So people should vote for something they know is going to fuck everything up, just to strike at the liberal intelligentsia that's been oppressing them all along? Give me strength... Brexit may have been a short-term bit of fun for portly, ageing taxi drivers like yourself but if it turns into the UK leaving the single market then things are going to turn very ugly for the Tories. All along we've warned people like you and all along you've said "lalalalala we're not listening".

Sample return and basic manufacturing are pretty fundamental building blocks of future space exploitation and we just don't seem to have much coming up with that. I readt about MOXIE a while ago, which is very interesting. But yeah, if we can't routinely do sample return from the Moon, then we're not close to having a permanent presence.

I very much doubt even a well equipped colony would survive very long on Mars, nor would they want to after a while. Face it, we're limited to life on this planet or something very similar. If you want an insurance policy, the Moon is just as good since it could only be a temporary hideout until the Earth is safe enough to re-colonise.

True but there was something they wanted waiting for those sailors. There is nothing on Mars. *nothing*

I agree and don't forget, they're only taking about living on Mars indefinitely because it's a one way trip. Who wants there to be some spooky mars base full of skeletons hanging around? Further, if u want resources, collect asteroids.

It's at least nice to stop regressions. So, log the bug, someone adds a test to reproduce it, then either the same person or someone else can fix it. Then, whenever someone changes something you can prove that it hasn't reintroduced the same bug.

Yeah I use them but only as an additional level of alt+tab. Ctrl+shift+left => workspace 1, Ctrl+shift+right => workspace 2 and COMMS (browser, email, chat)

Made in China, oh yeah baby.

A cheery thought, thank you... Well unless I wind up famous in which case they'll turn my house into a museum, like Arnie.

Landfill?! I don't know about you but I have pretty much every old phone I ever owned in a drawer at home. Includes a nokia 8310, a Sony W500 (sadly), another sony-erickson that seems to date from about 1997. Apart from my beloved Razr which someone stole...

Haven't you ever had stupid neighbours? They fight all the time, their garden is a mess, their kids live in the local park spitting and littering... Do you go and try to "help" them? Maybe that's how aliens see us.

According to Brian Cox, Eukaryotic cells may be a single-event bottleneck. In which case, prokaryotic life might be common but nothing else. If anything, that'd be a superb result because we'd have lots of new places to live and little competition.

Come now, it's not as if that will ever happen again...

"Lisa, the whole reason we have elected officials is so we don't have to think all the time. Just like that rainforest scare a few years back: our officials saw there was a problem and they fixed it, didn't they?"

I'm so far out of my depth it's hilarious but I've read that causality is *not* sacred. As is sometimes said, you can pick at most two of {special relativity, FTL, causality}.

Those aren't issues, they're features. Lack of static typing (odd choice of words - you could say Java lacks dynamic typing) allows much sparser code and you don't have to waste time compiling. The downside is there's more chance of runtime errors, but the time you've saved probably makes up for it and hell, you've got time now to write those unit tests. Performance isn't Python's strong point, but there are lots of options. For example, if you want to parse XML, ElementTree has a fantastic API and is written in pure Python so you can read it's code, step through it with a debugger. If you want it to go faster you can swap it out for cElementTree, which has the same API but is compiled from C code.