Depending on what policy a politician wants to push he can cite either traditional economics or Keynesian economics as part of his speel to push a bill. Economists are conflicting in their advice. Sure you can make a real good case for aiming for a surplus because that is good for the nation in the long run. But a lot of politicians are in it for their own personal gain in the short run. They'll borrow from the debt, have a spending party that feels good for a short run, but put the nation in a worse state for the long run. It is unsustainable and only benefits the elite who get crony deals.

Also scientists are supposed to be pretty unbiased, but the marketing people who use their unbiased data will take it out of context. A marketing person can tell you to put radioactive waste on your face because science has said it gives you a radiant glow. You think I joke, but I saw Lucky Charms touted as a health food on tv some years ago because a science study said oats are good for the heart and Lucky Charms has oat pieces. On top of that, it's not hard think there are times where scientists also get pressure from the corporation funding their science to give them the results they want. Just like economists might get pressure too.

If you can somehow make money off advertisements, you'd have more viewers.

There are people who make money with outdated systems that technology decimates. These horse and buggy people would love to see the Internet removed completely. This is why you see places like NBC not streaming the Olympics to everyone on the Internet, but only to cable subscribers. Sure NBC could make a boat load by putting localized advertisements in. People would have made out too if NBC put the Olympics on the Internet because they could watch the events they want when they want instead of waking up at 2 am. NBC is in bed with Comcast though and just wants more cable subscriptions instead of providing a quality service. And Comcast is afraid that if people stream quality programming, that more people will cord cut. So there's little incentive for Comcast to provide better Upload/Download speed. The RIAA from what I hear is making tons of money suing everyone they can, even local places in the sticks are getting sued for using non licensed music in karaoke. Some people would benefit if the Internet ceased to exist completely. This is the same as people who would have benefited if the automobile never got invented.

I discovered Scite and I'm impressed with what it does. It is open source and you can write C/C++

I'm sure IDE/Debugger combos can be superior, but not always.

Prosecutor,"Yah, you're going to jail for downloading some crappy movie."

You,"But I never downloaded that movie."

Prosecutor,"Lets hear your defense."

You,"I run a free wifi spot for people who want to check the net when they're out and about."

Prosecutor,"You should have never said that fellow. You're responsible for what other people do on your router. So lets see what other criminal activities they did before we sentence you to just a couple years of jail."

There's an alternative dialogue that involves a guy who clicks on links he finds on Twitter and Facebook and doesn't realize he watched copyrighted material.

Well He's God, He saw it coming. He isn't surprised.

They could have called it a "Delightfully Overwhelming Large Telescope" if they put half a heart into it. And why stop at Very Large, it could be a "Breathtakingly Large Telescope."

That's a possibility, but I'm just done with them for now at least.

Scammers are some of the scum of the Earth because they think it is okay to do evil to their fellow man if it benefits them monetarily.

I used to use dating sites. Laugh it up, you're allowed. I lost a true love to stupidity once. Anyway in the process of using dating sites for 3 years, I would only get about a 1/70 ratio of people I message. One girl came on strong with a pet nam and I was a little worried, but hey I'll talk with whoev until it gets weird. Anyway it culminates with her being stuck in the UK and no way to get a plane ticket to the states unless I sent her money. I called her out that this sounds like a scam, and that was the last I ever heard from her.

Anyway, one of the reasons for me stopping to use dating sites is that if God has someone for me, he'll hook me up, otherwise, I can work my butt off and have more to help the poor. There's more to life than just getting married and raising kids, though that is a cool part of it.

Big oil and your standard energy providers win if our electricity bills are going up. They're going up by 50% now around where I live. They figure,"Hey one way to compete with the electric car is to make it as expensive to fill up your electric car as buying gasoline." and it will work for the short run.

Right, that is the standard approach. Use hydrogen with particle accelerators which people are calling ion engines now.

It is just that the asteroids produce an interesting situation where if you had a rock cannon, you could use the asteroids as propellant. It is probably a bad idea though because it is like wasting asteroid material which could be used for research. Another idea would to have a sort of "leaping" robot which wouldn't deplete the asteroid's mass, but would jump from asteroid to asteroid without the loss of solid fuel. Sure it'd still need to use a little bit of fuel with conventional fuel if its leaping calculations were off to the next asteroid.

Its just a fun thought exercise when to acquire solid mass material doesn't require fighting a large gravitational pull.

My idea was to use a nuclear powered craft that once it latches on to its first asteroid, it then extracts small pieces of it, and fires them out like projectiles to move it to the next asteroid. You could even launch asteroids back towards earth if you're feeling lucky :P I don't hear anyone talking about using Asteroid rocks as the kinetic matter for propulsion. I just thought it was a unique thought to share with the community.

Just as sharks are known to prey on the wounded and weak of the ocean, Slashdot is always on the look out for weak servers of the Internet so we can hit them when they're down.

She approved the NBC-Comcast merger, then immediately quit the FCC and started working for NBC! I wouldn't trust a single thing she says since she's a poster child for corruption in the FCC and a prime example of the revolving door problems. While Congress is elected and has to try and hide its corrupt doings by making confusing laws no one can understand except lawyers and the corporations that wrote them, the FCC is on a tear of doing whatever it pleases. Believe it or not, there's still some people who think governmental officials are acting for the good of people, but the more the FCC brazenly does actions that are for their corporate overlords and not for the good of the people, the more people are losing faith in the government.