The bible says that man has dominion over the earth, and it is ours to do with as we please. And it is immutable, so nothing we do can affect God's work:

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

What a crock of shit. Santorum's "science" is nothing but avarice and ignorance.

I went to school when calculators were first starting to be available. That meant the rich kids could drop $400 for the Bowmar Brain with all the scientific functions and the rest of us had to made do with the TI-11 (or whatever it was...)

So the engineering school designed all the tests without numerical answers. You had to set up the problem and explain the solution, and devise a test to see if your solution was correct. All without using numbers....

Those were some of the hardest tests I ever took. 3 hours, 3 problems, and you sweated blood. I remember one of the problems:

"Calculate the heating of the skin of a rocket as it lifts off through the atmosphere. Assume the engines put out constant thrust. Account for fuel consumption and thinning of the earth's atmosphere."

I would bet that even today Google would be at a loss to provide an answer.

That's what I'd do.... Devise a test that required you to think through the answer.

OK to some extent. However, the Challenger deaths were pointless; the decision was made to favor publicity over engineering. So people died because NASA PHBs and political hacks didn't want to delay a highly publicized launch.

When a military pilot gets in an experimental plane, s/he knows it's experimental and knows s/he is wagering their life for the excitement of doing something no one has ever done.

That's very different from getting killed because a political hack didn't want a minor inconvenience of scrubbing a launch due to bad weather.

We do a weekly meeting. In between we do a lot of informal meetings; one off two-three person hallway get-togethers. Lots of times those are standups; if they longer than a few minutes we'll grab some chairs.

This lets me keep tabs on what's going on, keep in touch with how people are doing (yes I'm management) and also gauge where people are in their lives.

I know a lot about my employees through these meetings; projects, clients, co-workers, kids, wives, husbands, relatives, so I know if someone's child is sick I can't press them for a deadline...

Anyway, standups are like every other buzzword; a part of my toolkit but not a cure all.

I live in the real world, where I realize that neither corporations nor government is perfect. Where there need to be checks and balances. Where corporate greed needs to be checked by government regulations. Where government bureaucracy needs to be limited. Where corporate power needs to be limited. Where people on all sides make mistakes.

I don't live in a fantasy where government = BAD, corporations = GOOD, and there is no middle ground.

The "free of government interference" part is pure fantasy. Virtually every fire department is funded in large part by the federal government. Are you willing to do away with fire protection, police protection, clean water, clean air, vehicle safety, airline safety, basic work safety rules? Are all those "government interference"? And no, they can't be funded at the local level. Too much of America is too sparsely populated to fund its own infrastructure.

If government regulations are relaxed, powerful corporations will work in concert to lower work standards, lower pay, and increase work hours. Study the labor movement at the turn of the last century. In particular, read the history of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. Do you have any idea that those "powerful corporations" used to have private armies that beat and killed workers who dared to protest against poor working conditions?

What fantasy world do you live in?

Unfortunately the Tea Part also showed its utter lack of understanding of government with the debt ceiling fiasco. It's one thing to say you HATE HATE HATE and want LESS government but it's another thing to argue from a point of total ignorance of realpolitik and global economics and just simply HATE and act like a 2 year old in the middle of a temper tantrum.

Also, if the tea party wants LESS government, why is it so interested in using government to shove their religious/moral beliefs down my throat?

Face it, the tea party is just another political party interested in using government to establish its own agenda and impose it on the rest of us.

I'm having a hard time figuring out how the investors expect to get their money out....

Facebook reportedly has, what, 10% of the world's population? What's its growth model from here?

And how will it make the sort of money needed to pay the investors?

I guess I'm sort of stumped at the "business opportunity" offered here. At a guess, Z and 499 other shareholders are going to come out of this with a wad of cash and everyone else will be holding a deflated balloon in a few years....

None of the AWACS/JSTARS/etc planes are "made to be shot at". They're civilian airframes stuffed to the gills with super-secret electronics. They rely on fighters and ECM to stay up; they don't do any fighting themselves. Heck, they're unarmed.

T-Mobile has has the Lumia on sale since the turn of the year or so....

What's interesting is that *all* the "review" comments for the Lumia are glowing, all praise the technical features, and all seem to be quite well informed about the features and have correct spelling and grammar. While the review comments on the LG and other phones are more typical bitching and griping about how the phone quit working because the screen broke when the user dropped it....

The mind reels.