Except the minimum wage hasn't actually increased anywhere but Seattle, Washington(and even there it's still being phased in), and more-over, one of the big principles that undercuts this argument is: "once you can automate away a job, is there any wage at which you wouldn't?"

No, there isn't any wage at which you wouldn't - and it's been happening right under our noses for thirty-forty odd years now. Most people don't notice it because "automation takes away jobs" is virtually always assumed to mean "low education, low or no skill, rote and/or repetitive" jobs.

But the microprocessor revolution changed all that. The skilled master machinist has been replaced by an unskilled worker who loads and unloads a CAM machine. The draftsmen that, under the direction of an engineer, created and maintained the drawings the machinist worked from has been replaced by a CAD program used directly by the engineer. The engineer himself has been partly replaced by electrons too... instead of spending weeks with slipstick working out a stress calculation, now sets it up in a day or two on the appropriate software, clicks the mouse, and it's finished before he gets back from freshening his coffee.

And that's just one example, consider the business my wife works at... Thirty years ago, and at a tenth the size they had a full time accountant and two full time bookkeepers (plus data entry clerks and file clerks) - now they have an (almost) full time accountant, the bookkeepers (along with the data entry clerks and the filing clerks) having been replaced by a POS system.

When it's skilled, or especially when it's white collar, we call it "productivity improvement"... but we should call a spade a spade. It's automation.

They weren't able to do it back then, either.

Any large order had an almost 100% chance of having an arithmetic error. It was always unfathomable to me how more than a century after the invention of the cash register, a multi-billion dollar company could predicate all of their income on high school students' scribbling. Not to mention having to wait in line while all these errors were tediously generated by the staff then checked over by irate customers.

It was a great thing when McDonalds finally dragged themselves into the 19th century.

I would imagine it's down to too few people being on it still.

Not just too few people... it's also feature incomplete.
 

How long do you suppose people will wait before just not bothering with it?

It's already started... Ello has failed to learn the lesson of G+ and odds are, it will suffer the same fate. Gatekeeping at launch is just shooting yourself in the foot - people want to try your system, and if you lock them out... they aren't coming back. First impressions matter, and a barred door with a sign saying "only kewl kids allowed" makes a powerful first impression. In addition, G+, and Diaspora, and now Ello can't seem to grasp that to most people, personal privacy is just one of the many factors that they weigh. On top of the network effect there's also the features the system supports (chat, pages/groups, games, etc...), and all of the would be pretenders have fallen short on that front. (Or added them too late to make a difference.)

On top of that... Ello is going to have to come up with some pretty impressive optional features in order to induce people to pay for them - things the users can't get elsewhere while *also* providing a complete set of the features users have come to expect. That's a very tall order.

There's no doubt that like G+, Ello might be able to eke out a meager living on the fringes... but as a Facebook killer, or even serious competitor, it's already dead.

Yup. But the fossil record tends to be rather sketchy, and has little concern for what we consider our "needs".

Well, I don't think that quite matches the scientific concept of "species". By your definition, almost all species who were alive 50,000 years ago would be considered extinct, but hardly any biologists would agree with that. It's true that no humans alive today have 100% Neanderthal genes, but it's also nearly certain that there are no living humans with 100% Cro-Magnon genes, either. What happened would be considered a mixing of several human sub-species after migrations of one or more African groups into Eurasia. The Cro-Magnon sub-species disappeared, too, and modern human Caucasian and Asian sub-species are the results of that mixing. This sort of thing happens in species all the time, when conditions allow such genetic mixing, and the result is rarely considered a new species.

The fact is that modern humans are all one species. We can and do interbreed when groups mingle, and there are no groups of modern humans that are genetically incompatible. If sub-species "disappear" by genetic mixing, that is usually not called an extinction event. It's just the routine and normal mingling of subspecies.

