I highly recommend the MIT OpenCourseWare course on Python. It is written in a very simple and welcoming manner, and includes a free textbook, labs, lecture materials, and homework assignments. Python is probably the best route regardless, as it makes both an excellent teaching language, and a very useful language to use outside the classroom in the real world.
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-189-a-gentle-introduction-to-programming-using-python-january-iap-2011/
There are also a variety of Karel the Robot style introductory systems, including at least one ported over from the original Pascal dialect to Python. Karel the robot provides a limited subset of a typical programming language, and labs that allow a student to practice ordering a robot around an obstacle course. The pascal-based version was my first intro to programming, and it makes a great way to learn still to this day.
If you hit Washington, DC, then you should definitely check out the Smithsonian along the Mall. The National Air and Space Museum is especially good, although crowded in the summer. Make sure to check out the kid's section, which has a bunch of wind tunnels and other fun things that adults will get a kick out of. They also have a really great annex full of cool aircraft next to Dulles airport about an hour west of the city.
It would also be a terrible shame if you didn't visit one or more of our national parks while you're in the US. Our varied landscape and remote stretches of wilderness define the character of our nation perhaps more than any other single thing. Just make sure to pack plenty of water and basic survival gear, as some of the parks can be quite remote and wild.
Wherever you end up visiting, you'll want to keep a sense of scale in mind. The US is rather large, in ways that many of our visitors aren't really mentally prepared for. Consider limiting yourself to one or two regions, so that you get more time actually seeing things instead of racing from place to place.
I hope you enjoy your visit!
Correlation is not causation. One could argue that education does help in some direct ways (e.g., understanding enough about statistics to realize that you're probably not going to die from terrorism). However, there may be other factors at play, too. Compared with staying near home and picking up a job immediately, higher education carries some risk. It frequently involves moving far away from support networks, and taking on a considerable amount of debt, all for the chance of very delayed gratification. It could simply be that the minds of those seeking higher education are more finely tuned to accept a bit of risk in the search for rewards.
Another great book on physics for the uninitiated is Isaac Asimov's non-fiction book, Understanding Physics. Even after all these decades, it's still a fantastic book, and a surprisingly easy read.
Security firm eEye used to keep a long list of Internet Explorer vulnerabilities that they had reported to Microsoft, but Microsoft hadn't developed patches for. eEye's list tracked how many months, or even years, Microsoft had known about the vulnerabilities without releasing a patch. A few years ago, under pressure from Microsoft, eEye agreed to take their list down. Microsoft happens to be a big customer of eEye's, and presumably is responsible for a lot of eEye's revenue. This has been fairly typical behavior for security firms that have signed lucrative contracts with Microsoft over the last few years, and one wonders how much of this type of thing is merely hush money.
Libertarians are generally against government intervention and manipulation of the free market economy. What could be more manipulative than the coercive force of the federal government, providing government-sanctioned monopolies in the forms of patents and copyrights to rent-seeking entrenched industries? Those monopolies arbitrarily increase the costs of goods and services to individuals and other businesses, and they also have the strong potential of interfering with our constitutional rights, such as freedom of speech. Assuming they support "intellectual property" at all, most libertarians would require very high standards of proof of innovativeness before passing out such power, and would limit their scope and duration to the bare minimum "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts," as stated in our Constitution.
I would imagine that many of the asylum seekers are probably refugees from ethnic discrimination, or even worse ethnic cleansing. Many are probably forced to flee precisely because they are descendants of foreigners or a minority ethnic group. Wouldn't it be directly counterproductive to refuse refugees on the basis of their lack of ethnic purity?
Actually, I would expect most libertarians to be in favor of only limited intellectual property protections. Copyright, patent, and trademark laws are the very essence of government manipulation of the free market. When the government arbitrarily sanctions monopoly power through intellectual property laws, it creates artificial scarcity where there should be none. This raises the prices of goods and services for all Americans, and limits true innovation. It also puts Americans at a competitive disadvantage, because our competitors don't share our draconian intellectual property laws and therefore can operate at lower cost.
