The beauty of this scheme is that step 2 is irrelevant when it comes to privatizing government services. Just about any path you take leads to #3.
Make public schools ineffective by cutting the funding. Privatize the schools. Make a profit on government vouchers for private schools that are just as ineffective, if not worse.
Make the prisons overcrowded by throwing uneducated kids in jail on a three strikes count. Privatize the prisons. Make a profit by cutting health and nutrition services to the prisoners.
Make the courts ineffective by cutting funding and flooding the docket with charges against uneducated kids and internet downloaders. No time for lawsuits against privatized service providers??? Profit on cost savings for liability insurance, lawyers and other items.
Republicans in Wisconsin are obviously soft on crime. Education (and therefore education funding) mitigates future needs for prison funding. Despite what the tea party would have you think, there is a role for government services in US society. Public education is one of the essential government services, and internet service is a requirement for public education.
Republicans always like to say that the public sector is too inefficient, and services should be privatized to improve efficiency. What they don't mention is that privatization never leads to improvement in services over the long term. Basically, the extra efficiency (if it exists) in the private sector, is consumed by profit taking. Once the initial inefficiencies are ironed out, the extra money goes as profit to the service provider, not for service improvement. Then thanks to the accounting principle of compounded growth rates, the only way for the privatized service to succeed as a company is to raise prices. Government services are not growth industries unless the population is growing dramatically.
But never, ever, trust Comodo. Or at least many of their resellers. Every single story I've seen about compromised root certificates has involved a Comodo reseller.
And they used to exist in a lot of industrial marketing lines. A good idea that got chopped by short-term management philosophies directed toward wall street performance. Basically, it's an engineer that promotes sales of the product by facilitating its use, suggesting good applications, etc.
As far as compensating? They are part of the sales staff. Maybe geared more towards salary and less toward commission, because their role is more directed toward long-term market growth than the main sales force, but yes they should be compensated for scoring the big deals too.
Seems like some of those school administrators spent their winter holidays in Florida and got infected. I thought we had cornered the market on this kind of stupidity. 1) We're talking about high school students here, not elementary or middle school. Even more-so, the student is 18, and is therefore not a minor under the law. Seems like the teachers at this school are doing their job encouraging critical thinking, but the administrators have a completely reversed agenda. 2) We're talking about (sometimes crude) political expression. Protected speech.
Maybe the school thought that these videos on YouTube would be seen as being directed to actual children, rather than satire. Resulting in "moral corruption" of youth worldwide. Shudders! But... 3) Youtube TOS prohibit use if you are under age 13. "In any case, you affirm that you are over the age of 13, as the Service is not intended for children under 13. If you are under 13 years of age, then please do not use the Service." So distribution on Youtube actually implies that the videos are NOT intended for viewing by minors.
The smart thing for the school to do after Mr. Christie refused to take his videos down would have been to actually view the videos and see if they could get Youtube to ban him for violations of TOS or community guidelines. But they went to the police. Enjoy the show, Ontarians.
"It's news because some of these pre-orders are nearly a decade old... "
If a customer comes in with a readable receipt printed on thermal paper, that they claim is from 10 years ago, or even 5 -- it's a scam. Those things fade after about a year.
So I think GameStop won't be honoring very many of these at all. It's really just a bunch of good free publicity without any risk for the franchisees. Also, depending on their accounting practices, they may not be allowed to recognize the revenue from those ancient pre-orders until the order is actually cashed in.
The reason both law and science are complex is because they are systems of knowledge that are constantly accreting new knowledge into the system. There are multiple reasons law grows complex over time: criminals and those who skirt the legal side of the edges of the law are constantly finding new ways to exploit the system which results in a reaction to pass new laws. Exceptions (like fair use or self-defense) are carved out into statutory law in the interests of maintaining a balance of justice. Law evolves as technology enables new forms of crime.
The US has had a couple hundred years (plus much of English common law before that) to evolve a truly complex legal structure. The only way you're going to "simplify the law" so that normal citizens can participate again is a collapse into anarchy where we start over with something similar to the golden rule and build from there. But even without simplifying the law, it might still be possible to reduce the power of lobbyists and special interests in legislation.
"Words that mean one thing to lay people mean something else to the courts."
Hmm, that explains Bill Clinton's response of (my best recollection of the quote) "That depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is." in an interview.
