Amateurs Spy On US Spy Plane

arshadk writes with this excerpt from Wired's Danger Room: "The X-37B has generated intense interest, long before it ever left the ground. Boeing originally developed the 29-foot unmanned craft — a kind of miniature Space Shuttle — for NASA. Then, the military took over in 2004, and the space plane went black. Its payloads were classified, its missions hush-hush. ... You can even see the space plane for yourself: The X-37B is traveling in a slightly elliptical orbit more than 200 miles up, swooping from 43 degrees north latitude to 43 degrees south."

Comments

Re:Where's The Money From?

[jd]

Medical breakthroughs - mostly the Brits, French and allegedly Amsterdam but the investigator there has failed to return.
Astronomy - mostly the Brits and Russians
Velcro - the Swiss

Freedom does indeed cost nothing. Enslavement is the expensive option. Almost every peaceful revolution has resulted in a peaceful (comparatively-speaking) government, every violent revolution (without exception, the US included) has resulted in a violent system of governance and a violent populace.

As for Mubarak, he was mostly installed and maintained by the US. That wasn't cheap, y'know. Col. Ollie North, you remember him, the Pentagon's drug-and-gun runner to finance violence and instability? Consider how much US money is believed spent on "black ops" work, and now consider how much extra must actually be spent for Admiral Poyndexter and his ilk (before and after) to take those kinds of risks for extra funds.

A few hundred years ago, science and technology weren't too bad. Well, in Europe, at least. Once we'd kicked the religious fanatics out (d'you know how many wars and massacres those guys started?) and forced them to the New World (made a great lunatic asylum as well as a penal colony), advances came much more rapidly. Didn't know America still had peasants 200 years ago - shows how backwards a place it was compared to the civilized world.

(Y'know that America still had slaves then? C'mon, the Swiss abolished the practice in the 12th century and even the English started dismantling it around 1770-1776. About the time there was a slave-owner revolt somewhere. Now where was that again?)