"The article carries echoes of the "profit is evil and government is good" mantra so popular lately."

Is it that, or might it be "there are business where it's probably better not to center the whole focus on profits, which is what for-profit companies are forced to do"?

Of course, your mantra is shorter and more black&white-ish, so it must be true.

"These kinds of things are (fortunately for us) regulated."

That's why, say, an oil spill tied to the need to open a platform ASAP will never happen. Or... a nuclear facility will never suffer a melt down because management prefers to turn a deaf ear to the researchers that say more expense against tsunamis is needed.

Oh, wait!

"He thinks it's just private contractors that cut corners to save money? "

While government *may* cut corners to save money, since their percived profit not necessarily is tied to pure monetary profit, private contractors, *must* cut corners to save money, since their profit is pure monetary profit.

Colorado is a city now?

because it's still wildly popular in Japan. The US shards are, as the author notes, virtually complete ghost towns. I recently went back for a month, and other than banksitters in Luna or house collapses I'd literally go days without seeing another player.

If you want to talk spinoff technology from manned spaceflight, so far we have infrared ear thermometers, ventricular assist devices, artificial limb enhancements, "invisible" braces, scratch resistant lenses, memory foam, enriched baby food, cordless tools, freeze drying techniques, water purification, pollution remediation technologies, food safety tech, and quite a bit more just from NASA alone.

ROTFLMAO. I just love it when the cargo cultists quote NASA on how wonderful NASA is.

Damm few of those come from NASA, at best NASA used them and took credit for using them, and that's been spun into NASA creating them. Take freeze dried food for example - the process was first used commercially in 1938. The modern process was perfected just a few years later when it was used to preserve blood products during WWII. Or cordless tools, first available commercially in the 1950's. Etc... etc...

"But what I'm getting at is when the government pays employees way above the per capita income of taxpayers."

I see your point, but I think is moot both in practical and ethical grounds because tax-to-wages is not a one-to-one map.

In practical, it's just a market, offer and demand: if you want the best (not that you *must* want them, maybe your needs are not up to the best and brigthest but *if* you need them), you need to have three things:

1) Have a selection process to filter out everybody but the best.
2) Have a process in place to detect the mistakes on point 1 above and/or those that, still being the best when hired, may be not the best now.
3) Offer the highest pay (not necessarily just money, other perks included) so the best apply to your selection process to start with.

And with regards to ethics, I don't see how someone can be comfortable paying, say, a bartender the same than to a, say, brilliant doctorate in something you really feel useful. It is not as if that any single doctor needs to be payed in full by any single bartender's taxes. It is still reasonable for an hypothetical town of "humble farmers" to pay their, say, doctor, or judge, or sheriff, above their own average income if they feel their value to the community is also above their own average.

"If everyone wants to get paid above average, half of the available positions will remain unfilled."

Only if there's something like 'basic rent' in place.

In the meantime, in the real world, it's not so much about what you, as an employee, want to be paid, but about what you, as an employer, want from your employees. And then, if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.

"Consider that we have homeless people and other poor people who aren't necessarily helped by higher taxes in this country."

And then consider that those homeless are probably the ones that most benefit from the kind of jobs these people are doing, since are the most exposed to health/environment base standards.

"I want to say there should be a cap for how much government employees can earn for employment that is consistent over time."

It is said the if you pay peanuts you get monkeys. If you are paying below average, what kind of people do you think you'll attract?

Does it support SSLv2 and weak ciphers like NULL? or is it hardened out of the box?

He didn't say the Android Browser, he said the default Android browser.
In newer versions of Android, you don't get the old Android stock browser. It was the default in the past, but hasn't been so for a long time now, and isn't even available unless you run hacks to install it and its dependencies.

That is consistent with trying to balance a needle on its tip.

But Betteridge's Law of Headlines has already answered the question.
The problem is in the very premise. Safari never had anything remotely similar to IEs marketshare. Nor the corporate glue. It's silly to even try to compare what happes with the two over time.
IE was a major enabler and roadblock. Safari was never significant enough to even stub your toe on.

I'm still not sure how In intend to celebrate the IMPENDING DISMAL FAILURE of the EADP Mission fund raiser to raise $200k for producing a set of plans to for a viable asteroid deflection/destruction mission. Win or lose, something besides NOTHING ready to deploy on short notice. What kind of cake would be appropriate for this level of fail?

185 people have contributed $8,803 of $200k. Two of them are me.

WHAT IF a simple test appeared out of the blue one day... something that you could not ignore. Despite any best effort to put a positive spin on it, the moment it flicks into your mind you think to yourself, "All is lost."

A TEST as clear and obvious as it is simple. Something that no amount of explaining away could touch, for which no rational excuse was possible, and even the most carefully constructed counter-arguments reveal themselves as elaborate denial mechanisms, unworthy even of response.

Despite hundreds of trillions of real and imagined dollars in circulation, a populous modern society of the self-proclaimed 'age of enlightenment' cannot raise an amount of money equivalent to that of a single yearly CEO's salary...

We have built the Internet... and connected our world... to.... well shit.
I can't even think up a single good reason anymore.
It all seems like so much tripe, if we're in the process of failing this simple test.