Then somebody in either Engineering or Guidance really fucked-up badly.

some kind if lift to get samples up there from a rover

The samples have been dropped at several locations around the landscape, as the rover (I forget, Perseverance or Curiosity ; "Meh") geologised it's way across the scenery. You'd need to ship a "sample find and collect" rover to get them, and return to the launch vehicle.

Problem: you can't decontaminate a whole Starship

Non-problem. The samples are stored in metal tubes which themselves should be an adequate last-guard to prevent their being contaminated in transit, or at a reception lab on Earth. So, to achieve layered containment, you'd need some sort of storage vessel on the "pick-up rover", and another layer of containment that the rover's containment structure gets hoist into in the nose-cone of the (putative) Starship.

Since everything from the third layer of containment outwards won't actually land on Earth, it's state of cleanliness on lift-off form Mars is moot.

Since Earth routinely gets hit by rocks ejected from Mars - and has done for all the planets' lives - the question of Mars-to-Earth contamination is fairly moot too. Transferring rocks the other way (Earth-to-Mars) is harder - the flux ratio is estimated at about 99:1. But that's enough to make "planetary protection" in the other direction fairly moot too. The main reason for insisting on it (PP) is for avoidance of doubt in the event that sample return indicates the presence of Earth-like organisms on Mars. With the PP efforts, we (well, NASA, and the Russian and Chinese landers too) can say "we went to these efforts to prevent contaminating Mars with microbes ourselves, so these microbes were either transferred naturally in the past, or Mars was the origin of terrestrial life and transferred it here some time upwards of 3 billion years ago".

The exciting result (rather than the confusing and uncertain results described above) would be finding life on Mars that is considerably different to terrestrial life - which uses different amino acids, or different lipids, or a different genetic system. Then, we could say with high probability that it is reasonably easy for a "habitable zone" planet to produce life naturally. But finding Earth-like life on Mars would just leave us in a state of uncertainty.

Like every other oil-and-gas producing nation. Though there are significant costs for the materiel of production - pipelines, pressure valves, etc. Their "cost per barrel to the wellhead" is lower than for some countries, but the main factor in that is always how much tax the government take. Which is how the West (UK, America, essentially ; some input from France) set up their oil economies in the 1930s to 1950s.

This I know - I was on about the 4th time around that loop, and I guess I fat-fingered something and lost the post.

Do you ever not get the "this check is taking longer than expected" warning? It normally takes several minutes for that page to load for me - I assume it doesn't like my mixture of ad-blocking and NoScript. Which is Cloudflare/ Slashdot's problem, not mine. If they don't want comments, comments they won't get.

Does Slashdot actually have advertising? I've had that "Advertising disabled because of your contributions" checkbox for so long, I can't remember when it appeared (Before or after the Millennium? I can't remember. I guess it switched on when I reached 100 or so successful submissions, but I've never made any effort to find out.

But they're definitely enshittifying the site, as Cory Doctorow would say.

Many people would not consider the idea of transit or driving not being much faster than walking to be a feature, but you do you.

You're confusing description with approbation.

Since we don't have ultra-diffuse suburbs here (typical house plots are 8~10m wide on the street frontage) we don't get the large distances where transit can get much above walking pace. With bus stops every few hundred metres, and a busy bus system (so many of those bus stops getting used for pick up, drop off, or both), the bus rarely gets up to the speed limit. And that's in slack hours, not the rush hour. Several addresses ago, I was in the habit of taking buses on some of the long boulevards to get to or from home, and I could be watching the next bus hove into view for 10 minutes before it got to my stop - and I'd have walked 3 or 4 stops in that time. But that was an unusual situation of long straight roads combined with moderate hills, so you could see a kilometre or more along the road. Most cities didn't have that phase of expansion and moving the city centre away from the medieval centre, so you didn't get those long sight lines.

Sounds rather ableist.

You should see some of the disabled-bike-chairs that are the norm in Africa. There's no profit margin in making them, so the market here is for motorised devices these days. But that's a failure of the infallible market, not a technological problem.

Yep, leasehold versus freehold is another big scam. Fortunately, that's only a problem in Englandshire, isn't it. Maybe Ulster too?

Well, for values of "sparking" that include "adding just another example to a debate that was over some time before the Millennium Bug became a serious concern".

It's very simple : if you don't have a hard copy of the installation media, that works on a machine without serial, USB, WiFi, Ethernet or RFC 1149 access to any network of any sort, then (this is the hard bit - concentrate! - you can get there! ) YOU do NOT own IT.

You may have temporarily leased a copy of $WHATEVER$ software, but you own it as much as you own your taxi driver's vehicle. (I don't know about Uber's vehicles - if they operated within an hour's drive of me, I might pay them enough attention to find out.)

