Now that a Republican is in charge, it's "politics" ruining Nasa? Really?

NASA chief Charles Bolden:
"When I became the NASA administrator, (President Obama) charged me with three things: One, he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math; he wanted me to expand our international relationships; and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math and engineering."

I'm going to go on record as saying that Nasa has been pretty much fucked by politics since, well, forever.

Speaking of a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, what happens when Nell tells Barbie that her mommy's boyfriend is a bad man?

If you object to the multiplier, simply drive the speed limit?

I'm comfortably-incomed (in about the 85-90% percentile of US incomes, about 75% for overall wealth) and I'd be *perfectly* fine with this.

Since the goal of this is solely punitive, and not meant to be a wealth-generator, I'd say that we take the money into a pool for the local community, and then either give it entirely back to the citizens on a straight "everyone gets 1 share" basis, or, in each election allow the population to vote about what % goes back to taxpayers, and what % goes to local charities in each 2 year cycle.

On the contrary, for me it's *very much* about the humanity.

However, I treat people as intelligent beings worthy of respect and able to make choices for themselves.

First, let's tack down those shifting goalposts and remember that we're talking about executing "people" who have:
- been convicted in a court of law, AND
- had that conviction reviewed (appeal) for procedural, bias, etc errors and still found guilty.

There's just two possibilities at this point.
1) the person actually did it.
2) the person didn't do it and has been wrongly convicted.

In the former case, my goal is in no way punitive. I frankly don't believe that for the most hearty sociopaths, psychopaths, etc that commit the crimes that warrant capital punishment, that 'punitive' measures even reach them (much less any sort of rehabilitation). I don't frankly care. My point is utilitarian: these "people" (as you call them) have willfully made a choice to set aside their humanity and act in as inhumane a way as we can conceive, for some sort of benefit. As rational actors*, they did this but they have to live with the consequences of that choice. The rational thing for society to do in return is to remove this dangerous thing, and prevent it from hurting anyone else.

In the latter case - and I note that in this long, long thread of personal attacks, there has not been provided a single, concrete, contrary example to my original assertion: the cops don't just drive up and grab John Q Public off the street, and charge him with a capital offense. The individuals "innocently" executed are, by ANY standard, the absolute dregs of society, causing harm, misery, and untold pain to the people around them in many cases for DECADES. For every crime that they have on their arm's length rap sheet, there are probably at least a dozen others for which they were never caught. So yes, I'm saying again, as rational* actors they've made that choice, and while they may have been innocent of that particular charge, I'm willing to accept that they were worthless scum that we can simply be better off rid of.

*rational: some people will assert that these individuals are crazy, and thus not responsible for their actions. OK, but that seems to beg the question. If you have an unstable explosive that could harm people around at any moment, do you save it, give it therapy, maybe some counseling in case hopefully it can be useful? No, you dispose of it because it's simply freaking dangerous to everyone, and there's no desperate shortage of explosive that we can't find some later if we need it. There are 7 billion people on this earth. If you have 7 billion of something, you can lose a few and not even notice.

Look, I'm all for removing subsidies from ALL energy industries, and letting the fair market have her way with them - not just the renewables, but absolutely the petro-firms.*
*this includes not just direct subsidies, but indirect: tax breaks, increment financing, free use of public lands and waters for exploration, etc, etc.

But I think you (and the "divestor" movement) have it backwards. The public funding that comes from stocks raises capital, sure, but that's hardly their primary sources of revenue. I'd point to the fact that our modern economy runs on petroleum as the first point. Until that changes, they're not going to lack for profits, ever.
Wave your hippy cred all over the place, and get governments to 'divest' as a sign of your rage, but the fact is that where there's a demand, there's a market. Where there's a market, there's profit. Pablo Escobar wouldn't care if anyone bought his stock. I'd submit that neither would Exxon.
Let's also recall that Standard Oil wasn't built on public shares/trading, it was built on good old-fashioned cut-throat industrialism.

