Of course, the employees probably already spend 2-3 hours/year dealing with the piece of shit that is Microsoft Office. They probably also devote some amount of IT time and resources to dealing with licensing and activation issues, additional troubleshooting associated with imaging and installation procedures, etc.

Actually, really, I'm not being fair. MS Office is not a piece of shit. It's a really good application, though the whole installation/licensing/activation thing can be a bit of a nightmare at times. LibreOffice is also a very good application that most people could use as their office suit without serious difficulties. Mostly people just get upset because people know it's free. The fact that it's cheap makes them think it's "cheap" in the sense of "flimsy" and "poor quality", so they resent being moved onto it. That seems to be the single largest issue, in my experience.

I don't know if there is a system as complex as we are, so you're right, it's going to be difficult. On the plus side, we've already been working on the project for a few thousand years, and we started making some real progress in the last hundred years or so.

As someone with a science background, I always find it shocking how much random guesswork goes on in medicine. You'd think that we could take a person in, take a bunch of different samples for analysis, test their DNA, run a full body scan, and just find anything that wasn't working the way it should. Ideally, I think our goal should be to be able to find illness even when the patient doesn't know it's there.

It'd be great, for example, if you could go to the doctor and get a battery of tests, and have him say, "Hey, so you've been feeling a bit tired recently, right?"

The patient says, "Yeah, I guess I haven't been sleeping well, and..."

And the doctor interrupts, "Nope. I'm pretty sure the problem is that you haven't been eating enough [whatever]. It's causing too much of [something] in your system, which is causing you to be lethargic."

I would imagine that part of the problem is that you can't establish what constitutes a problematic variance from "normal" until you establish what is an acceptable variance from "normal". You can't establish what constitutes an acceptable variance from "normal" until you have some baseline of "normal".

of ALL the government programs worth blowing money on, I think NASA should be one of them. It stimulates the economy with relevant tech spending, inspires our children, and sets a rocket ahead of other nations.

NASA is of the things we can look back at over the last 50 years and be immensely proud of. Proud to a NASA supporting American.

they make a great beer though! The hops alone will send you to the moon!

FTFY and I see what you did there.

why don't we just send Congress to orbit??

It stimulates the economy, and our childrens' imaginations.
Small price to pay.
especially considering it's tech, one of things we excel at in America.

I'm surprised how many got this reference

Bro, this sort of reasoning is exactly why we have global warming deniers.
We can cut C02 emissions all we want and it's going to do nothing to stop an event like this from wiping us out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

We've never attempted a cold start of the electric grid.
Only starting up plants to match the phase of what they're already receiving.

that said, I think we'll be fine.

Other countries, not so much.

I'm sure all your competent employees will have no trouble rewinding the cores of every last transformer in America themselves. That takes an entire years' supply of copper.

Could have been physically assaulted by one of Minneapolis' many Somalian cab drivers who consider it a religious duty to abuse, threaten and assault all infidels.