How will I decide whether I want a right ARM or a left ARM? If they are ambidextrous, will it matter?

The fact that NASA went to the moon in 1969 was interesting, exciting, and fun. I remember where I was that day. At the dentist, with a portable tv from home, and when we put it in back the trunk of our car, we smashed the rabbit-ears antenna that we forgot to fold down before we shut the trunk lid.

That said, the question isn't "was it cool?" or even "was it worth it?" It's "what if Apollo never happened?

Most of us agree that it was cool. Was the expenditure to get a man on the moon worth it? Let's say it cost 40 billion 1970 dollars, which is like 100 billion today dollars (that's not exact, but in the ballpark). Was it that much money's worth of cool? Hard to say, but that's not really important to the "what if" question. And I bet if Apollo were a new project today, it would cost a trillion dollars. Especially considering that it cost the USA 15 billion dollars to reroute 10 miles of highway under Boston.

People who are saying that we wouldn't have the internet or tang or teflon are mistaken, because the moon money might have been spent on other science projects. As it was, the space program was allied with the techno-military-industrial complex already, so other innovation would have happened even without a moonshot.

I'm not a moon landing hoax person, but I know enough about science to understand that the cost of doing stuff on the moon and especially on distant celestial bodies, because of the distances and the hostile environments, makes it all rather impractical. Doing stuff in weightlessness, sure. In geosynchronous earth orbit, sure. On the moon? Maybe. But sending people to Mars or Jupiter or Alpha Centauri is more of a sucker's bet.

If the space program hadn't happened, that would be an outcome of events contrary to what was. The act of discussing it isn't ironic or contrary to anything, it's just a discussion. If the LA Lakers beat the Chicago Bulls in a basketball game with a last-second basket, and I say, "what if they missed that last shot," it's not ironic.

I don't have the energy to read at -1. +1 is plenty, and I don't read all articles and all comments. I do browse the "other content" stories (options:stories:other content), which I think is handy (i'm not sure how this is different from firehose).

If there's one gripe I have about the mod system it's that it often happens when I read comments about an article, they are mostly snarky meta-discussion about a peripheral aspect of the topic rather than about the topic itself. Sarcastic chat may be entertaining and/or interesting, but I wish I could filter based on relevance to the actual story topic. In the mod system, off-topic is a -1 point ding. I wish there was a way to tag a comment as off-topic or meta-discussion but not ding it down. Comments that are funny or interesting could remain, but I could still sift them out if I want to read about the actual topic of the post.

Orbitz/ITA

http://www.franz.com/success/customer_apps/data_mining/itastory.lhtml

Good-night, salty prince.

A few months ago, Google planned to tie employee bonuses to their social networking strategy:

http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/google/229401282

Do you think they meant the Google+ identity service?

it should have been pretty easy to find, after all, a diamond that large should be all sparkly.

Someone asked for a use case (implying that there were none), I provided some suggestions. I don't think anyone is saying that this stuff is a broad-spectrum replacement for paper. But in cases where paper is used for short-term storage, it might be handy. Re soup-du-jour sign, not only a sign, but the daily specials that are inserted into a restaurant menu and then tossed at the end of the day. Or any list that needs to be reprinted daily.

> what is the use case for these paper signs you want to print off, and yet change all the time????

visitor badges, entry tickets, soup-du-jour sign, etc.