That is not entirely true. Jury nullification occurs when a jury makes a decision on a point of law (i.e., that the law itself should not be enforced). Judges have done everything in their power to limit jury nullification, but that power does still exist.
Sounds like patch management could be a problem, particularly if we're talking about Windows. Think about pushing service packs across those links. Consider anti-virus definitions, and any other 3rd party software updates, too. Depending on how many machines you are talking about, deploying a patch and antivirus update server might be wise, so they can all pull from the one local system.
As far as the remote management piece goes, resilience to latency is going to be just as important as handling low bandwidth. Make sure to test these things with latency, not just low bandwidth.
Agreed. There are several other reasons why we should avoid a gold standard, or any other similar arbitrary standard.
For one, a precious metals standard never stopped a country from playing loose with its own rules when it felt necessary. Major countries throughout history have bent or broke the rules in times of war to raise funds. Nixon didn't like the idea of raising taxes to pay for the Vietnam War, because he knew it would make the war even more unpopular. So, he printed money instead, despite the official policy of maintaining a gold standard. This caused a currency collapse, the downfall of the Bretton Woods system, and the eventual abandonment of the gold standard, known as the Nixon Shock. The astute reader will notice that this is very similar to what is happening today to pay for the Iraq War. In any case, a precious metals standard is no guarantee of fiscal responsibility. Governments and central banks can choose to be fiscally responsible or irresponsible regardless. A lack of a precious metals standard doesn't force us to print money. We're devaluing our own currency out of choice.
Another reason to avoid a gold standard is that it would encourage gold mining instead of "better" investments. Gold doesn't create jobs. It doesn't produce dividends. You can't eat it. A fiat currency, if properly managed, will encourage more valuable economic activity.
Gold mining is also rather bad for the environment, and tends to poison water supplies that people and crops depend upon for survival. This has been a problem in Romania and Peru.
Finally, returning to a gold standard would arbitrarily shift economic power to those countries with gold reserves and gold deposits, and away from those countries that might produce otherwise more valuable goods and services. If you thought that George Soros's currency manipulations or Sovereign Wealth Funds were scary, think about what happens when Russia or China can arbitrarily manipulate the value of the world's currencies by increasing or decreasing their gold mining activities.
One of the biggest problems with quantum crypto is its reliance on trusted relays. Quantum crypto is not end-to-end. Quantum crypto only works for original photons. However, it's pretty rare that you have a single strand of fiber between you and your far end. This means that you're trusting your service provider(s) to secure all the relays in-between. Given the AT&T/NSA fiasco, I can't imagine trusting them with that power.
In the US, we have an odd pairing of free market liberalization with social conservativeness, and on the other side a pairing of social welfare and government interventionism with social liberalness. It's an extremely odd pairing. Here you've got someone who is fearful, and therefore favors a strong national defense and government regulation of immorality. That person would naturally lean Republican. You might also assume that same person might be equally fearful of financial or health difficulties, and might therefore favor government-provided safety nets. Well, in the US you'd be dead wrong, because that person would be more likely to be a Democrat.
To a large degree, this artificial pairing limits the options for the libertarian-minded. Either we have government interference in our bedrooms, or in our wallets, pick your poison. It also potentially limits the Republican Party's social conservative agenda. For instance, would abortions be less commonplace or even irrelevant if young women had access to more affordable health care, maternity leave, daycare, and other forms of government-provided social services?
I'd love to see the same study performed in Europe, where the pairings of social conservatives and fiscal conservatives isn't so strong.
Since when are the Japanese sensitive about photographing private residential areas!?
I live in the Weststadt residential neighborhood of Heidelberg, Germany. Heidelberg is a beautiful city, and sees many tourists. For some reason, the Japanese tour groups frequently travel down my street. Also, for some reason, many of the older Japanese tourists frequently take pictures of me doing such mundane things as bringing home groceries. I find it amusing that I am probably in several dozen Japanese photo albums, probably entitled "typical German going to the grocery store." I find it especially amusing, because I am an expatriate American, not a German.
