One man's shit is another man's stuff. - paraphrased Carlin

Your stuff is shit, and my shit is stuff.

I agree, those are the basic categories, and should be communicated to all (yes, I know it should be common sense, but...).

Frankly, when we went to single stream, I rejoiced in it. I had assumed that many of the problems stated in these posts had been taken care, and I'm dismayed that they aren't, or are causing other problems.

Like other posts I've seen here, I feel my utility should do a better job of explaining the issues.

Technology can fix some of these problems, but are more expensive. One thought I have is that, while expensive now, if some of these technologies are good and useful, the prices will come down. And when they do, we'll sell them to the rest of the world.

Well, what your "Gypsy" wrote, was an AC being a smartass. Let's try to keep the stereotypes to a lower level on this site.

Ok, you made your point. I too have (fill in ethnic stereotype here) coming around at night poking through the trash. As long as they don't make a mess I'm not going to go out there and chase them off. "There but for the grace of God go I", etc. I do understand that it can hurt the economics of the local recycling business. I don't really know how to resolve the issue without being draconian.

Here it's a dime for any bag, paper or plastic. The wife generally brings her cloth bags shopping, and I always forget. In that case, if I can choose I'll go plastic because I find them very useful for lining a small trash can or other utility purposes.

So true, so true. That's a funny bit...you're lucky you aren't going to lose any karma 'cause...it's true, so true.

Yea to cancelling SuperTrain(tm), Nay to moving water around is simple.

One could say that moving people around is a simple engineering problem.

Having said that, I do understand your sentiment.

The Central Valley and other broad expanses in Ca. used to be bottoms of seafloors. This means it is *outstanding* land for farming, and a valuable national resource. One of the reasons that Ca. is the 8th largest economy in the world.

Cheap water is indeed subsidizing low food prices for the world. That will be changing, of course. I don't expect that we will be "coming over and taking it from" you, we will be paying market prices. At some point people with excess water will be happy to sell it to Ca.

Hopefully it won't happen so quickly as to cripple the 8th largest economy in the world. That might not be good for anybody.

Run it up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes it.

"Dogs flew spaceships!
The Aztecs invented the vacation!
Men and women are the same sex!
Our forefathers took drugs!
Your brain is not the boss!
Yes! That's right! Everything you know is wrong!"

Yeah, they forgot the "at gunpoint" whenever talking about govt. (taxpayer) bucks.

We do. It's all the malcontents out there that won't go with the program.

"We do these things, and the other things, not because they're easy, but because they're hard!"

An RTOS is an obvious advantage. I wonder what the disadvantages of it were, as I assume they would have considered this. Expense? Resources? Experience? All of the above?

Adding more people to a project does not necessarily increase the chances for success. And, since the Planetary Society has a lot of educational outreach, I'm guessing that they included a lot of relative novices that learned a *hell* of a lot from the successes, but even more from the failures.

Anyways, I include this Planetary Society blurb because I believe this is one of the pathways to the solar system.

"Through this proof-of-concept mission, we will use CubeSats to open new paths beyond Earth and, one day, potentially to other planets with an inexpensive, inexhaustible means of propulsion: photons, solar energy in its purest form."

No. It wasn't.