It took 8 years from Kennedy's speech in 1961 to a human on the moon in 1969. Not only did NASA get a moon rocket designed, tested, and launched in that time, it also got an intermediate rocket program (Gemini) designed, tested, and launched prior to the moon program.

From scratch.

Other than the part about Gemini... you're completely wrong. Development of the F1 engine started in 1956. The J-2 got started in 1959. Engineering studies and development of what would become the Apollo spacecraft and the Saturn V booster were well underway by 1960. There was also a ton of other R&D projects and nascent technologies from NASA and DoD programs then under way. (Apollo relied on chips developed for the DoD and a guidance system borrowed from a SLBM.) That's part of why Kennedy chose the moon landing as a goal over his other options we already had many of the pieces under development.
 
And you can't discount another critical factor - during the crucial startup period Apollo had a massive budget.
 

Now we're looking at (maybe) 11 years to develop a working rocket to go to an asteroid.

Space programs are like women, when you compare a fantasy (your massively romanticized and largely factually incorrect version of Apollo) to reality... it's unsurprising that reality doesn't measure up.
 

But the call of space comes from the same place the call of the sea arose from in the past. To Terra Incognita, where "Here Be Dragons." Sorry, there be no dragons around the space rock.

Nope. The call of the sea was "here there be PROFIT".

a stunning achievement. from that effort came chips, medical telemetry, Lord only knows what.

In general, we got damm little back from the Apollo project. (Though NASA's PR department has spent decades telling us different.) Take chips for example - the only reason chips were available for Apollo is because someone had already built the fabs. (To sell chips to the DoD. But they got their timing wrong and the DoD wasn't buying big right then... leaving capacity available for Apollo.)

After necessities like food, rent, electricity, phone, transportation, clothing, and so on, it's going to take some wicked budgeting skills to have any disposable income at all.

So? It sucks to be poor. It's *always* sucked to be poor. It always *will* suck to be poor. You can't legislate that away.

Lack of living wage jobs is a problem. But so are the excessive expectations, created in part by our material culture and in part by the belief (created from whole cloth) that nobody should ever suffer because life is unfair nor have a life that sucks.

I used the Internet, quite happily and successfully, for more than a decade, before HTTP (curse you, Tim Berners-Lee) began to intrude on the experience. I would be very happy to go back to those days. Throw in an IRC/FTP/RTP+RTSP "subscription" for content, and there's nothing I would miss.

Yet... here you are. And looking at your posting history, pretty regularly too.
 

The old adage about TV ("99 channels and nothing on") applies to the web, but with several orders more magnitude of noise to signal.

If there's "nothing on TV", then what exactly are you doing here? And seriously, In a day where there's practically nothing that's not got a web page and a user community somewhere... I suspect you're blowing smoke for the karma.

The gaming community really doesn't need this old stereotype of gamers as uptight nerds who are scared to step outside the bounds of adult-imposed propriety. I played D&D in high school in the 1980s, but I found plenty of time for illin' like any other teenager.

Pretty much this. The same guys I played D&D with on Saturday afternoons in '80/'81 were the same guys I cruised the Stratford Strip with on Friday night and went (underage) drinking with on Saturday night. And the same guys who drove their cars waaay too fast on the back roads around Rural Hall. And went shooting the appliances folks had dropped in the woods off of Payne Road with. (And occasionally took a pot-shot at the old Payne place, which was rumored to be haunted.) In fact, the only real difference between semi-redneck gamers and the semi-rednecks non gamers around us was that we played D&D (and Traveller, and Boot Hill, and Gamma World, and... a whole bunch of other games vanished into the mists of time). The only time I recall one of us getting beat up was when one (not me) made an ill-chosen remark about someone's sister.
 
D&D and other fantasy and war games were also quite popular when I was in the Navy - and the submarine service is hardly a bastion of conformist nerds.

Correlation does not equal causation. And you've left out how Gygax and Arneson were avid wargamers, and how the first ruleset of what would become D&D was an expansion (by Gygax) of a medieval rule set by Jeff Perren... and how Arneson (an avid player of Napoleonic figures based wargames) further expanded on the concept.

Since the significant point mentioned was "the presence of a CPU" and not "the presence of Microsoft".... your point would be what?

For penny-ante criminal activity, yeah, BTC might make it easier for perpetrator and harder for the cops if he uses his head and a little common sense.

