The first non-spam comment on the article: "Clean energy!" Right... That rather depends on where the hydrogen comes from. If it's made by cracking water with energy from coal power plants, well...

Hydrogen has potential, but the manufacturers have some big problems to solve. Accident safety with those high-pressure (700 atmosphere) tanks. Leakage - hydrogen is very difficult to contain. A fueling infrastructure - at least with electric vehicles, any plug will do in a pinch. Transport - if you have fueling stations, you have to get the hydrogen to them, which implies huge tanker trucks with accordingly magnified safety issues.

Those may not be insurmountable issues, but they sure aren't easy...

I've done my time as a technical project manager. I can't say I enjoyed it, but someone had to do it, namely protect the developers from upper management so that they could actually get their work done. One thing it taught me was to plan around 30% of the project time on the requirements. That still seems insane to me, but that's what it takes. That was my time, working with upper management, documenting things, listening to them waffle, and generally refusing to hand anything to the developers until I had a firm set of requirements, signed off in blood.

When they would then immediately try to change. So during the implementation phase, the two challenges were (a) refusing to accept needless change requests, and (b) having to literally forbid upper management from talking to my developers directly, because they would direct them to make changes that I had already rejected. That latter led to quite a stressful little showdown :-/

FWIW: small companies are a lot easier to deal with than large companies. They have fewer managers and less time to waste on endless meetings. Usually you have a small group of people who really need to be elsewhere, so you can reach decisions fairly quickly. With large companies, there are apparently endless numbers of middle-management drones who want to put their oar in - or maybe they just want the coffee and donuts.

So: 30% requirements, 30% QA/Testing, and 40% development - that's about how the work hours broke down. Calendar time was different, with the requirements phase sometimes taking many months even for relatively simple things that were developed in just a few weeks.

I am totally pro-space, but I just do not understand the ISS. It is hugely expensive to keep and feed crews. And yet, the human habitation makes whole classes of experiments difficult or impossible, due to the atmosphere, the vibrations from movement, etc..

Where human presence could be useful: if we were actually building a space infrastructure. Capture some asteroids, use them for raw material, and build a base to use to get to the rest of the solar system. While lots of construction tasks can be automated, human intervention will occasionally be necessary. But we aren't doing that.

So, what exactly is the point of manned space stations? Is it really worth it? Or would the money, time and effort be better invested in some other types of space activity - automated experimental stations, or - let's dream - building a "real" base in space?

Google "asset forfeiture" and weep.

Asset forfeiture is a standard trick in the bag of US justice. They take your assets, then you then have to prove your innocence to get them back. The fact that this goes against the US Constitution, as well as international law? Irrelevant, I mean, what are you gonna do, call the police? When the police are the thieves, that's not very useful...

The US is a police state pretending to be a democracy. Lot's of people haven't been stepped on yet, so they can continue ignoring this unpleasant reality.

...as a student, and now as a teacher, I just don't get it. Why would you cheat?

I see students do this, and sometimes they do manage to weasel through lower level courses, if the instructors weren't paying attention. So they fail out of the program when they hit higher level courses, because they don't understand the basics. They've wasted maybe two years of their lives, plus a lot of money. If they cannot solve the exercises, if they cannot pass the early courses, there is just no point to dragging it out.

Ok, ok, I hear the excuses already: "I just didn't have time", "I was hung over", "my dog's pet goldfish died", whatever...

If they cannot understand the material well enough to do the assignments (or, perhaps, school just isn't their priority), they are in the wrong place. Everyone makes mistakes, and some people just pick the wrong major. Everyone - most especially the student - is better off if they realize this quickly and move on to something that they can actually succeed at.

"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." — H. L. Mencken, US editor (1880 – 1956)

Really, that's it in a nutshell.

TFS says: "It is never appropriate to use slurs, metaphors, graphic negative imagery, or any other kind of language that plays on someone's gender, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, or religion"

I will actually agree with that: it is inappropriate, as in, uncivilized, trollish behavior. And it absolutely must be tolerated, because freedom of expression is such a critical, fundamental right. Calls for silencing such boorish behavior are entirely misplaced.

