It's continuously drained all of their money and talent into stationkeeping for the US military and corporations and eliminated the possibility of human exploration in space.
How were they stationkeeping for corporations and the military? NASA can't do anything without corporations, so whatever it did the corporations would have made money. And the military? The military wants nothing to do with NASA, for the most part. From their perspective it's just a big money pit.
If nobody is interested and NASA really is keen on abandoning it, I'd hope that they'd launch a final mission to boost it into a high orbit before doing so so that it doesn't reenter any time soon.
I'd like to see them actually install the VASIMR module. That would keep it in LEO with minimal effort.
while this example of government selected (as opposed to free market selected) corporate welfare proves itself to be both expansive and unreliable, soyuz launches regularly takes place both cheaply and more reliably (though far from slashdot notice).
Based on what we've seen in Europe, this is the way things work. If you allow immigrants from countries with incompatible cultures, it's the second generation who carry out attacks in concert with co-ethnics from the home country.
Saudi Arabia is full of factions. Some of them are our friends, some are our enemies, and most are mostly neutral. The idea we'd try to "get rid of" a country because some of the people there are our enemies is daft.
Given she gave a home address that doesn't actually exist on her immigration paperwork, we could probably have expected more from our security services.
The problem is the flat tax doesn't actually address the complexity problem. Taking your adjusted gross income and matching it against an entry in a table isn't complicated. The complexity in the tax code comes from deciding what is income and what isn't. Much of what people describe as "loopholes" is genuine attempts by the legislature to fix unfairness that resulted in people paying taxes on something that isn't really income.
Let's say inflation is running at ten percent. I buy a house this year and sell it next year for what I paid plus ten percent. Should I pay taxes on the difference?
Has anyone ever built a working H3 plant? That's a rhetorical question. It may be cleaner and easier to extract energy from H3 because it's aneutronic, but it's not going to be any easier to get to steady state fusion with H3-Deuterium than it is with Deuterium-Deuterium. We still don't know how to do this, and it's entirely possible it will never be something that's practical for commercial power.
Let's get a D-D plant working first and then start thinking about whether mining H3 from the moon makes sense. I suspect it will be easier to just deal with tritium and activated shielding than to go all the way to the moon for H3.
I don't think a purely arbitrary definition of the word "mass" really adds to the conversation. People understand there's a substantive difference between a handful of drug dealers fighting a turf battle and a couple guys shooting up the office Christmas party.
Neither will the Democrats. They learned their lesson on gun control in 2010.
The fact is Americans don't want gun control. If anything in recent years public opinion has moved noticeably in the other direction. Obama doesn't care because he's not facing reelection, but you're only going to hear about gun control from Democrats in districts that want it anyway, and nothing will pass at the national level. We've been down this road so many times it's like a Greek tragedy, where everyone knows how it turns out but they still play their assigned parts.
Von Braun wanted to get there FAST, without bothering to assemble any space infrastructure along the way, and we won the "space race". But in doing it that way, we didn't learn anything about space construction, or build anything that would last, and we haven't been back to the moon in nearly 50 years.
If our on-again, off-again Mars quest is any indication, that's the only way to actually get there. One of the reason Bob Zubrin keeps pushing for a ten-year program is we can't seem to be able to hold the political consensus together long enough to do longer missions. I doubt we'll see any meaningful space infrastructure until someone figures out how to make money there.
Education used to be about bettering oneself. To expanding ones mind and being a better citizen and bettering society.
Sure... for a the small subset of students who had family money. I'm getting old now, and I remember my classmates paying pretty close attention to starting salaries.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, sure. There aren't that many FBI agents.
How were they stationkeeping for corporations and the military? NASA can't do anything without corporations, so whatever it did the corporations would have made money. And the military? The military wants nothing to do with NASA, for the most part. From their perspective it's just a big money pit.
I'd like to see them actually install the VASIMR module. That would keep it in LEO with minimal effort.
Who are you quoting here? I can't remember, ever, hearing a politician say that.
And the Soyuz is market selected?
And do what with it?
Heh. That's what struck me too. I suppose the reverse would also be no effect, sort of like flipping the sign on zero.
Based on what we've seen in Europe, this is the way things work. If you allow immigrants from countries with incompatible cultures, it's the second generation who carry out attacks in concert with co-ethnics from the home country.
Saudi Arabia is full of factions. Some of them are our friends, some are our enemies, and most are mostly neutral. The idea we'd try to "get rid of" a country because some of the people there are our enemies is daft.
Given she gave a home address that doesn't actually exist on her immigration paperwork, we could probably have expected more from our security services.
People are still dumb enough to believe Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapons program?
The problem is the flat tax doesn't actually address the complexity problem. Taking your adjusted gross income and matching it against an entry in a table isn't complicated. The complexity in the tax code comes from deciding what is income and what isn't. Much of what people describe as "loopholes" is genuine attempts by the legislature to fix unfairness that resulted in people paying taxes on something that isn't really income.
Let's say inflation is running at ten percent. I buy a house this year and sell it next year for what I paid plus ten percent. Should I pay taxes on the difference?
Yes, thanks for that quote from Joseph Stalin the industrialist.
He3 is a far superior fuel if you can make it work. It only produces charged particles, which is exactly what you want.
Clearly we can't build an H-T reactor any more than we can build a D-T reactor. But describing it as an "inferior" fuel is going a bit far.
Sadly, it might just be.
I would pay all my money to see that in action.
Shades? What Mars needs is a giant mirror to concentrate sunlight. Shades is going in the wrong direction.
Has anyone ever built a working H3 plant? That's a rhetorical question. It may be cleaner and easier to extract energy from H3 because it's aneutronic, but it's not going to be any easier to get to steady state fusion with H3-Deuterium than it is with Deuterium-Deuterium. We still don't know how to do this, and it's entirely possible it will never be something that's practical for commercial power.
Let's get a D-D plant working first and then start thinking about whether mining H3 from the moon makes sense. I suspect it will be easier to just deal with tritium and activated shielding than to go all the way to the moon for H3.
I don't think a purely arbitrary definition of the word "mass" really adds to the conversation. People understand there's a substantive difference between a handful of drug dealers fighting a turf battle and a couple guys shooting up the office Christmas party.
Neither will the Democrats. They learned their lesson on gun control in 2010.
The fact is Americans don't want gun control. If anything in recent years public opinion has moved noticeably in the other direction. Obama doesn't care because he's not facing reelection, but you're only going to hear about gun control from Democrats in districts that want it anyway, and nothing will pass at the national level. We've been down this road so many times it's like a Greek tragedy, where everyone knows how it turns out but they still play their assigned parts.
In later reports they were described as "assault weapons". So I guess they're long guns with polymer stocks.
Congressmen get threats like that every day. What makes the NRA different?
The power the NRA brings to Washington isn't money - your Congressman wouldn't lift a finger for these kinds of piddly sums.
If our on-again, off-again Mars quest is any indication, that's the only way to actually get there. One of the reason Bob Zubrin keeps pushing for a ten-year program is we can't seem to be able to hold the political consensus together long enough to do longer missions. I doubt we'll see any meaningful space infrastructure until someone figures out how to make money there.
Sure... for a the small subset of students who had family money. I'm getting old now, and I remember my classmates paying pretty close attention to starting salaries.