And this is exactly why people don't go to the Grand Canyon or climb mountains.

Old news. It launched two weeks ago and disappeared going Mach 20 (ish). The atmosphere apparently has a sweet tooth. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2010/04/27/darpa-loses-contact-with-mach-20-hypersonic-glider-during-test-flight/

I meant that as, lets send unmanned objects to the moon, and leave the manned missions to going some place new. I wish we could just set up a moon base and plop down there for a couple years, but there's no way that can happen AND still move forward with exploration. We would end up exactly where we are now, with a pretty cool little base hanging in the sky, but no one pushing boundaries because NASA doesn't have enough money to have multiple manned missions at once. If NASA was given another few billion dollars a year, maybe we could afford to design moon base and a heavy lifter, all while maintaining our robotic presence and the ISS, not to mention reopening the technology department to actually solving issues of long term space flight. It's unrealistic to expect that much from an organization that only gets half as much funding as it did last time it was asked to plant a flag on a rock.

I disagree with that sentiment. I believe if we go back to the moon, we'll end up in another shuttle situation. Doing something better than we did before (going into LEO, in the shuttle's case), but getting stuck with it. By skipping the moon we won't get stuck at another way point. If we go to an asteroid, we can study the moon along the way, maybe, but setting foot on a rock we've already been to won't be the goal, and that right there is the key point of this plan. NASA's express mission is to explore, and frankly, it hasn't been doing a very good job of that in terms of manned missions lately. Some may say that we don't need manned missions to explore. They may be right on the surface, but everyone's good friend Neil DeGrasse Tyson has some very good words on that subject: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQhNZENMG1o&feature=player_embedded

Clear (clear.com) has been advertising pretty heavily in Atlanta for city-wide Wi-Max. I can't speak for how well it works, but I can only imagine that they are getting a decent amount of business, seeing how they advertise more visibly than any other company in ATL outside of Turner.

It's not always about the exploration, its about maintaining jobs for a very intelligent portion of society productive in a way that doesn't give us more ways to destroy each other and creating spin off technologies. Exploration is just a cool benefit. With out reaching farther we become stagnant, which weakens us scientifically.

Honestly, there aren't to many foreign companies capable of space flight (one in Europe, if I recall correctly, nothing elsewhere private that I know of), so I don't see that being a problem. With out enough technological advancement, space is absurdly costly. There is a reason it's been purely government work until recent years.

For sports, there is nothing bigger. ESPN 360 is starting to become a big deal on college campuses, but there are blackouts if there is local television coverage. The major marketing pushes for TVs around here is always for 'the big game.' I don't have a TV either, but game day is when I hunt one down.

I agree with your gift analogy, but technically speaking, you're recieving a gift from hundreds of people. I'm not a tax expert, but I'm pretty sure they don't tax gifts worth very little (e.g. less than a dollar). Bittorrent isn't the gift-giver, its just the envelope that the money is in, the gift givers are the hundreds of seeders and leachers.