I read an editorial with the last few days that took the view that the privatized space industry is nothing more than a hobby for starry-eyed billionaires who are willing to sink vast fortunes into it with no prospect of an actual ROI.

Is there actually an in-the-black economy out there, beyond communication satellites?

NASA is trying to rationalize its existence. Most of the public isn't interested in progress in science, but the promise of money makes us drool.

Of course, any resulting money would go to whoever gets to market the metals, and the public would get nothing but the bill for bootstrapping it.

If we want the Federal government to boost the economy, we should think more top-down, and ask "where could we invest this amount of money to produce the most bang for the buck?". I'd be more in favor of policies that promote manufacturing, since our economy is rapidly converging toward nothing but flipping hamburgers and gambling on the stock market.

I'm guessing that the stuff we're running short of would not be readily available in asteroids.

And bringing in an asteroid-load of other stuff might make the prices plummet, which might have a big impact on the economics of fetching it.

The asteroid belt?

Also not the same as the prestigious and perhaps more familiar National Academies, which consists of The National Academy of Science, The National Academy of Engineering, The Institute of Medicine, and The National Research Council.

What happens if you try it somewhere else?

This will be a swarm of little ones, that fly around shooting missiles and delivering IP takedown notices.

The light was created in transit, to create the image of a universe older than it really is. Thus the stars and stuff could be created later.

The trick was making sure there wasn't an observable glitch when the post-creation light arrived behind the pre-created light.

You need to start a competitor that doesn't require citations. I realise it'll have to start small, but given your obviously correct ideas its superiority will shine through.

Wikitext is the most awful thing ever. It is barely computable. It provably can't be put into EBNF. Large chunks of it are literally defined as "whatever the PCRE lib in PHP happens to do". It is so horrible it has literally delayed a proper visual editor for Wikipedia by several years. We now have a visual editor that barely works after a huge amount of money and resources have been poured in. The only reason it hasn't been thrown away is that we have ten billion words of legacy content that has to keep working.

tl;dr a markup language is a nice idea, but MediaWiki wikitext is quite possibly the worst possible example and oh if only we could set it on fucking fire.

I know a pile of people with Windows phones. They really like them lots and find the interface marvellous.

Every one of them says the big problem is ... no bloody apps.

The FBI has been keeping files on people like you for decades.

"NSA Utah" is an anagam for "anus hat".

Of course. They're building this as the studio for faking the Mars landings. They're not going to blow it by going low-budget this time around.

I thought that's what we've been doing...