In any case, is it typical for the Japanese to consider their own residential neighborhood private, but everyone else's to be public?
We are here at the 2008 PETA worldwide conference, where we've secretly replaced the faux meat they usually serve with Folgers Real Meat From Suffering Dead Animals. Let's see if anyone can tell the difference!
I can also think of some great names for their new product, like "I Can't Believe It's Not Dead Animal".
An ion drive, along with most forms of propulsion, would indeed run out of juice for the reasons that you mentioned. If you want to keep the peddle to the floor during your trip across the stars, then you might want this instead:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussard_ramjet
A system like that would take a helluva beating. I'm a bit skeptical.
Um... why should I, as an at-will employee, shoulder the burden of this for my employer? If I were ever arrested at an airport for refusal to comply with Customs orders, my employer would have the briefest feelings of sympathy for my plight... before firing me. That would leave me arrested, possibly charged with a federal crime, and unemployed to boot.
I like my job, and I like the company that I work for. However, I'm not about to go to jail for them or anyone else.
Unfortunately, my employer has made it clear that they want their employees to cooperate fully with these searches, and afterwards tell corporate security. Realistically, it's the only reasonable thing for the company to expect. For one, no company wants to be labeled as "supporting the terrists!" Heck, it could even hurt their ability to win government contracts. For another, TSA is unlikely to back down just because of some corporate security policy. The employee would find themselves unable to board their flight at best (and thus unable to complete whatever task the company assigned to them), and arrested and possibly charged with some absurd federal crime at worst. The business travelers have the most to lose if they refuse to comply.
One poster suggested that government contractors refuse to cooperate, and call their corporate security officer and/or DSS. That's an interesting idea, but someone undergoing a TSA or Customs search won't have any opportunity to contact their security office during the search. They're not going to let you make a cellphone call. You either consent to the search, or you don't. If you don't consent, they might take it anyway, and I'll bet money you wind up in handcuffs.
Before you decide to lynch all the "investment class", maybe you should look at yourself in the mirror. If you have a 401k, pension, mutual fund, or almost any kind of equity-based investment, then you're one of "them". Granted, that doesn't excuse the pseudo-fascism/mercantilism that you point out. Many incumbent monopolies are rent-seeking by giving bribes to politicians in return for locking out legitimate competition. That's unethical, and ultimately short-sighted. However, the solution isn't to go out and shoot "them" in some crazy communist revolution. The solution is to actually support a free market. Overreaching intellectual property laws create government sanctioned monopolies. Free market rules don't stand a chance in that environment. Let's give reform a shot before we start advocating armed revolution, please.
Good, I hope that they succeed in changing that strategy. For any colony to actually be useful and self-sustaining, there has to be some hope of an economic return on investment. The driest deserts and coldest tundras here on Earth are like tropical paradises compared with anything outside our planet, whether that's the moon, Mars, or a space station floating around the asteroid belts. Any space colony would be heavily dependent upon imports for survival (e.g., food, clothing, natural resources, manufactured goods, etc.). That will require a roughly equal amount of exports to balance trade, probably in the forms of valuable minerals and manufactured goods that are best made in microgravity environments. That becomes rather difficult to accomplish if you're stuck in a gravity well like a planet or relatively large moon, because lifting those items back out would be prohibitively expensive. We need to stop obsessing over planets and moons, just because we happen to be bipedal and live on a planet now. Asteroids are the way to go.
Blasphemy! Everyone knows that it is far better for children to learn about drinking from their college frat buddies, than when under supervision of their family!
To a certain degree, there already is substantial punitive cost to short-term profit seeking on the markets. Every transaction on the stock markets involves a series of middlemen. Someone's gotta pay for the stock broker's Porsche, after all. The tax that you want already exists: It's called capital gains tax. In the end, all of the fees and taxes soak up any profits you make in short-term trading, and you trail behind the major indexes. Unfortunately, the modern emphasis on long-term investing through index funds hasn't quenched the market's demand for the quick buck.