Back on topic, from yet another IANAL: OP's arguments are astoundlingly weak, but a couple of points where I think the judge did fail: 1) The rental car analogy works in the sense that knowing which license plate is involved in an accident doesn't necessarily tell you who the driver is (say for a hit and run), even if you have the rental agency records. The car could have been stolen, it could have been a family member driving, etc. Very similar to having your neighbor "borrow" your wi-fi or your kid downloading MP3s would show up as coming from your IP address in the ISP records. I think the point the judge was making is that there is no "safe harbor" for car rental the way there is for ISPs who are only data carriers, so therefore an ISP is not a potential defendant, whereas a car rental agency might be a defendant if it could be shown they were negligent in renting a car to a driver.
2) Part of the judge's arguments about not granting the subpoenas was that based on the IP addresses, there was no guarantee that the actual act of copyright violation (assuming there was one) took place by a respondent in the court's jurisdiction. But this argument fails completely except in the limited case of users who actually reside at the boundary of a court's jurisdiction. Even if someone is stealing a neighbor's wi-fi, they would almost always be within the same jurisdiction as the person "identified" by IP address.
So the key point in the judge's argument seems to be that there is a measurable probability of a false accusation based on IP address. And because of the nature of the charge of illegally downloading porn as being extremely embarrassing and damaging to one's reputation and relationships, a strict standard is being applied to ensure that no false accusations are made. I could easily see the same court allowing a similar subpoena for MP3 downloads on the basis that those falsely accused would suffer less harm than in the current case. But more likely, he'd fall back on misjoinder of unrelated cases into a single suit.
"I'm sorry if your teachers didn't make this explicitly clear to you. A lot of teachers don't."
A lot of teachers actually view the formula memorizing and rote learning as the point of the program. My daughter's current teacher, for example. There is no discussion of the patterns and logic, it's "here's a page of formulas and here's a packet of problems to solve..."
It would be nice if schools taught logic through mathematics, but if that's the actual goal, maybe they should be teaching some basics of formal logic as a section of the math course rather than assuming it will be learned by assimilation. Teaching formulas all through K-8 and then expecting students to suddenly grasp the magic of mathematics when confronted with logic and proofs in Geometry is bass-ackwards. And you never see a formal proof in Algebra I or II, just outlines of the proofs, if that. How can students follow the logic when the logic is glossed over "to simplify things"?
Learning to think logically IS an important life skill. Too bad that isn't what is actually being taught.
....or, as stated below, they acquired the 47.* block. Unfortunately the block assignments referenced above don't show transfers as the result of mergers and acquisitions of the block owners.
Actually, no -- HP has both the 15.*.*.* and 16.*.*.* A class blocks. 15/ was their own and got 16/ from DEC via compaq. Not to mention chunks of smaller blocks from their acquisitions like EDS...Speaking of sitting on a gold mine. Ref: http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space/ipv4-address-space.xml
Based on this list Nortel was not the holder of any class A block.
of the Westboro Baptist Church, but it's kind of sad that "the Voice of Free Speech" doesn't see the irony of attacking people for speaking their views, however idiotic and bigoted.
Uh, no, they ban any license that " (i) disclosed or distributed in source code form; (ii) licensed for the purpose of making derivative works; or (iii) redistributable at no charge. Excluded Licenses include, but are not limited to the GPLv3 Licenses..."
Any CC "Share-alike" is banned by (ii) and (iii). Any CC "non-commercial" license is banned by (iii), as well as any CC license that allows derivatives is banned by (ii).
And finally, while Apache/BSD/MIT might squeak in, under (iii) a buyer couldn't redistribute the product, even though the Apache license would normally allow it. So the buyer is losing rights by going to the MS store that they would normally have for Apache based products.
Whatever the merits of AMD's cpus over Intel's, Dell depends on Intel for product segments where AMD is not competitive. Dell isn't going to be able to abandon the high end platforms, and when Sandy Bridge comes back around, Intel will be the big player in the server market again. Dell can't afford to give up that many product lines.
Heck, even HP can't afford to lose Intel, and their product line is a lot more diverse than Dell's.
On the other hand, AMD's executive office changes do point to a buy-out as a possibility. So who would be a buy-out candidate? If we eliminate buyers dependent on Intel and software houses, the future looks pretty bleak for AMD CPUs as a consumer product. A plausible buyer would have to be interested in acquiring a chip design team, a consumer product marketing arm and not much else, since AMD doesn't own their fabs. ARM would be a good match for complementary product lines, but are they big enough to take it on without disrupting their current business? IBM and TI are big enough to buy AMD without a hiccup, but they would probably kill the consumer products and just go for the CPU and GPU technologies. IBM in particular is familiar with AMD through earlier collaborations. A network HW place like Cisco? They are moving into servers, but that would make them more Intel-dependent, not less. Oracle -- Why would they want it?
