From TFS:

If it does work, it would eliminate the need for expendable fuel (just add electricity).

Always left out of these discussion is just how much electricity they need to produce useful thrust. While in theory, even a micro-Newton can eventually get you anywhere you want to go, practical considerations (E.G. the desire to not spend months in the Van Allen while spiraling outward, or the need to decelerate to enter planetary orbit) usually dictate a higher thrust level.

Power is, for example, a huge Achilles heel for the much vaunted VASIMIR - it requires much more than can currently be efficiently delivered in space.

The winning photo is very nice indeed.
Some of the runner-up images are okay-ish, but overall the runner-up images do not look like contest material to me.

That was my thought as well. The contest (which I'd never heard of until know) may well have "proved" that you can use a Rasberry Pi in photography, to the benefit (read:publicity) of the Pi... But the photographs themselves are generally much less than impressive in both technical and artistic quality.

You clearly have not read the appropriate NASA documents.

Actually, yes, I have.
 

Skylab was in very good condition and NASA wanted to use it in conjunction with the shuttle

NASA was (is) an organization of thousands of people - and cannot "want" anything. A small group of people, who had no funding, wanted to use Skylab in conjunction with the Shuttle, but that was just one of the dozens (hundreds?) of pie-in-the-sky ideas various groups within NASA generate on an annual basis. Very few space fanboys realize this and presume every single dammed one of those gotta-publish-something-to-keep-my-job studies and "plans" (was) is something "NASA wanted to do" no matter how ludicrous the idea was. Actually, the more ludicrous the idea the more the space fanboys love it, because it's just more ammo for their ignorant whinging about NASA's "failures". Ignorant because on top of not grasping the pie-in-the-sky nature of many of those "plans", they fail to realize that NASA is not an independent organism - but rather is a branch of the Executive Department and only does what the Executive approves and Congress fails.
 

Congress did not fund this cheap solution, so we ended-up dumping $100 Billion and ten years of construction time into building ISS to get a similar orbital capability (Skylab had 320 cubic meters pressurized volume, that's more than the US part of the ISS).

What's interesting here is you claim Skylab would provide similar capability - but then rather than comparing capability, you compare volume. Thus, probably inadvertently due to gross ignorance, you reveal the shallowness of your knowledge. In reality, Skylab didn't have a fraction of *any* of the capabilities of the ISS. It doesn't produce as much power, could only support a much smaller crew, and wasn't equipped with but a fraction of the scientific equipment, etc... (Even though Skylab and the ISS have a similar volume, the ISS has almost six times the mass. There's a reason for that.) Nor, given the small diameter of it's hatches, could it have been reasonably refitted to provide significant extended capability. Raw volume is impressive, but it's no more useful than an empty house. It's useful stuff that make a house or a space station useful, and Skylab was grossly lacking in that department.
 

The shuttle could have then flown additions to Skylab (which had a docking adapter for multiple visiting vehicles).

Yes, Skylab had a docking adapter for visiting vehicles. No, they weren't useful for adding additional modules. On top of lacking the structural strength, they had no provision for routing power, life support, data, etc. (Not without running cables through the already narrow docking tunnel - not that there was anywhere to hook them to on the Skylab end anyhow.)
 

When Skylab re-entered the atmosphere it did so under remote control from the ground, with its systems fully functioning until they were destroyed by the reentry.

No, they weren't "fully functioning". The third crew had to use a lashed up servicing system to replenish the freon loops in the air lock module (which were leaking). The also had to perform a spacewalk to install a back up set of rate gyros since the original set were failing. (Etc... etc...) Skylab was worn out, and it's equipment was beginning to fail even while the manned occupancy program was in progress.

A lot of people believe that Skylab was some lunar landing level program, and that in the same vein "tossing it aside" represented the loss of some grand capability. Nothing could be further from the truth. Skylab was a shoestring budget program subsisting on Apollo's leftovers and discards. (To the point where they had to take a hatch off an unused Gemini to provide an EVA hatch - they had no money to develop or build one of their own.) It had a minimal lifespan and modest scientific capability with no capacity for significant resupply, replenishment, refitting or extension.

Imagine if Skylab had stayed in orbit and been used as the basis of an ISS 20 years earlier.

I don't think the substances that would allow me to imagine that are actually legal.

Seriously, by the time of the third occupancy crew Skylab was badly worn out on top of the damage caused by the loss of the heat shield. It would have been much more of a liability due to the amount of work required to resupply and refit it.

I was SAC, and that statement is laughable.

