For the basic user, desktop and laptop hardware is now Good Enough and has been for a while. You do not, in actual fact, need dual quad-core processors, 24GB of DDR1600 memory, or the latest Radeon 7000 series or nVidia Kepler video card to check your email, surf Youtube, and edit your TPS reports. So a lot of people have no need to buy a new computer regularly now. Furthermore, computers have gotten cheap. So much so that almost everyone who has any want for a desktop or laptop, has one. Laptops and especially desktops don't have the faux "oh, your styling is out of date! You need to replace your car that will be perfectly good for another ten years!" thing going on that phones to some extent do.
So color me shocked: A mature and saturated market isn't growing 20% per annum, and is in fact shrinking relative to its size at the peak of growth! Meanwhile, servers always need MOAR POWAH so hardware there is more likely to keep churning. It's not like this isn't a predictable curve for every not-freshly-disrupted market (surprise: There's only 1 maker of gigantic utility-size power transformers anymore. I guess utility transformers are dying too), and yet it seems that every month this year there's been a breathless "Oh, let us lament the passing of the PC and the Laptop, for they are dying!" article posted. PCs are "dying" like file sharing is "dying": it's saturated at "everyone has one and does it."
No, neither of these two did. The Iraq war was ended by the authorization of George W Bush, on the time table authorized by George W. Bush. You seem to want to give Obama credit for not extending the war further than the Bush plan. How partisan of you.
If anyone deserves the actual credit for ending that clusterfuck, it's Bradley Manning - among the documents he gave to Assange are lots of nasty details about things the US covered up in Iraq, the kind which made it politically impossible for Iraq's government to continue to grant American troops immunity from prosecution. Which was the only reason Bush agreed to withdrawl.
So 111/191 Dems in the House, presumbly all who might be described as actually liberal or left-leaning (Including my own, Peter de Fazio), vote against this seditious legislation.
Liberal and civil rights supporter Ron Wyden has put a hold on the corresponding act in the Senate, as he has on multiple such acts in the past.
Meanwhile, the Republicans (both in Congress and in the media) make emotional appeals to fear to explain why we must give up our rights in order to be safe and preserve our "Freedom," and ever since 9/11 have openly and vehemently accused anyone who questions the nascent police state of being unpatriotic, unamerican and traitors.
But you're right, clearly both sides are equally as bad. But the Democrats are worse, so you should vote Republican to be safe, amirite?
I think that women, and Hispanics, and anyone who's part of a union, and the GLBT community, and plenty of others might possibly disagree though. Oh, and simple reality too: The vote was 301-118 in favor of passage, with 111 Democrats and seven Republicans voting no. Yep, both sides are clearly exactly equally as bad!
First of all, our actions towards Imperial Japan extended just a slight bit beyond "not selling them our stuff": US support increased in mid-1941, with the clandestine formation of the 1st American Volunteer Group, better known as the "Flying Tigers." Equipped with US aircraft and American pilots the 1st AVG, under Colonel Claire Chennault, effectively defended the skies over China and Southeast Asia from late-1941 to mid-1942, downing 300 Japanese aircraft with a loss of only 12 of their own. In addition to military support, the US, Britain, and the Netherlands East Indies initiated oil and steel embargos against Japan in August 1941.
Take a close look at the bolded bit: Someone declaring to you "I'm going to make you lose the war" is a declaration of war in all but name. Moral indignation over who was right has nothing to do with whether America's actions provoked the attack: Our government chose (along with those of Britain and the Netherlands East Indies) to directly intercede against Japan. Right or wrong, you can't pretend we were somehow Innocence Abused when they retaliated. The US was, to be honest, probably the most cynical of all involved at this point - Roosevelt knew perfectly well that Japan would retaliate, and that the moral indignation it sparked (by people making the same fallacy as you just did) would shut the isolationists up and bring America's industrial might to bear in time to make a real difference in the course of the war.
Odd you should say that, because the actual "natural" reaction in areas with endemic starvation is observed to be "pop out as many babies as possible to maximize the chances of one or two of them surviving to adulthood to repeat the process."
You want the out of control breeding to stop? End starvation and begin education.
