Exactly. Even if it's a 1000 to 1 shot, now you don't even know you're at risk and next week when the unlucky one out of 1000 of you go to hospital for a stomach bug, and the doctor asks you if you've been to West Africa, you say no. Granted, it's damn hard to cause a third-world scale outbreak this way, maybe a million to one or rarer for a grand total of at most a dozen or so infections nationwide, but it doesn't matter because you can turn that probability into an exact zero of the doctor stays home until they're guaranteed to not cause that scenario.

NASA has had its careless streak too. See Challenger and the investigation that followed. But realistically, this is what happens whenever you do things in one-see, two-sies instead of in bulk. If the Air Force only had one fighter plane and only flew it once every few months, you can bet there would be a lot of failures for a long time before everyone settled into a voodoo flight ops mentality and nothing new was tolerated at all because the cost of failure was so high.

Maybe yes maybe no. I thought so too on the first look, but on the second look it could just be a trick of the light in the dust/steam/ice coming off the fuel tank.

Windows also help when there's turbulence or just regular maneuvering at takeoff and landing. You can look outside and get your bearings to prevent nausea. Easier to get airsick (or seasick) if you can't see the horizon to stabilize your head.

Interesting, but I tend to remain skeptical. If you're talking about sending up a Bridgeport that you're going to use to make a 5 axis 20ft^3 workspace CNC, I believe you. If you're talking about sending up a dwarf-sized little mill (I can't think of any at the moment, but there's a Taiwanese company that makes table-top mills for about 1k a pop) to build a Bridgeport to build a..., there I just don't believe you can make it work without contorting yourself through a lot of hoops and picking up a lot of extra overhead that makes it more sensible to send up the full-sized Bridgeport instead. But like I said, interesting. If you've got a link to a writeup, I'll read it.

Nowhere in the constitution does it say that treaties can override rights. It's a court challenge waiting to happen. Also, treaties generally aren't voted on in secret, even if they're negotiated that way. In fact, I don't believe congress can legally vote in secret on anything. They can have classified meetings, but they can't pass secret laws.

Any compiler, let alone language, has quirks that can encourage bad behavior in bad programmers.

You can have my curly braces and my if...else...ends when you pry them from my cold dead hands!!!

Difference being that stuff like that can and does change with administrations, but more importantly, is fairly transparent. It's not like you come in to work one morning to your job at wecriticizegovernmentalstupidityforaliving.com and ...what office? what website? It's always been a shuttered building. What boss? What lead reporter? Oh you must be talking about prisoner 24601.

In my most optimistic guestimates, 1000 falcon first stage launches would probably cost about 5-10 billion, assuming they're recoverable half the time and last half a dozen flights each. But even when not counting the cost of the second and earth departure stages, that only puts a few hundred to at most a thousand-plus kg of payload on the moon per flight. You need way more than that to have ISRU equipment *and the in-place industrial capacity to maintain it*. Hell, a CNC mill can run 1000kg. And you need a few of those, some lathes, saws, drill presses, air handlers, compressors, water handlers, etc. Do yourself a favor and walk through a machine shop attached to a college lab or a chemical plant or something and do a mass budget before you start declaring stuff feasible with current tech for reasonable cost.

Unless you have a few trillion dollar coins stashed away somewhere that'll fund thousands upon thousands of chemical rockets, it's just not possible to do this. The only hope we have of actually getting to a place like Mars, or even the Moon, on a large scale (even with sufficient economic incentive to be there) would be new physics or a wild breakthrough in engineering, at least 30dB more than a re-usable SpaceX rocket would be. There's no guarantee that the former is even possible, and there is a guarantee that the latter won't happen without lots of deep thinking and hard work that needs an economic incentive to be worth-while, because it'll be very expensive and involve lots and lots of failure along the way. You can't force it, and you can't afford it, even if you confiscate everyone's possessions and tax everyone's income at 100%.

Someone's forgotten their fortan...

Also doesn't charge ahead with full-bore stupid against half the user and developer base's advice.

Considering W made it a point to keep ICANN's governance under the commerce department (censorship by which is banned by the US constitution) and Obama gave it away in a grand gesture of appeasement, you're pretty spot on.

Wrong attitude. What breaks? Probably nothing, yet. But if you want me to upgrade, you need to provide assurance to me that your shiny new gizmo will work in all my specialized use cases, not expect me to spend time verifying it will.