Joy rides don't thrill me...but I think the rich and powerful should all go because...

You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, "Look at that, you son of a bitch."

~ Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell

I don't know if a pilot could land a 20 Mach+ airplane, but the two Falcon crashes prove one thing: nobody would ever go up in a hypersonic glider unless it had an extensive flight-test program first.

It's a glider.

Materials.

"...trapped in the muck like footprints, of where our universe banged into others."

This may be true, depending on the definitions of the (perhaps metaphorically used) words "trapped", "muck", "where", "universe", and "banged".

Also, wasn't the same phenomenon cited as evidence of structure that existed "before" the big bang by someone else recently? Roger Penrose?

Only if the scientist who wrote that entered the sphere.

Now we know the probability of life developing on a distant moon has gone up from .2a to .25a where a is an unknown value between 0 and 4

That's an exobiology arithmetic joke you cretins.

What doesn't worry me is that Americans won't be able to afford food or will die of ordinary diseases. What worries me is that America's economy has grown by 2/3 over the past 30 years and all of that has gone to the top 10% of the earners.

The "bottom" 90% has seen negligible earnings growth over the past 30 years even though it was their productivity growth (aka "working harder") that grew the economy. This won't go on forever but what scares me is the process by which the trend reverses itself. It may not be pretty.

Current carbon fiber gets its strength from carbon "lamellae" which are a micostructural feature of the fiber itself. That is, inside the fiber are regions that are amorphous carbon and regions that are organized into sheets. If you wanted to make a structural material using graphene sheets this might be what you would do. But we already have it. So why isn't it taking over the world?

Beware of grandiose claims about strength. You could accurately say current carbon fiber is 10 times stronger than steel, but you don't see any real-world things made out of cfrp that are 10 times stronger than an equivalent steel part even on a weight basis. That's because going from microstructure to macro-structure is a long and winding road and includes also the weakest parts, not just the strongest parts that everyone likes to talk about.

If CS is anything like engineering, the administration doesn't want everyone to swim. They count on 1/2 of each undergrad year to drop out so the tuition of the unsuccessful can be used to subsidize the university's other programs.

God-forsaken wasteland if they start taking away the few perks that come with growing up as a human icicle? Do this and California will fall to the sound of a 999,999 rubber boots (one got stuck in the mud on the trek through Oregon) marching down from Canada, packing heat. (no I mean literally: electric socks (why do you think Canadians make such good major league pitchers? Carrying those lead-acid car batteries around the playground under your left arm while your throw iceballs with your right makes you strong that's why)). After that we'll open illegal back-alley Timmies and say goodbye to your peace-love-eternal-groovieness California. Think this is a joke? Check the obscure fine print in your immigration laws there's a hoser clause put in there by our secret operative Lorne Greene decades ago. They don't call it a Greene Card for nothing, huh? It's easier when you realize the truth: there is no lumber cartel. So stop it. Thank you. The nurse is here!

Firefox: BetterPrivacy

Being able to manually delete LSO's is ok but too labour-intensive. The addon above lets you delete-on-close like regular cookies you flag as "allow for session" in FF.

The world isn't lacking good ideas, it's lacking people who make them real.

We can barely find people who know the difference between crippling buckling. The not-horrible ones we can find have been working on the F35 for so long they think 2 years to finish one rib is about right.

If anyone wants to make an ambitiously weird new plane, they are going to have to invest billions just to get bright people back into this business. I wouldn't be surprised if it would cost hundreds of billions to get get a commercial carbon-fiber spanlifter into service because this industry is just so moribund. The organizations that are around right now couldn't make a go of it on any finite budget.

Maybe, and I don't know for sure, Google is a well-run company. My experience is that most large entities are not, and the manager's job is not primarily to manage people, but to figure out what the hell the group should be doing so that he/she won't get in trouble for going against the poobahs while still producing the vaguely-defined deliverables (those being defined as "that which the director determines you should have done in hindsight" or "that which they needed, not what they asked for"). If Google's managers actually know the requirements and have great people working for them, then they can concentrate of clearing roadblocks, a life most technology managers can only dream of.

That said, another legitimate job for a manager is to represent the capabilities of the group. Realistically. This is hard in engineering, because communicating many technical challenges is hard when the audience has never done that kind of work. It's pretty fun to stand up in front of a group of heavy-hitters and say "I know it seems like it should only take 3 months, but something always goes wrong so we need nine." They scowl and suck air through their teeth and maybe you don't work there any more pretty soon after that.

That's why technology companies need people who came up through the ranks because things that people have never done always seem easy. In 10 years, what will Google's non-tech managers be saying when they all have new hats? They will need people who can sit in a conference room with the owners and say "Larry, that idea you just had? That's just stupid." and not get laser-beamed.