People seem to feel that money spent on exploration has no valuable return! Yet they spend countless billions on food stamps and welfare, yet these also have no tangible return.
They lose sight of the fact that 99% of the money spent on exploration is for the purchase of items made on earth and represents the labor expended to produce whatever item.

Take gold - it is free in the earth, but we pay the miners to drill, dig, break rocks, extract etc, and ever stage is almost totally for wages to deal with a raw material. Same for wood products, fibers. plastics, metals etc.

Research means we pay thousands of people to do intellectually challenging and technically difficult tasks to gain knowledge. Welfare and food stamps means we pay millions of people to sit on their bums and do nothing. Welfare and food stamps are a $$ sink. Sure they allow people to live without effort, without intellectual challenge, yet why do we spend more and more to grow this welfare and food stamp industry? We have given excess voting power to non-productive elements of society. In Roman times, only citizens of the city of Rome had the vote - none in the others could vote, to get these few votes, the voters were bribed by the senators (the only politicians of the age) with food and entertainment, which came to be called "Bread and Circuses" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
The huge empire of Rome declined and fell due to various forms of mismanagement and some say, lead in the wine? The USA is not immune to this.
If the research that underpinned all the gains the USA and the world have made in the past 100 years is not continued, we will decline into a morass of welfare grubs. It might take a while, but the decline has begun and will accelerate. We need both democrats and republicans to be isolated from the lack of a private ballot.
We thing that seeing how a politicians votes gives us accountability - it does not, it gives the lobbyist accountability - he sees his bribes at work.

We need to break this pathway. Can we? The politicians have grown used to their well feathered nests and will peck at the hands of those who want to change things.

True, the speed trap mentality will never die. It might have to be state run via data base access as the cams take the pix. The old manual method can co-exist with it?
but perhaps voter outrage will help with this

On the basis that the directing mind of the car pays for the transgressions, a small fine , in the $10-15 area is not worth fighting, yet it will act as a coercive pressure to cause that mind to limit the motion of the car to be within limits. Of course, andone can make their robotic car exceed a limit - unless these limirs are hard wired in, with location data and the settings of these limits in all dirveable areas is also hard wired in or acessable from a central data base via the computer to adapt to time and other changes (like no left turn from 4:30 to 6:30 PM, Mon to Fri).

We know that all modern cars can have their chips accessed to change the performance curves to accelerate quicker. The OEM chip is patterened for conformity with emission limits. We know it is illegal to change them. We also see the brisk sales of 'modded' chips and programmers to 'mod' these chips. We also know that the police are not equipped to easily inspect a car to determine if it has been modded, and so these mods excape the law. Will driverless cars also get modded, to go faster, make left turns at all hours, or whatever? One might expect a power on self test would stop this, but, if the test procedure has been hacked - what then? We will then need anti-hacker laws and sealed boxes to control this aberrant behaviour, or have we reached the millenium and none of us will do this in the future? I expect a sealed data unit will deter most, but some will fiddle.

They ticket the car, if the person wants to challenge in court, he must admit to driving the car. If he defeats it, he has spent a few hours to save $10-15 = the purpose of the ticket has been met.
That is why I sad no points etc, and $10-15 set fine

As we speak, we have large penalties for all the driving offences, speeding, not stopping, bad lane changes and signal failures. The main reason is the large cost of the police and court system.
I suggest they impose a summary fine amount, with no points or other consequences, of $10 on each offence and use traffic cams to impose them. The ticket would have a choice of $10 pay and be done with it or $300 for a court appearance, plus driver demerit points and insurer notification of a trial discovers guilt. Usually guilt with a cam is quite easy to establish = sure to lose.

I feel most people with pay the $10 and it will act as a deterrent. They could also mandate a court appearance if over 5 of these occurred within 30 days to eliminate rich scofflaws.

As it is now, people are forced to fight and win/lose, the system costs rise.

Japanese women, from what I read, simply do not want the aggravation of childbearing, now it is fully within their control. In time the last Japanese female will grow too old to bear a child and the race will pass into extinction as the elders pass on.
Will all women, once freed of mandatory pregnancy follow the same path?

