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From this you get the Republicans are the good guys? If this were my only measure I'd count the Dems as the good guys. This bill is a weird combination of stupid and evil.

There are other convincing reasons to *not* count the Dems as good guys, but this isn't one of them. This is just more evidence that we've got two sets of bad guys with slightly different goals. Generally I find the Dems a hair less evil, but I consider them sufficiently evil that I rarely vote for them. I vote for some third party or other. There's usually one that's less evil in it's promises than the Dems and Repubs are in their actions.

There might well be a way to do that, though I'm not quite certain what it would be. However, IIRC, Heinlein didn't discuss the ways that would be used to prevent corruption, so it's unfair to presume that they didn't exist as well as to presume that they did.

OTOH, our current system doesn't prevent the powerful from manuvering their progeny into positions of power, so it's reasonable to guess that another system wouldn't either, without strong built in protections. And I can't recall a historical civilization that both tried to do that and was successful. So perhaps that happening wouldn't prevent a culture from lasting, say a couple of hundred years.

I'm going to be picky, but that's not fascism. Fascism is the corporate state, i.e. the corporations and the state working hand in glove. In Mussolini's case he took a bit of time picking sides in WWII, and finally picked what he thought was the winning side BECAUSE he thought it was the winning side, not because he agreed with it. His fascism became militarist because of the environment that it developed in, it wasn't a part of his central ideas, merely a tool in making Italy strong. And though he was anti-intellectual, he wasn't racist, he was nationalist. There really *is* a big difference. His central goal was to make Italy strong, and his choice of how to do it was the corporate state. Everything else was derivative from that, if you include mistakes as being derivative.

Perhaps the movie was fascist propaganda. I never saw it and don't intend to. The book wasn't, though it was militarist. And the viewpoint character spent almost all his time in a military environment. (Fascist has more to do with the corporations and the government working hand in glove. Read Mussolini. You can properly call the US government fascist. And it's quite distinct from Nazi (which, frankly, is bug-fuck crazy rascism, with a few other loony twists).

Well, I don't know what they're planning, but ISTM that if they divide the storage area they can greatly extend the time at which they're generating energy in exchange for nearly halving the peak generation capability...and without much pumping (which adds an additional inefficiency or three).

OTOH, the amount of energy that can be generated by water stored at a particular height depends on the fall distance. So the potential generation capability will vary a lot as the tide changes. Maybe some of the inflow could be used to drive a hydralic ram to lift some of the water higher than max high tide level. But that *does* introduce additional inefficiencies.

All in all, I don't know, but it looks pretty iffy.

You don't need a huge tide, that just makes it more efficient, and cheaper to build, and requiring less land and construction. So perhaps it's only feasible in a few places, but any country with a coast on the Atlantic, the Pacific, or the Indian Oceans should be able to make it work with enough effort and expense. Most of them just wouldnt' find it practical.

Tidal power would seem to have a lot going for it, but there's probably a good reason that it hasn't taken off before now. Of course, that reason may have been solved...

For that matter, cost overruns are also likely on large nuclear plant projects. (Every one I've heard about has had a significant cost overrun, of course there's a huge selection bias...)

Ah...Little Bobby Tables.

Sorry, but you severly underestimate the problem. Severely. When she was on warfarin she had to take blood tests several times a week, and they kept changing the dose because her diet wasn't rigidly unchanging.

Well, my wife needs a blood thinner, but strenuously avoided coumadine-warfarin. You can't eat green vegetables if you take warfarin, because vitamin K deactivates it. (So she's taking apixaban, which isn't affected by diet.)

That's all very nice, but MS is a software company. I'll admit I was thinking of cross-platform development environments, like their announced open source .NET, about which I know little, and I don't really count stuff they sell as end products. I will acknowledge that this is bias on my part.

OTOH, ... you actually use those things on a tablet? As other than file viewers? (You didn't say you did, so perhaps I'm misunderstanding you.)

That said, if I'd been thinking of consumer end-products I'd never have made that statement. MSOffice for Apple has been out for ages...and MSWord 5.2a for the Mac was the best word processor I've ever used. Far superior to any later versions, and it fixed a lot of bugs from the previous versions. These days it wouldn't be so good as, of course, it didn't handle unicode, but that's still the only improvement that I know about.

Yes, "he" claimed to be relating things from God. But what did he mean by that term? The available texts are too incomplete for me to decide...and they've been pruned by people with axes to grind. I can't be certain that I disagree with him, even though my belief in God is purely materialistically based.

While I agree that there's no good evidence that Jesus, per se, existed, there's some evidence that a person somewhat similar existed several decades before the time Jesus is supposed to have lived. Or at least someone who promulgated the doctrines that Jesus is reported to have promulgated. (Ignoring those of his disciples that diverge from the "red letter" text.)

It's been awhile since I looked at this so I can't be closer than "several decades", but it was somewhere between about 40 years and about 400 years. (Not a big help, I admit.) I think it was related to the Essenes.

What substantive actions can you point to that don't run purely on their platform? (Promises and PR statements don't count.)

To be fair, at the time MS adopted the CRLF line ending style there were *four* standards, none of them dominant:
CR, LF, CRLF, and LFCR (called NLCR..new line carriage return). They picked one existing standard, and Unix was already using another. The supporters of the other standards have died off, so there are only two standards left.

So don't blame MS for all the bad decisions. Only some of them. I still wouldn't want to use their software, though. Perhaps if they live up to their current "We love FOSS" line for a decade or so I'll change my mind, but currently it just feels like their latest lie.