How do you infer that I suggest due process is a "bad idea"?
I'm absolutely not against trials.
I explicitly state that even after a guilty verdict, if there is a flaw in process, method, law, or circumstance, they get an appeal.
I do not believe in an infinite chain of appeals based on the serial presentation of trivial disputes delayed as much as possible as a procedural method of commuting a death sentence to life imprisonment. In fact, I'd argue that is in itself inhumane, the constant dangling of appeals to hope, rather than the swift exaction of the legally-determined sentence.

In fact, it's opponents of capital punishment that want to throw the baby out with the bathwater: by asserting that since there are *some* flaws in the system, it should never employ the ultimate punishment.
If anyone's denying the value of due process, it's them.

My TV would probably cost $40,000 a decade ago. My iPhone would be a $30,000 workstation in the 90s. The NAS in my living room is $900,000 worth of storage in 1998 dollars. To your contrary, I think people have a perfectly reasonable expectation of low and dropping prices.

More of this, please. Don't demoralize a new programmer who doesn't have the experience to choose well between two similar-sounding options.

Agreed, but with a reminder that "direct and concise" is different from "asshole". You can say "thanks for the patch, but it conflicts with our long-term design goals and we can't accept it" is not the same as "LOL nope".

It gets weird. Some FLOSS projects stop because the work is "done". I have such a project myself that does data conversions from one database to another, and several distro download counters say it has quite a few thousand installations worldwide. And yet, I only touch the code when a bug report comes in. Other than that, it's more or less finished. It does what the label says, quickly and reliably. Many people use it in production. There's just not a whole lot that can be done to improve it other than succumbing to featuritis and adding a lot of bells and whistles.

Few commercial projects would hit this point because most rely on upgrade sales. I don't, so there's no incentive to push ahead. I suspect that's the case with many FLOSS projects which have scratched their itch. Why keep scratching?

Of course, as all these firms divest themselves of the oil industry and demand drops, the price for oil will drop as well, making it even more attractive to those needing to save a buck.

Yes, a language is a dynamic thing. The rules are constantly changing, and what was 'unacceptable' to purists is okay for casual use, and what was casual use only ten years ago might be perfectly acceptable even in rigorous settings today.

Further, English is a very agglomerative language; it's turned out to be astonishingly tolerant of loan words, adoptions, etc from other languages freely. Thus, at least in American English particularly, there's a tolerance (largely, I suspect, due to our immigrant past) for odd phrasings, word orders, or odd usage that eventually may become common parlance.

NEVERTHELESS, as much as it's getting down into the weeds of linguistic OCD to insist (or not) on the Oxford comma, or avoiding prepositional endings, or on specific adjectival orders (there's a rabbit hole if you want to see grammarians duking it out), that doesn't mean that there aren't rules of usage that are common for understanding, or that "there are no real rules at all" as this article seems to claim.

Yes, it's very intellectual to assert there are no rules, but a normal person recognized that's stupid: of COURSE there are rules. Are they regularly ignored? Sure. Should they be? It depends on context; if you're talking with your friends "u" is probably a perfectly acceptable replacement for "you". If you're writing a business letter, it will simply make you look like a moron.

If someone points it out to you, Insisting with sophomoric sincerity that "well there really are no rules in English anyway" will simply certify their opinion.

1. It's pointless. It's not an effective deterrent, at least not for all people, otherwise you'd never need to use it.
A: we have never executed more than 1/1000 of the men on death row. I would say the failure-to-deter is more a matter of inconsistent and weak application.

2. It's prohibitively expensive. Most of the costs involve legal wrangling, after all, but that's still part of the cost.
A: Bullshit. It's giving them repeated, desperate options that is expensive. You're convicted? You get one appeal. Fail? You're done. NOT expensive.

