Russia would like for us to continue gifting them with cash for 40-year-old missle motors, it's our own government that doesn't want them any longer. For good reason. That did not cause SpaceX to enter the competitive process, they want the U.S. military as a customer. But it probably did make it go faster.

Also, ULA is flying 1960 technology, stuff that Mercury astronauts used, and only recently came up with concept drawings for something new due to competitive pressure from SpaceX. So, I am sure that folks within the Air Force wished for a better vendor but had no choice.

When Palin was selected to be McCain's running mate, she had the highest approval rating of any of the 50 governors.

The only surveying company to come up with that is some podunk company in Alaska. Just because it's on Wikipedia doesn't mean it's meaningful.

Then the left wing media went to work and convinced all the mindless cretins like yourself that she was the devil incarnate.

She is the epitome of someone who is both stupid and suffers from narcissistic personality disorder. Her speeches are pure fucking word-salad. They are unlistenable, because they contain not just no information, but rather /negative information/. I cannot stand to listen for more than 20 seconds at a time. To make me actually listen to a whole speech would entail something like what happened to Alex in "A Clockwork Orange." After which, you would have to commit me via an IEA to a mental hospital.

"Grow a brain."

You forgot the "Morans."

--
BMO

The world does not owe you a living.

>internet will die if ads don't exist

I pretty much preferred the old Internet when the NSF was the backbone.

Go cry more.

--
BMO

Modern dishwashing detergents (and sensor based cleaning cycles) require some amount of gunk on your dishes to function correctly. In trying to meet environmental requirements over not using certain chemicals, they have switched to heavily enzyme based mixes that require some food and grease to actually do anything. Additionally, to save water, they have implemented sensors that run the cycle just until the dishes are clean and then stop--only if most of the dishes are already too clean, the sensor will end the cycle too early and the few really dirty dishes won't be fully cleaned.

Most dishwashers still let you specify a Quick/Normal/Heavy clean instead of sensor...but it negates the energy savings. On the detergent front...no way around it, enzymes are the way of the future.

Thank you both for putting some actual discussion in this otherwise really noisy pile of ... comments. Not sure where the moderators are.

Corporations will continue to make boatloads of money, artists will continue to sell their work for a song.

That's what I don't get. We already have the infrastructure in place for artists to "make it" on their own - no record label company needed. A friend of mine put a few of her self-produced educational videos on YouTube hoping for some publicity - maybe someone at a TV station would see them and pick up the series or offer her a job. Instead, the videos grew insanely popular among parents. The YouTube revenue was more than enough to fund production of the video series she'd been hoping a TV studio would bankroll. And now she's one of YouTube's biggest producers. Her YouTube revenue exceeds her (lawyer) husband's income, and he's taking more and more time off his law practice to help with her video and website production.

But so many aspiring musicians seem to think the only way to succeed is the "traditional" way - sell their soul to a record label who will take 90% of what they earn, and charge them another 8% as production expenses. Organic publicity on YouTube and social media is free (assuming people actually like what you produce). Amazon, iTunes, and Google Play take a 30% cut, which while I still think is excessive is a helluva lot better than the 95+% a record label will take. The only hold the record labels still have is on radio, which is declining in popularity. The record labels are this generation's buggy whip manufacturers - don't chain yourself to them. The Internet removed one of the biggest impediments to publicizing virtual media like music - production and distribution. Take advantage of it if you're an aspiring musician (or video producer).

I think you don't give Mars dreamers enough credit. It's fun to think about, and do a bit of handwaving, but most everyone realizes colonizing Mars is an enormous challenge. Obviously, the first European colonies in the Americas were much easier. They already had breathable air and a tolerable climate. Life was already firmly established, all the colonists had to do was harness it. Even so, many colonies failed.

On Mars, we have to start life from scratch. One problem that as far as we know Mars does not have, is hostile natives. The absence of that petty little problem is no compensation for the huge problems we would have to solve to build a sustainable colony on Mars. We aren't capable of doing it now. That list of obstacles to setting up a steel foundry isn't even among the main problems. Can we establish an ecology? What about ionizing radiation, how do we handle that?

It's possible we may conclude that even if we can do it, Mars isn't worth inhabiting. Really, why inhabit Mars? By the time we can do it, we could probably also inhabit space for indefinite lengths of time, and if we can do that, why not head out of the solar system? Seems likely there will be many planets that are much better than Mars. Mars then is mostly an experiment, a trial. Where is humanity going? Are we headed towards a blissful future of peace, all our critical problems solved? If yes, how long can it last, millions of years? We may need 100,000 years to send a colony ship to another solar system. We have no civilization that has come anywhere close to lasting such an enormous length of time. But we can dream.

