People like you make me think that the rumours that NASA never reached the moon in person, are true.

Several things increase my suspicions, my original post has now been demoted to a '0' and your reply to it is nonsensical, getting to escape velocity from the moon, is in terms of cost and safety, negligible when compared to the cost of achieving escape velocity from the Earth, my only explanation for your daft negativity is that - you have a hidden agenda.

Goebbels once said "Make a lie big enough and you will get away with it", Goebbels learned his craft from the double nephew of Freud, Edward Bernays.

It makes no sense that the human race has not been back to the moon since 1972, imagine how much easier, it would have been in the 60's, had NASA had the technology we have today?

I'm not saying NASA did not go to the moon, how on Earth would I know for sure? I'm the English equivalent of 'Joe Sixpack', I'm saying comments like yours make me more suspicious.

 

There is lots of He3 on the moon, getting to the moon is not hard, the hard, dangerous and expensive part is reaching escape velocity, make this far cheaper and safer and not just He3 becomes more available, but a whole universe.

The high cost to the human race's colonisation of space is caused by the danger and complexity, of reaching and leaving escape velocity, within the earth's atmosphere, the reason for this is the shuttle has to lift off with over 700 tons of fuel, the whole thing is made even more complicated, by the fact that to survive the heat of around 17000 miles an hour reentry into the atmosphere, by covering the surface of the shuttle, with the equivalent of bathroom tiles

There is lots of He3 on the moon, getting to the moon is not hard, the hard, dangerous and expensive part is reaching

The Space Shuttle turned out to be an expensive and dangerous white elephant, the reason the Shuttle was so expensive is, because of its complexity with millions of different manufactured parts.

There is another route, we can reach the edge of space no problem Burt Rutan proved this with Space Ship one, when he won the 'X' prize by reaching over 100 km twice in one week.

Yes the Shuttle was 'reusable' but in name only. They could not have turned that around in a week.

One idea could be to create rocket fuel on the moon, there is lots of water on the moon, use solar energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen which makes very good rocket fuel.

Use the rocket fuel to fuel a space tug, use the space tug to accelerate and decelerate Space Ship one, to and from escape velocity in the safety of a vacuum.

The moon is the door to the solar system.

Going to Mars is like 'trying to run before we can walk' we need to build a base on the moon first.

There is lots of silica on the moon, silica is the main component of glass, what we could do is build a huge glass dome with an aluminium skeleton and live under it, some estimates have moon rock, with around 40% oxygen, thus we can breathe if it is extracted.

Mmm, This is very good news, the father of Socialism was a man called Jeremy Bentham, an 18th century philosopher whose basic credo was 'the maximum good for the maximum number of people' also called 'Utilitarianism'

Closed source operating systems are the total antithesis of this, yes you might say, but how do coders get paid, a silly question really, try asking how those in the armed forces get paid with the same tone of voice.

When Microsoft released Windows 95, had they waited a couple of years before releasing the source code, so they could make a decent profit on their hard work, they would have had millions of coders working on windows, no they found a fat cow to milk and conned everybody, by rebadging Windows 95 as Windows 98 then ME then 2000 then XP then Vista and last of all 7.

There are two ways to write a computer program 'top down' or 'bottom up' each method has its advantages and disadvantages.

'Bottom up' means each individual routine is written first, like a routine to poll the keyboard a routine to poll the mouse, another routine to calculate results and a routine to display those results, the final bit of the programme is to write a big loop that goes around calling each individual routine.

Bottom up means you will probably end up with a different program than you thought you would end up with. Bottom up is more evolutionary.

'Top down' The big control loop is written first then the individual routines are written.

'Top down' is tidier, quicker to write and more profitable.

'Bottom up' takes longer and is more messy, but most of the time you end up with a more powerful program.

UNIX is written bottom up and Windows is written top down.

There are programs in UNIX that are over 30 years old that have been improved and improved because people have had access to the source code, VI is a good example for this.

Companies like Microsoft do not want open source because they are basically selfish and greedy.

Chemistry used to be called alchemy, where researchers worked in secret and did not share there discoveries with others, then the scientific revolution happened when alchemists published and in doing so became chemists, why should computer software be any different?

