"Yo Dawg".

So did the governments of Soviet Russia during the so called war communism period.

Yes, its fine to deliver 100 tons of shoes by making 100 identical shoes left that weigh one ton each!

State control apparatus always slides downwards into a pit of sewage because no one gains from doing a job better than the next guy, but many benefit from doing it worse, and anyone doing anything in a new way is undermining the status quo, and by implication undermining the government,

We the people give permission to people/corporations to operate profitably amongst us, and in return expect to have a contribution towards providing the infrastructure needed for them to operate (which included educating potential employees in sufficient numbers that their wages do not get over-inflated, and keeping them healthy by curing other people who might otherwise infect your employees and make them sick). In civilised countries, there are steps taken to avoid the terminally greedy stealing from the weak - at least partly to avoid the weak deciding that they would be better off if they went out burning and looting as an amusement..

Most of us, unlike Karl Marx, do not believe you need to own something to control it - the evidence is that it is quite possible to alter the volume on someone else's stereo, or drive a stolen car. The man was an idiot.

Scumbags like you think that the object of life is to be "greedier than thou".

For the benefit of the reading-ability-impaired AC's posting above, let me extract the relevant phrases:

Mass-media influences cultural evolution [...] They cannot understand life, except as something that generates politics and "human interest" stories. [...] They [...] work to maintain our limits to growth since it places their skills at a premium.

Which is an interesting, and quite possibly valid, point.

I just don't see what it has to do with SpaceX or anyone else using Pad 39A.

The crawler - transporter is so incredibly cool. Something that big actually moving.

I see your point, but back in the day it was transporting something larger that would be moving orders of magnitude faster, straight up, seconds after lighting the engines.

(As an aside, there were originally plans for a Pad 39C, and the VAB was scaled to allow simultaneous stacking of up to four Saturn Vs. Sigh, the space program we almost had...)

There are so many things to explore right here, you disgusting navel-gazing autistic psychopath. [bold added]

LOL! Who is navel gazing, now?

While the Outer Space Treaty has some things to say about it (the Moon Treaty was never ratified, or even signed by many of the players), historically the rules of precedence for establishing claim over new lands has been:
1. First to spot it.
2. First to plant a flag on it (which historically implied setting foot)
3. First to set up a base or fort on it
4. First to establish a settlement (ie, permanent habitation) on it.

With "right of ownership" proceeding in the above order. Robotic flag planting as we've had since the mid 1960's might be step 1.5, which is where China is at. USA was at 3 for a brief time in 1969-72 (since the later Apollo missions had surface stays of several days) although disclaimed it with the "we came in peace for all mankind" verbiage on the landing plaques.

If/when China establishes a manned base on the Moon, is there going to be anyone in a position to argue about it (beyond stern words at the UN and threats to remove "Most Favored Nation" trading status) if they claim ownership?

Dust? Seriously?

This is high vacuum we're talking about. Lunar dust is just tiny rocks, they get kicked up and immediately fall back to the surface. It's not as though the dust is going to float for days (or even minutes) in the (virtually non-existent) lunar atmosphere. (Sure sign of badly written SF or shot-in-a-studio movie footage: dust on the real Moon doesn't cloud, it sprays then drops.)

Sure, the exhaust plume gases will stick around for a bit. That will give LADEE something to help calibrate its instruments against, since presumably the reaction products are known.

They don't always shut down the company.

Sometimes they just arrest the COB/CEO. You don't really imagine there was zero connection between Joe Nacchio of Qwest refusing to give NSA customer records without a court order (this back in 2001) and his being arrested and jailed for insider trading, do you?

(He may have engaged in some questionable trades but nothing that other corporate execs have done without getting hit with such severe penalties.)

why can't I be the one who decides if I can have root?

Because your carrier thinks you might use it to avoid intrusive advertising.

Unfortunately, Twitch does not have any content (apart from games).

I remember at the time (mid-2000s?) *before* the original Core line came out, at least one article in Personal Computer World magazine extolled the virtues of the Pentium M. They quite seriously suggested it was worth considering for use in a desktop system. (IIRC, there were desktop motherboards that supported the Pentium M, the only issue was that you had to take more care with the heatsink and cooling than you would with a Pentium 4- or something like that).

Thought I'd point out that technically, AmigaOS is still around- in fact, last time I heard it's being "actively" developed (*) and sold, albeit as a very niche product targeted at diehard hobbyists. (**) As I commented, though even several years back:-

Also, the rights to the various Amiga and Commodore IPs (names, hardware and software all separate) have been split up, passed around like a bad game of pass the parcel, sublicensed and disputed; I won't go into the details because (a) I can't be bothered and (b) I'm not sure myself! :-)

But... yeah. Technically, last time I heard you can still buy a "modern" AmigaOne and run the new versions of AmigaOS on it.

(*) Though that may be for values of "active" comparable to the rate of flow of glass in medieval windows. And yes, I know that's possibly a myth. :-)
(**) To be fair, this is mentioned on Slashdot at regular intervals, so it's possible that many of you are aware of this anyway. The rights to the Amiga name, to manufacture the hardware and to the OS http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2710941&cid=39268663

HAM was around almost two years before VGA debuted (with the PS/2 in April 1987)! (*)

The downside was that it was hard to use for animated graphics, since the colour of most pixels were modified shades of the one to their left, meaning one had to take into account surrounding pixels when moving an object to avoid miscoloured streaking. Few action games used it, though I'm still convinced more games could have exploited HAM if the problem had been analysed methodically and restrictions on the use of base colours and general shading worked out to minimise artifacts and keep calculations workable.

Possibly this wasn't really considered because in Europe (where the Amiga was popular), most 16-bit games were also written for the Atari ST (***) and this would have made them harder to adapt. Hence most used the regular 32-colours-from-4096 or occasionally, the sort-of-64-colour "halfbrite" modes.

(*) AFAICT the best widespread PC adaptor around when the Amiga launched was EGA (i.e. 16 colours from 64). IBM *did* apparently have a graphics adaptor comparable to VGA in 1984, but the card alone was four times the price the Amiga cost when it launched the following year(!)

(**) HAM gave 12-bit colour using only 6 bits per pixel. One could either choose from 16 "base colours" (chosen from a palette of 4096 RGB colours) or choose to modify the red, green or blue component of the pixel to its immediate left, meaning that it could take up to 3 pixel positions to get an exact value; this led to fringing, which could be minimsed by choosing the base colours wisely (and by dynamically changing the base colours on every line with software assistance).

(***) Apparently there was a program for the Atari ST that gave it a software-assisted 512 colour display, but I don't know how restricted *that* was; apparently there were timing issues.

Yes- Dave Haynie, who was still there at that time made a comment a while back that pretty much confirms this, saying that the C65 (which he didn't think was a good idea either) was essentially driven by one guy and that "it was strange times at Commodore near the end"

Anyway, thanks for all the interesting feedback!