Worse than a paywall is the preposterous but ever more popular meme that lots of science should be secret so that terrorists can't get a hold of it and do blah blah blah. It is pure horseshit, but it will almost certainly gain enough political currency to be put into practice. For those of you foolish enough to take the contrary position, please note that scientific information has always been easily available in academic libraries. Making it secret would change the way science has been done for about 2 centuries or so. Also few, if any at all, recent terrorist attacks were informed by sophisticated scientific inputs. It is, in point of fact, pure unadulterated horseshit.

Or that old claim that you'll only see the true benefits when the entire world is locked in.

How many times do I have to tell you! It's safe god dammit nuclear power is safe! It's the safest, and cleanest of them all! Jesus H. Christ, you'd think we were talking about friggin'

plutonium or something...

Oh, wait...

'If we were all riding around on Segways now, cities would probably be better places to live compared to the car-infested streets we still endure. But that transformation hasn't happened. And it won’t. Why? Because Segways are lame. They’re too rational. They fail to acknowledge all the irrational reasons people love their cars.'"

Only a complete dork could make such a moronic comment. Everyone riding around in Segways would:

• Abolish what little physical exercise many people get. This would significantly exacerbate an already monstrous health crisis in the U.S.
• Require vast and expensive changes to the public thoroughfare to accommodate such a huge shift in traffic patterns.
• Demonstrate just how irrational and gullible people can be. It is little more than idiotic fashionista fanboyism. There is nothing rational about moving from cars to Segways.
• Overload the electrical grid and require enormous investments there as well. Who will pay for all of this?
• Require the fools who buy them to move back to their cars after they realize the utter impracticality of commuting via Segway.

Some talk has been made of selling what are uncommon terrestrial minerals like gold and platinum, refined on orbit and deorbited at great expense as a business plan, but frankly that's absurd.

Are you crazy? Are you aware that this isSlashdot? That is pure unmitigated heresy around here! We don't want facts or lucid, rational arguments! We wan t space opera full of hot female astronauts!

Lies! It's clean, I tell you, it's clean! Get it through your thick stone cranium: Nuclear power is the cleanest of them all!

Sheesh...

You mean Bull Schitzer?

You mean there's already a linux desktop and they forgot to have a year of the linux desktop? What a bunch of party-poopers!

Naturally, you get modded down. These people are suckers for aerospace industry lobbyists.

So we will spend a reasonable amount of money to send a robot out someplace to fetch an asteroid and put it into lunar orbit so that some bozos can go check it out in person at much greater expense? Why not have the robot do everything for a lot less money? Could it be (just speculating here) that the $100M project is a distraction from the manned project that will, as usual, channel huge amounts of money for yet another pointless human presence?

Aerospace pork will never end. Their lobbying is just too strong, and hordes of fanboys still believe a human has to be out there or it isn't exciting enough.

This could lead to increased transparency for the program and stricter requirements for drone strikes.

1. We're supposed to believe that the agency chartered for secret activities will give up its secret drone program and not continue subsequent drone attacks in secret.
2. DoD, home of DIA, will for some reason not keep the formerly secret CIA drone program secret within the DIA. They will be transparent about it.
3. It came out in The Daily Beast, so it must be true. These highly secretive organizations are now being open, honest, and accoutable to the general public.

Every morning between the time you get up and the time you go to work do 25 sit-ups, 20 pushups, and 25 standing toe-touchings. If you can do that much yet, work up to it over a period of months. Every weekend, go on at least one 5 mile walk, preferably two. If 5 miles is too much, work up to it gradually. If you don't move yourself to do it, nobody will. Think about migrating to a plant based diet, at least a few days a week. Don't look at it as a belief system, philosophy, religion, doctrine, spiritual path, etc. It's just food. Go plant-based a few days a week and figure out what foods you like or don't like and take it from there. Again, you have to drive it.

we've found silicon based flora in our own deep oceans

Citation needed. There are no silicon-based life forms known to man.

They don't have an emission spectrum that can be analyzed?

What if they rinse it off a bit beforehand?