According to friends of mine in Detroit, you are correct. The existing bridge is owned by Manuel Moroun and he is the one interfering. They said his latest tactic is up bidding for the land needed on the US side. Presumably he intends to rent out space to the US Customs Service like he does with the land associated with the current bridge.
Canada, on the other hand, is financing the new bridge in exchange for a larger share of the toll revenue. Canada wants the new bridge. The city of Windsor especially wants the new bridge. The traffic backups caused by the current bridge are a huge problem for Windsor. Manuel Moroun wants to build a parallel span to the current bridge, but for the additional span to be of use, the roads to the bridge would have to be widened, which Canada is refusing to do on their side.
I would not be surprised if Comcast was making big money from late frees, etc.. Other companies certainly do. One company I dealt with, my payment arrived earlier than expected so was treated as a payment for the previous billing cycle and caused a late payment fee even though I had already paid that cycle on time (as shown in my statement). Then another late fee was generated for the new billing cycle even though my balance was 0. While I was able to get the fees removed, it still wasted my time and effort. I've even been charged a late fee for having a negative balance (the result of buying something near the end of a cycle then returning it after making the payment). Again I had to waste time to get the fee removed. Only to have it imposed again the next cycle because the company had a policy of not issuing refunds for overpayments. Fortunately, there something I needed to buy so I could eliminate the negative balance.
The Debian team is very conservative about what they are willing to call "stable". They are also very conservative about what they let in to "testing".
In my experience, Debian "testing" is very solid. I know several sys admins who choose Debian testing over anything not Debian. Sometimes they deploy Debian stable, but usually go with "testing" because it's enough closer to other distros to run most current versions of specific applications while still having fewer problems.
Personally, I think they could call what is currently "testing", "near stable".
Why don't we just force the private power industry to use the fission reactors designed, tested, used, and debugged by the US Navy since the 1950s?
How well would those designs scale? Even on the largest ships, the reactors are small compared to commercial power production..
(While they're are some technical advances to using more small reactors, the construction costs would be higher. Also, while I like the idea of putting small power plants nearer the loads they serve, there will be a lot resistance to building new fission plants closer to urban areas than they already are.)
My girlfriend (and mom of my daughter) and I both experienced the "push back" from society as we grew up. We were both lucky enough to get scholarships to attend private schools for gifted children. We've done our best to provide at least as well for our daughter.
We got our daughter into a private school (also on a scholarship). The school was very good at keeping her academically challenged. It also provided other opportunities for her, including "drama club" and non-varsity volleyball.
In preschool, the teachers actually appreciated her ability to read, letting her "entertain" the other kids. There was no more "friction" between her and the boys then there was between the boys. She (and 2 other girls there) would happily play with either girls or boys and was accepted by both girls and boys. She was (and still is) a "Lego maniac" (along with other building toys like K'Nex). She also played with a few dolls she choose herself (Pocahontas was one of them, but she never wanted a Barbie).
When she was 10, she stated that "gender appropriate" never made sense to her. And that while she wants to become a mom, "I'm gonna to be an engineer, kinda like Kaylee." (the engineer of Serenity on the TV show Fire Fly). She will soon have her bachelor degrees in physics and aero engineering, then plans on grad school.
Knowing what we went through, we have been watching our daughter (and her boyfriend) as well as talking with her teachers, aunts, uncles and cousins. As best we can determine, she's getting along better than we did. Certainly she knows what she wants and is making darned good progress.
A progressive consumption tax is easy to collect. But not at point-of-sale, that's impractical.
What's hard about a sliding tax scale?
We already group items into taxable and nontaxable. Essential items will continue to be nontaxable. Basic quality of life and basic luxury items would be on sliding scales with luxury items being taxed more progressively.
I can see where it would be complicated to determine the fair tax of certain "big ticket" items, including houses, medical devices, cars and many home appliances. For that, then I suppose the buyer would have to file a consumption tax return with payment within 30 days of the purchase. (Items too expensive to be "necessary" could be charged the "quality of life" rate at sale; items obviously in the "luxury" category could be charged the luxury rate at sale.)