In so far as it was America's embargos on Japan (including oil) that were choking the life out of their industry, you can make a good case that we did bring Pearl Harbor down on ourselves.
Though in hindsight, it's actually a very good thing that the Pacific Fleet were caught with their pants down in the harbor: All the ships that sunk went down in about 40 feet of water, literally right next to the repair facilities and drydocks. As opposed to receiving advance warning, sailing out to meet the Japanese, and their bombers send half the fleet 4 miles down to the Pacific Abyssal Plane instead.
A monochromatic wave, having zero extent in momentum space, has infinite extent in realspace.
A laser pulse whose duration is comparable to a single wave period as those in TFA are will in fact have a very broad energy spectrum, which can be understood both through time-energy uncertainty and by noting that a pulse waveform has a broad fourier spectrum, corresponding to broad energy distribution.
I end up saying or at least thinking this every time a science-breakthrough article comes by on Slashdot: If you think whatever someone did in cutting-edge experimental science is "easy," it's because you don't understand what they did and/or the theory behind it. Think before you speak: If it were actually easy, wouldn't they have already done it this way? Posting a "dumb scientists, that was easy" comment will bring only embarassment.
Then go somewhere else, dipshit. As I recall from the minutes of our last meeting, the Nerd Mafia aren't forcing anyone to read/. against their will yet.
Demand for wireless is going to continue to grow for many years to come, and providers are not going to be able to let up. Data caps and throttling are understandable now as demand is far outpacing infrastructure growth. Eventually, demand will slow, and these practices will have to be addressed.
Um, NO?
Demand for bandwidth will always exceed supply. Because it's ridiculously easy (more often than not to the point of the application doing it by default) to use more and lower-latency bandwidth, while it is difficult and time-consuming to install more supply. And this becomes ever more true the farther you move up the tiers. Installing new high-quality GigE cards and 8-port switch in my office? Under an hour from opening the NewEgg box to a job well done. Rolling out 10GigE to the whole floor? All week for a crew of guys. Rolling out 100M or 1G fiber to whole cities? Years of work and the job's barely even begun.
And if anyone thinks demand will saturate, there are always applications waiting in the wings to use more bandwidth.
If you enjoy a 40 hour work week in a safe environment, I suggest you thank the Socialists for demanding it instead of the factory owners who were having them murdered by the likes of the Pinkertons.
Because society can't afford for you to be drain on resources for the first 20 years of your life AND the last 20?
When Roosevelt created it, the age for Social Security was just a few years short of the average lifespan, which was in turn just a few years longer than one's nominal productive life - recipients drew for an average of about 5 years. Since then we've extended our lives by over 15 years on average but we haven't done 1/10 as well at extending the years of productivity and good health. If anything, the horrifying epidemic of fatassery says we've regressed something awful. Living as a senior is expensive enough when you're in good health for your age, I shudder to even think what all the joint replacements and heart disease and all the other effects of being seriously overweight are going to add up to.
Oh, putting something that resembles Curiosity (Except for the nuclear generator and possibly the pulse laser) as a science platform together on a sub-$10K budget that you could drive around the foothills of LA is probably closer to the realm of possiblity than one might think.
Being able to promise, a priori, that it can withstand continuous exposure to a high radiation environment, and still function and remain in calibration for probably 5 years of operation after enduring 2 years in deep sleep in a radiation bath, 7G during deceleration, and the shock of deploying a supersonic parachute, all with the proviso "you never get to touch, repair or calibrate it again"... that's hard. Billions of dollars hard, it turns out.
The words you're looking for are "mentally ill," specifically "schizophrenic."
The human mind is very, incredibly, unbelievably good at finding correlations and explanations for things. In schizophrenics, the part that rejects 99.99% of "proposed" correlations and explanations as bullshit is broken.
Last I checked we're out of Iraq and by the midpoint of Obama's second term we'll be preparing to leave Afghanistan. The only military action Obama actually got us into cost less than a week of camping the terrorists' spawn point in Afghanistan, resulted in zero US or allied casualties, and acheived its clearly defined goal.
