant that cheating kids get excited about learning new things. I think they're just trying to do what they can to get the A, and little do they know they're potentially trading out a little bit of cognitive enrichment pertaining to the subject on which they're so desperate for that answer to get that A.

Not to say I didn't have my own bouts with cheating back in the day (I'm only human). In retrospect, however, now I can see the bigger picture a bit better. And I can also see how it likely robbed me of some of the essence of the subject...and, if you're getting a degree in higher education, aren't you there because of a certain passion for the subject? In that case, shouldn't essence be everything? A physics professor of mine once said it best: it's not all about the answer, it's all about the journey.

I'm an advocate of the notion that you learn more when you fail than when you succeed; stumbling through to come to a wrong answer can be more beneficial than breezing through to get the right one.