I was USN SSBN missile systems and have talked with many SAC (Minuteman) launch crews over the years, and it's the dead simple truth. Your systems are much simpler than ours (even without figuring that we had sixteen tubes that we operated individually while you mostly just watched lights) and you didn't (couldn't) operate them or intervene in their operations to the level we did.

The examples of the complexities that you didn't have to deal with are legion (off the top of my head and in no particular order):

• You had no pressurization system. (And even if you did you didn't have to wait for the ship to come to launch depth.)
• Your optical alignment system was set by the loading crew rather than operating in sequence as ours did.
• You had no navigation system interface to deal with as your tubes were fixed in position. (And equally, you didn't have to coordinate your countdown with the ship coming to launch speed or wait for the ship to commence hovering.)
• You did not test the missiles in sequence the way we did. (And unlike us, you couldn't do anything about faults even if you did, the weapons were miles away and maintained by a different crew).

Etc... etc...
 
So yeah, the jobs of the prairie dogs waiting in their holes (which is the subject of this discussion) were (are) pretty dammed simple. You punch buttons and swap drawers. If a tube goes down, and it's not at your end, you're screwed because there's f all you can do about it except to wait for a repair crew to be dispatched. (The liquid fuel guys? Yeah, I'll agree they were the real deal. But they're long gone.)

The problem is that promotions were based on the grades. So, people were not cheating to pass but instead to be "perfect" in order to look better for promotion.

This is the key point that everyone seems to be missing in the discussions I've seen here and elsewhere on the 'net, so it bears emphasizing and repeating.
 
It's interesting that they've shifted to using simulator performance (which is virtually impossible to cheat in) for promotion eligibility... because their jobs are basically so damn simple it's going to be very hard to realistically rate one crew as being notably better than another. On reaction time maybe? Or "procedures theater" (I.E. making a great show of doing everything by the letter of the book)? Since, AIUI, they swap at the drawer level rather than the circuit card level it'll be hard to evaluate and their troubleshooting and corrective maintenance skills.
 
Disclaimer - BTDT on both sides of the instructors console and of the evaluators clipboard. In a former life I was a Fire Control Technician (Ballistic Missile), USN Submarine Service, USS Henry L. Stimson SSBN 655B and Trident Training Facility - Bangor.
 
In the graded half of Team Trainer, we were scored fairly simply: "Pass", "Pass with comments (I.E. needs specific improvements)*, and "Fail". (And basically the only ways to actually fail were to have a gross violation of procedures, violation of safety regulations, or the simple inability to launch birds.) You could fail individual countdowns, but so long as there wasn't a pattern of failure you could pass the week "with comments". Outright failures of a countdown were very uncommon, and outright failure of the week very rare.
 
I can see how they could assign grades to specific tasks or objectives to create a spectrum from the top of "Pass" to the bottom of "Pass with comments", but the problem there is it's all too easy for the instructor/evaluator to start shading towards being subjective in their evaluation.

*You could also get "style" comments, but these didn't lead to a "Pass with comments". Operating an FBM weapons systems was a complex task and no two crews did it exactly the same. We didn't push standardization to the level that the USAF did, so "style" comments were a way for the instructors and evaluators to pass on what they'd seen work or not work with other crews or to highlight potential problem areas.

IIRC Williams went on to sink as much of TSR's money as possible into buying up the rights for the Buck Rogers RPG ... which flopped and sunk without a trace, crippling TSR's finances.

TSR's finances were in perpetual disarray from about '83 forward... when the D&D bubble popped.* TSR had built itself around the assumption that growth would occur at the same rate as it had during the bubble, and was screwed when it didn't. It never fully recovered. Even though Williams' mismanagement didn't help, by the mid 80's significant percentage of gamers had moved onto computer gaming and their purchases of hardcopy games dropped precipitously. They stumbled on long enough to be around when WOTC came into bucketloads of cash, but they were anything but a healthy company.

Not to mention the Buck Rodgers RPG is far from only "flopped and sunk without a trace", whether from TSR or elsewhere in the industry. (Even games that were huge successes (by the standards of the day) are by-and-large completely forgotten today.) At the height of the bubble ('82-'83) it seemed a new RPG was coming out every week, and the premises of the games were increasingly specialized and/or outlandish. By 1983, the market for tulip bulbs was beyond saturated**. By 1984 it was busted. By 1993, when the Buck Rodgers RPG was released, it would have taken a miracle for any RPG to be a breakout hit.

