the tanks themselves had nowhere near the shielding required to be used for human habitation (both radiation, and micrometeorite).

So you collect them into a cluster and store consumables (like water) that perform shielding in the outer layers.

Also: You really don't WANT shielding most of the time - unless you're up there for years. Primary cosmics mostly go right through you, while shielding produces lots of ionizing secondaries that tear you up. Then you need a LOT of shielding to block the secondaries. Its mostly the occasional solar storm that requires shielding.

This was looked at in detail over the last several decades. The tanks would have been very valuable for a lot of stuff. But not to NASA programs. Lots of politics involved.

The foam insulation would have off-gassed significantly and dumped all sorts of crap into your orbital environment, ...

Originally they were to be painted with a coating that would have kept the foam together, etc.

Then somebody looked at how much that coating weighed. (It comes right out of payload.) And they decided not to paint the tank after all and let the foam get shredded a bunch on the way up (after it wasn't really needed if you weren't going to re-use the tank for anything).

They actually burn some extra fuel to be sure the tank goes back DOWN and crashes in a desired area, so it doesn't go into low orbit, become short-lived space junk, then later come down in some unpredictable place along that orbit after "space weather" - mainly the varying expansion of the upper atmosphere - causes the orbital decay to proceed at some varying and unpredictable rate.

I recall space advocates being livid that the tanks were not being orbited and collected for orbital construction.

IMHO the smart home OS will look like QNX.

It might not BE QNX, but it will at least look like it.

QNX is doing just what is needed, and has been for decades. It's about the most rock-solid OS out there. It's tiny and fast.

(What little I've seen of it reminds me of what "super" - my clone of Wiser's clone of the core of Dkikstra & Riddle's T.H.E. - might have evolved into if it were oriented to being invulnerable to failed or hostile tasks rather than being completely dependet on the tasks it supports being well behaved and perfect.)

Verification is the process of checking that software works correctly. The more complex the system, the more complex the process of verification.

You said "verification" but you're thinking of "software quality assurance". Though "verfication" is sometimes used to describe a step in that process, when used standing alone (at least here in silicon valley), it refers to the analogous process in integrated circuit design.

Verification is a BIG DEAL in integrated circuit design. A good hardware project will have at least as many verification engineers as designers (and hardware designers will freely act as verification engineers - on OTHER designers' modules - during the later stages of a chip tapeout, without taking a carreer hit.) It is the limiting factor in when the chip design hits silicon and when it hits the market.

So IMHO the previous poster is talking about the up-front quality assurance processes and costs of hardware, rather than software, complexity.

(Releasing a rev to a software product due to a QA issue missed due to added complexity may be costly. But releasing a rev to silicon takes months and millions of dollars of sunk cost. They're not in the same league.)

If [self-serviing private philanthropy] does not achieve its goal, or does so inefficiently, then the public is not likely to be fooled.

If self-serving private philanthropy does not achieve it' goal, nobody is harmed except the self-serving private philanthropist.

If PUBLIC philanthropy does not achieve its goal, the general population has been looted and received no benefit in return.

... the companies pushing for more visas are NOT doing it because they're looking for the best and the brightest from around the world. They're doing it to drive the price of programming

They're also creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. The depressed prices for programmers and refusal of employers to hire Americans (for any but a few top-level jobs requiring rare or broad-ranging talents and experience), while importing H1Bs from several countries for any position short of startup principals and early-hires, has not been missed by the Millenials. The latter are, entirely rationally, avoiding computer science degree programs in droves.

There is no shortage of US computer scientists now. But if this keeps up, in another 20 years there WILL be a shortage of YOUNG US computer scientists.

Story I heard about mid-20th-century IBM mainframe. (I think it was the 360 series).

Core memory was tight and had cooling issues. The designers examined the instruction set and determined that, given cacheing and the like, no infinite loop could hammer a particular location more than one cycle in four (25% duty cycle), for which cooling was adequate. So they shipped.

Turns out, though, you could do a VERY LONG FINITE loop that hit a location every other cycle, for 50% duty cycle (not to mention the possibility of hitting a nearby location with some of the remaining cycles). Wasn't too long before a student managed to do this.

And set the core memory on fire.

Right. Playing with your gun teaches the ability to resist road rage. Are you even listening to yourself?

Try it. Then sound off. B-)

As you can see, the moderation converged on a more proper +5 Insightful

  I've read the post carefully and it doesn't qualify as Flamebait IMHO. It states a controversial political opinion and thus invites a discussion, which may lead to flamage, but does not itself lead with a flame.

So this looks like someone who doesn't like the position trying to suppress it, by hitting it with the most plausible -1, in the hope that one more like-minded person will have mod points and get it suppressed before very many people see it. That works for "politically incorrect" subjects (such as criticisms of the "heat death of the Earth, everybody panic and suppress technology" interpretation of climate data), where a crowd of like-minded free speech haters are ready to suppress opposing opinions. But pro-pot doesn't appear to attract that much system-gaming opposition.

