You are trolling right? There is just too much irony in that post for you to not be. If you aren't trolling, and you believe that is safe and sufficient anti-sql injection measures, then you might want to consider a different occupation.

All true. I hope, however, that there is still some room to engage in science for the sake of science and the unknown potential benefits it may bring. But you are right, I just don't see a mechanism by which it becomes feasible, financially or otherwise, without some technological breakthrough of the sort that hasn't even been conceptualized yet.

disclaimer: IANAL

That is where I said "unless their principal business is not risk". Having said that ...

Stone v. Ritter [Delaware 2006], while the court found on behalf of the company because the issue at hand was whether a failure to institute a particular program of internal corporate espionage to detect malfeasance or malpractice by its employees constituted liability upon its directors (the court found that in the instant case it did not), it did state that under a corporation's fiduciary duties is the duty of loyalty.

Stone v. Ritter cites Guth V. Loft [Delware 1939] in helping characterize that the duty of loyalty

So while the courts do give wide latitude to directors to make decisions on behalf of their companies, to include significant propositions of risk, it is clear that there is some threshold at which a reasonable level of risk crosses over into territory that constitutes a violation of the Duty of Loyalty as it posses a likelihood to

Under that guidance, a corporate officer needs to be able to show that their decisions pose a reasonable likelihood of being profitable to the company (conceding that what constitutes reasonable is generally quite broad).

So you are correct to say, in as much as I can find, that there is no such law, but there is such guiding principal which colors the law and the rulings of the courts and, more importantly to corporate directors, the disposition of shareholders. If you are tossed from your directorate position by a shareholder led initiative, or have to spend months or years fighting to defend a decision that you made because of the same, do the semantics of the process really matter? Does that not work to seriously disincentivize actions that are more likely to fail than to succeed?

Again, you are correct that a company is more tightly bound to abide by its articles of incorporation. Somethings, however, won't fly. You could file as a non-profit (though we aren't talking about non-profits here) but generally you must turn a profit some percentage of years (3 of last 5) or demonstrate that you can turn a profit or basically, show that the business is viable in order to receive tax deductions for expenses. There is a window of opportunity where start-ups can by-pass these requirements, but eventually you will be relegated to hobby status, and my recollection is that some states will rescind your articles of incorporation if you fail to demonstrate viability for X period of time. All this ignores the fact that exactly what kind of IPO or valuation do you think a company is going to have when their 10Ks say they don't intend to make a profit? You drop that valuation too far, particularly in technology rich turf such as space exploration, and you are some other company's lunch, and if you are public there isn't a damn thing you can do about it. So this all leaves you back at the wealthy individual territory which we previously covered.

Lastly, with respect to your example of SpaceX, the regulatory bodies (both public and private) place certain profitability and market capitalization requirements on corporations as a requirement for listing on exchanges. Even if SpaceX makes those requirements (and it looks like they may well be near that) they have to maintain them to some degree after IPO. That means hugely costly efforts that would deplete market cap are almost certainly not possible. Elon Musk has basically said the same thing, and that's part of the reason he hasn't taken SpaceX public.

Valid points, but I think the distinction is that if the general public wants a business to take on debt to perform some function for the public, well that ain't going to happen unless the shareholders want it. Shareholders are shareholders because they want to turn a profit, preferably quickly; they tend to have a dim opinion of things with an unknown return potential at some vaguely distant time in the future with a quantifiably negative impact on dividends in the near term. That's the trade-off of public investment.

However, if the public wants such a program to happen (and I'm making no statement about whether that's the case or not here), then it is usually something that a government is logistically more able (though not necessarily more capable) to do. That said, you are correct in that there needs to be some weenie, some potential payoff for the investment in one form or another, regardless of whether it is a public or private (or hybrid) program. The differentiator is that the confidence threshold for payoff for a government is generally much lower than that for a publicly traded business (particularly when the investment is huge).

Sensitive much? There was nothing anti-business about what NDT said. He stated simply as fact, the exact same rational that pundits on the right-hand side of spectrum have used repeatedly when explaining why business-oriented individuals are better candidates to run the government: businesses are results oriented, and generally risk averse. If they are publicly traded and their principal business is not risk, then they are required to be by law.

Tyson wasn't making a qualitative statement about business competence or capability, he was talking about the fact that there is not even the teeniest tiniest business case that can be made for building a human spaceflight program to Mars. None. No CxO could present such a proposition to their board without running the very real risk of receiving a vote of no-confidence. This is fact, not the bias of a left-wing statist (though ad hominem is clearly the appropriate mechanism through which to debate your point and win people to your position).