With the notable exception of one day that will live in Infamy, the US hasn't suffered a war on its owl soil in 150 years. Since the US became the world's dominant military power after WWII, Europe has seen the longest period of sustained general peace quite possibly in its entire written history.
Where exactly do you get "endless war" out of this?
Yep, you're sooooo much smarter than the rest of us stupid robotic sheeple. You've got it all figured out. And anyone disagreeing only proves that you're right!
Anytime you think that last statement, raise SIGABRT and enter debug mode - because it's 100% diagnostic of having executed a cognitive bug and entered into an infinite self-confirming-delusion loop.
I couldn't decide how to respond so I'm putting them all in one post.
Courtroom version: Do you commit any form of financial fraud through your banking accounts, AC? Do you... engage in any form of illicit sexual behavior in your bedroom? Do you use your office to engage in graft, fraud, or organized crime? Do you engage in criminal behavior using your automobile?
Categorically no? Well then, you're just a stand-up all around good guy aren't you? So, what are the details I need to access your banking account?... Oh, well when can I stop by to plant a camera in your bedroom, a recorder on your phone lines and a GPS tracker on your car?
I can't? So may I take that your response to my request is to go fuck myself? Would you say that any reasonable person would answer otherwise?
But how can this be? You've just assured us that if we're doing nothing wrong we have nothing to hide! And surely if you have no problem with secret and completely unaccountable government agencies monitoring you, you can't possibly object to just little old me helping out?
Communist version: <Fake Slavic Accent>Yes, Comrade, we all know that if you are not a Bourgeois Wrecker conspiring to sabotage the progress of the glorious Workers of the RSFSR, then you have nothing to fear from the OGPU or the NKVD! Only those who they know are guilty are taken away to the work camps to repay their debt to our glorious new Soviet society that Comrade Stalin is building. </Fake Slavic Accent>
Star Trek version:
Sisko: What are the charges against Chief O'Brien?
Archon Makbar: They will be announced when the trial begins, as is customary in Cardassian Jurisprudence.
Keiko: How can we prepare if we don't know the charges?
Archon Makbar: Mrs O'Brien, l take it?
Keiko: Yes.
Archon Makbar: There's nothing to prepare. Your husband's guilty verdict has already been determined. The trial will reveal how this guilt was proven
by the most efficient criminal investigation system in the quadrant. You may, if you desire, attend this trial, which begins in two days' time. ...
O'Brien: What am l being charged with?
Kovat: No need to worry about that at this point.
O'Brien: This is insane!
Kovat: Whatever you've done, whatever the charges against you, none of that really matters in the long run.
O'Brien: What does matter?
Kovat: This trial is to demonstrate the futility of behaviour contrary to good order. Everyone will find it most uplifting.
O'Brien: Not everyone.
Kovat: Justice will be done. Our lives will be reaffirmed, safe and secure. Here on Cardassia, all crimes are solved, all criminals are punished, all endings are happy. Even our poorest subjects can walk the streets in the dead of night in perfect safety. You're only one man, but your conviction will be a salutary experience for millions. Now then... The trial opens tomorrow. Do you have any questions, anything you want to say? ...
Gul Evek: According to reliable sources, the Maquis arranged the theft.
Odo: l object!
Kovat: Madam archon, please!
Archon Makbar: l thought we went over this yesterday. What is it now? Gul Evek has tied the Maquis to this plot by quoting reliable sources.
Odo: l think we deserve to know who these reliable sources are.
Archon Makbar: Can you provide any details?
Gul Evek: That information cannot be revealed without risk to national security.
Archon Makbar: That's acceptable.
Odo: Might we know how Gul Evek learned the warheads were in the runabout?
Gul Evek: Of course. We learned about them from reliable sources.
Archon Makbar: Are you satisfied, nestor?
Odo: Madam archon...
Archon M
Yes! Both sides are exactly equally as bad! One of them having gone completely giggling-with-glee-as-they-drive-off-the-cliff insane doesn't matter, THEY'RE BOTH EXACTLY EQUALLY AS BAD IN EVERY SENSE.
By the way, if you want to have some credibility as a non-partisan, you should avoid explicitly declaring that you won't listen to anyone who disagrees with you. But you have, so there's no point elaborating or in any other way attempting to explain that the (R)s and (D)s are not remotely equally as bad.
