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Because the moon is the perfect place from where to start if you want to go anywhere within the solar system. If we don't want to stay at home forever, we need a moon base.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
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I want to go to Malibu. That is in the solar system yes?
... such stuff as dreams are made on
modified 12-Dec-17 4:59am.
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That's staying at home.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
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Ron Anders wrote: Why.
Please tell me you're kidding. The ROI from our space program is enormous. We never should have even slowed down...
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The ROI from the space program is actually pretty poor, the manned program is even worse. The biggest bang for the buck actually came from the weapons programs.
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Joe Woodbury wrote: The ROI from the space program is actually pretty poor
Strange, because that's totally opposite of the conclusions reached by every study on the topic that I've ever read in my whole life.
Joe Woodbury wrote: The biggest bang for the buck actually came from the weapons programs.
If you ignore aerodynamics, GPS, telecommunications, etc...
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You were right to call me out since the headline was on my mind and my response was more narrowly focused than it should have been. To clarify, the space program can be divided into four areas, where the last two are very intertwined:
Manned
Unmanned exploration
Communications
Military
It is the last two where there has been a large monetary ROI, though again they are intertwined. For example, the GPS system was a military project. Also note that the Mercury and Gemini programs used modified ICBMs for their rockets.
In terms of knowledge, the unmanned exploratory programs, including weather satellites, have have a large intellectual ROI.
The manned program, however, has largely been a bust, monetarily and very iffy intellectually. Many of the things even NASA attributes to it should really be attributed to military research or non-space research (aerodynamics.) The ballistic and guided/smart missile programs alone were responsible for quite a bit of today's tech. (One reason the manned program hasn't contributed much is that safety requires that "tried and true" technology be used, not cutting edge technology. Another problem is that what can be learned by adding people is mainly whether people can survive in space and that was largely settled by 1974--the answer being yes, on the short term, not very well on the medium term and no on the long term.)
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I still disagree with you concerning manned spaceflight. Here are a couple links that may sway you:
The ROI Of Space Exploration[^]
NASA ROI - every dollar invested returns $14 to the economy.[^]
But even if we conclude that manned spaceflight does not give us any immediate return on our investment, I contend that it is still worth it in the very long run. Mankind will need to travel and live beyond the bounds of Earth sometime in our future. Maybe not for hundreds of years but it will happen. We'll be better off then if we make the effort now.
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First and foremost, NASA is governmental agency and all agencies make fantastical claims.
Second, the "aeronautics" part of NASA has given a massive ROI, especially if you go back to NACA.
Third, many of NASA's claims are nonsense. Like other agencies, they grant money to various institutions, including Universities, with no strings attached and then stake claims to anything those places produce. (Not simply speculation--NASA has claimed to be responsible for several projects my father worked on years ago when their only contribution MAY have been funneling some money to them on behalf of the DoD.)
Years ago, I had links to two web sites about this (unfortunately, I naively didn't save them and their contents.) One debunked most of NASAs claims on a line-by-line basis. The other was a financial analysis of the space portion of NASA which found the return was at best 4:1. IIRC, it further argued that most of this return was with the unmanned space program. (To me, it also raised the problem with most government programs--that is to argue there is a return because they provide jobs and people with jobs buy things. DoD does this all the time, which is why we build expensive weapon systems we don't need. It ignores the sunk costs of transferring money through the tax system.)
I have no issue with spending some money on manned space research, but we are a lot further from traveling in space than people realize. Right now, the unmanned/robotic missions are giving us the best bang for the buck. (Besides, the moon is a terrible stepping stone--it's gravity well with big problems. As but one example; we can't even keep an Antarctic base going without a constant stream of supplies. Another is lunar dust--pretty fascinating stuff which will kill you.)
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Maybe we can even get Mexico to pay for it 
Hogan
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Nah, the Lunar Lizardmen on the hook for the great big beautiful moon program.
The Mexicans will be too busy paying for another "great big beautiful" something or other that Trump wants. 
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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More fake news. 
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Lister and DeMarco famously observed that, “The major problems of our work are not so much technological as sociological in nature.” Obvious post is (maybe not so) obvious
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Windows 8 was a sure sign there was a takeover / turnover. It's been rollin on.
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Only WEight? What about Longhorn? Vista? Win7? Looks like they are more busy plotting and infighting than working.
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats.
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There are some 269 billion emails sent and received daily. That’s roughly 35 emails for every person on the planet, every day. Over 40 percent of those emails are tracked, according to a study published last June by OMC, an “email intelligence” company that also builds anti-tracking tools. This is why I never read my email
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This is why I have configured my mail clients for plain text and disabled loading of images.
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A commonly misunderstood concept in .NET performance tuning is the importance of avoiding memory allocations. It is thought that since memory allocations are fast, that they rarely if ever have an impact on performance. Did I post this before? I forget.
(That's a memory joke, son)
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"Premature optimization is the root of all evil" - Donald Knuth
I'm certainly not looking forward to maintaining any code that was written by someone who thought I'd be a good idea to create a cryptic mess to save some bytes...
Unless, you know, it really actually matters.
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Yap, that VB code performs well.
End Sub
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Indeed. Profilers were invented for a reason.
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Thought a career in computing would be a job for life? Think again, suggest Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers Nonsense, warns blurb writer
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AI will replace Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers by 2020. (Especially if, by AI, you mean "making sh*t up".)
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Definitely more likely. 
TTFN - Kent
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