Having been done by these scalpers twice, who would not know the Golden Rule if it bit them. Can I suggest that some pharmaceutical company could work on a greed reduction pill.

Assange has balls.

I sent what follows, to http://www.theregister.co.uk/

As of yet they have not published it, perhaps they have left their cubicles?

Peter.

Go into your local computer store, checkout the PCs on sale, they will all be running Microsoft's closed source operating system, I was led to believe that monopolies were bad for the economy and illegal.

If Windows was such a brilliant operating system, why did the London Stock Exchange ditch it recently for Linux? (well advised, by their mates at the New York Stock Exchange)

Why don't Google, Facebook, Amazon and many other companies use Windows.

Our National Health system, Education system, Police service and local government have given Microsoft millions and millions of pounds, when a free and better operating system exits, the only reason I can think of is, that the people who run our country are corrupt.

When the government keep telling us we are massively in debt, what they really mean is, we have a massive balance of trade deficit.

One way to make quite large dent in this deficit is to stop paying the Windows tax.

The BBC could do an immense amount to promote open source, but it hardly mentions it, this suggests to me that the BBC is corrupt also.

The fact that the BBC made a program about Linux and it was shown abroad but not in the UK, is a dead give away.

What is now called chemistry, used to be called alchemy, this happened around the time of Issac Newton, a contemporary of Newton's was Robert Hooke and apparently they were enemies, after Newton's remarkable insights into physics, he turned his powerful intellect towards alchemy, here is the kicker, he kept his research a secret.

Hooke realised that Newton did this, because he wanted to be the only beneficiary.

Amongst others Hooke realised, that if alchemists published their results then other alchemists could build on their discoveries and the science of chemistry was born.

Why should computer science be any different?

OK I can hear all the programmers out there complaining, how do we get paid, this is like asking Astronomers Physicists Geologists Mathematicians, people in the armed sevices ETC. how they get paid, rather silly question, if you ask me.

Closed source software, only makes the people who issue the binaries richer, it makes most of the rest of us poorer.

I will give you an instance, last August I bought a 1 x NNB-831 Xplora 15.6" - AMD Athlon X2 TK42 Ati Graphics 2GB DDR2 250GB SATA HDD DVDRW from Novatech not paying the Windoze tax, saved me around £70, I put Ubuntu on it and have not looked back since.

All we need is an exec with Assange sized balls on the Beeb, and the UK could make a good sized hole in its balance of trade deficit.

Would not take much, just a few programs showing how easy Ubuntu is to install and use.

And if people think I only advocate Ubuntu, I actually run Mandriva on my PC.

I have not got a lot of time for football, but the world cup is different, because I find football somewhat boring, I like to surf the 'net whilst its on and take the crowd's voice as my cue to something interesting occurring, them damn vuvuzelas spoil it for me, the relentless droning makes me kill the TV's sound and I keep missing the interesting bits.

The world cup goes way beyond sport or football, it is more about the one world we all live on, the sight of a North Korean player with tears streaming down his face, in the lineup just before kickoff, in the match against Brazil last night spoke volumes.

More than anything the world cup is about dreams, imagine a kid in some village somewhere, his arse hanging out his trousers, no shoes, living barely above malnutrition and he learns to play football then he learns football is the equivalent of 'the yellow brick road', without a dream we die.

Its the scale of it that awes me, every country on the frigging planet sends a team, 204/205 teams started out in 2007 and it got whittled down to a final 32 teams, each representing their country to display their talent for balance, athleticism, coolness under pressure, fairness and a way for all the tribes on our planet to have a knees up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_FIFA_World_Cup_qualification/

Do you know the saddest thing of all, the African people sing nice, try to get a copy of Paul Simon's album Graceland.

Why on earth didn't FIFA ban fart makers at the WC, the only reason they blow the bloody things is because everyone else is blowing them.

I also love the Olympics, but it is not nearly as egalitarian as football, all you need is something resembling a ball and you are good to go.

Because of those wretched things I missed Maicon's amazing goal, interesting how lots of people complained about the new ball, I wonder whether the old ball would have curved so much, considering how little the new ball was rotating.

Good luck to England on Friday.

The high cost to the human race's colonisation of space is caused by the complexity and danger of reaching and leaving escape velocity within the earth's atmosphere.

