Here's an in depth article specifically addressing this issue: Failure to Launch. It was published in March this year, five months before the Virgin Galactic crash. It painted a pretty grim picture then, so obviously things are even more dire now.

Some quotes.

In the absence of Galactic operations, the only passengers who have lifted off from Spaceport America are the cremated remains of people whose families have paid UP Aerospace to launch their dead loved ones on a final joyride.

Speaking about Richard Branson:

“What you have is one of the poorest states in the country and the taxpayers in this state subsidizing the business of a billionaire for the benefit of multimillionaires,” says Gessing.

The actual hub of commercial US space launch development is the Mohave Air and Space Port.

That facility recently released a promotional video calling itself “The Modern-Day Kitty Hawk,” and it may very well be right. Including Virgin Galactic, there are 17 commercial space companies using 19 rocket launch sites at Mojave. “It is the center of aerospace entrepreneurial development,” says Galactic CEO George Whitesides.

Even for Virgin Galactic, Mojave is where the jobs are.

Galactic job offerings announced via Twitter in the final months of 2013 were for nearly 50 positions to be based in Mojave, ranging from jobs like systems engineering lead to hydraulics systems engineer to propulsion test manager. In that same period only nine jobs to be based at Spaceport America were advertised, and those jobs were not lucrative engineering gigs but decidedly more menial positions like warehouse manager and diesel technician and manager of maintenance. ... But for every one job based at the New Mexico spaceport, there are still another five announced for Mojave.

The whole mess sounds a lot like the scam pulled by major league sports franchises: they get cities to build billion dollar stadiums, tax breaks that make it unlikely that the cities will ever directly make money from the team, and then hire a bunch of part time workers to run concessions. Not exactly high paying jobs that will fuel economic growth in the region.

It's another case of the ultra wealthy getting corporate welfare at the expense of people who really can't afford it. It doesn't much look like capitalism, it looks a lot more like a feudal lord starving the peasants to keep the castle in business.

I will tell you how it works from the other side of the fence.

First, find some area with a high cool factor. Cool can be substituted for almost anything else, like management.

Find potential employees who are obsessed with your cool idea/company. There are two equally important characteristics that these people must have: they must be really smart, and they must be ready to do anything to make the cool happen.

Promise them two things: they will help change the world, and any sacrifice they make now will pay off in big bucks when you succeed. Pay them a moderately OK salary, but not anywhere near the high end. If pay ever comes up talk about cool, loyalty and payoffs in the indefinite future.

Work them until blood comes of their ears. If possible cater their meals, so they spend all their time either at work or with their co-workers. This keeps them from realizing that you are stealing their life. It helps if you can find single people, or couples where you hire both people. Social ties to non-employees just cause trouble.

Raise money, get customers, and go into panic mode. Take the people you have hired with no management experience and make them manage stuff. Don't hire professional managers because it is a waste of money and time. Also, if they know that you are making mistakes, they might challenge you and make the staff start wondering if you know what you are doing.

Pay yourself very well, but act humble. If the place is small, take people out to lunch or dinner a lot. It's tax deductible, and it makes them think you give a rat's ass about them.

Be a technical success at the cost of business failure. Over promise and deliver late, but show great technical chops. Make sure that everyone in your market area sees how good your results are, even if they are not economically viable.

Go out of business. Be apologetic to your employees about failing. Tell them they did a great job and it's not their fault. It helps if you have a partner you can blame.

This is all OK, because you got the big salary, so you can buy a house and have a new car, etc. You also have the intangible asset of having a high profile start up with high technical visibility.

Do it again as many times as you can. If you do it right you will have some workers, clients, and even investors who will follow you around and experience the cycle multiple times. Your net worth can go up and you can become respected in your field without ever running a successful business. It's called failing up. It's a very popular career path in both Silicon Valley and Hollywood.

There is no content outside the pay wall that is useful.

What does a 'write-once-erase’ access model mean? For all we know, it means they can only write the data once, not more then once, and erase it without the ability to do any reads. That's one interpretation of those three words in that order.

Is there some way we can retroactively erase this from Slashdot? It's so broken it cannot be fixed.

Everyone leave this now and don't come back. It's the closest we can get to erasing it. That's what I'm doing. Now.