What's left after this is an Asian buy out, but I don't see where an AMD would fit into the business models of the companies over there.
So IBM, ARM or TI are my top three candidates, but there's a good chance I've missed some other company elsehwere in the world that would match up just as well as these three.
At least until the Sandy Bridge chipset gets sorted out...Unless AMD pulls a rabbit out of its hat with Llano, Sandy Bridge is going to take the power efficiency crown, and the price range for those chips puts a lot more pressure on AMD's price/performance leadership.
"...Calling All Dawns is the winner in the Best Classical Crossover Album category. " -- which is a slightly bigger award than "Best instrumental arrangement..."
"my impression of the openness of system is that it is fully proprietary Linux and thus not an open system..."
You may want to edit that. There is no such thing as "fully proprietary Linux". If it isn't GPL, it isn't Linux. It make look and function like Linux, but if it's proprietary, it's probably HP-UX or another Unix derivative developed under HPs Unix reseller's license.
Or if the carriers insist on lockdown of WebOS phones -- which they will -- homebrew will be gone on those. At least the tablets and PCs should stay open.
True about the transit times and the targetting, but the thought behind the moon is that in the long term it can be self-sufficient for resupply. The moon has a lot more available ammo in the form of RBRs than LEO. Any resupply to LEO would have to come from either Earth or the Moon (or even further out). If you have to shoot supplies up a gravity well anyway, it might as well be the moon's gravity well. LEO does have the advantages in flexibility and reaction times that you mention, so a possible scenario would be the moon as a supply base and facilities at various orbital levels in between there and Earth.
Defensively, a laser facility on the moon could probably whack objects in orbit without needing the power required to penetrate the atmosphere from that distance. Anything in that covers the earth every 90 minutes would also pass under the moon every 90 minutes.
Nobody has built a successful, self-sufficient "biodome" project even on Earth, so we are quite far away from this scenario of a self-sufficient moonbase. Maybe an artificial ecology isn't the right approach, but such a facility would have to be self-supporting for everything from basic life-support to the manufacturing and mining facilities required to provide the life support and so on. So that's a long way off.
Yes, I found it interesting that in the article they mentioned projectile attacks on assets in LEO (low earth orbit) but made no mention of ground attacks. Since current missile defense regimes rely on knocking out the activating mechanisms of nukes, they would be completely ineffective against RBRs (really big rocks) hurled from the moon.
On the other hand, you'd still need to build the launch facilities up there -- and once any nation put any sort of permanent facility on the moon, it would be the subject of heavy scrutiny by everyone else. Even without concerns about military capability, the spies would be after the economic and research data from moon facilities as well.
So no one is going to be sneaking a rail-gun launcher in there behind anyone's back. And even the presence of a permanent non-military facility would spark a "sputnik moment" among the other superpowers to have their own capability in recognition of the new level of competition.
And none of this addresses whether any individual nation has the economic ability to build a permanent facility on the moon. The old industrial nations have peaked without achieving it, so look to the BRIC countries later in this century, unless there is a joint UN project. But such a project would require a major attitude shift among the sovereign nations toward the UN, so don't count on it.
Bottom line is: yes the moon has military value, but does that add enough to the economic and research equation to justify a national (counting the EU as a "nation") initiative to be first? Certainly not for the US, where we can no longer afford our government as it stands.
to consult a labor lawyer. As far as I know (IANAL), if you require your workers to work x number of hours they no longer qualify as "salaried, exempt" employees under US law. At which point you have to pay overtime over 40 hours/week. Your boss might get the project done but bankrupt the company due to lawsuits.
And if this is a startup and no one has any stock options, no wonder no one is working 10-12 hour days...Tell the ownership not to be such cheapskates. Working for a startup carries risks to the workers, since odds are the startup will go under. so they deserve a cut of the ownership on the off-chance the company succeeds.
Meanwhile, start looking for a new employer. You're working for management with a short-term mentality at best.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you left out a couple of steps:
1. Privatize everything
2. ???
3. PROFIT!
The beauty of this scheme is that step 2 is irrelevant when it comes to privatizing government services. Just about any path you take leads to #3.
Make public schools ineffective by cutting the funding.
Privatize the schools.
