I'm a huge fan of SpaceX, but I'd have a lot of trouble getting behind the idea of putting a 20-year flagship mission project on a rocket that exists only on Youtube. But if NASA and congress screw around much longer, SpaceX will be there when they're needed. Or maybe there'll be a smoking crater where their launch site used to be, who knows.

As for ESA, they already had a joint mission agreement with us, where they'd launch a Jupiter system spacecraft focused on Ganymede and we'd launch a Europa orbiter, to carry out joint observations as a team. We fell down on our end of the deal, so they're going on to Jupiter without us, and they are *not* in the mood to get screwed again.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...

What NASA Headquarters is proposing is not a mission, it's a recipe for failure. They want to spend no more than $1 billion on a mission we planetary scientists have told them costs $2 billion.

Suppose you're planning a trip for two to New Zealand. You've got the budget all worked out: airfare costs about half of the total, even during the off-season, and you're skimping on hotels and meals and skipping the helicopter tour to save money. Then your spouse comes along and says you can only spend half as much. You can't make the plane tickets any cheaper, so unless you consider sleeping in the Auckland airport a vacation, she's saying you're not going to New Zealand at all.

It costs a billion dollars to send a bucket of bricks to Europa. Doing science once you get there is extra.

Cameras work on the same principles, and at the same wavelengths, as the human eye. Anything that disables a camera will blind a human.

Oh no, I mean 20% *more*. And I'd tax coal and gas too. Actually I want to do a 1% tax increase per year up to 100%, but nobody takes me seriously when I say that.

Industry is accountable to the law, idiot.

He said that industry *was* unaccountable in the '70s, because there were no environmental laws to hold them to account. So we created some, and an agency called the EPA to administer them.

You're absolutely right, industry is accountable to the law. So we'd better keep the law around!

I'm with the conservatives on this one: we can't use deficit spending for a major climate mitigation program like this, it has to be paid for.

With a 20% fossil fuel tax.

Oh wait, did I lose you guys there?

Great idea, but you can't get it started without a big pile of cash. Nobody will be willing to pay full price for college and then have to pay the taxes too, so you're going to have to subsidize college until you've got enough tax-paying graduates. Social Security had the same startup problem, but that was back when the government was flush with cash.

There's an old Tom Stoppard play called Albert's Bridge, in which a couple of guys constantly work to repaint a bridge. It takes four years to paint it, and the paint lasts four years, so all is well. But then they come out with a new 8-year paint, so the managers fire one of the painters and let the other guy do it alone on an 8-year cycle. After 4 years, the bridge is only half painted, and it eventually collapses.

"the TorMail e-mail server"

The server. Singular. Did TorMail's creators and users skip class the day they explained how Tor worked?

Good for you. How many of your classmates drove BMWs to school? Sorry I'm not trying to be catty, but that much attention to AP only happens at well-funded schools with prosperous, college-focused students. Not so much rich, just "adequate", which is rare in rural America.

I went to a large, fairly rural high school in a not-particularly-poor area. We had AP U.S. history and AP English. That's it.

Many of you (especially those of you who read and write the New York Times) come from adequately-funded suburban schools, and while you've watched The Wire and think you know what urban schools are like, you have no idea how weak the educational programs at rural high schools are.

Possibly a small piece of sensor code in a major automaker's engine computers. These are very conservatively built -- probably there are large chunks of code that haven't changed since engine computers appeared in 1980 or so. They're very common -- probably hundreds of millions have been built. And they run the same code constantly over and over, every moment the car is running.

The main reason I might be wrong is that the clock speeds for these engine computers are presumably pretty slow.

Meh. Canada is, in this as in most other things, negligible. (Sorry, guys. You know I love you but there's just not enough of you to make a difference.) Target really just opened in Canada this year, and their retail sales there amount to less than 1% of their total business.

Again, why? They aren't providing anything new to us so why should we spend money on their new products?

The whole point of this article is that you *do* want something new: continued bug fixes and security patches. Which you apparently want forever, for free. I'm no MBA, but I'm not sure that works as a business model for Microsoft.

Do you have the $6.5 million Microsoft wants from our organization to upgrade our workstations to Windows 7? $6.5 million is a damn good reason not to upgrade.

Oh look guys, it's Target's CTO posting to Slashdot! Good to see you man, but I'm surprised you found time to hang out with us.

Microsoft has provided not provided a single new feature in Vista, Windows 7 or Windows 8 that we actually need or want

Instant search of file contents was reason enough on its own to switch to 7. If you don't think you need it, it's because you haven't really used it.