Or a cheap way to extract gold from seawater; remember aluminum was once considered a precious metal on par with gold. It's not really scarcity of the resource but the scarcity of the available supply.

Which is why Bitcoin is more of a speculative hedge, like gold, than a currency. For Greece situation, the hedge makes sense because you are worried about local impact, rather than a world wide event. However, I question demand going up to the levels in the article. At some point, individuals will look for alternatives such as gold if the price gets too high; and those who bought cheap ought to dump theirs and take the profits before the inevitable drop; especially since moving BitCoins out of Greece is easier than moving Euros. They can get Euros or Dollars, since the bigger danger for them is not a collapse of the Euro but the Greek government deciding to convert Euros in Banks back to Drachmas and exit the Euro zone. Having Euros or Dollars outside of Greece is what they want, not a speculative hedge and if Bitcoin let them do that they'll buy it; but sell it as well lessing the chance of a big runup.

The risks of nuclear are much larger than the estimates at the beginning of the nuclear age, which are used by the merry slashdot pro-nuclear band.

And yet, to date, nuclear power has done less damage to the environment, as well as killing fewer people (by several orders of magnitude) than just coal mining, much less coal power in general.

If we'd gone all nuke back in the 60's, we'd not have had the last half century worth of coal mining deaths, nor would we have the coal ash heaps piled untidily about our environment. And best of all, we wouldn't be talking about AGW, since CO2 levels wouldn't be this high by a significant margin....

Yes, I know you were being snide.

That said, the ability to reach an NEO means putting a multiton spacecraft farther out (in deltaV terms) than we've ever gone before.

Something meant to put men on Mars MIGHT be suitable. Or not, depending on the orbit of the particular NEO that turns out to be a threat.

Yes, we're likely to have years of warning to develop the needed hardware. But "likely" isn't certainty, and it would really suck to waste ten years mapping NEOs only to discover that the last one we found was going to impact in nineteen months....

Which is why the development of suitable spacecraft should be done in parallel with the search for NEO's, NOT in series with the search....

It already has weeded out large landbound reptiles that can't take the heat (or the cold) due to meteor strikes.

I really, really hope you're not talking about dinosaurs here. Since dinosaurs were more closely related to birds than reptiles (why do you think they move Aves under Dinosauria recently?)....

A plan to save us from NEOs would require some ability to actually reach an NEO before it hit.

Since we're not working to develop that capability, pretty much anything else we do is irrelevant....

Do you even understand why the medallion system was implemented? I'll give you a hint, it has nothing to do with so-called taxi cartels.

Let's see. A bit of reading shows that the medallion system was implemented because of "public fears" that taxi drivers were driving too much, and therefore not doing proper maintenance on their vehicles.

So, the solution to "public fears" was to limit the number of taxis (which would require the taxi drivers to drive even more, thus further limiting their time spent on maintenance, OR to reduce the general availability of taxis, since they'd have fewer taxis working fewer hours each)....

Yeah, that's a strong argument in favour of the medallion system alright.

You are entitled to a private life, but if you make something public, it's public, period. No take backs. Not because I said so but because of the nature of public information.

For the sake of argument, what if someone with a twitter feed decides it's newsworthy and does it for you?

Umm, for someone with a twitter feed to decide some part of your private life is newsworthy, you had to have told him about that part of your private life.

And once you tell someone something, it's no longer "private".

Remember: "three people can keep a secret as long as two of them are dead"....

Why is is that after more than fifty years of progress, the United States is taking more time to put humans into orbit than it took to go to the moon?

Two reasons, really.

1) We spent money like water on the moon race.

2) We really don't care about putting men in space these days.

Okay, 3 reasons:

3) Two shuttles full of dead people in a risk-averse society. We've gotten so we get panicky when people die, especially when they do it on TV. So we're insisting on an insane level of perfection for putting people up. Hell, Dragon could've been putting people up for a couple years now, if it weren't for NASA's "man-rating" standards....

Etc... etc... Lots of potential reasons.

Yep. Hence the "unclear", as opposed to "stupid decision" or something similar....

If they get that going beyond the talking stage, I demand that they include a clause banning divorce in that proposed amendment. Vows that include the phrase "as long as we both shall live" should mean something, dammit!

Note that marriage is NOT a religious thing. It's a government thing. The religious ritual is completely irrelevant to marriage in the USA, since the only thing that makes a marriage valid in the eyes of the law is that marriage license you get at City Hall (or wherever the appropriate office is where you live).

The words the pastor says no more a marriage make than your father saying "well, you're ready to drive" means you have a Driver's License....

Of course, the GMO proponents will oppose this.

Of course they will. Because if it costs money to develop GMOs, then there had better be a return on investment. Or noone will bother.

And since GMOs, like any new drug, includes a lot of trial & error (mostly error), your successful new GMO (or drug) has to carry the costs of all your unsuccessful ones. So you have to be able to make a lot of money on any success, or noone will bother.

Note that the cost of developing this failed GMO will have to be paid, down the line, by higher costs on other products produced by the same people.

39 of the rockets they've "acquired" have never flown. LauncherOne is over a year away from its first test flight.

Arianespace's soyuz launchers (the other 21) have at least actually, though why they're not buying soyuz launches directly from the Russians is unclear.

They did just censor search results for merchandise branded with a particular logo that has a negative connotation for most enlightened humans

What, they decided to censor Civil War games too?

Except that if "State", only means individual states, then many of the constitutional amendments - including the second - fall apart on the federal level.

I'm curious as to which part of the Second falls apart on the Federal level. I'm assuming it's "shall not be infringed", but I'm not sure what that has to do with the "State".

Note that "being necessary to a free State" does not actually imply that the Federal Constitution is any less bound by "shall not be infringed" (since the Second is a modification of the FEDERAL Constitution, not a State Constitution).