D's basic language, and standard library, are excellent and solid. But they don't cover enough. This is probably inevitable, but it *IS* a real problem. The obvious way to solve it is to wrap C libraries with D code, and include them. This, however, takes the time and effort of skilled people.

E.g.: Sqlite3 wrappers are currently included, but they are so thin that calling them wrappers is almost a misnomer. There have been several attempts to wrap Sqlite3 in the past, but they've all been completed, used, and dropped. (Well, the ones that I know of.) It's hard to tell whether a external library has been abandoned, or is just considered "good enough".

OTOH, if you are comfortable with C, then using C libraries directly from D is not a problem. So I suspect the language maintainers don't understand the scope of the problem. Even I have successfully wrapped a library once or twice, and I'm not highly skilled at any particular language. (OTOH, I'm at far better than basic skill level in a large number of languages. But I haven't concentrated on one. [Professionally, before I retired, I was finally forced to use MS Access Basic, which I came to after over a decade of Fortran and various specialized languages, e.g. DataFlex.])

Where do you think they normally put power plants?

P.S.: There's no KNOWN reason that you couldn't put the antenna's on the tops of buildings, but people don't like the idea of even probably harmless radiation. And that's why they talk about pasture. If after a few decades the cows don't show any effects, then they'll talk about moving the antennas downtown.

Lisp doesn't work well without a good IDE...and I don't count EMACS.

Racket would be ok. It has a decent IDE. But it doesn't do multi-processing, even though it has the appropriate language features.

I don't know Clojure well enough. The last time I tried it (over a year ago) the install instructions produced an only-partially-working result. This is probably NetBeans fault rather than Clojure, but I didn't follow this up. I never got as far as checking how it did on parallel processing.

Most Scheme's and most Lisps don't handle Unicode gracefully.

I've considered Lisp several times, and always found some reason, not always the same, why it was not satisfactory. Most of them weren't inherent in the language, but in the state of the libraries or of the development environment.

P.S.: For Python, Ruby, Vala, etc. I don't feel the need of an IDE. For Java one is highly desireable. For Lisp it's essential. This largely has to do with the state of the libraries and the documentation....but it also has to do with the size of the active namespace (and how familiar I am with it).

P.P.S.: If you're going to depend on a set of public libraries instead of an included set, they you had better verify them for quality. This is why Python's "batteries included" stance is so good. You can depend on the basic libraries. Ruby tries to handle this with Ruby gems. The quality isn't as good as Python, but it's pretty good, and it has wide coverage. Lisp....The public Lisp libraries often don't work as advertised. It appears as if anyone can add anything to the library collection without any quality control. D also has that problem. It's one of my favorite languages, but it's collection of libraries is abyssmal. Often they will only work with an old or new version, but the requirements aren't usually listed. Frequently they have dependencies that aren't listed.

That's only one root of the saying. The other is that liberal ideas which are successful become a part of the conservative platform.

(Note that this does NOT refer to neo-cons who are con-men that have usurped the conservative name.)

But I've only seen one post saying that they should be sued because the sold a gadget with and advertised feature that they broke after the purchase. So I think that Google is still being let off easy.

That said, perhaps the circumstances were different, and certainly the time-lapse is different. Probably a lot fewer posters bought Goiogle's gadget because of the feature. (And, honestly, to me it's a lot murkier exactly what Google did. Perhaps that will clear up in a couple of days.)

Even if those numbers are correct, they could be great for powering other satellites. Or even for beamed power transmission to an ion-rocket headed WAY out.

For any particular set of numbers there is a range of uses. Could be large, could be small. Personally I think it could be the best way to power a refinery build on a captured asteroid, e.g. Of course, first you need to capture the asteroid, but there's another group(s?) of people working on that.

This depends entirely on the frequency chosen. One should presume that they chose a frequency that is minimally affected by those. There are many such, though they ARE a minority. Probably something long enough that the term "microwave" is a misnomer.

It's always seemed to me that for an SPSS the logical source of power would be a heat engine. Perhaps a Sterling cycle engine. Lubrication would, of course, be a problem.