As long as democracy behaves like the tyranny of the mob, it will be fought as such
The US tried to balance between the "tyranny of the few" and the "tyranny of the mob". For a while, that worked. Now, with the increasing income inequality, the balance of power is shifting toward the tyranny of the few.
Unless you are one of those few, can you really rely on the benevolence of those few? And for how long?
Even if you are one of those few, unless you are at the top, how long before you are excluded from the few?
If you're at the top, then I can see why you might like this.
If you want private justice, the guy with the guy protecting you as you sleep can kill you and take your stuff himself.
I know a woman who is a private security guard to a very wealthy person. She is paid far more than the security found in the lobbies of large corporations and 5 star hotels (I know a few of those guards, too). She is happy with her job, lives very comfortably and is very loyal to her employer. And is a former military sniper with the highest rating.
I think you are conflating different things. Higher intelligence does not necessarily mean higher risk of Aspergers or other social disorders. Your son could easily have been of average intelligence and still had the other problems you've described. Do you think he would have had it easier by being less smart?
While our society tends to mistreat the very smart, even more it mistreats those with social disorders.
My daughter is also gifted and scored an IQ in the 140s. Also has insatiable curiosity. Certainly she could (and still can) ask far more questions than us and her teachers could ever answer. But, she never has had issues keeping her curiosity under her own control. She quickly learned how to do her own research. But not at the expensive of purely social activities. She certainly pushed our patience and made plenty of mistakes, but never did anything bad. She's a happy teen who is doing very, very well in university (studying electronics engineering and physics). She's been with her current boyfriend (who is equally gifted) for over 2 years. And she's truly beautiful (scouts from fashion agencies regularly try to recruit her for modeling; she politely declines).
Yes, in some respects my daughter is lucky. I don't think that her intelligence was a risk factor in inheriting any social disorders. And she's certainly using it in good ways.
Why on earth does everybody in this thread think the plutocracy that runs the U.S. will allow a more intelligent general populace?
I don't. I think this will ultimately lead to a situation like the one in the short story "Examination Day", except that the overly smart kids won't be years past the zygote stage when they are "euthanized for the public good".
(In the story, parents drop off their son at an examination centre. Later, the centre calls them to inform them that their sin's intelligence exceeded the legal limit, then asking if they wanted their son's remains embalmed, cremated or donated to science.)
My own corporate experience as a software developer, architect and VP is that security is taken very seriously by industry and a considerable amount of effort is expended on that very issue.
I am glad you take your company's products' security seriously.
Sadly, most of my clients only take their company security seriously. Product security, no. In one case, the client was so averse to implementing any security measures in the products that, when our customer dictated we had to use a particular CPU integrity test that required a random number generator, when the project manager saw the name of the psuedo-random number generator I used, he exclaimed "What?!! You're putting encryption in the software?!! No!! No!! No!! We can NOT do that!!". I then assured him it was only a random number algorithm, not encryption.
I think that mobile app stores got it half right: the store simply asks for requisite permissions when installing an app. I've declined to try numerous "free" apps that apparently needed access to all of my private data for no good reason at all. It shouldn't be any different when installing Mac App Store apps. The only additional feature that I'd like to see is for the apps to define what subset(s) of permissions they can live with, so that the users would have an option of running apps with less permissions, with some loss in functionality.
For devices like smartphones and tablets that can't be administered in the way a full PC can be, I want *all* apps sandboxed - especially the vendor's apps.
As for minimum "subset(s) of permissions they can live with", why ask? If the app is asking for access to sensitive data without a compelling reason, why it would it also admit it doesn't need that access. If the app says "If you let me access X, then I can do Y for you", then I can consider. But even then, why bother?
The access permissions can be part of the sandbox mechanism. If I allow app W to access X, then the sandbox can allow that. Otherwise, it can just provide "Harmless X" for the app to play with.
