reasonably lucrative work

I could understand Fiorina just wanting the attention - but dear God, I hope she doesn't need the money. That $20 million severance package would last most ordinary people a lifetime.

I think her target market is Republicans who want a viable female challenger to Hilary. Realistically, she's setting herself up for Sec. of Commerce, or maybe, if she's extremely lucky and does moderately well in the primaries, VP. I am no fan of hers for all of the obvious reasons, but she is a rocket scientist compared to Bachmann and Palin.

Then why is it exclusively conservatives who use the incorrect term?

The area of geography she studies is how communities/economies are impacted by and adapt to changes in prevailing climates, which seems pretty relevant, depending on what question you're asking. She would be a poor authority on questions like modeling the impact of CO2 on weather, but more within her area if asking questions like, "how easy/difficult would it be for Indonesians to adapt to a 2" ocean-level rise?".

In terms of the IPCC reports, the research/authorship is divided into three working groups: #1 studies the underlying science; #2 studies impacts & adaptation; #3 studies possible mitigation strategies. She's part of #2.

They've fiddled with the licensing as part of competition for developers with Valve's Unreal engine, which makes it work for some use-cases where it didn't previously (e.g. the mobile exporter is now free, too) but it's been pretty popular for a while now.

It, being Space-X's planned MCT in case that wasn't clear.

Who says that the best plan is to perform lots of lengthy construction in LEO? Beyond dwarfing the lift capacity of the modules that form ISS it may also render Mars direct (or almost - send up one with all the hardware & fill it's expansive resevoirs with a second or even third) preferable.

As for reuse of raw materials, other than for consumables like water and maybe ammonia, there is little to profitably mine usefully from ISS for a Mars mission. If the seals are unreliable to the point they want to abandon ISS, nobody will risk lives reusing them as modules.

Who says ISS is better adapted to performing on-orbit construction better than something newer built for the purpose and without the political circus that comes with ISS? You?

If, as hoped, Space-X brings it's MCT online with as few problems as the Falcon 9 has had, ISS's assemblage of bite-sized modules is going to look old real quick.

The difference here being that I wasn't the one making stupid biased public comments. As for more and more and more and more government spending being "good", well let's just say that living in France under socialists has given me another perspective, one where private enterprise goes down the tubes until unemployment goes through the roof. Your nirvana, I'm sure...

Yeah I think that's likely: if they become a large company with multiple large contracts, they'll end up spread over the US.

Heck they're already doing a little bit of spreading out. They have a significant test facility in Texas along with some engineering offices, and are building a new facility in Seattle to build satellites. I don't know if this is strategic/political or just happenstance at this point though. For example I believe a big motivation for the Texas site was that they were able to buy facilities off the defunct Beal Aerospace cheaply.

It's simpler than that. After 14 successful launches (just 2 more) Space-X is automatically certified. The forces attempting to turn Space-x into a ULA clone were betting on a launch failure or two to slow Space-X down and justify that their way was the only path to space. Space-X's pushback on the changes mean that they are extremely likely to become certified without the burocracy. These changes are just the retrograde elements changing sides before that happens In an attempt to stay relevent.

No. See yesterday's story linked in the summary. The AF is finally waking up and discovering that they do not need to try and turn Space-X into a clone of ULA to certify them. That Space-X would be automatically certified after 14 successful flights (2 more to go) has absolutely nothing to do with anyone realizing that the requested changes were as necessary as some (like you) pretend.

Snort. Because the democrats who dominated congress up to now have done sooo well at eliminating graft & pork. Hell, we can barely remember what those are thanks to the wonderful dems taking care of all that is wrong in the world and sprinkling fairy dust in our morning cereal...

Find a new axe to grind, your old one is worn out.

Then it needs to be part of the qualifying exam, not external to that. If it's part of the exam, then it's obviously not going to be secret from the pilot examiners.

(Actually, I thought this was how it is already, at least in the U.S.)

I found found, it isn't about technical skills, but stupid decisions made from a group think process. While prevalent in all sectors government is the biggest offenders because government culture of "It is the mistakes you make which can hurt you" vs. Private which focuses more on your success. So government spends a lot of its time trying to figure out how many ways something can fail catastrophically, which could hurt their career.

So for this case, I get the impression that they put in a funky system to try to prevent bots from filling out the paperwork, because if they hear that their website allows bots to fill out licenses they could get in trouble. I am guessing they added this near the last minute of the project so the page was designed differently. Causing this complex stupidness.