All of these recent failues (including the U.S. ones) give some insight into the Apollo program's amazing success (except for 13) in the U.S.

Umm, Apollo had two failures (1 & 13). Out of 17 Apollos (not all of which carried crew). So a failure rate of 11% or so....

As opposed to Shuttle's failure rate (two shuttles of 133 flights) of 1.5%.

Admittedly, Soyuz also had two failures, of 117 flights (as I recall - could be off by a few), which amounted to a failure rate of 1.7% or so.

Oh, look! Shuttle had a lower failure rate than either Apollo or Soyuz! How is that possible?!

and a lower per capita rate of crime than half the nation.

Though higher than New York. Or South Carolina. Or Mississippi....

Well, here's your mistake, then:

We EXPECT the government to serve our needs and prevent abuses such as this.

You mispelled "their own" in the above.

So, who does the "biomatter" belong to when the "biomatter" is a fertilized egg?

It's not her DNA, it's not his DNA. And the fertilized egg is not a human in the eyes of the law...

So, who does the "biomatter" belong to? And why?

I'm no cardiologist, but couldn't these fractions be simplified?

Cardiology has nothing to do with this. Cardiology is about hearts, not eyes....

Designing and building a dam that provides drinking water and electricity to millions is not "societally meaningful"?

Likewise, designing a weathersat that improves predictions of hurricanes and such is not "societally meaningful"?

Interesting that the argument being used is that "most of what engineers do does nothing for society, so women don't want to do that sort of thing"....

Say some kid doesn't quite get what they were talking about in the lesson, and has additional questions. Where would that kid go?

To the FAQ page?

Seriously, while I doubt very much that educator is going to disappear, a great deal of the raw information is quite susceptible to computerization.

The most important thing you need a teacher for at that level is the socialization skills - we have less need of well-educated psychopaths than you might think (other than politicians and such, of course)....

Or maybe there's not really all that much NEW stuff that can be done "with a computer" or "in the Cloud"?

It's just possible that the industry is entering maturity, and the only things left are doing the things it already does slightly more efficiently than the competition, rather than in a radically different way.

Note that the very early years of aviation included a lot of innovation, both in terms of capability and use-cases. But the airline industry has since pretty much settled down to "move people about long distances as cost-effectively as possible". Not much has really changed in a long time other than incremental improvements in aircraft efficiency....

Or did everyone really think that computers/cloud-computing/whatever were going to be new and rapidly changing forever?

The Secret Squirrels should not be monitoring all Americans. They should be tracking terrorists!

Great idea! Wonder why noone ever thought of that before.

So, any ideas about how to go about "tracking terrorists"? I'm assuming you're going to start by identifying some of them? And then you're going to do what, exactly?

No, there's not a whole lot of really good reason for warrantless (or even warranted) wiretapping of everyone. Nonetheless, security takes a bit more than "well, we should track terrorists!!!"

Note that the real question is more properly phrased as "how much liberty should we sacrifice in exchange for how much security?"

Everyone will have a different answer to that (mostly divided along "how much of YOUR liberty for MY security" lines. A small number of people will rephrase that as "how much of MY liberty for YOUR security", and an even smaller number will say "I'd rather have the liberty than the security, thank you".

Most of the latter group will, of course, change their minds the first time they lose a job for an extended period, but that's neither here nor there.

What is relevant is that the question won't go away. You can't have absolute liberty and absolute security at the same time. So finding a level acceptable to as many people as possible is essential.

And mostly done by guess and by golly....

As an adult, I find this stuff still rather hilarious, but I'm an adult now and can easily discern it's just for fun. A child? Influential. They don't know better yet.

Watched all that stuff as a kid. Don't recall ever thinking "Hey, it would be pretty cool to drop a safe on someone - not like it really hurts them past the commercial break, after all!"

No, kids aren't so stupid that they see talking mice running at near sonic speed (or small dinosaurs doing same) and think "oh, how realistic! Wow, the world is pretty cool, isn't it?"

Hell, most of us (speaking of the kids of my day, and get off my lawn!) never even believed that animals could talk, much less order shit from Acme....

This site is for people who are smart enough and educated enough to be able to use both equally well.

But if all you can handle is division by ten, we've got a special handicapped section Just For You!

The Baby Boom began in 1845,

I really hope you don't think we had a Baby Boom after the Mexican-American War....