probably because the title talks about big black holes and a "smashup".....

Not only do they tend to be loudmouths, there are certain segments of the population in the United States that seem to laud ignorance..... I've lived on 3 different continents and enjoy hanging around in dive bars, you get to meet fascinating people, and one thing that I've discovered is that while there are idiots everywhere, (anecdote alert) only in the US do people BRAG about being ignorant.....

The company I worked for didn't pay overtime, and would constantly cut bonuses, so it's not just unions that are pushing OT.

To see how workaholism saps productivity and rarely leads to better results, look at Japan. Overtime is sacrosanct in Japan, at the company I worked at previously it was a badge of honor that the average amount of overtime was 60 hours a month. Japan has the lowest per-hour output in the G7, and it's a small wonder why. Managers will often times not buy hardware that can increase productivity because hey, you can simply make the workers work longer hours for free, whereas hardware costs money. The result is a populace that is unhappy, unhealthy, and well dying. The low birth rate is well known, what is less well known is that the Japanese have the least amount of sex in the developed world. The technology industry that everyone once thought would rule the world has come to be dominated by the west because managers have very little incentive to innovate, to increase productivity. And as the cherry on the shit sundae, the low productivity means that wages in Japan are lower, i.e. longer hours for less money. Trust me, you don't want to go down this route.

Nice astroturfing, you get paid by the CCP to post this bullshit? You really think China is transparent? HAHAHAHHAHA, what a fucking tool. Guess what, you are being fucked over by the CCP. Also, this economic progress is not "unheard of in human history", you are copying the Japanese model, right down to the bad loans. It's just on a bigger scale, and frankly you are doing it slower than Japan did it, which is saying something. Probably due to all the corruption by the CCP.

Actually it does because Vietnam is even more isolated, thus it will have a very hard time forming regional alliances against China, esp. if China bribes Thailand and Laos with either cheap oil or jobs on the rigs.

Well the problem will persist basically as long as the Chinese Communist Party does.... The CCP is deeply unpopular in pretty much every arena save for how it is handling the economy, if the economy starts to go south you may see Tienamen-like events erupting all over the country. In order to combat this the CCP has to keep the economy humming along and large #s of migrants from the countryside employed. They have done a decent job thus far, but there are some major cracks in the Chinese economy on the horizon. Long story short they copied the Japanese model, right down to the bad loans.

If China's economy does not keep on expanding you are looking at a potential financial crisis that would make the whole Lehman thing seem tame by comparison. The reason they are getting so bold is because to the CCP, exploiting these resources may literally be a life-or-death situation, as most dictators don't tend to just end up retired in a villa somewhere, they end up with their heads being separated from their necks.

There is a reason bullies tend to pick on weak loners, it's because they are unable to defend themselves and unable to get enough support from friends to overpower the bully.

The thing about Vietnam is that it it's a small country that doesn't have a lot of allies(Laos and Thailand have had armed conflicts with Vietnam in the not so distant past, and of course the whole French/US thing). China may be betting on Vietnam basically being forced to deal with China, since China is the dominant economic force in the area.

So basically you are insulting me and making shit up to compensate for the fact that you don't have a point? Why would they go through all the trouble of implementing such libraries in C if they didn't have to? If the languages are "Many scripting languages appear to be almost as fast as C"? Shits? Giggles? Get some real info and THEN you can act like a self-righteous prick. Until then, actually read and fucking try to grasp the information presented in a post before acting like a dickhead, k?

You're likely familiar with the theory of how the Moon formed: a stray body smashed into our young Earth, heating the planet and flinging debris into its orbit.

Isn't that how human babies are made too?

There is a much better rule of thumb, if the language needs to link to C to do relatively mundane tasks(XML parsing, JSON etc) then it's a sure sign it's a slow language. I couldn't believe that nobody uses a pure Ruby implementation of a friggin' JSON library. That just screams "Ruby is dog slow". From what I gather Python is similar.

Wait... does anyone seriously think that Congress will pass funding for anything related to NASA and the space programs? The current, Tea Party locked, science committee that recently called Climate Science "not science at all", Congress???

Good luck with that.

Unless it's a back-scratch back-room subsidy for their ilk and/or a state they wanna buy votes outta, forget it. Not ... going... to... happen.

jenny?
I've got your number, it's 867-530.....shit I was put under anesthesia as a child and now I cannot remember the last digit.

How is that list not weighted not only by recent events, but also Euro/Ameri-centric? Seriously, Obama AND Bush in the list of most influential people in history? In terms of overall impact, they wouldn't even make the list of top 10 us presidents. Seriously, no Harry Truman? Truman was, in terms of global impact, probably the most influential US president of all time. He was the one who decided to drop the atomic bombs, he was the one that oversaw the dismantling of the Japanese empire(one of the biggest events in the past century, but one most people know nothing about it), he was the one that really started the domino theory etc. Certainly more influential than either Bush or Obama.