Come on "digital natives", this argument was over while you were still trying to master bowel control. It's not news, and if you believe anything else, then you have been lied to, successfully. The people who lied to you are probably intending to steal from you, somehow. It's called "life" ; get used to it, because humans (and businesses) aren't going to change if they're successful in hoodwinking people like this.

Few people would walk across even a small city in any reasonable amount of time.

Define a "reasonable amount of time". I live in - and walk around (I should start the car some time this year, but it's probably rusted solid. Meh. Useless machine.) a small city of about 50,000. (It was the nation's capital for a century or three - I'd have to read it's history to check.) Takes about an hour, edge to edge, which I find perfectly reasonable. If I want to travel faster, I walk to the bus stop, wait for a bus, then use that. It doesn't really save much time. Because the road network was designed for horse and cart, using the car doesn't save much time either.

Of course, I could think of the small town I grew up in - totally nothing special, about twice the population of the small city I live in, slightly larger, and takes twice as long to get anywhere, unless you go out ti the outskirts and use the ring road - which normally means driving twice as far as necessary. And oddly, still takes about the same amount of time to get anywhere. A fifth of the number of bus routes though, so you really need a push bike if you want to get around fast. Road network designed for horse and cart, about the same time as the "small city".

How many bald eagles' wingspans would that be?

Plucked or un-plucked?

Why the hell should I learn to speak Septic? I didn't learn it when I had to work with them, and I'm sure as hell not going to now that they don't control my pay cheque. That's cheque with a "q", not a "k".

No hand-waving was required. The plan was to have high-speed and low-speed railways in each direction built below the human-friendly strip. The high-speed line would stop at, approximately every 10th station (say every 10km); the low-speed at every station (about every km, whatever that is in American ; 10 minutes walk, -ish). At the ends of the line ("harbour" and "inland") the trains loop back from "inland" to "shoreward" directions. You could add an interchange wherever the "city" intersects the "along-shore" railway system.

Nothing complicated there - just rational city design.

No cars. They've been designed out at the start. Similarly, no roads - just walk ways and cycle ways. This may sound heretical in some parts of the world.

Not quite.

As an organelle, it should be carrying enough DNA (and replication biochemistry) to duplicate itself, but will probably have transferred some of the genes it needs to prepare some of it's precursor materials to the enclosing organism. Which means that it then becomes an obligate endosymbiont (it is obliged to live in a host with those biochemical tricks).

So, you'd need to identify the sections of host genome that the organelle depends on, copy them (for which CRISPR may well be appropriate) into the new host organism (along with the necessary control proteins, genes, etc), then inoculate the modified organism with the appropriate strain of the organelle.

If you were adding it to a commercial food/ profit system ("crop" is so 16th century), you'd need to prevent it from breeding without buying something (an artificial dependency, like Monsanto are dependent on annual revenues), while not (ehemm) eating into your profits from your "corn" food/ profit system. You'd market the "artificial dependency" chemical as a safety feature, to prevent the new food system from reproducing without active human input (and AgroBiz profits).

... and shouting "I told you so!"

Which she did, in the early 1970s, with the then-controversial suggestion that chloroplasts and mitochondria came into existence as separately achieved symbioses between bacteria (with particular biochemical tricks) and multiple strains of bacteria without those tricks. Then later, the symbiotic bacteria lost DNA and cytoplasm to become "organelles". In at least one case, it happened twice (yielding mitochondria and chloroplasts within plant cells - hardly unsuccessful!)

Some time later (late 1970s, mid-1980s, I'm not sure) she further suggested symbiosis as an origin route for (IIRC) Golgi apparatuses (for fat metabolism), nuclei (for finer control of protein synthesis), actin fibrils (for muscles, motility and the endoplasmic reticule)... and a list of other things too. Which seemed to be stretching a good idea a bit far. But now ... well, we're a step further towards Margulis' scenario.

I got three of your "Kleinsteins" away back in about 2010 (one each for Dad, me, and my best friend). As I recall, there was something very nice in the hand-written note in with the packing slip, but that has got lost in the three subsequent house moves.

> If there are nasty customers they have a great incentive to treat them poorly so that they don't come back

Try that in your job and see how long you keep it. The only exceptions would be something like the DMV which people have no choice but to use, no matter how shitty they are treated.

Yes, some customers are deliberate assholes, but a complaint, legitimate or otherwise, is no excuse for you being one as well.

> Some towns and neighborhoods have very few restaurants to choose from.

And people talk. If a small town restaurant gives poor service, word soon gets out and other locals won't go there. Conversely, if a customer is an asshole, word soon gets out and they aren't welcome anywhere else.