OK, I realize I may skew a little older than many Slashdot readers, so here. Consider this your Easter gift:

http://youtu.be/ftgAG3Vnif8

Do you think you can use adamantium in a 3D printer?

Asking for a friend.

I had an uncle with a wooden leg and I thought it was a big deal until I found out my aunt had a cedar chest.

Unlike every previous launch, however, we the taxpayers are paying a fixed price to SpaceX, instead of the bloated cost-plus contracts that are large part of the reason why there hasn't been much progress in manned spaceflight in the last four decades.

Well, it's theoretically less expensive, but not yet. If you extrapolate out 50 missions, you start seeing SpaceX making an actual profit instead of a projected profit based on a fee stream.

My problem is that the entire thing still relies on government. If there is value in a "private" space industry, it hasn't been found yet.

Further, none of the profits ever materialize if you look at the external costs of the federal government already having done the hard work. Unless you believe SpaceX started with a clean sheet of paper and didn't make use of the past half-century of government space programs.

At best, you can say that there's a place for government and private industry to work together on the really big things like space travel. Without the government over-spending, there's good reason to believe we'd never have seen any space program at all. Or, convince me that without the initial public investment, any private company would have done the basic research required to send the first satellite into space.

Sorry friend, the design of the NASA space stations were done by NASA. They had private industry do the industrial part because they wanted to reward big political donations.

Either way though, it's a good thing we didn't wait for "private industry" to go to space, or we'd still be in the Sputnik stage.

The first space station went up in 1971. Forty-three years later, private industry figures out how to send a rocket up there. With taxpayers footing the bill.

John Galt is half a retard.

Tablets

You mean the 10 Commandments kind?

Thou shalt not take thyself so seriously that you think you have to save everything.

... or from police weapon lockers.

They also make them. See the case recently in Australia of motorcycle gangs making some (very) effective subguns (automatic pistols and the like).

It's pretty trivial to make a firearm capable of being used to perpetuate crimes against people: they just have to be better than not having a firearm, so looks, and impression of effectiveness, are more important than actually being well made firearms. Someone with crude hand tools can make an AK in a day or two, and that's a fairly capable firearm. The net result of regulation and elimination of privately owned firearms is that only criminals and cops will have guns, and military (and militarized police) will be the main ones with firearms suitable for any sort of tyrannical resistance and/or hunting.

There are already efforts well underway to prohibit any firearm with a rifled bore - you know, something that was invented to the point of being effective in the 15th century, and have been in common military as well as domestic use for 200 years. Still, you can't regulate ingenuity.

This is why they're also trying to control/eliminate consumer ammunition production (by making it prohibitively expensive through the banning of things like smelting lead, making it illegal to import lead, and things like that) - at least in the US.

That's a lot fewer jobs than the Republicans killed with their continual obstructionism and focus on social issues.

By the NRA fundamentalists' logic, we shouldn't have laws because criminals ignore laws anyway.

Google can't be blamed for this: one of its jobs is to lobby for laws that benefit its shareholders,

Yes, they can, and should, be blamed for this. Pro-social corporations should be rewarded for their behavior. Anti-social corporations should be punished. This is a pretty basic part of free market theory and the power of the purse. Stop repeating this sociopath-loving dogma as though it had any relation to healthy free market economics. Public backlash against despotic corporations is a very important correcting force in the free market.

Right, but the point is that since Congress won't do anything, then we either let FDA make new regs on their own initiative or we potentially allow dangerous conditions to fester. There really ought to be checks and balances involved, but Congress won't do their job, so...

I would have loved to been a fly on the wall in Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper's office when this non-decision was announced. Obama has once again taken the cowardly way out and punted a tough decision. He wants to continue to fundraise from environmentalists by saying "We're being tough on the Keystone pipeline and insisting it meets our environmental standards!" and then do the same with the big business crowd by saying, "We haven't said no to Keystone, we just want to make sure it meets our environmental standards." He doesn't actually want to make the decision, because then one crowd or the other will tell him to pound sand. Even though the entire job of being President of the United States is about making those decisions!

Worst president of my lifetime. Not even close.

At this point the alternatives are either FDA doing what they're doing, or never getting Congress to vote in new regulations. Don't kid yourself that today's congressional Republicans will let any industrial regulations go through.

That's crazy, because multivitamins are dead cheap: something like $15 for most of a year's supply.