An interesting contrast is that most North American duck species are known to hybridize occasionally, and the offspring are usually fertile. Does this mean they're really all one species? No, because they all mingle a lot, but interbreeding is rare. They have "behavioral" species-separation features, mostly based on female mate choice. The females are mostly all mottled brown (protective coloring), and the males often approach females of other species (because they can't tell them apart either ;-). But the females usually only accept males that have the "right" color markings; the others are ugly to them. This suffices to keep the species separate, though there is probably a very low level of genetic interchange between many of the species.

But humans aren't like this. Even if we do generally prefer mates in our own subspecies, most of us do find many members of other subspecies physically attractive, and we'll mate with them given the opportunity. This means that we really are all the same species. We now have good evidence that the Neandertals were merely another subspecies, because when they had the opportunity, they did interbreed with those slender, dark-skinned folks who migrated into their territory. They did so often enough to produce a new subspecies that's physically distinct from either of the earlier two (or three or more).

Could you please, please, try it before saying that it is just like [insert failed google product here] or [insert very successful google product that you don't like here]. I know this is quite a culture shift for Slashdot, but sometimes it's too much.

Why? Given Google's track record at UI and UX (generally pretty poor), their track record of 'fixing' what isn't broken (pretty good, I.E. they do it more often than not), their track record of benign neglect of their products (pretty good in the same sense as previous)... etc. etc., we have every reason in the world to be skeptical. We've been burned so many times before.

You cheerlead, I'll go with the odds.

No, that would NOT be much simpler and safer. There's a reason why every orbital space plane has been side-stacked (Shuttle, Buran, X-37).

X-37 is top stacked as was the X-23. On the other hand, both are small enough that they could be encapsulated in a shroud to avoid aerodynamic issues. (And you forgot the X-20 Dyna-Soar, which was also top stacked but was not encapsulated.)

What would have saved Challenger was the first "all-the-way-down" human decision turtle: 15% higher cost for one-piece SRBs instead of the 4-piece propellant sections.

If only the decision was that simple... Sadly, it wasn't.

First there were performance issues; The solid motors need to match to within 5% of each other - which proved essentially impossible to achieve with a monolithic grain as the propellant tended to stratify during the extended pour and the extended curing time. The solid motors needed to have consistent and predictable performance during the burn - which was almost impossible to achieve due to the aforementioned stratification problems. Both problems were also made worse because they couldn't figure out how to safely mix and pour the grains for both boosters in a single batch. Segmented grains, which could be poured in LH and RH segments from a single (smaller) batch suffered from none of these problems.

Next, there's storage and handling problems. The larger the grain, the heavier it is, and the harder it is to prevent it from flowing and deforming under it's own weight. Equally, since the large grains have to be cast upside down they have to be rotated rightside up - and nobody knew how to do that with large monolithic grains. A flex of as little as a couple of millimeters could crack the grain or lead to delamination. Also, segments could be stored individually, reducing fire and explosion risk.

Inspecting the grains with the technology of the time was also several orders of magnitude harder for a large monolithic grain.

Lastly, while there was a only a limited base of flight experience with large segmented grains (via the Titan IIIC)... there was no flight experience with large monolithic grains.

tl;dr version - there were a lot fewer known unknowns with segmented solids than with monolithic solids. A number of the known unknowns for monolithic grains were either outright show stoppers or could result in ruinously expensive R&D programs to discover if a solution was even possible. The known unknowns for segmented grains were all issues of scaling from existing experience.

Why on earth or space would you design an escape system like this?

Because it's solid fueled and thus much more reliable than liquids and, depending on design details, much faster to react. Also, it's pretty easy to build in a passive attitude control system that arcs the capsule out of the booster's path while the Draco will require active differential throttling. (Which in the case of Orion also increases reliability, as the launch abort system doesn't depend on guidance being available.)
 

I believe that this must be disposed of on every flight

Which also means it isn't carried to orbit and poses no further risk to the crew or mission. It also reduces total landed weight, reducing the size of the parachutes required and/or reducing landing shock for the same size parachutes.
 

and the separation is not without risk

Nothing is without risk - and Draco has a number of risks inherent in it's higher parts count and more complex operation that the Orion launch abort system does not have.
 