Unfortunately, the market doesn't seem particularly well-suited to long-term infrastructure investment, across the board in general. Power plants, oil refineries, telecommunications infrastructure, etc., all require enormous amounts of capital investment. Outside of government projects, these kinds of things just aren't being built. The return on that investment, if there is any at all, won't happen for years or decades. Within those years and decades, there is a substantial risk that your competitors might find a better/faster way to do it, or that something incredible might happen that renders your investment completely obsolete. In order for the investment to be worthwhile, it has to be produce a greater return than alternative investments (e.g., buying a bunch of an S&P 500 index fund), and/or more reliable.
Eventually, the market will correct itself. People will collectively realize that companies lacking significant R&D or infrastructure improvements won't do well in the long term. Once investors understand that, that knowledge should affect stock price in the short term. We already went to one extreme of the pendulum during the dot-com boom, when money was senselessly thrown into R&D with no focus on business needs. The pendulum has now swung back and is approaching the other extreme. It may take awhile for investors to collectively realize that long-term greed is better than short-term greed, in the long term.
The TSA can issue orders like that until it is blue in the face. If it ain't in the contract, and it ain't in the Federal Acquisitions Regular (FAR), then the only way this happens is if TSA (in other words, the taxpayer) chooses to *pay* for it to happen.
So looking at the model, it doesn't look like there's much room for internal bomb/missile bays. Exterior hard points defeat the entire point of stealth, so that's out of the question. What kind of payload is this thing expected to be carrying? There's not much point to building a fighter plane that can't carry any weaponry.
Slashdot Mirror
I highly recommend the MIT OpenCourseWare course on Python. It is written in a very simple and welcoming manner, and includes a free textbook, labs, lecture materials, and homework assignments. Python is probably the best route regardless, as it makes both an excellent teaching language, and a very useful language to use outside the classroom in the real world. http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-189-a-gentle-introduction-to-programming-using-python-january-iap-2011/ There are also a variety of Karel the Robot style introductory systems, including at least one ported over from the original Pascal dialect to Python. Karel the robot provides a limited subset of a typical programming language, and labs that allow a student to practice ordering a robot around an obstacle course. The pascal-based version was my first intro to programming, and it makes a great way to learn still to this day.
If you hit Washington, DC, then you should definitely check out the Smithsonian along the Mall. The National Air and Space Museum is especially good, although crowded in the summer. Make sure to check out the kid's section, which has a bunch of wind tunnels and other fun things that adults will get a kick out of. They also have a really great annex full of cool aircraft next to Dulles airport about an hour west of the city. It would also be a terrible shame if you didn't visit one or more of our national parks while you're in the US. Our varied landscape and remote stretches of wilderness define the character of our nation perhaps more than any other single thing. Just make sure to pack plenty of water and basic survival gear, as some of the parks can be quite remote and wild. Wherever you end up visiting, you'll want to keep a sense of scale in mind. The US is rather large, in ways that many of our visitors aren't really mentally prepared for. Consider limiting yourself to one or two regions, so that you get more time actually seeing things instead of racing from place to place. I hope you enjoy your visit!
There's a strong possibility that you're mistaken in your assertions there. There has been some reporting in the press that Wikileaks activists have actively eavesdropped on data by running one or more rogue Tor servers:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/06/07/100607fa_fact_khatchadourian?currentPage=all#ixzz0pWdlAepe
There has also been reporting as recently as today that Wikileaks actively gathered data from peer-to-peer file sharing networks:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-20/wikileaks-may-have-exploited-music-photo-networks-to-get-classified-data.html
Correlation is not causation. One could argue that education does help in some direct ways (e.g., understanding enough about statistics to realize that you're probably not going to die from terrorism). However, there may be other factors at play, too. Compared with staying near home and picking up a job immediately, higher education carries some risk. It frequently involves moving far away from support networks, and taking on a considerable amount of debt, all for the chance of very delayed gratification. It could simply be that the minds of those seeking higher education are more finely tuned to accept a bit of risk in the search for rewards.
