People in the past have happily killed animals. The only reason your statement is true is because people have not had to kill an animal themselves. Even the pet is killed ("put down") by the vet and not the owner. If the people would no longer have access to supermarket meat but only to (live) cows on pasture and living chickens, it would not take years before they decided that killing them for the meat to EAT is better than trying to become a vegetarian for most people.

By the way, the "sanctity of life" is a HUMAN invention. There is nothing in nature that hints to such a thing. Life throws away 90+% of life very early, before anything grows up. It's nature's QA process: instead of trying to perfect the production process, just mass-produce WAY more than needed and then throw away 90% of it.

I'm not saying we have to live by that, not at all! We received a brain so what we do with it is all up to us. I think we may even not have to worry about hindering natural selection in those species we deem important enough to prevent all this mass-death (ourselves first of all). We have computers and science, at some point (very soon - in nature terms) we'll be able to do much or all (or even better) than nature does by simulating selection and using the results to improve our genes, maybe even in the living organism (where there are trillions of cells all with their own copy of the DNA so that's a challenge to change them all, or at least the relevant ones in relevant places). And someday hopefully we'll be able to grow not the animal but just its meat.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-iTRZNhZGJkE/TdjpS-44TrI/AAAAAAAAAJg/LS2aJFqLCL0/s1600/english.jpg

Text: "The curtains where blue"

What the critic thinks: "The curtains represent his immense depression and his lack of will to carry on."

What the author meant: "The curtains were fucking blue."

The point is that IF (or when?) they get him, instead of an ugly trial process that the government may even loose, or not get a severe enough punishment (for them), or they may be forced to reveal (even more) stuff they don't want to, they have a very easy and clear-cut tax evasion case. Also, the public doesn't like people who avoid taxes, so it's also much easier on the PR front. And no war between the pro- and contra-Snowden factions, at least not nearly as much compared to if the trial is about "treason".

No, YOU got it completely wrong. You are unable to see the difference between micro- and macro-economics. I was talking macro. In micro you only see the individual or firm, in macro you see ALL (at ONCE, if you look at macro again looking at one individual at a time than you are NOT in macro view). You want low costs only in micro view, from the point of view of the individual. In macro costs = earnings (of the next entity in the chain).

You complain about "the expected cost".

Did you ever think about that EVERYTHING anyone earns anywhere is a "cost" for somebody else? Nature and economies are circular systems.

You WANT "costs" to be high - that means incomes are high. Of course, you don't want ANY costs to be high - battle tanks, mines, bridges to nowhere, poison gas, etc. are costs that are bad to have. Paying people to do nothing, by the way, is not on that category - these days A LOT of people would be much better paid to do nothing because what they DO get paid for is actually bad for the majority of people.

So "costs" are over all GOOD, but you have to look at the details, what they stand for. Too much abstraction is bad, comparing apples and oranges ("cost, money" makes everything seem completely equal) has gotten WAY too far.

Why are you putting words into my writing that are not there? Do you have too much spare time? Is your need to argue so great that you have to go and invent stuff?

Science has long proven that what parent.parent said is true. Children's brain develop. That is why - except for maybe in parts of the US and the Internet public - children are not charged as adults in court. You can easily Google some interesting lectures etc. on this topic. Not that common sense wouldn't have told our grandparents - today everything needs a "scientific study" unless it already serves our worst, lowest instincts, in which case any stupid comment is accepted as true.

I don't mind the focus on robotics AT ALL. Humans have a VERY hard time up there with the currently available space ships/technology - just because we find enough volunteers (>200,000 just applied for that one-way(!!!) trip to Mars) doesn't mean it's worth it.

No, my point is the country doesn't seem to be willing, able, interested, etc. to do even THAT.

Oh yes, there's the "money" argument. The sad part is that people completely mix up the very different meanings of "money" on small (individuals, businesses, municipalities, small countries with dependent currencies) and large (countries with the power to control currency) scale. There wasn't a pot of money with xxx billion dollars given to Adam and Eve or to our ape ancestors with which we now have to live. When a whole society like the US (with a world currency) decides to create something like a huge road network, or a huge power grid, or a 4g network - or a space program, then money and the values that money stands for are created at the same time. Sure, that only works if there is access supply of labor and resources, not if everyone is already working and the country is starving, but those conditions are met in the US. They prefer to give trillions to too-big-to-fail banks and to the military, prisons, health care (where the US has the by far highest cost but less favorable outcomes than comparable western countries), and so on.

