I was expecting actual warnings about hyperbolic space.

No, the US, a racist country, doesn't want its stuff stolen by China, another racist country. Given that the US already works with Russia, Japan, and the ESA countries, which are all racist countries, I'm sure something can be arranged. Probably what would happen is that the relatively secret stuff that the US has on the ISS like the communication system (TRDSS) will either be opened up or a few wheels will be reinvented in order to eliminate a good portion of the stuff that China would want to steal.

Moving on, I think the real problem with this concept is how badly the ISS turned out. It's an awful lot of money spent for little outcome. I suspect that the parties involved would both want a bigger and flashier space station than the ISS, would want the US to pay most of the cost, and there would be the same massive inefficiencies, vast cost overruns, and corruption as were present in ISS

Well, OK, so when should I expect that I can build a brochure site for a hotel that uses HTML5 videos and have one video format and one set of custom controls to work with? Because the world has moved on and Flash is no longer a viable option for this kind of work despite offering those advantages for many years, thanks to much the same browser developers who can't get their act together and actually provide a better replacement. They can't even manage to make the default "this is a video" overlay look the same, or even put it in roughly the same place so you can design placeholder graphics accordingly.

If your company's video site actually is YouTube then this kind of problem probably doesn't affect you all that much. However, for normal web sites that are just trying to take advantage of multimedia as part of the presentation, HTML5 audio and video are a bad joke, and the punchline is that all the much better technologies that used to be viable alternatives have been deliberately killed off anyway.

But this brings us back to the original question from my first post in this thread: why? What objective advantage do you or your employer/client gain by insisting on such compliance?

I do sympathise with your position, in that it should be an advantage to follow standards, and browser compatibility now and in the future should be practically guaranteed by doing so. The world would be a better place if this were the reality. But it isn't, and so pragmatically, I'd rather build web sites and apps that work than sites and apps that dogmatically tick the right boxes even though it requires more effort and offers no demonstrable benefit.

Yes, I was, and I respectfully disagree. Browsers today do a lot more, but frequently the support for newer features is so specific to each browser and in some cases so unstable that it is completely useless for real world projects, it requires silly amounts of boilerplate and prefixing (= will break at some future point you can't predict, so also useless for production sites that won't have ongoing maintenance), or at best it requires implementing something in multiple independent ways.

An example of useful standardisation would have been all browsers using the same default stylesheet. Imagine how much developer time could have been saved and how many glitches could have been avoided over the years if we had never needed things like CSS resets or Normalize.

But the point is that these non-standard-compliant implementation techniques don't break anything in practice, because every browser is tolerant of them and will always remain so because far too much would break otherwise. The only downside to not following those standards is that someone can complain you're not following their preferred standards. And someone always will, but unless it really does matter (for example, because it excludes customers and damages your bottom line, or it actually does undermine some sort of accessibility aid) you can just ignore them.

Genuine questions: Who do you think that would help, and why?

This kind of validation can be useful if you need to follow a standard for something to work. If browsers all followed proper de jure standards then this would offer a useful benefit for compatibility, particularly forward compatibility with future browsers.

Unfortunately, most of the major browsers today do not do this at all consistently. Even some of the people writing the standards have basically given up. (HTML5 "living standard"? Seriously? If it changes arbitrarily then it's not a standard.)

The de facto standards that actually matter are how real browsers behave, which dictate whether your page looks right in the browsers your visitors are using today. Nothing else you do today is guaranteed to work tomorrow without regular attention anyway, which is foolish regression from the situation a few years ago for which we can thank Google and Mozilla, but it's the reality all the same.

In my entire career doing Web work -- which is measured in decades -- I'm not sure I have ever seen an example where a project was objectively better off because it routinely enforced having valid mark-up and stylesheets. I have, however, seen plenty of cases where someone has deliberately deviated from W3C standards for a specific, useful reason.

For example, Google have been known to omit mark-up that they were sure wasn't necessary in any browser in order to save a few bytes. Multiply those bytes by a bazillion visitors to their site every day and that's a lot of traffic saved overall. Another common case is trendy MVC frameworks like Angular, which often use non-standard attributes on HTML elements for their own purposes. They could use standard "data-*" attributes, but once you've got a few of those sitting on many elements in your mark-up, it's just noise and excess weight, so they use their own prefix for namespacing instead. And yet, I don't see anyone claiming that either Google's search engine or Angular as a JS framework have failed as a result of these heinous crimes...

I agree, but there is a reason for it to happen. Namely, such corruption and inefficiency can get in the way of other powerful interests. My view is that there are some parties that need the Air Force to have better space capabilities and the ULA just wasn't delivering on that.

Let's not get hasty here. There's a reason I'm a fan of SpaceX, but not of the ULA. Sure, you might be right. But it also might be a way for the ULA getting to compromise SpaceX's competitiveness, at least in Air Force contracts.

Because the military industrial complex wants less subsidies.

We've had orders of magnitude more than 27,000 years of human flight, FYI. I'd say that there are probably a few tens of thousands of airplanes in the air at any given time. Meaning that we're accumulating about that much flight time every year.

That the thing about dark matter... it has a perfectly reasonable explanation (WIMPs). It's not that weird of a "thing".

I dunno. Usually when a theory requires more and more unseen entities over time it's a sign that it's time to replace the theory. We know General Relativity is incomplete, both because it doesn't take into account quantum effects and because it has internal contradictions - specifically, it assumes a continuous spacetime geometry but predicts non-continuous points (black hole singularities). Most likely Einstein simply missed some observer-specific assumption - for example, GR assumes mass-energy has an exact distribution rather than probabilistic one - and thus GR is not completely general.

A question I've had for a while... if space itself is being inflated (or any sort of mathematically equivalent scenario) - everything inflating in all directions at all scales - wouldn't there be some sort of weak radiation signal from electrons expanding into a higher energy state due to dark energy and then collapsing back down?

No, because a continuous force wouldn't drag electrons up and then let them drop back down. What it would do is alter orbital structure and energy levels. But how they'd be altered depends on how quantum mechanics and GR combine, which we don't currently know.

This isn't an argument you will win. If we can't accept the past few centuries of history because it is less than a few thousand years, then we can't accept those few thousand years, because they're less than the few tens of thousands of years of cro-magnon man and so on. It's no longer the age of spear chucking empires. Something has changed.

That's the oddest way to state such things. Those mean, ole Koch brothers are getting away with spending one or two orders of magnitude less than their opposition because they're rich. We're also ignoring that a lot of their money goings into weird games which just don't get them anywhere. There's a better way to put this. Their money is spent just as terribly as their oppositions' money, but the ideas that they frequently back, such as liberty, personal responsibility, and less government meddling resonate with a lot of people these days.

I don't consider you capable of deciding who is rich. And why shouldn't the rich or anyone else for that matter not want more. Your sane "standards" aren't feeding anyone.

Well, they can't possibly have more than three times their fair share just due to the size of the wedge.

Well, what about them?

The socio-economic development happened. Technology development appears to be one of the drivers of that.

The developed world had the exact, same problems. It got better in the same way that these societies are improving now.