The problem is that they are sitting in the middle of a wildlife refuge, and doing any demolition would actually cause far more damage to the local environment than simply leaving them in place. This is both in terms of simply hauling the demolition equipment in and trying to "rehabilitate" the land in some fashion after you have cleared away the mess.

Besides, there is always the possibility that some of those sites could still be reused, and concrete poured in the past for a launch pad is often very useful for subsequent launch site. For instance, the landing pad site at KSC that SpaceX is using to recover the Falcon 9 1st stage components is a former launch site that SpaceX got permission from both NASA and the USAF to clear away the metal on the site and set up the other things (like a radio beacon for the core to find) that needed to be put into the site as well.

Otherwise, the land is not really all that useful and can't be used for anything other than a place to study wildlife or launch rockets. Certainly no commercial businesses or homes can be built in the area unless it is directly in support of launch vehicles themselves. There is nothing else for it to do other than rot away, which has other very useful value in terms of trying to see what actually stands up to the environment of Florida over time and what doesn't.

Yup, the motto of Microsoft truly is:

The problem is that betting against Microsoft has generally be a bad thing, especially in the operating system software realm. I've been trying hard to avoid using Windows, but it keeps coming back from the dead each time I try to kill it and switch to Linux due to various kinds of issues. This might be the final nail in the coffin for me though as I may just weld shut any attempt to use Windows in the future.

Or a whole lot of kids are making "half-hearted" suicide attempts that are recorded as such, but are not actually self-harm that would have any chance of killing themselves. This is definitely a thing.

I also remember reading that about 90% of Finnish teachers graduated in the top quintile of their class. In the US, that figure is more like 4%. American students of education typically get the worst SAT and GRE scores of all the majors. We cannot ignore these facts when we're comparing educational systems. In the US it's easier to get into med school than it is for a smart Finn to get into teacher school. The quality of the people who make it through means that pretty much every innovation they try is bound to produce satisfactory results, because highly their best and brightest are in charge.

Yeah, but why not? This sort of thing obviously undercuts national security by tying up our cops, making them complicit in some asshole's prank, and causing potentially deadly danger. And compared to the effort and expense of mobilizing and deploying a freaking SWAT team, it is a comparative trifle for the NSA to answer a call from the cops asking for the malicious report to be traced to its source.

I hear Major Malfunction has gone into hiding.

Facial recognition and object recognition was always thought of in the AI community as a "pattern interpretation" skill, and we suspected that human brains have special magic gears for "effortlessly" succeeding at these sorts of tasks, while AI coders struggled to emulate our success.

Now we're seriously talking about computers already being better at these tasks than we are. This is one of those milestones in AI research when we have to cross off another item from the list of "things that keep AIs from matching or exceeding human intelligence". For now, there are still many items on that list, but I wonder which ones will be crossed of next, and how soon.

I was actually referring to all immigrants to Europe, not Muslims in particular, though they certainly seem to get the double whammy of "you're not from around here, are you?" combined with hostility towards their religion.

Europe is traditionally a place that people leave so it's not surprising that they haven't figured out how to assimilate immigrants.

^^^^^^^^ This ^^^^^^^^

People who think the United States is hostile towards immigrants should spend some time in Europe as one, particularly one of color.

You're quoting the Ma Bell divestiture as an example of helpful regulation?! Ma Bell:

1. Took her universal service obligations seriously.
2. Invested money into keeping her plant modern and current.
3. Was friendly to labor.
4. Threw gobs of money at Bell Labs for the sake of science, with no expectation of immediate payout or profit.

The contrast with modern day ILECs is telling. I'm less than one thousand feet from our central office and can't get DSL faster than 3mbit/s because Verizon wants out of the wireline business and is bleeding it to death. And who can blame them? They've forced to compete against unregulated cable companies while still meeting all of the legacy ILEC obligations, ranging from service commitments to labor contracts.

If Ma Bell was still around I would have had fiber many years ago. For all her flaws she put money back into the business and planned for the future.

You left 'customers' out of the list. Many taxes are simply passed onto customers as a cost of doing business. Of course, you're exactly right, and I've said this for a long time. A corporation can only transfer money to individuals in the form of salary (taxed) or dividends (also taxed); taxing corporate income is a form of double taxation and at the end of the day is little more than a hidden backdoor tax on individuals.

You missed his point. His point was that something will always be prohibited and they'll just move into selling that instead. It doesn't have to be drugs. Explosives and other forms of weaponry come to mind as items that are either outright banned or at least highly regulated in most of the World. Are you going to legalize and deregulate them too? Laissez faire for C-4? It would make the Fourth of July a lot more enjoyable but other than that I'm not certain it's a good idea.

But to be fair the system is rigged so that only people with an "R" or a "D" can possibly win most elections. The goal, then, should be to vote for the least harmful candidate who actually has a chance of winning. There are a lot of reasons why there is a two-party system in the U.S., and a significant one is because of the winner-take-all, first-over-the-line voting system. The collusion of the Big Two Parties and the relative ignorance of the average voter are also significant, but the voting system is probably the strongest reason.

How can anyone debate a piece of legislation that is so complex it would take (and has taken) years to analyze and understand in a few days?