An engineering problem in the sense that there is not enough matter in the universe to accelerate a spacecraft at 1 g for 2 years using any currently plausible propulsion method.

On the contrary there is a lot of information there. When a government official says "I may or may not respect the constitution" that mean he has already decided that he will do whatever he wants regardless of constitutional authority and obeys the law only when it is convenient to do so.

Yep, only problem is because most other people rely on buffet-style all-you-can-eat-for-fixed-price, the cash price for many services is stupendously high.

Last year I had a month-long cold of some sort and needed a checkup to find out what was wrong and get anti-biotics. I don't have a family doctor because the last two I've had retired (drove out of business due to poor medicare reimbursement rates), so I went to Patient First. I asked them how much the checkup would cost, and they said they could not tell me until after the services were performed. Great.

Got a bill in the mail a month later for $300 for a 5 minute checkup and chest x-ray. Anti-biotics were another $80. I don't mind paying these prices if that's what they actually cost. That's what the HSA is for. The problem is they would not tell me what the costs would be up front, and I had no way of shopping around for better prices at competing clinics. That's like going to McDonalds for a hamburger, but they won't tell you what the price is until they mail it to you a month later. And the cost of the burger ends up depending on how hungry you were at the time and how many poor people and illegal immigrants they had to give free hamburgers to.

How many of those 7 million signups are forced signups by prison inmates?

So basically "slow down over there, you're making the rest of us look bad" enshrined into law.

Next thing you know, they'll be passing a law so that companies must pay salary based on employees need rather then their productivity, because it's not fair that an engineer with a big family gets paid less than a single engineer just because he's not as good at the job.

I swear, it's as if these people read the first half of Atlas Shrugged and said "oh hey, that's a good idea, let's do that!"

Boycotting them is fine. Using public media outlets demanding the business owner be fired as a punitive measure is not.

Advocating a boycott is fine. Advocating an employee be fired as a punitive measure, when their job has nothing to do with the issue itself, is not fine.

There is a big difference between calling for your supporters to not use a product, and demanding that some person whom opposes your viewpoint be fired from their job which is wholly unrelated to the issue itself, purely as a punitive measure.

Tragedy of the commons. In Japan, people own their land and property. In Haiti, there is no private property rights. No one bothers to care and maintain things that belong to someone else or could be taken away from them at any time.

Everything Facebook as bought up until now have been products relating to the use of Facebook and social media content. This is the first company that Facebook has bought that is hardware oriented and not a product which is integral to Facebook. Therefore it is hard to extrapolate their previous acquisitions to what they will do with Oculus. I look at the situation (optimistically) as sort of like Elon Musk, founder of Paypal, starting SpaceX. Hopefully Zuckerburg is interested in Oculus because he thinks it is a worthwhile technology to invest in, not because he wants to absorb it into Facebook.

It can. The main problem with this type of operation is that the main generator and turbine are not designed for very low power operation, there is not enough steam pressure to drive them below a minimum threshold (~5-10% power). The Chernobyl accident occurred during an attempted test to see for how long the reactor could run its cooling pumps on decay heat after shutdown (the accident was not caused by this test directly, but due to the inappropriate actions by the operators leading up to the test).

The problem is mostly engineering and the way plants are designed. While there are steam-driven and axillary cooling systems, on older plants they can only provide decay heat cooling for a limited time, and generally require at least some power to operate valves and monitor levels. They were not designed to cope with an extended loss of all electrical power. Some newer plant types are designed to be passively safe, such as the ESBWR, which can remain safe with zero electrical power or operator actions due to its natural circulation design and enormous gravity-fed cooling pools.

Braindead soundbites like this gem from 2008?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PMmY20nJ8E

Your last part is right on. The fed is printing money like a firehose to fill the enormous whirlpool of money being poofed out of existence by bad debt, and debt being paid off. This is why we haven't seen much if any inflation even though we are printing dollars - the expansion of dollars by the Fed is being countered by the destruction of dollars by removal of debt. The government certainly loves this situation - the ability to spend unlimited money without having to worry about inflation. The true cost of the hidden tax of government deficit spending is hidden in the losses of the economy as a whole due to the recession.

Absolutely totally wrong. First of all, Inflation and deflation have zero to do with prices of individual products or market segments - they are global to all products, services, wages and prices simultaneously. You cannot point to one product getting cheaper and say "that's deflation".

Secondly, industry changes have nothing to do with money supply changes. Electronics getting cheaper due to technology improvements, competition, supply, and manufacturing having nothing to do with the money supply.

Thirdly, while steady inflation is not good, deflation is worse as it causes the market to stop investing in industry and growth and instead invest in hoarding cash. The rich can become richer regardless of whether the market is inflating or deflating if they use their money intelligently, this is always the case. But deflation causes slow and negative growth in the overall economy and reduction in standard of living, which is bad for everybody.

Even if private individuals could use the NICS system there's no point in making a law requiring it. The honest people will use it whether it is required or not since it protects them from liability, while the criminals will just ignore the law regardless.