I've had interviews go wrong many times, for dumb and dishonest reasons. It comes down to the fact that the employers weren't actually interested in hiring, had too many candidates to consider. So they hoke up an excuse that you don't have enough experience in a bunch of narrowly defined areas, and you're out. Deep down they know perfectly well that you could do the job. But they manufacture some desired experience that you supposedly lack, and start thinking of you as a liar for even applying. Never mind that the whole hiring process is packed with deception from start to finish. Of course you should never outright lie, but spinning and twisting the facts is fine, even encouraged. They focus on superficial skills and miss the big picture. Overqualified is another fun reason for rejection. Why would an employer ever want to reject a candidate for being too smart? Yet a PhD is typically seen as a negative. The standard excuse is that the employee will get bored and leave, as if there aren't hundreds of other more compelling reasons anyone might leave. More like, there's a good deal of prejudice against geeks and nerds and smart people in general, which has been getting worse in recent years with the upswing in anti-intellectualism. When a job application takes a turn like that, when they start hunting for excuses not to consider people, you know the employer wasn't serious.

So I'm skeptical of this push to get more people into CS. On the one hand, maybe there should be a 4th "R", 'rogramming. Maybe programming is such a fundamental skill that it should have a place in elementary school. But with all the noise over H1Bs and the demonstrated facts that many employers really don't value, like, or trust engineers as a whole, not just the individuals among them that aren't competent, it's hard to be sure. They know they have to have some engineers, but they don't have to like it, and many don't. Very tiresome having to always watch your back, be ready to defend yourself, and not give them any openings they can use to drum you out. However, this attempt to reach people when very young is such a long play, beyond what such short-sighted companies can conceive, that perhaps it is genuinely meant.

This ends a situation in which two companies that would otherwise have been competitive bidders decided that it would cost them less to be a monopoly, and created their own cartel. Since they were a sole provider, they persuaded the government to pay them a Billion dollars a year simply so that they would retain the capability to manufacture rockets to government requirements.

Yes, there will be at least that Billion in savings and SpaceX so far seems more than competitive with the prices United Launch Alliance was charging. There will be other bidders eventually, as well.

It is in Paris; drivers there sometimes nudge other cars to widen a tight parking spot.

So the lawyers win again...

Extra points for this remark. I suppose many of us (myself included) at first had a somewhat romantic picture when thinking about the first Mars settlement, even harebrained ones like Mars One. A garden dome with some cylindrical habitats around it, with a bespacesuited pioneer standing outside next to the rover he takes out on his daily drives around the planet. The submarine analogy is much more realistic... It'll be cramped, with only very limited time outdoors, with zero privacy, zero opportunity to escape your fellow colonists, and probably limited opportunity to escape into work (as people in such conditions often do). Big Brother in Hell. Probably exiting for the first month, still pretty good a few months in, but after a year (after you're still around) it's going to suck.

> The problem is that sending people to Mars is very expensive and the billions of dollars wasted on sending people to die on an inhospitable planet could be better used for other things.

Which is what people in my youth said about the Moon landing and, frankly, has been a constant refrain against all space flight. It's difficult to know which parts of interplanetary flight and technology will pay off the most, and I'd prefer myself to pursue some of those likely byproducts first. But just a few potential benefits include the multiplication of our space capacity, enough to support zero-gee crystal and semiconductor manufacture, zero-gee electrophoresis that multiplies the sensitivity of certain types of chemical analysis, solar power from space based solar mirrors, and the migration of the most dangerous biological and nuclear research to orbital or lunar bases instead of Earth based bases.

Mars 1 seems a poorly selected political target for space development, because the obstacles are so very large they may absorb all the resources that could more quickly and effectively build a real space infrastructure. But watch, in the mantime, while many proponents of real space flight and technology manage to squeeze some funding out of the overall Mars 1 project.

Don't dry your poodle in this microwave oven. Do not look into laser with remaining eye. Objects in mirror may be closer than they appear. Not to be used as a flotation device. This packet of nuts may contain traces of nuts. Look out for pedestrians when engaging the auto-park feature.

There's always a better idiot to beat your safety system. Also, wasn't this caused simply by the driver stepping on the accelerator? This did not look like the kind of driving any self-parking car would do, pedestrians or no.

The hard part is indeed establishing what the right level of security is and how to evaluate companies against that. At least over here, the exclusions for burglary are pretty clear cut: leaving your door or a window open, and for insuring more valuable stuff there are often extra provisions like requiring "x" star locks and bolt, or a class "y" safe or class "z" alarm system and so on. With IT security, it's not just about what stuff you have installed and what systems you have left open or not; IT security is about people and process, as much or more than it is about systems.