Make a profit on government vouchers for private schools that are just as ineffective, if not worse.
Make the prisons overcrowded by throwing uneducated kids in jail on a three strikes count.
Privatize the prisons.
Make a profit by cutting health and nutrition services to the prisoners.
Make the courts ineffective by cutting funding and flooding the docket with charges against uneducated kids and internet downloaders.
No time for lawsuits against privatized service providers???
Profit on cost savings for liability insurance, lawyers and other items.
Republicans in Wisconsin are obviously soft on crime. Education (and therefore education funding) mitigates future needs for prison funding. Despite what the tea party would have you think, there is a role for government services in US society. Public education is one of the essential government services, and internet service is a requirement for public education.
Republicans always like to say that the public sector is too inefficient, and services should be privatized to improve efficiency. What they don't mention is that privatization never leads to improvement in services over the long term. Basically, the extra efficiency (if it exists) in the private sector, is consumed by profit taking. Once the initial inefficiencies are ironed out, the extra money goes as profit to the service provider, not for service improvement. Then thanks to the accounting principle of compounded growth rates, the only way for the privatized service to succeed as a company is to raise prices. Government services are not growth industries unless the population is growing dramatically.
But never, ever, trust Comodo. Or at least many of their resellers. Every single story I've seen about compromised root certificates has involved a Comodo reseller.
And they used to exist in a lot of industrial marketing lines. A good idea that got chopped by short-term management philosophies directed toward wall street performance. Basically, it's an engineer that promotes sales of the product by facilitating its use, suggesting good applications, etc.
As far as compensating? They are part of the sales staff. Maybe geared more towards salary and less toward commission, because their role is more directed toward long-term market growth than the main sales force, but yes they should be compensated for scoring the big deals too.
Seems like some of those school administrators spent their winter holidays in Florida and got infected. I thought we had cornered the market on this kind of stupidity.
1) We're talking about high school students here, not elementary or middle school. Even more-so, the student is 18, and is therefore not a minor under the law. Seems like the teachers at this school are doing their job encouraging critical thinking, but the administrators have a completely reversed agenda.
2) We're talking about (sometimes crude) political expression. Protected speech.
Maybe the school thought that these videos on YouTube would be seen as being directed to actual children, rather than satire. Resulting in "moral corruption" of youth worldwide. Shudders! But...
3) Youtube TOS prohibit use if you are under age 13. "In any case, you affirm that you are over the age of 13, as the Service is not intended for children under 13. If you are under 13 years of age, then please do not use the Service." So distribution on Youtube actually implies that the videos are NOT intended for viewing by minors.
The smart thing for the school to do after Mr. Christie refused to take his videos down would have been to actually view the videos and see if they could get Youtube to ban him for violations of TOS or community guidelines. But they went to the police. Enjoy the show, Ontarians.
"It's news because some of these pre-orders are nearly a decade old... "
If a customer comes in with a readable receipt printed on thermal paper, that they claim is from 10 years ago, or even 5 -- it's a scam. Those things fade after about a year.
So I think GameStop won't be honoring very many of these at all. It's really just a bunch of good free publicity without any risk for the franchisees. Also, depending on their accounting practices, they may not be allowed to recognize the revenue from those ancient pre-orders until the order is actually cashed in.
The reason both law and science are complex is because they are systems of knowledge that are constantly accreting new knowledge into the system. There are multiple reasons law grows complex over time: criminals and those who skirt the legal side of the edges of the law are constantly finding new ways to exploit the system which results in a reaction to pass new laws. Exceptions (like fair use or self-defense) are carved out into statutory law in the interests of maintaining a balance of justice. Law evolves as technology enables new forms of crime.
The US has had a couple hundred years (plus much of English common law before that) to evolve a truly complex legal structure. The only way you're going to "simplify the law" so that normal citizens can participate again is a collapse into anarchy where we start over with something similar to the golden rule and build from there. But even without simplifying the law, it might still be possible to reduce the power of lobbyists and special interests in legislation.
"Words that mean one thing to lay people mean something else to the courts."
Hmm, that explains Bill Clinton's response of (my best recollection of the quote) "That depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is." in an interview.
