The government funded SETI program was terminated 20 years ago (1995). Since then it's been a private research program.

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For the AC who replied to you,

So he thinks it should have been funded for ten years longer than it was?

It's their job.

"102(c) The aeronautical and space activities of the United States shall be conducted so as to contribute materially to one or more of the following objectives:
(1) The expansion of human knowledge of phenomena in the atmosphere and space;
(2) The improvement of the usefulness, performance, speed, safety, and efficiency of aeronautical and space vehicles;
(3) The development and operation of vehicles capable of carrying instruments, equipment, supplies and living organisms through space;
..."
- National Aeronautics and Space Act (1958)

It's the very first job they are given.

Sword and shield?

I'm not sure they're going to be much of a threat to us.

The analogy doesn't work. In the song, the Devil accepted when he'd lost.

Even that isn't enough. Any system that gives aid and comfort to the extortionists is, by definition, corrupt. An appropriate response would be to create a centralised, universal licensing system to replace existing individual rights-holding licensing. Ends exclusive licenses, therefore prevents region blocking (by allowing other companies to exploit the absence), allows competition and model-differentiation in the distribution marketplace, allows artists to register directly and easily, letting them bypass the Big Four. And sends a clear message that if you don't play nicely with other children, we will take your toys away.

Done the right thing? Passed a law slavishly devoted to the copyright industry's wishes? So mindlessly copied the US version that it contained the same decade-known flaw, an absence of penalties for false-notices, fraudulent-notices, spamming robo-notices, allowing 3rd party companies to create whole business models around extorting fake "fines" out of people? How is any of that the "right thing"?

You are getting your rocket equation backwards. While small changes to payload result in exponentially increasing changes through the stages, reciprocally it takes a large change to the first stage to have a small effect on payload.

Landing a six story building on a barge in the ocean after launching a commercial capsule to the International Space Station.

The barge itself is 300 x 100ft. The extra width is on the deck only.

Hydraulics ran out just before landing. So it lost control at the last moment.

Or you could just google it.

Yes, and it actually was originally called a googolplexplex, but it has been reformed as "googolduplex", in order to standardise the next orders, googoltriplex, googolquadplex (10^10^10^googol, 10^10^10^10^googol, respectively) ... googol-n-plex.

Once you get above a googoldecaplex (ten repetitions of "plex"), you get into googol-10^n-plex notation. Once you get into googolmilliplex (googol-1000-plex), you get into googol-10^3n-plex notation. And so on. [Note googolmilliplex, googol-10^3-plex, is 10^10^10^10...10^100. With 1000 10's raised to 10^100. Googolmegaplex, googol-10^6-plex, is 1,000,000 10's, raised to 10^100.)

Then you have "Great" numbers which are one power higher than their namesakes. Like "Great Googol", which is 10^101. Or "Great Googolplex", 10^(googol+1). And Googolbang or googol-factorial, (10^100)!, which is roughly 1.63 x googlplex^100 (1.6294... x 10^10^100^100. Interestingly, in spite of having a hundred googolplexes of digits, it only has 18 significant figures.)

These are, of course, only the smaller googol related numbers. At some point it really gets silly.

As opposed to our current limited short-range teleporters?

I haven't tried it, but PLA apparently works well as the "wax" in lost-wax casting.

It's worth noting that unlike Hulu/Netflix/iTunes, Auntie doesn't go out of her way to block people who take even basic measures to bypass geo-blocking.

For example, on Firefox I use the Modify Headers addon and an "X-Forwarded-For" entry with the Beeb's own IP address. (212.58.246.94) There are other addons that make it as simple as clicking on a flag. Bit easier than screwing around with VPNs or DNS spoofing.