Another great book on physics for the uninitiated is Isaac Asimov's non-fiction book, Understanding Physics. Even after all these decades, it's still a fantastic book, and a surprisingly easy read.
Security firm eEye used to keep a long list of Internet Explorer vulnerabilities that they had reported to Microsoft, but Microsoft hadn't developed patches for. eEye's list tracked how many months, or even years, Microsoft had known about the vulnerabilities without releasing a patch. A few years ago, under pressure from Microsoft, eEye agreed to take their list down. Microsoft happens to be a big customer of eEye's, and presumably is responsible for a lot of eEye's revenue. This has been fairly typical behavior for security firms that have signed lucrative contracts with Microsoft over the last few years, and one wonders how much of this type of thing is merely hush money.
Libertarians are generally against government intervention and manipulation of the free market economy. What could be more manipulative than the coercive force of the federal government, providing government-sanctioned monopolies in the forms of patents and copyrights to rent-seeking entrenched industries? Those monopolies arbitrarily increase the costs of goods and services to individuals and other businesses, and they also have the strong potential of interfering with our constitutional rights, such as freedom of speech. Assuming they support "intellectual property" at all, most libertarians would require very high standards of proof of innovativeness before passing out such power, and would limit their scope and duration to the bare minimum "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts," as stated in our Constitution.
I would imagine that many of the asylum seekers are probably refugees from ethnic discrimination, or even worse ethnic cleansing. Many are probably forced to flee precisely because they are descendants of foreigners or a minority ethnic group. Wouldn't it be directly counterproductive to refuse refugees on the basis of their lack of ethnic purity?
Actually, I would expect most libertarians to be in favor of only limited intellectual property protections. Copyright, patent, and trademark laws are the very essence of government manipulation of the free market. When the government arbitrarily sanctions monopoly power through intellectual property laws, it creates artificial scarcity where there should be none. This raises the prices of goods and services for all Americans, and limits true innovation. It also puts Americans at a competitive disadvantage, because our competitors don't share our draconian intellectual property laws and therefore can operate at lower cost.
That is not entirely true. Jury nullification occurs when a jury makes a decision on a point of law (i.e., that the law itself should not be enforced). Judges have done everything in their power to limit jury nullification, but that power does still exist.
Sounds like patch management could be a problem, particularly if we're talking about Windows. Think about pushing service packs across those links. Consider anti-virus definitions, and any other 3rd party software updates, too. Depending on how many machines you are talking about, deploying a patch and antivirus update server might be wise, so they can all pull from the one local system.
As far as the remote management piece goes, resilience to latency is going to be just as important as handling low bandwidth. Make sure to test these things with latency, not just low bandwidth.
Agreed. There are several other reasons why we should avoid a gold standard, or any other similar arbitrary standard.
For one, a precious metals standard never stopped a country from playing loose with its own rules when it felt necessary. Major countries throughout history have bent or broke the rules in times of war to raise funds. Nixon didn't like the idea of raising taxes to pay for the Vietnam War, because he knew it would make the war even more unpopular. So, he printed money instead, despite the official policy of maintaining a gold standard. This caused a currency collapse, the downfall of the Bretton Woods system, and the eventual abandonment of the gold standard, known as the Nixon Shock. The astute reader will notice that this is very similar to what is happening today to pay for the Iraq War. In any case, a precious metals standard is no guarantee of fiscal responsibility. Governments and central banks can choose to be fiscally responsible or irresponsible regardless. A lack of a precious metals standard doesn't force us to print money. We're devaluing our own currency out of choice.
Another reason to avoid a gold standard is that it would encourage gold mining instead of "better" investments. Gold doesn't create jobs. It doesn't produce dividends. You can't eat it. A fiat currency, if properly managed, will encourage more valuable economic activity.