Back on topic, from yet another IANAL: OP's arguments are astoundlingly weak, but a couple of points where I think the judge did fail:
1) The rental car analogy works in the sense that knowing which license plate is involved in an accident doesn't necessarily tell you who the driver is (say for a hit and run), even if you have the rental agency records. The car could have been stolen, it could have been a family member driving, etc. Very similar to having your neighbor "borrow" your wi-fi or your kid downloading MP3s would show up as coming from your IP address in the ISP records. I think the point the judge was making is that there is no "safe harbor" for car rental the way there is for ISPs who are only data carriers, so therefore an ISP is not a potential defendant, whereas a car rental agency might be a defendant if it could be shown they were negligent in renting a car to a driver.
2) Part of the judge's arguments about not granting the subpoenas was that based on the IP addresses, there was no guarantee that the actual act of copyright violation (assuming there was one) took place by a respondent in the court's jurisdiction. But this argument fails completely except in the limited case of users who actually reside at the boundary of a court's jurisdiction. Even if someone is stealing a neighbor's wi-fi, they would almost always be within the same jurisdiction as the person "identified" by IP address.
So the key point in the judge's argument seems to be that there is a measurable probability of a false accusation based on IP address. And because of the nature of the charge of illegally downloading porn as being extremely embarrassing and damaging to one's reputation and relationships, a strict standard is being applied to ensure that no false accusations are made. I could easily see the same court allowing a similar subpoena for MP3 downloads on the basis that those falsely accused would suffer less harm than in the current case. But more likely, he'd fall back on misjoinder of unrelated cases into a single suit.
Well whatever patent it is, it's expired by now. So I guess the operative verb should be that RCA _had_ a patent on character generation.
Looks like 21st century research is reverting from scientific empiricism to medieval scholasticism.
"I'm sorry if your teachers didn't make this explicitly clear to you. A lot of teachers don't."
A lot of teachers actually view the formula memorizing and rote learning as the point of the program. My daughter's current teacher, for example. There is no discussion of the patterns and logic, it's "here's a page of formulas and here's a packet of problems to solve..."
It would be nice if schools taught logic through mathematics, but if that's the actual goal, maybe they should be teaching some basics of formal logic as a section of the math course rather than assuming it will be learned by assimilation. Teaching formulas all through K-8 and then expecting students to suddenly grasp the magic of mathematics when confronted with logic and proofs in Geometry is bass-ackwards. And you never see a formal proof in Algebra I or II, just outlines of the proofs, if that. How can students follow the logic when the logic is glossed over "to simplify things"?
Learning to think logically IS an important life skill. Too bad that isn't what is actually being taught.
....or, as stated below, they acquired the 47.* block. Unfortunately the block assignments referenced above don't show transfers as the result of mergers and acquisitions of the block owners.
Actually, no -- HP has both the 15.*.*.* and 16.*.*.* A class blocks. 15/ was their own and got 16/ from DEC via compaq. Not to mention chunks of smaller blocks from their acquisitions like EDS...Speaking of sitting on a gold mine.
Ref: http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space/ipv4-address-space.xml
Based on this list Nortel was not the holder of any class A block.
of the Westboro Baptist Church, but it's kind of sad that "the Voice of Free Speech" doesn't see the irony of attacking people for speaking their views, however idiotic and bigoted.
Uh, no, they ban any license that " (i) disclosed or distributed in source code form; (ii) licensed for the purpose of making derivative works; or (iii) redistributable at no charge. Excluded Licenses include, but are not limited to the GPLv3 Licenses..."
Any CC "Share-alike" is banned by (ii) and (iii). Any CC "non-commercial" license is banned by (iii), as well as any CC license that allows derivatives is banned by (ii).
And finally, while Apache/BSD/MIT might squeak in, under (iii) a buyer couldn't redistribute the product, even though the Apache license would normally allow it. So the buyer is losing rights by going to the MS store that they would normally have for Apache based products.
What manufacturer? AMD is a design and marketing house. They sold off their fabs years ago.
Whatever the merits of AMD's cpus over Intel's, Dell depends on Intel for product segments where AMD is not competitive. Dell isn't going to be able to abandon the high end platforms, and when Sandy Bridge comes back around, Intel will be the big player in the server market again. Dell can't afford to give up that many product lines.
Heck, even HP can't afford to lose Intel, and their product line is a lot more diverse than Dell's.
