If only the world could be fueled on socialist self-righteousness.

Ah, yes, it loses the essence of corn-dom.

Idiot.

"Free" is increasingly becoming the new thing; free-to-play models are starting to rise and succeed in video games, free steaming tv shows and other video are becoming increasingly popular, and naturally there are companies that operate in a way someone-like Google does. How many android/iPhone apps are free? And then we see various music services cropping up that allow free streaming music..

Why would the news be different from this trend? It's harder and harder to prevent the dissemination and replication of information
(pirating etc) and companies are finding creative new ways to still make money even in light of that. And the news is subject to the same problem; a paywall is not a big deal if one person has a subscription and can pass the text of the article around elsewhere.

All it takes is for one competitor to shit in the pot and go free or next-to-free to ruin the market for everyone else; I don't see pay-for news being a viable or stable strategy in the long-term.

Billions and billions of dollars?

Or maybe because even most scientists (actual scientists, not armchair commentators on slashdot) can't find an actual utilitarian reason to build a moon base other than juvenile delight at living out their sci-fi fantasies?

What makes you think they'll invest in something that has no guarantee of working, then takes perhaps 60yrs+ to have the first possible return on investment? No one does that these days, because all rewards must be immediate, apparently.

It almost sounds like you'd expect people to make an incredibly risky investment that probably won't pay out until they are dead, like someone has a social responsibility to do that or something.

At least he didn't do it in Minecraft.

Ron Paul doesn't support a direct return to the gold standard, so that's where I stopped reading your post. I certainly wouldn't vote for him (or anybody for that matter) but I'm not going to waste my time on Slashdot reading posts where someone didn't even do their most basic research. This is slashdot, not reddit.

Science should NOT be corporate-funded, it should be grant-funded -- directly from a scientific organization like NIST, or indirectly via university (or other educational) departments.

This is an extremely naive viewpoint born mostly out of ideology.

Much, perhaps most, scientific fraud in published studies has little to do with corporate R&D. In fact, it's fighting for grant money in the publish-or-perish environment in academia that contributes to most fraud. The grant system itself, in its current incarnation, is probably the largest contributor to scientific fraud.

It's this "business/capitalism-is-the-root-of-all-evil" Marxist reductionism that is getting really tiresome to read. I get it. You don't like business. Just don't try to boil down every ill in the world to "the corporations." When you do, you sometimes propose solutions that amplify the problem!

And what did you even want to propose, anyway? No private scientific R&D? Are you mad?