I realize you aren't being serious here, but come on, the CIA didn't even exist in the Prohibition Era.

Well, if you get a lot of earthquakes, you don't end up with many buildings that can't survive them, do you. One way or another.

Or, put more briefly, they have a 40 year history of being run like a typical American business.

I think we very likely could do it in Arizona now, if there was an economic reason to do so. In Arizona, there isn't. In space, there is.

Perhaps a good method would be to blast the dust off the panels with pressurized gas. This assumes it's available, of course; an oxygen factory would be a good thing to build, as a prelude to colonization.

Ah, pity. This really should be done. Granted the lag would be a problem, but see my post above for several reasons why this is better than sending humans and all their life support.

Well, yes; but sending up telepresence robots would let us build necessary infrastructure on the moon to make colonization much easier. One way, you have to keep launching oxygen, water, and food out of a deep gravity well to supply the astronauts until they can make all that for themselves. The other way, you just use robots to build the needed infrastructure first. The robots can also be made more resistant to solar radiation and temperature extremes, and if there's a big snafu, at least no one dies of it.

Hur hur hur! Thag have silly idea to make cave from wood! Where Thag going to get wood? How Thag going to cut wood? Thag wasting time. No pay attention to Thag.

But where will the next Microsoft come from?

If you mean the next big abusive computer monopoly: Mountain View, California.

If you mean the next big game changer and innovator: somewhere outside the Benighted States of America, obviously.

Hidden beneath all the shouting, the core issue is that computers and related technologies are all about copying. They make it very very easy to copy things; and the internet makes it very very easy to distribute them. Locking things up so they can't be copied or distributed is relatively complex and difficult. The traditional content creators and distributors can kick and scream and try to push the genie back into the bottle all they want, but their old business model is doomed by these simple facts.

One swallow does not make a summer, nor does the occasional lucid court decision give me faith in the legal system as a whole. It's nice when it happens (Kitzmiller especially), but the courts make plenty of bad calls too. That reactionary fugghead Scalia is still in SCOTUS; British libel law is still horribly broken; and then there's this story.

Really? Didn't work out that way in England.

I use Comcast and I've noticed DNS has been damned slow the last few days. Maybe this is why?

I can, and IANAB, just a science geek. Bacteria are prokaryotic: their DNA is distributed throughout a relatively small cell. Fungi are eukaryotic; their DNA is in a cell nucleus. This is Chapter-1-of-the-textbook stuff.

No, that was Bill Gates. He should have taken the left turn.