Otherwise this wouldn't even come up.

Who just increased their numbers in the House and took over the Senate? Except for executive action, the Democrats have nothing for the next two years.

Mitch McConnell is already talking like he was elected President. The Republican right is already talking abut impeachment.

Your whining about "liburuls" controlling the US is a blend of propaganda and paranoid delusion. Turn off the Fox News, leave your parents basement and visit the real world.

When will the 5 year old be replaced by a 1H-B because it's cheaper?

Ohh, scary scary. Some evil Swedish "librurls" want to take control of your dick. And they have an entire $36,672 in funding. I can see why you are taking it so seriously.

It's a real credible threat. They hate us for our freedom. Maybe we should fake some intelligence about weapons of mass destruction and invade their ass.

The market capitalization of Activision/Blizzard is $14 Billion. Take Two is $2 billion. Meanwhile someone is spending under $40K in Europe to do a study. How much impact can that possibly have?

Sweden is the Berkeley of Europe. They could ban all video games and it would make no discernible difference outside of Sweden. Just like Berkeley can pass laws on drugs or political asylum and it may or may not have any impact even inside the city limits. It's mostly posturing.

So why the freakout? It's clearly disproportionate. It gives the impression that there is a vast amount of insecurity, or maybe some unacknowledged internal guilt. It sure doesn't look like adult behavior under any circumstance,

The whole code.org thing always smelled fishy to me. When the "join the high paid software field with only six days/weeks/months of training" crap showed up I was even more befuddled. Nothing seemed to add up.

Now it all makes sense. These are cheap flashy diversions intended as distraction from the real agenda. They can claim they are supporting the future of STEM education in the US, and training those post K-12 to become employable in software. See, they are patriotic businessmen who love the US!!!

Meanwhile the real plan is to flood the market with unlimited foreign trained employees and drive technical salaries into the dirt. They won't be satisfied until technical talent is in the same range as minimum wage.

Before anyone screams that I'm crazy, that is exactly what happened in the visual effects industry. A combination of moving jobs offshore, lots of 1H-B visas, and a glut of under-trained people moved salaries for many into the under $25/hour range. No health insurance, and since everyone is a show hire, no job security. You don't like the unpaid 40% overtime? Go work at Starbucks.

By the way, that is not a theoretical circumstance. I know someone who used to do pretty well doing visual effects. Eventually he had to declare bankruptcy, and take jobs at both Starbucks and Target. When he finally got back into do effects he was making a third his previous salary. Since he is officially a "professional", he works at least 16 hours a week unpaid overtime. The job is six months, and at the first of the year he'll be pounding the pavement looking for something else. It's kind of like free lance indentured servitude.

If your think that your precious technical ass is immune to this, you deserve to end up sleeping in your car. The plan to screw you is in motion and all systems are go. The only question is what are you going to do about it.

Sorry to interfere with your right wing fantasy, but how can you accept this as factual information? I read the post and found it completely unbelievable. As far as I know there is no post-secondary education institution that would do that even if they wanted to. Any school that gets money from the government in any form can't discriminate. And that includes things like 4H, Boy/Girl Scouts, and military service. Since government backed student loans are at a vast majority schools, they can't discriminate by law. They would get in huge trouble.

So in the real world the most likely discrimination in the US would be by schools with religious affiliations. Say Bob Jones University, which engaged in racial discrimination. BJU admitted Asians since it's founding, but only let in black students in right around the time the Supreme Court said that private schools could not discriminate on the basis of race. Even then, they only admitted married black students.

In May 1975, as it prepared to allow unmarried blacks to enroll, BJU adopted more detailed rules prohibiting interracial dating and marriage—threatening expulsion for any student who dated or married interracially, who advocated interracial marriage, who was "affiliated with any group or organization which holds as one of its goals or advocates interracial marriage," or "who espouse, promote, or encourage others to violate the university's dating rules and regulations." In 1982 BJU's then-president Bob Jones III, during interviews in which he defended the school's tax-exempt status, cited nine passages from the Bible - drawn both from the Old and New Testaments - which he claimed demonstrated that God intended races to be segregated: "The Bible clearly teaches, starting in the 10th chapter of Genesis and going all the way through, that God has put differences among people on the earth to keep the earth divided", he said, adding that inter-racial marriage was "playing into the hands of the antichrist and the one-world system."