Right now it only takes two downmods to hide a non-anonymous itme. It seems to me that we have enough people willing to moderate that it's time to scale up the mod system, so a small astroturf operation can't shut down debate. Say: double it: Mods get 10 points, -2 hides, non-anynomous starts at +2, high-karma at +4, doulble everybody's current karma and readjust the cutpoints for bonuses, caps, and the like. That would mean it would take two moderators to suppress a anonymous post and four for authors willing to risk reputation. (It would also mean more work for those who are willing to moderate - but they might be more willing to spend a point if they had more to spend.)

Have you seen people drive? Road rage? Now think many of these same people with guns.

Target range practice is a very powerful biofeedback mechanism for teaching the suppression of the production of adrenaline and of all symptoms of excitement. Aligning gun sights - a pair of visual targets separated by about the length of the gun barrel (inches, a foot, or several feet), aligning them with a target (at tens of feet), and holding the alignment, gives visibility to even microscopic tremors and movement. Getting the image right and stable means drastically suppressing this movement. Over a number of range sessions, this leads to learning how to be icy calm, as a reflex, in the midst of a very stressful environment (full of intermittent explosions, bright lights, acrid smells, and odd-temperature winds).

(The effect is extreme. It was discovered that good target shooters, thinking they were just controlling their breath, had actually learned to "stop their heartbeat" - compressing the time between the pairs of beats before and after firing a shot and doubling the time between beats during the trigger pull.)

The result is that, after just a few good sessions, this becomes imprinted. Even in a rage, putting your hand on a gun drops you into that icy calm state.

Indeed, though antagonizing your opponents like that probably isn't going to help the cause.

There is no long a point in trying not antagonizing them. Pretty much anyone who is still actively lobbying against private ownership of guns is either ignoring the evidence, incapable of uncerstandng it, or has a hidden agenda (such as creating victim-rich zones for govenment or criminal activity).

These people are not going to be converted. Things are far enough long that we no longer need them as straw men to raise the bogus argumets to be knocked down with logic. (Those who can be convinced with logic are now mostly either convinced or subject to information shortage). But they remain useful as targets of ridicule, so those who are more interested in being with the in crowd than making smart decisions can be converted.

For those still uncertain on the issue: Do you want to reduce murder, rape, assault, robery, criminal victimization, and institutional suppression of minority groups? Or do you want to want to reduce gun possession? There is no longer any question: More guns mean less of all those things.

This is needed at the bar when pouring into a glass or pitcher.

By then it's far too late. This is about spreading out the active ingredient from the hops during the original mixinig, before brewing, so it can keep the ingredient from the fungi from loading up on carbon dioxide during brewing. By the time you pour, the opportunity for the hops to do anything but add flavor is long gone.

Nearly all of what you say are valid points. But one carries a misconception:

By it's very nature of being a focused, collimated beam a laser does not affect anything in "the general direction" of the target - if it was not focused and accurate, it wouldn't be an effective weapon and might not even be dangerous.

That's SO not true. There are two issues here:
  - Forward (and back) scatter: A laser beam "leaks" light, primarily in the "general direction" of the main beam and, to a lesser extent, in the general direction of back toward the source. It's not a big percentage. But when you start out with kilowatts of colimated light it can be more than adequate to burn out a human eye.
  - Scattering (also specular reflection) from the target, or the cloud of gas that remains of the target. This can be a substantial fraction of the incident beam.

"Do not look at the beam or the target with the remains of your face."

Deuterium/Hydrogen (D/H) isotope ratio is significantly higher (more than three times, in fact) than that of water found on Earth.

Q: How do you separate heavy water from light water?
A: Distillation. Light water boils off / evaporates more easily, because the molecules are lighter, and leaves the heavier water behind.

Why shouldn't this be true of vacuum sublimation as well?

Leave a chunk of dirty ice orbiting the sun in a hard vaccuum for a few million years, with the water quietly sublimating away. Seems to me the result would be that last remaining chunk of dirty ice would have a substantially larger fraction of heavy water molecules than the water on the planet where the deep gravity well hangs on to the lighter molecules.

Is it enough to explain a 3:1 enrichment? No clue. But I'd like to see that the analysis was done and what the scientists' estimates were.

(Not to say they ignored it. The last time I raised a similar question about a scientific paper reported here it turned out that the scientists HAD examined the issue.)

This will cost us billions of dollars in the private and public sector,

who is this "us" he is talking about?

The taxpayers. It's a clear violation of the "takings" clause of the US Fifth Amendment (long since incorporated against the states and their subdivisions, including the City and County of Los Angeles.) This means, after a bunch of legal wrangling, the courts are very likely to rule that applying such a law against a pre-existing building is a "partial taking" and the government must make the owner whole, i.e. reimburse him for his costs of compliance.

The takings clause:

No person shall ... be deprived of ... property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

if the public good is really being served here by improving safety of citizens, why isn't the discussion framed more along these lines?

When it gets to the courts, it will be. Count on it.