I am reminded again of why I stopped reading Slashdot. Goodbye again, morons.

With Constellation getting knifed, =anything= else is gravy as far as I'm concerned. Good riddance to an empty rhetorical gesture by Dubya in a pathetic attempt to be the 21st Century JFK. There was NEVER any funding for it, and the only positive result was the finally force the retirement of the ludicrous, dangerous, and ridiculously expensive STS. Sure, it makes awesome eye candy, but you got that in '81. Going back to the moon would be an empty gesture that would also burn through huge sums of money. I'm glad the charade is finally over. The only useful thing it would have provided would have been a heavy-lift booster capable of pushing 50 tons to Mars. For NASA to actually get a $6B /INCREASE/ -- on the previous year's budget of only /$13B/-- is absolutely fantastic, far better than I dared hope for. (Yes yes, the $6B is spread over 5 years. So it's only an annual increase of 9% over the 2009-10 budget, every year for the next five years.) My own interest is Mars; this budget raises the possibility that the next decade need not be a re-run of the data drought we suffered in the 80s and much of the 90s. (At the moment, there are only two Mars landers: Mars Science Laboratory, the gigantic nuclear-powered laser-armed beast, of which there is only one, and which is supposed to land with one of the most bizarre EDL systems I've heard of. Search for it on YouTube and prepare to shit yourself as you realised that there's just the one shot for it to work, or the $3B MSL gets lithobraked. Anyway, after that there's a vague plan to land TWO rovers in 2016: one by JPL and one by ESA, on the same vehicle. As the ESA rover, aka ExoMars, has been in development for well over a decade and has repeatedly slipped - in fact it's slipped further than it's been in development, I believe - I put the chances of that coming off at no better than 20%. AND THAT IS ALL. Ridiculous when you remember that the two MERs that are still running today, in the sixth year after landing for a planned 90 Sol prime mission, cost less than two Shuttle launches. I know what kind of footage and images *I* would like to see on the TV news in 5 years time, and it's doesn't include fleshy ones floating around clogging up the view. Anyone in the "space community" (meaning the non-professional interested people, e.g. those posting on this thread) who's moaning about the NASA budget at this point either hasn't been paying attention, is a whacked out 60s reject suffering an acid flashback, or has been watching too much Star Trek.

The policy in the UK has been Managed Retreat for several years now.

That story was posted on the 20th. I'm assuming the submitter saw the same thing I've got in my RSS reader, definitely from today (between "modern tech versus the past" and "Chrome OS benchmarked against Moblin, Ubuntu Netbook, more". The headline is "Hacked Climate Emails Stoke Debate", posted by ScuttleMonkey at 18:48 UTC. The link is http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/Ltx1dUIvKyA/Hacked-Climate-Emails-Stoke-Debate , which just gives me "The item you're trying to view either does not exist, or is not viewable to you.". At a guess, people started posting large chunks of hacked personal mail, forcing Slashdot to pull it - though ISTR from the old days (I'm rarely here now) that even pulling comments was a very rarely exercised ultimate sanction, and pulling whole stories virtually unknown. Either way I'd hope/expect an explanation post sooner or later...

Another history of the 2007-08 crisis from a credible source. (Not that Krugman's not credible, to a first-level approximation.)

> I really wish wall street would get off their 'risk models' fetish.The financial systems of the world are wildly
> complex beyond all comprehension. "Risk models" [...] as a rule, eventually always fail.
>
[emphasis mine.]

I'd be interested to hear your proposal for alternative ways for banks should manage risk without mathematical models. Wet finger in the air? Lottery numbers? Astrology?

Firstly, may I be the first to link to the Gaussian Copula. If you'd like to point to one equation that did more than any other bit of modelling to bring about the collapse in the credit derivatives market and the ensuring banking finance, David Li's horribly misused work is what you're looking for. Google is your friend for far more than you want to know.

Secondly, your assertion that "Human behavior is the basis for the Austrian school of economic thought" is, frankly, nonsense. I'm a great believer in markets, but human behaviour is a lot less invariant then you believe. Behavioural Economics is a fascinating field, and I warmly recomment reading around the subject if you'd like to learn something about it.

>> everyone that purchases a TV in Britain [has] to support the BBC, whether they actually watch it or not. >> > Yes, this is true. No, it is not. You only pay the license fee if you use (not possess) a TV set, radio, or watch live online streams.

El Reg got this one about right. ( Do check the comments though.)

OpenAustralia.org is your friend.

(a) Dude, whatever the fuck you're on, stop taking it.
(b) Is this story some kind of joke? I get 40mpg regularly in my 12-year-old Toyota Celica, yes the thing that won the World Rally Championship before Toyota pulled out to let Subaru have a turn on it. If 40mpg is the target for new cars, we're utterly, utterly fucked.

Oh, wait! We ARE utterly, utterly fucked!! Thanks, Republitards, you've helped wipe out civilisation as we know it. Have fun living off the land in what will soon be the desert wastes of Montana!

None of this makes the slightest difference to the expected global warming, except insofar as rainfall patterns may change slightly faster or slower in some places. How the heat is distributed around the planet is pretty much irrelevant to the global energy balance (as would be obvious to anyone with half a brain cell.) Now, please FOADIACF.

Such a superb O/T troll deserves a full -2. I can't wait for the sequel, starring members of a popular boy-band as Navy SEALs, kicking the door down and making with the smoke grenades and the raspberry-flavoured lube, and all.