There are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches. Neither NASA nor Musk has the absolute One Best Design - because there isn't any such thing. (And both of them are leaps and bounds above the complex horror that is Soyuz's launch abort system. Sure, it worked when called on... but that doesn't change the nature of the beast.)

Provided, off course, that they hadn't mounted the payload NEXT to the exploding external fuel tank... yes, I know doing it that way let you have lighter structure, but it introduced a whole range of problems and failure modes you wouldn't have had if the orbiter had been mounted on top.

Mounting the orbiter on top has it's drawbacks too... The orbiter's wings now act a lot more like fins, making it harder to maneuver during the early part of the ascent and inducing (very) high structural loads on the stack. And of course the wings are generating lift... right at the part of the stack where they have a nice long lever arm. In addition, if you screw up the stack's angle of attack, you can end up with the wings at an undesirable angle to the apparent wind. (Undesirable in this case means "the wings are trying to turn the vehicle but not the stack", I.E. tearing the vehicle off the top of the stack.)

Second, the boosters cannot be shut off. That's the big safety drawback of solid rockets - you light them, and they aren't going out until they're out of fuel.

*sigh* This is one of the biggest pieces of misinformation about solid rockets floating about out there, spread and repeated by shuttle detractors in a cargo cult like fashion until it's now regarded as a law of nature. What most people (including engineers who should know better) don't realize is that you don't need to shut them down in the first place- you just need them to produce net zero thrust. This is done via blowout panels in the front dome, and sometimes by blowing off the nozzle as well. And it's not like this is a new fangled technique either... It was used on the Polaris A-1 and A-2, Poseidon C-3, SUBROC, ASROC, Minuteman I and -II, and Peacekeeper missiles. It would have been used of the SRB's of the Titan IIIC booster for manned Dyna-Soar and MOL launches. It's used by Minuteman III missiles...
 
It wasn't used by the Shuttle because during the SRB burn, the SRB's are essentially 'dragging' the ET behind it... and thrust termination would have resulted in them 'hanging' from the ET or having to be jettisoned and the resulting changes in structural loads would have shredded the ET and tossed the Orbiter into the airstream where it would be broken up. (Which is essentially what happened to Challenger.) A normal SRB jettison doesn't shred the ET, because the loads come off gradually as SRB thrust decays and they're jettisoned as the T/W ratio passes through 1.
 
NASA looked at using an Orbiter mounted solid rocket to power it away from the stack, but even if the motor was used on a normal flight for orbital insertion after ET jettison it was too heavy.
 
 

Third, the Main engines are nearly useless in-atmosphere. They're lit mainly because they sometimes fail to light, and having that failure occur halfway to orbit would suck. The "boosters" provide about 80% of the thrust, if memory serves. The SSMEs aren't even at full throttle for much of the flight - Challenger had just set them to full when the stack exploded.

A friend of mine, an aerospace engineer by trade, once explained it thusly - "during first stage flight, the SRB's lift the ET and the SSME's lift the orbiter". This isn't entirely true, but it's a useful first approximation. And that being said, other than a brief time right around Max-Q (when the throttles are backed off to control aerodynamic loads) and as MECO approaches (when the throttles are backed off to control G loads) the engines are in fact run at full throttle during powered flight.

An additional advantage to those signs is that in a dystopian future, the terrorists are usually the good guys. The info will help direct those good guys to where they can find materials helpful in the fight against evil governments.

Step 1: research on the ISS focused on biosphere components and food production.

Those aren't baby steps - your step 1 is no lower than about step 5 in any rational plan. We don't even know how to build a biosphere _on the ground_. Baby steps start with the basics, not three quarters of the way up the curve in the most expensive place to perform research.
 

At the same time, work on high efficiency, low reaction mass propulsion systems.

We already have those. The problem is, they absolutely suck because high efficiency and low reaction mass means absurdly low thrust. (F=MA after all.) Absent new physics, that's not going to change and such drives are going to be useless for manned expansion.

Well, throw enough shit at the wall and something is bound to stick

Looking at the list, that was my thought too...