But at its heart it's the result of the dramatic slashing of the NASA budget after Apollo, the end of the "space race," and constant political interference (mostly in the form of pork projects that Congressmen wanted NASA to lend credibility to).

Well, no. Not really.

Pretty much all of the Saturn V pads and buildings are still there, and still in use - having been repurposed multiple times. The Saturn I pads were abandoned in the late 60's because nobody thought we'd ever use them again. (And then along came Skylab.)

Other pads were abandoned for a wide variety of reasons... For example, we don't need as many as we used to because we don't have vehicles sitting on the pad as long as we used to. Others were abandoned because rockets don't blow up nearly as often, so we don't need "hot spares". Others were abandoned because the booster was replaced by a different one and the activity shifted to a different pad. Yet others because not only do rockets not blow up so often, their payloads fail less often and have a longer lifetime, so we don't need much of the the frenetic launch pace of the 60's. (Or multiple combinations of these.) Etc... etc...

The number of pads required aren't pushed by raw budget, they're pulled by user requirements. Now, I won't disagree that budgets effect the pull rate, but so do a variety of other factors.

People where hostile to people with Cell phones in the 1980's, In college back in my day, if a student went to class with a Laptop we were hostile towards them. Portable technology takes a while to get into the culture.

Walkman's and portable CD players too... However the feeling was less about the technology or being portable (or new), and more about the price tag and what it was perceived to say about the owner. People walking about with expensive portable technology were classed alongside those walking about with expensive wristwatches - pretentious yuppie assholes with more money than sense.

You saw the same thing when iPods first hit the market, and again with iPhones, and again with iWatch.

The biggest threat to Amazon right now is companies like Walmart realizing that their stores can also serve as warehouses and getting their IT up to snuff.

There's a lot of retailers who have realized it - and who have gotten their IT up to snuff and offer "order online, pickup in store in an hour" services. (Concentrating on getting the customer in the store isn't a mistake.)
 
The problem for these retailers isn't IT (as it so often isn't), it's the infrastructure and overhead involved in setting up an Amazon delivery type of operation. Amazon already has the back-end, a very efficient warehousing, picking, and packing operation - all they had to do was add to front end (dispatch, vehicles, and drivers). Not only does Walmart not have the back or front ends... a retail store isn't a warehouse, and the picking and packing will be much more difficult (and labor intensive, since they can't use the robots and conveyor systems that Amazon does). Amazon could simply build on their existing operations, Wal-Mart would have to start from scratch and be fighting with one foot in a bucket of cement.

That way people have something to do while their car recharges.

This. Range anxiety isn't just about not having enough amp-hours to go there and back again - it's also about cooling your heels and doing nothing while waiting for your car to charge.

I already know the problems presented: The infected area is usually in some third-world shithole with little-to-no infrastructure, much of the equipment is big, heavy, and expensive, etc... but much of it can be made portable with sufficient engineering, and a good chunk of it doesn't even have to be brought along, or can be minimized (e.g. the ventilation/filtering systems that the centers here have to keep quarantine)

If Bill Gates wants to do something with all that cash, maybe he can hire a few engineers an medical types to build a deployable care center that can be flown out to $3rdWorldShitHole in less than 24 hours, and be put to use immediately when an epidemic strikes.

Let's see... the existing system uses minimal investment (mainly in transportable isolation units) to transport a small number of exposed or critically ill people to locations where an existing army of people and mountain of equipment already exists and has supporting infrastructure in place. Your proposed system has us spending tens of millions of dollars (if not more) to transport a (currently non existent) army of people and (currently non existent) mountain of equipment to a place without supporting infrastructure and requiring massive (and currently non existent) logistics pipeline to maintain to support a small number of exposed or critically ill people.

Other than the clueless paranoia displayed in this sub-thread, why on earth would you propose such a back-asswards system?

You, and the OP, are confusing two different problems. The first, moving the most critically ill people to treatment and isolating exposed individuals, is largely a solved problem. The second, quarantine and minimizing the spread of disease among the local population is a very different problem... and even so, it can be largely handled with existing systems. The problem with the Ebola outbreak in Africa was failure to recognize the problem followed up by a "too little, too late" response from the West, combined with cultural issues and behaviors which facilitated the spread of disease. You can't fix either by simply throwing money at them.

Aeronautics occur within the earths atmosphere. To not study it is completely insane.

"Aeronautics" != "[Enviroment|Climate|Earth Science]".
 

The EPA is a regulatory body.

One that has a considerable research arm.

I'm with the grandparent - NASA should get out of the earth science business (and probably astronomy, and energy efficient houses, and all the pies the bureaucrat have stuck their hands in), leave that to more appropriate agencies.

So? I mean seriously, what is that elementary school level reply meant to accomplish?

while the Soviets were able to build the most dependable rocket family in history with Soyuz?

More dependable than anyone else - by about .2%, much celebrated by the clueless, irrelevant in the real world.

Translation: "Russia can't even afford the power points for it's super heavy booster, so it's going to concentrate on the development of an unproven booster that budget crunches have already delayed for over two decades."

In the olden days, we pictured guys in construction shacks building it in pieces like the Enterprise in drydock. What can we do now?

Guys and girls in construction shacks.
 

I'm serious - we've better tech and construction techniques than we had in the 70's.

For truly big things? Not as much as you seem to think. Seriously, there's a lot of tech in development (3d printing for example) and a lot of pie-in-the-sky tech (which you list)... but so far, there's pretty much nothing proven to scale much beyond the size of smallish house other than Joe (and Jane) Sixpack.

You don't want issue tracking - you want task scheduling and task completion methodologies. The non-engineer have schedules to fulfill which are usually not associated with a deliverable but a task. If there's no deliverable, there's no bug, no feature, i.e. no ISSUE. So tracking issues loses the focus. Issues aren't always tasks in trackers and that's why those are so tied to code, since they mold issues to whatever a release date/agile software development needs.

This ^10 - the OP is trying to force a square peg into a round hole.

Their core problem doesn't sound like it's technological. It sounds like it's organizational and managerial. You can do quite complex things with the tools listed, but only if you have the organization, methodology, and discipline to use them.

A whiteboard, or even a clipboard, with a master task list (listing what, when, who) and some form of tracking progress (which can also be as simple as a whiteboard or clipboard) is more than sufficient technology for many organizations. That's the easy part. The hard part (regardless of the technology in use) is getting and keeping people organized and in the habit of keeping the system and their peers updated.

Why does not anybody in the solar industry step up and support nuclear energy as the logical replacement for coal to fill all of the known gaps in solar power?

Because it isn't that. Nuclear can't be ramped up and down quickly, so it's not useful for filling in.

Nuclear's inability to ramp up and down quickly is a design choice, not a law of a nature.

That's serialization (which is, in SF, far more common), not compilation (the topic of TFA).

There is a concerted effort throughout government to communicate in manners that cannot be audited.

Like phone calls, or meeting another official at a bar.

I just don't think emails should be regarded this way, they're far too casual

Maybe your emails are casual, but in this case (goverment usage), they're not. They've all but completely replaced conventional (snail) mail for routine communications.
 

they don't really reflect the official acts of people in the way that a true "record" does (in the sense that someone in the 1960s would understand the term "government record.")

Since we live in the 20-teen's, I completely fail to see how the opinions of someone from fifty years ago are relevant.

The government has to serve the interests of everyone. If you say "well more people live in cities" that's fine but that doesn't excuse ignoring the rest of the country.

If the rest of the country were being ignored, you'd have a point.