We haven't "Lost the ability" -- we simply don't have factories set up to manufacture that particular rocket. The "orbital propellant depot" concept -- made viable by the "new space" companies and their radically cheaper rockets has been much denigrated by the entrenched space lobby in congress, but the simple fact is, we now have experience in assembling modular craft in orbit (ISS), and thanks to modern computers and materials, spacecraft can be appreciable lighter. Plus, thanks to those same technologies (and better lunar surveying done in the last few years), we can robotically pre-land much of the equipment needed to mount a lunar expedition. Sure, the mission profile would look different, and building the hardware to land on and return from the moon would still cost billions, but the Falcon Heavy, which is really just a falcon 9 modified, will be ready within the next few years. With a green light today and consistent funding, we could easily have a permanent lunar presence by the end of the decade. I would guess the total cost would be less than ten billion dollars, if we were able to keep the government pork under control.

Someone else said this, but it bears repeating: Columbus isn't important because he was the first person to discover the new world, he's important because he was the last. After his voyage, its existence became widely known public knowledge.
TL;DR: Columbus was the Apple of explorers.

Protons.

Lab made diamonds are cheaper to create than gem grade consumer diamonds. I'm no expert, but I thought that industrial grade diamond (e.g. tiny ones, which this would DEFINITELY USE) was really cheap by virtue of being pretty abundant.

Given that it's a software licensing office, I wouldn't be surprised if a huge amount of income actually does pass through there. What right does the state of Washington have to make claims on revenue outside their jurisdiction?

As someone who has physically visited Microsoft's "Nevada Tax Dodge", I can tell you that they have hundreds of people employed across three office buildings, doing real work. Here's a street view: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=microsoft+licensing,+GP&hl=en&ll=39.466978,-119.777091&spn=0.014196,0.027874&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&hq=microsoft+licensing,+GP&radius=15000&t=m&z=16&layer=c&cbll=39.465765,-119.778911&panoid=SCavTRVJLjF335ijk_l6-w&cbp=12,0,,0,0 The white buildings to the left and right of the frame are wholly occupied by MS while the brown building in the center has one whole floor occupied by MS employees. Declaring that MS has no right to do business in states where taxes are lower is...well, disgusting.

I think you need to do some serious reading from unbiased sources on the logic of dropping the bomb given what was known to the various players at the time of their decision, and the background that led them there. I think anyone who gives it a fair shake will agree that all the alternatives were worse.

I think I fit in with a lot of 20-something /.ers. Being born in the mid-80s, I remember a time before internet access was widely available, but I was also too young to ever get involved in the BBS scene, and my first internet experience was web access via lynx and a library account (although my first home access was ...AOL [briefly] a few years later).

Yeah, they swap them out. People fly up and back on the ones they came on, and leave them parked for the duration of their stay, more or less. It's kinda like calling your parked car an "escape car".

I guess they didn't Czech for edge cases.

This needs more positive moderation. projectrho analyzes the topic exhaustively.

Yes and no. We would need to build a single walled carbon nanotubes that run the whole length of the elevator, but we can currently build them a few centimeters long at most, and we need something like 25,000 Kilometers.

As messed up as Reddit already is, can you imagine what that place would be like if they allowed users to transfer karma from one person to another? No need to make it do anything, just allow it to flow. The site would implode in a week.

You're incorrect. There are plenty of metals and oxygen on the moon. The moon (apparently) lacks carbon, nitrogen, and possibly hydrogen (for water) -- although recent evidence indicates that h2o may in fact be available on the moon.

I don't know where this 'there's nothing useful on the moon' meme came from, but you're not the first person to voice it, and it's rather silly.