If only you'd continued past the comma and read the next four words: promote the general Welfare.
I'm not even going to try and describe the number of things we now take for granted that are owed to national spending on both basic and applied research, other than to say that subjecting the rest of us to your ill-informed comment requires several rather important ones. Fantastic as it is sad to see people rant about the tiny sliver of America's national budget marked 'science' that's cumulatively done probably more to improve life for everyone and certainly more to extend human knowledge than all the rest of it combined, while seeing nothing wrong with the government pouring a not insignificant fraction of our entire GDP down a black hole, never to return.
I mean, seriously, here's a country that's the single biggest consumer of energy, with all predictions showing that it'll only grow, and a hefty chunk of it comes from sources that are 1) dirty and 2) foreign. Furthermore, it is a country that has already went through the energy crisis caused by withdrawal of said foreign sources.
You're approaching this from a rational perspective of someone who sees that the world is really old and will still be here for a long time.
Now try pretending that you think Jesus will magic you into heaven Real Soon Now. Because that's exactly what the end-times fundie Christians are about. It just so happens to provide a convenient excuse for destructive, short-term thinking as well..
Almost none of us who get PhDs and go through postdocs in the hard sciences do it for the money, we do it because we love our chosen field.
Because you'd be retarded to go through this much effort and sacrifice if you didn't love your field.
That being said, as university, science, education and national lab budgets keep taking it up the ass year after year (while budgets for the police state, the War on Drugs, the Pentagon and old people's entitlements remain sacrosanct), I'm not surprised that some physicists would jump ship. It must be nice being well paid from the start, and not having the teabaggers that control half of Congress trying to destroy the institute you work for.
While I agree that a large part of the reason that LTFRs got shitcanned was because the warmongers found out that you can't use them to make nuclear bombs (since the fuel pretty much stays until absolutely everything is completely burnt, with wastes removed by sparging fluorine gas to create volatile fluorides, there is no plutonium to extract), there is still the corrosion problem.
They used the most corrosion resistant alloys then known for the LFTR testbed and still found serious corrosion problems once it was decommissioned. I don't follow metallurgy closely enough to know if those issues have been solved yet, but we're talking about fluorides of everything with atomic number 40 and up circulating through the same tank. I'm not even sure if it can be solved. On the other hand, since the main loop is no longer a steam bomb with all the attendant bulkiness, replacement may be more practical.
The original Communists did a good job diagnosing the problems with Capitalism... too bad their cure is worse than the disease.
And a slight nitpick, it wouldn't be the same scumbags screwing us, those would be hanging from the gallows. New sociopathic scumbags-in-waiting from the proletariat fighting to take their place (Stalin vs Trotsky, anyone?) would be the ones screwing us.
And of course people accumulating money does drive capitalism (it is very difficult to have capitalism without capitalists). Many of those goods regular people buy wouldn't exist had it not been for the millions or billions of dollars corporations sank into research and development, courtesy of capitalism.
Ah, be careful. There's a difference between a capitalist who takes their money and spends it on more expansion, workers and research to make more money, and one who guts companies for money to spend at the casino we call "high finance." One of these, idealized as the fabled "Captain of Industry," is an essential component in the success of a nation, the other is a parasite that brings about the destruction of nations.
Slashdot Mirror
For the basic user, desktop and laptop hardware is now Good Enough and has been for a while. You do not, in actual fact, need dual quad-core processors, 24GB of DDR1600 memory, or the latest Radeon 7000 series or nVidia Kepler video card to check your email, surf Youtube, and edit your TPS reports. So a lot of people have no need to buy a new computer regularly now. Furthermore, computers have gotten cheap. So much so that almost everyone who has any want for a desktop or laptop, has one. Laptops and especially desktops don't have the faux "oh, your styling is out of date! You need to replace your car that will be perfectly good for another ten years!" thing going on that phones to some extent do.
