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the click-clack of abacus beads hitting one another. I imagine this one wins on length of time in use.

The question in my mind, however, is - if they do shut down this agency - then what will they do with all the old paper-only reports that were published before the internet and electronic documents came about? Presumably, all those old reports have been scanned into microfiche, ready to be reprinted on demand. What happens to those? I would hope that before eliminating the agency, there would be an effort to scan all those microfiche to pdf and make them available for free on the web. Or maybe just hand them over to Google and let them scan it all in and host it.

Correction: there can be no copyright on work created by government employees. Work created by contractors on behalf of the government CAN be copyrighted, if the contracting officer allows it. Also, the government can hold copyright when said copyright has been transferred to it.

See the FAR Subpart 27.4 as well as 52.227-14.

Also, there are exceptions to the rule. NIST and Dept of Commerce maintains a government-asserted copyright to much of its property data, for example the IAPWS steam tables. The reason it is allowed to do this is because there is a law passed by Congress that creates an exception to the normal Code of Federal Regulations that allows NIST to do this. Don't have that handy to reference but I have seen it.

nuclear weapons are never designed to just go "critical". Nuclear reactors go "critical" (or even slightly "super-critical" for short periods). Nuclear weapons go "prompt-critical" (which is just a fancy way of saying "really, really, really super-critical"). The distinction is not just semantics, but is germane to the physics of what is happening.

As the earth cools, its average density goes up, causing the planet to shrink. All just depends on whether the rate of expansion is enough to counteract the rate of contraction.

The AC is right. You are just introducing a strawman into the argument. If you are going to argue the monetary costs of a fuel, then you really shouldn't introduce human-contrived externalities into the mix. The danger in doing so is that then you have to figure out where to draw the line. Because whose to say that wind and solar don't have their own problems that are centuries in the making, as well? Oh, say like the future scarcity of silicon from manufacturing solar panels, or impact to migratory birds from windmills.

I am exaggerating the impacts from solar and wind here, but the point is that if you are going to insist on including the costs of CO2 emissions into the subsidization equation, then you also should include the future environmental costs of the other "green" methods as well. And the trick here is that it is really hard, if not impossible, to predict how future generations are going to place value on aspects of these technologies that are currently not seen as having a societal cost.

The only reason you want to account for the costs of CO2 emissions is because you, along with many other humans, are placing a (negative) value on that. I am sure there are Eskimos living in Alaska that would place a positive value on a warmer climate. Shouldn't you attempt to include their feelings in the matter? Why is your opinion and valuation more important than the Eskimo's? Whose to say the world wouldn't be an overall better place to live a few degrees warmer? Maybe we should be charging more for wind and solar because they ultimately would be preventing us from reaching such a panacea?

Far better to just avoid playing these "what if" games.

This is not entirely true. I work for a small federal regulatory agency. We are not cutting our budget equally across the board on all funding areas. For example, our agency brass has decided that nobody will be furloughed or lose their job and that all the cuts will be taken from contracting funds. And of that, the majority will come from research projects. So an 8% cut to our agency budget is translating to a 40% budget cut to research projects and some other contracts. The agency senior management then asked each low level Division to identify the projects that would be cut in order to add up to the 40%. Each Branch Chief/Division Director was given discretion as to whether they wanted to take a little bit from all of his/her projects, or to simply prioritize each project and then start cutting whole programs from the bottom up until the 40% was reached.

You don't understand how federal contracting works. Most of the time the cost overrun is the fault of the government because the specs that it generates are not complete. Which is understandable because R&D is inherently risky and unknowable. Issuing a contract that says "design and build me a new fighter jet that will replace my current fleet of planes" is not conducive to getting exactly what you want. But many requests for proposal that the government issues are precisely at this level. And another mistake you are making is thinking that the initial amount of the money that the government budgets for a particular project, based on its own limited knowledge of what it will take to complete the project, has any relation to the actual amount of money required to get the job done. If the government worker tasked with generating the contract specs was in a position to know with complete certainty what the job would require, then the contract specs could be written with much more detail, and the cost predictions would be better.

I suppose the counter to your argument is that citizens who work for the government are also receiving health benefits subsidized by you and I. So when health insurance premiums go up for all government employees because the costs of smokers are higher, then all citizens pay the price. Of course, you could also argue that one might expect those same smokers to not live quite as long, leading to smaller overall pension payouts. Maybe it turns out to be a wash, maybe not.

Incidentally, I would much rather have our government comprised of employees who aren't motivated by instant gratification. That same "instant gratification" tendency has a lot to do with the way our politicians approach decision-making. We shouldn't compound the issue by staffing all levels of government with people who think that way.

Bad example. Actually, as the owner of the dog, I have been potentially deprived of something - the market for that dog's sperm. There may only be a handful of people in this world who would be interested in buying the dog's sperm for breeding purposes. Since you have gone and sold it to one of those people, my ability to make money off of that sperm when I return from vacation has been irreparably harmed.

Incidentally, I do fall on the side of supporting file sharing, as long as a person does not try to resell a person's music/software/etc for monetary gain.

Your second example of "top tier talent and give them as much time as they want" is not illustrative of the rule. The rule says pick two. Your example only picks one - it picks good, but with expensive and slow. What your example should say is "if you want really kick-ass software, you need to hire top tier talent who are really expensive, and lots of them, because they are the only ones who can do it fast"

You may be right, but also consider this. Commissioner Svinicki, a Republican, is up for re-nomination. Reid has already committed to letting her renomination vote come to the floor. With Jaczko timing his announcement now, it now gives Reid a lot more leverage with Republicans in being able to hand pick another anti-Yucca mountain lackey. The wildcard is whether Obama will nominate that lackey as Chairman, or whether he will nominate Commissioner Magwood.

Actually, all you would probably get is a President who would advocate and lobby Congress for those things. The problem many of the Ron Paul supporters seem to forget is that no President is an island unto himself. Congress holds the purse strings, so it can undercut any of his ideas that they don't agree with. And given that many of his ideals are less than tasteful to both sides of the aisle, I doubt very much that he would be a very effective President. Even his veto power on any bill would be in jeopardy if Congress were sufficiently united to muster the necessary 2/3 majority.

He would not have the power to unilaterally abolish 4 federal agencies or the Federal Reserve. He would not have the power to unilaterally cut the defense budget (or any other part of the budget other than perhaps the Whitehouse budget). I do believe he could probably make good on his promise to bring all troops home - unless Congress could find a way to prohibit any federal monies from being used for such a purpose before he could take Office.

Well, it seems that I stand corrected. Just checked OPM's website. My benefits brochure in no way implies it is a yearly figure so I have just always assumed it was a lump sum. But OPM calls it an annuity implying it is a yearly figure. I take back my assessment. If you factor in the Soc Sec payments, and a decent 401K, that is pretty good, especially if the house is paid off and kids are through college. The only major expenses one has to look forward to then are medical bills.

Actually, the pay freezes are not stopping the automatic step increases. Just the automatic cost of living adjustments. My agency has taken an effective $25 million budget decrease because our approved budget has remained flat, but because the agency must still pay for all those step increases and promotions, it has to take $25 million from the money we would use for contracting to pay for those added salary expenses.