I'm as patriotic as the next guy - "go team USA" and all that - but I'm sad to hear that your rover is lost.

Space is not a zero-sum game. My country has decided that we're more interested in spending the dollars (that we constantly borrow from you) on social welfare programs, caring for old people, and floating eleven carrier groups in a world that doesn't have a single other navy that could fight ONE of them.

I'm looking forward to your next space accomplishment, as I truly believe such things help ALL people, ultimately.

...and it's not your decision. You don't. You take the job as it is, for what it is, or you leave. You don't get to change the client, and that includes their decision in other persons.

If the military wants to force a change, they could. I don't think they want to here, just answering your question for what a possible remedy would be.

Considering that only mass genocide would return us to the ecological balance we enjoyed* 5k-50k years ago, probably the people who agree with you would be Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot....so no, I'm pretty glad I'm not "with you" on that.

*by "enjoyed" I mean live in starvation/terror most of the time, desperately scrabbling to survive, reproduce fast enough to outpace the constant stream of child deaths, only to die in our mid-30s from some trivial disease or infection. But, it was "better".

My car, with it's thirty-year old headlight system also has the ability to having greater and brighter operation. They are called high-beams, and they are totally useless when there's another car within three kilometres of me. Modern bright low-beams already blind me, forcing me to swerve two-cars back and high-beam the guy who was low-beaming me until he pulls off the road to ask me why.

Putting the sun into a car isn't helpful.

Well, one of the primary requirements in the summary is to not use the public cloud in favor of a private one (so stuff goes straight to your PC without touching dropbox/google drive/whatever).

While I think that's kind of a waste of time, it was pretty clear.

The "news" is that glassholes' data is safe, because regular people look up to them and worship them and wouldn't dream of depriving them of their glass.

The results are there but the interpretation is flawed.
I'd be FAR more likely to believe US kids are stupid and confused 'astrology' with 'astronomy', than that they believe astrology is a science.

We were being given a college tour for one of our kids at a LEADING institution (retail price north of $50k/year) and the pretty young tour guide was showing us around, and identified one of the science buildings as "...and there's the building with various science classrooms including geology, biology, and astrology...", which prompted a sudden look up* by most of the male parents in the group, eye contact, and a shrug. I didn't notice a single mom or kid react.
*she was wearing yoga pants

So....natural processes occurring pretty much exactly as they have for thousands, if not millions of years. And humans, feeling they know how things "should" be, are going to interfere. Brilliant!

Prediction: we'll cock it up.

Wrong idea.

The lasers only illuminate a phosphor emitter, which then produces the actual headlight beam. No laser light is emitted at all. It's more akin to the way a CRT works.

A thousand internets to the first one that figures out how to make the lasers scan the phosphors CRT-like to produce projected video. Stuck behind a semi for miles at night and bored? Just project a movie against the rear of the trailer ahead of you with your raster-capable headlights!

Strat

It's not common courtesy and it's not common sense -- now it's the law.

Look, I'm on the side of the commenters too. I don't want to be forced to sit on a plane and hear dozens of phone calls. I'd much prefer the silence.

But there's no way in hell that I want to obligate other people to not doing something just for my own convenience!

Laws weren't ever meant to make life easier or more convenient. Laws were meant to stop people from directly harming each other. I've zero interest in telling people what they should be doing in general. This is very much a generational issue "there must be a law or a rule to tell me how I ought to behave" is something right out of a religious text. I don't need help deciding how to behave. I don't want others to have that help either.

Welcome to today's infinite surveillance. It's the only way to enforce these kinds of behavioural restrictions.

This isn't difficult. Employees get paid for their time. Brick-layers and programmers alike. The brick layer doesn't fix the wall for free. The bulider pays the brick layer by the hour to fix the wall. The owner doesn't pay the builder because the builder is contracted by the owner whereas the brick-layer is employed by the builder.

And this all makes sense. Since the choice of brick quality is made by the builder, the builder is accountable for fixing it.

Same goes for the software programmer, whose employer chose the platforms and the deployment schedule. The programmer gets paid to work. The quality of the work doesn't affect the pay at all -- just the odds of future employment.

For the record, I own and operate a web development company, for 21 years now. Bug fixing is always free to the client for the life of the project. I hate it when dumb employees make stupid mistakes. But I don't get to withhold their payment. I do get to fire them though. And I do get to engineer a platform that requires fewer employees. And I do get to choose clients and projects that don't require me to have employees do anything at all.

So, to answer your questions directly, there is no difference between software bugs and wall bricks. The only question is whether or not you contracted the programmer or hired the brick-layer.

Why would you bash him for what he said? He was absolutely correct, and everyone knows it. It's not a scandal that he said what everyone else was thinking but was too chicken shit to say.

It is a fact that 47% of people do not pay income taxes. It is a fact that these people do not give a shit about how much government spends, because they have no skin in the game, and in fact they know that the more government spends, the more they benefit.

So, fuck everyone who thinks that was some scandalous thought for him to have let out of his head. Everyone knows it is true.

I don't want to have to uproot my family, find a new job, and start a new life in another state just because the state I happen to live in wants to push religious beliefs onto my kids through the public school system

Socialist monopoly education is its own reward...