Sure, we need accrediting agencies. The problem with having the government be the accrediting agency is that you aren't free to take or leave their advice.

Makes sense.

Ah, I am realizing there are 3 purposes here: (A) space is militarily Advantageous, (C) space is Commercially useful, and (F) space is Fun. And by 'space', I guess I mean being there, getting there, and the offshoots from the work to get there.

NASA became what it is because of A, got so popular in part because of F, and had the really nice side-bonus of C. Because it's a kind of narrowly focused government agency, it ended up giving away a lot of C for free, so it's not directly self-sustaining. If A had not been so urgent, C and F might well have gotten us there without NASA, but much, much slower. At this point, as far as I can tell, the Air Force is doing the actual execution of A (and a lot of what NASA centered around was a little more like F anyway); and NASA is trying to survive with a lot of F and the related dreams of people who are excited by space, and claims that it is not the drag on the economy that it looks like because it's giving away C. But rich guys can use their own money largely based on F and dreams of C, and the ventures that actually get C will continue on with more F, C, and probably some A (hello, Howard Hughes). People complain about individuals getting rich(er) off of war, but quite possibly they are also making war less costly in dollars and lives. 'Course, we should still all just find a way to get along :-)

This makes sense to me at 00:16; it's probably just babbling with goofy substitution.

At this point, a number of the rich are working on buying luxury space yachts, and that will be all sorts of benefit to technology. It will also get the prices down to more reasonable ranges, something that has not been a strong enough driver in the NASA way of doing things.

Part of the problem is that medications are so heavily regulated (and other substances that might possibly do the job well enough are heavily enforced against). I take this more as a sign that prescriptions are required for too many things.

Also, medical science has gotten to this tricky place where they know how to destroy stuff that's killing you, but they don't really know how to replace destroyed stuff except via medications. For example, my pituitary's lining grew out of control when I was an infant. That should have just killed me, but we have the surgical technology to destroy the problem (aaaannnd the pituitary along with it). This means I'm in the 5+ category if you're counting hormones as drugs (7 drugs total, 5 to 7 each day depending on the phase of the moon).

Also, the sample is heavily biased. Slashdotters are biased toward being these things (no offense intended with any of these, I'm at least a little of all):
* Socially awkward. C'mon, if you weren't, you would be getting more of your social life somewhere else. These days, socially awkward people get medicated (we're probably overdoing it, but who am I to say, I'm not quite weird enough to need the help).
* Unusually bright. I've been coming to the conclusion over the past few years that mental oddities tend to track with other hormonal/digestive/physiological oddities.
* Paid/insured well enough to afford lifetime (and life-extending) drugs.
* Working in cubicles. This tends to cause lots of chronic conditions (unless you go to some trouble to avoid them, in which case you're less likely to be spending time here). And medical science has been spending lots of energy on inventing pills to sell us for those problems.

Yeah, well. What we have now is a regulatory system that ensures that potentially life-saving drugs take many years to get to market, and prevents people from making their own risk/reward calculations around taking a drug that might help them. It also makes the drugs way more expensive than they need to be. And then there is the ludicrous, ineffective waste of time, money, and lives that is the War On Drugs.

We probably need regulations around drug labeling, telling useful things like where to report adverse reactions, what problems this might give you in the short, medium, and long term, how well studied the drug is, what sorts of people the drug works best on, where the drug was made and where the ingredients came from. And we likely need some accrediting agency that ensures that the drugs consistently contain what they claim.

Hey while we have the attention of a talkative biologist . . .
I've heard occasionally that we're only a decade or two from having a commercially available genetics-lab-in-a-box. You know, program in the genes and it grows critters for you. How plausible is this? I only really need tiny little critters, say, microbes that will generate human growth hormone (I have no pituitary, and the drug companies are charging approximately 5x-10x their production costs for HGH in order to pay R&D on other drugs -- so I'm chained to insurance companies forever unless I (a) can grow my own or (b) can find a low-effort, reliable source of a spare $25K/year).

Thank you for that; I had not thought about the possibility of Connections being on YouTube (silly me). These things are still surprisingly enthralling . . .

Oh I don't know, maybe:

Solar collectors that beam down concentrated energy so we can power the world without burning stuff.

Getting out to the asteroids, pulling some in, and doing all of the messy, nasty refining in space so Earth can be clean.

Go read some sci-fi! There's lots of neat stuff, and some of it has really high start-up costs, but other stuff is relatively cheap and would be a license to print money (which would make some people rich, and also fund the more expensive stuff).

And that quote makes me wonder about a synthetic bridge over nerve damage. Get the details right, and you have a cure for paralysis. Wow . . .

So ah . . . #3 has been in a product recall death spiral for more than a year, hasn't it?

One can hope . . .

Me! I also like working in Java.

Wow. I had never seen that book before. At some point during the third page, I decided that it was exactly like Ira Glass had decide to write a Ruby guide.

My husband has the same problem, and I simply hate the color depth under them.

What will we do? Stockpile incandescents and become reclusive, I guess. Contemplate anti-CFL rallies. Become Libertarians.