Gold mining is also rather bad for the environment, and tends to poison water supplies that people and crops depend upon for survival. This has been a problem in Romania and Peru.
Finally, returning to a gold standard would arbitrarily shift economic power to those countries with gold reserves and gold deposits, and away from those countries that might produce otherwise more valuable goods and services. If you thought that George Soros's currency manipulations or Sovereign Wealth Funds were scary, think about what happens when Russia or China can arbitrarily manipulate the value of the world's currencies by increasing or decreasing their gold mining activities.
One of the biggest problems with quantum crypto is its reliance on trusted relays. Quantum crypto is not end-to-end. Quantum crypto only works for original photons. However, it's pretty rare that you have a single strand of fiber between you and your far end. This means that you're trusting your service provider(s) to secure all the relays in-between. Given the AT&T/NSA fiasco, I can't imagine trusting them with that power.
In the US, we have an odd pairing of free market liberalization with social conservativeness, and on the other side a pairing of social welfare and government interventionism with social liberalness. It's an extremely odd pairing. Here you've got someone who is fearful, and therefore favors a strong national defense and government regulation of immorality. That person would naturally lean Republican. You might also assume that same person might be equally fearful of financial or health difficulties, and might therefore favor government-provided safety nets. Well, in the US you'd be dead wrong, because that person would be more likely to be a Democrat.
To a large degree, this artificial pairing limits the options for the libertarian-minded. Either we have government interference in our bedrooms, or in our wallets, pick your poison. It also potentially limits the Republican Party's social conservative agenda. For instance, would abortions be less commonplace or even irrelevant if young women had access to more affordable health care, maternity leave, daycare, and other forms of government-provided social services?
I'd love to see the same study performed in Europe, where the pairings of social conservatives and fiscal conservatives isn't so strong.
Since when are the Japanese sensitive about photographing private residential areas!?
I live in the Weststadt residential neighborhood of Heidelberg, Germany. Heidelberg is a beautiful city, and sees many tourists. For some reason, the Japanese tour groups frequently travel down my street. Also, for some reason, many of the older Japanese tourists frequently take pictures of me doing such mundane things as bringing home groceries. I find it amusing that I am probably in several dozen Japanese photo albums, probably entitled "typical German going to the grocery store." I find it especially amusing, because I am an expatriate American, not a German.
In any case, is it typical for the Japanese to consider their own residential neighborhood private, but everyone else's to be public?
We are here at the 2008 PETA worldwide conference, where we've secretly replaced the faux meat they usually serve with Folgers Real Meat From Suffering Dead Animals. Let's see if anyone can tell the difference!
I can also think of some great names for their new product, like "I Can't Believe It's Not Dead Animal".
An ion drive, along with most forms of propulsion, would indeed run out of juice for the reasons that you mentioned. If you want to keep the peddle to the floor during your trip across the stars, then you might want this instead:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussard_ramjet
A system like that would take a helluva beating. I'm a bit skeptical.
Um... why should I, as an at-will employee, shoulder the burden of this for my employer? If I were ever arrested at an airport for refusal to comply with Customs orders, my employer would have the briefest feelings of sympathy for my plight... before firing me. That would leave me arrested, possibly charged with a federal crime, and unemployed to boot.
I like my job, and I like the company that I work for. However, I'm not about to go to jail for them or anyone else.
Unfortunately, my employer has made it clear that they want their employees to cooperate fully with these searches, and afterwards tell corporate security. Realistically, it's the only reasonable thing for the company to expect. For one, no company wants to be labeled as "supporting the terrists!" Heck, it could even hurt their ability to win government contracts. For another, TSA is unlikely to back down just because of some corporate security policy. The employee would find themselves unable to board their flight at best (and thus unable to complete whatever task the company assigned to them), and arrested and possibly charged with some absurd federal crime at worst. The business travelers have the most to lose if they refuse to comply.