The Space Shuttle turned out to be an expensive and dangerous white elephant, the reason the Shuttle was so expensive is, because of its complexity with millions of different manufactured parts, and the need to cover it with bathroom tiles.

There is another route, we can reach the edge of space no problem Burt Rutan proved this with Space Ship one, when he won the 'X' prize by reaching over 100 km twice in one week.

Yes the Shuttle was 'reusable' but in name only. They could not have turned that around in a week.

What NASA should be doing is creating rocket fuel on the moon, there is lots of water on the moon, use solar energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen which makes very good rocket fuel.

Use the rocket fuel to fuel a space tug, use the space tug to accelerate and decelerate Space Ship one, to and from escape velocity in the safety of a vacuum.

Once we can accelerate and decelerate space craft with rocket fuel that is obtained from out of the earth's gravity well, space travel becomes cheaper by many orders of magnitude, ok the capital cost would be very high, but once the systems are in place, the number of human beings, living in space increases exponentially. A good example for the way high capital cost projects work is the Panama canal.

First I tried Suze then I tried Coral then I tried RedHat then I tried Mandrake voila it worked.

This is in the early noughties, I think Mandriva went downhill once it sacked Gaël Duval.

I even bought my last upgrade.

I hope they survive.

Let us make the Jordan smell sweeter

Build us a reservoir, a dam and t'other side of dam, a clutch of pelton wheels.

With the weight of the world's oceans pressing on those pelton wheels, I fail to see why there would be insufficient energy to pump said 'salty brine' back from whence it came, minus the desert greening ingredient.

The dead sea lies nearly a half a kilometre below sea level, use this drop to generate electricity, use the electricity to extract the salt from the sea water - why is this so difficult for you to understand?

Or do you have a hidden agenda like shares in the dead sea potash/tourist industry, or perhaps you are an ultra conservative and totally disagree with any change at all?

"Remember, the Dead Sea is normally only fed from 'fresh water' sources."

Lol the Jordan river 'fresh water' the Jordan river is a fetid sewer.

Do you know the meaning of 'ad hominem' plz.

The dead sea is around a half a kilometre below sea level. This drop could be used to generate lots of hydroelectricity. The electricity could be used to remove the salt from the sea water. A first world country would have done this by now. Engineering could sort out the problems in the middle east instead of bullets and bombs.

Like it would cost more than the human race spends on cosmetics, or weapons of mass destruction, or watching grown men moving different size balls around, with various implements, or even moving the balls around with different parts of their bodies, it has even been known that human beings spend billions of dollars moving balls around with their feet, in the proud surety that is what they were born for.

What is the entire human world spend on lipstick?

How much money is spent in Las Vegas in a year and what artifacts are produced there, that have worth to the rest of humanity?

How much electricity is consumed by Las Vegas and how much food does it produce, to feed the millions of starving people on our planet?

What is the world spend on pet food?

Seeing as how you seem to know so much about economics, perhaps you could tell me why it is better to spend our hard earned dollars on the aforementioned items, than exploring the universe?

Perhaps you could explain to me, how it is cheaper to explore the universe with rocket fuel lifted up from the earth's surface, than use the rocket fuel that exists on the moon?

The high cost to the human race's colonization of space, is caused by the complexity and danger of reaching and leaving escape velocity within the earth's atmosphere, whilst dragging the fuel with which this is achieved up from the earth's gravity well, this is illogical when a supply of rocket fuel is close at hand on the moon.

The Space Shuttle turned out to be an expensive and dangerous white elephant, the reason the Shuttle was so expensive is, because of its complexity with millions of different manufactured parts and the requirement to lift the fuel up from the earths surface with which it achieves escaped velocity.

There is another route, we can reach the edge of space no problem Burt Rutan proved this with Space Ship one, when he won the 'X' prize by reaching over 100 km twice in one week.

Yes the Shuttle was 'reusable' but in name only. They could not have turned that around in a week.

One idea could be to create rocket fuel on the moon, there is lots of water on the moon, use solar energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen which makes very good rocket fuel.

Use robot technology controlled from the earth to create the rocket fuel.

Use the rocket fuel to fuel a space tug, use the space tug to accelerate and decelerate Space Ship one, to and from escape velocity in the safety of a vacuum.

The moon is the door to the solar system