Because they are both forms of expression, when they are on youtube. One may be considered vile and reprehensible, and the other not so much, though I'd wager you have never seen a Tea Partier rallying the base, if you think speech for political change can't be vile and reprehensible, as well. What kind of dolt are you to not separate the medium from the message?

This is a political maneuver designed to embarrass the GOP. 98 senators have already affirmed this amendment which was tacked onto the XL pipeline bill. To be clear, the amendment has no real effect on the construction of the Keystone pipeline; it simply forces all senators and representatives to get on the record on climate change. The GOP is up against a wall on the Keystone pipeline -- even if this bill passes, it will be vetoed by the executive branch and the GOP probably does not have the votes to override the veto (hard to vote for something that contributes to global warming after you've acknowledged that global warming is real.) This amendment is the Democrats fucking with the Republicans, pure and simple.

"ended up being 3X more costly..." you make it sound like the prime contractor didn't know this all along. When you land a cost-plus contract with the government (or anybody, for that matter) your job suddenly becomes to make the contract as costly as possible while still appearing to be executing due diligence. This is why Lockheed, Raytheon, Boeing, and the other contractors have been able to hoover up hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, with only the lame and inefficient STS to show for it. For the amount of taxpayer dollars diverted to the US space program starting with the boondoggle Apollo program PR stunt (yes it was PR. It was all fuck the Russians and their fucking sputnik, we have to one-up the commie bastards by going to the goddamn moon) we could have fixed our social safety net and cured poverty, and put money into useful areas of research, like medicine and energy production/distribution, and fixed our broken education and healthcare systems. Instead, we created a whole new class of welfare client, the aerospace/defense contractor, and managed to keep the Cold War going for 40 more years. Why do you think Tea Party darling Ted Cruz is now the gatekeeper for the US Government's science and technology funding? It's because Musk proved that you don't need a huge fucking corporate welfare system to support basic research. There is also the added political bonus of Musk's achievement discrediting every dollar the US government spent on "space research." One of Cruz's direct responsibilities is overseeing NASA funding, and it is going to be next to impossible to fight his budget cuts when all Cruz has to do is point to Elon Musk's SpaceX success. The Tea Party wing of the GOP is going to be insufferable for a long, long time....

They are using fuel as hydraulic fluid, an old and (apparently) still stupid idea. The SR-71 used JP-6 as fuel and hydraulic fluid -- one Habu pilot told me, "yeah, dumb engineering decision. If you are on bingo fuel, you might as well plan for a ditch, because bingo also means you are out of brakes and maneuvering." That was 35+ years ago. You'd think Elon would have covered that base.

the failure mode was the "E" in ESA. nukes in orbit are a non-starter in Europe. the people won't stand for it, and since they are paying for it, nukes are off the table for space probes. for ESA missions, that means solar or no mission.

So why not pay them more per hour? They are asking for longer hours because they know that asking for more money per hour is pointless.

fuck you, you neoliberal shill.

interesting definition of proof you have there. you've collected up some myths, tidied them up into current vernacular and presented them as proof of the existence of a deity, which is utter bullshit. The same bullshit, by the way, that happened at the Council of Trent, where all the diverse religious writings concerning the new heretical Jewish religion of "Christianity" were collected up, filtered, and proclaimed canon. Are all those vienna fairytales true simply because the Brothers Grimm collected them up into a single source?

Right, and if God is a perfect being, then he must also have the perfection of existence. There, we've got the whole ontological status of gods squared away. While we are at it, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? That answer proceeds from the same fucking train wreck of unprovable assumptions that your hypothesis is built on, the foremost of which is that a god actually exists, so go for it, dude.