So color me shocked: A mature and saturated market isn't growing 20% per annum, and is in fact shrinking relative to its size at the peak of growth! Meanwhile, servers always need MOAR POWAH so hardware there is more likely to keep churning. It's not like this isn't a predictable curve for every not-freshly-disrupted market (surprise: There's only 1 maker of gigantic utility-size power transformers anymore. I guess utility transformers are dying too), and yet it seems that every month this year there's been a breathless "Oh, let us lament the passing of the PC and the Laptop, for they are dying!" article posted. PCs are "dying" like file sharing is "dying": it's saturated at "everyone has one and does it."
If anyone deserves the actual credit for ending that clusterfuck, it's Bradley Manning - among the documents he gave to Assange are lots of nasty details about things the US covered up in Iraq, the kind which made it politically impossible for Iraq's government to continue to grant American troops immunity from prosecution. Which was the only reason Bush agreed to withdrawl.
So 111/191 Dems in the House, presumbly all who might be described as actually liberal or left-leaning (Including my own, Peter de Fazio), vote against this seditious legislation.
Liberal and civil rights supporter Ron Wyden has put a hold on the corresponding act in the Senate, as he has on multiple such acts in the past.
Meanwhile, the Republicans (both in Congress and in the media) make emotional appeals to fear to explain why we must give up our rights in order to be safe and preserve our "Freedom," and ever since 9/11 have openly and vehemently accused anyone who questions the nascent police state of being unpatriotic, unamerican and traitors.
But you're right, clearly both sides are equally as bad. But the Democrats are worse, so you should vote Republican to be safe, amirite?
Behold! The BSABSVR!
I think that women, and Hispanics, and anyone who's part of a union, and the GLBT community, and plenty of others might possibly disagree though. Oh, and simple reality too: The vote was 301-118 in favor of passage, with 111 Democrats and seven Republicans voting no. Yep, both sides are clearly exactly equally as bad!
First of all, our actions towards Imperial Japan extended just a slight bit beyond "not selling them our stuff": US support increased in mid-1941, with the clandestine formation of the 1st American Volunteer Group, better known as the "Flying Tigers." Equipped with US aircraft and American pilots the 1st AVG, under Colonel Claire Chennault, effectively defended the skies over China and Southeast Asia from late-1941 to mid-1942, downing 300 Japanese aircraft with a loss of only 12 of their own. In addition to military support, the US, Britain, and the Netherlands East Indies initiated oil and steel embargos against Japan in August 1941.
Take a close look at the bolded bit: Someone declaring to you "I'm going to make you lose the war" is a declaration of war in all but name. Moral indignation over who was right has nothing to do with whether America's actions provoked the attack: Our government chose (along with those of Britain and the Netherlands East Indies) to directly intercede against Japan. Right or wrong, you can't pretend we were somehow Innocence Abused when they retaliated. The US was, to be honest, probably the most cynical of all involved at this point - Roosevelt knew perfectly well that Japan would retaliate, and that the moral indignation it sparked (by people making the same fallacy as you just did) would shut the isolationists up and bring America's industrial might to bear in time to make a real difference in the course of the war.
Odd you should say that, because the actual "natural" reaction in areas with endemic starvation is observed to be "pop out as many babies as possible to maximize the chances of one or two of them surviving to adulthood to repeat the process."
You want the out of control breeding to stop? End starvation and begin education.
In so far as it was America's embargos on Japan (including oil) that were choking the life out of their industry, you can make a good case that we did bring Pearl Harbor down on ourselves.
Though in hindsight, it's actually a very good thing that the Pacific Fleet were caught with their pants down in the harbor: All the ships that sunk went down in about 40 feet of water, literally right next to the repair facilities and drydocks. As opposed to receiving advance warning, sailing out to meet the Japanese, and their bombers send half the fleet 4 miles down to the Pacific Abyssal Plane instead.
A monochromatic wave, having zero extent in momentum space, has infinite extent in realspace.
A laser pulse whose duration is comparable to a single wave period as those in TFA are will in fact have a very broad energy spectrum, which can be understood both through time-energy uncertainty and by noting that a pulse waveform has a broad fourier spectrum, corresponding to broad energy distribution.
