Clayton Christensen explains why the basic thinking taught in business schools and promulgated by consultants is killing innovation and the US economy:

Christensen retells the story of how Dell progressively lopped off low-value segments of its PC operation to the Taiwan-based firm ASUSTek - the motherboard, the assembly of the computer, the management of the supply chain and finally the design of the computer. In each case Dell accepted the proposal because in each case its profitability improved: its costs declined and its revenues stayed the same. At the end of the process, however, Dell was little more than a brand, while ASUSTeK can-and does-now offer a cheaper, better computer to Best Buy at lower cost.

Why is this happening? According to Christensen, the phenomenon is being

"driven by the pursuit of profit. That's the causal mechanism for these things... The problem lies with the business schools which are at fault. What we've done in America is to define profitability in terms of percentages. So if you can get the percentage up, it feels like we are more profitable. It causes us to do things to manipulate the percentage....

Thus when a firm calculates the rate of return on a proposal to outsource manufacturing overseas, it typically does not include:

• The cost of the knowledge that is being lost, possibly forever.
• The cost of being unable to innovate in future, because critical knowledge has been lost.
• The consequent cost of its current business being destroyed by competitors emerging who can make a better product at lower cost.
• The missed opportunity of profits that could be made from innovations based on that knowledge that is being lost.

cite

That's quite correct, and not an exaggeration. The "City of London" (now a tiny part of London) has a governmental structure left over from the Middle Ages. (It was codified in 1189AD, but is older than that.) It's one of the few holdovers from the feudal era that hasn't been modernized. The City of London Police should have been absorbed into the Metropolitan Police decades ago, but haven't been.

And free sites. They still exist - I run a couple myself. I found that for me, a mix of free and paid sites covers almost everything I need on the Internet. You just have to spend a little time finding what's for you instead of always following the top three Google hits.

Nice. My Voltron didn't come with pilots and keys. I think i lost his sword. :( I do have the giant plastic sword for humans though! Haha! I wished I still had my Transformers G1 ones. Argh!

Wow, that's it? I was expecting higher prices! I guess I will wait another 50 years. Ha!

...are you assuming sequential scans are orbits apart? That's not a reasonable limit. Heck, we don't even have that limit today on an *orbiting* sat, much less a geostationary one. ...rocks don't move continuously down the center of valleys, and this would have been quite visible.

mmmm.... no. :)

No problem. *I* didn't remember the lava tubes, so we're even. :)

Mine are rusty and hard to move too. They probably need cleaning. Heh. I wonder how much we can sell ours for these days. I am not going to put mine in display cabinets. I remember Robotech, but I never got into it.

Nice. Are they/you going to keep them to sell later? Their sale values might go up!

Google's page rank algorithm goes a long way to mitigate that by tracking how many links refer to a given site

No. Popularity is a horrible indicator of usefulness, and/or accuracy and/or value. A well curated directory, on the other hand, can be all wheat, no chaff. Unfortunately, no well-curated directory exists.

I will read a good comic.

However, I wouldn't touch Cheetos with your mouth. I consider NY style pizza to be the optimum way to consume cheese, and should there be a need to do so, you may rest assured that is exactly how I will handle the matter.

Yes and no. Yes, right now, as far as we know. Hints otherwise, however, do exist. Further, apparently, space -- being nothing -- can expand and contract much faster than the speed of light (see most cosmological theories), and since the distance from here to there in astronomical terms is essentially created by space... it may be that the speed of light is constant, but the space it travels though, isn't.

Also, we may discover something else. I'm perfectly ok with not being certain; I think assigning absolute certainty to things is a losing game, frankly. In the interim, I enjoy a good story. What I think is a good story is, of course, colored by my opinions, just as everyone's is.

Why would it hurt a spaceship to hit an inertialess object? lol

Try harder.