Going to the moon is expensive AND pointless. You have to do everything you do in Earth orbit, but it has to happen farther away from safety and at the bottom of a gravity well. There's absolutely nothing of value on the moon that couldn't be gotten cheaper by snagging bits off of a water bearing comet, or bringing that same water or up from Earth, for that matter, or mining a few local asteroids in-situ.

Look, gravity is *bad* and expensive. You don't go looking for it. You simulate it a bit with centrifugal force when necessary, but that's all.

Has the Sci fi story been written wherein the great nations of earth inevetibaly go to war to unceremoniously control the moon?

Sure, because trampling over a neighbor's backyard is the same as going to the fucking moon.

It would appear that Tea Party Politics are a form of infectious disease, and it's spreading to Russia. Does anyone have the time to tell Capt.PutPut that the USSR, and the Space Race are over?

If he issues an executive order to undo the spying, it is likely that those in congress who want the spying to stay will refuse to support Obama on other things he wants.

Bush wrote his orders in such a way that no other President can undo them. It requires congress, so this is 100% Bush's fault, and Obama is not allowed to undo it. I hate the people irrationally attacking him for something he simply cannot undo. Please attack the family responsible for it instead. The Bush junta created this and has left it in a state that Democrats cannot legally undo.

So you are saying Congress needs to authorize the current activities legislatively, before Obama would feel he had authority to override them by executive order? So as long as the activities are completely illegal he's powerless to stop them, but if they got a legislative fig-leaf then he could stand up to the Republicans by defying them? You just might have a future at the office of White House Counsel young man!

I almost hope Hillary wins, Obama is not going to leave office if he loses to a Republican (and his followers will eat it up; 'election was rigged, election was rigged!').

As a constitutional law scholar and professor Barack H. Obama knows damn well he can issue an presidential executive order to stop the NSA's activities. Yet he effectively does nothing by waiting on Congress. Shame on Uncle Tom. And you thought Sam was your uncle.

Check who voted for the Patriot Act the first time around. Almost everyone from all parties. Those were their true colors; they took advantage of the situation and used it as an opportunity to take away our rights. Furthermore, many people in both parties (except now it's Republicans that tend to do this more often) continue to vote to renew the Patriot Act.

If Obama really hated this, he'd try to stop it with his executive orders *even if* that would only be temporary. At least it would stop the collection for now. But he doesn't, and it doesn't matter what he does, because you seem to be an Obama drone.

I am center-left, and it's all horse shit. The fourth amendment has been gutted and I'm livid... as I am with Obama and Holder's misuse of drone strikes against US citizens.

Eh. Better yet, build a nuclear rocket that doesn't release any radioactive material at all. After all, you only need the heat. Use a propellant that absorbs UV and flow it around a nuclear lightbulb, and you have a rocket many times as efficient as anything we can build today, even at the low end of its theoretical range. Anyhow, it should be usable in atmosphere...

A new plane doesn't make a new engine possible. A new engine makes a new plane possible.

It's great that there Elon Musk is pushing out gains in performance, reusability and most importantly cost in chemical engine design! Kudos to him (and his company).

Of course for the real exploration of the solar system to begin, we'll need nuclear (fusion!) or other such unrealized technologies. Still it's a good start!

You say it like it's a bad thing. One of the objectives of bitcoin users is to avoid paying tax. And yet you believe governments should "bend over backwards" to help cover the inevitable losses from an unregulated market? Covered presumably by the tax paid by people using ordinary currencies.

You can't have it all ways.

Yes, because the advocates of those currencies are loudly crowing that the entire point is to enable criminal acts. That it's a perfect money laundering service and that this is a great thing.

But if a government responded rationally to this widely advertised lawbreaking by shutting down the people who launder money and the mechanism they're using to do it, that would somehow be immoral, and anyway they wouldn't do it. Because, um. Government bad, government inefficient, Bitcoin rules, FBI drools?

I'm shocked, shocked that Bitcoin exchanges might conceivably be running into money problems related to fund and transfer freezes from ongoing international drug investigations. That's simply not possible, because Bitcoin!