I end up saying or at least thinking this every time a science-breakthrough article comes by on Slashdot: If you think whatever someone did in cutting-edge experimental science is "easy," it's because you don't understand what they did and/or the theory behind it. Think before you speak: If it were actually easy, wouldn't they have already done it this way? Posting a "dumb scientists, that was easy" comment will bring only embarassment.
Then go somewhere else, dipshit. As I recall from the minutes of our last meeting, the Nerd Mafia aren't forcing anyone to read /. against their will yet.
Demand for wireless is going to continue to grow for many years to come, and providers are not going to be able to let up. Data caps and throttling are understandable now as demand is far outpacing infrastructure growth. Eventually, demand will slow, and these practices will have to be addressed.
Um, NO?
Demand for bandwidth will always exceed supply. Because it's ridiculously easy (more often than not to the point of the application doing it by default) to use more and lower-latency bandwidth, while it is difficult and time-consuming to install more supply. And this becomes ever more true the farther you move up the tiers. Installing new high-quality GigE cards and 8-port switch in my office? Under an hour from opening the NewEgg box to a job well done. Rolling out 10GigE to the whole floor? All week for a crew of guys. Rolling out 100M or 1G fiber to whole cities? Years of work and the job's barely even begun.
And if anyone thinks demand will saturate, there are always applications waiting in the wings to use more bandwidth.
If you enjoy a 40 hour work week in a safe environment, I suggest you thank the Socialists for demanding it instead of the factory owners who were having them murdered by the likes of the Pinkertons.
Those who hold these kinds of delusionally wrong views about society and history can basically be summed up by this shining diamond of WTF: "I've been on food stamps and welfare. Did anyone help me out? No."
Because society can't afford for you to be drain on resources for the first 20 years of your life AND the last 20?
When Roosevelt created it, the age for Social Security was just a few years short of the average lifespan, which was in turn just a few years longer than one's nominal productive life - recipients drew for an average of about 5 years. Since then we've extended our lives by over 15 years on average but we haven't done 1/10 as well at extending the years of productivity and good health. If anything, the horrifying epidemic of fatassery says we've regressed something awful. Living as a senior is expensive enough when you're in good health for your age, I shudder to even think what all the joint replacements and heart disease and all the other effects of being seriously overweight are going to add up to.
Oh, putting something that resembles Curiosity (Except for the nuclear generator and possibly the pulse laser) as a science platform together on a sub-$10K budget that you could drive around the foothills of LA is probably closer to the realm of possiblity than one might think.
Being able to promise, a priori, that it can withstand continuous exposure to a high radiation environment, and still function and remain in calibration for probably 5 years of operation after enduring 2 years in deep sleep in a radiation bath, 7G during deceleration, and the shock of deploying a supersonic parachute, all with the proviso "you never get to touch, repair or calibrate it again"... that's hard. Billions of dollars hard, it turns out.
The words you're looking for are "mentally ill," specifically "schizophrenic."
The human mind is very, incredibly, unbelievably good at finding correlations and explanations for things. In schizophrenics, the part that rejects 99.99% of "proposed" correlations and explanations as bullshit is broken.
Endless war?
Last I checked we're out of Iraq and by the midpoint of Obama's second term we'll be preparing to leave Afghanistan. The only military action Obama actually got us into cost less than a week of camping the terrorists' spawn point in Afghanistan, resulted in zero US or allied casualties, and acheived its clearly defined goal.
With the notable exception of one day that will live in Infamy, the US hasn't suffered a war on its owl soil in 150 years. Since the US became the world's dominant military power after WWII, Europe has seen the longest period of sustained general peace quite possibly in its entire written history.
Where exactly do you get "endless war" out of this?
Yep, you're sooooo much smarter than the rest of us stupid robotic sheeple. You've got it all figured out. And anyone disagreeing only proves that you're right!
Anytime you think that last statement, raise SIGABRT and enter debug mode - because it's 100% diagnostic of having executed a cognitive bug and entered into an infinite self-confirming-delusion loop.
Courtroom version: Do you commit any form of financial fraud through your banking accounts, AC? Do you... engage in any form of illicit sexual behavior in your bedroom? Do you use your office to engage in graft, fraud, or organized crime? Do you engage in criminal behavior using your automobile?
