Why don't publishers put the ads in a section of the page that can allow the rest of the page to load and render before the ad loads and renders?

Because you could stop the loading once the content you wanted was rendered, thus skipping the ad.

So the pages are set up so the ad loads and renders first.

Because they predict things accurately. That's all there is to it.

Ok name me one of the basic physical laws - like say Ohm's law, the gravity law, the charge law, the gas laws, etc that has been proven incorrect. Like I said - we may not understand things completely. We might have to add on to these laws or fine tune them for special cases. But nothing in physics is getting "re-written", although sometimes it gets written in a completely different language depending on the context. However every new addition must necessarily fit within the context of the old. Otherwise how could it exist in our universe? Yes there are places on the map marked "Here Be Dragonnes", but now we know exactly how those dragons must behave. Multiplication does not invalidate addition.

if you reread my post: "near total vacuum". It's empty enough.

Except solar panels lose power over time. You know, entropy and all that. Plus if you're moving away from the very star powering your craft, well then "forever" is not as long as you'd like.

Modern physics is never incorrect. Although it can be misunderstood at times. In the same way that relativity does NOT disprove Newton it confirms it, but extends it. Who would have thought that a little denominator with square root 1-(v squared / c squared) was missing, especially since if v = 0 then the whole denominator ends up being one...which means that all previous laws are valid exactly as they are. Science is not about great schisms where meanings and understandings are suddenly reversed from one generation to the next. That's politics and religion. Science is about progress, with every additional step necessarily building on the steps that were before it. Of course sometimes when you're standing a few steps higher up you get a better overall view of your surroundings and realize that maybe you were misinterpreting a few things before but now you understand them perfectly... until someone comes and puts another little step under your feet and you can see even further...

Oh you'll slow down alright. Eventually. In a spectacular fireworks display when you slam into some planet/star that got in your way... you probably won't be alive by then though.

Something is going to be generating the electricity to create those microwaves, and THAT is going to require some sort of fuel. There is no free lunch. Perpetual motion does not exist. And ya cannae change tha laws of physacks Jim.

Fixed that for you. Well, for your reader anyway - you probably understand it. Because of the way these things work, they are just about useless anywhere other than a vacuum. The only way you can spend a tiny tiny amount of energy accelerating particles to massive speeds is when there's nothing else in their way for them to bounce off of. But if you are not in any kind of rush for your delta v and are in near total vacuum this is almost a perfect engine.

There is. It's called Muphry's law..

But corporations are not people.

See my post, above, pointing out that corporations are groups of people, with all the rights guaranteed to people, who don't lose those rights just because they're acting together for a common purpose.

The legal system DOES, in some situations, treat corporations as pseudo-people. But that's just a convenient way to interact with the corporation's members/stockholders/what-have-you when they're acting together to advance the common purpose that the corporation was chartered to handle.

fuck off you right-wing scum.

In the immortal words of Red Skelton and Mel Blank: "He don't know me very well, do he?"

corporations aren't people.

Au contraire: Though they DO exhibit most of the characteristics of independent lifeforms, corporations are GROUPS of people, working together for a defined purpose. This is true whether they're businesses, schools, labor unions, churches, political parties, special-interest group, or whatever.

I assume we're agreed that people working together as a corporation shouldn't have any extra rights beyond the pooled rights of the individual members. But should these people LOSE any of their rights, just because they're working together?

Should spokesmen for a corporation with ten thousand stockholders, when speaking on issues related to the corporation's purpose, interaction with laws, and its stockholders' interests, have any less access to the ear of a legislator than the ten thousand stockholders themselves? A corporate lobbyist is just a representative of those ten thousand people when they're acting on this particular common interest.

The legal system treats corporations as pseudo-people because it's a convenient way to interact with the people making up the corporation when they're acting as a group.

[Rant deleted.]

Ad homenim. I win. B-)

I wish I could be shocked at this behavior but this is standard operating procedure in America. The government has long been owned by the corporations, stuff like this just removes all doubt.

In the executive branch this has also changed - and not for the better - recently.

One of the biggest political machines in the US is that of Chicago. Chicago is utterly corrupt. But it's also the "City that Works" (according to one of its slogans), because ANYBODY can bribe the relevant officials, for sums that are within reach. The result is not pretty (and never has been). But it is thoroughly entrenched. How it operates is well known throughout the region.

Obama is a typical Chicago machine politician, as are his associates. Those of us familiar with Chicago's politics warned that, should he be elected, the likely result would be the Federal Government's executive branch would be run like Chicago's political machine.

And that's exactly what has happened. The Congress, with its slow turnover, is still largely in the pocket of the same corporate interests as before - but the Executive Branch changes more rapidly and is currently being run on Chicago's political-machine model, top to bottom. (It's usually largely in the hands of organized crime, and has been since the Nixon-Kennedy election - which was substantially a battle between two Mafia "families".)

If you wonder at the odd foreign policies (or lack thereof) of the current regime and their blatant extra-legal use of government agencies to suppress political enemies and promote the interests of arbitrary groups with no obvious ideological connection between them, try thinking of it as a corrupt big-city political machine and see if it makes more sense.

Passing laws which make lobbying a criminal offence would seem to be a good start ...

It would also be unconstitutional.

The Right to Petition IS the right of lobbying, and is constitutionally protected. (That's why anti-lobbying laws keep getting struck down when challenged.)

In the US it's part of the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law ... abridging ... the right of the people ... to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." You'll also find it in Article 44 of the EU's Charter of Human Rights, Germany's 1949 Fundamental Law, England's Bill of Rights of 1689, Petition of Right of 1628, and Magna Carta (1215).

It's a fundamental part of Western Law: ANYBODY gets to ask their legislature to adjust the law to make it better for them (if they can get the legislators' attention) and not be penalized for doing so.

It's also a REALLY BAD IDEA to try to interfere with this fundamental right (and also with the fundamental right to support the political candidates of one's choice). The big money / big power people can always find ways to influence and finance the politicians of their choice. The only thing such laws do is make it harder on the "big mass of little guys". So they institutionalize elite-class favoritism and corruption, rather than retard it.

If you want to attack corruption the place to do it is the selection of the officials: Elections, and exposure of malfeasance to the electorate.