Not to interfere with your nascent flame-war or anything but "self-funding" is not inconsistent with "getting more taxpayer money". First, they may get larger appropriations while at the same time running side businesses. Second, even if their appropriation were cut to zero, any money they make on the side becomes "taxpayer money."

One of the most fundamental principles of our form of government is that no executive branch agency can spend money without Congressional approval, no matter where that money came from. The reasons for this go back to the English Civil War. Charles I attempted to rule without calling Parliament, but since the Magna Carta English kings did not have the power of taxation; the House of Commons did. So Charles attempted an end-run by exploiting a fee that had been traditionally levied on coastal towns to pay for maritime protection in time of war. Charles's attempt to use "Ship Money" as a revenue source independent of Parliament was one of the key events leading to the Civil War, and was familiar history to the framers of the US Constitution.

Or... he could just toss that ball bearing out the airlock.

When an aircraft intercepts another aircraft, it's closing velocity is limited to between the difference of the aircraft's top airspeed (if one is overtaking another) to the sum of their top airspeeds (if they are closing head on). That's because both aircraft "want", in the absence of energy expended, to match velocities to the air they're moving through.

There's no limit (other than relativity) on the closing velocities of spacecraft, so when one craft intercepts another in the minimum time.possible, it's closing speed can be, in fact likely would be on the order of tens of km/s, an order of magnitude faster the autocannon rounds fired by modern fighter jets. If an intercepting spacecraft wants to have a classic sci-fi space dogfight, it has to expend considerable time and energy not only matching position with the target spacecraft, but matching velocity as well.

I use this this conflict between matching position in the minimum time and matching velocities in my own stories, although from what I can see that's not a common practice.

I think you overstate the case -- for the present.

Thought experiment: Imagine you could magically transport several humans to Mars along with all the shelter and supplies they needed. Naturally, you could also use your magic transporter to transport a robotic vehicle. Which would be more valuable?

At present, the humans would be a better choice due to their greater behavioral flexibility and autonomy. But over the next fifty years or so we can expect the gap in flexibility between humans and machines to narrow. In 2064 we might prefer to send robots through our transporter, simply because of the logistics of maintaining a pressurized environment. We're already finding applications on Earth where we prefer to fly drones rather than manned aircraft, and not necessarily because of safety.

Yet at present we still find it more convenient to do some things in low Earth orbit with people rather than robots. The cost and complexity of maintaining human life 200 miles away is plenty high, but it's still worth doing. In a hundred years, maybe not.

Here's what I think the lesson of the thought experiment is: the choice between a future manned expedition and a robotic expedition, reduced to purely practical concerns (i.e. excluding things like glory and adventure) will come down to the rate of marginal advances in robotics vs. marginal advances in space transport technology.

At present the state of space transport technology favors sending robots to Mars exclusively. But how do we advance space transport technology to make the manned trip desirable? Well, there's some engineering research needed of course, but the best way to gain practical experience in the short term is to send more robots. If we do *no* robotic space exploration, the advantage will shift even more towards robotic exploration, because space technology will stagnate while robotics continues to advance. If we want to see manned exploration of Mars in our lifetime (for those non-practical reasons above), our best chance starts with an intensive program of high-risk robotic missions.

Everyone can code in the same way that everyone can play soccer or bowling. Only a small number of people will be genuinely incapable of it, most people can master the basics, but it takes skill and perseverance to become good enough to make a living doing it, and only a handful make it to the top.

My first exposure to HHTG was around 1980. It was available on this thing we had back then called "radio", which was kind of like wireless multicast audio streaming, only with a very limited selection of content streams.

Here's the thing: a film is never going to compete with whatever you imagined reading the book or listening to the "radio" plays. At best it can show you what you've already imagined. And when you see what you've imagined it's getting a pleasant hit of external validation. Why else would a Harry Potter fan go to see a Harry Potter movie? They don't go for a *different* experience than they imagined. And Harry Potter and HHTG are written in two very different narrative styles. I think most people who read Harry Potter picture more or less the same thing, but everyone who reads HHTG picture very different things. So the movie was bound to be a disappointment if you went to it expecting to see what you've pictured in your mind up on the screen.

On top of that the "radio" play is 13 hours long, and the books have even more material. The movie runs less than two. That means a lot of your favorite bits inevitably got left out.

Yes, you can sink all your money into Bitcoin and hope that a currency which doesn't respond at all to the size of the economy works out and saves the world.

Or you could become more involved in the political process and try to get people elected who will appoint more independent Fed governors and financial regulators and pass better laws for them to work under.

Choose your long shot.

