That is an extremely convenient cop out. NASA simply hasn't delivered on anything worth funding for a really long time. Success would breed support.

Ares was a deeply flawed in concept, design and construction and it cost a fortune to accomplish next to nothing. Why would anyone continue that farce when SpaceX and Falcon are developing far better launchers and capsules far faster and for much less money.

NASA simply can't do anything without squandering money. They sent a team to SpaceX to study how they were accomplishing so much with so little. The fact that NASA would send a team out to study this is disturbing in itself. One answer is stop using theirh entrenched contractors, (i.e. Lockheed and Boeing) who are milking every contract for every dollar they can.

NASA, Boeing and Lockheed are probably delighted when when one program is cancelled and replaced with another because they never have to deliver anything that works and the pay is the same.

What a crock. The NASA manned space program has been squandering money to no good end since Apollo was cancelled. If all the money squandered on the shuttle and ISS, to no good end, had been spent wisely and efficiently we would be on Mars now.

Danger isn't the important thing. What matters is if you are accomplishing something worth the risk and the money. NASA simply hasn't accomplished anything in manned space flight for 40 years.

Do you even believe this stuff you are shoveling?

Like bank transfers and just about all financial-services communications?

There are so many people that move around in this world that I expect good old-fashioned sneakernet with one-time pads will just become the norm, especially when time is not necessarily of the essence. When more data is needed then micro-SD will be employed, and encrypted connections will be left for when absolutely necessary.

When I was a kid, if my friends and I wanted to meet up, we had to generally all agree where we were going to meet in-advance, generally at school or when we were previously together, or a few of us had to decide and then had to manually pass the word on to others, who in-turn passed the word on to others until everyone was notified. We could coordinate and plan without "the authorities" in the form of our parents really knowing what was going on if we chose to keep them uninformed.

If the evil "they" still want to do us harm they can do it entirely offline. They proved that with how long it took to identify Osama Bin Laden's location, he avoided all outgoing traffic other than couriers and it took years to find him.

The brothers that bombed the Boston Marathon managed to avoid being caught in advance due to a typographical error. A Buttle/Tuttle type of snafu literally lead to the older brother's slipping through the cracks. Even after all of everything that happened, the younger brother was caught because a homeowner noticed some blood on his boat. Helicopters, infrared, and door-to-door searches failed to find him.

It hasn't been demonstrated satisfactorily to me that heavy encryption means that there's anything relevant to the authorities being transmitted therein.

Rovers and orbiters are built by JPL. JPL is NASA in name only. It was created in1936, long before NASA.

After giving JPL well deserved tribute for their planetary missions, they also deserve tribute for surviving, staying relevent and doing great work in spite of NASA.

Hubble was OK after a disasterous start. NASA does deserve priase for it along with the other great observatories.

Those programs don't really explain away the fact that the centerpeice of the organization and the one that sucks up most of the money, manned space exploration, is a complete disaster. At some point you need to ask, "What have you done lately"?

Its been a long time since NASA explored any frontiers with their manned space program. Shuttles carrying people in to LEO wasn't anything close to exploring a frontier.

Only if it actually works. If it doesn't or it breaks down immediately its only value will be if it compells NASA to develop the manned or robotic capability to go fix it.

It worked really well up until the point corruption went wild, they had a massive real estate bubble, followed by one going on two lost decades where they've propped up their economy with massive public works projects and piles of debt. Of course lately they are printing money at a furious place to try to break the deflationary spiral they've been in for like 20 years.

They also have a demographic time bomb because young people have stopped having jobs, hope or babies so they can't support their rapidly exploding senior population.

Uh, I thought they all have, with the possible exception of Russia and China and a few smaller ones like Cuba, Venezuala and Ecuador?

...I mean, Avenue Q already told us what the Internet is for...

And how does that work across multiple different and different kinds of devices exactly?

That's what I'm wondering, given that's the whole point in using that method to store credentials in the first place...

I also have to question the practicality of having different passwords for all one's accounts, especially on things as nonessential as forums. Between work and things that matter I already have to remember too many passwords.

Yeah... Perhaps a congresscritter should ask during a joint committee meeting, and if this answer is provided, the individual should be held for being In Contempt of Congress...

You'll note that the vast majority of human subjects in paintings that weren't commissioned by a family member of the subject are of attractive nubile women, frequently in a state of undress. That's not an accident.

Must be some pretty cheap steel, not even good enough to be a faraday cage...

There had been a bug in Google that essentially was smutsearch. Basically some kind of irrational math bug that would bring up only porn. They seem to have fixed it though.