Of course there are other ways to value a work of art, but economic value is the only one that justifies hampering the artistic value by making a work less accessible to the public. If a work is not generating any revenue, then the copyright is worthless even to a starving artist. There is no "moral ownership" of artistic works, there is only a "right to profit for a limited time" from those works. You have no right to tell me when and where and how I can enjoy your work except during the limited time which you profit from it to make a living. If you don't make even $15 off a song in the first four years, I'm pretty sure it would do you more good in the public domain too.

Finally someone mentioned the debris problem. >200 posts about kinetic weapons and flak shot and nukes and nobody considered the crap that misses is just going to come around in orbit and hit your back. The oft-posted Wikipedia article is on the Kessler syndrome.

I expect actual space combat to be almost entirely electronic warfare. If you can take control of a satellite, you can simply program it to de-orbit itself, possibly onto a target of your choice. The most effective physical ordinance would be a "robotic end-of-life drone" with a de-orbit engine that would simply attach itself to an enemy satellite and make it fall into the atmosphere. There is no way anyone hoping for anything less than Armageddon is going to start firing more conventional weapons than an occasional missile (as the Chinese have).

Of course, the same thing could be said about nuclear weapons on the planet's surface, so there's no telling how far a Cold War-style arms race would go in space. It is simply a logical extension of the principle of Mutually Assured Destruction. But again, it's a lot more likely that jamming, espionage and hacking from orbit and the ground will be used to disable a space asset. Of course, you could program a dead-man switch on your missile satellites so they go off when they lose communication, but we learned not do that from Dr. Strangelove.

Clearly they are false because no organization owns more than one scanner! This is clear evidence that someone other than their organization scanned some of the documents. /sarcasm

That would be true if you were trying to cool the water with the energy you extracted *from the water*. But a nuclear reactor does not conserve energy, it has input from the nuclear fuel. The only reason you need to cool the water at all is because the fuel is generating more heat than you can extract in your turbines, either because of their design or because of the limited electricity demand. If you have a place to dump the extra heat, using some of that electricity to get it from point A to point B is not thermodynamically implausible.

The reason this is a stupid idea is completely unrelated, though. If the reactor design requires active refrigeration, this is even more likely to fail than simple pumps, and you run a much higher risk of melting down. And if it is not required, no one would want to pay extra for a redundant overly-complicated system unless there are other reasons not to use the passive system in normal operation.

Straight from the horse's mouth: The whole reason they want to increase the funding for commercial vehicles is so they can keep more than a couple competing companies in the running. The goal of course is to have multiple systems working in the end, which isn't going to happen if we start picking winners before they've even launched anything. Republicans should know that better than anyone, seeing how much they gloated over the Solyndra affair. The truth is that industry is much better equipped than the government to get something working and in orbit, given that all the underlying research has been done already, in order to get American astronauts back in American spacecraft as quickly as possible.

Plus, I don't know what Sen. Hutchison is smoking, but the part of SLS (also known as the "Senate Launch System") that remains funded is the smaller version of the rocket which is good for low Earth orbit--precisely the part that can be used as a backup to the commercial system(s). Hopefully cooler heads will prevail and the committee won't gut what's left of the Mars budget to fund their local firecracker factory.

It's also no different from a lot of office environments where a few people do most of the work and the rest get coffee and look over their shoulders. Not saying it's good, but it's reality. If you want to test individuals, on the other hand, you have to set up artificial boundaries and won't necessarily be able to measure their "real-world" performance.

That was kind of my point. The OP seemed to think that there is an easily discernible line between "research" and "collaboration", and to a certain extent I disagree, which is why I suggested that if you allow one you may as well allow the other. But like you say, that defeats the purpose of individual education, though for the record, companies also like hiring people who are good members of a team in addition to knowing the material. I think there's a reason the paper exam has lasted so long, and this discussion will very quickly narrow in on it.

If you're going to allow them unlimited research, then why not let them collaborate too? Give the whole class a set of problems big enough that they need to organize and split them up to get them all done in time. And if they can find the solution already completed elsewhere, so be it, that's what a good engineer is supposed to do. The whole point of working in the real world is that your performance depends on those around you, so the only way to measure the performance of students individually is to put them in an artificial problem solving situation like a traditional exam. That's why we still have paper, closed-book exams in theory classes, and why there are an increasing number of "project classes" where the entire class grade depends on the success of a hands-on group project.

These numbers are what the GP is referring to. On a per-Joule basis, nuclear power does have the lowest number of deaths by far. There are a number of factors, starting with the comparatively small volume of fuel required. Coal requires much larger mining operations because the energy density is lower than uranium. More mining equals more opportunity for regulatory capture/failure producing unsafe conditions and mining accidents. The second factor is air pollution: The number of deaths caused by excess smog from coal-fired power plants is large and measurable.

I always think it's funny that solar power is cited as more than 10 times as deadly than nuclear on a per Joule basis. I understand most of those deaths are due to installers falling off house roofs, and since the total volume of production is low the average is not favorable. The bottom line is that once a nuclear plant is operational, the personnel protection regulations do a damn good job of keeping folks out of harm's way, and since they constantly pump out power and fail so infrequently, the average is pretty damn good.

The whole "inferior versus perfect" copy thing is a bit of straw man argument. You can only charge extra (read: more than free) if you provide some extra value in your product. Previously, the only added value they provided was a bit of extra quality in the recording. But 99% of the time the inferior copy served the needs of the user, so people copied things whenever they thought price was too high or didn't have the money.

Now that lossless copies are free, the sold products have lost their added value (and with DRM, actually negated it). So the sellers are complaining that they have to find some new way to add value to their products and they don't like it. Big whoop.

And yes I like Amazon, they are very convenient and I love the DRM-free aspect, but if I want to fill up my iPod I'm not going to shell out $1000 in one sitting. I'm going to put down the $50 of disposable income I have for the week (for however many songs it buys me) and download the rest. That's the market at work, such as it is.