Going to the metric system require us to exchange a system with a several non-decimal conversions (i.e. 12 inches = 1 foot, 2 cups = 1 pint, 16 ounces = 1 pound) to one with decimal conversions, of which 16 are required to be memorized in the order of increasing or decreasing units.

Horsehockey.

Most people never need to bother beyond milli, centi, desi and kilo. And, hey, the conversion is always decimal based so you just need to know the names. Desi and centi are not "regular" 3 orders of magnitude units but you do need to measure 1dl for cooking and 1cm is a lot more useful measure than 1mm for everyday business.

Beyond that, doing actual calculations, even simple ones, gets ugly fast on silly units. Figuring out the cubic kilometer thing is public school math, many people would get it wrong for sure but the principle is exactly the same never mind which units are used. Now most people don't do math with real life objects on day to day business which explains why so many people don't "get" metrics.

As I said, foot and pound are perfectly good units. Just adjust the adjacent stuff to work on decimal scale and you're peachy.

Nice try but the real meat of the metric system is that it works in ten-based system. Everyone can figure out how many millimeters are in a kilometre or how many cubic meters would you have in a cubic kilometre.

Good luck with that on the silly units. Foot would be perfectly good unit if broke down into ten inches and ten feet would work out to one yard..

Hmm, water, hence air, check. Relatively low gravity well, check. Plenty of sunlight sans atmosphere, check. It's a stupendous gas/water station as soon as someone gets a water => oxygen/hydrogen facility running there. Yeah, getting there in the 1st place is pretty hard but once you have ability to refill tanks from moon..

Oh my.

Customer segment A buys 1000pcs of a product with $8 profit/sale
Customer segment B buys 20000pcs of a product with $2 profit/sale

Which one made the company more revenue?

Looks like the links from your profile's "comment" page are busted. You cannot view your own comments in the thread to see what people replied to you.

There's English Al Jazeera which you can buy at least in Finland as a part of pay tv packages. Apparently they're by far more balanced with their reporting than the Arabian version is. Not too surprising, perhaps, considering their target audience.

Well, WB and BG are donating serious amounts of money to charities. After a couple of billions I do think you can start thinking a little bit out of the box beyond accumulating the next billion. Bill Gates has made his personal foundation focus on curing Malaria. Whatever you think of history of Microsoft, that's pretty worthy goal.

No sci-fi appeal, thought. Unless they device mosquito genotherapy that goes horribly wrong..

Ironically, Warren Buffet could fund his own serious space program if he wanted.

But you see, son, we did those nuclear tests for a good cause. Without those tests we wouldn't have the capability to destroy all life on earth five times over today. God bless America!

Seriously, thought, if you think of the rabid opposition to patently clean, efficient and safe nuclear fission power plants, you'd have ecoterrorists suicidebombing the project from get go. Luckily we have other options rather than the crude nuclear impulse engine. Some examples do things like using reactor core to superheat propellant which gives you crazy delta-v for the mass, bit like ion engines. Only this thing can generate serious thrust as well.

Still has bad nucular-word in it. Let's hope Obama's IMHO smart push to privatise space industry allows private launch companies to think out of the box on this one. After all a private company doesn't really answer to voters the same way as goverment institutions do. Unfortunately the goverment still regulates private efforts..

Still, Greenpeace spreads scaremongering about some rather modest fission piles contained in space probes wiping out half of the population on earth (or something like that), just imagine the propaganda about bona fide serious nuclear propulsion..

There is in fact navy presence in the area. Even a well-known blue waters superpower like Finland sent a corvette.

The problem is that
a) Actual warships are tremendously expensive
b) Warships are meant to fight other warships, not to deter pirates, so they're a tremendous overkill

British navy guy in The Register suggested some time ago that the right naval response for pirate hunting would be to get some freight ships and convert them to helo tenders. Helicopters can go all around the place quickly so they can in fact respond to pirate attacks at sea. On the other hand the fleet auxiliary tender would be rather cheap compared to a billion-euro destroyer full of high tech gizmos designed to fight nuclear submarines, jet fighters and seaskimming missiles.

Would a stint hunting somali pirates in a glorified freighter be exciting to naval officers and/or boost for career? Hell no. So therefore such low-cost solution is not considered, instead we get nice lines on CV for captains of destroyers looking for a position in admiralty..