> Business always takes the cheapest route for everything from labor to purchasing.

And government always puts loopholes in the rules for their patrons/donors.

To be honest, I've never understood this either-or mentality: that EITHER we have big business running everything, OR we have government running everything. I have no use for either. Simply put: I don't want to bow to a dictator and laugh at his terrible jokes, but I also don't want to bow to some corporate lordling who thinks he's too good to mingle in the slums with folks like me for any length of time.

There's no such thing as utopia, because there will always be crooks. The answer is simple: if it can be proven that an airline allowed a crash to happen because of poor maintenance or some other issue, put the management of that company in jail. Preferably in a Turkish prison. Naked. With a target painted on some extremely private portion of their bodies.

> Free speech can not cause aircraft instruments to malfunction

I think his Penguinisto's point is quite valid. No, free speech won't cause an aircraft to malfunction, but it can set off riots, start wars and cause all other sorts of "issues" in society.

So ... some might indeed argue that we should prove that our free speech won't "harm" anyone before being allowed to exercise that right.

> While it appears that his mind is going

As for this specific story, I think that's all it is. Youngsters have no idea how much fun it is to start getting old.

My wife has the same birthday as my boss. I know I've told her this; she acted surprised yesterday to "discover" it again.

But I'm not picking on her; I've forgotten things, too -- and the only reason I can't provide an example is because I can't remember one at the moment! :)

Armstrong probably pondered what to say some time before the moon landing, then it lapsed into subconscious. He's not lying when he says that it came to him on the moon, but it might be more accurate to say, "I forgot that I remembered it and said it on the spur of the moment!"

Nothing to see here, move along.

> Thinking that a gravity assist can help significantly ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_assist

Right. Most folks, even amateur space enthusiasts like us, don't really understand the gravity "slingshot" and how it works. Some have the idea that you can just accelerate like a demon toward a given planet or moon, whip around it and somehow gain all sorts of new velocity. That's not so.

What you will gain is part of the orbital velocity of the object that you're "slingshotting" around. Nice boost and it makes a difference -- our space probes use it all the time -- but it's not some magical means by which you can accelerate to C-fractional speeds.

No, not trolling, just making a morbid joke. But after I posted it, and having re-read it, it wasn't in very good taste. My apologies.

> We reap what we sow.

Granted. So why don't we insist that those who did the sowing get the first fruits of the harvest?

In other words: make the management of these food factories eat and drink these foodstuffs before they are shipped off to the market.

Problem solved in a matter of DAYS. :)

> If we had 1/10 of the human population on earth

May I assume that you would volunteer to be one of those who die in order to decrease the surplus population?

(Echoes of Scrooge .. .. )

> no recorded case of a resistant strain being developed due to antibiotics used on cows

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/02/21/147190101/how-using-antibiotics-in-animal-feed-creates-superbugs

Please note that I found that in a quick Google search. In this case, an antibiotic-susceptible organism jumped into pigs, became methicillin resistant. OK, that's not cows, but that shows me that the concern is based in real science.

Bacteria don't care where they live, as long as it's a suitable environment. In any such environment, if regularly exposed to antibiotics, they could develop resistance. This is true in food animals, humans, or petri dishes in the laboratory.

For you to make that assertion, I can only assume that either you are (a) uninformed or (b) a shill for Big Pharma, who make megatons of money off dumping antibiotics into the food chain.

> bureaucracy

This, this and this again.

I guess the day will come (I suspect that it'll be long after Musk has assumed room temp) when SpaceX is a giant, ossified fossil that can't adapt to changing markets. It seems to be inevitable.

My brother is the business guru in our family, and one of his favorite stories involves pizza chains. There's a TON of profit in pizza. Ergo, big chains like Pizza Hut were able to build these fancy restaurants with beautiful decor ... and then along came discounters like Little Caesars to eat away at their market share.

Smaller, leaner retailers like Dollar General are giving Wal Mart a run for the money nowadays, too.

Call the Economic Circle of Life. You're born, you go through a rapid growth phase, then you become hidebound and eventually just fade away.

> SpaceX would need to have solids, which they've quite deliberately eschewed.

ULA's Common Booster Core (CBC) is liquid-fueled only. Solids are indeed more storable for the long term, but if you need to vary the thrust for different orbital profiles and payloads, liquid is the only way to go.

I don't know that SpaceX is even interested in the ICBM market. Elon Musk is a space head who just wants to see people in the stars, and his company is a way to achieve his boyhood dream while making it pay for itself.

What I want to know is when someone is going to take on the jetliner market. Maybe a SpaceX-like company could come along and eat into that market a swell. Then Airbus will join Boeing and the others in complaining and sweating. :)

If information can be gathered, it will be. If laws are passed to restrict access to it, people will find ways around the laws and/or just plain break the law when they want to. This is true in both the public and private sectors.

