Fly766 noted:

Upmod +1 Informative, please ...

FTFY ...

Retired Chemist opined:

We never went back to Luna because Nixon hated the manned space program. It was strongly associated with JFK (whom Nixon also hated), and Nixon's telephone call to the Eagle's crew while the world watched the original Moonwalk on live TV didn't change the public perception that the technological triumph of the 20th century was Kennedy's accomplishment, not his.

Since the manned space program was important to the defense industry's bottom line (and their contributions to Republican lawmakers made them politically indispensible), Tricky Dick couldn't afford to simply choloform it, so he directed NASA to concentrate its manned spaceflight efforts on LEO missions like Spacelab and publicity stunts like Apollo/Soyuz. A fresh programe of manned missions to Luna was thereby relegated to "nice to have, maybe someday" - and, gradually, the voters forgot it had ever seemed important ...

The mice refused to use them, because, in order to do so, they would've been forced to sign up for Meta accounts ...

DarkOx lied:

Except that, due to generations of gerrymandering at the state level, very close to 2/3 of state legislatures are firmly in the claws of the Republican party, which would guarantee permanent GOP control of the Senate, with a large enough majority to allow the them to amend the Constitution at whim.

What was that about "frankly anti-democratic behavior" again ... ?

Posting to undo accidental downmod of parent.

(I meant to mod it +1 Funny ... )

ShanghaiBill blathered:

Nonsense.

It was the defense industry-style cost-plus project management mindset, and Chicago School MBA management principles that killed them, not SpaceX's engineering team.

There's a good reason that Boeing's C suite has decided it wants no part of fixed-price contracts in the future: those idiot children have no idea how to make money on those terms. And - surprise! - outsourcing, buck-passing, and treating highly-skilled engineering teams with massive accumulated institutional knowledge as completely fungible assets doesn't work, either ...

Malay2bowman misspoke:

AOL didn't open the gates of Hell, flooding the Internet with clueless, unwashed dimwits, until September-ish1994.

I remember the horrifying event - and its timing - well, because LAN Times (a McGraw-Hill biweekly publication devoted mainly to servicing the Novell NetWare community) began publishing my @internet column in early April that year.

@internet began as a kind of "Baedeker's for the Internet," aimed at my peers in the Novell universe, who regularly assured me that they knew the Internet was important, but didn't have the time to figure out how to use it by themselves. It was a wildly successful feature that started my career in computer journalism - entirely by accident, after I cornered LAN Times' then-editor-in-chief, Susan Breidenbach, at the SFNUG Christmas party in December 1993 to urge her to initiate just such a regular feature. (Silly me, I expected that, were I successful in pitching the idea, she would assign it to one of her existing staffers, and I could bask in the virtuous feeling of having done a Good Thing for my fellow LAN administrators. Imagine my surprise when she replied, "It sounds like something that could be worth trying. So, when can I expect your first column?" instead.)

AOL's horrible, primitive Web browser (Windows-only, if you please) was nonetheless capable of allowing a million and a half entirely-unprepared newbies to stumble around on the Web without a clue among them about how to behave on the Internet. Overnight, it was as if what had been a relatively-civilized community of relatively-clueful, mostly-techie users was invaded by ignorant, barbarian hordes tromping through our marble palaces with muddy boots, blinking stupidly, and drooling all over the furniture.

It was an utterly classic illustration of the tragedy of the commons - and the experience has been branded in my soul, ever since ...

sulfide complained:

It's very possible your phone number previously belonged to someone who donated to Obama's first campaign for president. I know mine did, because many of the Democrat-for-any-office spam emails I get refer to her by name as "Ruth" - and the SMS texts frequently conclude with a "friendly" reminder that "You agreed to receive these messages," even though I did no such thing. Also, "text stop to opt out" doesn't work, because so many different Democratic fundraising organizations have purchased that same, 16-year-old list that attempting to unsub from one of them is like trying to empty the ocean with an eyedropper.

BTW, I've had this same phone number for a decade now ...

backslashdot snarked:

Despite the association of the term with Nazis and other racial supremecist ideologues, the actual, origiinal Arians were ethnic Persians, none of whom had blue eyes or blond hair (which they acquired only through interbreeding with the mostly-Greek mercenaries whom Alexander the Great left behind as garrison troops, when he moved on from pacifying the easternmost Persian satrapies to conquering the Indus Valley).

I've always been amused at the worship of "Aryan purity" by Oswald Moseley and the Nazis he inspired, given that the actual ethnic Arians were what Moseley and his fellow "white man's burden-style" British racists would definitely have referred to as "wogs."

dunkelfalke observed:

Absolutely.

