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White House Wants Ideas For "Bootstrapping a Solar System Civilization" 352

MarkWhittington writes Tom Kalil, the Deputy Director for Policy for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Senior Advisor for Science, Technology and Innovation for the National Economic Council, has an intriguing Tuesday post on the OSTP blog. Kalil is soliciting ideas for "bootstrapping a solar system civilization." Anyone interested in offering ideas along those lines to the Obama administration can contact a special email address that has been set up for that purpose. The ideas that Kalil muses about in his post are not new for people who have studied the question of how to settle space at length. The ideas consist of sending autonomous robots to various locations in space to create infrastructure using local resources with advanced manufacturing technology, such as 3D printing. The new aspect is that someone in the White House is publicly discussing these concepts.

Comment why do cowboys hate freedom? (Score 2) 294

Are you colour blind?!! From the very map you cite, it looks like an even break between red & blue states.

With the exception of a few states, this looks more like a Western (non-coastal) state thing.
Western : Montana, Wyoming, Utah, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas.
Plus a scattered handful : Arkansas, Louisiana, Wisconsin, Michigan, Kentucky, Alabama, Virginia, South Carolina, Maine, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey & Delaware.

Comment journalism is dead, capitalism killed it (Score 2) 463

It used to be back during the days when terrestrial broadcast television was king, that the FCC mandated that stations produce a certain % of public service programming. That's the reason we ever had television news reporting in the first place. Or educational kids shows that weren't just half-hour commercials for the latest toys and sugary breakfast cereals.

Then we went to cable, which doesn't have the same regulation, removing the public service programming mandate. From that point everything was driven purely by the capitalistic profit motive.

So instead of filling the multiple 24 hour news channels with thoughtful, in-depth reporting, we've got CNN screaming OMGWTF every five minutes trying to grab attention.

See, the Invisible Hand makes everything better. Do not blaspheme the hand.

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