Exception, after exception isn't being made. It made headlines for weeks. Then it had to go all the way to parliament to get an exception made. And even then is was only for a short term exemption until a proper solution to the shortage could be found.

The Chalk River medical isotope issue was different though.

Everyone agrees that the regulator did its job by shutting down the plant for not meeting the once in a million years safety ratio that is the standard. However the plant was not a power plant, it was a research plant producing medical isotopes. So issue wasn't whether the ractor met the standards, it didn't. The issue was the probability of people getting injured or dying from a plant malfunction was significantly less than the probability of people dying from not getting those medical isotopes.

When presented with instructions to provide a temporary exception to the rule until other sources of the isotope could be brought online, the regulator said no. So things escalated until someone (parliament) had the authority to over rule the regulator.

She was fired for not granting the exception, even though she knew what the balance of probabilities were. Basically she was power tripping.

There isn't really anything new going on here, its just never been put togther like this before.

While NASA prefers water landings, the Soviets landed all of their equipment on the ground. So returning things to the ground isn't really that exciting. Additionally there were landing people (who are much more fragile than mechanical parts) from orbit rather than just high in the atmosphere.

And while reusable engines didn't work out that great for the Space Shuttle for various reasons. Lots of rocket engines have been used over and over on test stands on the ground. Rocket engines that can be reused isn't new tech either.

I don't know who told you the F-35 was an air superiority fighter but that is totally wrong.

The F-35 Joint *Strike* Fighter is a replacement deep strike aircraft. It will be filling the roll of the now retired F-117, and soon the F-16 and F-18.

Since the 70's air forces have followed the high-low model. An expensive air superiority fighter in small numbers, and a cheaper multi-purpose fighter in larger numbers. This is why the USAF has F-15s and F-16, and the Soviets had the SU-27 and MiG-29. The next generation is the F-22 for air superiority and F-35 for multipurpose.

Also the F-35 has nothing to do with the retirement of the A-10. The F-35 wasn't designed to replace the A-10 any more than the F-16 or the F-18 were designed to. The A-10 isn't a sexy plane in the air force's eyes, it's getting old, and no one made plans to replace it. So rather than admitting that they dropped the ball on CAS the air force is claiming that the F-35 will do the job.

There is nothing wrong with using and IDE, that doesn't make you a bad programmer. Relying on an IDE does make you a bad programmer. Lets face it, there is a lot of boiler plate boring crap involved in programming. Using an IDE to handle the mundane stuff makes a lot of sense. But if you can't do your job without it then you are probably not very good at your job.

Using a calculator doesn't make you bad at math. Being unable to do math without a calculator makes you bad a math.

A big part of the issue is that some of these organizations shouldn't be doing any of this at all.

A big part missing the the discussion is that the NSA is a military outfit. It is part of the DoD and its commander is a serving member of the US armed forces. It is the signals intelligence branch of the US military. Their primay mission is ensure secure communications for the US command and control infastructure, and gather intelligence on foreign military powers.

How did we get from spying on the Soviet Union, to monitoring the phones of every American citizen? As a military outfit they shouldn't be operating in the the US at all. You wouldn't let soldiers patrol the streets acting like cops, so why are thay taking on tasks the rightfully belong on the hands of the FBI? The simple answer is secrecy. Whatever legal games they want to play, at the end of the day they knew that they shouldn't be doing it, so the tasked it to the DoD so they can call it a matter of national security.

Except Norway did pretty much opposite of what Venezuela did.

Norway created a state company owned company (a crown corporation for those familiar with the British system) called Statoil. Using public funds the company established itself in Norway and around the world. Once the company got established it was turned into a public stock company (NYSE: STO). The Norwegian government remains the primary shareholder, however it is a public corporation run by the private sector for profit.

Venezuela brought in foreign established firms to provide the expertise and capital to exploit the country's natural resources and to aid in the development of the national oil company. Later a more socialist government decided that they didn't like the deal anymore and nationalized the foreign owned assets into the PDVSA, a government run enterprises.

The result is that Norway's oil industry is well coordinated and on friendly terms with other governments and oil companies. And frequently engages in joint ventures with other oil companies outside of Norway. Statoil is run for profit by via private sector mechanisms providing a good return on investment for the country, and is relatively free of corruption. The country's ownership of the controlling share of the corporation is treated like a long term asset for the benefit of future generations.

