If you have specie based money (the gold standard) then you are limited in the amount of money (ie resources) you can have in circulation which limits the size of the economy which means that economies cannot grow exponentially which means that bankers can't get really, really rich which means that the entire artifice of the current world falls to pieces.

Why do you hate America?

I've been on base to get a tour of the Solar Impulse plane.

I filled out a half-page form and brought it with me.

There are a number of smaller operators that operate out of Moffett. Of course Lockheed Martin has some operations there (They're a couple blocks away), too, but don't make it out to be some grand government conspiracy. A place in desperate need of money and planes, with spare space for planes, found a private party that was:

A) Willing to give them lots of money.
B) Wanted to park planes.

Now and then, they make them available for experiments (i.e. joy rides).

And despite the billboard advertising it, there's no way that I'd eat at the commissary.

A number of public and private entities use the field. H211 (and others) typically do two things:

1. They pay fees to NASA for the storage and operation of their aircraft at this airfield.
2. They agree to allow NASA to install equipment in these aircraft and afford NASA the use of these aircraft for experiments.

In exchange for this, they get cheap fuel, but not below NASA's cost. Sure, they're not paying the normal taxes on this fuel because federal regulations prohibit the taxation of fuel sold from government owned airfields, and federal regulations allow for private operations to use NASA facilities under contract with NASA.

NASA has hangars, fuel storage/delivery facilities, a short supply of aircraft for research, and no money. Private entities have aircraft, no place to park them near their bases of operation, and money.

Would it piss you off if frequent government contractor Lockheed Martin operated private aircraft out of Moffett? Oh! Wait! They do! Would you be pissed if the highly publicized and technologically interesting solar plane venture Solar Impulse parked their plane in one of the hangars and threw parties around it while in the Bay Area? Oh! Wait! They did!

People need to chill out about this. This is no big deal. Either change the laws creating this condition or kick private entities out of Moffett, an idiotic action that would likely result in the financial collapse of an already under-funded operation of NASA.

But, yes, I'm willing to grant your first statement... you are simple minded.

I suppose that for consistency you always refer to Nintendo as Marafuku and AOL as Quantum Computer Services?

Worth pointing out that Unix and variants absolutely dominate virtually all of the markets now. From a skills perspective, separating "Linux" is a bit pointless...

Not disagreeing with you, just trying to underline your point. I do not advise people to pigeonhole themselves into Microsoft, particularly when they will have a much better foundation for networking, security, storage, mobile, programming, and virtually everything else by learning *nix.

Involuntary actions....triggered by MUSIC are the most relevant questions, surely you hear music when your not playing your violin? Do you NATURALLY react? BTW: my score was 58 - I can't play any instrument and I don't spend a lot of money on music.

UK salaries aren't that high: it's more like the annual salary of about five professionals, and it seems to be about three times their annual "governance" spending according to the summary of their accounts on the Charity Commission website (although since they apparently have the equivalent of 354 full-time employees they must be filing the bulk of their wage bill under "charitable activities"). Perhaps more pertinently, it's about 1% of annual turnover, which is not an unreasonable level to pitch a fine which can't be treated as a cost of "doing business" badly.

AI suffers from continuously moving goal posts because nobody has a good definition of intelligence.. A computer (Watson) has already convincingly beat humans at general knowledge. Watson is an amazing technological feat however the general public does not recognise Watson as intelligent in any meaningful way, they have the same reaction as my wife when they see Watson playing Jeopardy - "It's looking up the answers on the internet, so what?". They don't even understand the problem Watson has solved, when the general public talk about AI they are thinking about robots that appear in modern movies and are basically indistinguishable from humans (eg:Terminator), something that is not only intelligent but also has also (nearly) mastered human social intelligence.

In a way they are right, emotions drive what the logical mind thinks about and AI cannot (yet) communicate, let alone reproduce, human emotions, I have long thought that this is partly because AI researchers in general concentrate on modelling the brain and more or less ignore the huge network of intricate sensors and actuators attached to it.

I'd argue that it's *precisely* what it's there for. Every single law is there to define and guide your behavior. Most people think it's a good thing to guide you away from murder, theft, rape, arson, etc. It's widely thought to be necessary to live in together in a society; these laws are essentially universal in first-world societies.

The question isn't whether, but how much. Pigovian taxes (ones to encourage/discourage behavior rather than raise revenue) are a gentler method of limiting behavior than banning it outright. It's a good way to resolve tragedies-of-the-commons issues, another thing widely thought to be a reasonable province of government. When everybody doing exactly what's best for them leads to worse outcomes for everybody, we agree to abide by restrictions that leave everybody better off.

It's not always as obvious as regulating access to grazing land. It's an open question of whether we want to treat this as a commons to be managed, and if we do, whether a Pigovian tax is the best way to gently manage it while allowing market forces to continue to operate. But it's hard to take seriously the proposition that government has automatically no place in the question.

Why would you say that they are NOT viable? Seems like Tesla has proven that electricity is viable for cars, Burlington northern is converting their diesel engines to LNG, and I noticed that my WM garbage truck is now LNG. More importantly, businesses are screaming that NG is viable, and car owners are screaming for electric cars.

My kingdom for mod points... ok, maybe my small fiefdom of servers.

And if you read the sidebar you'll see that its name changed to BP Amoco plc in 1998 and to BP plc in 2001.

Max Planck Leipzig? I hear similar stories from there.

If you REALLY want to see the price of gas lowered, there is a simple way to do this.
Do a compromise on keystone, where it is approved, and then 2 limited time subsidies are created for electric cars, and the other for nat. gas commercial vehicles.
At the same time, raise federal road taxes on gas/diesel by .25/gal/ year for the next 4 years, and then convert it to a % of the price, with a minimum. Next, give the gas tax to the state in which it comes from, and the diesel tax is used by the federal DOT. Then work on our roads
By doing this, we will see the tar sands hit global market, raising our local prices. BUT, with the above limited time subsidies, it will move our new vehicles over to none-oil, which will drop demand for gas rather quickly, and then will allow diesel and gas to be around 2/gal.