And by the way, Silicon Valley was NOT the result of the "entrepreneurial spirit" and of private capital but of long-term government investments: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo

It seems to me, from far away, that in reality the US is going farther and farther away from space exploration and research in general, so I am not sure if these efforts are "placeholders" and "proxy actions" by people so that they don't have to see the painful reality as much. Which doesn't make it bad of course! Just saying it also serves a psychological purpose for those creating such programs. We just had headlines about a NASA conference that excludes Chinese scientists (incl. those already doing research at US universities). Then there's the government shutdown, and the big political and economic problems - basically ZERO change after the last financial crisis, same people, same actions. From where I am (not in the US but reading as much as I can - used to live there for many years) most people couldn't care less about space, and it only gets worse.

You don't say "elicopter". You DO speak the "h". Silent really, REALLY means "silent".

Okay, so no one voted roman_mir down, his articles start with -1, Slashdot punishment for low score. Never knew that was possible. Good comment this time though, a step to ihttp://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/08/24/1645258/how-to-monitor-leaky-radioactive-water-tanks#mprove the /. score ;-)

...followed the link I provided. So again, for you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hardening

No problem, sometimes I don't read before responding myself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hardening

Maybe the submitter wrote about it, but the site is unavailable right now and his summary certainly does not reveal he knows a thing about the special considerations of electronics in radioactive environments. There is a reason we (in the East German army) had big tube-powered big bulky radios instead of smaller transistor-based ones.

Sorry, but I learned to fly at San Carlos airport (next to Redwood Shores, right adjacent to SFO airport and airspace) so I know a little bit of flying AND the area. I cannot see anything "unsafe" in the approach to SFO. Ofc I don't fly a "heavy", so if a pilot of one of those wants to disagree I'll bow to superior knowledge. But as long as there is no ("heavy") pilot who disagrees I'll say the only thing a LITTLE bit difficult is the approach over water.

However, even that is not an issue, you should have learned an easy way to track the point where you are going to touch down without ANY technical aids (we are talking visual approaches here, and visibility is near perfect in that area almost most of the time, esp. during the day): Keep your head in a position that you can easily remember and fix a point on the runway over a fixed point in front of you inside the airplane. When you look from your fixed head position over the fixed point inside the cockpit to the point on the runway it should not move. If it does (up or down) you are going to over- or under-shoot. That works independent of what the actual sink rate and speed (ergo the angle) is, always.

But then, my very own flight instructor later asked ME to demonstrate when I went on to learn aerobatics (i.e. "real flying") - turned out the "professional" pilots hardly ever do anything but "straight & level". Also, 5000 hours does not seem a lot if most of it is spent not just "straight and level", under computer control, and "at altitude". Only while maneuvering, incl. take off and landing, do you exercise flying skills. I said "flying skills", piloting skills include a lot more of course, from talking to ATC to calculating course, fuel, etc. etc. What those "professionals" seem to lack is good old FLYING SKILLS. It may sound strange from a lowly "small airplane pilot", but when I read that that Air France flight from Brazil went down because the pilots wanted to pull up when the airplane was in a stall (or close) - FOR MINUTES!!! - I really couldn't believe it - with some solid (small airplane!) training every pilot knows that you can never, ever pull UP to get out of trouble unless you have excess speed to trade for.

That doesn't mean I could fly a big airplane (wouldn't even be able to start it I guess), but while it does not matter to anyone that I lack the skills to fly a big airplane it matters to all passengers if the pilots cannot FLY (not "pilot") their airplane. I mean "fly" as in "without computer".

Is there an airline pilot here? I'm curious, what would you say about the FLYING skills of (big airplane) pilots? It seems that in the US the situation isn't bad, that this is an Asian (or Korean?) problem, and as I read it in an aviation forum not necessarily one of culture (at least not any more) but of many variables, including how easy it is for a lot of people to get to fly privately in the US vs. small countries like S.Korea, so that when a S.Korean wants to become a pilot they start from zero and do the training with an eye on the cockpit jobs (ASAP ofc, time is money), so no time/resources to do "fun flying" (like acro, which really, really teaches to fly). Then there's that even if you go into the job with good skills, how much is left after 10 years of mostly computer-aided careful "by the book" flying? How many pilots keep their (low-level) flying skills sharp by flying a small airplane in their spare time, to do "fun stuff" and "unusual attitudes and maneuverer"?

WTF - who upvoted EACH AND EVERY SINGLE POST here? The percentage of posts =2 is 1%.

This site's voting system needs improvement. Definitely DO ONT upvote emotional posts without any rational part. DO NOT upvote untrue statements. For example, Linus only OCCASIONALLY resorts to "strong" statements, so those who portrait him as a kind of screaming manager a la Microsoft's Balmer are just liars out for emotional votes. ESPECIALLY if there's an emotional topic, upvote only on-topic an NON-EMOTIONAL posts.

PS: My caps are NOT "screaming", I speak accentuated not loud. Think flat-tone poem vs. accentuated poem recitation. I don't know how else to bring the accentuated parts onto the screen in a "flat" font.