One poster suggested that government contractors refuse to cooperate, and call their corporate security officer and/or DSS. That's an interesting idea, but someone undergoing a TSA or Customs search won't have any opportunity to contact their security office during the search. They're not going to let you make a cellphone call. You either consent to the search, or you don't. If you don't consent, they might take it anyway, and I'll bet money you wind up in handcuffs.
Before you decide to lynch all the "investment class", maybe you should look at yourself in the mirror. If you have a 401k, pension, mutual fund, or almost any kind of equity-based investment, then you're one of "them". Granted, that doesn't excuse the pseudo-fascism/mercantilism that you point out. Many incumbent monopolies are rent-seeking by giving bribes to politicians in return for locking out legitimate competition. That's unethical, and ultimately short-sighted. However, the solution isn't to go out and shoot "them" in some crazy communist revolution. The solution is to actually support a free market. Overreaching intellectual property laws create government sanctioned monopolies. Free market rules don't stand a chance in that environment. Let's give reform a shot before we start advocating armed revolution, please.
Good, I hope that they succeed in changing that strategy. For any colony to actually be useful and self-sustaining, there has to be some hope of an economic return on investment. The driest deserts and coldest tundras here on Earth are like tropical paradises compared with anything outside our planet, whether that's the moon, Mars, or a space station floating around the asteroid belts. Any space colony would be heavily dependent upon imports for survival (e.g., food, clothing, natural resources, manufactured goods, etc.). That will require a roughly equal amount of exports to balance trade, probably in the forms of valuable minerals and manufactured goods that are best made in microgravity environments. That becomes rather difficult to accomplish if you're stuck in a gravity well like a planet or relatively large moon, because lifting those items back out would be prohibitively expensive. We need to stop obsessing over planets and moons, just because we happen to be bipedal and live on a planet now. Asteroids are the way to go.
Blasphemy! Everyone knows that it is far better for children to learn about drinking from their college frat buddies, than when under supervision of their family!
-American expat in Heidelberg, and loving it.
To a certain degree, there already is substantial punitive cost to short-term profit seeking on the markets. Every transaction on the stock markets involves a series of middlemen. Someone's gotta pay for the stock broker's Porsche, after all. The tax that you want already exists: It's called capital gains tax. In the end, all of the fees and taxes soak up any profits you make in short-term trading, and you trail behind the major indexes. Unfortunately, the modern emphasis on long-term investing through index funds hasn't quenched the market's demand for the quick buck.
Unfortunately, the market doesn't seem particularly well-suited to long-term infrastructure investment, across the board in general. Power plants, oil refineries, telecommunications infrastructure, etc., all require enormous amounts of capital investment. Outside of government projects, these kinds of things just aren't being built. The return on that investment, if there is any at all, won't happen for years or decades. Within those years and decades, there is a substantial risk that your competitors might find a better/faster way to do it, or that something incredible might happen that renders your investment completely obsolete. In order for the investment to be worthwhile, it has to be produce a greater return than alternative investments (e.g., buying a bunch of an S&P 500 index fund), and/or more reliable.
Eventually, the market will correct itself. People will collectively realize that companies lacking significant R&D or infrastructure improvements won't do well in the long term. Once investors understand that, that knowledge should affect stock price in the short term. We already went to one extreme of the pendulum during the dot-com boom, when money was senselessly thrown into R&D with no focus on business needs. The pendulum has now swung back and is approaching the other extreme. It may take awhile for investors to collectively realize that long-term greed is better than short-term greed, in the long term.
The TSA can issue orders like that until it is blue in the face. If it ain't in the contract, and it ain't in the Federal Acquisitions Regular (FAR), then the only way this happens is if TSA (in other words, the taxpayer) chooses to *pay* for it to happen.
So looking at the model, it doesn't look like there's much room for internal bomb/missile bays. Exterior hard points defeat the entire point of stealth, so that's out of the question. What kind of payload is this thing expected to be carrying? There's not much point to building a fighter plane that can't carry any weaponry.