I suppose apps could detect "Harmless X" and refuse to work. But, for example, suppose X is my Contacts List. If I never add any contacts nor delete any of the sample contacts, then my real Contacts is indistinguishable from "Harmless Contacts". Would be very rude for the app to refuse to work in that case, so any app that would refuse is probably some kind of malware.
Yes, I know that would mean no apps like TextExpander.
On my PC, I run Debian with SELinux and virtual screens, each with its own Xserver. Yes that means I can't copy/paste between applications on different virtual screens. It also means I had to create a lot of "Harmless X" resources that certain applications want to access.
Far from perfect. And a a major pain. and I know separate PCs would be a lot safer. I already have a separate PC for audio recording and editing. That PC doesn't have any network access.
So, as far as I am concerned, neither Apple nor Google have gone far enough.
I know many women in IT. And in other tech fields. Some of whom I've worked with. I've witnessed plenty of anti-female behavior. The most common I've seen is the assumption that anything a male suggests is intrinsically better than anything a female suggests. Next most common I've seen is paternalism. Rarely (but not never) do I see more overt forms (being in software development, calling a woman a "code c***" is an insult I've heard more than a few times). I know this is tame compared to what many people talk about.
And I know some people would consider this not sexism.
These subtle forms of sexism are probably just as bad. They may whisper, but the message they whisper is all the more effective for having been whispered - it's often easier to dismiss the obviously sexist comment than it is the clam, gentle voice "offering assistance".*
Sexism in IT and other tech fields is very real and all too common.
*I am NOT saying offering help is a bad thing. It is how it's done. However subtle, there is a difference between offering help to someone who is considered an equal and to someone who is considered an inferior.
The Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs were "Buck Rogers"* (or "Captain Kirk" or whomever your favorite space hero is).
We don't have any insert-your-favorite-space-hero, now. At least not one who can broadly inspire the support those 3 programs had. And I don't foresee one any time soon.
There is no vision.
It's not about humans vs robots. Yes, you can do a lot of real science for less money using robots. But it's not just about science. It's also about humans being humans. Of course, just putting humans out there isn't enough.
There is no vision.
Instead, we have pork-politics.
---
*Supposedly, the Mercury astronauts said "No Buck Rogers, no bucks. And we're buck Rogers".
This is the basic problem. Enthusiasts think "I want to go" and think that this translates to broad popular support. It doesn't. Nobody (except maybe the richest of the rich) can afford to fund their own expedition. These means that other potential astronauts need to rely on a support base to fund them. But where is this support base? Let's say you want to send 5 people. Round it off to 5 Billion. This means your mission needs to find 5 million people prepared to donate $1000 to send someone else to the moon.
15 or so years ago, I read about the Artemis Project. At the time, their funding model was to sell advertising and media rights. Their projected cost was about 5 billion USD. Seemed like the interest - at the time - was solid enough. Maybe their funding scheme would have worked, but before the team could actually ask for even seed money, they needed to show it was reasonably possible to succeed. (Supposedly, a major issue was contracting launch services.)
Also relevant, Artemis's 2 main space craft (the lander and the trans-Lunar transport) were designed around the Space Hab module, which was used to provide extended lab/work space for the space shuttle.
Looking at Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser page, they did receive some funding from NASA. As I recall, so did SpaceX. But as best I can determine, these funds were only a small portion of the overall project funding.
Unless the GAO (or a court) has issued (or soon will issue) an injunction to halt work, I don't see SpaceX (or Boeing) them stopping work.
While I like Sierra Nevada's design and overall plan better than SpaceX's, SpaceX has already delivered cargo to the ISS in version 1 of their space vehicle - more than once. That puts SpaceX well ahead of Sierra Nevada. Granted, the Atlas V Sierra Nevada plans to use to launch Dream Chaser has a much longer service record than the Falcon 9, I don't think that makes up for not having put at least a cargo version of Dream Chaser into actual service. Therefore, it seems very reasonable to choose SpaceX over Sierra Nevada.
I'm not sure about the status of Boeing's CTS-100, so I won't comment on Sierra Nevada vs Boeing.
