OK, I realize I may skew a little older than many Slashdot readers, so here. Consider this your Easter gift:

http://youtu.be/ftgAG3Vnif8

Do you think you can use adamantium in a 3D printer?

Asking for a friend.

I had an uncle with a wooden leg and I thought it was a big deal until I found out my aunt had a cedar chest.

Unlike every previous launch, however, we the taxpayers are paying a fixed price to SpaceX, instead of the bloated cost-plus contracts that are large part of the reason why there hasn't been much progress in manned spaceflight in the last four decades.

Well, it's theoretically less expensive, but not yet. If you extrapolate out 50 missions, you start seeing SpaceX making an actual profit instead of a projected profit based on a fee stream.

My problem is that the entire thing still relies on government. If there is value in a "private" space industry, it hasn't been found yet.

Further, none of the profits ever materialize if you look at the external costs of the federal government already having done the hard work. Unless you believe SpaceX started with a clean sheet of paper and didn't make use of the past half-century of government space programs.

At best, you can say that there's a place for government and private industry to work together on the really big things like space travel. Without the government over-spending, there's good reason to believe we'd never have seen any space program at all. Or, convince me that without the initial public investment, any private company would have done the basic research required to send the first satellite into space.

~300,000,000 guns, ~100,000,000 gun owners, with about ~14,000 annual homicides committed with firearms. Rhetorical question: What's 14,000 divided by 100,000,000 or 300,000,000?

It is a people problem. Studies have shown that the vast majority of first time murders already had extensive violent criminal records. Clearly the justice system is not doing these people or society justice, since there were ample opportunities to intervene before they took a human life.

It's also a socioeconomic problem, because crime is driven in large part by poverty. You want to cut gun violence? End the war on drugs, increase education and job placement funding, and start to look at seriously reforming our mental healthcare system.

Of course, all of those things are hard to do. It's a lot easier if you can just blame the guns, as though inanimate objects are possessed of powers of their own.

No it's not that simple. Plants require nutrients from the soil, which have to be replenished each year[1] partly by natural in-soil processes that break down residue from previous crops, but mostly from the application of synthetic fertilizer, which is synthesized using a process that burn natural gas. See the wikipedia article on the Haber Process.

Also there are fossil fuels used in the planting, cultivation, harvest, and irrigation of the crop.

If corn could fix its own nitrogen like legumes do, it might be a lot closer to carbon neutral.

[1] In many parts of the world, including the Brazillian rainforest, farmers are actively "mining" nutrients from the soil. The soil left from burning the rainforest is extremely rich in nutrients, allowing intensive farming for a few years. After a while, though, the soil is depleted of nutrients and organic matter and yields drop. Sadly many farms just burn down more forest. Some methods of farming, including zero-till, try to foster natural soil processes to produce more nitrogen in natural ways, reducing synthetic inputs.

Sorry friend, the design of the NASA space stations were done by NASA. They had private industry do the industrial part because they wanted to reward big political donations.

Either way though, it's a good thing we didn't wait for "private industry" to go to space, or we'd still be in the Sputnik stage.

Yes, it was, because it allows the urban parts of the country to dictate policy to the rural parts. It removed a critical check against the tyranny of the majority. It has lead to three generations of rural disillusionment and resentment that has now reached the point where there are mainstream secessionist movements (because Reynolds v. Sims couldn't touch the structure of the United States Senate, just the State level upper houses) in several States.

Your perspective would probably be different if you lived in any part of New York outside of New York City, or Western Massachusetts, or Southern Illinois, or rural California, blah, blah, blah.

Explain to me why it's acceptable for the United States Senate to be allocated based on geography instead of population, but not for the New York State Senate to be similarly allocated? What would be so horrible about creating a State Senate that granted each County two Senators while retaining the population based Assembly?

It's awesome that you attack one of the two major political parties (and by extension 30-40% of the American electorate) by name and get an upmod, while I simply state an opinion without any attack and get a flamebait mod.

The first space station went up in 1971. Forty-three years later, private industry figures out how to send a rocket up there. With taxpayers footing the bill.

John Galt is half a retard.

I think he likes beer. Just look at an aardvark, that's a morning-after-the-night-before job if ever I saw one..

I think you needed a "BRB, door" or perhaps a @.;'0 no carrier in there somewhere.

Tablets

You mean the 10 Commandments kind?

Thou shalt not take thyself so seriously that you think you have to save everything.

Imagine if these things fell into the hands of tairsts, or pediofiddlers? Someone could lose an eye.