Life has survived. but many species went extinct. I'm a little selfish. I want MY species to survive.
Frontiers are good for us. I don't want tax money to pay for punching holes in the frontier but I would like to have our species be (mostly) free to go out and reach for that frontier.

One thing not mentioned here (yet) is how much more efficient we tool users could be when we're outside the bounds of our fragile ecosystem. What if we could strip-mine an asteroid using methods that would be cheap but possibly really bad to use on Earth. Also we could use engines outside of Earth's atmosphere which (if used in Earth's atmosphere) would be bad for Earth but for moving about the solar system these engines might be reasonable.

If we have to use rockets from Earth to transport every material the extra-terrestrial humans would need, we'd have a very limited existence off Earth. But if we can use human ingenuity and make what we need from materials we find off-Earth, I bet we can do much better than is obvious to us Earthbound people.

So far all of our experience off-planet has been supported entirely from materials brought from Earth. The only exception I can think of is power from the Sun. We need to change the ratio. We need to have it that most of the matter consumed and used off-Earth comes from off-Earth. That will take some ingenuity.

I like it.

I read that NASA wants a new rocket to be flown 7 times without incident before it will qualify form manned-flight rating. Since SpaceX has yet to fly their new Block 5 rocket with the redesigned high-pressure helium tank, they have yet to start the 7-flight count. This, apparently, pushes the flight-qualification complete to after the end of 2018.

It is bad design if their upgrade programs brick their devices against all recovery methods. I've worked for several companies as a firmware engineer and our products were not brickable. The bootloader is not customer flashable, everything else is. Several of my products were RAID controllers in competition with LSI. I would suggest shouting far and wide that a consumer upgrade procedure was capable of bricking their device. Even the small computers which use uboot and like-bootloaders can be field recovered using an inexpensive (under $50) bring-up device if the manufacturers so choose. Designs like graphics controllers should have a recovery method using a PC app which placed the executable into RAM and then the user forces the graphics card into a special boot mode which looks for the executable at a pre-defined address.
      I've never worked on a PC motherboard main-CPU design but I would think that a good BIOS design should have an A-image and a B-image where you can not bootload the A-image from itself and vice-versa.

Some people who have glare problems have Fuchs' Dystrophy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuchs'_dystrophy

One of the key symptoms is that the problem is much worse after waking up and is not so noticeable after 6 or 8 hours.

For persons having this issue, putting lights behind the monitor is not a solution. Working in a nearly dark room is also not a solution because the glare from what light sources remain make it very difficult to see anything except the light sources. Setting the UIs to light on dark is definitely helpful.

Followed closely by WiFumm

you were lucky. At last your parents didn't just cut off the damaged limb.

They said they were at 10KV four years ago. Now they are looking for 1MW. That's kilovolts vs MegaWatts. The article said they were at 500KV. There is no indication how many watts they are at. The article didn't have enough information to understand how close they are to the goals.

Volts and Watts are related by Amps. P=IE Watts = Amps * Volts.

The United States has made it illegal to create low paying jobs in the United States. How else do you create a low paying job but to take it to a country where the country allows the creation of jobs in that pay category? Or am I reading this wrong?

Ethical b:being in accordance with the rules or standards for right conduct or practice, especially the standards of a profession: It was not considered ethical for physicians to advertise.

American Psychological Association (APA):
ethical. (n.d.). Dictionary.com Unabridged. Retrieved February 05, 2011, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ethical
Chicago Manual Style (CMS):
ethical. Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House, Inc. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ethical (accessed: February 05, 2011).
Modern Language Association (MLA):
"ethical." Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House, Inc. 05 Feb. 2011. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ethical>.
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE):
Dictionary.com, "ethical," in Dictionary.com Unabridged. Source location: Random House, Inc. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ethical. Available: http://dictionary.reference.com./ Accessed: February 05, 2011.
BibTeX Bibliography Style (BibTeX)
@article {Dictionary.com2011,
        title = {Dictionary.com Unabridged},
        month = {Feb},
        day = {05},
        year = {2011},
        url = {http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ethical},
}

So was it IBM who made the date on the IBM-PC have 2 digits?

Actually I was being paid for my coding for 3 years before IBM-DOS was shipped.

The biggest computer mistake of all time has to be Microsoft's using 2 digits for the year! How quickly we forget!

So where terrorism once required smuggling a bomb or gun on-board, now terrorists could aim a radio at the airplane to crash it?

This does beg the question, why are they doing motor vehicle inspections at all of they pass a car that can't safely (for everybody else - occupants of the car are at least responsible for their own safety?) go 90mph? And having done so, why would a gvt want to put a lower speed limit on a road where inspected cars can do 90mph?

Oh, my own answer is that they have some arbitrary goal that has nothing to do with safety. Like trimming our ranks of capable people who have low tolerance for boredom, or saving energy so the Afghanis can have when they take over.

I'm pretty sure the House of Representatives, FHLMC and FNMA are the biggest culprits here.

I didn't call you an idiot. I called the idea of spending money despite having cut taxes idiocy. I think I'm actually agreeing with you there.

My grief is with the Fed Gvt for trying to do social engineering with tax money. FHLMC and FNMA were involved in criminal activity with huge amounts of money, at the behest of many elected federal politicians. This is where our attention should go. But this is not even surprising. Big governments always do this. The solution is to bring all of the expensive projects to a more local forum. The whole idea of having 50 states, each having their own rules and projects, is a great thing. The citizenry could move to the state which best met their own notions of goodness and we'd all be able to see what solutions were great and which were mistakes.

As it is, we really don't have a choice. The whole thing is a disaster. I have many issues with Bush's presidency, especially his interest in spending taxpayer money on projects which are of clearly debatable merit, i.e. nationbuilding, pharmaceutical programs, etc...
Blech.

I have even more issues with the current crop of representatives. And they've mostly been in office since Jan 2008.

I completely agree with this! Reducing spending seems like a great way for the fed gvt to go!