Could Japan grow children in an animal uterus, or an artificial one? Would any chemicals from the mother cross the placental barrier and affect the child if the uterine animal was a pig or sheep, or cow? Is mammalian chemistry sufficiently plastic to tolerate these cross species internal fostering? We know that chemicals from the foetus trigger child birth in humans - will the same signal work with foster animals? Are there brain development chemicals in the mothers blood that are essential to normal human brain development?
An animal would be a lot less costly than a fully artificial uterus. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
more here http://bit.ly/1mOsaw7

Wyoming coal is as white as the driven snow....

Yes, usually they start into an equatorial orbit at launch and head downrange of the launch pad, so any safe abort would involve a downrange foot print of some kind. There will be varied aborts, depending on where they are which can save anything from the whole rocket to the payload. It all depends on these later stages having soft landing capability. Having soft landing for all stages will invoke a payload penalty, and might mean only a limited safe abort capability. The lightest part is the payload and a parachute save with floats might be affordeable in efficiency for that, but it is also the lightest, so a lander might be doable.
At some point the weight penalty gets too big for a rocket landing and a parachute descent is the only viable way.
I am sure paceX and the others will be optimizing all these choices over the next 5 years.

LOL, I can suggest you read a little more background.
This is a high performance craft. It has 9 engines. Each flight will differ in payload and fuel load to attain that payload to destination. They say they can fly on 8 engines. They do not say it can reach orbit on 7 engines? 6? With a light load they may be able to fly on 6 engines - unknowable.
The company may know this, but I do not.

From the way they speak, it appears they are going to explore this topic in detail because if they can do it, they can become more competitive.
Time will tell.

As for weasel words, I use them only to weasels....;)

If one engine stops, the other engines will burn longer to reach orbit and they might have less fuel as they reach orbit since the change of one engine from creating thrust to deadweight will change the specific impulse of the system as a whole. With 2 failed engines, it might not reach orbit and might then decide to soft land while it has the fuel to do it.
Each situation will differ and will have a point after which it can no longer make a soft landing and will have to go for crew emergency escape procedures. (if crewed)

Yes, it takes a full test, in addition, the extra weight of building it to soft land reduces the performance of the system.

Let us examine the stresses on the various parts and assess rebuilding.
The main engine takes all the heat and thrust of the launch. How much metal fatigue occurs? The extreme vibration of launch bends the metal back and forth a small amount. How much metal/ceramic has been burned off various surfaces of the engine?.
Electronics, probably can be used again. Sensors might need replacement. Tanks, piping and pumps all need to be tested for metal fatigue in the launch environment. We might find tanks etc are good for one launch, but not two, same for all manner of parts.
I am not sure what sort of assessment process Ariane went through before thet decided it was not economic to recycle. The data might be online.

That said, we can certainly re-use the launch vehicle, but the tests and assessment and replacement of the parts too worn by flame and fatigue may well cost more than a newly made vehicle.

It looks as if you are part of the problem, not part of the solution - anyone agree?

“As at January 1, 2014, the upper end of the salary range for Police Constables increased to $98,783 (including retention pay), as a result of the 2011 to 2014 collective agreement increases,” it states. Premium pay is the result of court attendance, overtime, and call backs for various reasons. The force says it has reduced premium pay of the last few years, but some is unavoidable. Collective agreements are fixed by the board, police spokesman Mark Pugash noted.

and then add to that, on top of the base

        Family Health Care Plan,
        Family Dental Plan,
        Vision/Hearing Care,
        Pay Direct Pharmaceutical Card,
        Life Insurance,
        Paid Vacation,
        On-site fitness facilities,
        Access to the Employee Credit Union,
        Pension Plan (OMERS),
        Education Reimbursement (up to 50% tuition reimbursement for job related courses),
        Employee and Family Assistance Program,
        Parental/Maternity Leave.

Not a lie, the benefits bring the average over the $100K. That paid duty is as police officers, at police officer paid duty wage rates = far higher than security types make.
The time will come when the various unions are brought back to earth in their inflated wages. 40-50 years of getting 2-3% real wage increases AND getting an inflation indexed increase has made all city/state/federal unions get far ahead of the ordinary worker, and they are parasitic on the workers. Governments make nothing = parasitic.
And yet the common worker pays this.

The UAW/CAW and other manufacturing unions have killed off most manufacturing jobs. These unions feel that state/city/federal unions = immune to greed.
We are getting to the point where the unions are killing us all.

So we all unionize, and we all get the same wages - right?

Unions do not want that, as happened in Australia. Unions want to live off the back of others