No, and no. Tyson has been trolling religious nutbars for decades. He didn't give in to criticism, he just twisted the knife when people demanded clarification. Make no mistake -- religion is more of threat to our species than global warming and nuclear winter combined. More than three-quarters of the population of the planet's last existing superpower are religious, and nearly half of them believes their messiah is going to return to them in their life time. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand that these nutbars have exactly zero interest in solving the problems confronting our species because they truly believe that they aren't going to be around to have to deal with them.

well, that is the problem with dealing with dictators. He may not be able to give any of our real estate "escape velocity," but he doesn't need to. He just needs to kill half a dozen theater goers in any movie theater anywhere on the planet that defies his edict. Fox News will makes sure the rest of the planet hears about it, and suddenly he goes from dismissable loon to credible threat, which is exactly what he (and his equally lunatic father before him) have wanted all along.

As you say, electric companies just want to buy their energy cheap and sell it dear. Nothing inherently wrong with that. But they actually do have a love for a particular distribution model, if not a particular means of generating power. They are scared of the decentralization of power production, which smart grids coupled with residential rooftop solar installations represent. Koch Industries is the largest player in domestic energy production in the US. They have billions and billions of dollars invested in the centralized production of energy, so they are fucking scared of decentralization, and rightly so. Sadly, instead of embracing decentralization and adjusting their business model, they are successfully lobbying state legislatures and publicly-run utilities to create laws and regulations that make it damn near impossible to get a residential smart grid up and running.

Hmmm. If everybody adopted your approach, the world economy would collapse. Capitalism doesn't work in a rational market space, which is what you would create if everybody actually considered the value of an item, and not just its price, before acquiring it. Fortunately for our global economy, hardly anybody understands the difference between value and price. As long as businesses can continue to successfully exploit that ignorance, the global economy will survive.

wtf...? Dude, the internet was designed to allow American nuclear weapons research facilities (both private and governmental) to distribute their data so that they could survive a Soviet first-strike and continue to develop weapons. This was back in the early 1970's, and it was called DARPANet, after the US government think tank that funded its development, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency. Seriously, it wasn't until the late 1980's and early 1990's that "the outpost of freedom" you are talking about began to take shape. Ironically, it wasn't on DARPANet that the whole subversive aspect of anonymous information exchange got governments noticing computer networks. It was the crude dial-up serial connections between PC hobbyists and their bulletin board networks. But it didn't take long for US government-funded researchers to scale up the hobbyists' point-to-point protocols with a couple of powerful tools that made distributed applications way easier to write -- network news transport protocol and unix-to-unix encoding - culminating in a store-and-forward distributed database nicknamed USENET which hitched a ride on the government-funded DARPANet. Thanks to USENET, developed after the dial-up BBS days but sharing the same spirit of information freedom, did the real power of network anonymity begin to manifest. This power was suddenly available to anybody who actually paid attention in their undergraduate CS courses. By the end of the 1990's HTML pretty much took over for NNTP and UUencoding, and the power of anonymity was available to anybody, not just engineers, scientists, and geek hobbyists. Look up Endless September for what happens when millions of middle-class American morons obtain cheap and easy access to a planetary information network -- that is what happened to your outpost of freedom -- people noticed it and turned it into a cesspool.

I'm going to speculate that you probably don't get much dead-tree journalism in your diet, which is why you seem to think this is some kind of trend. This was Journalism 101 prior to the advent of HTTP. Journalists used the 5 W's -- who, what, when, where, and why -- to establish a consistent framework for their audience. Including the individual's age helps establish the who and (possibly) the why part of the context for the audience. Unfortunately, the context-free environment made possible by HTTP has pretty much rendered conventional journalism protocols moot; establishing a consistent framework for the audience is kinda pointless, if the audience can switch contexts by simply clicking on a link. You can occasionally see some journalism online that still uses pre-HTTP conventions, but it is getting rarer, not more common.

hmmmm...interesting definition of cheat there. rocket jumping and jump strafing are possible within the rules of any quake game, including the single-player campaign. If the rules don't forbid it, how is it cheating? Being elite means (among other things) being able to recognize and exploit useful emergent behavior. That is one of the things that made the quake engine great -- it was complex enough that interesting (read: novel) phenomenon like rocket jumps could emerge from the fixed and extremely limited physics of that engine.