No, relativity says that all mass in the universe acts on all the other mass, even though the effect moves at the speed of light which is pretty slow over most of the vast universe, but most of the mass has already curved space by now since it has existed for so long. Newton's gravitation also says that all masses act on each other. Both of which models support my point that every point in the universe is affected by gravity, and there is nowhere that is "absolute zero gravity" as the comment to which I replied claimed.

Your point is irrelevant. The point, to which you replied, is that using Mint instead of the user doing what Mint did to Ubuntu, saves time.

You just tried to move the goalposts again to your point. And then you tried to "just saying" your way into moving them again into disagreeing that installing Mint saves time over installing Ubuntu and changing it yourself. Moving the goalposts again. And moving them into just being wrong.

You don't even know what you're arguing about, and you're wrong on what you want to argue about. Helping you perpetuate it is distasteful. That's all the help from me you'll get.

It clearly matters who is president of America Inc. As I pointed out, Republican presidents of it are intolerable, while Democratic presidents of it suck, but are tolerable. There's plenty of other supporting data. Like the GDP and the stock market each growing faster under every Democratic president than Republicans, since Eisenhower. Of course we can always do better. Then there's the warmonger record, which Republicans dominate (except are roughly equal on Vietnam, which is now just a middling war). It's absolutely false that the two parties are equivalent. And when there are only two on the ballot that can govern, let alone win, we have to be honest about which one is an unacceptable choice.

Of course America was designed for the Congress to primarily determine how much the country sucks, and Republicans are the source of most of the suck. If we call them "Conservative" (and its "Libertarian" flavor that's really "corporate anarchy"), we can include the Democrats who make the case for equivalence. This is the problem. But it's far too easy, because it's wrong, to say that it doesn't matter which party rules. When Republicans rule, all but a few suffer and pay for it. When Democrats rule, far fewer suffer.

Because we didn't have nearly the amount of mall rentacops as we had real cops. They didn't have the power of real cops. They mostly didn't even have guns. They didn't get sent to face the kind of threats that real cops face.

You are talking nonsense, and it's perfectly clear your libertarian trance cannot be broken. Enjoy your paradise in Somalia. Goodbye.

What a completely naive statement, completely ignoring all the ways in which rentacops suck far worse than government cops. To the point where rentacops generally aren't allowed the kind of power that government cops are allowed.

You do listen to what you say before you try to convince someone with your anarchist word salads, right?

At best all Obama did was continue the program.
[...]
Both Presidents Bush announced plans to go to Mars yet failed to provide any leadership in terms of getting funding to get it to happen or even building any infrastructure to make it happen.

Then again neither does Mitt Romney [really care to offer any real leadership]

Indeed that is why Obama deserves credit. He continued the programme. Despite also handling a catastrophic economic collapse that literally threatened to delete America's main industrial engine, the automotive industry. It took a lot of political capital and risk to continue that programme, instead of just lying about it the way those other presidents did.

the appointment of Charles Bolden as administrator of NASA was nearly the very last of any high level agency appointments made by Barack Obama, and the longest it took for any president since Eisenhower to appoint somebody into that position after taking office

Again, it's not easy spending money on something like NASA when the country is flooded by propaganda calling any government spending "socialism" during the biggest economic collapse in a lifetime. Appointing someone against that headwind, and NASA getting its various work done especially since a Republican Congress has insisted on interfering with anything Obama could take credit for (including killing Binladen), was real leadership.

So it's a good thing Obama will be defeating Romney in 6 months. That makes it look a lot better than if Romney and his party of Bush, Bush, Reagan (who did nothing but keep the Shuttle programme on the treadmill while pimping the Star Wars SDI boondoggle), Ford, Nixon and Eisenhower were running NASA. Those people showed leadership only in screwing the best thing America's ever done, our space programme. Obama deserves credit for keeping NASA going, even growing private industry into space the way Republicans would always lie about but never do. He will get that credit, and will do more to deserve more credit when reelected. Especially the fewer Republicans around to interfere with it.

The percentage of people who directly work for (and so are) the government who are elected politicans is smaller than the rounding error on the turnover of government employees. Most of what the government does is to enforce and obey laws, not make them.

They are expensive, their cost comes out of your budget, and they cause huge delays in your program.

Which your aerospace contractor insists be expensive, since your budget is charged cost-plus to the government/taxpayer. So your aerospace contractor wants its costs to rise, since that's the basis for its profits to rise. Which is why NASA wants to be expensive, because NASA's every move is scripted by lobbyists from aerospace contractors who write the legislation and budgets that control NASA.

It will indeed be good to get NASA out of a lot of that loop. Even though these private space companies like SpaceX will still be paid by NASA/taxpayer, they'll take some unindemnified risks and losses. Eventually they'll have enough private orbital infrastructure that the public will have only a purely regulatory role, not any expense role except enforcing the regulations. If we're lucky. More likely private space operations will have rid themselves of regulation entirely, and the only justice for people there will be what they can buy from the giant exoplanetary corporation.

As relativity explains, every point in the Universe is to some degree "near" any number of "large" masses, with the proportional gravity effect on/by them that Newton described.

That's right - rentacops are so much better than government cops.