Whether it's websites that find new ways to track everywhere you browse, or government boffins who want to know what you eat for breakfast and how often you have sex, they ARE going to get that information. The technology exists now to do it, so they WILL do it.

What should TERRIFY all of us -- without exception -- is the way this is being handled, both in the private and public sectors: "we will gather the info, but we promise not to abuse it and we will restrict access to it."

Folks, that ain't gonna happen. People are people. Crooks are crooks and curiosity kills every time.

Perfect example and please don't take this the wrong way. I'm NOT trying to restart the old debate about healthcare in the US. But I have to admit that it has puzzled me that some of the same people who scream about businesses tracking everything we do, don't say a word about the FACT that the Affordable Health Care Act creates one of the largest, most invasive and complete databases of health information that has ever existed.

And our protection? The same thing you see here. "We promise not to abuse this goldmine of information in any way. We're the government and we're here to help. Trust us."

Do you REALLY believe that, in a tight election, juicy tidbits aren't going to magically "slip" out about some challenger's medical history?

I don't know what the answer is. But if you begin to understand that there is no real expectation of privacy anymore, you're at least headed in the right direction.

If you're an individual, you can get the US Department of Labor to go to bat for you. They take an EXTREMELY dim view of businesses that don't pay for labor. (I was once on the receiving end from them -- long story, it was dispute with employee who would just come in to work without authorization and stack up hours, then complained when we didn't pay him -- and even though we were in the right in that particular dispute, WOW were they a pain to deal with.)

As others have suggested, you also do need to talk to an attorney -- but unless the invoices represent many thousands of dollars, it may not be worth it.

As for the comments here about how corporations can "rip you off" -- the deep, dark secret; the unspoken truth is, if someone won't pay you, your options are limited. Whether it's a neighbor who owes you for a lawn mower or a big corporation that owes you for work and services, you can take them to court, obtain a judgment, then execute same. It takes quite a while, though -- many, many months.

If the other party *can't* pay you, here's an even deeper secret: you're out of luck. Unless they have assets that you can seize, there's not a court in the United States that can force someone to invent money with which to pay you. I realize that's probably not the case here, but I state that just for completeness. Even if you win a judgment in court, if the other party CAN'T pay you, you have a pretty piece of paper and absolutely no money.

> So you're suggestion is that elementary school teachers pack heat?

Of course not ... unless they WANT to. They should be allowed to if they choose to do so.

I would never force anyone to carry a gun. At all. But if a responsible person wants to carry one, even a school teacher, he/she should be permitted to do so.

>Do you know what happens to panicked people, children or otherwise, who get in the middle of firefights?

When only the Sicko is carrying and using a gun, the panic will be rather MORE severe until said Sicko runs out of ammo or the gun jams (as happened in that mall up in Oregon the other day). Is that what YOU prefer? :)

http://www.nytimes.com/1993/08/08/us/soldier-kills-4-people-and-hurts-6-in-a-restaurant-in-north-carolina.html

My cousin and his wife were in that restaurant when Sargent French went on his rampage. He's a gun owner and is extremely responsible and law abiding. But at the time, concealed carry was illegal and just out of respect and common decency, he didn't take his gun with him. But I remember him telling me that, while he was huddled behind an overturned table with his wife, he wished he had his gun with him.

He never goes anywhere without it now.

What happened today was a tragedy. The real problem isn't the guns, it's people. Even if you could completely outlaw and eliminate guns tomorrow morning, sickos would still find some way to hurt others. No, it might not be a mass killing like this, but if you're the one on the receiving end of a sicko's attentions, whether you're in a group of hundreds, or all by yourself in a one-bedroom shack, is irrelevant.

> There really isn't much of any of those states that is "out back".

Oh, I'm not comparing them to rural Australia, don't get me wrong. The big killer, in any event, is the lack of wireless phone service in a really remote area. You don't realize how dependent you are on that until it's not available.

And "lost" is a relative thing. You may have a great sense of direction (I do as well). Not everyone does. Hiking to the nearest road isn't easy when you're doing it through thick woods that are filled with briars, too. (Trust me. I speak from experience.)

I don't know about 2-3 hour drive without seeing any signs of civilization, but that stretch from Atlanta to Augusta, GA, is pretty barren. The run from Augusta to Columbia, SC is pretty sparse as well. Doesn't compare to the "sticks" in Australia, I know ... but I can assure you, there are backroads in SC with no signs, no markings whatsoever, and unless you DO have a great sense of direction and can count turns, you can easily get lost.

In this case, of course, the complaint is that Apple's Map application is sending people into the sticks, where their vehicles can become stuck. Not the same at all, I didn't mean to apply that it was.