In this life there is no justice. There is only law.
Every time I've actually been through jury selection, part of the judge's introductory comments were "This is a court of law. The only things that will matter in your decision are the applicable laws and the evidence presented in this court."
Seems to be a very clear confirmation of your claim.
I don't know what's taught in today's US history classes, but even as recently as when my daughter took US history in both middle school and high school, the teachers and books were still teaching that the US was indirectly* founded through an armed revolution against the British Empire.
It that what really happened? Or were the founders of the US just a bunch of thugs with guns who wrote the Second Amendment as a way to give themselves the right to continue to be a bunch of thugs with guns?
Depending on your point of view, the revolution was either a pre-facto application of the Second Amendment, or the Second Amendment was a post-facto rationalization of criminal activities by a bunch of thugs.
--
*By indirectly, I mean that during the revolution, the newly self-declared independent, former colonies were a loose confederation, codified under the Articles of Confederation. In 1787, the Constitutional Convention, originally convened to amend the Articles of Confederation, wrote the Constitution, which codified the country as the United States.
Also, not new. I've visited several factories over the last 15 years. The systems on the production lines were all connected over ethernet running TCP/IP. Granted, 15 years ago, sensors and other small devices would be in clusters, each cluster connected to a (large) shoebox sized controller, but over time, as the networked controllers got smaller and less expensive, there were more controllers with fewer devices connected to each.
I suspect the plant Intel "installed" IoT into was just in need of a major update to its existing IoT (by whatever name it was called).
Slashdot Mirror
They will still have the numbers to show that they "generated" X additional revenue for the city/county/state when presenting their budget requests.
Unless safety was not the goal aimed for at all.
Wouldn't they want to show something for the investment?
According to friends of mine in Detroit, you are correct. The existing bridge is owned by Manuel Moroun and he is the one interfering. They said his latest tactic is up bidding for the land needed on the US side. Presumably he intends to rent out space to the US Customs Service like he does with the land associated with the current bridge.
Canada, on the other hand, is financing the new bridge in exchange for a larger share of the toll revenue. Canada wants the new bridge. The city of Windsor especially wants the new bridge. The traffic backups caused by the current bridge are a huge problem for Windsor. Manuel Moroun wants to build a parallel span to the current bridge, but for the additional span to be of use, the roads to the bridge would have to be widened, which Canada is refusing to do on their side.
I would not be surprised if Comcast was making big money from late frees, etc.. Other companies certainly do. One company I dealt with, my payment arrived earlier than expected so was treated as a payment for the previous billing cycle and caused a late payment fee even though I had already paid that cycle on time (as shown in my statement). Then another late fee was generated for the new billing cycle even though my balance was 0. While I was able to get the fees removed, it still wasted my time and effort. I've even been charged a late fee for having a negative balance (the result of buying something near the end of a cycle then returning it after making the payment). Again I had to waste time to get the fee removed. Only to have it imposed again the next cycle because the company had a policy of not issuing refunds for overpayments. Fortunately, there something I needed to buy so I could eliminate the negative balance.
The Debian team is very conservative about what they are willing to call "stable". They are also very conservative about what they let in to "testing".
In my experience, Debian "testing" is very solid. I know several sys admins who choose Debian testing over anything not Debian. Sometimes they deploy Debian stable, but usually go with "testing" because it's enough closer to other distros to run most current versions of specific applications while still having fewer problems.
Personally, I think they could call what is currently "testing", "near stable".
Free charging at their superchargers for the life of the vehicle
Probably a very big plus. But I still can't afford one.
Also, this reminds me: How is road tax collected? (aka, "Road Vehicle Fuel Tax" that you pay "at the pump" when refueling a non-electric vehicle)
Why don't we just force the private power industry to use the fission reactors designed, tested, used, and debugged by the US Navy since the 1950s?
How well would those designs scale? Even on the largest ships, the reactors are small compared to commercial power production..
