Not really. Under Franklin Roosevelt, eminent domain was expanded to the point where you don't really own your land, you own a license to use it from the government, which can be revoked at any time.

- that's a pretty racist remark. Are you implying that only whites have high IQs? You're also incorrect - there have been a number of astronauts of all races, and almost every space (and engineering) company actively works to increase the number of minorities and women in engineering disciplines. And it's working, slowly. I was just at a conference for internet hosting companies, and the percentage of 'minorities' and women was much higher than I would have seen even 10 years ago.

But it's still difficult to find even one US woman in graduate computer science programs, and the vast majority of 'minorities' in those programs that I've seen have been from outside the US. Anecdote: I was back in school a few years ago. At that state school, the graduate CS program had 0 American women, and 0 American blacks - and well over 1/2 the program was foreigners. But about 20% of those foreigners were women. The foreigners knew that success here meant the difference between a comfortable middle class life, and not. Interestingly, the school's new building was named after a foreign student who went through the EE program, succeeded, and gave the school $12 million for the building.

Societally the hardest part of increasing the number of technically educated youngsters is changing the culture within the home and early school to encourage and support analytical thinking, rational discourse, and motivation to achieve on the merits. It's hard to be a 'geek' kid when everyone in your class laughs at you, calls you names, and shoves you into lockers.

The "ultimate revenge of the nerds" is that they grow up to be engineers, and build the world everyone else has to live in! :D

In a real launch the vehicle is a couple of hundred miles downrange at separation. I'm guessing that one of the purposes of having a launch site in Texas is that then they can let the stage coast downrange some more, and land it at Canaveral. This would require less energy than returning to Texas. However Canaveral is pretty far downrange, so my guess may be bogus. This also depends on what type of orbit the launch is intended for.

Horses are also very good at body language. There are a lot of very subtle cues that a good horseman learns, that a horse already knows. IMHO there's good evidence that, like dogs, we have co-evolved horses to be good at working with humans. At one time I could make my horse turn either from the front or back, moving forward or backward or staying in one place, with my arms folded and just turning my head and adjusting my posture.

The historical way of teaching horses is rather crude, but has improved greatly in the last two decades. It basically is the equivalent to shouting "42!" (or any meaningless phrase) repeatedly until the horse does what you want, at which point you reward the horse. The horse has no idea what 42 means, it just keeps trying things until it gets rewarded (or, in older times, it stops getting hit.)

But, as a former-fellow-horseman once told me, horses have two purposes in life - to eat and get away. :) I'd add one more thing about every 21 days, except for geldings.

IDK if this is relevant to your particular work, but there are some very good Javascript libraries now - d3js.org comes to mind. IIRC Google has one or two as well.

If/when I ever get a new TV, it'll be hooked up via HDMI to the XBMC video server I'll get around to setting up. No ethernet to the TV, that's just asking for trouble. But, of course, I'm an aging curmudgeon and I do things like that. :P

Funny! :D
I even checked out thefacepalm.com - it exists, but the domain is parked. Maybe there's an opportunity for someone - a discussion site for skeptics, of everything? The motto could be "News you can ignore, arguments you disagree with." :) I'd say that there is a need for a site where folks who disagree with everything can go and agree that everything else is crap, but most discussion sites are filled with them already.

Anyway, I enjoyed your comment. :)

I'll just put this here: How Japan Plans to Build an Orbital Solar Farm.

IIRC Volvo and Mercedes, and maybe some other car makers were working with active suspension systems that had this feature about 10 years ago. But IDK if it ever made it to a production model.

Interestingly, I just received a link to an article in IEEE Spectrum, about How Japan Plans to Build an Orbital Solar Farm.

I'd be interested in seeing how a human would do at proving they are not a computer, or attempting to prove they are. Either one would be an interesting test, whether the tester was human or computer.

Sorry, wrong on all counts. :) I will say that one of the reasons I'm skeptical about space solar power is that (IMHO) to make it feasible will require using materials mined from space rather than shipping everything up from Earth - that makes it much more speculative. Others disagree on that. OTOH, solar panels seem to last a lot longer in space, and the sun is always shining. On the third hand, I see a lot of political difficulties.

Mining asteroids for aluminum or iron for use on Earth is not likely to make economic sense for a long time - it's true that shipping from orbit down to Earth is much cheaper than shipping up, but it's still not a win. But other materials do make sense. If you review the plans of Planetary Resources, you'll find that for several rare materials - platinum being the most famous - mining asteroids _potentially_ makes good sense - it's still highly speculative. But the folks who are pursuing this are used to high risk high reward ventures. Platinum mining today is a filthy, dangerous, extremely expensive, environmentally and socially disastrous enterprise. It's almost certainly cheaper to get platinum from an asteroid than from the present mines, even with the terrific cost of the initial infrastructure.

Here's a useful quote, from Wikipedia:

"Famously rich" above means, in the "Merensky Reef" zone of the Complex, approximately 10 parts per million of Platinum group metals - that's the whole group, not just Platinum - can be found. This means that a gram of Platinum must be extracted from more than 100 Kg of ore. This is by far the richest part of the richest mine on the planet. Other active mines are processing ores with much lower concentrations.

The top line on all this is that commercial space development is already reducing the cost of space launches. SpaceX is launching for 1/4 of the price of prior vendors, and forcing the prices of every competitor down. Their reusable vehicle technology has the potential of significant further reductions. We still need additional cost reductions, ideally an order of magnitude. There are methods with that potential but it's hard to say which one(s) will get there.

I should add - 'the company' is Integrated Space Analytics LLC, for which publication of analytical and reference data via the poster, the website, and subscription is the business.

Nope. The company's primary business is analytics and our primary interest is not defense but commercial space, particularly start ups and privately held companies that may become public. We are all 'space nuts' who have been working to advance non-government space for a long time. (Except me - I've been doing bleeding edge computer stuff most of my career. I've been more of a space groupie.)

We are doing this project because we think it's important. Development of space as an economic resource has more potential to 'fix' many of the biggest problems here on Earth than anything we can do down here. We are doing what we can to help make that happen.

"There be dragons out there" - and beyond them, the New World.

Rumor has it that Planetary Resources has already found a good target asteroid for their mining plans. If they are successful, the price of platinum may drop from $1500/oz or thereabouts to $10/oz, turning it from a curiosity used in expensive jewelry and (in extremely small quantities) as a surface in catalytics converters into an industrial metal with huge numbers of valuable uses.

Space Solar Power (which I'm somewhat skeptical of, mostly for reasons having to do with the politics of Earth) has the potential to replace every thermal power plant - nuclear, coal, oil - within 100 years, and providing enough power to allow all cars to be electric, thereby removing most of the present day sources of air pollution.

An economist a few years ago analyzed the potential effects of space development, and concluded that it had the potential to improve the standard of living of everyone on Earth by a factor of 10 within 100 years.

With that level of activity, even with the great number of robotic systems in use, the number of humans in space will gradually increase, and the cost of bringing them back to Earth will become more than the cost of keeping them up there in good health. And space habitation will become permanent.