And you can blame Milton and Rose D. Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics for Neutron Jack - and Ayn Rand for all three of them and their short-sighted management philosophy ...

HP was one of the truly great tech companies under the leadership of Bill Hewlett and David Packard. Then, in 1999, subsequent to a boardroom coup that completely removed the Packard family from the company's management structure, and the 1997 spinoff of all of the sprawling corporation's non-computer, non-printer-related lines of business into the then-largest IPO in Silicon Valley history, the venture-capitalist-heavy board of directors signed Carly Fiorino as CEO, awarding her the largest signing bonus in the tech industry to that time.

FIorino went through HP's management team with a meat axe, removing many of its longest-serving and most engineering-oriented managers and replacing them with hotshot MBAs and accountants. She spent the next two years working on what turned out to be a disastrous merger with Texas-based Compaq Computer Corporation at the height of the tech sector meltdown that followed the bursting of the first Internet bubble. The merged entity had extensive duplication of product lines (especially PCs), and Fiorina opted to cut headcount, rather than axe or merge the redundant product lines.

She single-handedly demolished an established corporate culture focused on engineering excellece that rewarded company loyalty and dedication to "the HP way" in its tens of thousands of employees, replacing it with a Darwinian culture of internal competition focused on cutting costs and increasing profits by preying on its legendarily-loyal customer base.

Every CEO that has succeeded her has been cut from the same rotten cloth, and every engineer still employed by the company despises the ground over which they ooze. It's the fault of the board of directors, and there will be no change at all in HP's behavior until those scumbags are thrown out on their asses - which, let's face it, isn't going to happen.

What is going to happen is more of the same lack of management scruple and contempt toward its customers until it loses all of them, and the vulture capitalists acquire HP's rotting corpse, sell off all its remaining assets, drain its retirement fund, load it up with a mountain of bad debt, and ship it off to the land of Chapter VII.

Or, to put it another way, end-stage capitalism business as usual ...

"Wells Fargo" has not actually existed for more than 25 years. The transition started in 1986, when Wells merged with Crocker Bank, and the combined entity kept the Wells Fargo Bank name, but adopted Crocker's charter, because it allowed them to engage in businesses that Wells' original charter did not.

Wells bought bank after bank throughout the "merger fever" period of the 1990's, but the deal that fundamentally changed its management culture for the worst was its 1998 "merger of equals" with Norwest Corporation. That resulted in an entity whose Board of Directors and C suite consisted entirely of Norwest suits. That "merger of equals" turned out to be a de facto takeover of WFB by Norwest.

Wells' management screwed up big time. Norwest kept the WFB name, but the combined company's ethical standards and management practices became purely those of Norwest - and the same duplicity that lulled Wells' executives into believing Norwest's false promises has been its core tenent ever since ...

martin-boundary pointed out:

Once again the seemingly endless ability of /. commenters to conflate copyrights with TRADEMARKS is what muddies the waters of this discussion. A work - a concrete, self-contained, unique product - is subject to copyright protection. A representation or symbol of a product, on the other hand is subject to protection under trademark law. You can't, for instance, copyright a name, but you CAN trademark it. (Thus: McDonald's.)

Legally speaking, the major distinction is that copyrights can be claimed "for a limited period," and they require no ongoing effort on the part of the claimant to remain in force for the "limited period" in question, whereas trademarks, once established, remain in force indefinitely, but the trademarks' owners must vigorously enforce their claim in order for them to remain valid. That, btw, is why Mickey D's legions of lawyers are so infamously aggressive about protecting its trademarks (the corporate name, the golden arches, the Big Mac and McFlurry product names among them).

Trademarks expire - but only once their owners stop paying lawyers to assert them. Copyrights, OTOH, expire after a certain amount of time passes, regardless of enforcement efforts.

Actors are determined to protect their trademark qualities, including the sound and characteristics of their unique voices, as well as their physical appearances, because the fucking MBAs who run every studio nowadays are so relentlessly determined to co-opt them. And they're getting litigious about it, because they HAVE to, not because it brings them any particular joy to pay lawyers to write cease-and-desist notices ...

alvinrod opined:

Neither my wife nor I are religious in any way. We were married in the back yard of my parents' house - by the mayor of West Carrollton, Ohio.

A marriage ceremony may or may not be religious in nature, just as there may or may not be strictures of a religious nature on marriages of which one or both parties to which are adherents of a faith that routinely imposes those conditions. But the legal nature of the bond itself is a matter of civil law. That's why a cleric, for instance, can marry you, but it takes a judge to un-marry you.

I'm surprised I have to explain any of this to you ...