*The largest problems that hardcopy gaming (board, pen-and-paper, etc...) companies face are the replayability factor and the scaling factor. For the first, you can buy a set of rulebooks and literally play for years without further purchase. For the second, one guy can purchase a set and then ten or more others can play using that set for years. Once a significant proportion of your userbase has a set of your products, you're screwed. There's a reason why every gaming company of the era got into supplements and expansions and ancillary products and media as fast and deep as possible - it's the only way to survive. WOTC didn't create the idea of endless supplements and expansions (as many seem to think), they merely perfected the implementation by convincing players they were vital to continued gameplay rather than being optional.

** I remember a meeting of our gaming group in 1983 where we were deciding which GM/game would be added to our rotation to replace one that was moving away... we literally had twenty or thirty different RPG's in hardcopy physically sitting on the table. When I attended Dracon I (or was it Hexacon I, can't remember as there were so many start-up gaming cons back in the day) in 1984 I took something like ten different games from my personal collection to the con. (Met Tracy Hickman there, out stumping the then newly released Dragonlance.)

From TFS: "[Man in a High Castle is] one of his most successful works"

Back in 1962 (when it was published) maybe... but by the time of my generation of SF readers (coming of age in the late 70's, early 80's) it was largely passed over in favor of Electric Sheep. With WWII much further in the past than when it was published, and the Red Menace having been replaced by MAD... it's foriegn dictatorship wasn't as relevant as the overcrowded overpolluted post apoplyptic dystopia of Sheep was to a generation that was influenced by the social chaos of the late 60's and had lived through the shocks of the early 70's. Stories involving the Nazi's (High Castle, Rocket Ship Galileo, even the (then) more recent Iron Dream) were seen largely as quaint anachronisms not classics. Which, in a large way, is also why Cyberpunk emerges in the same era...

No, I'm not the sole authority of facts relating to economics. I'm just not impressed by "actual numbers" when they're irrelevant to the discussion at hand and accompanied by smoke and mirrors.

And if you actually had a clue rather than parroting BS in the fashion of a cargo cultist, you'd note I never debated the validity of your facts - only their relevance. When confronted with this, you fall back on the typical defense of the terminally clueless... you raise the white flag and declare victory by indulging in personal attacks.

The arrangement made sense right up until TSR actually started making real money. When you and your friends bust your asses to build a business, and have no substantial income or assets to fight over, running it as a labor-of-love makes perfect sense. But once they started bulk-hiring new staff and pulled off 5000% growth over five years - Why the hell didn't they hire a competent CFO???

Well, because this was the early 80's not the early 00's and they hadn't lived through the dot bomb as we all have. (Seriously, the dot bomb radically changed the public's perception of how a business should be run if/when it Suddenly Gets Big. We simply didn't think that way back then.) That, and their desire to keep control in house and in the hands of gamers meant they never brought in any real (read competent) outside money... which might have imposed the constraint of hiring adult supervision as a condition of receiving the money.

When we (academics) do experiments on people however trivial we usually have to go through ethical clearance, get informed consent etc. I think its skipping that part that people are uncomfortable about.

The operative word being "usually", which implies there exist cases where you don't. The discomfort come from people not grasping the existence of the "usually", and that businesses are not academics and product testing is not held to the same standard.

Ask yourself what backs the value of UPS shipping labels, that people are willing to give substantial sums to obtain one? Intrinsically the label is just sticky paper with some printing on it. The answer is the UPS network of trucks and distribution terminals. They enable a package with a label on it to get from one place to another.

In a similar way, the Bitcoin network of p2p nodes, mining hardware, desktop apps, merchants accepting it, and user wallets enable moving money from one place to another.

In other words, Bitcoin is precisely what I said - a medium of exchange, a coupon, a token, not a currency.
 

The network makes bitcoin balances useful, and therefore have value.

So? Having value [being useful] does not equate to having value [monetary worth]. They're two different things, though I can see why BTC fanboys would like to obscure the existence of that distinction - because it's existence demolishes their entire theory.

As to the balance of your reply, it's just more of the same... handwaving, smokescreens, and you using words that don't mean what you think they do.

This is always the crux of the Great Bitcoin Debate.

No it's not, because it's no more something that can be debated than whether or not the sun rises in the East in the morning. You can't debate facts.
 
The rest of your post is just more of the same - smoke and irrelevant mirrors.

So... can we just formally decree that cryptocoins meet the definition of a "currency", and be done with it?

I certainly hope not, because ultimately they're completely unlike other foreign or domestic currencies in that they have nothing backing their worth*. They're much more like coupons, casino tokens, or tasting tokens at a beer festival than real money. They're a medium of exchange not a store of value. The flaw in the logic behind cryptocurrencies is that their inventors and proponents fail to recognize this.
 
* Generally the economy of the issuing country.

The company[Google] is never aware of any issues. It's their standard smokescreen/disclaimer.