Now, could a counter argument be made to NDT's point that perhaps a single, very rich, individual might be able to accomplish such a feat without having to worry about the ROI implications, perhaps even more nimbly and efficiently than governmental bureaucracy would allow? Sure, and I believe that Elon Musk is exactly that type of individual. Though I suspect that even he doesn't have the resources to pull it off alone, and will need outside investment. Which brings us back to challenges faced by business that Tyson identified.

Argue your position. Stop with the my team/your team red vs. blue bullshit and engage in an honest debate. If we don't find a way to do this as a society, to step away from demagoguery and ideological obstinence in order to find consensus, or at least rational, well-reasoned disagreement, then we have much, much bigger existential problems to address than the challenges presented by a manned mission to Mars.

So I was going to go all "what a bunch of bu..." on this, but your point about being able to set the secure flag from a non-secure connection makes the issue clear. This seems a rather easy fix for the browsers, refuse any cookie that has the secure flag set if it is being set over http. I'm actually astounded that this isn't the default behavior, I had always assumed it was. If this change breaks anything, well tough. You don't want to visit a site that is saving something "secure" over plain http anyway.

Whatever. Clearly it's a problem caused by the fact the some people just don't like to listen, and would prefer to talk.

But those bonuses (re-enlistment, specialty pay, hazardous duty pay, etc) still fit a very rigid structure. It isn't capricious, and everyone knows exactly what the requirements are to achieve that rate. SSGT Jackson doesn't make 20% more than SSGT Hanson simply because SSGT Jackson has a dick or because SSGT Hanson didn't have MSGT Thomas over for dinner often enough.

This is EXACTLY the kind of meritocracy that people whining about the occupy movement should be embracing. But they don't, they want to preserve their entitlements while criticizing others for seeking what they see as entitlements. What this company did isn't pay equity, it's just an idiotic overly literal interpretation of the expression (kudos for trying, but come on). I think you would be very hard pressed to find a significant portion of the occupy group that believes that a CxO shouldn't make more money than the average worker. They just don't think they should make an amount that is irrationally disconnected from their contribution to the success of the company.

The reality is, that if you were to pay according to merit, I think you would find that most high performing businesses would have dozens of employees who make more than any CxO because their contributions are that much more important. That doesn't happen though, because the entitlement issue happens at the top, not the bottom.

No honest person believes that a hamburger flipper should make the same as a police officer, or business executive, etc. Most decent human beings, however, would find it disgusting that such a large portion of our population makes insufficient money to survive, while WORKING THEIR ASSES OFF. They work multiple jobs because the assholes at the top limit their hours under 29 to avoid paying extravagant benefits like, you know, health insurance. They end up having to use corporate welfare (which in reality is ALL welfare outside of that for the disabled) in order to get by the day to day. Not ironically, the people complaining about the "entitled" workers for wanting to be able to live inside a home, to take a couple days off when they get hit by a car without losing their job, or be able to get antibiotics when they get pneumonia, are the same ones who treat those workers like shit at the drive through or the checkout or the customer service desk.

Damn it, how dare you interrupt a solid shilling with facts and things!

Marriage was NEVER about kids. It was about property rights and inheritance, and subsequently about the Church's ability to influence the distribution of money and power. Which is, interestingly, pretty much what the current debate has been about too.

I know, the Republic comes to a halt when Congress cedes power to the Legislative. Wait, what?!?! Mama always told me, it is better to remain silent and be thought....

Or maybe the clinical stupidity of the US Government mandating backdoors in cryptography (either officially or covertly) has just been clearly illustrated. But then it would be absolutely impossible for anyone but friendly forces of the US Government to exploit such a thing, right?

Rarely. It is on leased land, not private property (at least not the Industry's private property). Often Federal leases.

Schrodinger's EULA?

That isn't really the type of cert expiry they are really referring to, but consider this: The mechanism you describe requires a certificate revocation list, which is just another way of doing the exact same thing - using a trusted 3rd party to ensure you all agree on the parameters used to determine if something is trustworthy or not. That's not an improvement, and in fact, it is far less tolerant to network interruptions (a network interruption could cause a client to trust a credential that it should. Using time, it doesn't matter if the network is interrupted within reason, you can still determine if the ticket is still valid).

Remember, this isn't about you tricking your own clock to trust a ticket provided to you. You could choose to do that all you want. Its about the other party choosing to trust you or not. And YOU don't get to roll back the clock on their infrastructure. If you could, you could open a security hole just as you have described, which perfectly illustrates why NTP/Time Synchronization is so important.