You're right. Nothing ever came out of the space program, aerospace industry or particle physics labs that equated back to our day to day life.

To quote JFK, "We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too"

The U.S. learned from going to the moon. From building the tevatron and the A-12/SR-71. From the Manhattan project.

It doesn't matter if the goals are social equality and food for all, or freeing ourselves from the Oil economy. What matters is the single, common and focused goals to drive projects and technology further. The type of projects that lead to new and better lives for everyone in it. The list of discoveries and advancements made *JUST* off of the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo projects would fill pages. It was not about putting a footprint on the moon. It was putting a footprint on the moon and learning everything we could about doing it. It was about the advancement in computers, radio, rocketry, electronics and a myriad of other fields. The A-12 project advanced our understanding of supersonic travel to a new level.

The point is, I really think as a society, we've fallen into the prediction that John Steinbeck made at the height of the progress of the 60's.

"We now face the danger, which in the past has been the most destructive to the humans: Success, plenty, comfort and ever-increasing leisure. No dynamic people has ever survived these dangers."

50 years ago the U.S. could put a man into space. Today it can't.
50 years ago the U.S. was at the forefront of particle physics. Today it isn't.
50 years ago the U.S. started development of 3 different spacecraft on 5 different man rated rockets over a 7 year span. Today it's 10 years just to develop one.
50 years ago the U.S. had a plane capable of traveling at Mach 3.35. Today it doesn't.

I seriously feel bad for the future country my kids will inherit. It doesn't seem like we're moving in the right direction on the science and technology front.

Seriously. If you aren't paying for it, you aren't the customer. You're the product being sold.

You don't actually think they spend $20,000.00 on a hammer, $30,000.00 on a toilet seat do you?

I just got my quote for replacement tokens. They're giving me a 3 to 6 month estimate on when I'll actually have the new tokens. I can quote the whole chain from "Nothing was stolen" to "Nothing was stolen that could replicate a token" to "Yea, our bad."

Lets ask the fine folk of Pripyat how the government run nuclear facility, completely free from capitalism running into it's core fault worked out.....

What happened on Slashdot? It used to be that you'd actually write a summary with several relevant links to different sources. Then it became just quoting the first paragraph of the article. Now its just posting the entire article? At least I guess we can't claim someone didn't RTFA.

It's the timey wimey wibbly wobbley....

You have 65,000 inbound ports. You can't possibly be peering with more then 1000 or 2000 other torrents anyway without completely destroying your bandwidth. Further, there is nothing that says SSH has to run on port 22. You just like it to because it's easy. There's no reason you can't NAT to 100 servers for SSH, run 50 webservers (with both SSL and non-SSL ports), torrent to 5000 of your best friends and still have 59,000 ports left to play with. And a translation table with 5000 entries isn't beyond the capabilities of anyone that might actually have the much infrastructure running behind the device.

I just want my stapler back... The new ones aren't as good as the swinglines.

It's completely ironic that the government would prevent a corporation from requiring that if it a supplied gives a better price to another customer, it has to give the same price to that corporation. Especially since the GSA requires that any government vendor do the same thing or its a violation of the False Claims Act. So seriously, how is it that an act that hurts the consumer is good for the government?

Politicians continually want it both ways, but this is seriously a waste of tax payers money.

The point where democracy fails is when 51% of the people realize they can take all the money from the other 49%

Time can be rewritten. He'll come back. Fix deepwater horizon, prevent the disaster and then none of this thread would have ever existed. I just wonder if my mod points would survive the change :)

Actually, odds are that none of the gas you are buying at a BP station actually came from BP. The stuff all comes from the same local distributors who pass it back and forth like it's water. Local stations (none of which in the US are actually owned by BP) just pay for the right to use the name. To boycott BP you'd need to track their shipments in and out of places and then find out where things went. Unless the local distributors boycott BP (not likely) there isn't anything you'll be able to do as a customer. And besides, if BP goes under, who then will pay for the spill.