Categorically no? Well then, you're just a stand-up all around good guy aren't you? So, what are the details I need to access your banking account?
I can't? So may I take that your response to my request is to go fuck myself? Would you say that any reasonable person would answer otherwise?
But how can this be? You've just assured us that if we're doing nothing wrong we have nothing to hide! And surely if you have no problem with secret and completely unaccountable government agencies monitoring you, you can't possibly object to just little old me helping out?
Communist version: <Fake Slavic Accent>Yes, Comrade, we all know that if you are not a Bourgeois Wrecker conspiring to sabotage the progress of the glorious Workers of the RSFSR, then you have nothing to fear from the OGPU or the NKVD! Only those who they know are guilty are taken away to the work camps to repay their debt to our glorious new Soviet society that Comrade Stalin is building. </Fake Slavic Accent>
Star Trek version:
Sure they can modify them: By declaring them unconstitutional and therefore null and void.
Yes! Both sides are exactly equally as bad! One of them having gone completely giggling-with-glee-as-they-drive-off-the-cliff insane doesn't matter, THEY'RE BOTH EXACTLY EQUALLY AS BAD IN EVERY SENSE.
By the way, if you want to have some credibility as a non-partisan, you should avoid explicitly declaring that you won't listen to anyone who disagrees with you. But you have, so there's no point elaborating or in any other way attempting to explain that the (R)s and (D)s are not remotely equally as bad.
If only you'd continued past the comma and read the next four words: promote the general Welfare.
I'm not even going to try and describe the number of things we now take for granted that are owed to national spending on both basic and applied research, other than to say that subjecting the rest of us to your ill-informed comment requires several rather important ones. Fantastic as it is sad to see people rant about the tiny sliver of America's national budget marked 'science' that's cumulatively done probably more to improve life for everyone and certainly more to extend human knowledge than all the rest of it combined, while seeing nothing wrong with the government pouring a not insignificant fraction of our entire GDP down a black hole, never to return.
You're approaching this from a rational perspective of someone who sees that the world is really old and will still be here for a long time.
Now try pretending that you think Jesus will magic you into heaven Real Soon Now. Because that's exactly what the end-times fundie Christians are about. It just so happens to provide a convenient excuse for destructive, short-term thinking as well..
I am a physicist.
Almost none of us who get PhDs and go through postdocs in the hard sciences do it for the money, we do it because we love our chosen field.
Because you'd be retarded to go through this much effort and sacrifice if you didn't love your field.
That being said, as university, science, education and national lab budgets keep taking it up the ass year after year (while budgets for the police state, the War on Drugs, the Pentagon and old people's entitlements remain sacrosanct), I'm not surprised that some physicists would jump ship. It must be nice being well paid from the start, and not having the teabaggers that control half of Congress trying to destroy the institute you work for.
While I agree that a large part of the reason that LTFRs got shitcanned was because the warmongers found out that you can't use them to make nuclear bombs (since the fuel pretty much stays until absolutely everything is completely burnt, with wastes removed by sparging fluorine gas to create volatile fluorides, there is no plutonium to extract), there is still the corrosion problem.
They used the most corrosion resistant alloys then known for the LFTR testbed and still found serious corrosion problems once it was decommissioned. I don't follow metallurgy closely enough to know if those issues have been solved yet, but we're talking about fluorides of everything with atomic number 40 and up circulating through the same tank. I'm not even sure if it can be solved. On the other hand, since the main loop is no longer a steam bomb with all the attendant bulkiness, replacement may be more practical.
The original Communists did a good job diagnosing the problems with Capitalism... too bad their cure is worse than the disease.
And a slight nitpick, it wouldn't be the same scumbags screwing us, those would be hanging from the gallows. New sociopathic scumbags-in-waiting from the proletariat fighting to take their place (Stalin vs Trotsky, anyone?) would be the ones screwing us.
Ah, be careful. There's a difference between a capitalist who takes their money and spends it on more expansion, workers and research to make more money, and one who guts companies for money to spend at the casino we call "high finance." One of these, idealized as the fabled "Captain of Industry," is an essential component in the success of a nation, the other is a parasite that brings about the destruction of nations.