BJU fought the IRS in the courts. There was a lot of political drama, including then President Regan asking the IRS to back off, but it finally went all the way to the Supreme Court and they lost their tax exempt status.

In 2008, the University appoligized.

In November 2008, the university declared itself "profoundly sorry" for having allowed "institutional policies to remain in place that were racially hurtful."

However, they never re-applied for tax exempt status.

When the right wing screams that they are victims of discrimination, it's a combination of hypocrisy, deliberate misinformation (a.k.a. lying), and paranoid delusions. I have a suggestion: leave your parent's basement, listen to something other then Fox News, and visit the real world for a change. Who knows, you might even learn something.

Would this get so much attention on Slashdot if the subject wasn't strippers?

Suppose it was another state licensed field, like barbers. Many state require barbers to have a license. Do you think that story would get posted in the first place, or get so many comments? I wonder.

Well, they can be trained in one day, but it takes over a week to get a CEO class tailored suit, so it will take at least that long to get them behind their executive desk in the corner office.

Then there are weeks of training to learn all the executive perks. It's not just the key to the exec washroom any more. There's the gym, and limo, and checking out the exec jet (which requires many hours of flight time).

Then there is all the time needed to meet all the important people both in and out of the company. Of course a good CEO will multi-task, and combine that with $1000 lunches and $20,000+ dinners (including guests). A really sharp CEO will combine this with testing the jet, and possibly quick weekend getaway jaunts to the Bahamas, or somewhere similarly up scale.

To do the job right it might takes months, or over a year before the hard work of rubber stamping begins.

That's the first question I always ask.

If it's funded by a special interest group then don't even bother to look at it. Whoever pays the bills gets the result they want. This is true for academia as much as anyone else.

Given the screw ups we've seen in big business, particularly Wall Street, how much training do you think those knucklehead CEOs had?

Using same scaling factor as Codecademy, I figure about 3 weeks to train a replacement.

Think of all the money that could be saved!

Hundai is no stranger to fraud:

- August 4, 2003: Chung Mong-hun, Chung Mong-koo's younger brother and then chairman of Hyundai Asan, jumps to his death while facing trial over an alleged $500 million secret "cash for summit" payment to Pyongyang before the landmark June 2000 North/South summit. He was also accused of doctoring company books and embezzling 15 billion won.

- June 18, 2004: Hyundai Motor Group vice chairman Kim Dong-jin and Korean Air Chief Executive Cho Yang-ho are given suspended two-year and one-year jail terms respectively, for raising a slush fund to support politicians in the 2002 presidential race. Both get to keep their jobs.

- March 26, 2006: South Korea prosecutors raid Hyundai group units such as Hyundai Motor and Kia Motors Corp. over a probe into suspected illegal political lobbying.

- Apr. 19, 2006: Hyundai Motor says the Chung family will donate $1 billion in shares of the group's auto shipping affiliate Glovis Co. Ltd. to atone for the bribery scandal.

- Apr. 28, 2006: Chung is arrested on charges of misusing company funds.

- May. 16, 2006: South Korea indicts Chung, who is officially charged with breach of trust and embezzling 103.4 billion won in company funds, some for personal use, and for incurring losses at group companies by forcing them to support weaker affiliates.

- Jun. 28, 2006: Chung is released on $1 million bail.

- January 16, 2007: Prosecutors demand a six-year jail term for Chung.

- February 5, 2007: Chung is found guilty of breach of trust and embezzling company funds and sentenced to three years in jail.

- February 12, 2007: Prosecutors and Chung appeal the three-year jail sentence.

- Jun. 19, 2007: Prosecutors seek to double the jail sentence for Chung to 6 years.

- September 6, 2007: South Korea's appeals court upholds the lower court conviction and hands Chung a 3-year jail term suspended for 5 years.

Here is a paper about using lasers for very high performance accelerators with relatively short distances. They are also wake field devices.

A proper utilization of these phenomena and effects leads to the new technology of relativistic engineering, in which light-matter interactions in the relativistic regime drives the development of laser-driven accelerator science.

The bulk of the paper is way beyond me, but it was still an interesting read.