(While they're are some technical advances to using more small reactors, the construction costs would be higher. Also, while I like the idea of putting small power plants nearer the loads they serve, there will be a lot resistance to building new fission plants closer to urban areas than they already are.)
My girlfriend (and mom of my daughter) and I both experienced the "push back" from society as we grew up. We were both lucky enough to get scholarships to attend private schools for gifted children. We've done our best to provide at least as well for our daughter.
We got our daughter into a private school (also on a scholarship). The school was very good at keeping her academically challenged. It also provided other opportunities for her, including "drama club" and non-varsity volleyball.
In preschool, the teachers actually appreciated her ability to read, letting her "entertain" the other kids. There was no more "friction" between her and the boys then there was between the boys. She (and 2 other girls there) would happily play with either girls or boys and was accepted by both girls and boys. She was (and still is) a "Lego maniac" (along with other building toys like K'Nex). She also played with a few dolls she choose herself (Pocahontas was one of them, but she never wanted a Barbie).
When she was 10, she stated that "gender appropriate" never made sense to her. And that while she wants to become a mom, "I'm gonna to be an engineer, kinda like Kaylee." (the engineer of Serenity on the TV show Fire Fly). She will soon have her bachelor degrees in physics and aero engineering, then plans on grad school.
Knowing what we went through, we have been watching our daughter (and her boyfriend) as well as talking with her teachers, aunts, uncles and cousins. As best we can determine, she's getting along better than we did. Certainly she knows what she wants and is making darned good progress.
A progressive consumption tax is easy to collect. But not at point-of-sale, that's impractical.
What's hard about a sliding tax scale?
We already group items into taxable and nontaxable. Essential items will continue to be nontaxable. Basic quality of life and basic luxury items would be on sliding scales with luxury items being taxed more progressively.
I can see where it would be complicated to determine the fair tax of certain "big ticket" items, including houses, medical devices, cars and many home appliances. For that, then I suppose the buyer would have to file a consumption tax return with payment within 30 days of the purchase. (Items too expensive to be "necessary" could be charged the "quality of life" rate at sale; items obviously in the "luxury" category could be charged the luxury rate at sale.)
As long as democracy behaves like the tyranny of the mob, it will be fought as such
The US tried to balance between the "tyranny of the few" and the "tyranny of the mob". For a while, that worked. Now, with the increasing income inequality, the balance of power is shifting toward the tyranny of the few.
Unless you are one of those few, can you really rely on the benevolence of those few? And for how long?
Even if you are one of those few, unless you are at the top, how long before you are excluded from the few?
If you're at the top, then I can see why you might like this.
If you want private justice, the guy with the guy protecting you as you sleep can kill you and take your stuff himself.
I know a woman who is a private security guard to a very wealthy person. She is paid far more than the security found in the lobbies of large corporations and 5 star hotels (I know a few of those guards, too). She is happy with her job, lives very comfortably and is very loyal to her employer. And is a former military sniper with the highest rating.
I think you are conflating different things. Higher intelligence does not necessarily mean higher risk of Aspergers or other social disorders. Your son could easily have been of average intelligence and still had the other problems you've described. Do you think he would have had it easier by being less smart?
While our society tends to mistreat the very smart, even more it mistreats those with social disorders.
My daughter is also gifted and scored an IQ in the 140s. Also has insatiable curiosity. Certainly she could (and still can) ask far more questions than us and her teachers could ever answer. But, she never has had issues keeping her curiosity under her own control. She quickly learned how to do her own research. But not at the expensive of purely social activities. She certainly pushed our patience and made plenty of mistakes, but never did anything bad. She's a happy teen who is doing very, very well in university (studying electronics engineering and physics). She's been with her current boyfriend (who is equally gifted) for over 2 years. And she's truly beautiful (scouts from fashion agencies regularly try to recruit her for modeling; she politely declines).
Yes, in some respects my daughter is lucky. I don't think that her intelligence was a risk factor in inheriting any social disorders. And she's certainly using it in good ways.
Why on earth does everybody in this thread think the plutocracy that runs the U.S. will allow a more intelligent general populace?
