When we (academics) do experiments on people however trivial we usually have to go through ethical clearance, get informed consent etc. I think its skipping that part that people are uncomfortable about.

The operative word being "usually", which implies there exist cases where you don't. The discomfort come from people not grasping the existence of the "usually", and that businesses are not academics and product testing is not held to the same standard.

Ask yourself what backs the value of UPS shipping labels, that people are willing to give substantial sums to obtain one? Intrinsically the label is just sticky paper with some printing on it. The answer is the UPS network of trucks and distribution terminals. They enable a package with a label on it to get from one place to another.

In a similar way, the Bitcoin network of p2p nodes, mining hardware, desktop apps, merchants accepting it, and user wallets enable moving money from one place to another.

In other words, Bitcoin is precisely what I said - a medium of exchange, a coupon, a token, not a currency.
 

The network makes bitcoin balances useful, and therefore have value.

So? Having value [being useful] does not equate to having value [monetary worth]. They're two different things, though I can see why BTC fanboys would like to obscure the existence of that distinction - because it's existence demolishes their entire theory.

As to the balance of your reply, it's just more of the same... handwaving, smokescreens, and you using words that don't mean what you think they do.

This is always the crux of the Great Bitcoin Debate.

No it's not, because it's no more something that can be debated than whether or not the sun rises in the East in the morning. You can't debate facts.
 
The rest of your post is just more of the same - smoke and irrelevant mirrors.

So... can we just formally decree that cryptocoins meet the definition of a "currency", and be done with it?

I certainly hope not, because ultimately they're completely unlike other foreign or domestic currencies in that they have nothing backing their worth*. They're much more like coupons, casino tokens, or tasting tokens at a beer festival than real money. They're a medium of exchange not a store of value. The flaw in the logic behind cryptocurrencies is that their inventors and proponents fail to recognize this.
 
* Generally the economy of the issuing country.

The company[Google] is never aware of any issues. It's their standard smokescreen/disclaimer.

Having spent many hours in trainers and simulators of varying levels of fidelity courtesy of Uncle Sam's Canoe Club - trust me, a low fidelity simulator is much better than none at all. You can still learn quite a bit.

When you graduate kindergarten, and learn to read, go back and read the exchange and note that spin-offs are the topic of discussion - not follow on missions.

Until then, toddle off to bed with the other infants, the adults are have a conversation here.

Pretty much this for me too... I'm a photographer, and those side effects would directly affect my ability to shoot. Not worth it.

On the other hand, for a submersible? Meh, not impressive. Dive below and it gets calm fairly quickly.

Since it isn't a submersible and didn't (couldn't) dive, your point would be what? That you can't be bothered to read TFA, instead making assumptions and then treating them as facts?

This. And "some tiny minority continuing to do things the buggywhip way" may technically mean the buggywhip way isn't dead... but yeah, for all useful purposes it actually is.

Why should anyone believe a person with a clear agenda, no access and no evidence?

That was my thought too... except I'd have added "and whose report contains so many assumptions, incorrect statements, and weasel words that even if I was inclined to believe the guy I'd be skeptical".

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.