On the other hand, AMD's executive office changes do point to a buy-out as a possibility. So who would be a buy-out candidate? If we eliminate buyers dependent on Intel and software houses, the future looks pretty bleak for AMD CPUs as a consumer product. A plausible buyer would have to be interested in acquiring a chip design team, a consumer product marketing arm and not much else, since AMD doesn't own their fabs. ARM would be a good match for complementary product lines, but are they big enough to take it on without disrupting their current business? IBM and TI are big enough to buy AMD without a hiccup, but they would probably kill the consumer products and just go for the CPU and GPU technologies. IBM in particular is familiar with AMD through earlier collaborations. A network HW place like Cisco? They are moving into servers, but that would make them more Intel-dependent, not less. Oracle -- Why would they want it?
What's left after this is an Asian buy out, but I don't see where an AMD would fit into the business models of the companies over there.
So IBM, ARM or TI are my top three candidates, but there's a good chance I've missed some other company elsehwere in the world that would match up just as well as these three.
At least until the Sandy Bridge chipset gets sorted out...Unless AMD pulls a rabbit out of its hat with Llano, Sandy Bridge is going to take the power efficiency crown, and the price range for those chips puts a lot more pressure on AMD's price/performance leadership.
Yes, it's a bad title: He actually won 2 Grammies: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=411886
"...Calling All Dawns is the winner in the Best Classical Crossover Album category. " -- which is a slightly bigger award than "Best instrumental arrangement..."
"my impression of the openness of system is that it is fully proprietary Linux and thus not an open system..."
You may want to edit that. There is no such thing as "fully proprietary Linux". If it isn't GPL, it isn't Linux. It make look and function like Linux, but if it's proprietary, it's probably HP-UX or another Unix derivative developed under HPs Unix reseller's license.
Or if the carriers insist on lockdown of WebOS phones -- which they will -- homebrew will be gone on those. At least the tablets and PCs should stay open.
True about the transit times and the targetting, but the thought behind the moon is that in the long term it can be self-sufficient for resupply. The moon has a lot more available ammo in the form of RBRs than LEO. Any resupply to LEO would have to come from either Earth or the Moon (or even further out). If you have to shoot supplies up a gravity well anyway, it might as well be the moon's gravity well. LEO does have the advantages in flexibility and reaction times that you mention, so a possible scenario would be the moon as a supply base and facilities at various orbital levels in between there and Earth.
Defensively, a laser facility on the moon could probably whack objects in orbit without needing the power required to penetrate the atmosphere from that distance. Anything in that covers the earth every 90 minutes would also pass under the moon every 90 minutes.
You forgot the internet. That (or at least the basic technology behind it) WAS invented for military purposes.
Nobody has built a successful, self-sufficient "biodome" project even on Earth, so we are quite far away from this scenario of a self-sufficient moonbase. Maybe an artificial ecology isn't the right approach, but such a facility would have to be self-supporting for everything from basic life-support to the manufacturing and mining facilities required to provide the life support and so on. So that's a long way off.
Yes, I found it interesting that in the article they mentioned projectile attacks on assets in LEO (low earth orbit) but made no mention of ground attacks. Since current missile defense regimes rely on knocking out the activating mechanisms of nukes, they would be completely ineffective against RBRs (really big rocks) hurled from the moon.
On the other hand, you'd still need to build the launch facilities up there -- and once any nation put any sort of permanent facility on the moon, it would be the subject of heavy scrutiny by everyone else. Even without concerns about military capability, the spies would be after the economic and research data from moon facilities as well.
So no one is going to be sneaking a rail-gun launcher in there behind anyone's back. And even the presence of a permanent non-military facility would spark a "sputnik moment" among the other superpowers to have their own capability in recognition of the new level of competition.
And none of this addresses whether any individual nation has the economic ability to build a permanent facility on the moon. The old industrial nations have peaked without achieving it, so look to the BRIC countries later in this century, unless there is a joint UN project. But such a project would require a major attitude shift among the sovereign nations toward the UN, so don't count on it.
Bottom line is: yes the moon has military value, but does that add enough to the economic and research equation to justify a national (counting the EU as a "nation") initiative to be first? Certainly not for the US, where we can no longer afford our government as it stands.
to consult a labor lawyer. As far as I know (IANAL), if you require your workers to work x number of hours they no longer qualify as "salaried, exempt" employees under US law. At which point you have to pay overtime over 40 hours/week. Your boss might get the project done but bankrupt the company due to lawsuits.
And if this is a startup and no one has any stock options, no wonder no one is working 10-12 hour days...Tell the ownership not to be such cheapskates. Working for a startup carries risks to the workers, since odds are the startup will go under. so they deserve a cut of the ownership on the off-chance the company succeeds.
Meanwhile, start looking for a new employer. You're working for management with a short-term mentality at best.