If a commercial vendor can manage to write the required code in the time given, the budget given, and meet all interface demands from the various perspective users. There is still no way that certain TLA (three letter agencies) will let all their documents be indexed. Thus, the project is DOA.

NASA's strategic goal was to force the Russian's to spend more money on their space program, while they maintained a healthy defense budget to protect itself from potential US threats. Now the USA has an obese defense/ security budget protecting itself from... ???? and it has managed to "bail out" several large companies with large PAC's to protect the USA and "global" economy from.... ??? If there is any question as to why the USA is falling behind, just read a little history about the cold war, or if you prefer the short version look at the National Budget ~20% GPD v. Taxes ~15% GDP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget I suspect that while Neil used the context of NASA, he was talking about a much larger problem than the insignificant budget of NASA, forget man space flight.

• 1) Invent chemical free chemistry set
• 2) Market said set to Morons
• 3)....
• 4)profit

and I though selling 16oz bottles full of water was never going to catch

I do not expect to use any electronics that transmit or receive radio data on a flight. However, as an engineer I do expect that someone will forget to turn off the radio on their device. Thus if I was designing flight control hardware, I would want to ensure that my equipment would not be adversely affected by someone who forgot to turn off their device(s).

How in the world are new devices developed and approved for production that ignore the possibility of EMI from portable devices? There are no excuses for such negligence.

To all those who have commented about because a "Democracy" would have "Democrat" in it did you not notice that Republican has republic in it. Unfortunately, CmdrTaco quoted someone's editorial comment and most people seem to be reading the quote as fact.

The equations and theories used in science are man's interpretation of how the universe works. They are our human attempt to understand and to be able to predict how the universe behaves from our perspective.

We have developed the peer review process as a means of allowing experts to look at our work before it is published to decide if our findings are believable based on the current scientific understanding. The peer review process is a lot like a democracy, it is not perfect but it is the best thing we have come up with so far. The scientific community should resit making policy and the politicians should quit trying to do science. Even experts in their fields will cite sources when they are available, why should non experts be expected to do any less?

What a sad day it is, I read DOS as denial of service through most of the first verse. The sad thing is I grew up on DOS, ok MS-DS.

to quote the summary: "$8.4 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to begin work on what's known as the Behavioral Learning for Adaptive Electronic Warfare..." This is likely a phase 1 or 2 porject were they have to show proof of concept. This is the DOD we are talking about, I am sure that before BLADE is done that the total cost will be in the 100's of millions.

Miele, but don't complain about the price.

Instead of taping it to a stray cat, I suggest we return them to the government* since I am sure that they will be marked as "Government Property."
*Given that a local police officer is a representative of the government, his government issued car or personal vehicle would be a proper place to secure the government's property :-)

How quickly we forget that little skirmish that started in 1775 and lasted until 1783 or the skirmish in Vietnam or the ones taking place in the middle east, organization has its limits.

No, doing it the way he suggested you would want to use a CVS (drugstore in the USA).