Another alternative would be manufacturing the cells in orbit. (There is talk about capturing an asteroid.) Cells made in orbit could be designed with large traces, for durability, and wouldn't need to be rugged enough to survive liftoff. Perhaps some sort of 3D printer could be used. (We wouldn't need a high volume.) FWIW I've already heard of a 3D printer that could print integratted circuits, though I'm not sure how well it works, or what medium it uses.

Unh.,.. Just how soon do you think cancers could be expected to show up? That's not a fact, that's a hope. One that isn't in any way justifiable.

OTOH, I will agree that it will probably never be possible to look at any one particular case of cancer and say definitively that this particular cancer was caused by Fukishima. What WILL be possible is to look a a population of cancers and say "This proportion was probably caused by Fukishima.".

I believe that in your other two "facts" you may be committing the "no true Scotsman" fallacy, but I haven't studied the situation sufficiently to have any certainty. (And you haven't specified how one is to distinguish the membership of the "couple of subcultures" from the rest...outside, that is, of using guns illegally.)

You are foolish. The expenditure on ALL space projects by the US is a minisicule fraction of the total government expenses. You could quadruple NASAs budget, and it wouldn't even show up as a blip in the overall budget.

OTOH, this is the exact kind of thing NASA *should* be doing. Advanced research. Something that no company or corporation will do, because the payoff is decades away. I'm not a real fan of planetary exploration, robotic or human, but that's because I thing the asteroids are the important place. Sitll, they all require that similar problems be solved (though slightly differently, as asteroids don't have a requirement for a heavy lifter at the destination).

P.S.: Don't expect libertarian asteroid governments. Asteroid governments are going to be highly dependent on complex technology. That means strict limits on anything that might be seen as damaging. Think, if optimistic, about constitutional monarchies, which a bit of a heavy emphasis on the monarch. And where anyone who's second cousin or so the the current monarch has a shot at being selected by the "council of elders" or some such to be the successor. Based as largely on their competence as their desire.

The technology is already good enough that you don't need that large an antenna. The antenna is designed to allow the capture of a lot of power at a low intensity. IIRC microwave power transmission is over 90% efficient at low intensities, though in this case you also need to use a wavelength that the atmosphere is transparent to. That means that it treats water vapor as transparent. Probably also liquid water (rain, sleet, snow, hail, you), because if they absorb energy, then it can't be picked up by the receiver. This probably means that only electrical conductors will absorb it. The frequency determines the size of the antenna needed to be the most efficient absorber. Multiples and fractions of the wavelength of the radiation is generally most effective, but this can be altered by applied electric charge. (Think tuning a radio.)

The place where we can expect improvement is in the transmitter. That's got a lot of tricky parts that need to be quite durable. The antenna is already pretty good, and there probably isn't too much improvement possible...not if you want efficient reception.

In the designs I've previously seen, you don't need to "solve" that problem, because it just doesn't exist. The prior plans called for the area under the microwave antenna to be pasture land. They didn't want it to be residential because there was no evidence that low level exposure to microwaves over a long period of time was safe. Short periods of time? No problem. You have much less intensity per square cm than you have in a microwave over. That's why the receiving antennas need to be so large. (But large doesn't mean expensive. It's [almost] just wire netting.)

OTOH, I didn't look at this design. But from the size of the receiving antennas proposed nothing about that feature has changed.

Bingo!

I don't believe that there's been any real study to determine how many people have it. But of the number of people who have bad enough cases to be admitted to a hospital, and were then diagnosed with MERS, more than half of them died. Without knowing the associated percentages, however, we can't really say more about it than "it's occasionally fatal".

Excuse me, but what is he clearly guilty of? Please cite a New Zealand law, not a US law.

If the action was committed in New Zealand, and was not illegal there, what are the possible grounds for ANY action?

The main point is that the owners of the new media are not news organizations. Consider the implications.

To help you in your consideration...
1) Kentucky Fried Chicken used to be extremely tastey.
2) H. Salt Fish and chips used to be not only extremely tastey, but quite popular.
3) Hublein, basically a liquor company, bought KFC. Within a few months that chicken became not worth my eating.
4) About a year later, KFC bought H. Salt fish and chips. Within the same month that also became not worth eating.
5) It's been years since I've seen an H. Salt fish and chips store. (I may have seen on inside a KFC outlet a year or two ago. But it could be a decade ago.)