From the wikipedia article it shows that this was primarily backed by religious people in the US and not the politicians of the time in government. Today South Africa has a policy of Black Economic Empowerment which is essentially a tit-for-tat policy that further puts into law race differences and somehow benefits a "Chinese" looking person who may come into the country fresh today over a local "white person" who is being "reverse discriminated" against. Whilst not as bad as Zimbabwe's policies, the sentiments are similar, and you wonder how race can still be an issue there when in most places in the west it doesn't matter at all. Perhaps South Africa could have been today in a much better shape if it just went out of Aparteid on commercial and trade foundations and actually enshrined into law equality for all.

Cheapest might be to learn from the Soviet example where several competing departments tried to come up with an idea or implementation and more optimum solution sort of came out naturally as a result. Given the number of firsts the Soviets had of the USA it might be much faster as well. Funny how the USA has had an almost authoritarian system in place for managing projects in space since the start of NASA and they don't embrace a more free-market approach.

Wind turbines produces little steady electrical current, and even if you go with peak energy production from these things and couple with solar there is a cost to the environment. A large wind farm that produces any sort of useful amount of electricity for private or industrial consumption takes the wind out of the environment as a system in the same way that damming a river takes the water out. You have a "dead zone" where there is little wind and above you have a much higher flow of wind, which can only lead to the wind above pushing down over some distance from the wind farm to fill the void and dumping down inland (because if you put the things too far out you would need really long cables). This would increase the temperature inland and has the potential to change weather patterns close to the surface of the earth (where is of course most important to us living there). Here's a video in the crazy greenie sinister tone, but might be what future environmentalists have to deal with.

The environmental impacts of large scale wind energy production are pretty much completely untested for and could potentially be very bad. There has been little actual scientific research, and this has been almost entirely due to moneyed "greenie" groups (a single group in the US brings in yearly 100m dollars in income!) opposition to performing basic research in a proper scientific study.

Another thing to remember is that the moon was much closer in the past and is slowly drifting away from the Earth. Tidal influences on the moon and earth system would have been much greater in the period it is thought the moon was formed.

Doh. I even misspell 'spelling'. Okay. I'm going to get spell check in Firefox working again.

You're right. I see these speeling and grammar things all the time when I post, and it is a little embarassing. It's a habit from other sites that I post quickly without proof-reading. This is because I am used to posting, then proof-reading, and then editing. I suppose I should do better.

This is the current leading theory. Yes, it is very recent, but in the video I linked to you'll see lots of famous physicsts that you should recognize.

It's been a while since I was in physics studying this kind of thing, but it seems to me that since it is a smaller body and formed around the earth at a much smaller distance from the earth and then moved out, that there would be only a handful of parameters that would determine how long a tidal lock would take. First would be the small mass of the moon and smaller iron core, which would lead to faster tidal lock than say a planet around a star. Second would be the distance from the Earth (smaller the distance the faster it would occur). Thirdly, the impact between the 2 'proto-moons' would directly influence the rotation rate and axis of rotation of the moon (although from a disk around the earth, the eccentricty with respect the earth would be minimal). Since the moon was very close to the earth around its formation, and it formed in orbit around the earth, I would assume that a tidal lock would have occured very soon after its formation. Probably somewhere there is a simulation to show this.

Here's an article that explains why the composition is likely to be different for more fluid materials upon the theorised collision of the 2 'proto-moons'. This explains in principal that the less solid objects were drawn to the near side (as per the original article linked to in the summary), leaving a thinner crust on the near side. The only new interesting take-home is that the period of bombardment of comets and asteroids (due to the stabilization of the orbits of Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus throwing them towards the inner solar system) was likely slightly less violent than predicted before.

Almost. The moon was thought to be formed in stages. First by a proto-planet called Thea roughly about the size of mars hitting the earth not full on, leaving debre in space. Over time the debree formed a ring to minimize energy between the earth and the ejected material. The ring then had paricles clump together that rolled on more dust to form 2 objects. These 2 objects with different material makeups (probably from the different amounts of Earth or Thea in them) then collided after some passes around the earth, leaving one side completely different in makeup from the other side. One side is tidal locked to the Earth, so it always faces us as you already know. You can see some of this by looking at the smooth section of moon vs the rough section as well.

Tick

Well... some of them you'd think might have looked pretty good in the past, but yeah -- tick

You've clearly never worked at a school before.

Sorry to tell you, but all this time you've been talking to Bonobos.

What you neglected to mention is that the "greenies" are the source of much of the fearmongering in those steps and are in many cases simply anti-corporation, except for new "environmental" companies that many have financial interest in, and mostly anti-science. These are groups such as Greenpeace, which its founder has tried to distance himself from because he actually cares about the end result for the environment.

Now gas injection underground seems like a bad idea, but many greenies are in favor of deep underground heat extraction to power turbines, which if ramped up may be worse for the environment from similar problems and loss of efficiency being far away from people's homes and businesses. Who know, wind farms could be about the worst thing for the environment and people, as well as long standing communities that are divided by these things. Out at sea they if ramped up they might even change weather patterns. This is a new entriely unproven experiment unfortunately with little science to back up it being good for the environment. Damming for hydro used to be something that environmentalists blocked because it changes the ecosystem downstream forever.

Environmentalist that have scientific backgrounds and care about the environment, its animals and its plants, should really separate from the scare mongering "greenies" that have directly led to these gas recovery efforts through their actions in the past through the processes described in the parent post. At least they feel good about themselves and have something to rile against.

As a contributor to open source myself (okay, minor, but in quite a few projects) I can say that it is very much a scatch your own itch thing that, in a mature environment with lots of devs/project managers/translators/package maintainers/etc., will gel together to form a nice overall 'product'. Many people do it just for the fun of it and already have another (I assume quite good) source of income. As nice as they are, it is the artists and content people that usually like the micro-payment system -- I suspect because some of them do it in real life?

Have to agree with the senitment here. The company is at fault because he could have gone under a bus or something and there would be no way to recover the data.

He should have claimed amnesia.

Politicians everywhere are largely useless at directing resources to where they need to go. Why complain here when it could have as easily gone into something less useful? Political stunt or not they are doing the right things.

Well time and again physics has been shown to be the driver of much of our progress. Just have a look at how long it took biologists to make use of x-rays or scattering of electrons into a microscope, the chemists to see the value of quantum theory in understanding how molecules form and interact, how at CERN Tim Berners Lee invented HTML and how the next super fast cables that will replace gigabit ethernet have been made and tested there, or the origin of duct tape, and I could go on and on. India (and China) in my opinion understand that physics research in particular gives the best bang for the buck. Good on them for not cowering away from hard physics challenges.

Science research and development, engineering, and technical progress is arguably more useful for moving societal issues forwards. The byproduct is better education, a smarter population, and better job opportunities. You can spend money trying to fix social problems all you want, but ultimately people need to know that their future is secure, their bellies can be filled, and they can support themselves beyond any one-off public spending not to be recovered. Claiming that poverty or corruption need be "solved" first is a recipe for disaster and not compatible with what happens in all of the developed world (which still has poverty and corruption to a small but significant extent).