I think most politicians treat NASA like a nice big juice pig. The only thing many care about is that things get done in their state.

SpaceX is the only one doing launches and not based on military contracting or ICBMs. They are also making progress at an insane rate. And doing this while profitable ... because the whole program costs less than a couple shuttle launches and I'm talking nothing->today.

But to be fair the F9heavy doesn't exist yet. And likely won't for 3-5 years.

They have the Falcon 1e to build test and improve. And they will likely be producing a F9e as well. In addition they are going to be working on recovery of the 1st stage, and looking into 2nd stage recovery. Plus they will be working on getting man rated and the upgrades to the Dragon required to do that. So they do have a lot on their plates at this time. That said, I hope to see a Falcon super-heavy by 2020!

We've got the 3rd dimension to fully use. Then we have memsistors (I won't call them memristors because it isn't a portmanteau and is sort of stupid sounding). These two things will be able to feed our high rate of growth for some time. But it will come to an end soon. Maybe within 30 years before we find something else to keep pushing us forwards.

And if we ever DO have a period with no technological progress we have created ourselves a comfortable buffer zone... Software efficiency can be improved greatly, and each improvement to software gets multiplied ten-fold. Hopefully by the time we get through that period, science will have picked up again.

If not? There is always infrastructure to build up. Perhaps computers will act in part like thin clients passing off super complex calculations to a server. This isn't so unreasonable if you think of it like the natural extension of the internet. We pass searches to Google today rather than run a spider ourselves. In the future we'll likely pass more processing over to giant servers. If a true artificial intellect is built than users will likely make requests of it from the outside rather than have it exist on their PC.

Wow has well over 200 realms and 10million players. I think there is room for a handful of hardmode servers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCgQDjiotG0&fmt=18

Seriously fast!

Yeah... WOTLK reached a level of ease that a group of semi-concious troglodytes could beat almost every fight in the game.

Cata can't and won't fix it. The problem is that the game has been too easy for too long. It started OK. Buuut now the player base is a bunch of idiots that are terrible at video games. If they restore the difficulty to like... some reasonable level they'll lose too many players.

This is a problem plaguing the whole industry. The pool of players has grown, the vast majority of the growth in the terrible player sector. The breadth of players is far to wide to throw everyone into the same difficulty game and expecting it to work out. It will be impossibly hard for some and mind numbingly easy for others. They need some form of adjustable difficulty. Maybe hard mode servers (D2 had hardcore). It is a problem that many companies aren't bothering to solve.

Sidenote: I hate it when people refer to people that suck as 'casuals'. I play infrequently, making me a casual. But I don't suck. My cousin plays frequently and is terrible. Political correctness is no substitute for technical correctness. If you are going to use a term don't conflate it with something else.

You WILL conform to socially accepted norms!

No they weren't willing. Just today they caved and allowed the GOP to get their money in order to keep government and the economy moving.

The GOP refused to pass or even look at ANY legislation until tax cuts were extended to Americans making over 250,000.
The Dems said... but that'll cost us 700 Billion, more than the bailout that the libertarians hate so much. How about we give tax cuts to all americans for the first 1 million USD in yearly income? Just no tax cuts for the SUPER rich.
The GOP said you can go fuck yourself, we aren't passing anything, not even nuclear treaties with Russia or tax cuts/incentives for small business'. Oh and we are going to let unemployment benefits disappear. We will not budge until you give that money to the super rich.
The dems go, fuck! Fine. We'll extend the cuts for 2 years so that we can extend unemployment benefits for 13months. We hope we can get you on board to sign a nuclear peace treaty in the future too and probably the small biz incentives.
GOP: The democrats are willing to run the economy into the ground in order to prop up the government for a few more months.

Earlier today a guy said that the dems were fiscally irresponsible because they don't know how they are going to pay the 65 billion for unemployment. The same day that the GOP lost the government 700Billion. I am losing all sense of partisanship with recent politics. The GOP are almost wrong on EVERY issue. On some issues they are SO wrong that it is fucking disgusting. The level of evil required to have a solid voting block willing to play chicken with the economy of the country and possible nuclear stability or the world for 300,000 fantastically rich people. Disgusting.

Mr. Orwell?

It might be valuable in a war. Not to terrorists though. And in a war the other side would have the list anyways.

For the 2001 Patriot Act:
Republicans: 98.6% Yeas
Democrats: 70.0% Yeas

For the 2006 Renewal:
Republicans: 94.3% Yeas
Democrats: 34.7% Yeas

The Patriot Act was passed unquestioningly TWICE by the GOP. Once with some questions by the Dems and rejected once by the Dems. And if you broke this into the liberals vs conservatives, the libs would have never passed it.

Lets try to be factual about this. It really is sad that just a few days ago I had to prove to someone that the democrats voted against entering the Iraq war (since they blamed both sides evenly). Can't people do basic fact checks?

Just in case... The Iraq War:
GOP: 215 Yes, 2 No ... (99.1%)
Dems: 82 Yes, 125 No ... (39.6%)

To be fair, the senate is made up of even more people. And half of them are willing to end government in order to help out the richest 1% of people in the country....

Agreed. I simply used 20 since that is what the parent used. Even with my generous assumptions it is still a damn stupid idea. That was the idea.

By your figures you have 10.7k to spend on the stuff you missed. Take off food/drink and a couple outings. And you still have about 5k to spend on leisure. Sign up to a handful of services, a couple magazines, and a game. Sign up to a fitness club or get some lessons. And you still have a bit left over.

Really, you've no idea what life is like for most people. There are millions of people out there today who 'bust their hump' for 1/3rd that. Many of those people live in your country. You weren't complaining about not having a 'reasonably good life' you wanted a reasonably luxurious life.