I don't. I think this will ultimately lead to a situation like the one in the short story "Examination Day", except that the overly smart kids won't be years past the zygote stage when they are "euthanized for the public good".
(In the story, parents drop off their son at an examination centre. Later, the centre calls them to inform them that their sin's intelligence exceeded the legal limit, then asking if they wanted their son's remains embalmed, cremated or donated to science.)
Did anyone else notive the fact that this dude's a professor in theoretical physics? He wouldn't know a genome from a hole in the wall
Why would high level expertise in one field necessarily exclude low* or even mid level expertise in other fields?
*by "low level expertise", I mean above the level of a well informed "ordinary person".
My own corporate experience as a software developer, architect and VP is that security is taken very seriously by industry and a considerable amount of effort is expended on that very issue.
I am glad you take your company's products' security seriously.
Sadly, most of my clients only take their company security seriously. Product security, no. In one case, the client was so averse to implementing any security measures in the products that, when our customer dictated we had to use a particular CPU integrity test that required a random number generator, when the project manager saw the name of the psuedo-random number generator I used, he exclaimed "What?!! You're putting encryption in the software?!! No!! No!! No!! We can NOT do that!!". I then assured him it was only a random number algorithm, not encryption.
I think that mobile app stores got it half right: the store simply asks for requisite permissions when installing an app. I've declined to try numerous "free" apps that apparently needed access to all of my private data for no good reason at all. It shouldn't be any different when installing Mac App Store apps. The only additional feature that I'd like to see is for the apps to define what subset(s) of permissions they can live with, so that the users would have an option of running apps with less permissions, with some loss in functionality.
For devices like smartphones and tablets that can't be administered in the way a full PC can be, I want *all* apps sandboxed - especially the vendor's apps.
As for minimum "subset(s) of permissions they can live with", why ask? If the app is asking for access to sensitive data without a compelling reason, why it would it also admit it doesn't need that access. If the app says "If you let me access X, then I can do Y for you", then I can consider. But even then, why bother?
The access permissions can be part of the sandbox mechanism. If I allow app W to access X, then the sandbox can allow that. Otherwise, it can just provide "Harmless X" for the app to play with.
I suppose apps could detect "Harmless X" and refuse to work. But, for example, suppose X is my Contacts List. If I never add any contacts nor delete any of the sample contacts, then my real Contacts is indistinguishable from "Harmless Contacts". Would be very rude for the app to refuse to work in that case, so any app that would refuse is probably some kind of malware.
Yes, I know that would mean no apps like TextExpander.
On my PC, I run Debian with SELinux and virtual screens, each with its own Xserver. Yes that means I can't copy/paste between applications on different virtual screens. It also means I had to create a lot of "Harmless X" resources that certain applications want to access.
Far from perfect. And a a major pain. and I know separate PCs would be a lot safer. I already have a separate PC for audio recording and editing. That PC doesn't have any network access.
So, as far as I am concerned, neither Apple nor Google have gone far enough.
I know many women in IT. And in other tech fields. Some of whom I've worked with. I've witnessed plenty of anti-female behavior. The most common I've seen is the assumption that anything a male suggests is intrinsically better than anything a female suggests. Next most common I've seen is paternalism. Rarely (but not never) do I see more overt forms (being in software development, calling a woman a "code c***" is an insult I've heard more than a few times). I know this is tame compared to what many people talk about.
And I know some people would consider this not sexism.
These subtle forms of sexism are probably just as bad. They may whisper, but the message they whisper is all the more effective for having been whispered - it's often easier to dismiss the obviously sexist comment than it is the clam, gentle voice "offering assistance".*
Sexism in IT and other tech fields is very real and all too common.
*I am NOT saying offering help is a bad thing. It is how it's done. However subtle, there is a difference between offering help to someone who is considered an equal and to someone who is considered an inferior.
The Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs were "Buck Rogers"* (or "Captain Kirk" or whomever your favorite space hero is).
We don't have any insert-your-favorite-space-hero, now. At least not one who can broadly inspire the support those 3 programs had. And I don't foresee one any time soon.
