With you here. Most idiots can't control their clapped out Taurus's (or is that Tauri?) so how on earth will they manage flying? I see old farts pull out in carparks straight into each other all the time - even with just 30' of height that will be all over red rover! And don't start me on energy/benefit either. Do you really want to get to work quicker and pay more doing it? C'mon guys, we're /. nerds we can see past this one. Hey guys ....

One of the easier ways to restrict how your words and ideas are searched and indexed on the net is to to hide them in plain sight. A jpg image of text is very dificult for a search engine to use, yet you and I can read and understand the data quite easily. This ability to scan on line has been around, but not mainstream to my knowledge. I'm guessing Google has been checking jpgs for text as a trial for some time. Once this is gone maybe ASCII art text will work for a while. Hiding/protecting data by steganography is detectable by scan now, eg http://www.outguess.org/detection.php so the battle continues. Of course one can work offline and send letters to each other and be protected by law :-) I wonder if one day sending stuff my mail will seem shady?

The US budget is $18.3b for NASA in 2010 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Budget. and The United States currently pays around $20 billion per year to farmers in direct subsidies as "farm income stabilization"[10][11][12] via U.S. farm bills - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_subsidy. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a federal government entity designed to supplement regular oil supplies in the event of disruptions due to military conflict or natural disaster, costs taxpayers an additional $5.7 billion per year. and who knows how many billion on protecting its gas corporations - http://www.progress.org/2003/energy22.htm. Space research is cheap, repays in technology dividends and uplifts people. Subsidies encourage the status quo and defer the inevitable.

Australia has more square kilometres than most. Hip Hip Array!!

The concept is not new but it is very difficult to turn it into practice. These guys at University of Queensland and others have been working on this for several years and have trialled severa prototypes before. http://www.uq.edu.au/news/index.html?article=20718 Not bad without military budgets - beat them to the punch!

But not once we measure them. So we only find the 100% probability ones. The others have dead cats in them ;-p

Google images for "apple" and the number one hit is not from mother nature - it is a bite from the forbidden fruit confirming that mankind has left the maker to reinvent himself in his own image. I wonder why the rainbow got left behind and is just white now..

Might help the engineers to figure out where the ground is before they dump a probe into Mars at high velocity :-)

I agree - maybe the NASA guys want to extend the shuttle life because the alternatives aren't sorted? It seems very suspect to make this 11th hour change for the last mission by the fleet. Still, it will delay decommissioning costs and push the scheduled expenses back which will please some at NASA.

This is when the Piranha brothers stumbled upon the Other, Other Operation in which they promised not to beat them up if they paid them the money... (M.P.) It's been tried before. The worth of exposure of information to the public is complicated by judgements about values (in Indonesia it is standard practice to take bribes openly, something which was also common in the days of Sir Christopher Wren and Samuel Peypes) and notions of what is in the public interest (all Slash Dotters are wankers but who cares or wants to know?). They could resort to advertising. Or not to advertise their products next to their stories :-)

You had it easy! Best we could manage was a tape drive on our C64. You had to forward the tape (an audio tape) to your save point and then enter load" etc before our Dad would slash us in two w'it breadknife, if we were lucky! I was too busy playing Elite and Impossible Mission to get Zork. I got Zork first on my PC (Atari 286) - who could afford an 80086? My one at work cost A$5,600 with a 10Mb Tadon step drive disk and a Hercules graphics card in 1986. My 286 in 1987 was A$3,600 - with a 9pin dot matrix printer. You could buy a house for A$46k back then. I must have been mad. And you tell that to the young people of today and they won't believe yer!

Yup, I'm with you on this one. The mere existance of a key, the sharing of the key and then the subsequent movement or reproduction of the encrypted knowledge is all exploitable. Just watch any popular spy thriller where the leading security/scientist steals the data to save his hostaged wife/kids. The fact is, quantum encryption removes much of the key's weakness. Blame other security systems if physical security is weak.

Yeah, but little girls from Whoville keep getting stuck in them when the Grinch breaks into their secure boxing section - I've seen it on TV so it must be true!

DOOM shipped on diskette (~2.8Mb) but DOOM needed about 4.8mb of hard drive space, which is a fraction of the number of pixels on the cameras in the article. In fact the image size per frame will be bigger than the entire game. See this site for all your DOOM info needs. http://www.gamers.org/docs/FAQ/doomfaq/sect1.html

I know the rest of you will post the childish big put downs, like the fact you have to carry a laboratory everywhere with you, or wait for the first legal case over accidental removal of testes at the toilet or the wife jokes of "at last he can help with the washing up" so I will post the sobering comments that we all have to start somewhere .. and get 3 good punches in at the same time :-)