Did you get this from a Clancy novel? I think this idea was used on a Chinese nuke base by the Americans in the protection of Russia.
Anyway, while you can vary initial launch speed, you still have to penetrate the atmosphere and still end up with a terminal velocity that is high enough to have much oomph. There is a reason most meteorites burn up in atmosphere.

If you try to hit the earth with something at mach 30, my bet is that you can't get there before your object has evaporated. And if you go at much lower speed, your mass has to be very high to make up for that, and your weapon will then be very expensive to get into orbit

And again, you still have the problem that you develop a new solution for something that already has a cheap non nuclear equivalent in the form of cruise missiles. Additionally, your sattelites are sitting ducks for anyone to pick off.

Yes, well, his example was a 1 ton rod at mach 10, which equalled 2 800K cruise missiles.
If you argue that the mass could be much lower, how do you accelerate whatever weight you end up with to equal that?
How do you get that thing to reach mach 30 in atmosphere?

If you can solve that, you still have a solution that is still not cost effective compared to existing non nuclear technology.

I can tell you that it depends on which product group you are active in.
some teams like the C++ product group have (at least when I was an MVP) a very good relationship with their MVPs. this included getting developers to look at weird bugs, getting lots of interesting information, technical previews, etc. From my experience, the low level groups (SDK, DDK, C++) had a very active private community going with their MVPs.

For people interested in the product they were working with (C++ and SDK for me) being an MVP can be a rewarding experience, because you get a lot of technical inside information, people to talk with, an MSDN subscription, some free incidents with Microsoft support, etc.

Other (often the larger) product groups had virtually no real relationship with their MVPs, and some groups just treated them like unpaid 1st level support. Or in some cases they just plain ignored them. What it means to be an MVP and what you get out of it really depends entirely on your category and interest group. It can range from very good to very crappy.

+1.

Heaven forbid that people actually have rights, and a measure of protection against exploitation.
It amuses me that some Americans apparently think it is offensive
a) to have a right to holidays
b) to actually take your holidays
c) to have some measure of protection against termination without cause.

IIRC, the problem was not that the existence of macs was acknowledge, but rather that employees are specifically forbidden from taking pictures and publishing them to the world without proper authorization. This is standard practice.

I sometimes take pics at work with my cellphone, for internal purposes. If I were to post them on my blog (because e.g. I thought they were interesting) without approval form a director, I would be kicked out as well.

Utter BS. People marry here all the time, just like in the US and other countries.
And imo, marriage is fantastic.

You know, it would help if people actually got to know each other before making important decisions.
And then, after having talked about all important issues, you decide if you have any business marrying or not.
It's amazing how many people get married without even agreeing on having kids or not. Or having a career or not, or...

You are right that people change. Otoh, a lot of divorces and breakups happen with people who never should have been together in the first place. I have noticed that many of the people whom I knew and broke up, did so because they didn't agree on having kids or not. Or pursuing a career or not, etc. Going into marriage without having discussed and agreed upon these things beforehand is idiocy.

You mention mature people, but mature people also discuss the big things beforehand, and they also realize that marriage takes work to make it work, and that it will have its rough spots. That is why traditional marriage vows are the way they are: Good times AND bad. Sickness AND health, For richer AND poorer, for as long as you both shall live.

Yes. Obvisouly this depends totally on what people you have in both sides of the family.
I'll be the first to admit that there are many families in which this would have ended very badly.

+1.

Many people marry for the wrong reason, or wait until after marriage to talk about the important issues.
Before my wife and I started living together (let alone married) we had long talks about what we wanted out of life, if we wanted a stable life or adventurous, whether we wanted kids and marriage, religion, etc. Had we not been on the same page, I would have walked away. Simple as that.

My wife is completely non-techie. She appreciates what I do, but does not share my interests or hobbies.
Yes because we are both comfortable with who we are, we arrange for our interests not to conflict. That way we can both enjoy our hobbies. Granted, with kids around, hobbies need to scheduled in, and have to take a backseat to other things.

And hobbies are just one thing. I know people whose marriages failed because after marriage, they were having continuous resentment over having kids or not, pursuing a career or not, moving to a different country / state, becoming self-employed rather than salaried... Much of the misery could have been prevented if they had just talked about their goals beforehand, rather than just seeing how it goes.

Mine was just my wife and me. We (Europeans) married in the US (not Vegas) without telling people in advance, and simply came back home married.

You mean, kind of like how Americans feel they are unique, superior to the others, and surrounded by vile enemies that miss no chance to do harm to the USA?

That depends.

Because they don't need to prove it or allow you to review whatever evidence they are working with.

To cover section A:
If they say '/. member artor3 is suspected of having ties with al qaeda', they can take you and that will be that. You might have spoken once to someone who thinks sharia law is a great idea. It doesn't even have to be true or believable.

To cover section B:
And you don't even have to be guilty because they can say you were -planning- to do something, otherwise why would you have googled the chemical composition of fertilizer (or whatever tenuous link they can make).

That has A and B covered, unless you think that they would never accuse (rightly or not) an American citizen of being a sympathizer with Al Qaeda.

I work for a big pharma company, as a sysadmin. I don't know much about the science though.

Any company finding a cure for HIV or cancer or the common cold would have its stock skyrocket, turning the board instant billionaires.
Somehow I have trouble believing that they would suppress a cure, just for the purpose of being evil at their own expense.

And it isn't a cure, in case you missed that. It is a vaccine. Like the vaccine against smallpox. Once you get smallpox or ebola, your chances still suck.

Seeing them daily would be a great help I imagine.
I practice traditional Japanese jujutsu, and my currciculum has the Japanese names printed next to them.
The kanji which I have an external link to (like names of techniques etc) stick much better in my mind than the ones I only see in the kanji list.
The least I can say is that Japanese is an interesting language.

And sometimes not without a sense of humor. When I learned the kanji for 'target' I thought to myself 'hey, that sounds familiar. And kin means 'gold' but that would mean... :)
You probably know this so I don't need to explain the joke, but for those who don't speak the language: kinteki is the (a) Japanese word for testicles, which can be literally translated as 'golden target' or 'bulls eye'

2 years ago I started learning Japanese. Last year I started learning kanji.
So I force myself to learn something new every single day, or I'll never know even the grade school kanji list.
Learning 3 to 4 new kanji every day, and repeating them lots of times is the only way to learn the grade school kanji within 1 year.
Even then I'll probably need another year of repeating things every day to really 'know' them.