There is no vision.
It's not about humans vs robots. Yes, you can do a lot of real science for less money using robots. But it's not just about science. It's also about humans being humans. Of course, just putting humans out there isn't enough.
There is no vision.
Instead, we have pork-politics.
---
*Supposedly, the Mercury astronauts said "No Buck Rogers, no bucks. And we're buck Rogers".
This is the basic problem. Enthusiasts think "I want to go" and think that this translates to broad popular support. It doesn't. Nobody (except maybe the richest of the rich) can afford to fund their own expedition. These means that other potential astronauts need to rely on a support base to fund them. But where is this support base? Let's say you want to send 5 people. Round it off to 5 Billion. This means your mission needs to find 5 million people prepared to donate $1000 to send someone else to the moon.
15 or so years ago, I read about the Artemis Project. At the time, their funding model was to sell advertising and media rights. Their projected cost was about 5 billion USD. Seemed like the interest - at the time - was solid enough. Maybe their funding scheme would have worked, but before the team could actually ask for even seed money, they needed to show it was reasonably possible to succeed. (Supposedly, a major issue was contracting launch services.)
Also relevant, Artemis's 2 main space craft (the lander and the trans-Lunar transport) were designed around the Space Hab module, which was used to provide extended lab/work space for the space shuttle.
Yeah, throw in the random human factor
The cars in the fake city may be driverless, but the simulation is still being controlled by humans.
I can tell you from first hand experience, when the sim director is in a bad mood, the simulation gets very, very "interesting".
Looking at Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser page, they did receive some funding from NASA. As I recall, so did SpaceX. But as best I can determine, these funds were only a small portion of the overall project funding.
Unless the GAO (or a court) has issued (or soon will issue) an injunction to halt work, I don't see SpaceX (or Boeing) them stopping work.
While I like Sierra Nevada's design and overall plan better than SpaceX's, SpaceX has already delivered cargo to the ISS in version 1 of their space vehicle - more than once. That puts SpaceX well ahead of Sierra Nevada. Granted, the Atlas V Sierra Nevada plans to use to launch Dream Chaser has a much longer service record than the Falcon 9, I don't think that makes up for not having put at least a cargo version of Dream Chaser into actual service. Therefore, it seems very reasonable to choose SpaceX over Sierra Nevada.
I'm not sure about the status of Boeing's CTS-100, so I won't comment on Sierra Nevada vs Boeing.
Their ideology is that anything that gets in their way of accumulating more money is unfair.
In this life there is no justice. There is only law.
Every time I've actually been through jury selection, part of the judge's introductory comments were "This is a court of law. The only things that will matter in your decision are the applicable laws and the evidence presented in this court."
Seems to be a very clear confirmation of your claim.
I don't know what's taught in today's US history classes, but even as recently as when my daughter took US history in both middle school and high school, the teachers and books were still teaching that the US was indirectly* founded through an armed revolution against the British Empire.
It that what really happened? Or were the founders of the US just a bunch of thugs with guns who wrote the Second Amendment as a way to give themselves the right to continue to be a bunch of thugs with guns?
Depending on your point of view, the revolution was either a pre-facto application of the Second Amendment, or the Second Amendment was a post-facto rationalization of criminal activities by a bunch of thugs.
--
*By indirectly, I mean that during the revolution, the newly self-declared independent, former colonies were a loose confederation, codified under the Articles of Confederation. In 1787, the Constitutional Convention, originally convened to amend the Articles of Confederation, wrote the Constitution, which codified the country as the United States.
Also, not new. I've visited several factories over the last 15 years. The systems on the production lines were all connected over ethernet running TCP/IP. Granted, 15 years ago, sensors and other small devices would be in clusters, each cluster connected to a (large) shoebox sized controller, but over time, as the networked controllers got smaller and less expensive, there were more controllers with fewer devices connected to each.
I suspect the plant Intel "installed" IoT into was just in need of a major update to its existing IoT (by whatever name it was called).