Venezuela has for it's part burned bridges with everyone who had previously invested in the country. Making it hard to expand outside the country, and more importantly attract foreign investment which could provide the expertise that Venezuela lacks. The PDVSA is rife with corruption providing cushy jobs to 'friends of the family' for various political players. The ROI for the people and government of Venezuela is much lower than it should be. And rather than treating it's ownership of PDVSA as an investment (like Norway does with Statoil), they treat it like a cash cow to fund various ill conceived economic plans.

Norway acted as a sole proprietor in a free market. Venezuela acted like the post-revolution communist governments of the last century.

Don't be so quick to count embedded guys out yet. While there isn't much in systemd itself, but as I understand it it will integrate well with kdbus. And kdbus (I think) plans to support QNX style "yield CPU to destination" type message passing. Which is a very nice feature for realtime systems.

I know it sounds loopy but I think he has a fair point

People's wants are infinite but people also want free time to enjoy themsevles. People are only willing to work so hard for their wants.

If you look at how far things have some in the last 500 years, the amount of stuff provided by the government even in capitalist countries is incredible. Basic literacy was once limited to the elites, disease was rampant. Yet today here in Canada, 1/3 of the population will get a high school diploma, 1/3 a college diploma, and 1/3 a university degree or higher. Healthcare is provided by the government. So what happens when the GDP per Capita continues to grow? In real terms it was $30k in 1994 and stands at $40k in 2011, what will it be like in 2100? What does a country with a $100k GDP per Capita look like?

I don't think that it is unreasonable to think that at some point the level of services provided by the government will be high enough that many people will choose not to work. And instead spending their time on other pursuits. The maginal benefit you gain from going from just government services to a full time job just would be enough for some people. Now obviously not everyone will do this, some poeple will always strive for more. But some people will.

Imagine if you had the choice between $60,000 a year from the government, but $100,000 if you got a full time job. In dollar terms the marginal benefit is $40,000. But at $60,000 you already have enough for the comforts you already enjoy like food, clothes, TV, Internet, vacations, etc. Would you really work 40hrs a week for a little more comfort, or would you take all of that extra time you have been afforded and persure your passion, or spend time with your kids?

Or you could just use an IDE like Vim, Eclipse, NetBeans, etc. that can handle git via plugins. If you are using git enough that you need an interactive shell, you might as well just integrate it with your development enviroment.

There are two arguments being made to support equality in gender ratios. A) A bigger pool of applicants means a higher quality workforce. B) Equality is an end in itself.

But surely there are women who have the right talents for these dangerous jobs! Most likely the death rates in these industries would fall if high quality women would replace the lowest quality men. And isn't saving lives a social good?

And as far as the shortage theory goes, some people working on oil rigs or the tar sands make money on par with programmers without having to get an education. There is a huge shortage of labour in the Alberta Tar Sands.

According to the BLS 95% of workplace deaths are men, even though men make up only slightly more than half of the workforce. So how come there is no push to get women in high risk jobs, like oil wells, private security companies, mining, etc?

It's got nothing to do with gender balance. It's about feminists finding things to rail against.

The problem with this study is that it presumes that the materials collected will be used on earth. The idea behind Planetary Resources is that they would be used in space.

A bottle of water costs what? $1 maybe $2. The cost to put that bottle of water into space can range from $1,000 to $10,000. If Planetary Resources can find some asteroids with ice, extracting the water is not that difficult a task. The problem is getting the machine for mining into place because putting things into orbit is so crazy expensive.

Even if it costs them $5000 per litre to mine water they can still make a profit. Not because water itself it expensive, but because putting it into space is.

No they had the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance through which the USSR gave China several R-2 rockets which were improved versions of the R-1 (the soviet copy of the V-2). They also provided the blueprints, training to Chinese engineers for almost a decade.

Since the colapse of the USSR China continued to recieve assistance from Russia. Both in the form of training by sending Chinese cosmonauts to Star City, and technology transfer. For example, the first Chinese spacewalk was done in a Haiying spacesuit, but they had a man in a Russian Orlan-M spacesuit on standby as backup.