It doesn't matter who wins: the Republicans and the Democrats are two sides of the same coin.

- Obama didn't dismantle any of the horrible stuff put in place by GWB (Patriot Act, Guantanamo, etc.). He just built his own abuses on top.

- If the Republicans win, they will not dismantle any of the horrible stuff put in place by Obama. They will just build a new layer on top.

What the US needs is a new coin.

I can't find the link - my Google-fu is apparently weak - but a couple of years ago a truck driver was arrested crossing from Canada into the US. Reason for the arrest: he had printed stories - fiction, not pics - describing sexual encounters with children. He was arrested for possessing child porn. I don't know what happened afterwards, and finding this online seems to be difficult, given the search terms needed...

The best suggestions I have heard consist of two things:

- Clearly defined X-Prizes for private industry: First company to achieve X receives Y prize money, second company receives fraction-of-Y. The total cost of the X-prizes will be a tiny fraction of what a bureaucratic government effort would cost.

- Remove as many regulations as possible from private industry - let it be a "wild west". Example: plenty of people want to volunteer for high-risk space missions. Currently, worker-safety regulations cannot be disregarded, no matter how many waivers the people sign. Get rid of that - as long as people know what they're signing up for, the government should stay out of it.

The de-regulation bit also includes lots of other things. Just as an example, the endless environmental impact assessments required before you can build a launch facility. There are mountains of regulations that stand firmly in the way of actually making progress in space...

Do we have to hear about this every second week, year in and year out? On average, girls are - for whatever reason - less interested in math, physics, chemistry. Meanwhile, boys, on average, are less interested in things that revolve around social interaction. Likely, these preferences are based in biology. Make sure the playing field is as level as reasonably possible, and then leave off. Let individuals decide what they want to be.

The other aspect addressed by the article is race. Here, there may also be biological factors in play, but within the US cultural factors play a huge role - specifically: support for education within the family. Cultural issues are very, very difficult to address - because, cultural change needs to come from within the culture itself. There is very little to be done about it by the tech companies, or even by the educational system.

Security prevents casual theft. When vulnerabilities are found, we fix them, to maintain a basic level of security. Sufficiently determined criminals may be able to break your security anyway. With https, the route that is always open is directly monitoring your computer directly, where the data is unencrypted. They are, after all, criminals - and it is the job of our governments to help chase them down and put them out of business.

What is frightening about the today's situation is the discovery that many western governments are among the worst of the criminals. Governments have more resources than criminal organizations, and (short of vigilantism) there is no one who can enforce the law on the government officials involved. This is the real dilemma we face, as we consider our security systems.

Conspiracy theories are fun, but I incompetence is probably an adequate explanation here. Some commercial project left a mess somewhere, a faceless bureaucrat heard about it, and this idiocy is the result....

I haven't been able to find anything, but presumably something triggered this? Did some major Hollywood movie move in 20 trailers, 30 trucks and a demolition derby - and lay waste to a national park?

I mean, the proposed rule is stupidly worded, but I expect - thirteen layers back - it was meant to solve an actual problem.

Is the management at the USPTO so incompetent that they cannot do this themselves? If you are a manager, you know what your people are doing. If you don't, you should be fired. The solutions to this problem are bleedingly obvious, but unpalatable, so they need to spend millions paying someone else to give them the options, that they then won't implement...

Renewables are "predictable and reliable"? This quote is all over the net in summaries of TFA, but it does not exist in TFA, nor even in Prof. Lombardo's original article.

It's great that Tesla is putting this effort in. Note that they have chosen a very special location - masses of sunshine, shallow and easily accessible geothermal, etc.. However, as usual - if the title of the article contains a question, the answer is in the negative - no, others cannot do this.

The expense is massive; Tesla is doing this primarily for political "green" points. It takes massive amounts of land. It requires a special location. Few other companies will be in a position to reproduce this.

And - to get back to my first point - renewables are neither predictable nor reliable. Tesla is not going off-grid, nor could they. There have been plenty of previous references on Slashdot to the actual (non-)reliability of wind farms and solar. Even geothermal has its limits, not only location, but for each location there is a hard limit as to how fast can you remove heat.