But for the bigger stuff and full blown fraud? (I.E. anything that's going to bring the full weight down on your head.) I don't think BTC will change things much unless you're willing to never, ever touch the hidden or ill gotten money that you've somehow managed to never have in your name in traceable records in the first place. Once it's traceable, I suspect it doesn't matter much if it disappears as traceable USD and re-appears as a Tesla bought with (theoretically untraceable) BTC... You're going to have some explaining to do, and it's going to be very hard to create reasonable doubt.

But as always, the "if you can't do the time" rules applies unless you're 110% certain you'll never slip up. Because all it takes sometimes is once.

This. It's the the thing that the "it scales back slightly the decentralized and fee-less nature of Bitcoin, which are important features to many of its supporters" crowd doesn't grasp. (One of the many things about how the real world works that many BTC fanboys don't grasp.)

What sort of "rebels" would have the training an ability to set up and operate a crew served weapon?

Rebels that had that training before they became rebels? (And who could then give guys that didn't have the training the bare minimum they need to know.) That's a serious answer by the way, folks don't lose their knowledge just because they turn their coats. And on top of that, low level missile systems designed to be used in active combat (like the BUK) are generally not designed to operated by rocket scientists in the first place. They're simplified and designed to operate quickly with minimal controls.

I take it you've never studied forensic accounting, or met a forensic accountant? (I have both, as it's a specialty my wife (an accountant) was looking at going into.) It's actually very hard to make funds "disappear" unless they never "appeared" in the first place. The only way to hide illicit income is to never visibly spend it and never take traceable possession of it. You might be able to hide a big pile of wealth - but you will leave traces that you moved it. Paying someone under the table? Same problem. Etc... etc...

Or, to put it another way, like so many here on Slashdot, you seem to suffer from the delusion that you know better than the actual professionals. You don't. Forensic accounting and accountants have been around a long time, and they've seen everything you describe. Using bitcoin the Mob might be able to get away with these things for a while, but knowing what I do (and what you seemingly don't) I wouldn't even try.

Is your only point to pick at the example or do you really disagree with the thesis?

I didn't pick at the example - I completely demolished your theory by demonstrating that your cheap and plentiful could not possibly exist. But you're to thickheaded to realize this.
 

Making your basket nuclear but still needing another 10 support baskets that limit its speed and supply its eggs with yoke defeats the purpose of having it nuclear!

Wrong again moron. The purpose of going nuclear wasn't to increase cruise speed, but to increase dash speed (I.E. at flight quarters), and to reduce the volume required for ship's propulsion to make greater volume available for aircraft fuel, munitions, spares, food, etc... (And as a bonus, they've discovered they can also carry about three days worth of fuel for the escort group - greatly improving the overall operational flexibility.)
 
Or, to put it another way, your cheap and simple is actually much more complicated and expensive than you think because you now need an enlarged logistics train to fuel the carrier. It's much more constrained in operations both because the lower dash speed limits the top weight of aircraft that can be launched and because it must be resupplied (with fuel, ammo, food, spares, etc...) more often.
 

What part of this is complicated?

It's very fucking complicated - and you have the understanding roughly equivalent to a five year old who goes "oooh, sun hot daddy!" and mistakenly believes he thus grasps the intricacies of the fusion reactions that produce that heat.

The reality is whatever fancy device you own that has any kind of transistor in it, much less a CPU-- a phone, a tablet, a TV-- you're having to fuss with it. Constantly.

Horseshit. My printer has a CPU in it, and in three years I've never had to do anything but turn in on. (I rely on the auto off feature.) Ditto for the CPU's in my and my wife's cars. Or in our GPSr's (a handheld and two dashboard navigation systems). Or in our washer and dryer. Or in our home entertainment system (TV, Tivo, HDMI switch, Roku, Blu-Ray player). Or in our microwave. Or... we pretty much haven't had to "mess with" any of the dozens of the CPU's in our possession. (And most of what little "messing with" we've had to do has been with the phone and desktop, and the "messing with" has been minimal... hit "update" and walk away for bit.) I don't know what planet you live on, but here on Earth in 2014, consumer grade devices don't generally require user intervention.

Anyone with an IQ above room temperature has long known that if Bitcoin was accepted as a medium of exchange it would be treated like any other and subject to the appropriate taxes and has no problems with being so.

And then Amtrak took over all passenger rail-travel, and has never shown a profit since.

Passenger rail has never been a profitable business in the US.