3. It is irreversible. If you figure out you got the wrong person, you can't fix it.
A: So what? I mean, sure, it's regrettable. But personally I support a woman's right to choose to abort; ergo, to be logically consistent if I'm allowing a woman to kill what may be an innocent, healthy baby who's done nothing wrong except to be inconvenient, I can certainly accept killing someone who's PROBABLY guilty (or if innocent of THAT particular crime, is guilty of tons of others as well as generally making life for others around them miserable for years).

4. Even if you have the right person, it's not actually punishing HIM (or her,) since death is the ultimate fate of all living organisms.
A: I don't care it it's punitive. I'm utilitarian: there are no recidivists from the death penalty. None.

The person you would execute is receiving the exact same thing your own beloved child is doomed to get the day you conceive him or her.
A: So? Seriously, you're overrating death. As far as I'm concerned, it's throwing out a non-contributing part.

5. If you think you're getting the person being executed an earlier start on his/her eternal punishment, consider that eternity is the exact same duration,
A: Strawman, now you're *really* stretching.

6. In as much as there IS no eternal punishment, in the place many people believe their imaginary friend consigns "bad" people when they die, as it turns out.
A: Still just a strawman, there is 0% way you know this is true, in any case.

7. The people you punish are the friends and family of the people you kill, who often had nothing to do with the crime, even when you DO have the right person.
A: then they should have worked harder to provide that person with a social safety net, to maybe help them be a human being than someone society is better off without.

8. If you DO have the right person, consider the very real possibility that he or she is performing suicide-by-court-system and that you are playing right into a would-be suicides hands, by allowing, condoning, or supporting this stupid, counterproductive, barbaric practice.
A: I'm fine with that. Happy to help.

9. The executioner is morally and ethically no better than the person being executed;
A: that's ENTIRELY your assertion. I look at it as taking out the garbage; a stinky, but necessary job.

10. The idea that it's a punishment of the guilty having been thoroughly debunked, now let's briefly examine vengeance.
A: again, not punishment, not vengeance. If I find a sharp piece of glass on the floor, I don't throw it away to 'punish' it or 'pay it back' for cutting me. It is what it is. And the best thing I can do is dispose of it before it hurts someone.

11. It's a cowardly act to execute someone using someone else's hand.
A: I'll do it for everyone else. Again, the world needs garbagemen. My idea is to simply put them in a 100' silo with a stairway to the top. They don't HAVE to commit suicide by jumping, they could just starve. Either way, it's nearly cost-free, and actually "green" - crows need to eat too.

12. Restitution becomes impossible after the person dies,
A: every single case of "innocent" being executed, the individual may be innocent of THAT case, but is a horrible, worthless person who has committed numerous other crimes harming people around them for decades. They're worth getting rid of. (Shrug)

Not a single thing you said made me doubt my feelings on capital punishment one whit. Thanks, tho, for allowing me a nice list to comment on.

Every example I've seen of someone executed "who was innocent" has been scum otherwise. Certainly, they may have been innocent of that specific crime, but they've generally been worthless wastes of human flesh causing misery to the people around them for their entire lives.

And even IF they were perfectly innocent people, so what, really? This world is infested with 7 billion people. They're not precious snowflakes, they're utterly, completely, expendable. We cheerfully will cut out healthy tissue to excise a tumor; if we occasionally sweep up a non-scum person, really, so what as long as the bulk of bad guys are correctly executed.

Oh, and to the original point? Gravity's free. Put them in a cement 100' silo with a stair to the top. Either they starve to death, or jump off the top. Either way, it's toxin-free, zero-cost, energy-efficient, and afterwards crows get to eat, so it's green too.

The timecube domain is for sale. No word on whether the buyer gets to keep the crazy though.

You're presuming a symmetrical link, which isn't a reasonable assumption for any nontrivial network setup. Your client may only have one path to the server, but the server may have a hundred load-balanced paths back. Or imagine a very asymmetric link like almost any cable or DSL connection. When you're dealing with milliseconds, these are practical questions and not hypothetical nitpicking.