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CommentsDisplaying Chris's 10 most recent comments.

• Snake Robot Taught ‘Terrifying’ Strangle Trick

  March 26, 2013 at 10:23pm

  In reply to ImChiquita.

  You guys are aware that the “three Laws of Robotics” aren’t actually laws, aren’t you? They were made up by Isaac Asimov for use in his robot stories. Other than the fact that they are probably a pretty good idea for robots interacting with humans there is nothing that requires any robot to follow them and nothing that prevents it from violating any or all of them.

• Desmond Tutu: George Bush, Tony Blair Must ‘Answer for Their Actions’ at International Criminal Court

  September 3, 2012 at 12:19pm

  Desmond needs to take off the tutu and STFU.

• Curiosity Sends ‘Interplanetary Voicemail’ and High-Res Photos of Stunning Martian Landscape

  August 28, 2012 at 10:30pm

  In reply to MrKnowItAll.

  The world has a lot of poor, starving people in it. if you took NASA’s entire $18B budget and applied it to feeding the poor, the world would still have a lot of poor, starving people and we would have even less chance of doing anything about it. Technology has driven our standard of living, and aerospace technology has been a major driver. We feed the world because we have the technology, the economy, and the land to do it.if we lose our technology we just bring to poor and starving closer to home.

• Curiosity Sends ‘Interplanetary Voicemail’ and High-Res Photos of Stunning Martian Landscape

  August 28, 2012 at 10:17pm

  In reply to GoodStuff.

  Before you send a manned mission, you send unmanned missions. Mars is a long trip so you have to bring enough supplies to stay for a while. People also require a lot more in the way of support than robots do. When you are trying to land, Mars has too much atmosphere to ignore but not enough to make things simple. Getting into practice at landing bigger and bigger things will be really useful when you try to send a manned mission.

• Neil Armstrong, First Man on the Moon, Dies at 82

  August 26, 2012 at 12:55am

  In reply to stinkybisquit.

  Actually, I believe that he went to work for NACA’s Lewis Laboratory in Cleveland. NACA became a part of the newly created NASA in 1958. Armstrong He even flew the X-15 at one point in his career.

• Neil Armstrong, First Man on the Moon, Dies at 82

  August 25, 2012 at 6:53pm

  In reply to salvawhoray.

  There are, by my observation, three types of people that don’t believe that we went to the Moon.
  1) The ones that have seem somebody’s explanation of why we couldn’t have done it and are too scientifically illiterate to understand that the explanations they hold to don’t hold water. These people are innocently ignorant.
  2) People that know that the reasons that they give for why we couldn’t go to the moon are lies but use it to push their own agenda. These people are, in a word, liars.
  3) People that believe that because the government says so, it didn’t happen. This is a relatively recent phenomenon, but it is a sign of intellectual laziness. It is easier to believe that everyone in government is lazy, a liar and/or corrupt than to realize that the government isn’t a monolith. Rather, it holds some of everything. Every part of the government has conservatives & liberals, believers & nonbelievers, lazy and hardworking. There is no way that you could keep a secret like this with that many people involved. I’ve worked in and around NASA for the last 25 years and there really is something in the nature or scientists and engineers that won’t let a lie stand, at least on a technical issue. If the landings were faked, somebody (actually a lot of somebodies) wouldn’t be able to contain it, or themselves.

• Soros Just Revealed He Invests in Devils (No, Seriously)

  August 21, 2012 at 9:29pm

  Invests in devils? I suspect that he gets stock options from the Devil.

• Social Security Administration Requests Massive Amounts of .357 Ammo — But Why?

  August 15, 2012 at 9:04pm

  Before anybody’s tiny little head explodes, an Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity contract allows the government to purchase up to a preset number of items over a particular period of time for a pre-negotiated price. It does not mean that the government will necessarily purchase that number of items. They can draw from the contract repeatedly until either the time period runs out or until the total number of items have been purchased. It keeps the price constant and consistent over the life of the contract no matter what happens to the market price.

• We’re Safe on Mars’: Rover ‘Curiosity’ Touches Down on Red Planet (See the First Pictures!)

  August 7, 2012 at 10:54pm

  In reply to Edohiguma.

  The US has missed Mars at least once and crashed a couple more times. I believe that the Russians have missed every time they have tried.

  Mars may be big but it is a long way away.

• 70 Facts About Our Economy Obama Probably Doesn’t Want You To See

  August 5, 2012 at 1:05pm

  In reply to Ravings of a lunatic planet.

  Most of this stuff is either authorized and paid for in the budgets of federal agencies, either directly in the law, as an earmark, or as the result of a program set up by an agency under the direction of Congress. The poop throwing was probably not funded explicitly, but through a program that was in the budget for the agency that supplied the money.

  The thing that jumped out at me in the “Wastebook 2011″ report as not belonging there was #98 – the one about $1 bills.

  We still have $1 bills – even thought they are more expensive than coins – because people still seem to want them. Does it make any sense to save money trying to force people to use $1 coins that they don’t want?

  As far as #69 – the high risk research program – is concerned, that may well unnecessarily duplicate other programs, but performing and funding high-risk research is something that I think that the government should be doing, at least in selected areas. There are a number of areas where foreign governments are pumping money into their industries to try to help them take market share away from the US. Supporting high-risk research – stuff that would have a huge payoff if it works but is too high risk for a company to invest in – seems like a reasonable thing to do, primarily to thin out the possibilities, remove the worst of the risk and let private industry spend their time and money trying to develop something they can sell.