If your bike was made of solid gold, then a conventional bike lock would be useless. Also your bike would be very heavy.

The point is that your analogy has some flawed interpretations. What you're saying is that the use value of riding your bike anywhere outweighs the expected cost of its being stolen. That's completely valid. Likewise the marginal cost of a more sophisticated lock may not be worth the marginal reduction in expected theft-cost.

But information has a wider range of uses and values than a bike does; you can't just say, "well HTTPS may not be perfect, but it's what we've got and it's good enough." Some information is literally priceless. Other information may not be priceless, but maybe it's not really needed on a system so you can protect it by moving it to a less exposed system. HTTPS is just one of many tools you have to work with when addressing security. Naturally you want to use it as skillfully as possible to reduce your vulnerabilities, but part of the process in many cases is imagining what would happen when something you're relying upon fails, then planning to deal with that.

TELNET. Of course "flawless" means "meeting its design goals," it doesn't mean "suitable for any application."

China is a signatory to the "Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies", Article II of which states:

It depends on how the money is handled. If it goes into the general fund, then I think this is great. If it is used to fund NSA operations, I think it is bad. That would make it too easy for the agency to avoid Congressional oversight.

In general self-funding government agencies are terrible idea-- that's why running the government "like a business" sounds good but is a lousy idea. Government agencies should serve the public, they shouldn't be profit centers. That's a conflict of interest. In places where police funding depends on seizing property involved in crimes -- typically drug crimes -- there's an incentive to do it to make money rather than fight crime.

There are some exceptions, like water districts that are funded by water and sewer fees, but these are essentially utilities that are run by the public, their rates set by boards elected by the ratepayers. But no agency should be self-funding except that it is controlled by the people providing the funding.

This is definitely a YMMV situation. I have heard lots of reports of CFLs only lasting a couple of years, and I'm sure they're true, but I converted all the fixtures in my house to CFLs in the early 90s and most of those bulbs are still in service. I have been replacing them recently because their output and color temperatures have dropped dramatically, but so far none of them have "burned out".

When I bought these CFLs they were very, very expensive relative to incandescent or halogens. Now you can buy an eight pack of "60 watt replacements" for under $12 -- just a dollar more than an eight pack of equivalent incandescents. You can find 12 packs for $18, I wonder whether manufacturers have pulled back on quality to cut the price. I've seen non-dimmable 23w CFLs at unit prices as low as $2 and as high as $13.

As for LED bulbs, I have two supposedly identical bulbs but one has obviously sloppy build, lower-than advertised output, flicker, and an eye-frying violet color temperature. The other has flawless build quality and seems right on-spec. What I suspect is that the low quality bulb is a counterfeit. Cheap li-ion batteries are often counterfeits, sometimes made in the same factory that makes the genuine article. Who'd be better equipped to make an undetectable knock-off?

So the lesson may be to be careful where you buy your bulbs.

You'll likely end up trying a few brands. The thing is that with incandescents, you pretty much always get what you expect; the worst thing that can happen is that the thing dies prematurely. With LEDs, I have been burned in a few different ways: lights not being as bright as advertised, or giving off a horrible green/yellow light instead of "warm white", or a nasty blue-ish hue instead of bright white. When LEDs were relatively new, it wasn't uncommon to find differences in hue or brightness even between different production runs of the same brand and model. I finally found a consistently good brand for regular bulbs, but now the (costly) quest to find good spotlights begins.

GP and GGP posts were very much about attractiveness.

By the way, the Sari and that other dress (forgot the name) are not "traditional" in the same way that tuxedos and tailcoats are traditional or worn at formal occasions only. When I visited India, I saw these everywhere in public life as well as in the office. In our own office in Europe, visiting Indians sometimes wear them as well.

India arguably needs to be a tech powerhouse more than the US does. It faces tougher problems with fewer resources; it has to do more with less. It already has a huge middle class, but it needs to grow that middle class to bring capital in for the even huger underdeveloped portions of its society.

I wish them well. Nations becoming more technologically capable is not a zero sum game.

The IR thing puts a somewhat different spin on matters, because it's a step towards seeing through walls. A case like this came in front of SCOTUS a few years ago and even Scalia balked at giving IR detection his blessing.

Last time I looked into this the courts were still working out where sensory enhancement/extension crosses over the line. If someone were being loaded into an ambulance and you overheard the conversation, no foul. But if you couldn't hear the conversation and used a parabolic mic, that would cross the line. But what if your cell phone camera happens to have a really good mic? At some point the extension of the normal sensory capabilities begins to intrude on normal "expectations of privacy".