was a clue zooming far above your head.

And alcohol!

The agricultural megacorporation lobby is very powerful in the US. Very powerful indeed. They are not easily crossed.

There, fixed that for you... your original looked very odd to those of us old enough remember when the agricultural lobby was the farm lobby.

Nearby communities are not far behind in bringing broadband to their residents; they see high-speed Internet as an economic boon akin to rural electrification in the 1930s, one that could bring higher home values, better business climates, and easier access to the modern economy.

I've been saying that for a while. First was electrification, then telephonication, now internetification. High speed internet has become a basic service and necessary baseline for habitability.

Bullshit. What the quoted paragraph says, and what you claim to have said are two very different things. Rural electrification didn't make rural areas habitable (your claim) - it completely changed the face of rural living by dragging them out of essentially medieval conditions and into the modern era. (Refrigerators, lighting, etc... etc... and this included towns (and thus commerce) as well as individual residences.) That being said, I don't completely buy they hype of the quoted paragraph - because, if nothing else, America was still a largely rural country in the 1930's and it's almost entirely urban today.
 

As the rest of my generation retires in large numbers (in 20 years or so), those areas are going to continue to get passed over if they haven't got decent communications infrastructure in place.

This might come as a surprise to you - but most people don't actually want to retire to an isolated cabin in the butt end of nowhere.

Nevertheless, a bunch of fearful and uninformed people vigorously protested Cassini and it's RTG.

For Christ's sake, Cassini was fifteen years ago - and in that time we've launched Curiosity and New Horizons with essentially nary a peep. Even at the time of it's launch, protests and lawsuits against Cassini were marked by how few there were as compared to years past. (Though they loom large in the view of the ill informed because of the amount of attention it got on the 'net at the time.)

The fearful and uninformed here are those who keep citing an event fifteen years ago as some kind of 'proof' of opposition to spaceborne nuclear power - while completely ignoring facts that fail to support their hypothesis.

In other words, it's perfect for the attention span and depth of engagement of the 'net generation' Falkvinge wishes to reach out to. If it can't be summed up in an image meme/slogan - they aren't interested.

Moving water to where people live is a simple engineering problem. Why not solve it instead of being a victim of the weather?

Because there isn't any water to move - California long ago outstripped it's natural supplies and has also already taken all the water they can from adjacent areas.

Based on my experience, it's certainly worth considering.

Well... not knowing where you live, or pretty much any other salient facts (such as the costs of the battery package and the measures you've taken to reduce consumption such that you "have no other utility costs")... your anecdata is pretty much useless. Nice cheerleading, but useless.

Internally, our company uses several different mechanisms for securely transferring sensitive documents, all of which are superior to fax in speed and reliability, but we interact with hundreds of other businesses that refuse to abandon this mid-last-century technology for the same job.

Lost in all this bitching and complaining and casting aspersions on those who still use faxes is the answer to one simple question - why should they switch?

Even though they're "last centuries technology", they're simple and straightforward. The UI standardized and well and widely understood. They're free of malware and viruses and the risk of the endless upgrade treadmill breaking them. They're cheap and widely available, and even if someone takes a sledgehammer to one - you can run out to the store and have a new one online (with minimally trained personnel) within an hour or two. (They're the ultimate in plug-n-play.) Every fax machine is, out of the box, 100% compatible with every other fax machine out there - none of the complications of your "multiple systems".

From the point of view of the end user, they have many virtues that more recent (read "l33t") solutions lack, and few vices - and they just bloody work.

Astrobotics is building and operating the payload, duh.

Let's wait and see if Astrobotic ever even makes it to LEO before counting those chickens.

At 200km the air pressure is about 100 million times less than what it is over here. That is enough to have a reasonable decay rate of weeks/months/years. "skylab" came down after a few decades, right?

Depending on the satellite's drag and ballistic coefficient, below around 200km you're talking hours to days, at 300km - days to weeks at the outside. Unboosted, anything between (roughly) 300 to 350km is essentially gone within a year. That's why Skylab was and ISS is, higher still - in the 400km range.

Skylab's second stage (seperated after the station was in it's final orbit) re-entered after only two years, while the station itself was reboosted on several occasions by docked Apollo spacecraft. Skylab's post occupation lifetime was extended by giving it a larger than normal reboost before the final manned mission departed, and subsequently by carefully maintaining it in a low drag orientation.

The ISS requires regular reboosts to maintain altitude.

I dont understand why they arent powering it with the light entering the aperture. Surely a camera could be powered by some of the light its capturing?

It's still in the early stages of research, but yes you can power a camera from light entering the lens.

Wouldn't it be funny if their target audience boycotted the movie out of solidarity and it flopped?

The "nerds" and "technology workers" could stay away en masse... and the movie would end up making 5.02 billion rather than 5.03 billion. Neither group is that large, or their target audience.

Not that they would stay away mind you - they've been drooling over the possibilities of sequels and prequels for a decade. (And bitching about how Hollywood makes nothing but sequels and remakes for even longer.)

Most of the other clean tax subsidies are given to the clients (e.g. SolarCity, Tesla) not to Musk's companies directly.

On the contrary - SolarCity retains the tax breaks and the subsidies. They even counsel against the "buy it outright" option because "you'll need an accountant specializing in energy credits and taxes". (Read "our business model is based on being an unregulated utility and utterly depends on monthly cashflow from leases".)